My Executive Producer Asked Me the Questions No One Else Does | Dave Rubin

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:07)
Hi, I'm not Dave Rubin. I'm Dave Rubin's executive producer. My name is Phoenix, and this is The Rubin Report. Today, we're interviewing my boss, my friend, and just my partner in so many different things. So, Dave, welcome to your own show.

**Dave Rubin** (0:24)
Wow, Phoenix, I've taught you how to do an intro. This is very impressive.

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:28)
Was that good?

**Dave Rubin** (0:29)
It was pretty decent. It was pretty decent.

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:31)
I've never done this before.

**Dave Rubin** (0:33)
I'm a little worried about what's on those papers, but the intro, direct to camera.

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:37)
Well, it's all about August.

**Dave Rubin** (0:38)
It's all about you. Cool. All right.

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:40)
You think it's... Well, we're here today to just ask you a bunch of questions about why you do August, what's special about this upcoming August, and I want to hear a little bit more about your reflections of this past season.

**Dave Rubin** (0:56)
Yeah.

**Phoenix Glenn** (0:56)
This is your 14th season, beginning in September, and it's been, I think, your 10th August, but your 9th one that you've recorded or been more public about.

**Dave Rubin** (1:09)
Yeah.

**Phoenix Glenn** (1:11)
For those who don't know, I've been with Dave for six years, so I got connected with you back in May 2020, when I was 19, and I was your intern.
And I did a summer internship, and it was heading right into August 2020, and the whole world was shut down, and Michael Moles brought you back on. So I've been around the block for quite some time now, and every single end of season, it just gets better and better and more different, too. So I'm super curious to hear what your August is going to be like this year. So let's just start with this. What's different about it this time around?

**Dave Rubin** (1:51)
Well, first, like a guest on a show, what I'm going to do is answer a completely different question than the interviewer asks. Which first, for just a second, since the audience doesn't get to see you a lot, I think it's worth just mentioning a couple of things about you because, yeah, you've been with me for six years, but you were my intern. Now you're the executive producer of the show. So you run everything that goes on here, and you're basically everyone's boss except for mine, and don't ever forget that.
But you have grown into, I mean, I trust you with all of my stuff, and we have separate businesses together and a whole bunch of stuff.
And the fact that you were my intern, the story that I've told about you many times, which I just love, and I'll do it real quick, and then we'll get into the meat of this, is that when we did the original show, what was that, four years ago or something, with DeSantis for the Don't Burn This Book Tour, it was the height of Don't Say Gay and all that ridiculous, the height of the post-COVID DeSantis rise, and we're in Orlando, in Disney country, and there's protesters outside, and all hell's breaking loose, and I'm sitting in the green room before the show with DeSantis, and then it's just the two of us, and we're talking about baseball. We're not even talking about politics or anything else. And then you come into the room, and I said, at that time, you were my producer, not yet executive producer, and I said, oh, Governor, I want you to meet Phoenix, my producer. And he looks at you and he goes, producer, what are you talking about? And he goes, he's your intern. He had literally read the book, and in the first book, no, it was in the second book, in Don't Burn This Country. I wrote about, because I was writing about college, I wrote about how you literally, you were my intern, you were at college. I said to you, drop out, I saw your bright future ahead of you, and I was like, forget school, come work for me, let's make something great happen here. And you said that your parents really wanted you to finish college, so you went back. Then the book was published, but in the time between it being published and that show, you had subsequently dropped out of school and become my producer, at that time intern. Then was it intern to producer? Did you have something in between there?

**Phoenix Glenn** (3:55)
There was an AP role.

**Dave Rubin** (3:58)
Yeah, you did a lot of different things. Long story short, the fact that he had read the book and remembered you and everything else, I just thought was kind of fascinating about him, but it tells you a beautiful thing about our adventure here.