Ep 14 | Dave Rubin | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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I was taught when I was a kid by my dad, he drilled it in my head over and over and over and over and over again.

What you follow the two most powerful words in any language with defines you.

And they are creative words.

And be careful every time you say, I am.

Follow those words with who you are.

Who are you?

Well, here was the word that popped into my head.

I am here.

And although that sounds sort of...

So present?

Yeah, I was going to say it sounds sort of cheesy, right?

I am here.

What does that actually mean?

Does that have any real value?

But that was what popped in my head when you just said that.

We didn't sit down and record any of this.

You actually said to me, let's not talk

before we start here.

But yeah, present.

I am really trying in this crazy time that we live in that seemingly is getting crazier constantly.

And then when you add the technological component where everything seems to be getting sped up faster and faster, where we used to talk about a 24-hour news cycle, now it's almost a minute-by-minute news cycle, the way we want to destroy people and things and institutions that have been with us forever, the way we want to just sort of ransack history and think that we can build everything new.

And as if you just have ideas today that have been born of nothingness and all of history was meaningless and all of these things.

I really try to be present.

I mean, even when I'm doing this, right?

So you're interviewing me now, but I interviewed you earlier today and we've done it a couple of times on each other's shows over the last couple of years.

I really try to just sit in that room with that person

and forget everything else.

Now, you can't do it all the time because sometimes life just gets in the way.

And, you know, there could be on any given morning.

And it's fatiguing.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, it's really.

Well, look,

life is tough, right?

Life, you know, I'm on Tor with Peterson.

Life is suffering.

Life is not easy.

There is no easy way out of this thing.

You can figure out ways, I think, to mitigate some of the madness and hopefully you can pilfer some happiness along the way and find someone or some people that you love and enjoy some good food and sex and

whatever it is that makes you happy and play video games if that's what you want or play sports or read or whatever.

But life is tough.

And I think it's supposed to be tough.

I don't know what the

real purpose is other than you have to find

some use and utility for your own life.

So I think if I've figured out one thing, it's that I know that I wake up every day with a purpose.

There is not a day at this point in my life, at 42 years old, after, you know, having all the 12 years of struggling as a stand-up comic and a couple radio shows and Sirius XM and being on the Young Turks and

personal struggles and being in the closet for a long time and a whole slew of things, that I wake up every day.

The second the day starts, I'm like, there is so much to do.

There will not be enough hours in the day.

You know, I still want to have time to walk my dog and just, you know, do some human things too.

But I think being present is the most important piece of that because that's where you'll find some honesty.

And I think generally, I think what has sort of put me on the map with a lot of people is that I've been honest about my political evolution, my personal evolution.

You know, it's funny, I'm surrounded by

this group of people.

You know, I've got really the public intellectual of our time, Jordan Peterson.

I'm on tour with him, right?

And he's a clinical psychologist and best-selling author and all that.

I've got Eric Weinstein, who's a world-renowned economist, and Brett Weinstein, who's an incredible biologist, and Sam Harris, who's a neuroscientist and sort of the most outspoken atheist we have in a slew of other people.

Ayan Hirsi Ali, who's lived through more than any of us could possibly imagine.

One of the bravest people on the planet.

You know, she absolutely, you're absolutely right.

But not only brave, she to me is the

marker marker for what side of things you're on.

If I say Ion Herci Ali to you, and you don't immediately say I love her or I admire her, or you know, maybe you don't know who she is, so I'll throw those people aside for a second.

But if there's a moment where you have to think about what you think of this woman, if you know who she is,

something is really whacked with your moral compass.

She is, I've interviewed presidents, prime ministers, I've interviewed everybody you could possibly think of.

She is the only person

that had a, at the time, a secret service man

stand at the lens of the camera.

Is she still that bad?

Is it still that bad for her?

I don't know that I can say exactly what, but I can tell you that I've been at private homes with her where security, where no one could have possibly known where we were, and security guards have to be outside.

But anyway, I'm surrounded by this level of incredible intellectual,

deep, meaningful people who are doing incredible things.

And I feel very blessed by that.

It's like I'm someone that's interviewing them usually.

And now I'm thought of as someone that's in this group with these people.

And it's like, wow,

what a freaking gift

that is.

So I guess somehow I did something right along the way.

Well, Twitter's the journal from hell, I suppose.

I don't journal enough, but I am writing, I'm finally writing my first book right now.

What are you writing?

So I don't want to give away too much at the moment, but it has a lot to do with, I think, some of the things we're going to talk about here.

A little bit about my political evolution, sort of the way I see the world sort of shaking out now and what really are the issues that we can't talk about and why can't we talk about them and how if we're going to start talking about them, we can go ahead and do that.

And really how I've been able to have these really tough conversations with a guy like Ben Shapiro,

you know, who will not only not bake me the cake, but said that he wouldn't even come into, if I had an anniversary party for me and my husband, we've been married over three years if I had an anniversary party Ben said he probably wouldn't come and yet I can consider this guy a friend now he may not be a friend the way my true my truest friends in in the most accepting decent way people that I go way back with are

but I don't need to make the world bend to my will and I can find room for people that I think differently and more importantly and I said this to Ben when when we got into this and we both got a lot of hate for it by the way he got a lot of hate from people on the right that aren't happy with gay people and i got a lot of people hate from people on the left that thought i was being a pushover or something to him but i said you know ben hopefully we'll do this for another 50 years and we can do it in public you know we'll do these conversations and we'll talk about these things and i think i'll move you i think when when i'm 90 and he's a little younger than me he's 80 or whatever it is i think that over time i will have moved him on on certain issues not that i want to change

religious beliefs are i don't i don't want to change them but but I think

that over the course, the only way we are going to get anywhere, period, in this world, is by doing this.

Will your relationship be worth it if you don't move him?

Yeah, it would still be worth it.

It has to be worth it, right?

It's like, because otherwise, what is it?

Otherwise, it's an agenda.

It's an agenda, but it's also nothing.

You will never engage with people who think differently than you.

And we're, we're, you know, as we just discussed on my show, it's like we are veering to that place in many respects.

But I'm hopeful because of the amount of people I see in real life, not in 140 characters, but in real life who are trying to grapple with some of these issues, who are realizing in many cases that their allies are the same people they thought were their enemies a couple years ago.

You know, the first time that we sat down, I said to you, I thought you were, it was, I think,

I thought a half genius, half crazy, half entertainer.

And I know that's three halves, but there was a lot going on there, right?

And it's like, I don't know that five years ago, I would have thought, wow, I can sit down with Glenn Beck and have no agenda other than, you know, look each other in the eyes and figure it out.

And I think I'm a better person for that.

And I just see no, you know, there's this idea that if you talk to somebody, that automatically means you endorse their ideas or you're giving air to whatever

thoughts they have that, you know, are untoward or something.

And I just don't buy it.

I don't believe it.

And I'll keep fighting to make sure that that's not the world that we live in.

It's really amazing that,

I mean, so I

was invited to go to

interview

Assad in Syria

and turned it down because it had too many restrictions.

Because I knew what he wanted.

You know, he wanted me to tell his story.

I'm not going to go into something.

And somebody asked me, well, you can't talk to him.

I mean,

what would you talk to?

Would you talk to Hitler?

Yeah.

Yeah, I would.

I would.

And I would ask honest questions.

I wouldn't try to get him.

I would just ask honest questions and let them hang themselves.

You know, let them be exposed for who they are and speak honestly about it.

I don't understand how...

I don't understand how me being friends with you, you being friends with me or Ben or something, how that hurts us.

how that,

how that's your,

even if we weren't friends, you being on my show, I'm not endorsing you, you're not endorsing me, I'm exploring.

Yeah.

Well, this shows how people have conflated people and ideas, right?

So of course, I mean, this is the most rudimentary, simple thing that people need to understand if we're going to function as a society.

You have to be able to talk about ideas and separate that from people.

I mean, this is sort of age-old thing about the artist and the art.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

And you're going to have all sorts of flawed people.

They're going to have all sorts of flawed conversations and create all sorts of brilliant art and all sorts of things.

And

if we can't separate those two things, you'll never imagine if we couldn't do that.

We're North Korea, I mean, or worse.

I mean, we're really something worse.

What kills me is that much of this now is coming from the left.

And

you were the one that said, no, art should challenge you.

You know, you go to a play, you read a book, you see a piece of art.

It should challenge you.

It should push you maybe into uncomfortable places.

Well, where is that now?

On something much more important,

ideas.

I mean, good art is an idea.

Where is that?

Yeah, it's so weird because,

you know, it's kind of funny.

It's like if I asked you to tell me your political journey, you can picture certain markers along the way, but it's really hard to truly remember what you were thinking at that time, really, really what you were thinking.

So even though my journey has been pretty quick in the last, let's say, three years, that's a pretty quick space to have a pretty big evolution.

It's still hard to remember exactly what was going on.

But I know that, look, I was a lefty.

I was a progressive.

I always considered myself liberal.

And I I wasn't really one of the people that was always screaming racism and bigotry.

I was, and I'm sure I did it more than I'd be happy to remember, but I wasn't sort of full on in that.

That being said, I was also at the time, because so much of it was related to gay rights a couple of years ago and marriage, and because that directly affected me, I think I did get caught up in it.

So I think that that's partly

Maybe I use that as a little bit of an excuse now, but I think that's a pretty honorable position in that all I wanted was equality.

I wanted equality under the law, nothing more.

And I think once everyone has equality under the law, which we have right now, well, then the rest is on you.

It's a little bit of luck and it's a little bit of hard work or probably a lot of hard work and everything else.

And you're still going to run into bad people.

And there's going to be bad people and there's going to be racists and there's going to be bigots and there's going to be cheaters and liars and stealers.

But there's also going to be great helpers and teachers.

And sometimes those teachers are the bad guys.

They don't know they're teaching, but they're teaching.

Yeah, you know, one of the things that Peterson, who I'm on this tour with, says all the time is that this is just an adventure.

Make it your adventure.

And I think if you really take that, you know, you really think about like what makes a great adventure, you know, like you've got Darth Vader's helmet in there.

Why is the adventure of Star Wars?

Why is Luke's story an adventure?

Why is Frodo going to that wherever the hell he went?

I'm more of a Star Wars guy.

Mount or whatever, Mount Doom or whatever.

Neo's adventure in the Matrix.

Why do we care about stories?

Because it's on you.

The stories are what's giving us the map.

And this is where you can take this to a religious level if you want, but I don't think you have to only discuss it in a religious sense.

It's on you in this world to figure something out and do something that's not easy.

If you do something that's easy, I have a lot of friends right now who are, you know, I'm 42.

So most of my friends are, you know, let's say within five years of that.

A lot of them are sort of getting to this place where the rubber's meeting the road, where it's like, we're not young anymore in a traditional, you know,

we're not in our 20s anymore.

You know, we play basketball and it's a lot slower.

Usually someone has a career-ending injury every week.

And yet we're not old, but like now our lives are ours, you know?

And what I'm finding is a lot of my friends who never really challenged themselves.

They just kind of got a job that was relatively meaningless.

Maybe they're married, but it wasn't the person that they were really supposed to be with.

It was just somebody that was there, sort of thing.

They're kind of having their midlife crisis right now, which I think is a little earlier maybe than a traditional midlife crisis would kick in.

But I think this also goes to the things are speeding up and technology is speeding up and the rate that we change and think is speeding up.

And I'm not there because

I have purpose every day and I feel like there's an adventure here.

I'm about to go on to, I think, eight countries in Europe in 16 days with Peterson and find out what all new people are thinking and have those conversations.

And I get to go out there and talk to all kinds of people and

they tell me all sorts of things and

they're all different.

And that's incredible.

But to the earlier point of this group of people that I'm surrounded by with Harris and the Weinsteins and

Peterson and everybody else, and you, I included that,

these are really great intellects.

And look, I'm a comic.

I was a poly sci major, but I'm a comic and I'm a talker.

And

I like to think about these issues.

But I don't think my place is to necessarily

be the hardcore intellect.

Not that I can't do it, but I'm not a trained biologist, let's say, or neuroscientist or something.

But I come more from your school, which is I want to connect with these people.

I want to understand these ideas.

I think the thing that I'm probably best at is distilling some of these really complex ideas into language that regular people can understand because I consider myself a regular person.

And when I sit there with Eric Weinstein, who rifles off five mathematical theories that I can't even pronounce, well, if I can get one of them into something that makes some sense for people, that they can use, you know, one of the greatest minds of our generation, you know, he's using a mathematical theory to explain something that's happening on social media, you know, a trend related to speech and everything.

And he's going, there's a reason for this.

There's a mathematical certainty, reason for this.

And he does this.

He's done this repeatedly on my show.

If I can get a couple of people to understand that a little bit better and it cleans up their thinking a little, it's awesome.

It's powerful.

It's real.

Diane Sawyer, you know, Diane Sawyer.

Of course, of course.

Diane Sawyer.

I said I'm 42,

not 22, you know.

She invited me to lunch one day when I was at CNN before I went to the evil empire.

Depends which side of evil.

and she invited me to lunch, and I was

about your age, and I was on tour, and

I just was not stopping.

And I came in, and the first thing I noticed, she wasn't in stage makeup and TV makeup, so she looked tired.

And I must have looked exactly the same because I sat down and she said, you look tired.

And I said, I don't know how to do this.

I know.

I am so tired.

And she said, oh,

you have to look at it differently.

And I would give you the same advice.

She said,

you will come home every day if you can come home.

And when you're finished with the day, you will be bone-tired.

And I remember bone-tired because that's the way I felt.

My bones hurt.

I was so tired.

And she said, you will be bone-tired.

But in exchange, you will get to witness and see things that no one else sees.

And you're just in that part of your life that is just,

you're a witness.

That's why I asked you if you kept a diary.

You're a witness to something that nobody else gets to see.

It's weird.

You know, I've never had it sort of explained that kind of clearly to me, but it is weird.

I'm tacitly, or maybe not tacitly, is probably not the right word.

I'm subtly, I guess, aware of that behind myself, sort of.

Like there are moments when I'm on stage and, you know, whether I'm with Peterson or doing stand-up and I'm really,

I'm doing my best to say something that is true, that I believe.

Or in stand-up, sometimes it's like you're saying something that's mostly true and trying to make people laugh at the same time, you know?

But then when I see the way people react to me after and want to share their stories with me and all of these things, it's like.

It definitely, I can tell you this, I'm a better person even right this second than I was four months ago than when we started this tour.

Because not only because of sort of just being around Jordan, who I think is as close to

consistently saying something true as anyone I can really imagine on earth, he is trying so freaking hard using all of the incredible tools that he has attained.

He is so slow in his speech.

And people have said to me, he sucks or slows.

No, he's exact.

He's weighing every word to make sure it's right.

He is so responsible.

One of the analogies that he uses about the way he approaches these talks, and I love this, because this is where he can take a very complex idea and get it into something that you can just, that a regular person can understand.

He'll say, well, you know, when I'm thinking through an idea on stage, you're watching me do it.

I want to get it to the edge of where my intellect can get it.

And then I have to sort of put it down so I don't.

you know, just completely lose it right in front of you.

And he likens that to his daughter climbing the tree in front of their house when when she was young, that he would watch her.

She could get to a certain branch and then, you know, she'd a couple of times put her leg over, try to reach, try to reach, couldn't do it.

But then a couple days later, could get a little bit further and a little bit further.

And before he knew it, she was at the top of the tree.

And I see him doing this.

I genuinely see it.

The guy's doing hour and a half lectures that are different.

basically every I mean I haven't heard the same one twice I mean you know sometimes there's some themes obviously that are similar you know I'm sure the I'm sure the publisher would be happier if he was just talking about the book the whole whole time, but he's using this to expand his knowledge.

And I think, and I've never seen him,

I've never seen him lie or say something that he doesn't believe or intentionally mislead the audience or anything like that.

Really, I've never seen it.

I've seen him,

you know, if I, if during the Q ⁇ A, when I ask him something that maybe he doesn't want to fully address at the moment,

he'll say it.

He doesn't, you know, I mean, you know what it's like, all these people that get on TV all the time and they have an answer for everything and they know everything.

And, you know, you're never going to see a real human there.

I see presence and human with him all the time.

So I think I'm better from that just in these last couple of months.

I still got a long way to go.

It's a work in progress every day, right?

None of us, I don't know anyone that's, that's fully there, but I don't know.

As soon as you stop working, you die.

Yeah, you're done, right?

That's it.

So it's like.

I want to keep working.

I want to keep being on the adventure, but also knowing that people think that I've done something good here just because I just started saying what I think.

That's all I did.

So to get back to the original question, I just, I was a lefty.

I was one of these people and I saw something early on that now pretty much everyone sees.

I mean, everyone, whether you're conservative, libertarian, you're an old school liberal, even most of the progressives, I think, actually see it now, that there is this truly horrific authoritarian strain that has just

encompassed the modern left.

And I mean that from the academic perspective to the media, to the political establishment.

It has just infected everything.

And for some reason, I was one of the first people that saw it.

And I tried the best I could as an insider to say, let's wake up or it's going to lead to really terrible things, not only within our party, but within the other guys.

You will get Trump, the guy you think is a Nazi, and all of these things.

And guess what?

He's not the Nazi.

And then you won't be able to see the Nazi when the Nazi comes because the Nazi might be you.

And I think that's a lot closer, although I don't like playing those word games, of course.

And all I did was tell my story.

And because of that, an awful lot of people suddenly, I guess, were in the recesses of their mind thinking similar thoughts.

And now they're on that journey with me.

You don't.

I don't think.

I don't think people

are born brave.

I don't think people, in fact, I don't think there's any.

I don't think there's anybody in history, unless they were insane, that did something great that wasn't terrified.

They just did it anyway.

But it's a muscle, and unless you've had to exercise that muscle on smaller things all throughout your life, you're just not going to do it.

Let me start early with you as a kid.

First time you thought, I'm different.

Well,

if this is sort of leading to something about sexuality, is that kind of where you're trying to go with this?

Yeah.

I mean, I probably,

maybe around 50 years.

I mean, unless there was some other thing that would have been different that would have went, oh, no, wait, wait, I don't know what this is.

Well, no, I mean, I always, I think I, you know, it's so funny.

People say, oh, I always thought I was different.

And then everyone says it, and then it's like, well, we all couldn't have been different.

You know, what are we?

So I was always sort of, you know, I was always kind of funny and quippy, even when I was in kindergarten.

You know, I was always like sort of the, I wasn't the class clown, but I was kind of in the back, like making fun of the class clown.

Or, like, so I always saw the world a little bit differently.

Now, that may be a precursor to

talking about sexuality a little bit.

I would suppose maybe around third or fourth grade, something like that.

But I would say, in a more

when what I'm looking for is

the first time you thought

I'm different, and this is a bit scary.

Yeah, so that I think probably around 10th grade or something, and I don't even know that I've ever talked about this publicly before.

I remember thinking that

like I seemed to be attracted to guys, but I didn't think I was, I didn't think I was gay.

Gay was like, you like show tunes and you like dancing.

I mean, that's

right, that you're gay.

Well, that's the funny thing.

I mean, people say this all the time.

People say to me, you don't seem gay.

And it's like, well, what do you really say?

Like, you know, there's pretty much one thing that makes you gay and then everything else is something else.

But I still don't really like theater and I'm a horrible dancer.

You know what I mean?

And I'd much rather play basketball and video games or whatever.

But I assure you I'm gay.

You know what I mean?

Like, so I, so that's what made me feel weird, I think, because I didn't act the way you were supposed to act if you were gay.

And I think there's a lot more people like this than we see at all because we still sort of do, even now, for all the progress that's been made.

And I say progress in the true sense of progress.

mostly what you get on television or in mainstream media from gay people is still sort of a minstrel show.

You can get a lot of them on Bravo talking about fashion, or you can get some over-the-top, you know, sort of clown on some other show.

But there are people who are.

But there are people like that.

Sure.

And I don't begrudge them.

If anything, there was a time in my life where in a weird way, I was actually jealous of them because I thought, whoa, you so are who you are.

And it's just out there.

Well, I kind of felt like a freak because people would say, even after I came out, people would say, well, you don't seem gay.

And I, and they meant it as a compliment.

That's really what they meant.

They meant, you seem normal, but I didn't feel normal.

So the more people tell you you're normal and you don't feel normal, that's when you really start feeling crazy.

So it was like this really odd.

So I don't want to compare the two at all, but I'm an alcoholic, but I had certain rules.

I wouldn't drink until 5 p.m., but I would stand at a place at 5 and I would literally, I would watch the secondhand, okay?

Because I was not an alcoholic.

Alcoholics are drunk all day long,

and so it's a weird thing because you're convinced.

No, no, no, that's not, that's not me.

Yeah, is it kind of like that?

It is kind of like that.

It really is kind of like that.

You know, one of my policies when I, so I actually,

I don't know that I've ever, I think maybe I've said this once or twice, but the first night that I ever came out to someone, believe it or not, was

9:10, September 10th,

2001.

2001, at about 11.30 p.m.

in the Times Square subway station.

I told my friend Mike Singer, who was a comedian.

He was gay, actually.

He was the first person I ever came out to.

And then, and he didn't really realize that it was like something major for me.

He thought I was just telling him, like, I'm gay, you know, like zippity-dooda or whatever.

And we separated.

He went to Queens.

I went back to the Upper West Side, Upper East Side at the time.

And

I woke up the next morning and obviously the world had changed.

And I remember, I mean, this is what being closeted is sort of like.

It's an inside job.

The reason they call it is the closet.

There's only room for one in there.

And when you are that isolated and that disconnected and not being real with your reality and not being truthful, you become paranoid.

You become duplicitous.

I could lie like that, not even that I was trying to lie.

People would say, well, you know, who are you dating?

And it's like, you could just come up with a lie.

It wasn't, I wasn't walking around thinking I'm going to lie to people all the time, but lies.

And that probably,

yeah, that's probably very similar to albinism or abusing a drug or whatever.

But I remember I woke up the next morning, and I know this sounds completely insane.

I was also smoking a lot of pot at the time.

I woke up the next morning, and I honestly thought it had something to do with what I said.

That I truly thought that.

Shut up.

Yeah, I truly thought that that's how sort of twisted the world had become to me.

Like, because when you are so cut off from what you're saying.

Was that a religious thing?

Or

where did that come from?

You thought the.

I thought I had had this horrible horrible secret for so long and I finally said it I finally actually said it I released it into reality and then I woke up the next morning in the city that I lived in how long did it take before that went away

probably I mean I think at some point over the next couple days then the true nature of the reality of what was happening with 9-11 gosh that must have made it a thousand times worse I mean I can't imagine that you know anything that would make it a thousand times worse but but you know, within within an hour of, or maybe two hours of the attack, I was on, I lived on 90th and 1st.

So if you know Manhattan, I mean, that's really the polar opposite of where the towers were.

And, you know, within two hours, the smell and the soot and the air.

And then, you know, I had friends that couldn't get out of the city that stayed with me.

My grandma actually lived in Manhattan.

My dad couldn't get out of the city, stayed with her and some of his coworkers and just all that chaos.

So I think I probably broke out of that paranoia quickly.

But, I mean, it was a real thought in my mind for a little while.

But that's what happens, I think, when you are so

closed off to reality.

And you can't deny your truth.

I mean, you know, I'm pretty sure I'm not the guy who came up with the truth will set you free, but you can't.

You can't deny your nature.

You can be the best person you can be, and you can always work at that.

But

so, my favorite

line

is not the truth shall set you free.

It's

and I don't remember who said this first, the truth shall set you free,

but it might make you miserable first.

Most likely it will.

So when you started, how did your parents take it?

Did you

so I was still so what I did was so

after that, I thought my policy, despite this psychotic and really paranoid thought that the world was ending because of me, I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm really not kidding when I say this.

It really was.

After I got past that, my policy was if I tell one person and I feel better,

then I'll tell someone else.

And that's what I did for the course of like two years.

And by the way, in 2001, I was already 25, 26.

So I was not a young person relative to figuring out who you are.

And I regret the, you know, not, I don't have regret in that I know I'm here now and I'm supposed to be be here now.

But I know I did a lot of undue damage psychologically to myself and probably physically at some level.

And I did drugs and all sorts of things because I was coping the way anyone would cope.

So my policy was if I tell one person and I feel better, then I'll know that that's sort of the right path.

And what I would do is I would tell one person, I'd feel better for a little while, and then I would start feeling worse again because I needed to tell someone.

And then when it would get to the breaking point again, I would tell someone else.

And the more people I told, what I realized was

the time before I'd feel bad would start getting shorter and shorter because the more reality I stepped into, the less I could tolerate

the lie.

And so that was, it was like I was testing myself in a way.

I was testing.

Well, I don't feel gay, whatever that means, or the world doesn't see the person that I am as

this thing.

And

I was doing doing a little test on my own.

And,

you know, it's not even something that I talk about a lot or think about a lot that much anymore because

I just am.

I just am here.

And

the

back to what my dad said, I am.

I mean, that's really a complete sentence by itself.

You know, it can be followed by something, but when you are whole,

That's all it needs to be said.

Yeah.

I am.

I would say the piece that I do think about is that,

you know, you always doe yourself.

Like, no matter how good

or whole Glenn Beck might be in 2018, you know the guy that was standing there at the bar counting those minutes down.

And I know the sort of damaged person that I was for a while.

I don't dwell on it.

I don't.

I'm too busy to dwell on it now, which is nice, right?

Like, it's like I'm doing something right now.

So I don't.

But some of the vestiges of that still haunt you, haunt me at least.

And I don't know that you fully can ever escape that.

And maybe there's a reason for that.

Maybe there's a fuel in that that you need as

either a creative person or just an aware person.

As a Christian, you know, we believe in the atonement, we believe in forgiveness.

And so if you really accept that, and you can give that to whatever,

but it does change you.

Because it was when I was,

you know, 30, I was completely out of control and

I just I couldn't live this way anymore and I couldn't live with the mistakes that I'd made they were just crushing and

you could look at this as a spiritual thing or a mental thing doesn't matter yeah

but when I finally made the

so I took the step and said this is what I believe and this, I'm going to give this package to him, and he's going to take it, and I'm not going to do it.

That's why I don't understand well why people argue about religion.

Does it work for you?

Yeah.

If it works for you, I don't care.

I don't care.

But

I had blinding, crippling migraines twice a week.

And I know it was just from the mental beating inside.

The day I made that commitment, last migraine I had, I mean, and I had them for years.

And

you can give it away, but it's almost, I think,

it's a constant renewal of

let it go.

Let it go.

Yeah.

I think hell is

not being able to forgive yourself.

Not being able to put your past in the past.

Well, think how powerful that is.

I mean, so that's like saying, well, hell is here and heaven can be here too.

If you line this stuff up correctly, whatever your mission is here, and you do it forthrightly and honestly and treat people well and

truly do the best you can, which we all fail at all the time, every single day.

Like, if you don't think you do, then you probably do more than more than most, right?

So if you do that, then you could be, then heaven could be right here.

Because otherwise, what's better than what you can imagine?

It can all be right here.

It doesn't mean you're going to have 50 million bucks tomorrow and

honestly.

But that's not.

But that's not.

That's not it.

That's not it.

So anything that I think that we can imagine as human beings can happen here and now.

Yes.

And if you really believe that, if you really strive to achieve that, I think you have a pretty decent chance at it.

You might not.

And you might screw it up, right?

You might get it for, I think what you probably, I think probably

at the end, if you all, if everyone goes across a life that's a full, healthy life to 90, let's say, I suspect that the people that do this the best, that live the truest, most honest, decent life possible, I suspect there's very few people that live in that place of heaven for a long time.

You kind of can dip, you can dip in and out.

You can dip in and out.

You might have a run.

You know, it's like you can look back on your life.

I can think of certain moments in my life, certain summers or whatever it was.

I was like, man, that was good.

You know, like I was on it.

I was, I was there.

I was present.

I was, you know, whatever it was, whatever I was doing.

You you know, like I can even think back when I was doing stand-up and like I, even though I was, a lot of my repression was what was leading me to be on stage, right?

Like I was, that's the interesting thing, actually.

It really fueled a lot of good comedy when I was younger because pain usually does.

Because pain does, but then, you know, I heard George Carlin say this, and I love this.

It's like.

You got to have a certain amount of pain to be a comic, but then at some point, you better own that pain and get rid of it.

Otherwise, it'll destroy you.

And again, there's a great analogy to an alcoholic here.

It's like you may need it for a while or you may have a good time on alcohol for a while.

It will not last forever.

And I think this is why so many great comics die of drug overdoses or alcoholism or otherwise do all sorts of crazy things because they never get to the point where the pain is secondary because they need the fix to be funny.

And I definitely remember thinking that my life was sort of like it was like two tracks that weren't lined up sort of.

So like I was really on a good career track, but my life was miserable.

Yeah.

And I was alone and I was lying and all sorts of stuff.

And now my life is pretty, you know, it's pretty close.

And there'll be moments when it's disjointed again.

And hopefully, I'm just aware enough to get it lined up when it needs to be.

Tell me the moment that is crystallized in your head of

this is hell not being me.

Yeah, I know it for sure.

For sure.

The moment that I remember that I sort of hit rock bottom, so to speak.

I remember, so I lived on 90th and 1st.

And if you know the New York subways a little bit, the closest subway is 86th and Lex.

That's a pretty far walk for a a subway because you got to go 89th, 88th, 87th, and you got to go first to second to third to Lex.

New York City time, that's a big walk.

Rain nor sleep nor snow.

I was working, I was doing stand-ups at stand-up at night, but I was working just some job at a, I don't even, I honestly don't even really remember what it was.

I had some desk job, really, I think at a PR company or something.

I have almost no recollection of it, really, because I was so disconnected from my reality that there's a certain, there really is a certain part of my husband David, who's named the same name as me.

It's amazing.

People go crazy.

He asks me often about my early 20s.

And I always say, I can't really remember because I think my day-to-day life was so disconnected from whatever was going on in my head that I can't really, like, I have a vague recollection of the office, but I don't really remember what I was doing.

Yeah, like truly.

That wasn't that long ago.

It's not that long ago.

I mean, this is, this is, you know, 20, and it's not that long ago, 20 years or something.

This isn't 80, you know, 70 years ago.

Anyway, I remember walking that commute one day to just to get to the subway station in the morning.

And I'm walking down the street and everything was shaking.

The buildings were shaking.

The street was shaking like an earthquake, like this around my head.

But I was still.

So I was walking and I felt still on the street, but the entire, it felt like the entire world was was shaking, not spinning like this, it was shaking like this, like this, like a globe that you were like doing this.

And that's when I remember this for sure.

I haven't thought of this in a long time.

I remember this.

Like, I was like, whoa, I have got to fix this.

Like, that's when I finally was like, something is not right here.

And it is, it's what you said before.

It's like, when your reality is so disconnected from real reality,

man, your world will shake.

You will do things you shouldn't do.

You will act out in all kinds of crazy ways.

But that for me,

I guess that was really the rock-bottom moment that then I started getting a little bit of it back.

Oof, I forgot about that.

Sorry, I didn't mean to.

No, I mean, that's what it's all about, right?

It's good to go, you know, because some of this also is the more you talk about this.

I don't talk about it that often, but that is how you get some closure on some of this stuff.

And

it renews some of the things that, wow, how did I get here now?

Why am I tolerant?

And it's of other opinions.

It's amazing to me.

I remember at the time I said the worst thing about me.

Somebody had called up, and at the time I was on radio.

I'd been done radio for, I don't know, 25 years,

and

had a big audience.

And I was, Mr.

Goody Tushus, I was known as this, you know, clean-cut guy.

My marriage was a wreck.

I was an alcoholic.

And somebody,

I was trying to clean up my life, and I had stopped drinking, but I wasn't sober yet.

And

somebody had called in on this morning show and said,

you know, Glenbeck, you know, you might have the perfect life, blah, blah, blah.

That's all I heard.

You might have the perfect life.

And I don't even know what they said.

And I stopped and I said,

you know, let me tell you something.

Nobody here knows who I really am.

And the room just stopped.

And everybody was like, oh, dear God, play a record, man.

What are you doing?

The bat phone goes off.

Yeah, of course.

And I said,

let me tell you who i am and i just bore my soul

and i turn off the mic and i looked at steve stu my now still my producer he was an intern at the time turn off the mic and i said well right this day down this is the day glenn beck destroyed his career

the opposite happened yeah it's so empowering because you have lived with this secret and it's destroyed you.

And you just want to say, this is who I am.

And I'm struggling.

And I'm, you know, I am vulnerable here.

And all of a sudden, all these people

would come up to me or in the days when we still wrote letters, would write and say,

I can't believe you said that.

That's exactly how I feel.

This is exactly what I'm going through.

And it's amazing to me how it's why I believe when somebody says, you know what, don't read that.

That's the first thing I read.

Don't say that.

Don't think that.

Don't talk to that person.

That is so damaging.

Because when you keep that secret, you're not only crushing yourself.

Everyone around you has their own secret.

Whatever it is.

You're actually crushing the nature of reality.

You are.

I really believe that.

The more that you operate in some sort of alternate reality because of your own crap, whatever that crap might be, and however you act out because of that crap, well, that's just what everyone's doing.

We're all doing it to different levels.

So maybe as the two of us sit here right now, we're doing the game a little bit better than we used to, let's say, right?

Like something like that, right?

Of course, not to say we don't have struggles and deficiencies and all of those things, of course.

But if everyone's doing that at some level,

Well, then the reality that we're all co-building together becomes this really strange tenuous thing and I think that that's really where we're at right now we sit online all day long we sit online all day long yelling at people and and pretending as if we've got all the answers you know all of these writers at all of these ridiculous publications it's like you people none of you have created anything uh you know i got into it once with um you know jonathan chait at uh is it new yorker magazine or new york magazine okay i don't even i don't even like mentioning any names because i try to talk about i try to talk about ideas instead of people but if he's either at new yorker or new New York magazine.

And he said something to the effect of on Twitter, something about how small business, the phrase small business is just a Republican catchphrase.

No small business really exists.

It's just a way that they trick you into being for big business.

Something to that effect.

And I retweeted him and I wrote back, well, Jonathan, just FYI, I have a small business with a couple employees, and I'm very proud of what we've built here.

And I think you're wrong about this.

I mean, I did it pretty respectfully, not on the the attack.

And then he wrote back immediately and he said, see, a couple employees.

And I thought,

this is pretty interesting.

I have a couple employees.

I've built a company that I'm incredibly proud of.

We pay all the benefits 100% for all of our employees.

We're growing a little bit right now, but we're doing it within our means.

All the ideas.

California.

In California, yeah.

I'm a crazy person, right?

I may move in with you, by the way.

We'll get to that at the end.

Did you go to a soup kitchen at night?

But he mocked the idea of a couple.

And I thought, this is really interesting.

So you guys, you hate big business.

Now you have somebody saying, I'm a small business.

Now you're mocking them.

So what is your reality that's right for you?

I know that I've employed people.

I'm suspecting he never has.

He works in a giant company for a lot of money.

And it's like, well, if I had 16 employees, would that be the number that now you're okay with?

Because I know if I had 100 employees, you'd say I'm big business and I'm bad.

I have a couple, so I'm small business and I don't exist.

What's the number for you, person who's created nothing?

You know, you write some things, but do you do?

I don't know.

Again, I don't want to make this too much about things specifically.

But I relate this back to what we're talking about: that it's like we're all playing these imaginary

intellectual games that somehow we know what is best for everyone.

And if only we could control everything, everyone would be okay.

And that's actually pretty tyrannical and not very horrible.

It's totally fascistic.

But does it

does it come from arrogance or fear or both?

I mean, we're all watching Facebook.

I mean, come on.

You look at Facebook in the pictures.

My pictures on my Facebook.

I post pictures of me.

My favorite pictures of me are when I get up in the air in the morning and my hair is standing straight up.

You know what I mean?

Because that's what's real.

But you look on Facebook, you look on where everything is fake.

You take a picture now and you color adjust, you color correct, you make sure that, no, that product is there or this cup is there or my favorite blanket is there.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

No one is reflecting.

actual real life.

Yeah.

Well, this is why I try to take these breaks because you really, especially if you do what we do where people really are paying attention it's not just like i'm taking a picture of food and my five friends are commenting on it or something like that i mean we're we're really trying to engage in ideas in an honest way so people really do care about what we say and yet there are moments where even i as someone that's really aware of this and i try to take the weekends off and as you know i did the the august off the grid thing and all that i still get caught up in the madness of it all or or i'll be on instagram and if i took a picture of my ice cream cone i suddenly realize it's five minutes later and i just adjusted the color of the mint chocolate chip and I'm like, what the hell did I just do?

Right.

You know, what did I just do?

That's a command chocolate chip.

It's usually a very nice green.

You feel good about it.

It's like, this doesn't need to be colored anymore or saturated or structured or whatever.

So we're all doing all of these things.

And this is what I mean.

We're not giving ourselves the space to just kind of be anymore.

But it's to ourselves.

We're all doing it to ourselves.

But I think there's going to be a big anti-technology movement building.

I mean, I think there's the roots of it now.

Well, I think there's now camps for adults where there are anti-technology camps that are springing up all over the place.

And you can, you know, technology.

Not anti-technology,

a balancing of technology.

Well, I think the camps are designed to really get you off the devices and be present.

But it's not like technology is bad.

Well, I think eventually we'll get to some of that.

I mean, I think there will be really, there will be radical anti-technology people, really.

There will be.

I'm sure there are some now.

No, I don't think there will be because

everything that humans have created can be good and it can be bad.

Everything we've ever created.

We split the atom.

We make clean energy and we blow things up.

We learned quickly, let's not blow things up.

Yeah, but you know what?

We've used them.

Yes.

And they will be used again.

Correct.

And anything that we create, anything that humans can do, I mean, that's the irony.

It's like, you know, you see people that are either for stem cells or against stem cells or all of these things.

And it's like, if something can be done, it will be done.

Yes.

So I don't believe in just stopping things because of the potential for evil because it's going to happen.

And

you don't want to just, I would say, you don't want to just, if all the good people stop because of all the potential bad things, well, then you're just going to leave it to all the bad people who are going to do all sorts of awful things.

Correct.

Like, for instance, I do not want the federal government to have AI.

I don't want them to have it.

I don't want Google to have it.

Well, that's a good idea.

When I say a the ship has sailed, I know,

no, I mean AGI.

But I don't want,

I certainly do not want China to have it or Russia to have it.

So you're kind of sitting here and you're like, okay, well,

we better.

But what if the ship already sailed?

I mean, truly already sailed.

I don't mean it just metaphorically.

I mean, what if, well, it's still a metaphor, but no,

what if it really has happened already?

Because I am starting to think that that might be where we're at.

That these algorithms now, you know, the people that came up with the Google algorithms that now control so much of our information, a lot of them aren't even there anymore.

Right, right, right.

So, yeah.

So, that, so we have AI.

Are you familiar with AI, A-G-I-A-S-I?

What's A-S-I?

Okay, so

artificial intelligence, we have.

Yeah.

Okay.

And artificial intelligence is good at one thing.

So I can sort through Facebook and I can find these things.

I can play chess and beat any human.

I can do

play Jeopardy and I can beat you.

I can look at

cancer tests and I can

diagnose it better than any human.

That's AI, but it can only do one of those things.

It cannot do general things.

It can't be good at many things.

So we have AI.

The next step is AGI.

When we hit AGI, the world completely changes.

What does the G stand for?

General.

Artificial general intelligence.

That will work like the human brain, so it can do

everything.

When it gets into AGI, the next step is ASI.

That could be an hour in the transition.

It could never happen.

We don't know.

And S is super intelligence.

That puts us in a position of,

it has been described as

we are a fly on a plate in a kitchen.

That fly has absolutely no idea that's a plate, that's a kitchen, and what those people are even, what they are, let alone what they're talking about.

We are the fly.

ASI are the people.

Okay.

That,

you know, some people say 2040, 2050.

Ray Kurzweil says we will get to AGI by 2028, I believe.

You haven't seen anything yet.

And the problem is,

is that

you should never fear the technology.

You have to fear the goal of the technology.

Because when it hits AGI

and especially AI, whatever its goal is, it will accomplish it.

Okay.

It will accomplish it.

Well, that's why right now, if you were to just take this into where we're at now, when you see the James DeMoore memo at Google and you see the way social justice and this faux diversity

has been injected into the the algorithm.

I mean, we know

the way search results are manipulated.

So, we actually are now manipulating truth in the name of diversity.

Correct.

So, if you just play along now with these next two phases that you've mentioned here, eventually this AI,

if it has been manipulated properly, properly by the bad people, the way they want it manipulated, there's going to be an awful lot of people that that AI is going to turn against.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

I mean, now we're in every dystopian movie ever, right?

It's already happened.

They did a study on

releasing people from prison.

Okay.

How do we tell who should be on parole or not?

So they fed all of this information into AI.

And it's just cold and calculated.

And so what it did is it spat out who should go

on prison release and who should not.

Well, they did it for a while.

Everything was working out until somebody noticed, wait a minute,

this is letting more white people out than black.

So then the scientists said, is the AI racist?

Wait.

Well, if you programmed it to take in race, perhaps.

But if you took it in to look at just these numbers, so what did they do?

They adjusted it.

So they unbiased it.

They unbiased it, which was the bias.

Right.

You have to define.

We are in a place where nobody knows what any word means anymore.

We don't know what it means to be a racist.

We don't know.

When people say a safe zone, it drives me out of my mind.

You are safe.

You're uncomfortable.

There's a huge difference.

What we are programming right now is only going to get worse because it will just, it's the baseline and it keeps building on that.

So what I would say, the saving grace, because when we go down this rabbit hole of a conversation, people start freaking out.

And I know guys like us are going to think about this all the time and worry about it.

And okay, fine we can we can be the canary in the coal mine all that the saving grace is that I believe that

this this social justice idea and these terrible ideas of diversity and unbiasing where you're actually you're then putting in systemic bias so if you know there the the one that everyone talks about is that if you search um

something like american scientists

or famous American scientists, you now get a disproportionate amount of black scientists.

Now, nobody is saying there aren't black scientists or shouldn't be black scientists, of course.

But if you were to search famous American scientists, most of them would be white.

Now, we can discuss all sorts of reasons why that is, but it is just the truth.

Now,

what you realize is that all of these trickeries that all of these AI is doing and that these people are putting into the system,

they can't stand forever.

I honestly believe, and this is why I think that the individual can win still ultimately,

is that

it will destroy these companies.

If Google says, you know, we're not going to hire Asian engineers anymore because they're disproportionately represented at our company and in the engineering field, well, then what you're going to say is, well, first off, you're now putting in systemic racism.

There's no systemic racism that's stopping anyone from any color working anywhere.

If you now, as a company, Google, say, well, we can't have Asian engineers here because we want to be more diverse, You're actually injecting systemic because now it's in the system.

It's

not a law at Google, but it's part of your company policy.

Now it's systemic.

Ultimately, what that will do, and I mean this not just at Google, but at every place that buys into these ideas of this faux diversity, they will start hiring worse people, not because...

These people are minorities or gay or transgendered or whatever they are, in a wheelchair or whatever they are, but because you will not be taking the best of the best and forcing people to strive to be the best of the best, you will be taking people for lesser reasons.

And ultimately, over time,

that means your company will start faltering because there will be someone out there who is smart enough to go, This is nonsense, and I'm going to fight for a better thing.

So that's a little bit different than totally fighting the AI and the evolution of all of that.

But that's still where humans can make a difference.

Stop buying into this nonsense because it will come for everyone.

Okay, we're at the end of, well, I have to last question.

Yeah.

End of your life.

You're

because of.

Because of AI's life-saving technology, you're 300 years old.

Oh, geez.

And

you're thinking back.

What do you hope you will fill that blank in after I am

at that moment?

I'd say I am okay.

I hope at the end, wherever that end is, whether it's 86

or 300.

386.

Yeah, that does sound quite horrific, whether I'm just a head in a jar.

Yeah, if it's 386, it would be, I'm tired.

Yeah, I'm really exhausted.

I think I'm okay that whatever it is that I did here, that at the end

that I felt okay with whatever I created,

whether I have kids or don't have kids,

whether nothing, where there are all the things that we've talked about here, whether I'm irrelevant in a year for some reason, or whether this is just the beginning.

Again, I always feel like I'm at the beginning.

I hope that at the end I'll go, I did everything I could do.

I really did, you know, within the constraints of being a human.

I did everything that I possibly could do.

I had a good friend, my best childhood friend, since I'm four years old.

I remember the day we met in kindergarten, literally.

We've been best friends for now almost 40 years.

His father died suddenly last week.

His dad's 80 years old.

He had a heart attack in the middle of the night.

He was dead two days later.

He had

four great sons, a whole bunch of grandchildren, been married, I think, 60 years.

Really good man.

I can only picture this guy smiling every time I went over to my buddy John's house.

Dad was there having a great time with us and messing with us and was a good father, obviously a good grandfather and everything.

And

I went to the funeral last week.

And people were crying, but they were also laughing and all of the things that happened.

And the feeling that I walked away with, I hadn't seen his dad in probably about 10 years, but the feeling I walked away with was that

was a life that was full.

And I think that's all you can want, that you did something, you know, whatever it was, whether for him it was, you know, having kids and having grandkids and being around for everybody or whatever else he did in his life that I don't know about, that you just hope that you did something that was real.

And that at the end, you go, all right, I did it.

And

now let's see what happens after this.

I think you can leave the stage.

That's it.

Saying that.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, my friend.

You bet.

Thank you.

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