Dave Rubin Shares The BIGGEST LESSONS He's LEARNED From Ben Shapiro & Jordan Peterson | Lewis Howes

Individual rights is the most important thing, period. Regardless of gender, skin color, sexual orientation, any of that immutable stuff. If you are a legal member of the United States, I believe you should live under the exact same laws, period.

Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got Dave Rubin in the house, my man. Good to see you.

Thanks for being here. It is good to see you, and I mean that in the most literal way possible.

Because we haven't seen a human being in months.

I kid you not, I've got my new associate producer, Michael here, who's doing some stuff for us right now and taking some pictures, but besides him, I.

Have not seen anybody.

Are you sick of your husband? I'm sick of my husband, I'm sick of my dog. You know what? I'm really sick at looking at a.

Camera, because I'm doing this whole book.

Tour just staring into a camera, a blank camera. And I'm imagining someone's face. I imagine someone, they said to me, some people are like, you want us to send a picture so you can just look at my still face. But I'm just staring into that camera all day long. So I genuinely mean it, it is nice to see another human.

It's good to see you, man. We lived in the same neighborhood for many years. We live, I don't know, 10 miles away now. And I didn't really learn about you until about a year ago. I think when I was interviewing Jordan Peele, I saw some videos of him with you. 'Cause I don't follow political stuff at.

All, but you also do non-political stuff. That's why you look young and happy.

Yeah, healthy, vibrant, joyful. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just not really that into it. I feel like it's more confusing to me than anything, so I try not to focus on things that I'm ignorant about. Try to learn a little bit, but it's like, if I start to speak in there, I'm gonna get mauled.

So I try to-- that's actually probably a very healthy way to look at the world. You know, I always tell people, it's like, the people right now, especially in the midst of coronavirus, The people that only look at the world through a political lens, like if you only see the world through Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, blah, blah, blah, or you wake up every morning and you're like, what did the governor do today? And what did the New York Times say about this thing and that thing? It's like all that can lead you to is endless misery because politics is not, I love politics. I'm a political creature, so I'm not pretending I have nothing to do with this. But if your whole worldview has nothing to do with anything other than just the day-to-day political machination, you will be miserable because politics is a battle of power. And it's like pretty much everyone in Game of Thrones. Did you watch Game of Thrones? No. You didn't watch Game of Thrones? I watched the first two episodes and I couldn't get through it. You know what? I honestly didn't love it. I know we're gonna get a lot of hate for that. You didn't watch it and I didn't love it, but I did watch it.

I did watch the whole thing.

And in Game of Thrones, basically everyone dies. And the people that are around at the end, everyone they know is dead. And that's sort of what politics is. Everyone at some point dies. Well, everyone's gonna die one way or another. It's sort of like this endless, like just like crushing and slaughtering people now in many ways through the mob, which is why I wrote the book. But like, I'm just not that interested in just politics. 27 Democrats voted for this and 30, it's like, how do people- There's so many more interesting things out there.

How do people who are in politics, I would say you're in politics all day though. Yeah, no, I am in it all day.

You're in it all day. This is the irony, but it doesn't.

Define my worldview and that's really what I mean. How do people who are obsessing about it live a good life? It's because you're constantly in stress and anxiety and anger and frustration and, Yay, we won. Oh, we lost.

Well, that's one of the reasons that in chapter 10, the final chapter of the book, I lay out ways to get away from this stuff. You know what I mean? It's like, you need to look, you know, it's funny because certain people will say, I'm not political. And that's actually not what you said. You said, It's not totally my thing, you know, blah, blah, blah. And that, that makes sense to me, 'cause not everyone can be political. But when people say, I'm not political, it's like, well, politics cares about you, you know what I mean? So like, there's gonna be something one of these days that comes down the pike and you're suddenly gonna be like.

Oh man, my kid's gonna be, I need something for my kid or this, my family or immigration. Like I'm dealing with immigration 'cause my.

Girlfriend'S from Mexico, so it's like, so yeah, now I get interested. Ah, now you suddenly care about politics. So that's the interesting thing. It's like when people say, oh, I'm not into politics, you, It will get you at some point because something is gonna happen in your life, whether it's your Mexican girlfriend or suddenly your kid's school isn't funded enough or is funded the wrong way or there's a charter school you wanna send them to and they don't want you to go there. They don't want you to go there, it's like, it's all there. But getting away from the day to day thing is why I wrote chapter 10 the way I did because it's a political book. But then I wanted to say to people, hey, we need spaces to not be political. One of the things that drives me nuts is that, When we had sports, remember when we used to have sports? You remember that?

You go to a basketball game.

I'm watching the Last Dance right now. It's like, give me-- Wait, can we talk about that in a second? I want to finish this up, but I want to talk about that. So, one of the things that I try to do is I take August off the grid.

No phone, no news, no nothing.

Lock your phone in a safe. I literally lock it in a safe. And I've done it for three Augusts in a row.

And I'm telling you, you can reset your brain. In your heart, your body, you feel alive again. You can clearly think everything, right? It is not, I am not exaggerating.

I am not being over the top. Literally, like around August 15th, like about two weeks in, songs will start playing in my brain. Like I will literally be walking down the street and suddenly a song is just like rolling in my head. And the reason for that is your brain's got a lot of stuff in there, a lot of stuff. And if you're in the day to day, what the hell's going on? Who am I fighting with? Somebody I didn't know across the world said something that I mildly don't like and I gotta destroy them. You're inundating yourself. We have no idea, I got my phone here somewhere, we have no idea what that little black mirror is doing to us. It's rewiring us and basically I rewatched Matrix a couple days ago and it's like we are the batteries. The Matrix is actually happening right now. You know the Matrix, the whole idea is that the human, the organic being became the battery for the digital machine, right? And we are actually Doing it.

25 years ago, that movie?

Yeah, yeah, about 25 years ago. And it's still, man, it's how things stands up. You know, sometimes you watch a sci-fi thing and just because of tech and how things change, it's like, ah, that feels too old.

But that thing-- It's still pretty.

Oh, it's pretty everyday. It's pretty current still. Yeah. Wait, can we do Last Dance?

Yes.

Are you loving it? So I haven't watched it, but I-- oh my God, it's amazing. But 92, okay, you remember which finals that was? No. So this is-- How old are you? I'm 43. I'm 37.

37.

Okay, so around same time. Yes, okay, so it's a little early for you, but '92 was when Jordan and the Bulls beat the Blazers, and it's the famous moment with the shrug. Right, of course. Ah, of course. And you see, you know, he hits the six three-pointers, 35 points in the first half. You see Cliff Robinson just crumble as a human. But my hero in life to that point, and in many ways even still now, was Clyde Drexler. Oh, he's unbelievable. Clyde the Glide, I love this guy, and I still do. We've actually, we text every now and again, which is great. And, you know, he's totally apolitical. We live in very, very, very different worlds, but I just saw this guy playing and he was so smooth. He never showboated. He was calm and cool. I mean the nickname Clyde the Glide. And I just, my dog now is Clyde, so we call him Clyde the Glide. We named him after Clyde. That's amazing. But what I loved about him was, you know, all of these guys, especially now, it's always about them. You know, that you hit a three, you dance, you shimmy, you pound your chest. around your chest, you look at the crowd and all that stuff. And like, I was never into that. Maybe that's partly why I interview people the way I do and the rest of it. But Clyde was just like his head was kind of down. He used to dribble with his head down. You know you're supposed to dribble with your head up, but he would dribble with his head down. And then, you know, you'd look at the end of the game and you'd be like, he scored 42 points, had.

11 rebounds and eight assists.

You're like, I didn't even know he was playing. Right. Because he was just calm and cool. So, it's like the Barry Sanders of basketball.

Yeah.

In many ways, Barry Sanders.

Go off the field.

Barry Sanders, the guy who was freaking amazing, but quiet off the field, never showed but just went in and did his work. And there's something I really, really respect about that. I don't know why as a 12-year-old or 13-year-old that that really appealed to me, 'cause you'd think it's odd. It's like you'd like all the other stuff, but for some reason that appealed.

To me more than the guys that were out there making it all about themselves. I think there's people that love the humble achiever, and then there's others that love the Muhammad Ali's, the Mayweather's, the McGregor's that, say what they're gonna do and they do it. They call their shots and they do it. But I feel like that's a lot harder of a life to live. There might be big upside, but big lows as well.

There's big-- and I think also the way and the time that we like those things is different. So like, I also came to love Kobe Bryant. And Kobe Bryant was the ultimate showman. He wanted to take out everybody. He was an incredible orator too. I mean, every interview with him. And I'll tell you, the day that-- the day before Kobe died, We're here in LA, obviously, and I was flicking through the channels. There's the Spectrum Lakers channel, whatever it is. And Kobe was doing a show on there and I saw him and he kind of had half-shaved and he sort of had a little bit of a beard at this point. And I was just flicking the channels and I swear to God, the first thing that popped in my head was, There is a guy living his best life. This is literally the day before he died. And the next day, I was going to San Francisco, I think, and just as I pressed the Uber, you know, I saw on Twitter and I couldn't believe it, just like everyone else. I was like, this is made up. This can't, you know, because you always see that, somebody's name and you're like, no, no. And I teared up and then I was late for the airport and when I got into the Uber, it was a young black guy, probably late 20s. He was hysterical crying. Oh man. And we sat there and I cried too and he said, I may not be able to drive. I said, let's just take a couple minutes. And we talked about basketball the whole time, how much he loved Kobe, how he taught him, you know, the mamba and taught him about passion and drive and all those things. And I know this is quite a tangent from wherever we were going, but like when you see people like that, like that's the thing about Kobe that's so weird is like it doesn't fit reality sort of that something like that could happen to someone like him. And that's not to demean, you know, his kids or anyone else that was in there. But when you see someone that was so doing what they were put on this earth to do the highest level, the highest level. And it's not just, you know, a lot of athletes, they finish up and then it doesn't quite work out.

Right.

Even Michael Jordan, you could tell it's like he owned the team. He came back. Even now, it's like a little bit.

Of, like, what's going on there? But Kobe was freaking thriving. I mean, he won an Oscar. Schools, the Oscar schools, the podcast, the.

Books he was creating after basketball.

Tiffany and I got to interview him a year and a half ago. I gotta watch that. I'm gonna watch that today. It was. It went viral when it came out on ESPN and NBC and olympics.com and Lakers. It went everywhere because we talked about love, we talked about family, we talked about these other things that he normally doesn't talk about. And it was an ex, he set an example that I always remember, and Tiffany was there, which is me and Tiffany filming, where we went to his office at, the interview was set for something like 8 o'clock in the morning, first thing in the morning. in the Orange County at his office. We get there, I think, around 6:30, thinking, let's get there super early, let's set up the cameras, like make sure we have everything ready. And when we get there, 6:30 a.m., the assistant opens the door for us and like unlocks it, opens the door. And she's like, this is where we normally film our interviews in this spot. And I was like, I'm not really feeling this. Can we walk around the office and check another location? Yeah. And we walked through a long hallway with kind of windows, glass offices on both sides, kind of conference rooms, into another big room. Didn't like what we saw over there. We walked back through this long hallway with these offices on each side. And the lights were turned off. And at one point, when we crossed this office, I see a shadow in the back of this office. And it's Kobe sitting there just like this, looking up. His computer's turned off. There's no phone in his hand, no lights on. no distraction. The guy's just looking up like this, dreaming, visualizing, staring into the distance at 6:30 a.m. and I talked to his sister, I go, Is that Kobe? Like he's in the back of the room.

Yeah.

I think that's Kobe. I saw for a second and I was like, what's he doing here? And she was like, He's been here for an hour. And he was up before then at 4:00 working out with his daughter in the gym, you know, playing basketball and teaching her about his mentality. And she was like, he's always the first one here. And I'm like, here's a guy who has it all, five championships, all the money in the world, invested in businesses, Oscar, and he's still showing up setting the example, which I thought was really cool.

It's, it's, that's just cool. I mean, it's truly incredible. And that's what I mean about, like, when you heard about that moment, it's like, it feels like a rip in reality in a way, because, you know, we're all sometimes doing the best we can, sometimes not doing the best we can. And, and I always think about it sort of like when, when you're in your zone, when you're, like, really living life the best way you can, like, at the moment. I'm in a good spot and it's partly because of the book, but it's partly because of being around Jordan who I know you've interviewed. I'm in a good run right now and I find when you're in a good run, you actually start forgetting about time. You're like, holy cow, three months passed by and some of that stuff that's always rattling around in my head, the old demons or whatever's in there, you kind of forget that they're there. Now that's not to say you're always gonna be on that path and we all then make mistakes and do all those things. That's kind of what life is about, right? Like figuring out a thing that works. trying to stay within those lanes as much as possible. But when you see someone like Kobe, who exactly what you just described, it was so obvious to all of us. And then he's gone like that. It makes you question reality. Like, what is this? What is this thing that we're doing every day that could just be ripped like that?

What brings you back to perspective and gratitude? You know, why I talk about gratitude all the time. It's almost like this, I talked to all the scientists, professors, doctors, researchers on happiness and it always comes back to gratitude as being one of the main research scientific things that lead to happiness. You get gratitude from perspective. It's like, okay, my life used to be bad, now it's good and I'm grateful. Or someone lost a child or someone lost a parent, I've got mine. That perspective helps us. You went on tour with Jordan for what a year or something?

About a year and a half.

Year and a half. This guy's probably blown up more than anyone online right now. It's been amazing to watch his trajectory since a book came out. What would you say has been the greatest lesson you learned from his example and the way he thinks? Because he's one of the most powerful thinkers today in a lot of people's opinions. What's the greatest lesson you learned about yourself and a new belief that you adopted after being around him.

--Yeah, I lay out a bunch of those in the book actually. And the funny thing about going on tour with him, I mentioned this, it's like we it wasn't planned. He literally he was in my studio with Ben Shapiro. We do this interview and that night Jordan was doing his first ever theater show here in LA at the Orpheum. --Okay, yeah. --And we knew he was doing it and first off to put him and Shapiro in a room together and I'm not even going to include myself in that room. --He's just facilitating. --Yeah they're playing tennis and I'm just okay, okay, let's make sure. I'm the ball boy, really. I'm just making sure the thing doesn't go out of the way. So we do that and we went for like two hours and they were just getting started these two. And the speed with which Ben talks. So that's Ben, right? And then you're watching Jordan with the hands. It's like, I feel like I'm in a movie here. And I think what I've become good at actually, why I fit into this whole thing, is that I am able from a regular person's perspective when Jordan goes off the deep end with all of this stuff and Ben, yeah, what can the, how do we understand that? That's when I feel like my role.

In my show, it's like, how do we take a billionaire's mindset or the greatest athlete in the world and make some simple ideas so that human beings like myself can apply them?

It's funny, I love that you're embracing it because it's very obvious that you are and that, for me, it's like, people will be like, oh, Dave, you know, Dave thinks he's like Jordan Peterson or something like that. I'm like, no, I do not at all. Like, I was, Part of this thing that was incredible, but so we finish up the interview with them and they could have gone hours, but I wanted to be respectful of Jordan because he's doing this first test show. He had never done a theater show and literally as a joke as he's walking out the door, I said, Hey Jordan, if you want, I'll come on with you tonight. I'll tell a couple jokes. That's it. I was like, I'll warm up the crowd. He looked at me, he didn't even think about it for a split second.

He's like, that sounds great, Dave.

I'll see you tonight.

Go there to the Orpheum, 3,000 people.

Wow. What was he gonna do without you? Did he have a set up man? No, he had nothing. He was gonna walk on stage and like, And we're like, okay, and we're like, sure. It's Jordan. It's like he just, it's sort of what we were talking about a little bit before the cameras went on, but he just does. He just does things, you just move forward. So we get there and it's jam-packed and the announcer says, so now nobody knows I'm gonna be there, which is fine. The announcer says, and now the host of the Rubin Report, Dave Rubin, and the crowd goes freaking bananas. Really? And I couldn't believe it, because this was just when the whole intellectual dark web thing was taken off. All of us were feeling that something special is going on, but we don't know what it is exactly. Are we teammates? Are we a road touring group? Are we combatants? Like, what the hell is this? Are we nemesis? Is this a pattern? Like, what is this thing? The crowd went crazy and I genuinely couldn't believe it. I was like, I cannot believe these people know me. And from that moment, I crushed it up there. I made some silly jokes about lobsters and about the way he talks, he sounds like Hermit the Frog and some of that stuff. And the show was over. The agents at CIA were there. They said, Are you repped? I said, yeah, but let's talk. And we signed the deal, like, the next day, and it completely changed my life. A year and a half later, we did 120 stops. We did something like 20 countries. I saw this man, so to answer your question, I saw this guy change people's lives. Like, not just talk about stuff, not just put out theories that kind of sound right, not give you faux you know, personal wisdom. I saw him by laying out those 12 rules. The amount of people that I saw him get to stand up straight with their shoulders back, that clean their room, I mean, I could give you a million examples, but I'll give you one, 'cause this is the one that like, I actually took it out of the book, but it just stuck with me. We were in Ireland, we're in Dublin, and try to imagine like, this is a guy that he did not want fame. He was a clinical psychologist, right? So this isn't like, this isn't a guy that, this isn't like meeting a comic who suddenly becomes famous and it's like, oh, this is what I always wanted, or an actor like this is what I wanted. He was still this like humble quiet guy from Alberta, Canada, you know, who's touring with his wife and like you know only eating only eating red meat. Yes, they only eat salt. I could get him to have a whiskey every now and again, which was always nice. But we finished the show in Dublin, you know when you do these theater shows as the performer you don't walk out the front because you're going to be mobbed. So there's always this little side door and you leave a couple hours later and try to imagine just like the level of travel and jet lag and he stopped every single person for a year and a half that wanted to say hello to him. He shook their hand, he asked them what their name was. I mean, the guy was just off the charts. And these are very much things that I've tried to incorporate into my life. So that partly answers the question. But we walk out, and it's late night, he's signed all the autographs, he shook all the hands, the whole thing.

He's tired.

He sounds like a tired Kermit the Frog now. Yeah, now he really, like his voice. His voice, 'cause also, you know, he has that thing actually where he talks about it sometimes. that the way he talks is sort of up here, and that's just like what happened to him sort of, but sometimes he used to say he would train himself to try to sound a little deeper, but I could tell when he was tired, his voice would trail off a little bit, and usually at the end of the night, the guy was beat. We walk out, we see these two guys, one's about 60, one's about 20, 25, and they're crying, and they're sort of embracing, and they quickly, they see us, and they run at us, and it's me, Jordan, Jordan's wife, and the tour manager, and it turns out they were a father and son who had had a falling out about five years before, who both bought the book, both showed up to the show because they were fixing their lives, saw each other at the show, made amends, and they stood there telling us that story, both of them crying. Then Jordan starts crying, his wife starts crying, the tour manager starts crying, I start crying. It was like, it felt, I knew it as it was happening. I was like, I will never Forget this. And I can give you a million other versions of like that sort of thing. People coming up, I got this job because of you. I got off drugs because of you. I got a better job because of you. A guy that literally, we were in Sweden, a guy ran, was running the jet bridge. He ran onto the plane. He was like, Jordan, I could get fired for doing this, but I just have to tell you I got this job because of you, blah blah blah. And meanwhile, everyone on the plane is looking, who the hell is that up there? But I saw so many things like that. Young people buying their first suits. I was in Stockholm at H&M. I was just buying a baseball cap. because it was really windy. And literally the guy in front of me, young kid, he's probably 20, he tells the cashier, I'm buying a suit because I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight. The guy goes, I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight. I tapped him, I was like, hey, they knew who I was. And then I gave him a shout out at the show. I forget what his name was, but I was like, Mike's here. He bought his first suit tonight to be here and the whole crowd applauded for him. And that really was the feeling of the tour. So what I got from Jordan more than anything else is if you say something true, you can change the world, because that's what he did. It's not magic, it's not magic. We sort of think that that's not quite right somehow, that you actually can't change the world, or the world is just this thing that goes and you're an actor in it or something, or maybe you can get your little piece and it's kind of okay, or something like that, but he lived up to those 12 rules. It doesn't make him perfect, it doesn't make him Jesus. He's obviously had some issues since then, which by the way he was open about, as some of them were transpiring. But that is the lesson. You can change the world. If you fix yourself, you have no idea what putting a little order in the world can do. And I'm really trying to do that. I really am.

Was there a belief that you had that was changed after that year that you were like, no, I'm 100% this thing and believe in this value and principle. But as time went on, maybe I believe in the opposite or something Honestly.

It'S probably the biggest belief that there is, which is belief. He moved me on this. So as we were on tour, there were a couple other tour stops that he did these debates with Sam Harris that you may have heard about where in essence they had done a couple podcasts together. He's atheist. Jordan is a believer. Jordan's what I would call a sort of functional believer. I don't know that he believes in sort of like this undefinable magical God. And he always would say, I hate When we would do the Q&A, he'd say the only question he hated was when people would say, Do you believe in God? Because he found it to be such a sort of amorphous question that no one- what is short of? Right, because short of saying yes, I believe, or saying no, I don't believe, your answer is always going to be muddled and nuanced, and I hate to tell you, but a lot of people can't deal with nuance and other things. But what their debates really were about were pretty much the nature of reality. Like, is reality and are the are the biblical eternal truths valuable and true versus what Sam would say, which I'm just paraphrasing both of their arguments. Obviously Sam would say that humans can basically come up with systems of belief that are eternal and good enough. Sort of like enlightenment values around the 1700s of free speech and open inquiry. That's kind of enough. And I really, I was definitely in the Sam corner years ago, and I have completely moved to the Jordan side. I think I think you can be a complete secular person and non-believer and be absolutely moral and decent and good. I know many such people, including Sam. But I don't think a society can organize itself around something, I'll say it a little differently, I think the only way a society can organize itself is around a belief outside of itself. You cannot organize a society, look, that's what the United States did. What did the founders do that was so brilliant. They said, Here you go, you have God-given rights. We're just protecting those rights. That's what the whole point of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is. They didn't say we gave you these rights. They said there are things that exist before us and those things are the things that we will build a system to create because if you say that the system itself made you free, if the system, our government made us free, well, you're saying man made you free, but no man made me free, no man made you free, you were born we are free as human beings. Now, a government can take our rights, but it didn't make me free. And we're seeing a weird version of that right now with coronavirus. It's like we're watching some of our rights be slowly eroded and we could debate whether that's all well and good. And, you know, right now our Fourth Amendment, you know, the right to assembly, like that's suspended right now. You know, that's big, but we're not really talking about that. So I would say Jordan moved me on what really I don't know. In many ways it's the core question of life. I just don't think a society can do it otherwise.

So for 40, I guess, years, were you a non-believer in God or a certain religion or because you grew up Jewish?

Yeah.

Jewish kind of.

Yeah, see, I mean, Judaism is like Jew-ish, right? Like, well, that's the funny thing, because Judaism really more in a modern sense, it's more like, oh, do you like Seinfeld and Bagels and Lox and like have a sense of humor? Like that's very much like what we think of some of the traditional dinners or something. Yeah, and then okay you're gonna celebrate Passover, you eat some matzah, like that kind of thing. And I very much had that. I came from actually a more religious family than that, but not like super, super religious. But I think the difference for, and I obviously I'm not speaking for all Jews, I'm not speaking for all believers, all Christians or anything else.

But I think the sort of core difference when you and I are so similar because we have to qualify everything we say otherwise people like, Well, they're gonna come anyway.

They're gonna come anyway because they know where to cut the video.

I know, go ahead.

But I think the difference in a vague sense or in a broad sense between the way Jews believe and the way Christians believe is that Christians believe in sort of like a very personal relationship with God, where Jews, it's sort of like the sort of like existential and eternal struggle of finding out what truth is. And that's very different. Those are very different things. I'm not saying one is better, I'm not saying one is worse. Look, the history of the Jews, we don't have to go into it. It's a pretty painful, brutal, pogromed, holocausted, lot of death history. So I don't think it necessarily came with some banner of protection around it. It obviously didn't. But so when you ask me, was I a believer in a traditional sense or something like that? I was not a believer or a believer. I was never taught that that was actually that important. It was more like, what did you put into the world?

So we just What would you say that you believe in now? Is it you believe in the idea of God or you believe in a religion or you believe in a...

I believe in some eternal truths that have to exist outside of ourselves. It's the only way a creator...

There had to be a creator.

There had to be a creator. Something had to start this and it had to be something with some level of intelligence out. I don't think we're just atoms flying around. Maybe we are in a simulation too, right? Everyone's big into the simulation idea. I don't even think that would preclude a creator at the beginning of that thing, right? Like when you're playing Sims or whatever, I don't know, one of those games, like you're the god of that game. So like you started somewhere, but someone started you and somebody had to create that world. So these conversations can always go in like, you know, we could parse this off into 80 different.

I mean, I love this topic. I'm curious in a world of abundance of info and ideas, free thinking videos, media influencers, persuading people, enrolling people in their ideals. How do we as young people, how does anyone find their values and their beliefs?

Yeah, it's tough.

Especially when you say, oh, I changed my belief at 40 and, oh, I.

Check, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, it's tough. It's a great question because it's tough.

Right.

So. Well, first off, I think there's a unique opportunity right now. So through the noise of the online world and. for all the haters and the trolls and the bots and all that stuff. It's on you to pilfer out some truth out of it. That very much explains, by the way, how Jordan appeared. You know, it's like Jordan was saying this stuff for a long time, right? He was saying these things in the classroom. He was doing these biblical lectures for a long time. And then clearly the world, through the chaos of the world or the last 20 years of a zillion ideas coming at us all the time or the collapse of the mainstream media, or the collapse of manhood in a certain way and we don't have good leaders anymore, political or personal, there was something crazy happening. And here's this guy who's been having this beacon, right? He's sending out a beacon saying there's some truth here, these biblical stories. I mean, the one that I say in the book is like, why do we all think that the little guy can beat the big guy?

Why do you go out?

Yeah.

My name's David, so I always felt.

Like I'm the little guy, you know? David, right? Like, why am I always attacking Google every time they demonetize me or push one of my videos down? Well, It's not. Yeah, well first of all, it sucks, right? It sucks. But why do I do it? No one in their right mind thinks that they can beat Google, but there's an eternal truth there.

David beat Goliath. I don't know if you've seen what Brian Rose is doing right now with London Real.

Have you seen him?

No, I'm gonna do London Real in a couple days. Oh, yeah. He just raised over a million dollars in literally two weeks. Because Instagram shut him down, or not Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. YouTube is taking his content away.

Why'd they do it?

I mean, nothing has surprised me at this point. Oh, David Ike, David Ike, yeah. Yeah, he got on and they deleted it. It was like, had a hundred thousand views in an hour or something. They delete it. He tried to do it again. They deleted, then they deleted his account.

Or suspended, and then everyone deletes his page.

Wow. I mean, I'm doing the London real in a couple of days. I'll have to talk to him about this. Yeah, he raised literally from his audience over a million dollars creating something like, I forget the name of it, but something like the free speech video platform where you can have these thinkers on and it's not gonna get blocked by a big corporation.

I mean, I've had enough of a foray into this and I actually started a tech company in the middle of this called Locals.com where we're building digital homes for creators to protect them because I believe in competition. I don't like, you know, all these people that want the government to come in and solve this. It's like, well, big tech is really big and government's really big. I don't really like these big things, so why would I combine these big things? So it's an odd spot for a lot of conservatives cuz this is the one where the conservatives are like, hey, we love we love Trump and Trump's gonna help us. But, you know, if Trump loses the election, well, congratulations. Now the people that you don't like are also in bed with big tech. So that that's a whole other thing. But but that concept, though, of big tech sort of deciding we have no idea this this is the most important part. We have simply no idea how they're manipulating us. We have no idea when you put up a podcast How many of your subscribers get those videos? How many they just don't send them to? What the algorithm says while, oh, he's got Dave Rubin on this week, his audience leans a little this way, we're gonna suppress it this way, we're not gonna show the tweets. Crazy, right? You know that shadow banning, meaning suppressing tweets in your timeline, which is just supposed to be chronological, that's what we all signed up for with Twitter, right? You follow people so you get one chronological feed. Shadow banning is in the terms of service. They tell you in the terms of service that they can deboost, I think they use another sort of Orwellian term, but they can basically hide or boost other people. So in effect what we're doing is we're in control. We're playing a basketball game or any sports game, the rules are rigged, we all know the rules are rigged, and then the outcome comes out and we're.

Like, oh, I can't believe that.

We're trying to play blackjack in Vegas right now. Yeah, it's like, and by the way, guys, some of you are gonna get better cards or no, some of you are gonna know what's The next card coming. You're gonna know when you got the ace coming. And then we all pretend we don't know. So it's such a big issue because it actually in many ways sits on top of absolutely everything else.

So I mean back to the question of how do we figure out what our values and beliefs and principles are if we're thrown so much information from all these different opinions and ideas, government, free thinkers, YouTubers, whatever. Influencer, we look up to influencers who are doing crazy stuff. How do we actually set values and principles for ourselves?

I'm glad you brought it back because I find sometimes when I'm interviewing somebody, you go on like a great tangent. I love it. And then I'm like, what the hell was I asking? I do the same thing. I'm trying to do better. No, but I can see you're present and that's the thing. When you're in it, when I'm doing the other version of this, when we're doing it the other way, it's like I try to be in it as much as possible. And sometimes when you're in it, it.

Leads to the next great thing. You're three steps down and you're going, there was something back there that I.

Wanted to pick up. I think this is an important thing.

For us to figure out because I have seen over the last 15 years, whatever, you know, since I've graduated college, let's say, you know, I had one vision and set of beliefs that we're trying to get into college and then play professional football and then it's how do I make my first, you know, $5,000? How do I make whatever?

Yep.

How do I sell? It's like your vision and things evolve and your values evolve. evolve, I would say, as you grow.

So, I think the only, so, yes, I agree with your premise. I think the only way to actually do it is it's on you. I know that sounds kind of cliche and not like the perfect buttoned-up answer, but it is now on you that you have access. Every single person with the phone or with internet access has access to incredible minds at all times. In many ways, in many ways, we're watching And I think we're really seeing it exacerbated by corona right now, but we're watching the university system collapse because you know all of these kids now they're going, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why am I paying 30 grand a year and going to all this debt? I can be on Zoom for free. And they're doing it, Zoom for free. And not only that, think about it right now. So just a couple of, you know, people, it's like you could learn psychology.

From Jordan Peterson on YouTube for free.

Or buy the book and you get a membership for 20 bucks a month or whatever. and this is this thing that we're talking about, this access to information and knowing that there are good people out there who are figuring out ways to live kind of outside the system. It's a beautiful thing. But your question really is how do you pilfer something out of the muddle, out of the noise, out of the muck? That really is on you. I think the best thing you can do is what I've tried to do, and I suspect it's what you try to do, you try to find some people who are doing something Approximately close to true you know what I mean like they're you that you can just sense oh, you know what's true when.

You see the leaders you know it in government who are Saying one thing that maybe your family doesn't agree with how do you know? I think you have to do the work so you have to do the work to actually know facts.

Okay, so let's we'll back up a little bit, right? So okay, so how do you know what's true? Well, first off there are book you know look, it's like you get could you read books that are all manipulated or whatever, but let's let's try to like clean it up a little bit For the average person that's just going, man, I want to figure out kind of what's true here. First off, I think, you know, this is where we gotta have some, a decent education system. And it's very 50-50 on whether we have that. I've heard some interesting libertarian arguments that we just have to get the government out of education altogether. Why is it that everyone in LA, you know, all the lefty liberals in LA that love to tax the hell out of you and throw money at everything, you know, where they all send their kids? It ain't public school. It's private school. Private school, yeah. So like these are the, complex issues that underlie everything we're talking about. I think you have to be able to know some facts and not just narrative. So like one very simple one that we hear all the time is that there's this wage gap, this gender wage gap. And the implication is that women make 63 cents or something on the dollar that the men make. And this is because of systemic misogyny and a patriarchy and all of these things. Well, you can actually do some research. Go on Google. I would highly recommend a PragerU video by Christina Hoff-Somers who is a true feminist, meaning she wants true equality for women, she has fought for it her entire life, and she lays out why, when they present these numbers, it's not exactly true. Do you know that men and women do different things? So there's a really fascinating version of this coming out of Stanford.

It's like a documentary. It's like we can make a documentary persuade you into anything with facts or these, you know, information.

Right, right. So you always have to be careful of the sources, and I wouldn't say just watch one video, Look, I'm mostly a libertarian when it comes to economics, and I can give you a couple great guys. I mean, watch my interview with Thomas Sowell, who has been beating this drum for literally 50 years, who was a leftist and a Marxist. But I wouldn't say to you, watch that, that's the truth, now you're done. It's like, okay, watch that. Now find a sort of lefty economist and match these two things. Match these two things. So when Thomas Sowell will say something like, you know, every time we throw money at something, we make the problem worse. So we have a welfare state that we all know doesn't work, because if it worked, it would get people out of poverty, but we know it just keeps sucking people in.

They're dependent on it, and they stay in it, they're not empowered, they're not--.

And you can't blame them. And they're not responsible. All of those things, and-- why, because it's easy, why would you get out of it? So the best example I can, and then so, okay, that's a great point, because then you can take what you learn from an academic, right? And then you can map it to something in your life to see if it jives. So a great example of that would be that my sister, she actually just moved out of New York City 'cause of corona, but her plan was to live in New York City her whole life with her husband and kids. They just left, but she was in a, you know, one of these big 40 floor high rises, and it was basically half rent controlled and half market. So she was paying, I think, around five grand for a converted one bedroom. So they turned it into-- Wow. A studio, that was it. Yeah, they turned it into two, kinda. And one of the bedrooms didn't even have a window. With her two kids, she would refer to it as my little box. I live in my little box, right? Now the problem is half of the building was rent controlled and what happens then is you've got people that have the exact same apartment as my sister who are now paying 400 bucks a month and then you can't blame them for not getting off the government dole because if you're looking at your numbers, if you're just looking at your life and you're going, well the government's been giving me this 400, and then what happens is that it goes generationally. So my sister will say, there are literally people here who are the grandparents, now their grandchildren are living there and.

They'Ll inherit that too. And they'll stay in that place because it won't force them to try to be more creative or hungry or resourceful.

And by the way, again, you cannot blame them for that. Because it would be almost, it would be like, let me get this straight. I could pay 400 bucks, I'm gonna live in a nice area in a nice building and there's a doorman down there. Or you're telling me I can give all that up, get three jobs, work my butt off, and have to leave.

And move to a much worse place.

Commute an hour and a half. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's a good example because what you do is you hear a theory. So Thomas Sowell would say the welfare state creates perpetual welfare and then he'll lay out some numbers to do it. Okay? And he's written a million books on this. Then map it to something that you know in your real life. And I would say the thing that really has shifted, people always ask me have I really shifted on anything in these couple of years? I have shifted on economics because in the process of all this, much like you, I started my own own business.

You pay a lot of taxes here in California, man.

We pay bananas. It's crazy.

It's almost like they're making more than us.

And not only are they making more than us, but what are they doing to us? What are they doing to us? The more that they take from us as the job creators, the more they say to us, you can't give other people.

You can't hire more people because we.

Don'T give any money to hire people.

Yeah.

So here's my associate producer, Michael right here. He's a great guy. We just hired him right at the beginning of coronavirus, right? We sent all my guys Omaha Steaks in the midst of this thing because they're busting our butts for us. I treat my guys good, we pay all their health insurance and all that stuff. I'm not patting myself on the back to say that. I'm saying I have a vested interest in keeping my guys happy because they will work hard for me and I can grow my business. Now I can tell you, I don't really want more stuff in my life. That is the truth. We have one car between the two of us, but we have a nice house, we have a good life. There isn't like, I don't like flip the internet like, what can I buy tonight? I really have the physical things that I want. So I don't mean they should tax me lower just so I could have stuff, although that would be well within my right. Like if I wanted a yacht and I could afford it, that would be fine. But what I know as someone that runs a small business, if you cut my taxes right now, I guarantee you the first thing I'm doing is hiring someone. Exactly. Guarantee it. My guys are killing themselves right now working. We're all working 10 jobs. And it's like that. So what I'm saying here is, hear what a great economist thinks. Map that to your life and see if it makes sense. And if it does, that's probably the right thought.

And do that in religion, do that in relationships, do that in everything.

Do that literally in everything.

Find both sides and see what's true for you.

Listen, I'm talking about a libertarian economist in Thomas Sowell. I'm not saying ignore the leftist economist. Find that guy. They're out there. Find them and see if high taxes, I mean, you could also, I traveled the country with Jordan and every Progressive city that we went to. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the high tax places. Guess what happens there? People can't afford apartments anymore. Ton of homelessness, drug use. Guess what? You're not going to believe what happened in the low tax conservative cities. Dallas, Salt Lake City. You know what? Clean. Clean. Nice buildings. Very little homelessness. And again, that's not a knock on homeless people at all. That is that we have to think about policies honestly and we're not that good at it. We're not that good at it.

But I mean, just because your values and truth and beliefs might be one way, does it mean that that is the truth and that is the value that everyone should have? Or if someone else has their values, principles and beliefs, we should adopt that.

Well, what is the truth? Right. Okay. Well, what you're asking is, can one set of ideas be empirically better than another set of ideas, right? I think that's, in essence, what you're asking. So my answer to that would be yes, absolutely.

There are ideas that are better than other ideas.

An idea of, oh, everyone should, we should kill everyone. That's not a good idea.

Not a great idea, right?

Like, not a great idea.

We can't kill everyone.

What principles are the ultimate principles? You want like the primo, I mean, I'm just like, I'll tell you, as close as I can get to that answer is exactly what I lay out in this book. Individual rights is the most important thing Period, meaning that everyone who lives, let's just do it from an American perspective, everyone that lives in the United States, regardless of gender, skin color, sexual orientation, any of that immutable stuff. If you are a legal member of the United States, I believe you should live under the exact same laws, period. That eliminates discrimination. It doesn't, now here's where the lefty argument would be, oh, but some people come from money and some people don't. Well, yeah, That's life. That's tough. Some people are born with great physical attributes and some people are born disabled. Some people come from a lot, come from a little. Some people come from great homes where they're gonna be enriched and set off into the world in a positive way. Some people come from broken families where they're abused and then that hampers their life and then that cascades through generations. But the government can't fix all of that. I think all the government can do is give you equal rights. And then it can basically say, now we're out of your way. And then find the little spots where they have to jump in. That's it.

Equal rights in terms of what? What does equal rights actually mean?

Well, equality under the law, meaning there's gonna be no law that discriminates on somebody based on an immutable characteristic.

Gotcha.

That's it. We're not gonna say black people get this, white people get this, gay people get this, straight people get this.

Women get this, Yeah, that's it.

It doesn't matter. Those things do not matter. And there's an- you-'re a human being. You get equal rights. Are you here legally? You got equal rights, we're good to go. And then we'll get out of your way. Now that's not to say we shouldn't have any government, although I really do like some of the really far right libertarian thinkers. When you say far right, people think you mean like racist, but when I say far right, I mean like the disassemble government, like let's see what happens kind of Mad Max people. I love the idea. The Burning Man type of thing. Yeah, it's like the The perpetual Burning Man people. But guess what? Burning Man burns kind of hot, right?

Like you can't live like that forever, right? It flames up at the end of the week.

Burn it all down. Nobody wants to be cleaning those porta potties. No, that's the thing. And everyone wants a shower.

Everyone wants a shower.

Have you ever done it?

I haven't. I haven't been called. You're too a pretty boy for that. Every one of my friends has done it. And every year my friends like beg me to come and they're like, I've got a ticket saved for you. Every year they save me a ticket. I'm just like, I don't feel drawn. I love the people that go, you're all awesome.

I think maybe 10 years ago I would have enjoyed it now.

I'm like, come on man. I like sleeping on a nice bed now. I used to sleep in the back of buses and middle seats and back of planes. So, I like to have a comfortable bed. I like to be clean.

I hear you and your gust storm all day.

This is powerful. This is really interesting. I'm curious, we talked about Jordan and Ben Shapiro a little bit. When you did this little conversation with Ben and Jordan, who was a better debater?

You know.

They'Re completely different and opposite.

In the way that they-- well, it's interesting because I don't know that it was a debate per se. It was really just like a match of wits. That's what it was. Like it wasn't like we set out, like I've done debates on my show, like I've done debates with great thinkers, Dennis Prager, who's a believer, and Michael Shermer, who's a skeptic. And we talked about, can you have a moral society without God? And they hold completely opposite positions and we debate it. And by the way, they happen to like each other very much and it turns out in a bizarre, we found out that day that Dennis's current wife actually dated Michael years before. His wife was there. It was like a really weird, strange thing, but like, what a beautiful thing. And it's like they view the world in the most fundamentally different ways. I would say this for like Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro also. It's like Sam and Ben disagree on literally everything. I'm talking about friends. But, well, I would say more, I don't know that they're friends like, I had been out to dinner with both of them a couple times, but I'm not saying like they're the chummiest chums, but they're allies. Yeah, yeah. They're allies in like the quest for us to live our best lives. Yeah, that's great. What they view as their best lives are different things obviously Ben from a religious perspective and Sam from a humanist or an atheist perspective. So as for who won the debate, it's not who do you think is.

A better debater in general? Like if they're not debating each other, but...

I think Ben in a debate, Ben's style, the quick hits of Ben, his mind operates like that. Jordan's strength is taking seriously complex, long, argued ideas and extrapolating them, but that takes time. And I would say to Jordan, when this is really true and people find it hard to believe, but when we toured, he never gave the same speech twice. Every single night, I mean, try to imagine that, an hour and a half lecture. Some nights he would do all 12 rules, some nights he would do one rule, some nights he didn't even talk about the book, he would talk about Twitter literally the whole night and relate it to his life. People loved it. I never, I mean, when I tell you that I would look at the crowd, because you know, I'm sitting on the side of the stage, so I can basically see Jordan from behind and then see the crowd. And I'm telling you, it never stopped. It never, never stopped. There was one night where we were on stage during the Q&A, and someone asked a biblical question, and he was coming up with some imagery from a biblical story, but he couldn't quite remember it. And then suddenly we heard some screaming in the crowd, and then like a crashing sound, and it turned out that somebody about 20 rows back ran at the stage, we saw the guy, and then security tackled him. And I kind of freaked. Like, I like, first I like kind of froze. It's like, you know, you don't expect, you know, even though we've been warned and we talked to security and all the things, but we didn't know what this guy was doing. And I kind of froze. And Jordan, he now knows the whole room is like, holy shit. Like, is someone about to kill them? Like, what the hell is going on here? And Jordan, like, in the most calming possible way, he completely saw what happened. and he goes, Guys, he said, everybody, I want you all to calm down. I saw his phone. He had the image that I was talking about, and he wanted to show it to you. And he got a little overly excited, and he shouldn't have come up here like that, but I want you to calm down. But the way he just did that, and that sort of answers your question earlier about Jordan as well, but I bring that up here because Jordan's strength is understanding the human condition and working within that. Ben is a debater. Ben is a debater. I've seen him debate a ton of people. I've never seen Ben beaten in a debate. I've never really seen him rattled. I don't think I've ever seen him beaten in a debate. I don't think he's probably not at his best every debate. But I've never seen him purely beaten or someone like really gets him humiliated or something.

But he always has something to come back with.

He's got something. So that's just more of a style thing. I don't think Jordan, you know, Jordan would even say on stage something sometimes he'd be like, you know, I'm not a combatant. He would say, you know, every time a hit piece comes out, he would be like, you know, I'm not that thrilled to have to fight it. And I feel very similarly. It's like when I see them come out against me and there's a lot of them right now, you know, people that are just attacking me personally and that just have years of not liking me, that, you know, hate me now. And it's like, well, I'm not really that interested in that you don't like me. Some people like me, some people don't. But some people want that fight all the time.

You know, we talked about this before the show about getting hate. And I think the bigger that anyone gets, they're gonna get more people that love them and more people that hate them. And you're getting a lot of hate and attacks. And I feel like when you're in the political game in that world, you're gonna get a lot more hate in general.

Yeah. Yeah.

Extremist people that are, like, shouting your name in praise and other people are, like, trying to take you down, assuming. I don't know if that's.

Yeah. So I don't know if I'd ever.

Want that, that life, but I think.

You know, well that life may come for you whether you like it or not. I think it will come for me. Yeah.

You know, it's already coming even though all I try to do is speak positivity and just show the light of people and the best of people. It's like I had been on, he's talking about being, you know, tied to his bed and bullied as a kid by like friends or whatever or fake friends and how it affected his whole life, like being bullied and made fun of and picked on. And I'm trying to like showcase the good about people, even if you don't believe in what they believe in, there's still lessons that we can learn from everyone. Absolutely. But even just doing that, people hate me for that.

Do you remember this about two years ago? You know Mark Duplass, the director and actor, he's been in a-- I recognize that name. He's done a gajillion things on HBO and a whole bunch of stuff. He was his brother, it's the Duplass brothers. His brother was in Transparent. He's been a lot of stuff. I sort of became friendly with him on Twitter, and you may remember this about two years ago, he sent out a tweet that in effect all it said was, I disagree with him on a bunch of stuff, but Ben Shapiro is not the devil.

It was something to that effect.

Something like that. And he got... The mob went bananas. He deleted the tweet. Oh my god. He then, Mark's a nice guy. I've broken bread with him before, privately. So this is not a knock on him as a human, but this is sort of what the mob is. He deletes the tweet, but now they know they've got you, right? Because he didn't do anything wrong. All he said was this guy who I have political disagreements with is a human being, something we all know to be true, right? He deletes the tweet, then he issues an apology. He actually posts an apology about, and then basically threw Ben under the bus and said, and his racist past, and all of the stuff, like just the red meat stuff that we all know is nonsense. And unfortunately, what happens in that case is the mob came, Mark bent the knee, and then it's not like they ever let you get up. They now know we've got you and you will now stay down forever. And that's one of the reasons whenever I see one of my friends or sometimes people that aren't my friends, sometimes even people that have gone after me, when I see them getting mobbed, if it's just, I will defend them. I will defend them even at a cost to myself because, I mean, right now, right now I have this crazy coordinated Reddit, just these underbelly of the gross internet. all assaulting my Amazon reviews and they're all writing horrible things and none of them have read the book, they're not verified reviews and the rest of it. And it's funny because it's called Don't Burn this Book. I wasn't expecting this to be 1941 Germany where they were gonna like, the trolls were gonna show up and throw the books into the bonfire, but in effect they're doing a digital book burning. Why would you burn a book? Well, you would burn a book because you don't want the ideas to get out there. So why are they, if my ideas.

Are so nothing, well then why would.

They be assaulting the reviews? They're assaulting the reviews because they don't want people to read read these ideas.

It's probably the best thing that can.

Happen to the book.

In many ways.

More people talking about it. Well sales wise it is, but I'm not gonna sit here and say that it isn't slightly annoying. You know what I mean? It's frustrating when you see. Yeah, like you know, to go to my Amazon page right now where we know we're crushing it, but then see that the first six comments because they send thousand. The worst. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like lie after lie and all that. So it takes some toll, of course. But ultimately they are the driver to what they're proving the point of the book. Like, I couldn't make this shit up.

I feel like, you know, I've gone through different stages of levels of attacks, right? There's different things that have happened in my life where people then bullied me online or attacked me. And I remember being like, Man, this really sucks. Like, in a moment. Yeah. And a recent one, a year, a little over a year ago when it was happening, the mom mentality, I just kept thinking to myself, like, this is happening in my favor. And I'm going to have hindsight now. And a year from now, this is going to blow away. Some people remember, but it's not going to be this much energy.

If you don't let it destroy you.

You don't keep moving forward and keep being positive and keep creating the content that you love that's helping people in service, eventually they're going to let it go. And you're going to be that much stronger because of this to be able to serve at a bigger level. You know, Jordan Peterson, we have a video that went viral, there's 30 million views on Facebook with Jordan from my interview, where he says, don't protect your kids.

Yep.

You know, the thing that makes them beautiful is their vulnerability, their, you know, their insecurities, the things, these things that make them children, but don't protect them because they, it's gonna weaken them if you protect them. They need to fall. They need to smash their face on.

The ground and scab up. He would tell a story about his letting his daughter climb a tree and.

She would occasionally fall.

He knew he had to do it.

Exactly. And it's like, you know, as a friend of mine was going through this this last weekend actually, Dr. Nicole LePera, who's a therapist that puts out like how to help people with anxiety and stress online. She's blown up millions of followers on Instagram. She got tons of attacks of being like this cult leader where all she's trying to do is just, here's an Instagram image of like how to overcome anxiety. But millions of people are flocking to it. and people are getting attacked at the highest level. How do we overcome the hate and attacks that are to come our way? When we put our voice in the world, when we share our truth, when we rise to our greatness?

Yeah, I suspect you know the answer because you're doing a version of yourself, but this really, more than anything else, may be the driver behind the whole book. Because I really believe that right now the biggest growing sort of political or even philosophical movement is people that are just afraid to say what they think. Doesn't mean you agree with me. I lay out my political positions here. If it turned out that you disagreed with me on 10 out of 10 of them, it would be completely fine. It's very obvious, this is the first time we've met, it's very obvious we wanna live in the same country. We wanna find fulfillment and happiness and make people's lives better. All of that stuff, all good. And if we disagree on abortion or on legalized weed, it just doesn't matter to me, truly. That's not to say those things aren't important and we should discuss them and all that, but it's just like I want truly to live in a country with people that disagree with me. There's something like 350 million people in the United States. It's like if they all thought like me, we'd probably have a problem, you know what I mean? Like I don't want to live in North Korea. I like America. This is a good spot, right? But I think the main driver of the book is really getting to what your question is. You must start standing up for what you believe. I think a lot of people think that, you know, everyone feels this weird thing right now. And with Corona, it's getting even weirder. It's like we don't know what the future is anymore. You know, just two months ago, remember.

Two months ago when we used to go out? Hang out, Fran, go to the basketball game.

Yeah. Go to the beach. Go to the park. Remember the beach? That was a great thing that we had here in SoCal. It's 85 and sunny today. We can't go to the beach. So really think about it. The world feels right now for everybody. if you're thinking, the world feels like, kind of like, whoa, is the future guaranteed? We always thought everything would basically be okay. You know, you might go, oh, Trump's president, this, that, the other thing, but you think that the world itself is sort of like functionally okay. Well, right now we have all been trapped in our houses for two months. Nobody thought anything like this could happen.

Ever.

Ever. And by the way, the good part of it is that I think people are rethinking their lives. People are going, you know what? Maybe I don't want to commute that hour to work each day and I do maybe want to work from home where I like being around my kids more or I don't like being around my kids more or I don't want to live in a big city because I'm too reliant on systems that are under assault or I want to be able to grow more food so I need to move out to the suburb. A million different things. Like I've really tried and in the Ruben Report community, one of the things I try to do is we post recipes on there. We've been doing stuff about how to do gardening. Wow. Like just stuff. I'm not a freaking amazing chef. My husband happens to be a great chef and we post some of his stuff, but I've started gardening. I'm growing broccoli right now and peppers and all this stuff. I mean, you'll see my house eventually. It's not that I have a huge garden. I got beds on the side of my house. But it's like, in the midst of this, I started rethinking things. It's like maybe I should be a little more reliant on myself. And we planted some citrus trees. Maybe we should be more reliant on ourselves. So I think being reliant on yourself, that that really is the answer. So how do you beat the mob? Well, the mob actually preys on the fact that people are afraid. And I think there's a lot of people that think, oh, if I could just be, I can sit this one out. Let me just sit this one out. Let me be quiet this time. It'll pass. It'll pass. It doesn't pass. That's the thing. They have preyed on the fact that good people are good people. And they have used that against us. And it's the frog in the boiling pot. If you think that your acquiescence or that your silence is saving you, you're actually turning the dial up on the pot that you are in. And as you know, it does not end well for the frog, right? Like that frog is fried at the end of that thing. And I think that that is what has happened here. And that in many ways is why I wanted to write the book more than anything else, because that was the idea. It was like, I don't think that everything I present here is the most legendary political idea of all time, but I think I've been able to communicate ideas in a good way, and I've paid the price. for that.

And there are rewards, absolutely, based on the price you paid too.

And I don't say paid the price to get any pity points. I don't want any pity points. I've gotten the rewards of that too, right? Like it's awesome, it's cool. I wake up and I'm ready to go every day, you know?

How do you feel like we can emotionally arm ourselves for taking on backlash? Because if we want to be great in our lives at any stage, any decade of our life, There's going to be critics, haters, backlash, mob, whether it's online, offline, whatever. What do you think we can do emotionally to prepare for that? Besides what I think is the best thing is just to do it as often as possible to be able to stomach it and say, okay, I'm still alive.

I'm still here. Yeah.

Like, it didn't kill me. It hurts. Yeah.

But I'm stronger. Well, partly it's that. Partly it's that. Partly it's basketball has been a theme here. So like, partly it's why did Michael Jordan practice it's harder than anybody else, right? Like that is the known thing. Kobe was like it too. It's like why did they do it? Barkley didn't love practice. Allen Iverson famously practiced. Yeah, exactly. And that's not to say they weren't great players, but Allen Iverson and Charles Barkley never won championships, and Michael Jordan won six championships, and he was in the final six times, right? And he systematically eliminated every one of his peers to get there. So partly it's just that you gotta, you know, Douglas Murray, who I've had on my show, who's a brilliant conservative political thinker from the UK and one of the greatest writers that I think we have in modern times. He said to me once, he said, you know, if you get in the pool, he said, in a British accent, if you dip your toe in the pool, you might find out that the water is not that cold. And I actually think that that's the right idea. You know, there's nothing to fear but fear itself. It's something like that, that we create these monsters and then when you actually go ahead and do whatever you're supposed to do, step in the pool and be like, damn, I thought the water was gonna be freezing, but it turns out it's 92. It's fresh, yeah. And that's not to say it's gonna be perfect, because trust me, it won't be. You will lose friends. I mean, we've all been through versions of this. People that you love will suddenly say the worst things about you. You'll watch. I'm seeing some of this now. I'm getting a lot of support from my sort of right-leaning friends. So, you know, Shapiro and Peterson and Glenn Beck and Dennis Prager, that crew. A lot of my lefty guys who have been with me all along the road have completely abandoned me. Wow. Because they don't want to just deal with any of the backlash. And I also think this is a whole other topic, but I think that goes to a little bit of the lefty mind, which is in constant protection mode. That's sort of like a whole separate thing, but you gotta get in. Get in the game, because the game is coming for you anyway. Whether you like, you can say, I'm not playing, but it's what we talked about with politics before. The game is being played, man. That's like saying, if we were looking at a chessboard, it's like, You are one of the pieces whether you like it or not. And if the whole board is being shifted around, well, you got to move with it.

How do you handle interviewing someone or sitting down with someone who has every opposite belief than you? Who is so firm in their beliefs on whatever opinion they have, they hate everything that you love. Yeah. How do you sit and listen to someone with an opposing view on everything about your life and your beliefs and not let it affect you and hurt you.

Is that possible? So I can give you two examples of this. I'll give you one on the left and one on the right because the premise that you're asking could apply to no matter where you fall, right? So on the left, I interviewed Marianne Williamson. You know her, right? The Democratic candidate. Yeah. So I interviewed her and as I was interviewing her, lovely lady. Maybe a little out there, that's fine too. That was part of the magic. But what I realized about 20 minutes into the interview is we had a fundamental impasse on how we view the world. She's a collectivist and I'm an individualist. She believes sort of in collective guilt. So she had just done this thing a few weeks earlier in a church.

About the, you saw this?

About the slavery, about the, yeah. And that she had the white people in the church go up to the black people and touch them and basically apologize. And it's like, I don't believe you're guilty for your father's sins, your grandfather's sins. much less, no one in my family owned slaves. That's not to say that we should not realize that obviously slavery was a horrible thing and all of those things. But I don't believe in collectivism that white people are suddenly guilty of something or black people inherently are not guilty of something or guilty of something. I just don't believe the world operates like that. I believe the world operates, you are responsible for your thoughts and actions. Now she obviously viewed the world in a very different way and that's very obvious in all of her policies and all of the things that she was putting forth. And I realized as an interviewer in that moment, I thought I could let her say whatever she wanted, and I will, and I'll treat her respectfully. But if I don't stop right now and announce we just have a fundamental difference on how we view the world, then everyone's gonna look at me and be like, Dave, everything she said up there for an hour is completely against what you say, but you just let her say it. So I felt the best way to deal with that was to just make the announcement, just make the announcement. We just view the world differently.

There you go. Not making them wrong, not making them bad or whatever.

Do I believe that my view of the world is closer to something that will ultimately free people? Absolutely. But it's not interesting to me to bring on people to just attack them. I'm not interested in doing that. Someone else can do that, that's fine. It's not what I want to do.

You're more of a neutral, Yeah, like me.

Yeah, well, yeah, it's because this is how you get... I, it's very obvious to me that you don't have an agenda with me. You're actually trying to find out what I think.

That's much more in line with my kind of...

I'm trying to get you to... Then trying to gotchas. And by the way, man, I say this all the time. If a million... You know, I was kind of early on the long-form interview thing on YouTube. But if a gajillion other people start being out there doing it better than me, I will find other things to do. Like, I really liked writing the book. I like doing public stuff and talking to the camera and tours and all that. So, So that's why it's like, I never feel a competition in any of these things. It's like, man, if you blow up, that's awesome. You're doing something good, I really mean that. That's cool. I can do other things. I wanted to be in the NBA, it's too late. But I'll give you the right version of that as well, which was I had this guy by the name of Stephon Mulinuon. Do you know who he is? So he's a YouTube guy who's become a bit of a cult figure and he talks a lot about race realism and sizes of brains and all of this stuff that I was never particularly interested in. it's not my thing. There's a twang of what feels like genuine racism in it. I don't even mean that he himself is racist per se, but if you're obsessed with that topic, it always strikes me as a little bit weird. And it was one of the only interviews that I've ever done, maybe literally the only one I've ever done, where I actually called a couple people to ask for advice on how to go about doing this. Because I wanted to treat him respectfully the same way I would treat everybody else, but I also wanted to make sure I wasn't-- I'm not getting attacked.

By the world for-- well, I knew.

That was gonna happen no matter what. I knew that either way was gonna happen, right? So I talked to a couple people and I felt that I dealt with the interview correct. My driving point in the interview was I kept saying to him, I think I said it three times, why do you care about this? Why do you care about whether there are racial differences related to brain size and IQ? And I don't know that he gave me an answer that perfectly answered it for me, but I also think as an interviewer, if I'm never to touch, I'm sure you have your own version of this, if I'm never to touch the people that are on the fringes, then what will happen is the fringes will keep getting tighter and tighter. You know what I mean? Like we'll keep getting a slimmer and slimmer version of who we can talk to. And you know, it's sort of like the Alex Jones thing. It's like, listen, Alex Jones may be a nutbag, he may be really a WWE style wrestler, more than a political pundit or he may be half actor and half conspiracy theorist. It doesn't even matter what he is, but the idea that this was the guy that we had to take out online, I'm not defending anything he said, I'm not lauding it or defending it. I'm just saying when they do this coordinated assault to just eliminate somebody, what in effect what they did is they made him more popular. I've heard from people on the inside that he's actually making more money than he he's ever made before, because they drove his core fans to him, right? To however he makes money, I'm not even sure that is, maybe it's through his website or whatever, they drove it all to him. So instead of giving the YouTube rev, which you know is pretty crappy, and the nub, the CPMs and all that nonsense. So I'm just a believer that for guys like us, we have to do our best to talk to some people that maybe aren't loved by everybody, and then survive the slings that'll come with it. It's just what you got to do or get it into another line of work.

That's it. If you can't stomach it.

If you can't.

I hear you. I try to really make sure that I'm never attacking someone or anything like that when I'm interviewing them. It's really trying to pull the best out of them and make sure that also that I'm not saying this is also what I believe in. I think that's good that you do that.

Well, because that's the tricky part because sometimes someone will say something that everyone knows that I think is is wrong or the wrong idea. And it's like, I don't feel it's like, like sometimes you don't need to constantly justify. Yeah. I don't see, that's the thing. I don't want to justify myself. I may push them and say, you know, well, I don't really understand. I mean, if you keep giving money to the thing that you say doesn't work, maybe that's not going to work, you know, something like that. Well, that you can do that, but then it gets to a point where.

It'S like, if they came on my.

Show, which is in my home. Yeah, literally. Yeah, it is literally in my home. I'm not there to destroy them. And as far as I know, no one has been killed because of any of the ideas that have been put forth on the Rubin Report.

It's funny, I'll get a, you know, I typically have, I guess, a certain type of person on my show, let's say maybe, I think. And when I don't have that type of person on, people are like, I can't believe you. Like, I'm gonna get this with you for sure. Like, when I had Jordan on and Ben on with you, they're like, I loved you for seven years, but now I have to unsubscribe because I can't believe you'd even give a platform to a human like this. And I'm like, I remember a few years ago I was on Ellen one day, the Ellen Show. And the next morning, 24 hours later, I was on Glenn Beck. And people were like, I can't believe... It's probably the only person ever to go on Ellen and Glenn Beck. Yeah, that's quite a day.

Yeah.

I flew to Dallas, did the whole thing. And people were like, I can't believe you're on Glenn Beck. And I'm like, why? If I'm trying to get a message across, do I just want to speak to people that only think the same way, or do I want to try to inspire People think in different ways.

But now think about this. Did you get any hate for going on Ellen?

No.

So this is super interesting to me. No, I'm going to get praise. But that's super interesting to me because this is also partly why I wrote the book. Because this, what you're talking about right there, is a symptom of something that's on the left that really is out of control right now. So these people see you go on with Glenn Beck. Now, Glenn happens to be a good friend of mine now. I didn't know him two years ago. He's a super nice guy. Glen and I have major political disagreements. I am pro-choice. He is pro-life. That is like the biggest one for conservatives. Like that is the one where they're just like, what the high hell is wrong with you? You may disagree with me on everything else, but the pro-life one for them is the big one. Yet Glen and I, they distribute my show on the Blaze. Like we're actually in business together. People think he's my boss. He's not my boss. I do whatever I want.

We give him my show.

That's it. But I know him to be a good man and everything else. Now think about it. A perfect man. and he would never tell you. He's perfect. By the way, the guy's apologized for his past so many times. It's like, I don't know that anyone's done more Mia Culpas than Glenn Beck. But the point is that, so you go on Glenn Beck and then your lefty audience is going, how could you be with that right winger, blah, blah, blah. Now they'll probably call him racist and Glenn is not a racist or any of that stuff. But what's interesting is, you're right, whoever the right side of your audience is, the politically right side of your audience is. Ellen's a member, the number one top lesbian we've got in America, and she's a known progressive and lefty and blah blah. Why did nobody, you said you got none, and that doesn't surprise me. Why didn't nobody say, you, sat down with that lesbian? They're supposed to hate gays, aren't they? That progressive lesbian? And they didn't. And that disconnect is one of the things that I am trying to show people, because everyone, because the new move that people make is, oh, both sides are equally horrible. And at this moment in 2020, it's not true. I am not saying that there is no mob on the right. Of course there can be a mob on the right. But the mob on the left is coming for everyone all the time, even the biggest lefties. Brett Weinstein, who I had on my show, and you probably know his story, he was a professor at Evergreen, a progressive his whole life. Evergreen is the, Evergreen State was the most left college. It was voted literally the most left college in the United States. And they had this day once a year, I think they called it a day of absence, where students of color would not go to class that day as an acknowledgement of what they felt was historical racism. And they had been doing this for two decades. All Brett said one day was they had decided to change it. About three years ago, they were going to actually tell white students and students not of color not to come to campus. And he said, we can't do that. We're a university. We can't tell people not to come to class. one day because of their skin color, that's racism. He didn't say that they can't do it the other way. He had allowed it and been part of it for years. They then called him a racist. Of course, even though he was taking the anti-racist position, he was literally chased off campus with bats. Him and his wife, Heather Heying, who was also a biology professor at the school, they both ended up resigning. They got 500 grand to resign, which sort of sounds like a lot of money, but for two tenured professors is absolutely nothing. But my point is the left Ellen does it to their own. They sort of come for everybody. Brett was a Bernie Sanders guy, he bought into all of that stuff, and he wasn't good enough for them. So it is interesting, and the one other thing with Ellen on this is, remember there was that moment at the football game, was it when Ellen was taking that picture with George W. Bush? Now what happened?

She got a lot of backlash on her show and talked about it, right?

She literally had to apologize on her show.

She was like, We're friends. Even though I don't believe in everything that he believes in.

But why did nobody, not one conservative came after George W. Bush? You're in a box at a thing, you're in a box of the lesbians, kind of funny, but you're in a, you're in a box at a football.

Game with America's top progressive lesbian.

No mob, they went and judge him, nobody judged him, nobody cared, no but, or shouldn't the stories were all, Ellen DeGeneres sits down with, or is in the football box with, you know, George W. Bush, who was for the Iraq war and blah blah blah. Shouldn't the stories, if we were a mature society, a society that wanted to heal, shouldn't the stories have been George W. Bush, who ran as a wedge issue, used gay marriage as a wedge issue? It's one of his worst mistakes.

And I think he actually regrets it.

I don't know that he's- well, meaning.

He made a point. I'm like, I am- you-'re a lucky man. I I don't want people to live a happy life. You know, it's like, let's just make good decisions.

They're like, Wedgie, what? No, a wedge issue, meaning he took, at the time, gay marriage, it was being debated, but it wasn't like a hardcore issue of the right. He made it a right issue. His campaign manager at the time, Ken Mehlman, really pushed him into doing that, and you're not gonna believe this, turned out Ken Mehlman was a closeted gay guy. So that's a whole other psychological examination right there. But George W. Bush made gay marriage a wedge issue, and that actually helped him get re-election, 'cause it fired up the evangelical base that was very anti-gay marriage at the time. And by the way, most of them don't even care about it anymore, which shows you that they've changed. But the point is, if we were a healing nation that wanted to show evolution, that wanted to show people change, we change, you can be friends with people that you maybe don't agree with, the stories on HuffPo, instead of being Ellen sits down with war criminal George W. Bush or whatever it is, the story should have been George W. Bush President who ran against gay marriage goes to a football game with literally America's top most famous loved lesbian and their friends.

And their friends. Look what we can create together now.

But nobody ran that story. And this. Well, because why, you know, why do you turn on the 630? Well, not that anyone watches the local news anymore, but, you know, you turn on the news and this guy got shot, this guy, you know, lit himself on fire, the cat died over here, a woman got electrocuted, you know, if they were to say, you know, everything's all right. You gonna watch that?

No one's watching. Yeah.

I don't know that anyone's watching the other thing, but we do have a, Bill Maher talked about that this week, that we have this sort of like, I think he called it outrage porn or something to that effect. We're just like, we've become obsessed with all of the craziness. And that also goes to why I talk about getting offline every now and again and not being permanently political.

It's like when this whole coronavirus stuff hit, My girlfriend was, I wouldn't say obsessed, but she was checking a lot of stuff all the time and it was causing her to almost get sick.

Yeah, yeah.

Emotionally, anxiety, stress, shortness of breath, and she was creating sickness symptoms essentially the first week. And I said, you need to stop watching this. It was my birthday, March 16th, kind of the first week it all hit. I said, for my birthday, do not talk about coronavirus. That's all I want. Just like, please, for like a week before she was like, ah, you know, the stress and she didn't talk about it. I go, this is all I want. And now she doesn't look at it anymore at all because she knows it only causes more stress and anxiety. You can't live a great life when.

You'Re focused only on the negative all day long. Well, not only the negative, but the immediate, the immediate, it's in the definition. It changes every second. And if you're obsessed, oh my, they found out that there's two more cases in here and this guy did, It's like you will go bananas in the midst of this thing. So letting go with some of that stuff, it's key, man. It really is. Focus on a positive vision. Did she give you just the day, or did she give you the day.

Then she took it back for a few weeks, but now she doesn't talk about it anymore at all.

Yeah.

She knows the stress of it. And it's like, in her culture, the telenovela is a big thing. You know, it's like, ah, that's what people watch. Like, you stole this, and then you cheated on her with your sister's ex, whatever, and that's what people are fascinated by. It's fascinating by you know it's hard to put out positive information out there sometimes.

Can I do a reverse interviewer move here? I wanted something's been rattling in my head. And since I'm doing so much press, I'm not interviewing people right now. There's something I've been thinking about and maybe I'll give this thing to you and you can start asking people about it. So I've been watching rewatching the Sopranos during the break. I was gonna call it the break. Whatever the hell this is. You never saw it? Okay so it doesn't matter. You've seen it. I know what it is. Mafia movies.

Yeah.

And one of the amazing things about the Sopranos and almost all mafia movies is that the bad guy or the good guys do all sorts of horrible stuff. They beat their wives, they have goomas, they kill people, they chop, they're alcoholics, they're doing coke, they're beating their kids. They've got hookers over.

You like them, yet you like them. Because they're trying to go after the.

Bad guy who's stealing the money or something. Well, who's often doing just the same stuff. Right. But there's this fascinating thing. You watch Goodfellas and you're rooting for Ray Liotta who's doing all kinds of horrible stuff, right? You're rooting for Joe Pesci, you're rooting for Tony Soprano in this. Well, it's one of the things that I've really been thinking about lately. Something that you just said there really like clicked that with me. That I think the reason is that they have a code. Oh, that's how I wanted to bring this all around as the guy being interviewed, right? We're talking about greatness. They have a code that they live by. It may not be a the code you like or the code that is the right code or something like that. But Anthony Soprano or any of these mafia guys, they have set of rules. They have a set of rules. Now, and if you play by those rules, you almost let them do anything. So in the last couple episodes, he has literally chopped up a man. He has cheated on his wife with like 20 women and prostitutes, you know, the whole thing. He moved out of his, you know, he hit his kid, like just so much stuff. But he didn't-- But the whole time, and I keep saying this to David.

As we're watching it. He kept his mouth shut.

He didn't tattle. He didn't, yeah. And I really think there's something to that. I have to think this thing kind of through a little bit more, but I think that sort of gets to a lot of what we're talking about here, that you need some kind of code in life. I'm not saying your code should be cheat on your wife and kill your business partner. And do cocaine all day. You got to do all that. But I think the fact that he has a code, It allows you to watch somebody do horrible things and still be like, oh, well, at least he's got a code. And I guess I would relate this a little bit to the political part, which is most of these politicians, it doesn't seem like they have any code. You don't know what they believe they say anything on any given day. You see just again, like, the same stuff that they railed against 10 years ago is the same stuff they're going for now and all that kind of stuff. I don't know what I did there, but I sure.

I just feel like It's just a game, you gotta constantly be evolving the game to get people to vote for you. And you have to change your beliefs a lot of times in order to, like, the George Bush thing. Maybe he was changing belief or whatever to get voters.

He knew.

He played the game.

How do we get the base out? The base, oh, the base is heavily Christian. We know that the gay marriage thing is a big one for them.

Do you think there's any political leader that at a high level in government has been able to stay true to their principles and values throughout their, you know, 4, 8, 12, 16 years of being in government.

I think the closest we got is Rand Paul from Kentucky. Senator from Kentucky, his dad was Ron Paul who sort of led the Tea Party movement. He's a true libertarian. He tries to cut spending all the time. He tries not to vote for wars. He tries. You know, it's odd because he's become one of Trump's biggest allies because Trump has cut a lot of regulations. he's kind of freed up business to do stuff. I view that as a good thing. And one of the reasons that I don't have Trump derangement syndrome, that I have become sort of okay with Trump, although do I think he lies? Of course he lies. What I wish, you know, he would somehow speak a little nicer and some of that stuff, of course. But the policies themselves, I actually think have basically been fine. And one of the reasons I've been able to even, it seems odd that you have to say you have the courage to say that, but you know what happens when you say that kind kind of thing is that his main ally is this guy that I actually really do think is trying the hardest he can. Does he end up signing bills that increase the debt and the rest of it? Yeah, because the whole system is out of whack. There's no money left and yet we keep, okay, more stimulus. We have literally no money.

How much debt are we in right now?

Trillions and trillions of dollars and it's going up. I think we just signed another $2.2 trillion stimulus.

It's like the number. How do we get out?

Well, I hate to say we're gonna get out of this or is it just Go banking, can I whisper how we get out? I mean, it's called war. The sad truth is, it seems to me that we're in an almost unavoidable conflict with China now. They have so much of our debt that we know we can never pay it back. There's nothing, short of some sci-fi, we find a planet somewhere that has unobtainium, like in Avatar, and we mine it and sell it to the Chinese here, although we would get in a war over who's gonna get there first. Like, there are debtors and we've got more weapons than our debtors right now. That's, I mean, talk about a mafia move. It's like, we sort of know, we can keep borrowing from them because we got all the nukes and, you know, they've got some stuff, but, you know, we've got bases everywhere.

It's a seriously depressing, like, unpleasant thing to think.

But more people, can't they just create more weapons and have more- They got more people. I suspect they're probably cloning people too. That's a whole other thing. I mean, we know we can clone dogs and- Crazy, you know, you can grow sheep. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. And it's like, if we can clone dogs right now, which we, you, there's commercial cloning of dogs happening right now. It's the same people that did Dolly the Sheep.

You can do it right now.

And for a million dollars, 50 grand. To clone a dog?

To clone a dog.

50. 50.

You've seen a clone dog?

I've never seen a, so I haven't. I'll give you one. I'm gonna give you one. I have not said this publicly, but I will tell you this. this. Your dog is so long. So, my dog, my dog Emma was my first dog that I ever had. She died in February. She was 16. She lived an incredible, this dog, she lived an amazing life. She was a rescue from Hurricane Katrina, survived the hurricane, gave birth during the hurricane.

She lived with us in New York.

Then came with us to LA. She went to the White House, she went to the Grand Canyon. This girl, just gorgeous, great life. Okay. And she lived a long great life. We treated her great at the end. The last thing right before we put her down, we had people come to the house and put her down. We cooked the whole chicken. We put it on the floor. We let her tear through it. She was struggling to stand at that point and everything else, but she lived a great life. Anyway, a few weeks before we had to let her go, my husband David was cooking and he said, and Emma was there and she was kind of just, you know, and they just stare at you. They just look look up at you and the eyes and the whole thing. And David said, you know, I'm really gonna miss that. I'm gonna miss the way she looks at me. And suddenly that sparked something in my head and I started doing a little googling about the cloning thing. And I've never said this publicly before. I know. I don't know who's gonna get more crap for this, me saying it to.

You.

Or you letting me say it. But I found this company that does the cloning. They're the same guys that did Dolly the Sheep. Remember that? the famous one 20 years ago. Dolly the Sheep was the first sort of animal cloning. Anyway, they do commercial cloning. It's 50 grand a pop. I don't have 50 grand to do cloning.

I had my assistant contact them and.

I sent a bunch of videos. Don't tell me they did a trade for it. They did not do a trade. So Emma is on ice right now. Shut up. We did the samples. You have to do some skin samples, some samples, and she's on ice in Austin, Texas right now. And then here's the thing. We because I was supposed to be on a book tour right now and everything else. We said, well, we're not going to have a dog probably through the summer because we're traveling. Also, we wanted a break. Like, it was a, she had a heart breaking. Yeah. Heartbreaking. Like, we, she, she had, she had bladder cancer, so we had, like, a long protracted thing. We wanted to break. Then Corona hit, and I ran to the, I heard that the shelters were all closing down, and I, I saw this guy, Clyde. He had it. Well, he was, he had no name at the time. They just found him, but, but. He literally, they had the thing signed. He was about to be put down that day. We grabbed him, he's gorgeous and he's awesome too. But anyway, Clyde is Emma is on ice. Her cells are on ice to be cloned.

When's it gonna happen?

You want to hear the even-- Is this legal? Yeah, no, no, it's legal. What's not legal is CRISPR technology.

So they're not allowed to manipulate their.

Genes in the United States. To enhance them as a super-- you- can't.

So you can't.

That's CRISPR, where you can manipulate eye color, you can manipulate- oh my gosh. Because David's allergic to dogs, so he said, could we ask them if they could- I'm allergic. But so in America you can't do that yet, but now I know I was telling you- China you can do this. Because in China, there's no doubt. And not just China, by the way, and I'm not even knocking the Chinese. Once science comes out, once you open that Pandora's box, you can't stop things. So in many ways you could argue that by us not allowing these other gene manipulations, that we're actually going to fall behind as countries are doing this. So that's my point.

We always have to do it.

In a way, we have.

If someone else is going to do it, we need to do it.

I mean, this is the race to science that can lead to all sorts of, you know, the island of Dr. Moreau and all kinds of stuff. But anyway, she's sitting there and I don't know if we're ever going to do it because I'm a huge believer in adoption and I love saving dogs and all of that stuff. But we couldn't say no to the opportunity. And by the way, the company's wonderful. They didn't want all they They said, We'll do it for you, because we see how much you love your dog, and we see all these, I put videos up of her that got millions of views at the end, and they said, Listen, if we give you the puppy at the end, all we would ask is that if you turn on the camera and say hi and say who she is. And so we'll see if we're gonna do it. I honestly don't know. This is nuts. And you know what's funny also? I had this running joke, I've had this running joke with David, that what will happen, this is before coronavirus, that that what will happen is we'll clone Emma, she'll start multiplying, and then humans will get a disease and start dying off, and then the world will be run by Emma, which is sort of the plot of Planet of the Apes. And then next thing I know, we're.

In a pandemic, and I've got Emma.

On ice in Austin, Texas.

So maybe she's the savior.

She could bring us home. I mean, if she starts talking, it's like, you know. So have they done this already with another dog? Yeah, yeah. Barbra Streisand has several cloned dogs. So there's a lot of celebrities that.

Have it, but they won't talk about it publicly, 'cause they think it's a bad PR move.

'Cause you got to. have a lot of money if you're gonna put it used to be like.

Go rescue a dog that's gonna die.

Why spend 50 grand on your own dog? And truly, I have an ethical, I'm not downplaying it at all. Like, I'm not sure we're gonna do it.

We did the stuff to get the material. It's like having your eggs taken out as a woman. Yeah.

You're saving your eggs for the later if you want to do it. It's like having your brain taken out and they're gonna ice it and bring.

You back in 2021 22. Let me try to wrap this up. This has been a powerful, it's been so great meeting you and connecting with you and hearing all this stuff. Even if I don't 100% agree with you, 100% of your life. Oh, everything you do.

Geez, can we make a note of that? That's gonna be a problem.

I feel like you have to say that at the end of every one.

Of your interviews, right? Yes. You know, oddly, I've agreed with everything you've said here. I don't know.

This was a real weird one for me. Every question I've asked you, you've agreed with. Incredible, incredible. This book is called Don't Burn this Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason. There's a lot of unreason out there for sure. Got a lot of great people who've endorsed this, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eckhart Tolle, which is, you know, someone on the other side, I guess. Someone Larry King who I've interviewed as well, so some great people in this. Excited to check it out more, man. This is really powerful. I've been watching a lot of interviews about you, researching for this, so it's been fun to learn about your story and a lot of things we didn't get to talk about which was what was harder to come out as being gay or your political side, which I've seen you talk about. But if people want to learn more about all these other things you talk about, they can go watch you on the Rubin Report, YouTube. Do you have a podcast too? Oh, it's a podcast that it's on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's your main channel. The book is where can we get the book?

You can go to don'tburnthisbook.com, we're crushing it on Amazon. And if you want to help defeat the trolls, Leave it, this is what I keep telling people, leave an honest review. If you want to give me a three-star review and you're like, you know, I didn't love it, but it was okay, I'm fine with that.

I don't like the just the destructive, the menace thing. I can take a one-star honest review.

Over a one-star, this sucked and he's horrible or whatever. Do you know Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator? So Scott, I did his, he does a Periscope show and he's a great thinker. He's one of the people that when Trump got elected, When everyone said it could never happen, I was on Rogan, I think, the day before. And I said, yeah, it's 50-50 because I had listened to interesting people like Scott Adams who had sort of explained what was going on there. And Scott Adams said to me, I'm now calling it the Scott Adams Theory, that if you sell a book and that book only has five stars and one stars, you've done it right. Because that means you have people that love you and people that hate you. But if you have all three stars.

You got a problem on your hands.

It's not an interesting book.

Yeah, you haven't done that much. You need to be on both sides. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's called the three truths. So, imagine it's your last day, you've cloned yourself a million times over but eventually technology blows up or something and you can't clone yourself anymore and you've got to say goodbye. And you've created every dream you can think of for your personal life, professional life, everything you want to say, it's out in the world. But for whatever reason on your last day, you've got to take all your information with you. so no one has access to your content anymore. Your book's gone, everything's gone. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true about your life, about your experiences, the lessons you've learned, and you could pass these on, only these three things. What would you say are your three truths?

Well, I think the most important one is that you stand up for what you believe in. That is the most important thing. It is your life, as far as we know, we got one shot at this. thing. And if you don't fight for what you believe, then all you're doing is creating room for people who believe other things. And those may not be great things and in many ways will be your fault when the world goes out of control. So that would be one. I think another one that this would be a sort of one that I came to a little bit later in life is be a little kinder to yourself if possible. I don't have regrets in life. I really don't. That's not to say I don't have all of the mistakes, all of the mistakes and stupid things and drugs and every other stupid thing that I did. But I don't regret them because I made it out on the other side. But I do wish in the process of that maybe I had been a little easier on myself. You know, like that is, I think especially when I think of the closeted stuff that we didn't get into, I beat the hell out of myself up in a way that now seems almost, it actually seems almost unimaginable. And in essence, I don't even know why I did it. There was no shame. All of that stuff, but it was like it was an internal job. It was an inside job. So I would say be kind and then one more. This may sound cliche, but do something. Do something with your life. You know, like I think one of the reasons that so many people, I'll answer a little differently. I'll say do something, but what I mean by that is people always say to me, Dave, why don't you put out five shows a week? You do one or two shows a week. and then I do some live streams and some other stuff. And I always, my answer is always, well, I assume you have a life. If you watch my show, that probably means, hopefully you listen to Lewis's show, you listen to Sam Harris' podcast, you watch the Jordan Peterson thing, you watched maybe, you know, Rogan does 80 hour shows, so maybe you watch half a one show. There's enough stuff out there that's cool and interesting, but you shouldn't just sit there watching stuff all the time. Like, don't, I don't want to, it's not like, if I did more, well, first of all, I don't have a freaking time anymore. Like we have enough, we're busy enough, but I don't mean it because of that. I mean it because go out there and do stuff. Don't just sit there on your phone all day as riveting as this interview maybe was. Like hopefully you put your phone down after and go do what you want to do, whatever that is, and find something that gives you purpose. Like I think that was the trick that that anyone that's interesting in the world pulled off is that they started doing something and then before they knew it, it was like, whoa, I became the thing that I thought I could be. And that does feel like a very sort of Jordan-esque type move because I saw him do that. But a lot of people don't do it and they don't know why they don't do it, you know? And now it's funny because now that I've achieved something that's, that's pretty good, a lot of my friends, my college friends, my high school friends, that saw me go through all the struggle years of stand up and having no money. And my buddy who worked at a food service thing used to literally drop off giant cans of tuna, like industrial can of tuna, and I would just eat tuna for weeks. I kid you not. My mom was always afraid I was gonna have mercury poisoning, right? I was gonna drop dead for, he ate too much tuna. But like, I did all of that stuff and it's like, I don't know why I did it in retrospect. Standing out on street corners, handing out tickets, I'll tell you one funny thing related to that. So one night, so this is called barking and we were trying to do stand up. You stand out there for an hour a night, you hopefully get your stage time and it might be front of, it's usually in Times Square, so if you get 50 people in the audience, it's like four of them are Chinese, three are from the Netherlands, you got two people from uptown, like it's a weird collection of people that you got to somehow figure out how to be funny on. That wasn't the hard part for me. The other part was that we would do it Six nights a week, I did it two hours a night, 'cause we usually do two shows a night. And I did that for probably five years of my life. And that is very hard to think back, how the fuck did I do that? What gave me the crazy passion to do that? But there was one night, there was a crazy Nor'easter, New York City. The city was shut down. They were telling you, do not go outside. You're gonna freeze to death. You're gonna drop dead out there. It's like, hot in the winter, you gotta get out of here. But of course, I only knew how to do one thing. I remember I put on two pairs of pants, put on two pairs of socks, sweatshirt, hoodie, jacket, another jacket, hat, muffs. I'm out there and my cell phone rings. And this is before iPhones and whatever. It's like my old Nokia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nokia, like all I can do is play Snake. And it's my roommate, so that's why I picked up and I pick up. I remember my hand shaking, I'm freezing. And he goes, and it's my roommate Mike, and he goes, Dave, I'm watching the local news right now, and they're doing a report from Times Square that nobody should be out in this freezing cold. And I see you standing behind the reporter. There was a reporter like half a block away doing the thing about, nobody should be out here, and here's this idiot comedy tonight anyway, but there's nobody on the streets. But like that type of thing, like, I have no idea how I did it or why I did it other than I did it.

You did it. And I think the point of be kinder to yourself is probably something that I don't hear enough, but it's something that I would give as probably one of my top 10 truths at least because for 25 years, I was raped as a five-year-old boy by an older man. For 25 years, I held that secret in. And so, I can't understand what it's like being closeted gay or not telling your story or what's happened to you or where, how you feel or what your position is on sexuality. But I understand the feeling of beating yourself up. Yeah. Shameful for something and feeling like you won't be accepted if people knew. And when I learned how to, you know, so it was just a constant beat up as especially as a straight man.

Yeah.

Trying to be more manly, I guess, in middle school and high school and be seen as a man. to have been sexually abused and raped was like the lowest of low for a straight white man in Ohio, right? For me.

How long did you hold that in?

25 years. Yeah, until I had 30.

So, nobody, literally no one knew.

No one knew, yeah, except for me. And it was a story that I would remember every day. I mean, I remember the scene, the setting, the whole thing, experience every single day. And I would just kind of use it as a fuel for anger.

Yeah. Oh my gosh.

And so I can't fully understand what it's like, but I can empathize in a sense of like beating yourself up, feeling shameful, feeling insecure. What are people gonna think of me? Are they gonna accept me? Are people gonna love me? And I think if I would have been kinder to myself, I would have had a much better life. I think everyone should be kinder no matter what they're going through, whether it's sexual abuse or they're not fully accepting who they are, whatever it is. Yeah, it's like if we are kind to ourselves, we're gonna have much more peace and love in our heart and that's what we're all looking for.

Man, well, you know it's funny, I usually tell at the end of a good interview when someone gives a closing remark, I'm like that's how you end an interview. You just did it yourself on your own show, but I promise you we will have you in studio and let's.

Talk about that and learn a lot more. You're a great interviewer, man. You really are. You just gotta ask curious questions, dumb questions that you think I think the reason why I'm okay at it is because I ask a lot of dumb questions that people aren't willing to ask.

Ah, come on. That's fake humility.

And I feel like, no, it's true. I feel like because I'm just a curious person and sometimes I feel like, man, I wonder if everyone knows this, but I'm gonna ask it anyways. I have one final question for you, even though you said you wanted me to end it there.

You cleaned it up really nice at the end there, yeah.

Make sure you guys get this book. Don't Burn this Book. Check it out. Give it an honest review once you check it out. And I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Dave, for how you've shown up in your life consistently towards your truth. And again, I don't know 100% about what you believe and everything, but I love the fact that you have even changed your beliefs in the last few years and you constantly are evolving based on your experiences, based on what's working for you and what you want is best for the world in your point of view. So, I acknowledge you for that and for putting yourself out there, especially in your political space with all the hate that you guys get. I don't know how you do it. But I acknowledge you for putting your art out there because it's an expressive art form and I know how much energy it takes to put that out there. And I appreciate it, man. I'm glad we got to connect. My final question is what is your definition of greatness.

Well, I knew this one was coming. I knew that's why you said before I got one more for it. I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Greatness is, is, I mean, this is an offshoot of what we're talking about here. It's, it's doing what you're supposed to do. I have been blessed. It's, it's very much like your situation. Like the amount of people, like you sat across from Kobe Bryant. I toured with Jordan Peterson. I've become good friends with Peter Thiel, like, like innovative thinkers. I have I have interviewed and you have interviewed people that have done what you're supposed to do as a human being. Greatness is doing what you're supposed to do. Greatness isn't, oh, you have to invent a product or you have to be a basketball star. Greatness is there is something, I really believe this, there is something in you that is the thing that you are supposed to become and you got it. Maybe this is sort of what you were saying a moment ago. you almost have to just learn how to get out of your own way to do it. We all know it. We all know there is something in us that internal monologue that knows what is right and what we're supposed to be doing and that we shouldn't lie and we should be honest and we should be open with our friends and we should be loving and generous and all those things. Doesn't mean we do it all the time, but if you try to do it as much as you can, that's the best you can do, I think, right? But when I've sat across from people, like when I sit across from Jordan or I sit across from Teal, and I'm sure it was like this with Kobe, and you're like, Man, this is exactly where we started. This is how you end an interview the right way, right? When you sit across from that and you see it, it's almost like you're not talking to a human. Because you're seeing someone that's like, We're all in a big freaking show here and you're one of the stars of the show. That's a pretty beautiful thing. So if, as the kids are saying these days, life is a simulation, it's like, well, maybe life's a video game or maybe life's a cartoon or something, but it's like, you may as well be the star of the thing. And what does the star do? Luke blows up the Death Star. You might as well win the game.

You might as well, at least play the game.

Play the game. At least play the game.

I'll just watch other people play the game. Yeah, I made the game. Can we shake hands? I haven't touched another. You do it. I appreciate you. If you're looking for more thoughtful and honest conversations around politics instead of hearing nonstop yelling and screaming, then make sure to check out the Ruben Reports Politics playlist right here. And also if you want to see full interviews and episodes, check out his episode playlist right here. Also make sure to subscribe and click on that notification bell to be notified of new videos.