Why You Have to Speak Your Truth, No Matter How Unpopular It Is | Dave Rubin on Conversations w/ Tom

[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with Tom I'm here with Dave Rubin what is that my man welcome to the show Tom it's good to be with you I'm just hunkered down in the fort over here just trying to avoid the coronavirus zombies and whatever other apocalyptic things are happening outside who knows at the moment it's raining here in LA we already yeah very apocalyptic for sure this is a super weird time man how do you think about what's going on given that you have a book tour which we can see over your shoulder don't burn this book launching a book right now I have a lot of friends who are doing it it seems like a rough way to have to launch the book how are you thinking about that why didn't you push it off what's the thinking yeah well I should say had a book tour and we will have one in the future but the current book tour which of course was supposed to launch on April 28 the day that the book comes out in New York City that has been indefinitely postponed and you know we'll see over the next couple months as things slowly get back to normal when we can start doing that and you know at this point after being trapped in the house for so long although this is my home my studio is in my home and I work from home and my my crew comes to my home to work and all that you know everyone's getting a little stir-crazy and my hope is when we get on the other side of this thing that we're gonna have like a little feeling of the roaring 20s where people are gonna want to be out and about again and will want to go to public events and comedy shows and speaking tours and restaurants and all that stuff and you know it'll be good for the economy but I think more than anything else it'll be good for the the human spirit I did have a call a couple weeks ago with all the top brass at penguin Random House and they said you know do you want to delay the delay the book and we just don't know if what's gonna happen we're shipping and we don't know if people will be at the stores and all of those things and you know my feeling is this is the first book I've ever written I I finished the book last July so July of 2019 and then you know you add it for a couple months but really I stopped touching the book probably right around Thanksgiving of 2019 you know we're in April now so I've been sitting on this thing for a long time the ideas that I talk about in the book I think are mostly timeless ideas but you know like anyone that that does anything when you do something you create something it's a piece of art it's a book it's a comedy skit whatever it might be you build something you don't want to sit on it forever you want to do it and kind of get it out there so that you can move on to do other things and I'm very proud of the book but I basically said to them we got to get it out let's get it out I think it's I think actually I didn't anticipate Corona nobody anticipated Corona but I think the ideas that I talk about in the book are very related to what we're seeing right now with you know government stimulus packages and federal shutdowns and borders and a series of the other things that I talk about so my feeling is you just move forward you keep moving forward I do know that a lot of books were delayed and canceled and yeah maybe it's gonna hit us and hurt us a little bit in the bookstores if they're still closed in certain states and things like that but fortunately there is online we've got an e-book we got a you know the voice-over version and and we'll see what happens but I just think you gotta move you can't just wait till everything's perfect because perfect never comes yeah that is that is a very fair statement I don't know so I've I technically have a book deal I have continued to refuse the advance because I the amount of time that it takes to sit down and write the book the amount of time that it takes to go out and promote the book I'm super conflicted and that is the right word I'm conflicted about it I want to do it and I don't want to do it it's kind of how I feel about kids so my wife and I don't have kids and what I've always said is that I actually really want kids like I really want kids and I used to Big Brother for this kids like eight half years I know what it's like the good and the bad and the only thing that I want more than I want to have kids is to not have kids and that's that's where I'm at with the book it's like I put out so much video content that is exactly what I would write in the book and so it's like man I'm already putting so much time and energy into those ideas those thoughts trying to get them out of the world in a way that I can constantly adjust them and revamp them and the thought of sitting down for you know God on the short side six months I mean if I'm just absolutely murdering it or a year which is probably more likely given how slowly I write to you know concretize the ideas and get them in a way that I can put out so it's like the only thing I want more than to actually put those ideas out of the world in that way is this they'll have the time to do something else come I hear yeah I mean I definitely hear yeah right like we exist very much in the same space I'm putting out a ton of stuff and it's not just the videos but whatever I'm doing on social media and touring and you know speaking of colleges and all that stuff and when this thing was presented to me and it was presented to me I didn't I didn't ask for it one day we started getting a bunch of calls and you know some of the the publishing houses you know wanted to make this happen my feeling again because I do believe in this you just keep moving forward was oh there's a great opportunity here and I'll just figure out how to make it work and somehow even though right now in the last few years of my life I've been busier than I've ever been I just you kind of just figure out a way it's a little bit of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park like life finds a way you know and you find a way to do it and I basically for the so for me it was about a six months six month process of writing but basically what I would do is I'd wake up I'd let my dog out to pee I'd make some coffee and I'd go into the green room which is because my studio is in my house one of the bedrooms is the green room where the guests come in and can chill out before the show and get makeup and all that and that became my office and I basically closed the door at about 8 a.m. and often right until about 2:00 or so without eating nothing I would just go go go go go and every now and again my husband would open the door and just like slide in a plate of food as if I was in like maximum security because he'd realized that you got to eat and then I would be like wow you know I am hungry and I didn't even realize it but it's funny that you talk about it framed within having kids because when I when I handed in the manuscript in July it felt like what I can only presume a little bit of what giving birth is like like you you've worked on this thing for months you know you if you're if you're the woman you know pregnant you've eaten right like I gave this thing every then you give it you sort of put it there and then the weird thing is for a book that the next thing that you do with it is you start dissecting it so it's an odd thing because it's like you birth this thing and then the first thing you have to do is operate on the birth which is a really weird process and and you know obviously the editing part and all that is extremely it's it's very technical and you move things around and then you have to you know battle out some of the ideas but I can tell you this and I suspect it would be the same for you if you can figure out how to carve out that time the rewards that I now feel for this thing like I feel like it's more it's more timeless than say just doing interviews or video content on a daily basis it's a way of crystallizing your ideas and and challenging you know like little things that I thought maybe were maybe left unsaid or I hadn't fully come around on one idea or why do I really think this about taxes why do I really think that this should be the cutoff point on abortion and how does that compare to a pure pro-life position or a pure pro-choice position all of those things if you like what you're doing it's fun working through those things so I really did enjoy the process actually even though it's work it's it's definitely work and it's exhausting and and you will hit writer's block and all of that stuff the process I think if you can get through it and you have something to say it's definitely worth it yeah when it comes to writing the book for me it is it's really a trade off so if I'm gonna be spending that time on that there's something else that I'm not spending my time so I've become known so ironically when I started all of this I thought I would be the business guy and I thought that's where everybody was going to you know be interested in what I had to say and as I was trying to explain to people how to build a business I kept coming back to dude first you have to get your head right like if you're not thinking in the right way you're gonna miss all these opportunities that there's like this foundational layer of stuff and so I started going into that just as like okay once you have that in place now I can talk to you about business principles but the thing I struggle with my employees the most the thing that I went through myself was all this mindset layer stuff how to think problem solving mode focusing on the problems instead of the solutions the ability to generate momentum to not be emotionally devastated by criticism like all these things that [ __ ] people up like I've always told people boredom kills more entrepreneurs than anything like all the sudden financial difficulties all that the thing that eats entrepreneurs alive is your friends are out partying and you're at home working on like some really boring [ __ ] like I remember dude I don't get mad very easily when we were so I had left quest we were launching impact theory and getting an EIN number a tax ID I was about to [ __ ] punch through a wall I was like this is the most deeply inefficient system I have ever encountered in my life and it is so enraging when you're small and you're trying to like get something going you're trying to get momentum going and you've got to [ __ ] pay your employees but you can't pay your employees until you have a tax ID dude I was literally I wanted to tear my hair out as somebody with a couple of businesses now so I've had to get a couple ein zand then you know you have to wait for the ein to get the bank account open and then sometimes the thing gets lost in the mail we had that happen once and then you gotta wait on the phone with the IRS which I don't have to get into that I mean all of those things and the funny thing is of course they're there side issues for anyone that's really trying to accomplish something those are the things that you have to do to build the business behind what it is you really want to do I actually think one of the things that I'm most proud of is that all of the issues that I talk about on the show related to freedom related to Liberty related to getting rid of regulation and owning your life and individual rights and all of these things and low taxes so that people can flourish those are the exact things that I've imported into my business here so you know we're in a really really difficult challenging economic time and at every other level beyond economic but my business I have three businesses now but my business meaning the Rubin report and the production company behind it we're absolutely thriving right now which is which is great and it's but it's not a coincidence it's because I've always made sure to a take good care of my employees so that right now and everybody is working from home I know they're really working and that they have a vested interest in seeing us succeed and if they've needed us to buy them equipment my director works remotely now we make sure we get everybody stuff we don't cheap out on things we pay a hundred percent of all of their and their dependents health insurance the way we've run everything here that our company has no debt we just hired somebody I mean in the midst of coronavirus I just added a new associate producer all of those things that I'm very proud of they're not coincidences they're from doing exactly what you said there you got to get your head on straight first know know what you think and why you think it and then that's a sort of beautiful thing because I didn't ever think of myself as a as a businessman in any way the fact that I now run this company that that funds and produces this this was the goal but I actually like all that other stuff now because then it's like oh these things aren't just ideas talking about low taxes and why that will help you thrive it's not just an idea it's actually when you put it into practice and I go wait if my taxes are lower I can actually hire more people thus helping the economy and I can pay for more their insurance or whatever it is it's a pretty beautiful thing and it's funny because I I will often see that people let's say my my ideological opponents so like the the real progressive types they're always screaming about unions for example and often you find as is with my my former employer that's a big YouTube channel they scream about unions for everybody else all day and then it comes out in the news a couple weeks ago that their own employees are trying to unionize and they're fighting them tooth and nail again and it's like yes and but that's so consistent I think with what comes out of a certain version of the political machine these days and what I wanted to do was say something that was true and then as a byproduct of that I was able to create something good which is a pretty beautiful thing so it's it's super interesting I've always avoided politics I think partly because I don't find it very interesting partly because the culture wars has become literally crazy so as what all refer to as a culture war ISM you being what I would consider in the [ __ ] middle of all of that maybe will describe the definition but yeah that was all happened what so far I was it was kicking off I was building business so I just had my head down so for basically two decades I just had my head down I was working that was it I'm trying to go businesses I was so bad in the beginning at being an entrepreneur that it was just like constant panic mode for years and years and years I didn't even have time to sort of look up and you know think about what I think at at a higher level then as you're building businesses and it's real and your house is on the line and you start looking at especially living in California of the insane tax rates it starts to to be a little bit more you start having sort of background opinions this is not an area I feel like I'm I'm well thought out it was very interesting to read your book and to see all of your ideas laid bare walking people through exactly what you think one I'd love to know like have you always been drawn to this and how do you deal with this sort of what all call glutton for punishment mode that you're in I've seen videos of people hanging you interrupting your talks you go to college estill which seems like madness what what is it that draws you to this and makes it worth sort of all the difficulty yeah so I'll do the first part first which is have I always been interested in this you know it's funny I didn't really realize that until I was writing this book because I was a political science major in college and and I remember in eighth or ninth grade it was the 19 1988 presidential election was Michael Dukakis versus George HW Bush it seems like many lifetimes ago and we did a mock election in my class and I had to I was like the campaign manager for Dukakis and Dukakis was the liberal and the Democrat and he was the good guy and Bush was there evil Republican and they care about war and money and he was the bad guy that's I think where the the real political thing started but under that I would say and I write about this in the book my Emily was always it's not that anyone in my family was in politics but we just always kinda talked about everything so at holidays we'd have big tables with aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandkids and nieces and nephews and the whole thing like everybody else and friends and we would be arguing about everything I mean arguing about foreign policy arguing about abortion arguing about taxes the immigration everything that now we all talk about and really somehow in my family dessert would be served and everyone would just kind of forget it like it was just like nobody held a grudge over politics we had we had family grudges you know that that often could last a generation or two in terms of interpersonal relationships that kind of stuff but I never saw anyone storm out of a meal because of a political disagreement or even even really yelling at each other you know it would get heated sometimes but I never saw that and I think that that ability to to do that dance to be able to talk to people and understand that people think differently and then you still break bread with them they're still your family I think that just got embedded into my DNA somehow so I think that that's part of it and then as far as like being you know in the eye of the storm or a glutton for punishment with all this I mean look if you're gonna do anything good in this world it is gonna come with a certain cost you know if you if you are going to try to say something true try to say something that you believe it is going to come with people yelling at you people trying to silence you D platform you potentially physically try to stop you they'll try to go for your job I mean there's there's a million examples of this over the course of time you know scientists you know hundreds of years ago talking about new scientific theories and having religious authorities go after them anyone anyone anywhere that tries to innovate and do something good you're gonna have people push against you you know what Tesla was trying to do and basically destroyed by Edison I mean there's there's so many examples of this kind of thing so all of that stuff you know when you see these videos there's the one that really went viral where I was at the University of New Hampshire and I'm basically tell a bunch of kids that you know you should live free and let's appreciate America let's agree to disagree I mean that was the message and they're screaming at me and they bring noisemakers and you know they chant and they they would pick times because they would set it up in their phones so that every few minutes a bell would go off so different kids knew when to stand up and interrupt in chant and I would literally there's a moment people can find it on YouTube where I would go I was literally I don't know maybe eight feet away from these two people and their moms lessly chanting and I'm standing in front of them but they refuse to look at me they won't look at you in the eye I kept saying guys I'm right in front of you if you have a question for me or a comment or a thought you know feel free to tell me I'm right here and they wouldn't even look at me because they don't even want to think that they're that their opponent is human so all of those things they're not really fun in the midst of it you know like it's not I don't think I'm combative by Nature I mean you know you see the way I do interviews I'm not here to really fight with people I am interested in in talking to people but some of that just comes with the territory and actually I wouldn't have thought this maybe three years ago but I now think this that if it wasn't for a lot of those slings and arrows I don't know that I could be where I am right now because now when the hit pieces come or the New York Times says something stupid about me or box or HuffPo or the butt or BuzzFeed or any of these things it's like now first off I have an army of people who defend me before I even have to defend myself but I also know that these people haven't taken me out they haven't taken me out and if anything they've helped me strengthen my resolve and I think you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and I think a lot of people need to hear that and that's why so much of the book is about you know get your [ __ ] together basically so that you can face the mob one day because otherwise whatever it is that you believe that isn't mainstream that isn't just the automatic woke opinion of the day you're never gonna say it and do you want to be the type of person in your life that doesn't say what they think most people don't I don't we get cowed into fear with that but I don't want to be that person and that's why I was really trying to write this book one thing that I found along those lines really interesting in your book and I didn't know this part of your story at all was that you didn't come out for a very long time as being gay and then it was causing you massive would you categorize it as anxiety or depression like one what would you categorize it as and then to how did you end up there if you had this family it seemed pretty open you guys talked about everything that was it that made you afraid to be open about that you know it's an inside job it really it's an inside job meaning even if even if the world is totally open to you whatever that means to you your when you're in the closet and by the way you know and I talked about this in the book the closet we only think of the closet as you can be closeted about your sexuality my point in the book is you can be closeted about many different things and I think many people right now are politically closeted people who have just very basic decent political beliefs are afraid to say what they think if you're afraid to say what you think to your family to your friends whatever it is you are closeted in a way so that's why I make that a metaphor in the book you know I think partly they're looking back there were probably a couple things you know first off gay you know it's a little hard for people now in 2020 to remember what it was like in 2000 in 1990 1980 19 whatever the stigma that was attached to being gay and nobody really wants to be the other nobody wants to you know it's like in retrospect now I see why there's so many reasons that maybe by being the other in this regard by having this other thing about me that it did help shape a certain tolerance from me it did help shape my belief in the individual it did help shape my belief that we can be different and still love each other or at least not kill each other so I don't regret it now but I think I did part of it was that there were no gay role models in a way you know there was RuPaul or there were like over the top you know every cliche gay ridiculous character that you can think of and by the way even now there aren't many gay role models you know there's a couple gay people on TV someone like Anderson Cooper who all the gay people in New York City knew he was gay but was closeted way later and I I oddly became resentful of him because I was out at a certain point and he was still closeted and it was like why am I doing the dirty work for Gloria Vanderbilt's who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars and on CNN every night but I would say I also didn't because I'm not flamboyant or something like that and I like basketball and I like videogames and I like Star Wars and things that are not thought of as gay whatever that means I think that made me kind of feel like a freak sort of because you know like it's a weird thing it's like it's funny because like when you think back on how you used to think sometimes it's like wow it's crazy that I used to think that way but I think it partly was that I was like like I knew who I wanted to like sleep with or whatever but that was different than every other part of me that anyone knew and for a long time I just had a hard time reconciling those things I thought gay meant you love Madonna and you like to do ecstasy and go to clubs and go to theater and I don't like any of those things although I did do ecstasy once at a Madonna concert and I didn't really have a great time so you know I think it's just an inside job and and at some point you know I described in the book that when I was really closeted your ability to even see what's real starts to change because if you're hiding yourself all the time you need to be real so that you can exchange reality with other people so like right now and we're all trapped in our houses I'm actually quite worried for mental health going forward because it's cool that we can do this right and hopefully people listening or watching this can hear something that we're saying and can then mirror some truth off that they could go I struggled with something similar or that has no meaning to me or this guy's nuts or whatever but the more that we just are all distancing ourselves that's why I don't like the phrase social distancing because yes we have to physically distance ourselves six feet right now but the idea of social distancing we're social creatures and there's a reason for that we need it so that we can keep going and keep learning and growing and all of those things so at the end of the day whatever it was whatever it was that kept me there for a long time it's funny I don't have any regrets per se because I think whatever whatever I went through got me to where I am now which is good but I I guess my one it's not quite a regret but I wish I had been a little bit easier on myself because you know you you put when you're when you're not really being hard on yourself about exactly well just that I was gay I thought there was something wrong with me you saw other like that yeah I said well I saw it as bad or I just saw it as like something there was like a defect in me meaning my friends were all very similar as me and we'd play basketball and do all these things and they all had girlfriends and it was like there was something about me that was flawed dude there's something really interesting there so I've heard people gay people that have come out of the closet talked about that a lot and they're maybe it's tied up in the very notion of identity that there is some sense of getting something echoed back to you from other people that helps you form your sense of identity we I really want to understand that so you're thinking that something is broken or something is wrong is it simply like we interpret different as being wrong when we're young or like what do you think that mechanism is that is so common that so many people feel like that well look there's something inherently I'm a hundred percent Pro gay right so I'm married to a man we've been together for 10 years we've been married for almost five but you know the idea that say to gay people can't procreate in a traditional sense we're actually in the process of having kids would be a surrogate and an egg and the whole shebang as we were yeah as we were walking into the sperm bank it's kind of funny it was like like the day before like the full-on shutdown of Los Angeles because of coronavirus so people are like scattered and it's very weird out and we're walking into the sperm bank to deposit sperm and Dennis Rodman was standing outside and I was like I will never forget this it's like lockdown date one and there's Dennis Rodman as we're as we're walking in to deposit sperm but I think I think that it brings up all sorts of issues about how you think about the world if you can't procreate or even more important than that I would say until gay marriage this is why I think gay marriage was so important regardless of how you feel about gay people if you don't give people the opportunity to be in some sort of stable relationship that everybody else can be in leave them with you leave them with an endless life of narcissism and chasing after sex and all those things and I used to live in West Hollywood which is the gayest place on earth I mean they have rainbow crosswalks this is the gayest place on planet Earth basically and you know one of the saddest things there is you see all of these guys who are you know 50s 60s 70s possibly even over Oh older who come from a time when there was no way they could be in a functional relationship and then and then you throw in the AIDS crisis and everything else and then you see that basically they've had to live their lives just for their spray tan and to work out and get hair plugs and wear muscle shirts just because they have to just get that next quest and that's a really I I feel terrible I didn't like going to the gym there because I'd often just be focused on those guys like how sad it was and and I think that that concept related to the question you're asking until gay marriage came out it was it was sort of like well what kind of future could I have I never really thought about the future in a weird way I just sort of did whatever I wanted to do and that's not really a way to live and that's why even in the book I lay out some other beliefs that I now have including why why I think the time-tested stories even of the Bible that I don't consider myself a believer in a traditional sense but I think that there are things outside of us that are true and that our time-tested and churned throughout the ages that helped us flourish as a society I could have never seen that the other way if I didn't realize that I could have a future so I think it I don't know I know it's a little bit of a messy answer because I don't know that there is a great answer to it and I would also say that you know like straight people and everyone else all gay people are different so some people so David my husband he's he's 12 years younger than me so he grew up in a time where when he was in high school not only was he out already where I wasn't out until I mean I tell it in the book but I literally came out to the first person I ever came out to at 12:30 a.m. in the Times Square subway station on September 11th 2001 and then I woke up I woke up a few hours later in America was under attack but I was I was already you know 25 years old he was out much younger and and he always says to me he's like well I knew I was gonna be married I knew I was gonna have kids in a family and the rest of it and that's why equality is so important because it's not that you're giving people something special what you want to do and what you want out of a society is you want laws that treat everyone equally and then you don't force anyone to get married or you don't force anyone to be single but if you don't give people that opportunity and I think this is where the the the Republicans and conservatives really got screwed up for many years they got so obsessed with gay and gay marriage and all these things well if you didn't allow gay people to have functional lives then actually you were gonna force them to become all the things that you thought that they were you know these sex drug-crazed monsters or something like that and I don't know I think actually at some level I lived with some of the shadows of that because I know what I was for some period of my life at least and and it's it's very I think it's great that now you know a kid could be 15 and say I like boys I like girls whatever and generally people don't care and maybe that kid when he's 21 will think something else or whatever I think these are all basically good things yeah I think they're basically good things man what a difference 12 years makes that's a that's really interesting it's cool to see that we're changing that fast heartbreaking like you said to know how many people had to live a lie because it really was dangerous and I mean I'm sure there were places still in America where it actually is still dangerous that's heartbreaking one one thing I wanted to follow up do that is so interesting I've got to know so you guys are going to have a child through a surrogate how do you jump through the sperm to use so this is actually happening right now we just had a call like an hour ago with the woman who's helped facilitating all of the stuff so what we're trying to do right now actually we have the surrogate already we're about to settle on on the egg donor so we haven't officially settled on the egg donor yet but we both deposited sperm and our goal is with this we're going to take two eggs from the donor his sperm my sperm and have twins so by a yeah yeah yeah wow that's cool then how did you guys I mean okay so just pretty straight down the middle fair one in one that is really [ __ ] fascinating do you guys do you guys have like this one hope for a boy one hope for a girl will you guys slap that she can right you can choose yeah you can do all sorts of stuff I think they call it selective elimination you could do all sorts of things with interesting phrases like that around them you know I actually David definitely wants at least one boy and I think his preference would be to I'm I would really be okay with the boy and a girl I don't think I want to girls but I think a boy and a girl would be totally fine two boys would be fine and if it ends up being two girls it'll be two girls I don't think we're gonna mix with the magic of the universe or mess with the magic of the universe - why not magic of the universe or why not - girl why not just the magic of the universe you know once so once the egg hits the sperm even though I do talk about my feelings about abortion and I think you know 12 weeks is the cutoff you know I do believe that you you have at that point the genesis of life and then we could talk about you know five days in is a blast this is really life and where are you at and in four weeks and the rest of it I I would just be we'd have to have a serious conversation about about what we would do then my hope actually is that when we make that when we do this and and the sperm meets the egg and one and one and one if it I hope that it's either two boys or or a girl and a boy and you know we'll we'll go from there so I think I may not understand how the selection process works so it's done after they fertilize the egg I thought it was done at the sperm level no no it's done after they they don't know the sex until they fertilized by the way there's no silly questions related to this because I can tell you after being in with these fertility doctors and the surrogacy people on the egg deal and everything it's like this is a whole other world there are so many issues related to science and government and and absolutely everything you can think of and we all think we know oh you know it must be just so easy or just dragging a sperm throw it in there you're good and it's like there's so many things to think about what's the most surprising um well I guess more I don't know if this is surprising exactly but the fact that science can somehow pull all this stuff off is actually pretty incredible when when you see it like when we've been to the fertility clinic and you know you see oh and this is the literally the machine that we use to fertilize the egg with the sperm like this is the device that science has come up with to do that to make life like that's pretty freakin incredible but I would say also you know just the fact that there are women out there like this this young lady who we just chose to be the surrogate who from everything I can tell about her seems to be a really you know wonderful person and she's married with three kids and that she wants to help she wants to help other people have children that she's willing to give you that tells business we have not met face to face yet we're about to do a Skype meeting okay meet her before you make yeah so we we've seen fiction yeah we've seen pictures of her we we've we've all agreed that we're gonna do this you know there's a we have a profile she has a profile we go back and forth to ask questions make sure we're some of the things that were really important to you like if I was gonna do this I would be a psychopath about their diet and yeah like their exercise like that would family mental health issues like ah you want to talk about like I actually love that we're at a point where people can take some control over this which I'm sure people absolutely hate about me but I find this [ __ ] fascinating so mental health diet exercise what were some key factors for you yeah so in terms of mental health and mental health history my feeling is that's far more important on the egg side meaning that you want to make sure that the the woman providing the genetic material that she doesn't have either any major physical diseases or he's a carrier of all sorts of stuff where that she comes from a family that doesn't have a long history of mental health or or cardiac problems or cancer or you know a litany of other issues on the surrogacy side it was or is she well first it was just is she in a stable home so this woman happens to have three children three young children we've seen plenty of pictures everybody looks looks very happy she looks fit you know she does some exercise it seems like she basically eats right we're not gonna force her you know you can do all sorts of things or if you want to throw in a ton more money you can give them all the money in the world for all organic food the entire time and all that you know our basic feeling was if she's healthy and does exercise and has a family you know we don't want her eating fast food all the time so we've talked a little bit about that it doesn't sound like she does too much of it anyway but also knowing that she had three kids that were all born basically at 40 weeks that are seemingly or not seemingly that are healthy and everything else that was important on the egg side it's why it's taken us a little longer there it's like well also coronavirus has actually really slowed this process because you know people aren't people aren't donating as much right now they're not getting as many surrogates they're you know there's a hole which is the prize right now if you could or would you wait and tell coronavirus sort of settles out um well that's been an ongoing discussion we're sort of allowing the doctors to decide the timeline here so it is possible that I could find an egg literally when I end this call with you and at this point we have the surrogate and as long as the doctor would be willing to do it which some doctors are and some doctors aren't and I'm not an expert in all of this obviously I think we would be willing to move in this because if we weren't then it's like alright well what are we really saying here is this thing gonna last three more months six months nine months it's like if we're it goes to what I said earlier like I think you just move forward and move forward and move forward I think I got a little bit of that from from Peter teal just like keep going just keep going and so we will see how the egg thing how that sort of shakes out because yes you have to be more careful about the genetic stuff there the family history all you know I want we found you know you look at these it looks like dating websites basically you know you're just swiping past all this girl you know that's what it looks like really it does and you're there to you they're telling you all these things about themselves what we've really found is like I'm not that concerned about saying IV education I want somebody that's that's educated hopefully went to college but I'm actually we haven't even put too much primacy on that it's basically we want someone that looks healthy and fit that is healthy and fit and that that seems happy that that actually has sort of driven us more than oh she you know went to Yale and is that Stanford you know Business School and blah blah blah like I believe if we're good parents we can we can teach the right things and help on the education front and that the genetic beginnings of that yeah that you could be more predisposed of predisposition you're gonna have more of a predisposition let's put it that way so yeah we're paying attention to all of that stuff and you know you at some look at the end of the day you just hope you're making the right choices and then you hope you're gonna be a decent parent I guess so what do you would a decent parent look like like what are some core like so for instance yeah I know that people would if I had kids I'd really be in trouble because I was spanked growing up I don't have any beef with it I think a lot of kids run write it today and so thankfully I never have to like deal with the societal backlash against that but like what are some parents of tenants of parenting that you subscribe to or maybe that you worry about or you haven't decided on like what are some key things that you guys are debating now you know it's funny we haven't talked about it too specifically other than we have come to realize that David will definitely be more of the authority figure and I'll kind of be more of the fun one like that just seems to be like the trend a little bit like even just with our we have a new we have a new dog now and like he's a year old we got him the day that the that LA was closing all everything because of the shutdown I saw that the the shelters were closing and I was like I just got to run there and we had just lost our 16 year old dog to cancer about a month ago and she lived an incredibly wonderful life it was it was truly magical but we were gonna wait for a while probably for the fall because I I had the book tour and I was we were gonna be traveling a lot and you know we wanted some time after after Emma had had left us but then this thing happened with Corona and just like I'm just gonna run over to the shelter and just see and we went to the local shelter and there was this beautiful gorgeous dog their one-year-old pit mix who looked almost exactly like Emma our previous dog that was a total coincidence and he was about to be put down that day the order had already been signed and not because he had any behavior problems or anything else but these shelters are just completely overrun and I was like that's not happening and and we took him and for the second he got here he's been great and all that but I mentioned this because he's fairly untrained and he's young and sort of crazy and running around and eatin socks on the rest of it and David is much better at sort of being the disciplinarian where I'm just like I yeah you could get on the couch you know oh you're standing on the dining table that's fun you know and all that kind of stuff so I don't know I think basically though to be a good parent what would be a good parent that you would allow that kid to hopefully make their own mistakes without going too overboard in the mistake Department you know you give them as much of a leash to experience life but knowing that there is a leash you know not just throw them out into the world and just Oh see what the hell happens but you know and I think actually what that probably comes down to is if you're a pretty much a whole person who has like some sort of semi-coherent but hopefully mostly coherent worldview then hopefully you can raise a child just just by being that just by being something that is kind of sane and kind of stable and kind of real I think you can model some of that behavior but this would probably be best if we pick this up in about 16 years we'll see if I'm even remotely close to write about that yeah but I think about how we were raising I think we grow roughly at the same time so I was able to so I grew up in Tacoma Washington so it wasn't like Los Angeles where I'm at now but yeah my mom would let me ride my bike know like four miles away five miles away and not even really like think much about it it was just hey I'm gonna you know hop on my bike and ride there was like this dirt track that me and my friends used to ride our bikes to and when I think about how far away that really was and that you know that was like nine or ten years old and that my mom let me do that you would just listen obviously not when I went that far but normally we just be sort of wandering around the neighborhood and when he's dinnertime whatever my mom would whistle you could hear the whistle really far away you could probably hear my mom's whistle like a good half mile away and I just you know come running home and and that was that you live in LA so it's probably a little bit different but like how do you think of that like what kind of physical freedoms how do you perceive the level of apparent danger for kids what do you think about like the I'm sure you've read the book the coddling of the American mind like where do you fall and all this like letting kids I assumed you were pointing to the book yeah yeah where do you fall on that stuff um well it's funny so I'm 43 how well do 44 44 okay so we're basically the same age and yes there's something sort of magical I think when you think back to our childhood I I grew up in Long Island but but very much the same thing was on my bike all day long I don't know we were crossing highways and doing crazy stuff and somehow we always got home we didn't have cell phones I didn't have a tracker you know on my leg I don't know what my mom thought we were doing I used to climb trees I always ask this to my mom now I'd be like or to my dad I'll be like you know I used to climb that tree in front of the house I'd be like 30 feet up there like a monkey and you guys would just let me do it there were no pads on the ground like I could have broke my neck any and yeah a series of insane things that we used to do but nobody thought anything of it and and actually at least in my community everybody turned out basically okay you know there weren't any major accidents or anything like that that feels very special and very different to me than what it must be like now raising a child and I think you know this goes to this sort of helicopter parent thing and that we're on top of them all the time and now you know there because you'll you'll give them a phone which is a safety thing in a way so they can communicate with you but also opens up a truly sort of crazy Pandora's box of all sorts of trouble that it could get them in and a million other things you know and you know so the phone I mean technology like fire it's like it can be used for a lot of good you can you heat your house and cook your food but it can also burn down that house and and kill everybody so I would hope well first off I don't know by the time we really have the kids at an age where they're running around I don't know that we'll be here in the People's Republic of California I may have saw well I mean just tax wise in just the general state of where this state is going with our with our real far left the governor who ruined you know Newsom Gavin Newsom basically ruined San Francisco I don't know the last time you were up there but the amount of homelessness and drugs there it's it's absolutely disgusting you may know that they literally have an app to tell you what streets have human poop on them so that you can download the app get to SFO and avoid the human poop so there's a lot of trends that I see here in Los Angeles that I really don't like what I do like about LA I love the freakin weather it's it's beautiful every day happens to be raining today and when it does rain it's actually nice because you're like oh that we do need that but the weather is great and I have a nice group of friends and and because Pollak for me because politics and and media are really media and I should say entertainment are really becoming one thing doing what I do is really great here in Los Angeles I don't know that we'll always be here though but you know as far as what I would let them get away with again it would be I would try to you know give them that long leash and then you know one day you come home and you fell out of a tree and you know you got a spike in your shoulder well maybe you won't do it again but but all of this you know it's it's a it's a more intellectual exercise for guys like us until we're actually doing it right yeah but it this is you want to talk about an intellectual exercise I think it's really revelatory about who a human being is it's one of the things like always when I'm interviewing somebody and they've got really strong beliefs I'm always like what do you teach your kids right like that's that I want to know so you've got hey this universal beliefs but the rubber meets road when you have [ __ ] kids and I want to know like what are the big ideas you have you distilled them you're trying to teach your kids so for instance this is not the reason I didn't have kids but it was a factor man like when I think about my natural personality so in my relationship I would be the disciplinarian a hundred percent and I am super worried that I I know the of hardship you have to have to be able to especially as a guy to be able to toughen the [ __ ] up which is exactly what I had to do I was so soft as a kid my dad did not push me at all to deal with physical pain did not tell me hey stop [ __ ] crying about it like the pain can serve you you need to get tougher never gave me that message I'm sure out of love and affection but in the end like I still had to learn those lessons I just had to learn them really [ __ ] late in life after was causing all kinds of problems for me that I was so emotionally weak and so when I think about I need to because my kids would you know very lucky position but my kids would grow up wealthy I did not grow up locusts yeah my kids be really in trouble of just me trying to like make my own life what I wanted to be like their life would be nice right far nicer than the way that I had it's now they're growing up soft and I'm [ __ ] afraid I'm legitimately afraid did you watch oh god the first man it's a show on Apple TV about what if a great show by the way I think it's called the first man and it's oh that's the Mars thing yeah well it's what would have happened to America had Russia beat us to the moon it is [ __ ] awesome but I don't want to spoil it with lyrics I'm sure dance around it a little bit but there's a moment in there where a kid has very the kind of trauma that would impact your whole family and I thought [ __ ] that could have so easily been me the way that my parents like dude I used to go to my friend's house ride motorcycles without helmets we used to shoot bow and arrows straight up into the air that's insane but just the same thing a hundred percent insane but nobody was majnu's they were like hey there's a bow and arrow go play there's a motorcycle play like it is it is what's the phrase I don't believe in God but it is but for the grace of God that I made it out of my childhood and man when I think about it it's good though but what you end up having is so my grandparents my grandfather was one of like eight or nine kids but I think only five made it to adulthood so I think three of his siblings died you know before the age of eight or whatever not that people thought of kids as disposable dude but it was you just knew that there was going to be some amount of death involved and as you whittled down the number of kids HAP's where you're only having one kid or two kids I know I would have that sense of like this is precious man and I'm so [ __ ] afraid of something happening to this child and so you know I'm gonna you know do the the sort of corralling and protective mechanism I don't know I just worried about what that would that that would actually end up creating a problem and I just sort of weighed like what would be worse mollycoddling them a little bit to make sure that they get to adulthood or the the trauma of losing a child that's what freaked me out I mean this is it's one for the ages right it's one for how we even behave in our own lives like you can we've all done crazy [ __ ] that we shouldn't have done right we've all done drugs we shouldn't have done or this behavior that behavior whatever it is we've all done those things and whether you came from a family that was the helicopter parents right on top of you you know it reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons maybe around season eight or nine or so when Simpsons was still in those Corps years when you find out they show you a flashback to Flanders growing up and now here he is the most sort of stiff dorky religious conforming thought guy on the planet and they show you his parents and why did he become that way because his parents were ultra hippies who gave him no rules so what did little Ned Flanders crave he craved rules and then he became really religious and really obsessed with rules and turning to the church for everything and all that it's a little bit of a caricature of the whole idea but it's the right it's the right bones for what we're talking about here it's like you want to give them freedom and then if you give them freedom they might hurt themselves again at the same time by giving them that freedom hopefully you've you've shown them that in the future if they act responsibly with freedom that all sorts of good things can happen on the other hand you can you can hold them in and protect them from the world but what might happen well now you send them off to college you've done you know a crazy job protecting them from everything and now they get to college they have one puff of a joint and because they've been hidden from everything next thing you know it's three years later and they haven't moved off the couch because they're a pothead or much worse than that so there's no I there really is no perfect way here and then there's you know this is this is it this is what life is it's it's how you want to do your life and then hopefully if you did something kind of right that you can then model that for the people behind you but they have to make their own mistakes too so what are some of the beliefs like you have very clear beliefs you laid them out in the book high emphasis on freedom freedom of speech I think you said in the book is an absolute barring the things you said that the Supreme Court has already ruled on don't yell fire and no one citing violence what are what are some core values that you want to instill in your kids yeah well real quick on that don't yell fire one you know it's an interesting thing that I had to Google a bunch of times because it's a slight misnomer that you can't yell fire in a theatre you actually can yell fire in a theatre in a jokey way or in a certain context you can't yell fire in a theater to incite panic because then that becomes a criminal problem that's like a very minor sort of in the weeds thing but it is an interesting one because you hear people say it all the time and I used to say it but it's really with the intent to do harm in that case I so I lay that out in that I'm for free speech with with that caveat and then in the United States we have the most slight cases that are almost never used in case of libel or slander which I do believe should not be protected speech but they're very rarely used because the bar to prove them is so high that it never happened so I all of them I mean that's the thing all of the beliefs that I've that I've put into practice that I've talked about on the show over the last couple years I've sort of put into this book because I didn't want to write something that was purely what I'm against most people know what I'm against already I don't like socialism I don't like collectivism I don't like top-down power I want people to be free right you know how to live your life the best way you can it doesn't mean you're doing it all the time it doesn't mean I'm doing it all the time none of us are right we're not we're not Jesus we have moments often sometimes you might have moments where it months go by and you're like whoa I've been on a really good run I fought some of my demons and I started behaving better or doing all the things I needed to do to really get in the groove with life and then life kind of moves moves smoothly and then you have other times where you just [ __ ] up a zillion things or you lie or you cheat or whatever it might be and then life sets you off in in a different path but I wanted to give people something that wasn't just oh I'm against these bad ideas but what am I really for and what what it all really boils down to is I am for the individual I believe that that in any sort of free society but for our context in an American society what we have done better than any other country in the history of the world is give more people more freedom than anywhere else everyone everyone in every corner of the world has come to the United States and in almost every case without exception has made it better for themselves and for their children it is very rare almost impossibly rare that people immigrated into the United States and then left because they couldn't make it here and they were like ah we're going back to the other place nobody nobody whether your ancestry is Irish or Italian or Jewish or Chinese or Mexican or whatever it is everyone comes here and basically makes it better and that is because we have this incredible belief in individual rights that everyone regardless of your sexuality or gender your skin color although even your nationality as long as you are an American citizen should be treated the same and by the way you know whenever I say that people say well well black people used to be slaves and women couldn't vote that is true it is an imperfect system created by imperfect people but over time we have expanded those rights to more and more people so we freed the slaves we allowed black people to vote we allowed women to vote now gay people can get married and if you were to show me any group of people in the United States in 2020 that do not have equal rights by the nature of some immutable characteristic I would absolutely fight for that what I don't want to fight for is that because you're a perceived marginalized oppressed group or something like that or the history of your people not you has has had a rougher history or this or that or the other thing that you're gonna get special rights now because every time we say Oh well you don't have to be as qualified to get into this college or you don't have to be as qualified to get this job or whatever now that kind of sounds right oh we're trying to make up for some historical thing except what you're doing actually is punishing someone else who doesn't deserve to get punished and a great example of this is that Harvard over the years has made it much harder for Asian students to get in because they had they had in their mind what was too many Asians now that in my book that's known as racism but they decided we have too many Asians here so we're gonna make it harder for Asians to get in and we're gonna make it easier for these other groups now why should we be punishing a young Asian kid who busts his ass whose parents or grandparents or great-grandparents came here we're not given anything just like your ancestors weren't given anything in mind weren't given anything and I write about what life was like for my grandparents and great-grandparents who came from Eastern Europe with nothing and busted their butts so that my parents could be a little better off than they were and now I'm better off than my parents that's the American dream that's what most of us have some part of but the idea that we would say oh no no no you Asians because you work too hard and you care about education and you care about school and blah blah blah you guys are getting it you're getting it off too easy we didn't give you anything but you guys are just doing it to good we're gonna now punish you that's deeply dangerous so I think what happens is a lot of people just sort of have lazy thinking they only think about it at the first day and they go oh well this group had a rough go of it we best help them even if it wasn't that specific person it was generations before we best help that person and that kind of sounds right until you go well alright are you for punishing someone else and then they go oh I guess not and then it's like yeah well then the argument falls apart pretty quickly yeah when you get into this stuff it's it's really interesting so as somebody who obviously has embraced capitalism in in the extreme I'm a huge believer in capitalism and at the same time like I don't like to see people struggle so I've and then again this is one of the reasons I didn't have kids so it's it I do not like people putting roadblocks or barriers in front of somebody who wants to bust their ass and build something and that [ __ ] you want something talked about something that I do have a very strong opinion about it's the opportunity to build something for yourself the opportunity to be rewarded for adding value for working your ass off all of that and so that's one thing that I it it seems to me as somebody who's not deep in this world admittedly but when I see things on the fringes where in fact I'll what do you think about the I had it never once occurred to me that people were reacting poorly to the phrase pick yourself up by your bootstraps or pull yourself up by your bootstraps and then I started hearing people you know saying oh they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps I was like wait what this is a negative thing like the the notion of yeah working hard and trying to figure something out now I'm not denying look it's what I call minimum requirements so there's something out there not smart enough dude they're never gonna make it and they're [ __ ] and they are [ __ ] through no fault of their own genetic lottery absolutely brutal maybe they were drug and alcohol impacted I mean dude the the litany of things that can end up being stacked against you is so so so gnarly but talk to me about your view on the notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps working hard trying to get ahead and then the need yeah or maybe you don't feel like we need to worry about people getting left behind but that's sort of where I struggle is like I don't want people getting left behind by [ __ ] me I do not want somebody taking everything that I'm trying to build to try to level equal opportunity yay equal outcome gnarly in the extreme and yeah so so you so I agree with the premise you sound to me very much like sort of an iron Randian capitalist you believe that you that the government from what I can understand should basically get out of the way so that as long as we have equal rights right equal opportunity and and by the way when people say equal opportunity it doesn't mean we all start at exactly the same thing it means that the playing field is level but yes some people are born into more money some people are born smarter some people are born with more athletic skill or better looks or a series of different things so there's no such thing as it just sort of this magical equality right so what can a society that has all sorts of people do it can only I think create an even playing field so you've got a chance so pull yourself up by your bootstraps it was funny AOC Alexandria Acacio Cortez she said well who's ever done that as if it's a literal phrase I mean it was a phrase at one time but you you can't pull yourselves up by your bootstraps you ever try to do that I mean the point is that if you work hard if you work hard in America you've got a chance and nowhere in the world gives you a better chance of doing that and by the way there are also millionaires there are children of millionaires who inherit inherit all this money that go bust because it because you still have to work for it you still have to invest properly you still have to know what you're doing you can't just squander it all away so I believe so your question though was well what do you do about the other people well first off it is proven time and again over over now decades that capitalist societies not yes they make a lot of really rich people but everyone rises with that right everybody comes up with that the poorest people in America are way richer than the poorest people in third world countries and in second world countries and and often their quality of life is even better than middle-class people in some of these places they're not living in huts you can be you can be sort of in the bottom percentage in the United States and have some sort of shelter and often a TV and a washing machine and death it at that uh maybe not the greatest life in the world but you know you can you can get by that's because capitalism moves everybody up it doesn't mean that everybody is going to be rich but if the question really is well what do you do about those people what my preference would be is rather than this giant social safety net that we know doesn't work if it ever worked then more and more people would always be getting out of it but what happens is people get caught in it forever because once the government starts giving you something they start giving you sustenance so now you can get a certain amount of food or whatever your supplies you need are now they give you also subsidized rent and the rest of it well let's say you're I mean the great I can give you a great example my sister lives in in New York City she's paying market price for a two-bedroom apartment it's an obscene amount of money something like five thousand dollars for it's not even a two-bedroom it's a converted one they manufactured a second second bedroom out of write some like five thousand bucks that's market price for it which by the way after Corona I think will significantly go down because I think people are gonna be moving out of cities but that's a different thing altogether in her building they also have subsidized housing so there's people in her building that have lived there for generations that are paying something like six hundred dollars a month for the exact same apartment now that sort of sounds nice right this sounds kind of nice oh we're helping poor people get apartments that's right but what happens is and this is a fact that we then find these people cannot leave and then it becomes a generational thing because why would you if you're being given a six hundred dollar apartment and the government even giving you some money for that why would you pick yourself up by the bootstraps bust your ass and get a better job which then would mean you wouldn't get that help anymore and then you'd be kicked out of that apartment and have to move somewhere else so I don't blame the people that get caught in this cycle I blame the machine that is constantly putting people into this cycle so if you want to help people truly you unleash the market to do everything it can which will create more jobs and all of that right you're a businessman you've created jobs I'm a businessman I've created jobs and then the hope is that more and more people will work and then figure out ways to rise themselves now of course you are totally right that there will always be people on the margins because of mental health because of a litany of reasons bad luck bad choices drug addiction all of those things that will always need some extra help my preference would be that if the government would mostly get out of that game and I'm not saying completely I do think there is some this is where I would say although I'm mostly a libertarian I you know I'm laying out classically liberal principles in the book and a classically liberal principle would be that you want some guidelines on society where a libertarian would just sort of say completely get out of the way with everything I would say we can do something to help the people who need it the most but just throwing money at things is not the right answer what I would prefer to do is you scale back as much of that administrative state as much of that social net as possible even though I think it was well-intentioned but the - hell is paved with good intentions you scale as much of that back as possible and then you know who will step up good people will step up I am sure you give some money to charity I'm sure you do some things for causes that you care about I actually believe people want to help more but the more that we just say how the government will do it don't worry about that the government doing well then know what none of us think it's our responsibility so we're all willing to just have more of our paycheck taken away so that the government can do something highly inefficient I just don't think it's right and I think that if you want to help people that and I'm guessing you probably do in your own way that you'll keep doing it and then we can have we can have something for the really extreme cases and by the way I will fully admit this is not a perfect system but there is no perfect system and part of the problem right now with what's happening with the progressives and the Socialists is they just think that their system will be perfect that they can build a perfect system we'll have a quality for everyone we'll have racial harmony will have perfect economic equality all of these things guess what no it can't happen and it can't happen because humans have to make the system and we're imperfect right we are imperfect so we can't create a perfect system so I always say this is like this is why Thanos killed half the universe and Avengers right he knew that there were finite resources in the universe and he said it's the nobody's gonna do what has to be done well what has to be done I got to wipe out half the universe so that we can have peace and harmony so if you think that wiping out half the universe is the right way to do it or enslaving half the universe is the right way to do it and then you do it but there's no such thing as a perfect system there's a there's a messy system freedom is messy and the best thing you can do is give it some basic guidelines to keep that core piece in place yeah when I think about the issue and I agree with you it's messy and I honestly man here is here's what I think is just the gospel truth there's no way around it there's no way around suffering there's no way around seeing somebody's look because their I mean if they are literally they don't have the mental faculties to execute at a high level which unfortunately like anything IQ or whatever metric you're going to use the the real functional intelligence maybe is impossible to measure but we can all agree is either present or not present they're just some people who fall below that line and I don't know barring anything so horrifying where we start dictating the the genetic lottery as you were saying despite me saying in my own life I might be willing to choose the sex it is a [ __ ] terrifying so for so anyway might so when I think about what I would want to do so I've I have achieved a lot in my life partly through very good fortune for Shore fortune favors have prepared make no mistake I was ready to capitalize on opportunities that came away but I'm not a fool I don't think that my life is devoid of luck there's been tremendous amounts of luck in my life so when I think about actually going in and helping it is not obvious what the answer is so one of my favorite stories and I'm so desperate to get this guy in the show because I'm almost certainly mischaracterizing exactly what he did but as I interpreted it there's a guy named Geoffrey Canada Geoffrey Canada grew up in Harlem during the crack epidemic he realizes yo this is a problem with education I'm going to get a scholarship to Harvard I'm gonna get a degree in education I'm going to go into the system and I'm gonna fix it from the inside and he does it then so bright and so hard working ends up getting I think a full ride to Harvard goes to Harvard comes out and spends I think ten years in education trying to fix it and then he realizes you can't fix it from the inside and this this is [ __ ] haunted me and I've quoted this so many times it's why I'm so desperate to have this conversation with him he said you have to give up on adults and I was like oh my god that was so bright and he said even if you he goes look at the [ __ ] data and what the data is saying is the difference between a kid who grows up in the inner cities and a kid who grows up middle class is the number of positive words they hear by the age of five and it's so massively impacts their the language centers of their brain that they either will be able to go on to thrive or they won't and it's this thing that really holds it back so we become so obsessed with getting to women who are pregnant or about to become pregnant and I was like that's so genius that's like target man target that's their game [ __ ] fine women ever praying or about to become pregnant because you can influence their buying behaviors for the rest of their life you can influence the child's buying behaviors and the fact that he identified something so simple as I never would have thought that it's your impacting the language centers of their brain which of course is going to influence the number of words they have which is going to influence the concepts then grasp which is going to influence their ability to articulate themselves it's like really terrifying the number of ways that echoes through somebody's mind so that seeds planted in my head yeah well very quickly on that I mean actually you're making what I think is a pretty conservative argument which is that basically what you're calling for there is you want stable families ultimately right because where is that stuff gonna come from where you're gonna care about those women where they're gonna be treated properly and and be able to have the time to eat right in when they're pregnant and all of those things what you want are stable families so that over time because we all know this we all know that there are a million studies about this if you grow up in a two-parent home you are way more likely to make the right choices in life and be successful and stay out of jail and stay away from drugs and all those things not perfectly of course and are there single parents who are wonderful obviously but if you look at the data over time that we it's something we all know but we're all sort of afraid to say it like if you come from a strong family it will have given you some sort of bedrock at the bottom it'll give you some sort of foundation like you were gonna build a house and you want that foundation to be kind of kind of solid right or extremely solid and if you don't have that it just opens up all sorts of other opportunities and that could get us into a whole other conversation about why actually by giving so much money to poor people that you actually end up hurting the family you incentivize women to have more kids there's all sorts of studies on that kind of stuff but that's a whole other thing yeah it's interesting so when I you're 100% right you quoted in your book something that was very startling which are the stats around people who grow up without a father and how impactful that is my parents did me a solid which was they three weeks after I left for college I'm the youngest three weeks after I left for college my dad moved out and I thought whoa like thank you I never I don't know that I could do that because he was unhappy for a very long time yeah but man because of that I felt net world's most normal childhood don't have any trauma for my parents getting divorced or anything like that so very very grateful for that but when I look at the like what's really gonna solve the problem right so I don't I am very worried that we don't actually know how to solve the problem we know some things that don't work but we're it's sort of like so here's I have a hypothesis I think I know what would work now I'm wise enough to recognize I don't think I should be making policy anytime soon but my hypothesis goes like this so I'm my last company had 3,000 employees about a thousand of them group hard as hell in the inner cities of South Central Los Angeles Compton like [ __ ] crazy crazy and the kind of story people used to think I grew up poor my friend I did not grow up or I now know what real poverty looks like and I'm talking people I help my stepfather while he bled to death from a gunshot wound to the head my best friend I watched and tried to hold his intestines in as he bled to death because he was shot point-blank range with a shotgun in the stomach my sister was shot to death in the heart with an ak-47 in my front yard on and on and on and I was just like Jesus Christ I'm literally I'm looking out my window I can see the [ __ ] neighborhood right so in my nice beautiful neighborhood I see it's so fun close and they never drive to go out so I'm interviewing all these people and we're growing so fast dude I'm having to interview people two and three at a time we're high we grew by 57,000 percent in her first three years alone in manufacturing so that just like the number of humans you have to [ __ ] higher and the rate at which you have to hire them is pure insanity so at the early stages everybody that was brought into the company was interviewed by me literally Barna janitor EVPs sales didn't matter everyone in I mean it was me and so I'm having to come up with a way to interview people very very rapidly and sort of cut to the heart with who they are so I start asking this magic Genie question and magic Genie question goes like this you're gonna be granted one wish and one which only can ask for more wishes can't cure cancer bring somebody back from the dead I'm sorry you want so I want to know like what what do you really want and dude I must ask that question 250 times without fail every single person gave me the same answer and they all said 1 million dollars and I remember thinking what the actual [ __ ] it is a magic Genie and you're going to ask for a million dollars you can ask for a trillion dollars you could ask for a money printing machine that makes money they accepted everywhere through all time and I was just like why are they not asking for an impossibly large amount of money and then I realized for them a million dollars was an impossibly large amount of money and I was like holy [ __ ] we have a mindset problem we have a frame of reference problem to be very specific and the way that they looked at the world was so capped they had put a glass ceiling on themselves their parents had told them the world doesn't want somebody like you to succeed like they actually tell their kids words like that and I heard that over and over and over and over and while anecdotal man this is anecdotal at scale this was a lot with people and i was just like men so my life's mission is because my wife and i could have retired bought an island and literally never thought about working or money again and now we're working harder than we've ever worked because my theory is if you can give people the right mindset they'll go down it's what I call the only belief that matters if you believe that through hard work and deliberate practice you can gain new skills and those skills have actual utility in the world right it's not about checking something off a list to say I read this book it's about learning architecture so you can build a bridge that doesn't collapse when cars go across it and that's transformative it is the ability to change the world around you I mean it cannot be overstated how powerful the acquisition of skills is so it was just like okay how do we get people to realize put time and energy into learning something that matters and you can change your life and change the lives of those around you and the more I went into that world the more I hear people believing that they can't move classes and I'm like whoa whoa it is the belief that you can't move classes that is [ __ ] you up far more than whatever in Justices there are in the world and that's the [ __ ] that scares me like as somebody who sort of I I politics freaks me out there's too many things to learn about with Maya and maybe my limited intellect I'm actually perfectly fine to accept that but personal responsibility is my [ __ ] obsession because that I know like you can take and run with it and so just wrap that up I will say but I don't know even as hard as I'm going to influence societal change how many people get eaten by the world it's just like yeah well well first off there's a lot there but you're you're first up you're living your words right like you're you're actually you're not just saying this stuff like oh this is what I believe and I just believe it and it's self-evident that it's true you actually put it into practice and hire it as you said a 30 or workforce a thousand people that came from these areas and I would venture to say that most of them probably have a much better life for having the opportunity to work at one of your companies and then hopefully move their way up and maybe get out of that neighborhood if that's what they wanted or the rest of it so that is the essence of the of the American spirit like that here's here's what real thing I'm grappling with right now some of them yes and there were amazing transformation suit and it was it was tear inducing material I mean people who were like you didn't just change my life you changed the life of my entire family tree like this is gonna echo incredible but I am haunted by the number of people for whom it was just money so to give you an idea we had one employee Reata for almost a year she was amazing amazing bright hard-working [ __ ] you couldn't push her around this woman knew like just clarity of purpose not to be intimidated by anybody she was amazing she got her first income tax return she'd never had an income tax return before and she quit because she'd never had that much money before and I was like oh my god like this is an intelligent woman a driven woman but the frame of reference is so crazy that we're not crazy so unhelpful so dad yeah it sent her off in this weird direction well I would say this that that that shouldn't haunt you in that you can't solve everyone's problems right like you can yeah well that'd be pretty lofty that's a pretty lofty goal and and hope is moronic those you're saying and I know that I just so I really do find myself sketched out in this weird space of like hey don't [ __ ] tell me what to do with my money I'll do whatever the [ __ ] I want and [ __ ] like people are really struggling what do you do so but but but with that in mind though so okay so you've built businesses you've got money as you said you can you can retire and go to an island and that would be a pretty great life probably right but you don't want to do that yet and you're still busting your ass well what's the what's the real way to then make the most of that it sounds to me like the real way to make the most of that is you keep reinvesting in your companies you keep coming up with new ideas so more and more people can partake in it now does that mean that that woman isn't that the idea of that woman isn't gonna keep coming through the system and then suddenly just breaking down in the middle of it because she realizes she has no idea to pay taxes or maybe you along the way you learn the lesson that oh you know I'm bringing in all these people who aren't that educated who need all sorts of life skills so one of the benefits that I'm gonna give them which will end up being a write-off for you is I'm gonna give them a tax course that I'll pay for that hopefully they won't have to deal with that and that again it's you using your money to expand knowledge to other people which in turn it actually feeds you because it's the ideas that you care about and I think you and anyone that is involved in business that actually wants to help people I think that's how you do it you don't turn to the government and say you guys can just do it better because there's just simply no evidence of it there is no evidence I have a quick question how are you how do you think we should be handling the crisis now with the number of people filing for unemployment yeah so there's a there's a lot to say about this so first you know the as a general rule I don't love government bailouts I don't love them the government usually creates all the problems you know we have big banks that are too big to fail and then what did we do we bailed them out and we made them even bigger right more small banks went away and then what we said was too big to fail so you'd think maybe you'd want to make it less big we actually made it bigger so government is always putting a bandaid on another government problem because they find another emergency to create something bigger and even in this stimulus package you know we gave 25 million dollars to the Kennedy Art Center and then they fired half of the musicians that are there or something like that like we know that the gut that you know the politicians they put all this pork for their own pet projects in and all that nonsense that being said in in this case where we are dealing with a truly worldwide unprecedented event that has shut down the global economy that not only look first we've had pandemics before right we've had the Spanish flu before we've had the Black Plague I mean there's been things but this one has spread the world and also because we're so interconnected now even if even if coronavirus hadn't made it to the shores of the United States if it had spread across Europe spread across Asia and everything else we'd still be feeling some economic impacts of it so what I would say would be a basically good idea is you have to prop up businesses and this is where where so many people get things wrong they think if you help business that means you hate the regular guy well no businesses are the things that employ the regular people so if you help them right so so it's it's just a flaw in logic because they think because so many people are taught that business is evil that big business is bad and it's like no that is actually the engine that keeps this whole thing going so I would say you want to help business now that doesn't mean you just give endless cash to all giant corporations that don't need money but certainly if you can help out mom-and-pop stores if you can help out you know people like right now what think there's like a couple things you can do so if you can't pay your mortgage right now I wouldn't want someone kicked out of an apartment but it's not just as easy so people will say all right freeze mortgages it's not quite that easy because then the landlords who own many properties if they're not now getting their income well now they're gonna go out of business so everyone that just throws these easy answers Oh give people money Oh freeze mortgages all these things they all sound right and then you think about them for about usually takes about four seconds and you realize that they're they're much more complex than that so I would say we want to do a series of things right now to basically help people so first off I don't know that you can freeze mortgages but if you are about to be kicked out of your apartment or whatever it is the government could say that for three months were suspending evictions and then you know as we figure out what's going on here how long this is all gonna last there'll be a kick back to the building owners and the lenders and things like that I would prefer not to just give a ton of money to the banks and let them kind of figure out what to do with it we know that this didn't work last time we gave all this money to the banks and then they created all sorts of other regulations that created all sorts of other problems so what it really comes down to is do you want to just in a time like this when all these people are unemployed and having all sorts of problems is the best thing that the government can do some people the pure libertarian proach you do nothing you let the market crash and crumble and then through that human ingenuity will reconstitute itself and smart business people will do sorts all sorts of interesting things but you let it hit the pain point right like you let it crumble so that it can rebuild i I think intellectually that's a really interesting exercise I don't know to keep the wheels on a society if you could ever do that so the real argument then becomes if you put that aside the real argument is well do you do you prop up businesses or people do you want to just put cash into people's hands so that they can absolutely make sure that they can pay the bills buy the groceries make sure that they can get their medicine things like that and then you know help the businesses I think there's a little bit of both I think unfortunately what's happened here is you know goddamn well that literally not one congressman or senator who signed that stimulus bill read that thing nobody read that thing it was like this if not like this or this that thing was massive nobody read it they all stick in these ridiculous things like diversity and inclusion memos and all of this nonsense that has nothing to do with coronavirus just to to get their little pet project in there and this again would be where I would say you scale back the power of the government you get what I would prefer to do than any of it let people keep more of their money I don't no matter how many millions of dollars you have I want you to have more of it because I believe you know what to do with it and I and I would say that exact same thing for poor people and I would say you know I lay out what I think is a fair tax system in the book and basically if I do this by the way but that's from a position of ignorance how do you think like is that only works if we radically scale government back basically yeah radically scale it back what is government really good at not only what is it good at what was when the founders framed the Constitution what they wanted were this conglomerate of states to govern themselves and then the federal government would basically make sure that the state's weren't warring the federal government would take care of the borders of the entire entity and very little beyond that that really was it meaning if you lived in New York most of the decisions that would impact your life were made by the legislature in New York the governor of New York and that went for the same of all the states even right now when America is at its best it's at its best because the states are doing their things so legalizing marijuana is a great example of this Colorado was one of the first states to do it and everyone that didn't want it to be legalized said they're gonna legalize it and they're gonna be more potheads and it's a gateway drug and all these horrible things are gonna happen in baba bhot and guess what none of that happened actually now it got legalized there's new businesses selling it they're raising tax revenue that you can use for our other projects and all that that was Colorado taking an experiment and now you can export that experiment to other states and if you don't like what's happening in Colorado well then you can move to Alabama where it's illegal or if and so I would prefer that the states be able to do as much as they possibly can so when we talk about you know pulling back government it's just that the federal government was never supposed to have this such power and the irony right now is you know you've got a certain Nadja people in the United States who have been screaming for now for years roughly that Donald Trump is Hitler and his supporters are Nazis and yet at the same time right now we're in a crisis and what they want is more from the federal government so they're saying oh if only the federal government could do more right now really so you want the guy you've been calling Hitler for the last four years to do more that doesn't really make sense what I would prefer is you give all of these guys less power and the the exchange there is that when it's your guy in power if you've scaled back some of his power he can't do absolutely everything you want him to do but the beauty is that when it's the guy that you hate right so in my case when it's when it's Bernie Sanders who has all the reverse ideas that I have if we've scaled back the power enough he can't do too much damage to that the wheels will stay on regardless of the extreme guys on both sides but the only way you can't you that's what unfortunately the the the progressives of today who have way too much influence they think if they could just get their guys in that everything would be perfect and that would be a dystopia for me so I want to scale back the power so they don't have a chance to do it and by the way the same thing would go for the authoritarians that might rise on the right you have a book in your nightstand forget on Liberty by John Stuart Mill it was here the other day it's probably in this room somewhere I brought it out for something I don't see it right this second back well we're surrounded but it is if it's not in here it's in my night band yeah you said that there were a few key ideas that were really simple but very profound that you'd like to come back to oh yeah I mean well so much of what I lay out at Dome / in this book is are the base ideas of on Liberty by John Stuart Mill I mean the core of it is what we well a lot of it's really the theme of everything we've talked about here but beyond everything else the individual is the only thing that matters that that is the only way by strengthening the individual all right that that is how you will allow people to flourish to make sure that the government doesn't have too much power over your life until you hit those marginal issues where the government has to do something so as I'm saying right now corona wire is one of those type of issues where look what I love to leave this all up to the states and let every state decide how they want to deal with social distancing or how they want to deal with the bailout or whatever yes in a perfect world I would like to do that but you know what viruses don't care about borders so if if this governor of New Jersey let's say was doing everything wrong with coronavirus and the governor of New York was doing everything right we got a problem because there's a border there and the virus doesn't care about the border so I fully acknowledge that not everything can be done at the super local level but in effect John Stuart Mill who wrote on Liberty you know what was it maybe a hundred years before the fount No fifty years before the founding of the United States maybe something like that 1700s that he had the right ideas that the only way that you can allow people to be free the way that you can allow the human experience to flourish in them in the greatest way possible is to not create a system that will crush it don't take away people's rewards just because you you have some other desire to do with them let people have what they earn find the little moments where we need some some sort of collective in the right sense of government to do the little things but the big things are better what what could happen in your life right now that you would really want the government involved there could be a couple things right like if your house was broken into you might want the police but as a guy that's doing pretty decent you also might have some security you also might have a gun in your house I mean there's all sorts of things go to the post office I mean if you think that the post office which is run by the government it's brittle is so brilliantly run and then they'll say oh well we want you to take there we want them to take our health care too and it's like in the post office your ask someone at the post office for a pen they think that's like asking for gold because they don't even have pens at the post office so I think we just have to be careful with with what we ask for so liberty the book is called on liberty you can literally read it in an hour and and liberty is the key of all of this so hard right I guess but one thing that I really want had to be here somewhere literally in the room this morning I don't know where it went one thing that really resonated with me is jordan peterson and i know that you spent a lot of time with him he's somebody that i don't know anything about in the early days I was hearing headlines he sounded like a psychopath and I was like yeah I don't know man and then he just kept popping up on my YouTube feed and so one day I was like you know what [ __ ] it like what is why do people hate this guy so much let me just hear him talk crazy for a minute and so I clicked into one of his videos and I was like wait a second this actually like this is amazing this is absolutely fantastic and I and from there I ended up reading his book maps of meaning which I actually read before I read 12 rules for life and it's somebody dance man oh my god it's so good so I was changed by Joseph Campbell's the power of myth I mean book in change dude that book hit me it influenced so much my life in terms of rituals in terms of as somebody who struggled to go from being a boy to being a man like his ideas around hey the lack of meaningful rituals is a real problem like we need these demarcation points and so when I got married I went through a ritualistic scarification to remind myself I was different after my marriage than before it's been profoundly impactful so I read maps of meaning and I'm like holy hell like this guy is he's picked up I think he's even better than Joseph Campbell he's picked up where Joseph Campbell left off and is really like shown how usable and powerful this has been in in his life I had two questions or in people's lives I have two questions for you one do you have any updates like what the [ __ ] where is he what happened like is he gonna be okay and then - I'd love to know I know you spent a lot of time touring with him like what were some key things that you've taken from him yeah so the first one I can't say anything that isn't really public I can say that I did see him within the last couple months he's getting better he will be back you know we was able to write the the front blurb on my on my book and the back blurb and he's working on his book you know benzos are a [ __ ] hell of a drug and you know there was this meme that somehow he was this like addict for all this time and blah blah blah and it's like it's not only so patently dishonest but he was totally when we were on tour he would talk about taking a small amount of benzos to help him deal with anxiety then in the midst of the tour he found out that his wife had what they thought was terminal cancer thank god she's okay now but I was actually with him out to lunch when he got the call that she was sick or that they that they thought it was going to be terminal I saw this guy lived through a year and a half almost two years of an unimaginable life rise to fame the scrutiny the loved the hate the travel every piece of it and I never saw him once break one of those twelve rules so so the first part of the question he will be back soon enough my my guess is we'll be hearing from him probably a little bit in the summer and then probably back to somewhat like normal speed probably in the fall don't totally quote me on that but trust me I know the amount of people that are pulling for him because I get messages and people literally come up to me on the street and I think they want to ask me something about me and they'll say how is Jordan and that's completely fine with me because he affected me as much as he affected any of these other people which gets me to your to your second question being on tour with this guy it was incredible because I saw somebody doing exactly what I think we've tried to do here for this last hour or whatever it isn't and what I sense you're trying to do with your life which is you take your ideas you put them into practice and then through that have been able to help other people that's pretty cool and I think really that's what Jordan did he really he created these twelve rules you know from from stand up straight with your shoulders back which is present yourself properly to the world right from that sort of simple rule to you know pet a cat if you see one on the street which is really just stop and smell the roses and you know I think it's rule number six is it's either six or nine you know about know that somebody that you're talking to might know more than you I mean these sort of basic things that I don't think any I don't think in and of themselves that any of the twelve are totally revelatory and I don't think he would think they are but he gave them together as a package that I think for whatever reason the reason that it worked for you the reason that it for me the reason why I worked for so many people was that something has happened in the last 20 years partly as we're watching our old institutions crumble partly as we're watching the media just feed us awful nonsense partly the rise of YouTube and a million other voices a lot of people kind of lost their way within that I don't it's a partly probably because of what we talked about before about helicopter parents or distant parents or all of these things right like that whole mix that whole stew and what I saw was a clinical psychologist from Toronto who is this mild-mannered sounds like Kermit the Frog guy travel the world and help people I mean help people in the most fundamental ways I'll tell you two quick things so one of them we were in Dublin and you know when you give these big talks at these theaters you know there's a huge entrance out front and then there's usually an artist entrance on the side so that you don't have to walk in or out through all the fans and everything so you know we did a ton of travel I think we got to Dublin that day I think from the UK you know there's there's jetlag there's just like the endless amount of emails reading articles about himself that our lives doing the press all that stuff but he never phoned it in he gave a different talk every night which is staggeringly incredible I don't know that anyone can do that besides him anyway it's late night it's probably like midnight after a very very long day he's given a talk he's done the Q&A he's shook all the hands taking all the pictures we walk out the side and we see these two guys in the distance and they're kind of hugging and they kind of run right at us and one of them was about 60 the other one was about 25 maybe 30 and it turned out that they were a father and son who had not seen each other for like five or six years before that they had had a falling-out and by coincidence because of reading 12 rules for life they had started getting their lives in order and they were at the same show together and saw each other and reconnected that night so there they are crying now Jordan starts crying I I teared up a little bit it's like think how profoundly powerful that is not because this guy was selling them something right like it was like selling snake oil not because he was trying to make a profit off these guys but he says get your [ __ ] in order get your life in order and you might be able to get the world in order right clean your room before you clean the world and that's what these guys did and they reconnected that night incredible another one real quick was a night that we were we were somewhere in Scandinavia I think maybe in Sweden and the guy that's running the jet bridge runs on to the plane and it's a young black guy and he says to Jordan he says I and I only mention that he's black by the way because if you listen to the press they were saying oh it's all angry white men that listen to Jordan Peterson I couldn't care what what you know what race this guy is he runs onto the plane he says I could get fired for this but I just have to tell you I've read 12 rules for life you fixed my life I got this job I'm doing great blah blah blah Jordan gets up shake his hand the guy was glowing like beyond beyond glowing and I could give you a million a million stories like that so I saw something real I saw real true change I'll give you one other real quick we're in this one was in Stockholm for sure I go to H&M which is their number-one export besides IKEA from Sweden and I just wanted to get a baseball cap because it was it was really windy out and I walk in I grab the cap and then I'm on line and there's a young guy in front of me and the cashier and they're speaking in English the young guy has a suit he tells the cashier he's like I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight this is my first suit that I've ever bought the cashier says I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight and then I tap on the guy and I said me too and they knew who I was and we talked for a little bit and I thought how absolutely incredible this is this young kid out of I was probably 19 years old is buying a suit so that he can dress up so that he can stand up straight with his shoulders back and attend an event of a guy who helped him turn his life around and I gave him I gave him a shout-out at the show that night and had you know 2,000 people cheering for him I had him stand up in his in his new suit so I saw real tangible change and there's so little of that in life and it and it comes with it comes with flings it comes with arrows you know it comes with arrows that are sometimes being shot up that are gonna come right down on you because you know you start talking to media without knowing that they're trying to get you and the rest of it but it was it was a magical year and a half and I have no doubt that he'll he'll eventually be back and better than ever man yeah that'll be that'll be great to see that notion of everything coming down to you and taking responsibility for your life and man I I will never understand push back on that like I I actually don't get it I don't get how somebody could think that things will be worse if they look inward take responsibility I've told the story so many times I'll give a truncated version but the very first blog article I ever wrote it was my first foray into stepping from sort of behind the company and not being the face or anything to being the face and I wrote this blog article and I wanted it to be like the greatest gift I could give like the the thing deepest inside me that I had learned that it changed my life forever the the gift that I've been trying to give to all my employees cuz I used to do this is back at Quest I used to do what I called quest University where I was like look I will teach you anything and everything that I know about entrepreneurship going back to the very first thing I was talking about I always thought that was how is gonna reach people and the mindset stuff just came because that that's the primer right if you get that right then you can build a business or be a linchpin in your life would be a better parent or whatever like it it is all going to come down to the foundation of how you think how you interpret the world like just the way you look at things and so I write this blog article and it the title of it is everything is your fault and the punchline was imagine getting hit by a drunk driver whose fault is that and I'm like it's your fault I thought people are gonna be like yes this is amazing and people were pissed and they were have your victim blaming and when you do this this is crazy and I'm like look in a world where even the insurance company is going to tell you that it's the drunk drivers fault I just want to remind you you could have made a different choice and gotten a different outcome that's rad that's so empowering and to like being empowered even though that means you have to own your suffering even though if things are not going well you've got to turn around and say yo like there's I could do something different and get a different outcome so I can't just pass the buck I can't make this somebody else problem in my thing is even even if just [ __ ] the data shows this isn't your problem you didn't create this this is happening to you it doesn't help it doesn't help it doesn't know it puts you in a position you're you're not solution oriented well just to go off that real quick you know it it's first off that's very consistent with everything else you're saying which is nice it shows that you have like a holistic view of the world that this isn't just like some tape together Frankenstein monster that like sort of makes sense right like this this consistently makes sense but so specifically answer your question about how you can't understand the mindset of the other people it's really interesting because I think even the people that that purport to believe that it's it everything's you it's not your fault it's the system and corruption and blah blah blah I think if you if you took them at a really individual level most people know and you can get them to realize they won't you know it'll take a couple of conversations that it's their life and that it is on them to fix it I think intuitively we know that we know that because it's the story that has made us come this far I mean I say this in the book this thing about what are what are all the stories that you care about what did Luke Skywalker do when he realized what the Empire was doing he blew up the Death Star he didn't ask someone else to do it I mean every movie what did what did Frodo do with the ring he didn't say I could somebody else get that thing to Mordor he went on the quests himself I mean every every story every forget fictitious stories what is what does LeBron James do in basketball you know what I mean he dragged a whole bunch of very average teams eventually to Championships he lost a lot of championships too he lost more championships than he won but everyone it's on you to make the best of the world not to just complain about everything and I think most people do understand that I think what I'm more scared about and I'm more scared per se what a more generally fearful of is that there are bad actors who want to use that emotion use that fear use that feeling of uselessness to control people and that's what societies do so when we hear all these ideas about socialism and all that that are the complete reverse of everything we've talked about here it's oh it's not sold as something scary which it is meaning that the government can do whatever it wants basically at any time and you're gonna owe everything to the government what is it sold as it's sold as compassion we're all gonna have a part of everything where everyone's gonna have health care we're all gonna be nice everyone's gonna go to college everyone but that's not real it's not real and it's actually removing the most human part of us which is the part to fight for what's yours that's what you must do as a human being or don't do it and see see how it turns out yes ma'am [ __ ] a big issue that we could do a whole nother I mean really that's largely what this entire thing has been about but man don't burn this book was a really interesting read it was really you're not trying to hide you lay out all your ideas for the world to see I think it's pretty interesting I respect the way that you are always willing to change and even just watching since you started interviewing people watching you change and evolve it's been really interesting and and I think so early on in the book talking about coming out of the closet it's something that really rings true with how you live your life I think that's dope man working people connect with you get the book find out more you're not exactly an invisible person on the internet so I'm sure a lot of people know but for the people don't someone find you they could probably figure it out my Brandon guy is pretty good it's Rueben report calm and Twitter Rueben report and Instagram Reuben port all that and it's don't burn this book comment or they can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and the rest of it and and I just would say I've thoroughly enjoyed this like this is what this is what real conversation is all about this is this is how you push things forward because you show people that these aren't just everything we've talked about here these aren't just things we're talking about they're things we're trying to live so once this coronavirus passes let's break bread in real life like real people you know like we did when we were kids remember you can go out to a field with other people it was a long time ago but I ride as days awesome and I'm sort of that that'd be great right on man it was a pleasure like definitely guys thank you so much that's the end of the episode normally this is where I shake hands and push the microwave so to take care of takes care of itself but these days no mics which way hi brother thank you so much man you're right about the matrix for 50 years we've been suppressing the really interesting new ideas and calling names on anybody who would propose ideas that would point out the unstable nature of art market democracy