The Harsh Truth About Elon Musk, DOGE, And Trump’s America | Dave Rubin

what does the government do particularly well not much the government has become just an insane monster it's just an Ever growing monster that just keeps eating more money eating more resources none of these agencies are doing what they set out to do what do you think the role of the government should be not much I would say the founders basically got it completely right that everything should be dealt with at the state and local level and then the federal government should have a couple things that they're supposed to do what are your predictions for the finances of the average American I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now across the board I think the world is changing in massive ways we're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now I think we're in for an incredible time in America doesn't matter how much money you have but as a general rule I would tell anybody [Music] Dave Ruben thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour we really appreciate it good to be with you guys we are drinking our psychotropic drink and we'll see what happens in about a half hour from shout out Chris Williamson this way for it to kick in I walked in I said what do you got with with caffeine thinking there might be some ice coffee involved and now we got mushrooms and God knows what so we'll see what happens so we first wanted to discuss the cultural conservative shift that I feel like has really been hitting hard the past probably I mean started maybe even like seven or eight years ago and then slowly it's been ramping up and then recently it's just exploded I mean you have Joe Rogan who's just a lifelong liberal going to the right you have Elon Mark Zuckerberg even lending Credence to to Donald Trump after the the attempt and uh you actually started as a liberal commentating for The Young Turks and then you started to see things a little bit differently and started going to the right where do you think that all started from so I started with The Young Turks in uh about 2014 and although I don't have a lot of great things to say about Jen from The Young Turks I do always give the guy credit for he was early in on digital media which now has completely dwarfed mainstream media and even just this morning when I was on the plane I was flipping through Twitter and it's like msnbc's being sold off and CNN's about to fire half their people and there's just complete upheaval now so I do give credit to the guy for for kind of getting in early on that I was always kind of a liberal growing up I'm from New York I was just sort of like a new York old school liberal which is very very different as I'm sure you guys know from what the modern sort of framing of of what a liberal is um I was liberal in that like I didn't really care who you married I didn't care what you smoked um in some sense I'm still at least I consider myself beg begrudgingly pro-choice um but that was sort of when things work you can kind of be liberal and that was what most people were in America at the time I'm a child of the 80s I'm I'm 48 like that was really how things were and then conservatives were thought of as a little more conservatives kind of you know were more about business and War something like that they were meaner or you know you picture like The Simpsons uh all the rich guys in the room with Mr Burns and the lightning in the background and Draculas there and everybody else um and I started at The Young Turks and they were kind of to me they were like liberals but they were hopped up on caffeine they were just screaming all the time everybody was a racist and a bigot and a buffoon that they were fighting and I kind of liked it and I think that that's actually what caught on culturally for the progressives is that they were just like Juiced up about everything all the time and they were just so right and everybody else was so wrong and then after about a year there I started thinking something is not right here like there you know sometimes when you just feel something for a while and then you don't you don't have like the exact touch Point yet but I was just kind of feeling like this can't make sense like how are we so right about everything and it's all so obvious and all of these people are just evil and bigots and racists like it can't be and then there were a couple moments along the way that that kind of broke me uh the most famous one that I think became way bigger than me uh was when Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher with Ben Affleck and Affleck was on and people think he maybe was getting a little Juiced up for Batman at the time and they started discussing radical Islam and Sam was trying to explain that you have to be able to criticize ideas without being bigoted towards people and Affleck just jumped all over Sam Harris who's a very softspoken atheist he was on the show to talk about mindful meditation basically a new book he had about that and Bill Maher who was lifelong liberal Live and Let Live kind of thing and basically was he called them gross and racist that was the line and I was watching it I remember watching it live that night and I was watching it and I thought holy [ __ ] this this right now what was happening right in front of me this is what I've been trying to formulate in my head that I knew was wrong that that the Liberals the progressives somehow were completely unable to separate how you should be able to talk about ideas criticize ideas uh without being bigoted towards people and once I saw it like so perfectly and maybe it had something to do with Affleck being kind of like an A-list star and kind of over the top so it was so emotive I just started talking about that on my show and suddenly all these people started coming to me like Dave I'm seeing something wrong here too and then really what happened was I started talking to some conservatives I started talking to Larry Elder there was a very famous moment we had um I started talking to Glenn Beck Ben Shapiro all of these guys and what I found was even though I disagreed with them about some stuff there was an awful lot of just oh Live and Let Live America's kind of good like let's see if we can talk this stuff out and really all I was getting on the other side was scorched Earth so anyway to to kind of get that to exactly where your question is this new thing that's happening right now I don't really describe it as conservative as much as it's just pro-america right cuz Tulsi is definitely not a conservative tuls is definitely pro-choice and um you know the war thing has now flipped because the Democrats have become the party of War but RFK is definitely not uh a traditional conservative but what's bringing all these guys together it's basically a love for America and it's a love for free speech and hopefully a restoration of those things so I would say it's like a it's a wide tent new conservative movement if you want to use the conservative word I mean I'm married to a guy like that's not the most conservative thing out there so like there's something really interesting brewing and I'm very um I've been getting a lot of cred for the last couple weeks because it's so connected to my journey but I'm very proud that I had anything to whatever to whatever extent I had anything to do with it I'm very proud because I think I think America's back and uh we had a little something to do with it I genuinely think one of the biggest catalysts to Trump winning this election was Elon buying Twitter oh yeah now X oh yeah and now he's wanting to run the Doge Department of government efficiency with vras Swami which I personally am like absolutely thrilled about oh my gosh me too no it could it could not be better it literally could not be better and you speak with Elon or you have quite a bit actually do you think that this is something that's actually actually going to come to fruition actually going to make a difference yes yes yes yes yes yes how do they have any Authority cuz my understanding is that they could make recommendations but they can't Implement anything themselves well we don't know exactly yet because it's a new department so there's an there's a certain irony here right their whole goal is to eliminate departments right we have something like 479 departments you know more than two a year basically in the history of the United States uh and they're adding a department to get rid of department so we don't know like the technical mechanism yet I saw all these people like Elizabeth Warren like is like oh it's how are they going to be so efficient they need two people to do the job you know implying it should be a oneperson job but it's like first off Elon has 20 other jobs at least the guy is literally sending us to Mars he's building tunnels under La he's the top player Diablo too is he really is he wait is he literally the top player the top player he did actually recently speedrun something and set the world record in Diablo but I think that he's officially top 20 leaderboard in the world which is insanely competitive because he he's I mean you have people that dedicate their lives to Diablo probably thousands tens of thousands of people and he has all of these lives and jobs and still he's top 20 well I can tell you story not not about Diablo specifically but maybe a little bit about his psyche that might explain that because the first time that I met him was right after he bought Twitter so it was about two weeks after he bought Twitter and I got a a message from somebody saying Elon wants you to wants to meet you can you come and I was in Florida where I'm in Miami and obviously they're in San Francisco I called every friend I know with a plane and I was like somebody you got to get me there immediately like he wants to meet me tonight and nobody get me on plane I get on the finally I there was one flight that I could get on I get it was literally the last seat you know you know 37b right in the middle to go meet Elon I show up at Twitter at about midnight and there's I don't know like 50 or 75 people up there and he immediately walks out he says hi he's like and his eyes were kind of bloodshot it was a long day you know he's just dressed in like a ratty t-shirt and he's got sneakers on and kind of you know just average jeans like could not if you had just seen him down the street You' just be like that's any guy like and and he's like Dave uh you know they told me there's some weird stuff going on with your Twitter account he's like I'm really tired but if you want me to look at this now you could spend a couple hours otherwise if you could just come back in the morning and I was like just that right there tells you everything you need to know about the guy like I am one of a zillion people like that you're going to now at 12:30 a.m. we're going to sit down and go under the hood and look in my Twitter and see what happens so I was like I was like it's okay uh we could do this in the morning I did spend a couple hours that night with the with the programmers going through the stuff but then the next day I met with him and I've sub subsequently met with him a couple other times and the guy's just doing a million things like if you're supposed to be on a on a journey in life if you're supposed to find something that you want to do and do it I don't know that anyone's doing a better example of that so to answer the question I think they absolutely are going to go in and as as BC said they are going to delete departments I think almost nothing is off the table they are going to their the government has become just an insane um I would say uh monster it's just an Ever growing monster that just keeps eating more more money eating more resources this is the Deep state that you know Trump's been talking about for years and they're going to go in and and they're going to do it quick sort of like what's happening in Argentina right now and then suddenly people are going to be like holy they did save two trillion uh in the budget and uh people are going to get some of their tax money back and we're not going to have all these wasteful departments and things are still going to work and that's what I think the the left is now worried about more than anything else it's not that he's Hitler nobody thinks Donald Trump is Hitler honestly maybe there's some people that are very very confused because they watch too much MSN but what they're really afraid of is this guy is going to get in and now he has the right people around him he didn't have the right people around him last time but now between RFK and Tulsi and Elon and BC and the list goes on and on I think Rubio is going to do a great job Secretary of State it's like they can really do things right now and I I think we're in for an incredible time in America the next decade why nobody think to do this sooner because we've all been talking about wasteful government spending I mean it's nothing new you see like the toilets going up in San Francisco that cost like a million dollars like toilet yeah um I mean I think the main reason for it was the culture wasn't ready for it you know like the people that were like oh taxes are too high or government's not efficient or there's too many agencies or you go to DC and there's these giant buildings where nobody's working and you're like what the hell is going on here I just don't think it was like culturally cool enough to move anything really so like there was never going to be a great you know every now and again you'd get a politician Rand Paul I like a lot obviously libertarian cator from Kentucky it's like he gets in there and he constantly talks about budgets and why what are we you know if we're giving money to Ukraine let's say could we get a receipt like basic stuff and he just gets he gets no traction with any of that but he's I think respected by let's say smart people I think they needed a cultural movement behind it and I think largely what happened was uh once covid hit and we saw the just the absolute disastrous response across the board from the NIH and the CDC and the department of Ed and just every Department that you can think of um then suddenly there was enough of like a wakeup around people and then it's also because of it's because of this it's because of podcast and people talking about things honestly in a way that they weren't seeing on media so there was just like a Confluence of things and I would say it was sort of perfect timing and then the right group of people and that we're on the precipice of of fixing it which by the way will not be easy or anything else but I do think some major things are going to happen but before we get into that even if you think it is a bit overhyped AI is suddenly everywhere from molecular medicine to business efficiency all the way to self-driving cars and if it's not in your industry yet it will be very soon but the problem is that AI requires a lot of 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headquarters you said that there were some issues with your Twitter account what issues did you see and also what did you learn from the from the people that were running Twitter was there actually stuff that was being like shadowbanned like truly from the inside sco yeah oh yeah like what what was the the problem there yeah so first off it was a like it's hard to even go back that year and a half or whatever it was it two years even already that he bought that thing it might it might even be about two years I think it's been more time I yeah time is very weird lately um that's what endless scrolling does to all of our brains we don't know it really it just like crushes the the time shift or something it was about two weeks after he bought it and it was just chaos there because he was firing people left and right you know now it sounds like he's fired up to about 80% of the entire company but remember when he got in he immediately fired a whole bunch of people so it was huge offices there I mean their commissary it's massive and there was just nobody there I'm talking about even the next day when I went back at normal office hours not when I was there just at 1:00 a.m. um he also felt that there were people there that were still moles you know because they were still dealing with we knew that there were people that either were working with the CIA or the FBI or somebody was somebody was govern somebody government related was in at Twitter so he didn't know who how many people were there he didn't he was worried that if he started firing people that somebody could just take down Twitter alog together I mean that was part of the complexity of how do you fire the right people because they could do things that would make it completely useless and you just bought the thing for you know 44 bill so anyway when we sat down and started looking at my account so well I should back up for one second and say that you know uh you know I've been on Twitter for like 12 or 13 years something like that and you can sort of see and being on YouTube and all these things you can sort of see when things are kind of working and it feels roughly right it's not that you get the exact same amount of views every day or anything else but you don't see like these insane spikes and then like you put out the same type of thing a few days later and get you know no views and I was going through all these like crazy versions of this for a while and and again it wasn't just Twitter I was seeing this on YouTube too um anyway I went in there and the programmers basically they just kind of opened up the hood and showed me what was going on there and it was really extraordinary because Jack dorsy who was the CEO of Twitter during the the old days he if you remember he testified under oath Ted Cruz asked him do you guys shadowban and he said no under under oath now he probably was using a little bit of a linguistic trick there because shadowban isn't a technical term in some sense right so we could all Define it a little bit differently but in essence do you do something that depresses views for some people in a in a feed that should be um chronological and he said no they showed me I mean they showed me the entire system the entire system was built to do that it wasn't that it it wasn't um a bug it wasn't a bug it was a feature like the entire system was l Ally built with endless amounts I I can't even tell you how many tags there were related to words or connections or you tweeted at this person or you tweeted this topic on this day like it was the craziest I'm not a programmer also so I'm sitting with programmers and some of the um you know the code and stuff is going above my head but the basic stuff that you're looking at of this word that word this topic connected to this hashtag and you follow this person so don't let it be seen the entire system was built for that so that was I would say it wasn't shocking to me cuz I knew something was wrong and clearly everyone that was paying attention knew something was wrong but it was shocking in that the former CEO of Twitter testified that they don't do it so I think that right now the the beauty of what's happening is that by Elon going in and opening this up I don't do my own Facebook my guys do that but like it seems that Facebook's gotten a little bit better you mentioned Zuckerberg well clearly he wasn't as involved in this election as he was before so that there's an implication okay maybe were fiddling around a little bit less on the Electoral Bezos made some statements Bezos Washington Post didn't even endorse Kamala they didn't endorse a candidate at all so you can see by I think basically by Elon being brave we needed somebody that was bigger than the the me or Shapiro or even Rogan we needed like we needed like huge forces and I think when Elon basically teamed up with Trump that that fully shifted something in the culture and that has now led to this to this incredible moment no it seems like speaking of that a lot of people are going towards deregulation at this point and they're thinking that's going to be better for our economy better for the average person where do you think that deregulation could actually hurt people I mean I'm a big deregulation guys so I would I would try to deregulate as much as possible we were talking right before we started I mean both of us left la like LA to do anything to start a new business or build a studio in your home or literally do landscaping outside of your house or anything there's an obscene amount of regulations and rules and you know all these things that you have to pay and all of this stuff so where could deregulation hurt as it pertains to Tech specifically or just the average person for for any industry like what do you think is going to get impacted by that the worst I'm not really worried like will there be something down the pike that they'll figure I don't know if you had no building codes I think there's probably ways you could privatize a lot of that stuff or at least make it a little more local focused than federally focused I I'm actually not worried about that at all like I'm I'm sure there is something right there clearly they will do something and there will be unintended consequences I think it's all a risk worth taking right now like to me if you just deleted as VC said if you just deleted the Department of Education tomorrow we'll see what happens on the other side and I actually think it's going to be a hell of well you just yeah I mean you can because it's a giant building and those people will need jobs but you know what it's not going to be that's the thing that's the thing none of these agencies are doing what they set out to do the EPA was basically set out to kind of keep an eye on companies that were dumping sewage into the water like but it basically became a law writing agency so these things have become way too big they have way too much power and I I think if you eliminated virtually all of them I mean their goal is to eliminate about 300 of them but if you eliminated virtually all of them then what would happen well most most policies would be kicked back to the states which which is exactly what the Founders intended and I think that that for the most part I want I live in Miami I want most of the things that I have to deal with in my life to be dealt with in Miami and then from there Florida and then the stuff that we all have to deal with say the border that should be dealt with with the federal government but the less agencies and middleman I mean this is what Trump I mean he started the thing about the Deep State eight years ago and nobody really talked about that we didn't really realize boy there is this thing in in DC that just exists it just exist ex IST this this middl management bureaucratic nonsense and finally people are seeing it so I think I'm telling you they are going to do a lot it is going to be like Malay and Argentina and it's going to happen very quickly what do you think the role of the government should be not much not much I would say I would say the founders basically got it completely right that everything should be dealt with at the state and local level and then the federal government should have a couple things that they're supposed to do so that would be border make sure the states aren't Waring with each other you know interstate commerce couple things like that foreign policy which back then was way less of a big issue as it is now um the government shouldn't do much and especially as technology innovates and as AI comes around like there's just going to be more and more ability uh for you to live the way you want without governmental interference you know what does the government do particularly well not much and I say that as someone that lives in Florida with a highly competent government so for example um you know two years ago we had hurricane e and basically a a a category 5 that hit Southwest Florida demolished Fort uh Fort Meyers sanabel Captiva some of the barrier islands there immediately after the hurricane everybody on the news was saying to rebuild the sbel causeway which is about four miles was going to take three years that's what everybody was saying um Dan santis basically had it rebuilt in a month because he brought in the right people he cut regulation I actually met one of the contractors at the sanz's reelection night a guy came up to me said that he was one of the contractors that worked on on it and he said Dave I just want to tell you this that this guy he basically brought all the best contractors down he took everybody to the to the bridge and basically said what do we need to do we gave him our recommendations and he started making it happen the next day that's proper competent governance we're just so not used to that we're used to what you fled in California an Ever growing state that taxes endlessly and punishes people for success and then it's like how is it that I have nice clean roads in Florida how is it that we don't have homeless people not we know homeless people but why do things work with no income tax in Florida and why does Cali tax the high hell out of you and have much worse services and much worse infrastructure and a whole series of other problems so I would say as as little as the government can do is what I wanted to do what about leaving it to the private sector I would leave as much as possible to the private sector I mean this is where okay so should there be some regulations around environment let's say because you don't want every company dumping sewage into the river that's like the the base one that most people would ask about yeah I think you can have some basic regulations around that um but most yeah most things I see the thing is capitalism the beauty of capitalism is that someone's always trying to make a better mouse trap so if you're a company that's that is exposed to be doing horrible things and this is also the beauty of the Internet by the way because now we can expose things a lot quicker because we all have phones and we all have cameras and all these things it's like if you're a company and whatever you're making you're making making glasses and it turns out that actually you're dumping a ton of toxic sludge into the water into whatever into the fields behind you and there's schools there it's like that will now be exposed very quickly and there will be more competition for that cuz here's I remember a while ago there's that big oil spill I think it was like 2008 or 2009 yeah I don't know anybody who's like oh that company had that big oil spill but they're 5 cents cheaper I'm not going to go there they just look at the price you're like all right well it's cheaper that oil spill I didn't see it you know it's always tricky to get get people to care about things that aren't happening in their backyard right um right when it happens in your backyard then it's like not in my backyard then suddenly you're screaming about it but if it happens miles away you don't realize all the reasons that it will potentially affect you or anything else um I think the world's changing I think the world is changing in massive ways and and it's deep it's definitely connected to what we're talking about with Twitter and YouTube and everything else it's like the media used to just control that overin window in such a tight way that the stories that we would see were were so Slim in nature and leaving out so much and now it's like if there's an oil spill and and something really terrible is happening it's going to be covered in New Media in a completely new way and it will get out there more can you force people to care about it enough so that there are different regulations maybe but you know the Exon Valdes was a horrific the Exxon Valdes was a horrific oil spill we have regulations against oil spills the guy the captain I think was drunk and fell asleep like there's no system that's perfect so I would personally I would just be uh reigning in all of that and then and then you have to hope that enough good competition is out there so that companies will do better what about tariffs what are your thoughts on that I feel like people have a very poor understanding of tariffs they really do we've played a lot of videos of people being very confused about tariffs on my show lately the thing that confuses me so much it's like okay I studied economics in in college but at the same time now people have very convincing arguments on both sides of the aisle people on the left say the people on the right don't understand tariffs and people on the right say that the people on the left don't understand tariffs what's your understanding of tariffs and then I'll ask you to Steelman that argument sure so well my version I'll tell you why I agree with Trump's proposition for tariffs first because that that's what sort of brought this back right I mean basically what's happening right now is that other countries are putting huge tariffs on our products so we can't as uh I played a video on my show uh Mr Wonderful what's his name from Kevin great um he was basically explaining that you know we can't sell an American car in Japan because they put 100% tariff on it so no idiot in Japan is going to be like man I really want that GM so bad I have to have that Escalade that I'm going to pay for it right and we don't do the reverse on their stuff here so Trump is in effect using the the threat of tariffs to get some sort of tariff parody and then the hope would be that we would have enough competition in America to deal with that and hopefully we would I mean from my perspective I would then want people to be buying more American but I don't want it to be um exorbitant to buy to import cars or anything else because we should be able to buy whatever we want to buy um but I'm basically with Trump on this that we have to at least threaten a little bit it's sort of like Trump with NATO the first time around you know his whole thing everyone was like he's trying to destroy NATO and Trump was like well I'm not trying to destroy NATO but why is it that we foot the bill on NATO and nobody else does you know and then what did Trump get out of it well suddenly a whole bunch of other countries started paying into NATO as well so I think I think that it needs to be a little bit more of an even game that would be my my basic version of it it makes sense if we were to try to get the other countries to stop levying tariffs on the United States then I feel like that would help out a ton but in terms of just like increasing tariffs from other countries trying to sell in America I think the argument his argument is if we say to Japan if there is a 100% tariff that's what that's what uh Mr said Kevin o if there's a 100% tariff on American cars going into Japan then if we say okay there's 100% tariff on Japanese cars coming into America then suddenly they'll be like okay well actually we're going to lower this so I think he's using it as a point of Leverage right I think what a lot of I think what the other version of it would be if we were trying to steal man on the other version it's something like oh okay now Trump's going to do it and they're going to do it and we're going to get in this like escalating price War but that's not really how competition works the idea is oh if you guys are going to have this crazy we're just going to do the exact same thing and then the car manufacturers of Japan might be like boy this isn't such a great idea because we can't sell in America anymore because it's too expensive to go there so again this is another one where I just think competition and and how why do we have such insane rules you know what I mean like can either one of you make the argument for that you know why why do we have why do we allow this with China China and Japan and plenty of other countries why do we what try to make the argument well I think we need we need cheap labor I mean when it really comes down to it right so if we're importing a lot from China saves the average person here significant amount of money they don't really see or notice the deficit in terms of national debt it makes no difference for them but if they're able to get an iPhone for a grand instead of $3,000 the average person says I don't care well it goes to your other point that it's hard to make people care about things properly and they don't really think about where their iPhone is coming from or the women that are literally using their fingers to you know put the chips in and all that stuff but I would say basically if you can create a situation and and I think it's fairly obvious Trump is going to do this uh if you can create a situation where other countries feel that they can't just rip off America anymore that ultimately they will lower tariffs too like it's actually insane we make some pretty good cars in America we didn't you know 50 years ago but we do now actually it's like why can't we sell them in Europe it's because of the Tariff so you threaten them basically say hey we're going to do to you what you've been doing to us and then they might just come around but but we'll see I mean we'll see if he actually does it and and what what comes to fruition I think it's a conversation worth having so I mean it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out I feel like that's kind of the theme of this entire presidency it's like it'll be interesting to see kind of how all not back we'll see we'll see well I'm mostly thinking like RFK even like what'll even happen with that I think it's all just like it's going to be such a massive shift yeah it'll be interesting to see well we're not used to doing amazing things in America at least in you know you guys are probably how old are you guys 34 34 26 26 so I'm 48 so you guys have I have a couple years on you like we're just not used to doing amazing things anymore America we we did we sent people to the Moon I mean we were in a space race like we used to do incredible things Elon is actually doing incredible things but as a nation we haven't been doing incredible things anymore we've done a lot of unimpressive things I would say and if you look a lot of our architecture and our infrastructure and we've stopped dreaming in a lot of ways so I it seems to me that Trump now represents a restoration of the American dream that it's like we're going to get government off your back we're going to look in and be like well what did happen during covid and why did we inject all these kids with this stuff and why did we force doctors out of work if they didn't want to be injected with it and why did we think we could lock people in their home and how did these agencies get so powerful and why did nobody get fired like we're actually going to look under the hood to use a reference I used before with Twitter we're going to look under the hood and be like wow we have been wasting insane amount of money we have been doing these crazy military Adventures overseas without really understanding why or explaining it to the American people and I think all of that I think when people see a little bit more of how screwy things were and then they start realizing boy it didn't have to be this way I think it will get more people more and more involved I also think they're going to decentralize a bit of the DC power and move some of the agencies out and I think when you do that you know it's like why is the Department of Agriculture DC I don't know maybe it should be in Iowa like once you actually do that then the power center will be less powerful and you will be giving back more of the power to the people it's interesting that reminded me that we were talking to somebody and they were telling us about government spending and they said that um and they've experienced this firsthand where they had a certain budget uh for an aircraft and because they didn't get the bud like they got really close to uh you know the budget by the end but they had to like use up so they get so what they ended up doing is just like flying planes from coast to coast just to yeah just to be able to hit and say okay we reached our budget and now we could get more money the next year and if we don't do that then they're going to cut off they literally cut the budget and by way flying empty planes that was back and forth think so that that's a perfect example of what's wrong with the government no business could operate this way right you could never operate that way you would never be like I have to spend more otherwise I won't magically get more money there's Supply and Dem there El it but that's how the government haser so that why is it that the government to build a bathroom in DC on the street costs you know 10 times what it would cost if somebody else was doing it like this is consistently what we've seen with the government so I think just pulling back on all of that stuff and that's exactly what DOI is going to do they're going to look at all of that you know what did they just find out this week the Pentagon has has seventh audit seventh audit like they're missing like $300 billion it's like it's completely insane or somebody there even a year ago there was something with one of the checks we wrote to Ukraine where aama was in the wrong spot and we act accidentally gave them an extra couple yeah yeah yeah my interview with Rand Paul will have the exact numbers on that but there's all sorts of evidence of this type of nonsense never happens to me yeah no it does no and if it did happen if it did happen to you your accountant would be in a lot of [ __ ] right like you'd be like this can't happen again and I probably have to fire you did did anybody like on the receiving end of that check be like well hold on a second you actually said this amount but no of course not it wasn't found out till like a year later I for I wish I could remember what theed that and they no no because because it same thing it goes through so many filters and layers and the person receiving it probably doesn't know how much is supposed to be set they're like oh the the money's here all right and that's a whole other rabbit hole that I would prefer not to go down but the point I would say broadly is that this is exactly what the problem is people that are engaged that sort of care about these issues they don't even really understand what's going on and I think that when they peel back this stuff we're going to see such a mess under there and it will be able to be cleaned quickly did you see the video that Malay put out in Argentina I think right before he got elected where he's in front of the board and he has all the Departments the board aa aa and he's ripping them off and guess what he's done it and now their GDP is growing by something budget budget surplus the GDP is at like at 88.4% growth like and it's just because he was like we will not do this anymore it's just enough and that's kind of where we're at but In fairness I haven't heard like much from the constituents of Argentina in terms of like how this is affecting them I know for naib buele the guy from El Salvador like that's actually treating people in El Salvador incredibly well my my roommate that I had back in college he's El Salvadorian and I actually texted him because I see all this stuff on Twitter but you never know what's real and what's fake sure and so I texted him like hey I know you're Al Salvadorian how is this actually affecting people I don't want to go by what you know some random like white dude in Minnesota is saying about you know El Salvador I want to see from an actual constituent and he said that he was actually able to go and visit his grandma for the first time in like a decade because it's finally safe enough to go and see her so I've been to El Salvador a couple times before bu because my brother-in-law uh was working with an organization that was helping poor people get shoes sidebar but he had to live in a in an incredibly protected armed guard barbed wire community that was basically for Americans that were trying trying to just help these communities and when we went I mean you could not walk outside you know you basically knew if you walked outside first off you literally couldn't because they had giant metal gates and armed armed guards there but that they made it very clear if you walk out of this thing if you figure out how to get out of here without us uh you will likely be killed or at least have all your stuff stolen and it's not like that anymore I mean they had you know you've seen the videos of him just wrangling these gangs there were gang members basically took over the country the gangs were running country they were literally just going into houses and saying this is our house now there's nobody to call the police don't basically didn't exist so buou has done something absolutely incredible and I think it was this morning I saw he put up a screenshot of how much of El Salvador's cash is now in Bitcoin yeah it's like it's like this guy's really revolutionizing his country it's incredible I mean he could have been wrong he In fairness he could have he could have been drastic drastically and then but he also twe which I thought was even dangerous because I would never say something like that nor would I say what he said which was I told you so right did you see that tweet that he did like once Bitcoin was skyrocketing like I told you so but now he's even doubling down off of that first audacious move and now people are going to have more artillery if it ever goes down to like you know just attack him with right there's absolutely a risk there because I mean Bitcoin happens to be doing quite well right now but clearly has had its ups and downs and you just you just don't know like what does that really mean okay so you have that in Bitcoin and that's great and El Salvador has that but what does it really really mean for the people it's still a little unclear to me at some point it's it's a stored wealth not you're not spending it so there's something to be said about what he's doing there but I would say um the fact that he's thinking about the world differently that if he gave a speech at CPAC about a year ago where he basically said look we were the most violent country in the in the Western Hemisphere out of developed Nations we were the most violent and we're basically the safest so I I can't verify it's absolutely the safest and by what metric they Mark that at but that he's been able to change it quickly that clearly Malay has been able to change it quickly again I think goes to how Trump will be able to do this fairly quickly although really quick before we go into that if you run your own business you understand how difficult it could be to manage your own finances cards receipts and payments pile up fast 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your thoughts on bitcoin and doing maybe like a strategic Reserve well I've got some Bitcoin and I've never paid for any Bitcoin because when I first started doing my show somebody you know a lot of Libertarians liked me because I'm basically anti regulation and not big on government and people said put up a QR code which I wasn't even sure what that was at the time on my website and I just put it there and people started giving me Bitcoin so I have a nice amount of Bitcoin which I'm very excited about particularly in the last uh week or so I think that should we have some sort of Reserve you mean the government should have some sort of Reserve absolutely absolutely I mean we're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now like the world I grew up in a world that the I remember I got my first cell phone it was right before 911 I lived in New York City in 911 I had a little candy bar black and white you all you could do is play snake on it and yeah that was it that was basically it like think how fundamentally different the world is from that that was 23 years ago basically the world is changing so fast everything that's happening with AI Industries are disappearing the everything that's happening now with robotics and that there you know even now it's like Amazon at their factories is doing so much Automation and so much with robots and everything else but the guy who drops the package off at your house is still a man but that's not really necessary right we can do it with drones they'll do it with robots Elon just you know Optimus and all this stuff so it's like there's so much changing right now that I think our currency needs to probably change along with it so I would tell anybody like you should get some Bitcoin at least I'm definitely not an expert in it why don't you buy more it seems like that stands for everything that you do well first off why aren't I buying more again I never bought any in the first place I like I like the idea that I just have this thing on The Ledger that I've never bought like there's something fun about the idea like literally also it hurt maybe to buy it since you were gied well right so now it's like it's 100 Grand basically as we sit here right now right it's a 95 or something like that I had the counter before you got here I was just watching what is it what is it it was 993 it could hit 100 today cuz is it the first day it's ever been a 99 uh yeah to then then that's probably people are excited to push it to 100 so why wouldn't I buy more I mean I'll be completely transparent with you I just had a what is 995 so right there it's going to push through and as soon as it breaks 100 then there's more news more articles and it's going to push it 99740 was right there now I will say though because I I did watch this in 2017 when it hit 20 yeah and everyone I was watching it on TV watching it hit 20 for like a second and then boom everyone started selling yeah and it just plummeted and then it was a slow descent from 20 down to like 3500 right so the same Could Happen theoretically it hits 100 everyone's like all right we're good sell my sense is it it's going to go down again maybe not all the way down to 20 but like that's part of what's going to happen with this thing over time um I would say why I don't buy more is I just had a meeting with my financial people this week and we were discussing what we have in Bitcoin versus everything else and they actually felt that my ratio was exactly right so you know based on what their based on their how they view people should be Diversified in various things okay Black Rock said uh the optimal allocation for Bitcoin and they said this in 2022 is 85% Black Rock said that your Bitcoin allocation should be 85% of assets yes for for the like like the retail investor as the it portfolio should be 85% this was in 2022 how much Bitcoin is Black Rock have yeah J could be quite a bit if it's 85% of their port was that it was such an asymmetric risk to take for the amount of upside like the amount of upside you for the amount of downside was so strong that it should be 85% of your portfolio to maintain the proper allocation of like Risk versus reward at that time Bitcoin was probably what it was in the high 20s mid to high 20s wonder what Dr that would be interesting to see well it would get kind of nutty because you'd only be a only insanely insanely wealthy people would be able to do that so um this is where I listen to my financial guys like if you if you have people around you that you trust that you think are good like you should take their advice I us as I always tell my team it's like I will trust you guys until something goes horrifically arai and since things haven't yet I trust the people that I've brought in on the topic of trump presidency he was flirting with the idea of 0% income tax now you being kind of in the nitty-gritty and knowing a lot of those people being in that sphere do you think this is truly possible or do you think this is just another thing that's thrown out overpromise underd deliver which I feel like we've seen just every single campaign ever uh it's probably a little bit of both I think he really knows how to just throw things out and see what happens like kind of just it's just a balloon you leave it out there for a little bit it kind of floats around do people get interested in it or not and then I think there's something real there too there's a lot of people on the more libertarian side of this that think a consumption tax is the way to go that you basically get rid of income tax or the more traditional way would be that you be for a flat tax which i' I would be I would be for a flat tax for sure that's what I wrote about in my first book we could pick what the number would be so you know you could say maybe it's 12 or 15% everybody pays it and then to throw the to throw the lefties a bone I don't know that this is moral or ethical or even financially sensible but just to try to get something past that you could get more people on board maybe you exempt everybody under 50 Grand and then maybe if you're making you know over a couple Mill a year it ticks up a tiny percentage but that basically you know you get like deductions or anything too or is it just gross I mean the idea of a flat tax is you're going to eliminate all of that and you'll have a one page tax well you have but you'll get rid of all of the other craziness right it's you're going have a onepage tax code with virtually no loopholes and that's it to me that would be a great way to do it a consumption tax makes a lot of sense though like I really like the idea of if you could actually get rid of the income tax all together okay the government still needs some money to operate even post Elon vbec crushing these agencies and all of the things the government still does need money every so unless you want to be like total andap about this which I'm not um I like it intellectually but like I don't think we can fully operate that way in a country of 350 million people I would say the the consumption tax is a great idea the more stuff that you buy and the more money that you spend you'll be taxed on that money people are always going to buy things and they're always going to want things and need things and in that sense if you have a lot you're it's not exactly that you're paying more in but there's a there's a well I suppose you are paying more in but it's it's more voluntary in that sense rather than oh you make this much and we're taking 39 points 7% of it and that's that but again I would only liken it back to the the state income tax issue right which is how does Florida somehow manage to have roads and police and fire departments and high property taxes though right but it's marginally higher look at the property tax difference I mean you guys could try to pull it up if you want between LA and Miami it's not that different there are some things there one to 2% one to 2% sure but you're saving 10% on income tax at Le you know if you're especially if you're in the highest ratio so I Mo there's a reason that people move to low uh to no income tax states you know people aren't very excited when they're suddenly like all right I'm moving to C in New York so I can pay more in income tax so even though that's not why I left LA and I suspect that's not ultimately why you left Cali too wait what's the no here there's no income tax right nothing right so there's a reason it works and 7% property tax here by the way you got a lot of space capped at 3% which is crazy yeah what are some of your predictions for a trump presidency terms of the economy in terms of the Federal Reserve I know that some people were flirting with the idea of even just like stopping the Federal Reserve what are your predictions for the finances of the average American I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now across the board again you get rid of Regulation you start bringing in people that are going to make things more efficient look at what look at what the economy was doing under Trump pre-o um even if you care about some of the identity politics stuff which I don't care about his last state of the union speech we have lowest black unemployment of all time lowest Latino unemployment of all time he went through these unbelievable numbers that we had and the Congressional Black Caucus sat there like this it's one of my favorite videos ever as they're talking about that because you think they might be going like this oh that's pretty good we're the Congressional Black Caucus black people have their lowest uh unemployment of all time and they simply didn't care that's a bit of a separate issue but I would say by bringing in Elon by bringing in bbec by bringing in all of these people they are basically going to get America going in you can even feel it in you know the election was less than 3 weeks ago and you can feel there is a reordering of the world right now it is it is very very obvious that other countries are suddenly like America might be back and I think all it actually takes is a little American attitude to start switching these things up and start you know we were on a sort of I would say a slow motion descent into hell that's what I always say on my show we didn't really realize how bad it was it everything always seemed like it was getting worse and it was like oh we can endlessly print money and we can endlessly give money to this thing or that thing and it'll just sort of work forever and it was just kind of getting worse and worse and we've been in some sort of like Frankenstein style democracy basically where the media kind of lies about everything the policies don't really make sense the math doesn't add up nobody knows what's really going on but we just keep doing it and I think what's happening now is people are realizing we're not going to do that anymore and I think just that notion alone is go is going to and also because of the technological Evolution that we're about to have or revolution I I think that we are going to we're I'm telling you I've been saying it on my show we are going to have an 80s style revolution in this country it is coming it's there is going to be a 10year boom as short I would say the only hedge against that would be God knows what the machine can do against Trump you know does co9 come out the zombie apocalypse do they make do they literally make World War III happen before he gets into office but short of like some crazy thing you know some Black Swan event which absolutely could happen I think there's every indicator that we're about to go into an incredible time in this what would you say to the average person who feels like the American dream is dead and they look at housing prices and they say it's so unaffordable I can't buy a house stocks are at their all-time high my income is not kept up with inflation groceries are expensive what would you say to that person I would say you're right I say you're right and you should be very happy that Trump is President I mean the I'm not a I'm not a I've built a couple businesses and I've done well in that sense um but I'm not an economist I I have no doubt you guys are more experts that department than I am so when I'm talking about these things in my show I try to talk about it in the most simplest terms so the two ways that I talk about it usually are price of groceries and mortgage rates to me that's the easiest way we all go into the supermarket and we all see the same things right every it doesn't matter how much money you have I guess if you have an un told am you're a billionaire you're probably not walking into the supermarket yourself but all of us basically go in and what used to be like $5.99 for a pound of beef is now $1.99 literally more than double price of eggs rice and milk all of those things something's not right and Camala her answer was we're going to put price controls because it's the it's the the groceries the groceries are basically and the stores are trying to gouge you and it's complete Insanity she doesn't want to connect any of that to what gets that pound of beef into the store which of course includes fuel costs and it includes the cost of fertilizer and and a gajillion other things right her answer was oh at the end of the whole process let's just give governmental control so I talk about prices of food and then mortgage rates because I think one thing that I did well is that in I've bought a couple houses and I've done well on all of them because I did it when interest rates were low and if and when interest rates are low I've always liked paying my mortgage I have a mortgage now I like paying it because I got in when it was still low like under three and then it's like wow I was able to afford something that in essence I couldn't just buy in cash but I'm able to now have something I pay the bank a little bit extra right not a crazy you know now what are mortgage rates now or interest rates like that's an insan amount of money but now if you're at like two and a half which they were during during most of Trump's presidency it's like yeah you have to pay the bank a little something to lend you money that seems like a fair exchange that's capitalism that's pretty good and then you get to own something and hopefully invest in it and make it better and then eventually sell that and do that again and again someone argued that Trump caused housing prices to go up so much not directly but during his presidency because they lowered rates so much people are locked into their mortgage that they can't move because they got a two and a half% rate if they were to move their payment would double I don't know you could blame Trump well the implication would be the Federal Reserve but it was would under his presidency but is the is the implication there that because rates have now gone up the guys with the good rates are locked in I mean I don't know how you can blame Trump for that right well you were saying under his presidency uh you could afford a house yeah because you got a two and a half% mortgage but my counter claim to that is for those who didn't get a mortgage during that time yeah now unable to because mortgages were so low during that time I don't know that mortgages I I don't know that I'm fully qualified to answer the question actually but like I mean I think basically it's it's because the Democrats largely screwed up the economy I think it's it's partly covid related but I think it's an endless printing of money that then the banks are just like all right money is worth less we're just not going to lend like we did and you know we also had we had banks that were too big to fail and then we somehow made them bigger so there's less competition with the bank now so I think there's a series of problems there but as a general rule because I want the government out of the economy as much as possible um and out of everything as much as possible I want there to be more Banks so there's more competition so if you can't if some bank is offering you 5% you might find three other Banks to start negotiating with them and next thing you know you do get a an interest rate or you get a mortgage at 3% or something like that so you know some of this is like okay this President did this this President did this it it all sort of es and flows what are some of the biggest issues that you believe are not discussed enough well you know it's funny because online almost everything is being discussed now right like I mean that's the beauty of what's Happening online there are a million podcasts discussing almost everything from a mainstream perspective which is crumbling I would say the main thing that they didn't discuss honestly was that there could be a type of person out there who was not a pure leftist that still was a good American and they basically treated everybody that wasn't a Democrat or wasn't a lefty or didn't just pick the thing of the day that the lefties were into they basically treated them like they were a Nazi or a horrible person or a garbage person as Joe Biden said and then I think what happened was you basically had a mainstream media that was that more and more people were waking up to the nonsense you had an ascendant alt media and that really was what this election was about so I think I think it's hard to say what isn't being discussed so much is being discussed now but I would say the the the thing that I think has flourished to the top right now that that desperately needed to be uh push to the top is Free Speech I don't think people had any freaking clue how bad the Free Speech situation was and then I think Co started waking some people up you know when you suddenly started getting a couple doctors that were like all right maybe this thing was from the shadow Banning on you shadow of a thing in terms of like saying vaccine or covid and stuff like that so so I think it's ironic actually because they basically the media was so terrible they created this alt ecosystem online and then Co comes in and then Co basically put like rocket fuel on the alt thing because then there were just online people like me and I'm obviously not the only one but then I started talking to say J Bichara who might be the head of NIH now who was a Stanford uh physician who was very skeptical of everything that was going on so then more and more of us started talking about it the government started censoring us more and more and then it started feeding itself I had a tweet in um I think it was July of 21 that uh it was right after Biden said that if you get the vaccine you will not get nor transmit covid and I said Not only was that not true but I said uh the boosters don't work and they are prepping us for mandates by the Fall mandates were coming anyway my tweet got taken down and then Jim Jordan congressman from Ohio said that I was one of the people that they know when they went in and looked at what happened with Twitter and the government they know that the government had Twitter take down that tweet so and you get nothing by the way the government fully can step on your first amendment Free Speech rights and you get nothing you don't get a letter you don't get an apology I was at the capital with him I was like is there anyone here that I could go to and they might say sorry he's like no that there's literally nothing you you can't sue them there's nothing you can do so you accurately predicted consequences of you know Co and then some government official agency who knows was putting pressure on Twitter for you to delete that tweet not for me to delete they deleted the tweet for Twitter to then which they did yeah and yeah and then the beauty of that actually is that so that happened it got deleted maybe two hours after I put it up something like that I said I said the vax is not working as promised you guys can probably find the Tweet the vax is not working as promised and mandates are coming and it was taken down what I did was fortunately because I have an audience first off I called a couple of the higher profile people that I know and I was like guys can you screenshot I have a screenshot of it can you get this out there and fortunately to whatever extent Twitter was still fre free at the time enough people started doing that uh I had also started my own tech company called locals where we were able to allow people to speak freely so I was able to get people to to follow me there and still I could still communicate with people and I could still directly chat with people and everything else so there's always a better mouse trap I mean that more than anything else I think that's my attitude about the world right now as long as we are free to whatever degree we are free the human Ingenuity will always solve all of the problems so the fact that the government could go in and do that and nobody is fired for any of that um is a scary proposition the fact that they fully violated my first amendment rights you would think that there would be some repercussion there there simply isn't um but look where we are now things are in a much better position that's pretty unbelievable actually that you that you said something that happened and the government removed it from to now what if at the time they genuinely thought that what they were saying was correct your information could be detrimental doesn't matter I mean the road to hell is paav with good intentions it just doesn't matter um first off you know you have every right to be wrong about things I mean that's part of having a human mind that's part of The Human Experience um I was also it was at that time if you remember I think it was in June of 2001 uh 21 where Biden said that thing on stage you will if you get the VAC you will not get nor transmit Co I knew at that point we already knew that wasn't true there were enough people paying attention to what was going on online that we knew it wasn't true because there were people getting the vaccine still getting covid we 100% knew that so it was just another one of you know everyone has their own little sort of red pill Journey you asked me a little bit before about waking up to things I think everybody over the last couple years has just had seen a series of things why is it that in 2019 I was tweeting about Biden having dementia am I I'm not his doctor I'm not a doctor but I was just watching this man who couldn't complete a sentence who was slurring and confused and everything else and now it's fairly obvious that he either has dementia or blue body Dementia or Parkinson's or something like that but the point is we weren't even allowed to talk about that for about 5 years until the debate and then the debate was so terrible and then suddenly that night the mainstream media couldn't hold the narrative anymore and then everybody started talking about it and then two weeks later he's not even the nominee anymore so there's a there's a weird there's a weird control system that has been put in place it's it's sort of matrixyl system partly through the government partly through big Tech and I think we're seeing that kind of wash away right now because of Mostly because of Elon what do you think are some of the biggest non-issues that are discussed too much uh abortion for sure for sure um it's not that it's a non-issue uh but it has somehow plac wedged itself as like the number one thing in the hierarchy of importance for a huge amount of Voters largely women I think you could probably argue something like 30 or 40% of the people of America vote as abortion being their number one issue there's so many reasons that that just does not make sense um putting aside what any of our personal views on abortion are or when Life Starts or anything else there's so many things that you should be voting on before that I would argue you should be voting for National Security and safe borders basic competence government government and infrastructure and things of that nature and then abortion I think in a sane world you know then you decide is it my fifth most important thing or my 10th most important thing but they have convinced especially on the left they've convinced par uh middle-aged women mostly that abortion is the number one thing and now you have the same women now saying my body my choice are the same women who were screaming that everybody else should get vaccinated and I think that's also caused a certain amount of craziness because people's people went on every side of every issue during covid and and I think now it's been we've been left with a bunch of people that really don't know what they think about a whole bunch of things but abortion is by far the big one you know when we were supposed to have the Red Wave in November of 22 and it didn't materialize it's because for two weeks before that uh the entire media was screaming about the Republicans coming for abortion and roie Wade is going to kill the reversal of roie Wade is going to kill people all the reversal of roie Wade did was kick it back to the states which I do think was the right decision even though I am begrudgingly pro-choice every state should be able to make up their mind on that for example Florida is six weeks it's heartbeat bille that's too strict I would say for me personally but then I have to decide as a Floridian is this the thing that I put at the top of the hierarchy and if it is I can leave and I can go to California and have an 8-month abortion or fight for eight-month abortions there um but because so it's an ordering thing more than anything else they have just convinced women that you have to think about abortion more than whether your streets are safe or where why your kid is hooked on fenel or why it's not safe to go out in New York City at night and that that it's it's so dangerous and wrong but before we 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been using Gusto for 4 years now I've never had a problem I seriously recommend the product when I signed up I didn't get 3 months for free you guys can get 3 months for free with the link Down Below in the description all you got to do is go to gusto.com to get started today that is gusto.com slist or click the link Down Below in the description thank you so much to Gusto for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast why do you think we become so divisive I would like to blame social media algorithms to me it just seems like the more you are it's just like that gets boosted so people are incentivized to say like the most radical stuff that they want to or that they can because it makes them money and platforms love it because they get to show ads yeah the system of selective pressures is not great right now right like yes the crazier you do the more clickbait stuff you do all of that for sure you're right like it's it's a part of the game and it's something that that even my team internally will will discuss things something related to thumbnails or titles or how we're doing this or that and then at the same time there's a game that's being played whether you like it or not and you can either hate the player or hate the game so it's it's a little complex to figure out how to you want to build something that's good and just I'm talking about you guys or just anyone in general that's creating content um and yet you want to be in the system so you want to be seen right like it's that's just reality um so I have no doubt the AL have done this to us but I would say actually it's there's something worse than that which is also connected to everything else we've talked about here which is just a horrible education system in this country it's a horrible education system in this country where we've taught young people to hate the country they don't understand how the goodness of America they don't understand what the Melting Pot is that what we do here in this Multicultural Society is the dream of that people 250 years ago could barely even imagine and all of the goodness of this nation and we've just thrown that away we've made them focus on identity and genitals skin color and we've Unearthed ancient hatreds that we put to bed and L all of that really starts at the education level more than anything else so I do think there's an algorithmic component to it for sure but it's mostly if you had if you had people who were educated properly really educated properly in in a true classically liberal tradition and you and you really scaled that at a societal level then if the algorithms were screwing with people Society wouldn't get completely out of whack it it would actually start self-regulating I think but when you have a bunch of people who have been taught all of the wrong things who who are also being told that the Earth is going to end in 12 years because of climate change and then you create this anxiety situation with young people and they're told that they living in a country that shouldn't exist because of systemic racism or any of these things it all just feeds itself to like a certain level of neurosis that I think particularly people younger than me are in right now and uh we have to get out of that which by the way I think I think by blowing apart the department of uh education by pushing more school choice and charter schools and homeschooling and pod schooling and all of those things we will we will do that what's pod schooling it's just like a version of homeschooling you know if you have a pod like you might be the family at the at the in the community that has I'm thinking podcast that's from my mind podcast schooling I'm like yeah okay people are learning I don't know that pod schooling is technically like a term exactly it's just like the idea that you have a pod at your house that would teach this this subject and someone else might have a pod at their house that teaches this subject something like that I see okay I'm thinking podcast that's but actually podcast would be a probably be good I mean where are most of us getting our information these days for better or worse it it largely is podcast and everything else I was when I was on the plane coming here it's a 5 hour flight from Miami to to Vegas and the person next to me was watching CNN the entire time so I can't hear it but I'm just watching and it's like it's it's even more mind-numbing when you can't hear it because you just look at the chirons it's endless Hysteria for I kid you not for the entire five hours that I would just peek over every few minutes um it was just it was just Trump Trump trump Trump trump Trump trump it's like he's not in office yet we might be veering towards World War III right now there's some other stuff we could be talking about what happened to Camala where's she been for the last couple weeks we thought this woman was going to lead the Free World but they've just dumbed down every we're basically an idiocracy but it just seems like they do that just to sell ad space I mean that's really what it is is that the more they throw at you they I think they can do it as as they can do it you know that ra so I saw today that Rachel mat you know how much she gets paid how much you think Rachel mat gets paid I 10 million a year probably Millions probably 5 mil 30 million a year MSNBC is now cutting her pay to 25 million a year uh I am very successful I have way more views on a daily basis on my live stream than she has I do not make 30 million I do not make 25 million I don't make 20 million a year uh how is she going I know how is she going to survive you know and it's like she has to give an awful lot of that for taxes too cuz I'm pretty sure she Liv so are you saying they make that much money cuz if they pay her that they have to at least be making that just if we were to take away the pharmaceutical ad money that might be a bit different proposition right I mean we during covid you would literally have fouchy on for an hour on Meet the Press and then it would go to Commercial and it would say brought to you by fizer and it's like wait what what what the the company that this guy was just Shilling for is sponsoring the the new news right now so one of the reasons that this hasn't fully shifted yet like you guys are obviously in a similar business that I'm in here um is that Industries don't just die overnight right like the dinosaurs they're sinking in the laa Tar Pits but they don't just sink immediately it takes some time for them to syn so there's an entire world that exists around ad sales and corporate structure of the dying mainstream media that hasn't fully moved over if I was being paid per view in any way of it that she's getting paid forie I'd be making a [ __ ] ton more than her it's fine I'm not complaining about it but it just it just kind of is what it is but I would also say this when you realize that that woman has been getting $30 million a year and then you were to go through the laundry list of things that she got wrong did you ever see that five minute thing that she did talking about the vaccine saying I mean she did the exact same thing Biden did you will not get covid you will not transmit covid this is the only way out of Co are are those her opinions though or is she told hey here's a script we need you to say these these bullet points I don't know what would you say for $30 million a year that's the question that's the question well I don't know when it comes to being a news anchor who did we talk to about this of like do you get to say your own opinions or do they give you points I would say it's a little Don Lemon was it Don yeah I think it was Don Lemon good old Don Lemon yeah yeah um I would say there is a reason they are paid to be in those chairs and that is the reason I could never be as bad at my job doing a news show every day as Joe Scarboro is at his show every day I could never be that I couldn't live with myself number one but I I think people would tune out those and by the way that's what's happening now why is it that that two weeks after the election suddenly Comcast is like we're going to sell MSNBC if the election had gone the other way and they re and the propaganda worked they wouldn't be selling MSNBC they're selling MSNBC because they're like oh [ __ ] we've been paying these people this crazy amount of money and the propaganda is not even working CNN is uh is they've just announced that they're going to fire a bunch of their onair talent it's like why would you fire these people just after an election oh they're not really good at whatever it is you've put them out there to do so I I'm quite enthused that that this is happening but if you really think about it you're basically asking is it is it are their intentions good do they not really like did M Rachel mat really know what she was saying was she paid to say it did she write the script I don't know what the exact answer like I don't know what's in her heart I don't know exactly what's in the mind of the producer but I do know that she works works at a giant Corporation and she put out information that was exactly the same as all the corporations wanted and that was completely different than what was happening online and that thing is the thing that's now flipped and poor Rachel will only get 25 million to do that job so when you're watching media like that how do you know what's truthful and what's not like how do you how do you really get down to the facts it seems like watch Fox and you just they're like this is right you watch MSNBC and they say this is rightline like this is right yeah it's almost impos POS but I would say if you have just like a little bit of skepticism with most things you won't fall for most of it so I I'm very very proud of my track record on on most of the issues I didn't fall for the Russia hoax I didn't fall for the very fine people hoax I didn't fall for the covid nonsense or some of the other things that I mentioned when je you remember the Jesse Smet story it was like somehow why is it that AOC and Camala within five minutes had both tweeted this proves white supremacy in America and black people are assault and everything else and the entire thing turned out to be a hoax And yet when I saw the story come across I was like I don't know something seems a little fishy about this this seems a little bizarre they found him in the Subway sandwich and there was a noose and they yelled this is Trump country I was like I don't know this just doesn't sound right I so I think just going in with a little bit of skepticism is probably your best armor against the [ __ ] it's not perfect we're all going to fall for different things and be duped you know I'm not particularly good at predicting elections um I backed to santis in the primary I thought he I thought we were ready for a wholesale change so I would say I missed that one in in the sense that one of my main fears about Trump was that he wasn't going to be able to put himself around the right people that I'm very happy I'll have a full mayaula on that I'm very happy that I turned out to be wrong and ironically the whole time I was calling for people like tul and RFK to come over to the Republican side of things but I think there's a fundamental difference being we could all be wrong about like who's going to win the election will there be a red wave versus just do you directionally get most of what's Happening right or are you just wildly wrong on most of it and if you're watching people or listening to podcasts that are wildly wrong on most of it you're probably watching the wrong shows yeah but it's tough It's it's almost an impossible question to answer and it's just going to get harder and harder how has the whole tenant media thing shifted your perspective on like how you approach uh just information or what you're told or coming to your own conclusions on things you know I did a 10-minute or 15minute interview with Megan Kelly about it and I basically said that was the last time I'm going to talk about it okay um but I but I would give you like 30 seconds of Lauren Chen who was running tenant I've known her for a decade uh I talk to Tim P about it and Benny Johnson and some of the other guys and I literally I asked for more information about who the backers are I spoke to someone on Zoom who it's now it's unclear who I spoke to but that was through Lauren and I would say you just need to be a skeptical actually the exact same answer I just gave you you should be as skeptical even when you know someone for a decade uh and you ask for information and you ask for resumes and you speak to someone that you might be told is a benefact or anything else you should just be as skeptical as possible but I will also say in no way did that affect my content at all period zero nor was I asked to which was the bizarre part of it but I would I would rather leave it at that I I looked into it a pretty good amount and I read the uh the indictment and everything yeah and it seemed and I watched a ton of media too from people on the left people on the right like uh I know David Pacman was talking about it Sam Cedar was talking about it I watched a legal eagle video on it which I thought was really good and it it truly did seem like you had no idea and and well that's the thing even the the doj sent me an email a few days later saying that you we believe you're the victim of a crime here I wasn't accused of anything actually you know the funny part about it was and I said this to Megan so it's worth repeating if you guys want to talk about it um the funny thing is I'm so used to reading dishonest things about myself if if the New York Times ever writes about me it's dishonest or if any you know all these whatever is it's always something dishonest or they misquote something or they take the word not out or something like that when I read the indictment I was like oh I'm commentator number one I figured that out very quickly and I was like this is all true I did ask who the backer is and I did ask for a resume and I did ask to speak to somebody and I did make sure they'd have no control over my content and a series of other things so it was very bizarre to suddenly be in a controversy where I was where I was like oh the thing I'm being accus I'm not I'm not even being accused of anything I'm I'm the victim in this thing and the doj is doing the right thing that was like the the craziest part for me the thing people are going to see the amount of money you're getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in this contract and they're just going to be like you can't be a victim while you're making that amount of money at the same time that I feel like I'm not saying I'm a victim they first of victim was their their word I don't regret anything that I did I did a silly show for them the funny thing is this had nothing to do with Ruben report do you even know the show that I did for them I'm guessing you don't yeah it wasn't reacting to things or something yeah it was called people of the internet and what we did in morning was my guys would literally select uh nonsensical viral videos and I wouldn't see them in advance I didn't even know what they were and then I would just watch them live and it was like oh fat girl goes into Wendy's and gets hit with hamburger and then I'd be like oh that was something like the show was so stupid and so ridiculous and yeah it it so I was confused what they got from that I guess you'd have to ask them or youd have to ask Laur and Chan I suppose no yeah it reminds me somewhat similar to like Sam bankman fre yeah I mean the only other thing I would say is it's it's a weird thing to think that you could know someone for almost a decade that exists in your space um and that they would try to dupe you and other people that you know and everything else but again they you know the funny thing is we've been talking for an hour here you guys haven't asked me anything about Russia Ukraine I think I mentioned something about Ukraine or one or two things about the general money state affairs it's just not even on my top 10 things it's been ramped up now because it feels like the war might go hot at any moment but like the biggest Dave Rubin fan in the world is not watching ing me because of my hot take on on Russia Ukraine I like I do Free Speech stuff I do Tech stuff if I'm going to do foreign policy I'm much better versed to talk about the Middle East so the whole thing was extremely bizarre I I have no idea like I have literally no idea did Lauren know I I have no idea yeah now I got a question for you what do you think is a valid criticism for yourself objectively well people used to say it's funny people used to say that I as an interviewer I was too like a softball interviewer or something like that um I well first of a valid criticism anyone could criticize me for whatever they want so my policy on interviewing which has shifted actually a little bit over the years but my general policy on interviewing um was my hero was Larry King and growing up and I became very good friends with Larry King over the years and he was a mentor and a friend and sort of like a bonus it was like half dad half grandfather for me but I remember growing up watching CNN and this guy on any given night he'd have the cast of Seinfeld on one night he'd have the pope on the next night he'd have Magic Johnson on the next night he'd have the animal guy on the next night and then he'd have earthwind and fire on the next night and I was like he treats everybody the same he ask them interesting questions you get to find out a little bit more about them and I and it's pretty great so when I started interviewing that was really my policy and I still think that's the best way to interview somebody as a general rule I find that if you well it's similar to what you guys are doing here you're asking me questions and you're letting me talk and it's like if I don't know what I'm saying at some point you kind of see the person wrap the Noose around their neck uh that's why one or two things that you've asked me very specifically about the economy like I don't have a problem saying I'm not an expert I admired that and I want to take a second here to say that that that was really cool of you to say not just to continually Pat you on the back but I'm just saying it was good that you actually said I don't think this is my area of expertise probably shouldn't listen to me in terms of this well thanks I mean I don't I don't mind doing that because I'm not I'm not the sum of all things you I'm an interviewer I tell people what I think you know on on your program yesterday too you made a correction wasen because I'm saying like lit like never see anybody from like Legacy mainstream or even like the daily shows like daily podcasts the things I listen to like people rarely ever say like hey I made a mistake I said something that was inaccurate and here's me correcting this I said it yesterday I found out very quickly that it was wrong and here I am like correcting it on my main thing on your main that's actually probably the nicest thing you could say to me because I I because I it's not a big deal to me it isn't and it's weird so Phoenix my producer who's here he knows like when I if I get something wrong it doesn't happen that often but you might get a number wrong or I'll slightly misremember what was like the Elon thing I don't know was I there in September of 21 or was it a few months after like some little thing when I get the proper information I think it's nice to fill in those blanks and also I don't think you have to be an e everyone wants everyone to be an expert in everything so I would much rather like if I was sitting down for if a 5 hour someone was going to interview me for five hours and we were just like listing out the things that I'd love to talk about like it the Free Speech stuff the media stuff that that's what I love talking about and I've been right in the center of it and I think it's my core competency and that I've been able to communicate that really well and my life has been deeply connected to it and I started companies because of it and everything else so like that would be my like favorite place to be like the economic stuff that we did here I like doing it from like a more like light sort of philosophic presence like I'm not an expert in the economy but I I know the precepts of liberalism or Classical liberalism or libertarianism and I have the general notion of how I want the government to work so that so we can do it in that sense but when we when you ask me something very specific there I was like it's fine to like all right I don't know everything that that's just fine it's part of the problem that everyone now wants to know everything about everything and it's like it's like when anything happens it's like man these people who can't tie their shoe want to tell you exact what is going to happen if we reverse the Iran nuclear deal and it's like no no you said the a valid CR criticism of yourself would be that you did softball interviews that you maybe didn't interview as hard as you should have in certain things what do you think is well I'm saying that's what people said about me you from a personal internal perspective what do you think is a valid criticism of yourself you know it's interesting I don't have I don't have many regrets because I think if you if you line things up properly in your life and then things start working which they largely are working for me right now I'm in a I'm in a good relationship I have two kids that are thriving I have businesses that are thriving I'm surrounded by people that are thriving my two best friends on this Earth are my two best friends from childhood I think that that says a lot about me um but I would say one thing for sure is I was closeted way too long in my life uh about my sexuality and that that it's very hard to live one life as a human being like one honest authentic life it's really hard to live two or three or four or five and I think that that did damage to me and delayed me in certain senses and whatever and I've largely gotten over that but you know even the things that you get over in life you have the ghosts of that kind of sit with you um so I sort of wish I would have dealt with that a little bit what was it like to come out did you find that people were not accepting no no it was way harder to come out not as a lefty it was way harder to be like I'm not a progressive than it was to come out as gay I suppose but also I'm I'm from a different generation like it wasn't nobody really cared back then I mean that's sort of why I see this ' 80s 90s Revival coming nobody really cares who you sleep with or like what you're doing so anyway to really answer your question like coming out it's not really fun for anybody but I would say it's you know some people um as Homer Simpson said Marge I like my beer cold and my homosexual is Flaming and I'm not that flaming so like a lot of people just had no idea I play basketball I like video games like I like normal guy things whatever that is so people were more like shocked by that um but by the way there's plenty of people like me you know what I mean and there's probably more people like me than the other way but if you're if you're over the I actually when I was first coming out I kind of liked people that were more over the-top gay in general because I was like oh you just are who you are and there's no there's no weirdness where I was like there must be something wrong with me because I act this way so you know but you live and learn I suppose yeah was there any negative consequence of coming out no like anything bad that happened to you that was unexpected no I mean you have your struggles everyone has C relationship you're going to have some my dad wasn't thrilled first but has completely come around and loves my kids and me and everything else um other family members sort of shock something like that but again it's very hard to live one life one like good authentic Life as a human being try to live two try to live two try to live two for one week and see how that goes like have a completely alternate life what's that like like explain it's unbelievably stressful and and it's it's it's actually you know it's funny it's not funny actually it's sort of depressing but like I have trouble remembering a good portion of my early 20s because of that because I was living two lives so like I'd be with my you know I was doing standup and I'd have my Straight friends that I was playing basketball with and then I'd have like a couple gay friends that I was going to bars with that night but they but those two worlds never met and it's very weird you end up lying all the time even if you're not directly lying like I wasn't I wasn't really directly lying to anyone but it was like well it was constant lying of omission people would be like where were you and I oh well I was uh I was downtown well okay then they would kind of leave it there they know what I was doing or just any you just end up lying all the time and uh you know obviously Jordan Peterson is is very important to me personally and professionally and you know one of his main things is you shouldn't be lying because it's the worst of you're going to end up with the worst of all conclusions one way or another and I think the more that all of us Escape that the more we can get out of this this mess that we're in this might be too much but I'm just I'm just curious It's not often we made it this far let's see what happens did you ever have like a girlfriend mhm I've probably banged more girls than the two of you combined probably I mean probably definitely how did you do that wait so when you're a certain age like like it just works like it just works it just works it just works interesting that you were you were with girls and did you was there ever a time where you thought you like it there there were a lot of um also guys I'm straight I know these questions kind of make make it sound like I'm like the line now we're St I'm just I'm just curious because it's a little thou do protest too much now you it's interesting because I was talking to gr before this uh cuz obviously you know the the topic came up but I was like it's so rare that you get to talk to somebody who has a complete different experience of life and I'm not saying that like just because you're gay it means that you're completely different than me but like generally speak I wake up in the morning I have coffee generally speaking I'm guessing that the thoughts in your mind are different than the thoughts in my mind like a pretty predominant thought for a good amount of of your life so it's like you have a different experience different lens that you're experiencing life through so it's interesting to ask these questions to I have actually no problem with this again it's not like I see it's always funny because I'll have people that literally will be watching me for two years and then I'll see a comment like Dave I didn't know you were gay and then you just offhandedly mentioned something about your husband or something and I I kind of like that because I'm like well I'm doing a news show for the most part so I don't need to bludge in people with my sexuality like any more than Wolf Blitzer would bludge in anyone with his sexuality and nobody wants to think about that so it's like no but that's the not that I know of but but but yeah now really was wolf who knows you know I wouldn't judge him either way but you get the point um nobody was to think about Wolf Blitzer now everyone's pitching Wolf Blitzer naked oh God okay yeah yeah okay but I would say it's just it's just like a this is what the the the twist the most Twisted part that they've done in the last decade or so with identity politics has made you think that these things that are mutable about you whether it's your skin color or it's your genitals or your sexual attraction or whatever it might be that these are the most important things about you and they're just not they're just not but if you make people focus on those things all the time they will become much bigger than they actually are and that's why there's very few people on Earth that have ever come out of the closet and been like boy I regret that because if you are if you live your authentic self then it's probably better than all of the other versions of yourself that you could have lived right um and so that to me is you you in some sense you have no choice you have you have no you guys probably know somebody that's closeted you probably do you may not know you do or you don't but we've all been around people that you're like ah maybe you know she really does love rugby that girl and she hasn't had a boyfriend in 30 years and or the guy who's like constantly going to musical theater I don't know whatever it might be and it's like they're not until they like if your friends don't know who you are actually who you are rather than who pretending to be or your family doesn't like you're not going to get to whatever the end of the road that you're supposed to do here is you just won't and I don't know that I'm going to get to the end of the road or any of us whatever the purpose of life is basically I think it's largely it would be some youngian version of like or if you watched Groundhog Day it's like I think we're here to solve as much of our [ __ ] to the best extent that we can do it and then maybe something else happens good after it otherwise you're probably just doing it again if you haven't seen a movie Defending Your Life with oh great movie Albert Brooks probably his best movie around 1986 Merill Street he ends up in purgatory on trial over his life great movie what's it called uh Defending Your Life you mentioned Jordan Peterson we had him on the show recently he's just so impressive love Jordan Peterson one of the he has positively affected my life just so much through his lectures through the podcast everything so love Jordan you dealt with the sexuality it's great not true not true at all guys not true you'll see sorry Grandma see me with a wife in like 5 10 years we'll see about that um 5 10 years how old are you 26 26 let's wrap this thing up in the next two years come on well how long should you date before you two three years let's have you should be having kids by 30 one actually one of my only regrets in life he doesn't have kids how are you married yeah and how long you been married uh a few months and how old's your wife 26 all right so you're ballparking it it's probably going to happen in the next two years that would be mybe three three to three to five I've said even even that's a long that's a long delay than what our grandparents did where they were all basically having kids at 21 22 sometimes even younger I'm not saying that that was perfect but I do regret that we didn't have kids till I was 46 and it's like I play basketball with these guys now is a great group of guys mostly ages between about 35 and some into their mid-60s and the guys that are in their 50s and 60s over the summer they were bringing their kids who are now in college and they were playing with us and I was like how cool did these these dads get to play it's 55y old guy gets to play with his 21y old son I didn't have kids till 46 if I want to be playing with my son when he's 16 17 I really need to still be in as good shape as possible when I'm in my mid-60s which then started getting me in better shape even so there's other's a good thing gives you it gives you reasons to work hard so to but it would be a lot easier had I done it way back removing sexuality for a second and complexities around that and everything else I'm just saying as a general rule seeing those guys like like oh you had kids like my my best friend my buddy John I met him we were four years old I met him the first day of kindergarten literally remember meeting him now it's 45 years later basically he has a 23-year-old son so think how funny that is I grew up my whole life with this guy yeah he has a 23-year-old I got a two I have two all that work in the beginning you were able to maybe put into your career yes and reap all the benefits of that early on so that maybe you could chill a little bit more later in life way I kind of see it absolutely absolutely I there is it is very possible if not probable that had I not focused on my career the way I did um and maybe it was for some of the wrong reasons like doing standup at night made it very easy to have an excuse as to why I was not dating I now realize that I didn't realize it at the time but basically everybody would be like oh you're not dating guy well you're in you're in the clubs every night you know I was doing standup literally six or seven nights a week for 10 years something like that so again it was sort of like a lie of omission but maybe all of the energy and everything that I put towards that it clearly led to some skill set that led me to be able to be a talk show host and everything else that I do so so it's it's a regret but I would say yeah there's probably a little asteris there because it did lead to obviously other things that were good yeah so on on Jordan um I know one of the things that he like really popularized him was a bill c16 which is like basically mandating that well they tried to mandate use of preferred pronouns with like actual I don't know if it was criminal or some sort of like uh Penal if you didn't obey that law I'm curious because he's a proponent of free speech you're a proponent of free speech what do you think the media's role in terms of like should they have com like some sort of obligation to tell you the truth are they is there some sort of law that they should then then be obeying or would that then go against Free Speech if they just want to say whatever they want to say because they have a lot of power they can influence elections they can do so much should there ever be laws that that Force the media hold their feet to the fire a little bit or do you think that's an infringement of free speech yeah the one-word answer is no I mean there's no law that you could put in place that will force them to tell the truth and you can always Whittle I mean this is what lawyers do at trials like getting people to whittle away and say things in certain ways so you're never really saying the truth or anything else like we don't need more laws right right now actually what we need is exactly what happened the media lied about so much we've already Illustrated it several times here that what happened an entire New Media ecosystem developed Jordan Peterson who I believe to the to the extent that someone might actually be a prophet on Earth I believe he could be like if you view the world if there are prophets if there are angels if there are people that that have some gift that is beyond us I think Jordan has done more good for this world than certainly anyone that I've ever known or been in contact with or anything else um why Jordan Rose because he went against a government that was trying to infringe on free speech so I don't know that there could have there there we have from an americ amican perspective of course because we have the First Amendment we have all the laws we need around speech I do not want any more laws you know basically you can't violently threaten somebody you can't yell fire in a crowded theater with the intent to do harm and then we have incredibly tight liable and slander laws that's it that basically is it and I'm completely fine with that um again it's a it's a better mous trp argument the argument would be let them lie and as long as we have a free internet to whatever extent that it's free then the better ideas will Bubble Up and you're get your Jordan Petersons and you guys are going to be able to do whatever you want and I'm going to be able to do whatever I want and then the trips will far away they may you speak very positively of Jordan and you actually did like I think you've done like over 200 tours not tours but like stops on different tours with Jordan like opening for him or like talking on stage with him etc etc in fact I think you might have been the first person to interview him after the bill c16 video too which is just crazy that was like it eight years ago this week it was November 18th uh 2016 so you're very familiar with him what would you say are some of the most impactful things that you've learned from him and what is something about him that may surprise people the best thing that I can say about Jordan um is that he is the exact same person off camera that he is on camera the exact same person there is literally no daylight um I just I was in uh Scottdale uh doing his 500th podcast a couple days ago and I'm literally it's the end of the night and I'm I'm in the hot tub with Jordan his wife Dr Oz and his wife nothing weird happened but that Jordan Peterson in the hot tub at the end of a long day of work and interviews and writing and doing podcasts is the same exact guy talking about the same exact things that he's talking about on air um he is the most decent human being I've ever met you know try to imagine the level of Fame that he's attained but it's not just normal Fame it's one thing if you're a musician and you're famous or you're an athlete and you're famous you know somebody comes up to you and they're like oh man Michael Jordan I love that move in the 992 finals and like it's you I play basketball better because you all all that stuff whatever I love your music whatever Jordan literally has taken hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and made them stand up straight with their shoulders back right he's gotten people to clean their room first before they started cleaning the world and I think some of the ordering that we're seeing in the world right now is because of Jordan Peterson directly and sort of where we started was if I've had a little something to do with elevating Jordan then man I did enough here on this planet I really believe that um you know the amount of people that he got off drugs the amount of people who mended relationships with their parents or brothers or sisters people that got better J like I could tell you so many stories of crazy things that happened like when we were in Sweden and the plane was about to take off and they were literally moving the Jet Bridge the bridge from the plane and a guy in a orange vest because he was one of the luggage guys from downstairs saw Jordan and he ran onto the plane as the thing was moving to tell Jordan in the craziest way my God you've changed my life I got this job because of you I I was on drugs on the plane and they were like Sor you're going to have to get off the plane the guy probably got fired after that who knows what happened but like like that's just one of a million things that I saw to be on stage with this guy I always thought it was incredible because I had the best seat in the house every night because you know we'd be in front of five or eight or 10, people but I would be right behind him on stage so I could see everybody I could see him doing his walk back and forth you know he's kind of like a panther just going back and forth like this and I could see everybody and almost without exclusion for however many hundreds of thousands of people we performed for you'd never see anyone break eye contact stare at him the entire time but you'd see people crying you'd see people crying you'd see people in with the most open look that they could possibly ever have because they were having realizations about their lives um it it was absolutely incredible so so the best thing I can say about him is that he is authentically the person that that you know him to be where do you draw the line between uh free speech and hate speech well I would say exactly where the Supreme Court did which is that there's no such thing as hate speech you can say mean things about people I can open up my Twitter right now and show you some horrible things and memes and images and all sorts of evil god- awful things that people say about me you can block them ignore them not pay attention to it if you're walking down the street and someone tells you hey you're [ __ ] [ __ ] blah blah blah you can just keep walking um if they if they are trying to incite a violent mob against you well we have laws against that that doesn't fall within the first amendment uh and then as I said before we have extremely uh stringent laws as it pertains to liable and slander you know the fire and a crowded theater you actually can yell fire in a crowded theater you just can't do it with the intent to do harm so I don't we so there is no such thing as hate speech there are mean people who say mean things and it is up to you as an adult to figure out how to take mean things and either not let them enter you or if they do enter you how to uh extricate yourself from them as quickly as possible and what are your thoughts on platforming certain people and where do you draw the line on that I know with us um you know we have quite a few people who want to come on and we always have to balance like giving them a platform versus just being genuinely curious and wanting to hear a different perspective it's it's extremely tricky I would say um until it's not tricky anymore and for me I was especially when I started the show and remember it's a very different internet than it is now it was very wild west there weren't lot of interview shows I was really me me and Rogan were the first sort of two long form interview shows when I started doing the long form interview obviously I didn't invent the long form interview but it was but they weren't doing it online really and they certainly weren't doing it in you know I built sets that looked like television sets so I was doing something that that appeared very professional the way people had always seen before so if I gave anyone a platform immediately a certain portion of the internet was like holy [ __ ] this doesn't look like it's in someone's basement or it doesn't even look like it's in Rogan's thing where he's smoking weed with them with a curtain in the background it looks like it should be on television so I think I was held to a higher standard as it came to that my general philosophy was something close to what we discussed before which was I'll bring on I will try to bring on as wide a variance of people as possible and I'll talk to them and then my audience can decide that was my general philosophy what interestingly happened as as I did that was more and more people on the right were willing to talk to me and the more I talk to people on the right the less people on the left were willing to talk to me and that I think probably I'm going to guess that you guys probably have some version of that now happening to you too I see this happening across the board now and this is unfortunately it's become a cancer of the left that they've abandoned all of their really what I would say are their true liberal principles in the name for this sort of hegemonic very controlling attitude and it's a shame because you're constantly finding enemies everywhere you know the day after the election there were all these articles written about how the left has to find its new Joe Rogan and it's like dude you guys had Joe Rogan Joe Rogan the mushroom eating pot smoking iasa doing MMA guy like he is not supposed to be a conservative voting for a republican but you guys purged even him which is something that we sort of hit on before so I as a general rule I think you should be as open to talking to whoever you want but you but you also have to make decisions in your life and you have to decide what kind of show you want to do and and if you platform somebody are you going to do the appropriate push back where you think it should be done and who do you want to be associated with I would say it's it's just you guys have to make a decision for yourselves and everyone's decision would be different as for the platform answer on that as long as you're not breaking the laws of the United States I don't have a problem with anyone being on a platform and if you do break the laws of the United States then you have a bigger problem than the platform um when we created locals which was to deal with a lot of this stuff because people were getting kicked off these platforms left and right the policy that we put in which I really think is is still the best policy is that we we did a subscription platform so we and I knew that if you literally charge people a quarter literally 25 cents a month it would eliminate 99% of the bad behavior because most of these people are on Burner accounts it's Anonymous a quarter puts some skin in the game even though it's no nothing in essence and that would eliminate 99% of it however if someone wants to join my locals Community they can pay me that we do $5 a month they can pay me the $5 a month and if they want to get in there and just yell at me all day it's up to me so I can either decide to take their money and say whatever they want or I can kick them out of my community but they're not off the platform so then they would be out of the Ruben report Community but they could be on Scott Adams locals Community they could be on bridg fedy or Michael mice Etc so it's not a platform thing we basically treated it like I treat my home you can say whatever you want about me outside of my house but I'm not going to invite you into my home to say awful things about me so I I was just trying to create some version of the game that was a little more uh elegant let's say and I think I think we accomplish that what you mentioned about certain people not wanting to come on the show that has been our experience we have fortunately had some people that were on the left that were willing to come on our show such as Hassan we've had Destiny David Pacman Don Lemon claims he's independent he came on our show so there have been people that have been willing and we arean and a casparian like we are so so so appreciative of those people that we willing to come on the show um but we do kind of run into that same issue where a lot of people they see that we talked to some other people on the right uh or people that they disagree with and I think that they're unwilling to come on the show well I think one of the problems there is also that the ideas of the left have really run thin and they used the false cries of racism and bigotry and misogyny and all of those things dist even some of those people that you mentioned they've said hor unbelievably horrible things about me and you cannot find me saying unbelievably horrible things about them um because I'm just not I'm not that interested in that game but if you're the main crudel that you have over people is that is I'm going to call everyone a racist and everyone a bigot then I'll never debate their ideas and then what happens is then they don't want to do a two and a half hour podcast with somebody because they don't want to have to sit there and defend their ideas because they're used to winning arguments just because they've said the worst possible things about people so it would be much harder as a general rule to get someone who's not that seasoned in talk why didn't Cala do Rogan it was because they knew it's not because Rogan is a hardcore interviewer right Rogan would be criticized actually that's a criticism he gets the same thing as me that he's a softball interviewer he just talks to people well okay so why wouldn't she do that there were two reasons she didn't do it she didn't do it number one because she knew that the Lefty base was going to go bananas that she's talking to right-wing Maniac Joe Rogan we've already Illustrated why that's complete nonsense and then the other reason is it would be far scarier for her to do a three-hour open-ended interview without any preparation rather than even as bad as she was in the 60 Minutes interview or the really you know highly produced ones even if her answers are terrible it's all like you know 45 seconds of an answer right so even if she does all up her double speak and circular logic and all that nonsense it's like somewhat tight you put her three hours with Rogan her head would have exploded because there aren't many people on the left that can explain their stuff other than Trump is evil but with all that said we do want to be very appreciative towards those people that are on the left that are willing to come on the shows and actually have the discuss I think it's I think it's super super super important and it's unfortunate cuz we just want to talk to people and hear them out but it's like we've consistently run up against that issue but shout out to the people that are on the left that have came on the show we really appreciate you guys um lastly you mentioned the subscription platform that you have I'm curious because we actually started out as a finance podcast if I'm sure you wouldn't want to disclose numbers but in terms of percentages what is the revenue like in terms of where is it where's it all coming from for your for your media business you mean for my media business or for locals cuz I don't own locals anymore we merged with with Rumble and then Rumble and public and so I don't own that anymore um so you mean for my own personal yeah wherever wherever your revenue is coming from like like subscriptions you have sponsors now like I can ballpark you the answer on that subscription is probably about 20% something like that probably about 20% 20% and then sponsors is like sponsors YouTube pre-rolls um how else do we make money we well so Rumble sells our ads those are the ads that go everywhere so they're on Spotify they're on YouTube etc etc uh pre-roll subscription obviously we have merch um we must have some other we must have some other stuff but that that's the bulk of it yeah yeah we wanted to get into subscriptions maybe we were always considering it we think we should I sent you a text you didn't get back to me on that we tried to okay we tried to I still know the people at locals and my brother-in-law was my co-creator and it's a fantastic product and it's your community you do whatever you want you set the rules our live video on there is as good as Instagram in terms of interactions and everything else we live stream my show on there every day you'll set your rules as you see fit you decide how much you want to charge and and and all of the other principles that I think we've talked about here related to free speech and everything else you we we just built you a house what you do in that house is completely up to you is there anything else you want to mention while we uh we have a couple minutes here at the end um well I'm looking forward to being in Vegas for a day I you know I've only been I've only been to Vegas one other time it was in 2016 for the Democrat debate that they did here uh it was Bernie versus uh Hillary at the time and I was at AA TV which was Larry King's network and they had no budget and they basically were like we'll get you the Press passes but we're not going to pay a dime so I had to pay to bring my team here and I didn't have any I was maybe making 60 Grand a year at the time something like that so I didn't have any money we drove from La we brought our own stuff it was very janky and whatever we stayed at Circus Circus there you go have you been over there at Circus Circus pretty sure I still have a disease that night it was uh so uh and I'm not much of a gambler but I do really like casinos in general in Florida we have the the Hard Rock in Hollywood Hollywood Florida and even though I don't gamble I like going to concerts there and I just like the atmosphere I like sort of like the old simulation I don't really have vices in that sense anymore I like tequila I'm coming out with a tequila next month that's my next that's my next business project um but I just like I like the stimulation of it so I'm actually really I was very happy when when guys told me we were doing this uh cuz I wanted to chat with you guys and uh Phoenix has been a big fan of both yours for years and uh and then I was like oh and we get to go to we get to go to Phoenix we get I was in Phoenix last week we get to go to uh to Vegas and and be around some of that stuff which I hadn't so no I've really thoroughly enjoyed this and and I appreciate the kind words there and you guys have built something really nice you got a be this is your house you got a beautiful house here thank you I appreciate it and I just like I like just seeing other people that are doing something good like it's not that complex you know there's so many people in our space or whatever this is that are constantly trying to destroy each other and whatever and it's like I see no competition with anyone to me if I'm doing something good if you build it they will come if you're doing something good you will build it and they will come and everyone will come that was a weird way to end yeah no that's what she said all all right there we go yeah thank you guys for watching next thank you Dave thank you Phoenix till next time