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

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

Oracle: Free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/iced Ramp: Now get $250 when you join Ramp at https://ramp.com/ich Gusto: Try 3 months free at https://gusto.com/iced Subscribe to  @RubinReport  Dave Rubin Here Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps : 00:00 - Intro 00:01:31 - Is a mass shift to conservative ideals happening? 00:01:56 - Rubins Liberal to conservative flip 00:06:46 - DOGE - Department of Government Efficiency 00:11:20 - Why wasteful Gov spending not addressed sooner? 00:12:53 - Sponsor: Oracle 00:14:03 - Twitter HQ and Shadowbans 00:18:29 - Where deregulation hurts people 00:21:07 - The role of government 00:25:36 - Tariffs discussion 00:38:09 - Sponsor: Ramp 00:39:13 - Thoughts on Bitcoin 00:43:36 - 0% income tax possible? 00:46:52 - Trump presidency outlook 00:49:28 - Is the American dream dead? 00:53:24 - Undiscussed big issues 00:59:21 - Over-discussed non-issues 01:01:37 - Sponsor: Gusto 01:02:54 - Why are people so divisive? 01:10:37 - Finding truth in media 01:12:35 - Tenant media’s impact 01:16:37 - Criticism of yourself 01:21:31 - "Coming out" experience 01:33:48 - Relationship with Jordan Peterson 01:36:48 - Difference between Hate vs. free speech 01:44:34 - Media business revenue *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Not much. The government has become just an insane monster. It's just an ever-growing monster that just keeps eating more money, eating more resources. None of these agencies are doing what they set out to do. What do you think the role of the government should be? Not much. I would say the founders basically got it completely right, that everything should be dealt with at the state and local level,

and then the federal government should have a couple things that they're supposed to do. What are your predictions for the finances of the average American? I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now across the board. I think the world is changing in massive ways. We're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now. I think we're in for an incredible time in America. It doesn't matter how much money you have. But as a general rule, I would tell anybody.

Dave Rubin, thank you so much for coming on. on the iced coffee hour. We really appreciate it. Good to be with you guys. We are drinking our psychotropic drink and we'll see what happens in about a half hour from that. Shout out Chris Williamson. This is wait for it to kick in.

I walked in, I said, what he got with caffeine thinking there might be some ice coffee involved and now we got mushrooms and God knows what. So we'll see what happens. So we first wanted to discuss the cultural conservative shift that I feel like has really been hitting hard the past probably, I mean started maybe even like seven or eight years ago,

and then slowly it's been ramping up. And then recently it's just exploded. I mean, you have Joe Rogan, who's just a lifelong liberal going to the right. You have Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, even lending credence to Donald Trump after the attempt. And you actually started as a liberal commentating for the Young Turks.

And then you started to see things a little bit differently and started going to the right. Where do you think that all started from? So I started with the Young Turks in about 2014. And although I don't have a lot of great things to say, about Jenk from the Young Turks. I do always give the guy credit for he was early in on digital media, which now has completely dwarfed mainstream media.

And even just this morning when I was on the plane, I was flipping through Twitter. And it's like MSNBC's being sold off and CNN's about to fire half their people. And there's just complete up people now. So I do give credit to the guy for kind of getting in early on that. I was always kind of a liberal growing up. I'm from New York.

I was just sort of like a New York old school liberal, which is very, very different, as I'm sure you guys know from what the modern sort of framing of what a liberal is. I was liberal in that. Like, I didn't really care who you married. I didn't care what you smoked. In some sense, I'm still at least I consider myself begrudgingly pro-choice. But that was sort of when things work, you can kind of be liberal.

And that was what most people were in America at the time. I'm a child of the 80s. I'm 48. Like, that was really how things were. And then conservatives were thought of as a little more conservative. kind of, you know, were more about business and war, something like that. They were meaner or, you know, you picture like The Simpsons, all the rich guys in the room with Mr. Burns and the lightning in the background, and Dracula's there and everybody else.

And I started at the Young Turks, and they were kind of, to me, they were like liberals, but they were hopped up on caffeine. They were just screaming all the time. Everybody was a racist and a bigot and a buffoon that they were fighting. And I kind of liked it. And I think that that's actually what caught on culturally for the progressives is that they were just like juiced up about everything all the time and they were just so right and everybody else was so wrong. And then after about a year there, I started thinking something is not right here.

Like there, you know, sometimes when you just feel something for a while and then you don't, you don't have like the exact touch point yet, but I was just kind of feeling like this can't make sense. Like how are we so right about everything? And it's all so obvious and all of these people are just evil and bigots and racist. Like it can't be. And then there were a couple moments along the way that that kind of broke me. The most famous one that I think became way bigger than me was when Sam Harris was on real time with Bill Maher with Ben Affleck and Affleck was on and people think he maybe was getting a little juiced up for Batman at the time. And they started discussing radical Islam and Sam was trying to explain that you have to be able to criticize ideas

without being bigoted towards people. And Affleck just jumped all over Sam Harris, who's a very soft-spoken atheist. He was on the show to talk about mindful meditation, basically, a new book he had about that. And Bill Amar, who was lifelong liberal, live and let live kind of thing. And basically he called them gross and racist. That was the line. And I was watching it. I remember watching it live that night. And I was watching it. And I thought, holy shit, this, this, right now, what was happening right in front of me, this is what I've been trying to formulate in my head that I knew was wrong, that the liberals, the progressives, somehow were completely unable to separate

how you should be able to talk about ideas, criticize ideas, without being bigoted towards people. And once I saw it, like, so perfectly, and maybe it had something to do with Affleck being kind of like an A-list star and kind of over the top, so it was so emotive. I just started talking about that on my show, and suddenly all these people started coming to me,

like, Dave, I'm seeing something wrong here too. And then really what happened was, I started talking to some, conservatives. I started talking to Larry Elder. There was a very famous moment we had. I started talking to Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, all of these guys. And what I found was, even though I disagreed with them about some stuff, there was an awful lot of just, oh, live and let live. America's kind of good. Like, let's see if we can talk this stuff out. And really, all I was getting on the other side was scorched earth. So anyway, to kind of get that to exactly

where your question is, this new thing that's happening right now, I don't really describe it as conservative as much as it's just pro-America, right? Because Tulsi is definitely not a conservative. Tulsi is definitely pro-choice. And, you know, the war thing has now flipped because the Democrats have become the party of war. But RFK is definitely not a traditional conservative. But what's bringing all these guys together, it's basically a love for America and it's a love for free speech and hopefully a restoration of those things. So I would say it's like it's a wide tent, new conservative movement, if you want to use the conservative word.

I mean, I'm married to a guy. Like, that's not the most conservative thing out there. So, like, there's something really interesting brewing, and I'm very, I've been getting a lot of cred for the last couple weeks because it's so connected to my journey, but I'm very proud that I had anything to whatever, to whatever extent I had anything to do with it. I'm very proud because I think America's back

and we had a little something to do with it. I genuinely think one of the biggest catalyst to Trump winning this election was Elon buying Twitter. Oh, yeah. now X. Oh, yeah. And now he's wanting to run the Doge Department of Government Efficiency with Vakramuswamy, which I personally am like absolutely thrilled about.

Oh my gosh, me too. No, it could not be better. It literally could not be better. And you speak with Elon or you have quite a bit actually. Do you think that this is something that's actually going to come to fruition? Oh, yes. Actually going to make a difference? Yes.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. How do they have any authority? Because my understanding is that they could make recommendations, but they can't implement anything themselves. Well, we don't know exactly yet because it's a new department. So there's a certain irony here, right? Their whole goal is to eliminate departments, right? We have something like 479 departments.

You know, it's more than two a year, basically, in the history of the United States. And they're adding a department to get rid of departments. So we don't know, like, the technical mechanism yet. I saw all these people like Elizabeth Warren, like, is like, oh, how are they going to be so efficient? They need two people to do the job, you know, implying it should be a one-person job. But it's like, first off, Elon has 20 other jobs, at least. The guy is literally sending us to Mars. He's building tunnels under L.A.

He's the top player of Diablo, too. Right. He's a credited on the L.A. Crazy. How? Is he really, is he, wait, is he literally the top player? No, he's not the top player. He did actually recently speed run something and set the world record in Diablo, but I think

that he's officially top 20 leaderboard in the world, which is insanely competitive. Because he, he's, I mean, you have people that dedicate their lives to Diablo. Right. Probably thousands, tens of thousands of people. And he has all these lives and jobs, and still he's top 20. Well, I can tell you a story not about Diablo specifically, but maybe a little bit about his psyche that might explain that because the first time that I met him was right after he bought Twitter.

So it was about two weeks after he bought Twitter. And I got a message from somebody saying, Elon wants to meet you, can you come? And I was in Florida, where I'm in Miami, and obviously there in San Francisco, I called every friend I know with a plane. And I was like, somebody, you got to get me there immediately. Like he wants to meet me tonight.

And nobody would get me on a plane. I get on the, finally, there was one flight that I could get on. I get, it was literally the last seat, you know, at, you know, 37B right in the middle to go media on. I show up at Twitter at about midnight and there's, I don't know, like 50 or 75 people up there. And he immediately walks out. He says hi, he's like, and his eyes were kind of bloodshied. It was a long day. You know, he's just dressed in like a ratty t-shirt and he's got sneakers on and kind of, you know, just average jeans.

Like, could not, if you had just seen him down the street, you know, you know, You'd just be like, that's any guy. And he's like, Dave, you know, they told me there's some weird stuff going on with your Twitter account. He's like, I'm really tired. But if you want me to look at this now, we could spend a couple hours. Otherwise, if you could just come back in the morning. And I was like, just that right there tells you everything you need to know about.

The guy, like, I am one of a zillion people, like that you're going to now at 1230 a.m., we're going to sit down and go under the hood and look in my Twitter and see what happens. So I was like, I was like, it's okay. We could do this in the morning. I did spend a couple hours that night with the with the programmers going through the stuff, but then the next day I met with him and I'm subsequently met with him a couple other times and the guy's just doing a million things. Like if you're supposed to be on a journey in life, if you're supposed to find something that

you want to do and do it, I don't know that anyone's doing a better example of that. So to answer the question, I think they absolutely are going to go in and as Vivek said, they are going to delete departments. I think almost nothing is off the table. They are going to, the government has become just an insane, I would say, monster. It's just an ever-growing monster that just keeps eating more money, eating more resources. This is the deep state that, you know, Trump's been talking about for years. And they're going to go in and they're going to do it quick, sort of like what's happening in Argentina right now.

And then suddenly people are going to be like, holy shit, they did save $2 trillion in the budget. And people are going to get some of their tax money back and we're not going to have all these wasteful departments. and things are still going to work. And that's what I think the left is now worried about more than anything else. It's not that he's Hitler. Nobody thinks Donald Trump is Hitler, honestly. Maybe there's some people that are very, very confused because they watch too much MSNBC. But what they're really afraid of is this guy is going to get in, and now he has the right people

around him. He didn't have the right people around him last time. But now between RFK and Tulsi and Elon and Vivek, and the list goes on and on. I think Rubio is going to do a great job, Secretary of State. It's like they can really do things right now. And I think we're in for an incredible time in America the next decade. Nobody think to do this sooner.

Because we've all been talking about wasteful government spending. I mean, it's nothing new. You see, like, the toilets going up in San Francisco that costs like a million dollars for, like, a toilet. Yeah. I mean, I think the main reason for it was the culture wasn't ready for it. You know, like, the people that were like, oh, taxes are too high or government's not efficient

or there's too many agencies or you go to D.C. And there's these giant buildings where nobody's working and you're like, what the hell's going on here? I just don't think it was, like, culturally cool enough. to move anything, really. So, like, there was never going to be a great, you know, every now and again, you'd get a politician, Rand Paul, I like a lot, obviously Libertarian Center from Kentucky. It's like he gets in there and he constantly talks about budgets and what are we, you know,

if we're giving money to Ukraine, let's say, could we get a receipt, like basic stuff? And he just gets, he gets no traction with any of that. But he's, I think, respected by, let's say, smart people. I think they needed a cultural movement behind it. And I think largely what happened was, Once COVID hit, and we saw just the absolute disastrous response across the board from the NIH and the CDC and the Department of Ed and just every department that you can think of. Then suddenly there was enough of like a wake up around people. And then it's also because of this.

It's because of podcasts and people talking about things honestly in a way that they weren't seeing on media. So there was just like a confluence of things. And I would say it was sort of perfect timing and then the right group of people. and that we're on the precipice of fixing it, which, by the way, will not be easy or anything else, but I do think some major things are going to happen. But before we get into that, even if you think it is a bit overhyped,

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Yeah, oh yeah. Like what was the problem there? Yeah. So first off, it was a, like, it's hard to even go back that year and a half or whatever. Was it two years even already that he bought that thing? It might even be about two years now. I feel like it's been more. Time's, I don't know.

Yeah, time has gotten very weird lately. That's what endless scrolling does to all of our brains. It's terrible. I hate it. Really, it just like crushes the time shift or something. It was about two weeks after he bought it. And it was just chaos there because he was firing people left and right. You know, now it sounds like he's fired up to about 80.

of the entire company. But remember, when he got in, he immediately fired a whole bunch of people. So it was huge offices there. I mean, their commissary is massive. And there was just nobody there. I'm talking about even the next day when I went back at normal office hours, not when I was there just at 1 a.m. He also felt that there were people there that were still moles, you know, because they were still dealing with. We knew that there were people that either were working with the CIA or the FBI or somebody was, somebody government related was in a Twitter. So he didn't know how many people were there. He was worried that if he started firing people,

that somebody could just take down Twitter altogether. I mean, that was part of the complexity of how do you fire the right people because they could do things that would make it completely useless and you just bought the thing for, you know, 44 bill. So anyway, when we sat down and started looking at my account, so I should back up for one second and say that, you know, I've been on Twitter for like 12 or 13 years, something like that.

And you can sort of see and being on your, YouTube and all these things. You can sort of see when things are kind of working and it feels roughly right. It's not that you get the exact same amount of views every day or anything else, but you don't see like these insane spikes and then like you put out the same type of thing a few days later and get, you know, no views. And I was going through all these like crazy versions of this for a while. And again, it wasn't just Twitter. I was seeing this on YouTube too. Anyway, I went in there and the programmers basically, they just kind of opened up the hook. and showed me what was going on there.

And it was really extraordinary because Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter during the old days, if you remember, he testified under oath. Ted Cruz asked him, do you guys shadow ban? And he said no, under oath. Now, he probably was using a little bit of a linguistic trick there because shadow ban isn't a technical term in some sense, right?

So we could all define it a little bit differently. But in essence, do you do something that depresses views for some people in a feed that should, be chronological. And he said, no, they showed me. I mean, they showed me the entire system. The entire system was built to do that. It wasn't that it wasn't a bug. It wasn't a bug. It was a feature. Like the entire system was literally built with endless amounts. I can't even tell you how many tags there were related to words or connections or you tweeted at this person or you tweeted this topic on this day. Like it was the craziest. I'm not a programmer also, so I'm sitting with

programmers and some of the, you know, the code and stuff is going above my head, but the basic stuff that you're looking at of this word, that word, this topic connected to this hashtag, and you'd follow this person, so don't let it be seen. The entire system was built for that. So that was, I would say, it wasn't shocking to me because I knew something was wrong. And clearly everyone that was paying attention knew something was wrong, but it was shocking in that the former CEO of Twitter testified that they don't do it. So, I think that right now, the beauty of what's happening is that by Elon going in and opening this up, I don't do my own Facebook, my guys do that, but like it seems that Facebook's gotten a little bit better. You mentioned Zuckerberg.

Well, clearly he wasn't as involved in this election as he was before so that there's an implication, okay, maybe we're fiddling around a little bit less on the electoral. Even Bezos made some statements. Bezos Washington Post didn't even endorse Kamala. They didn't endorse a candidate at all. So you can see by, I think basically, by Elon being brave, we needed somebody. that was bigger than the, the, the, me or Shapiro or even Rogan. We needed like, we needed like huge forces.

And I think when Elon basically teamed up with Trump, that, that fully shifted something in the culture. And that has now led to this, to this incredible moment. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids. And I want to give back to the community. Ooh.

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I mean, I'm a big deregulation, guys. So I would try to deregulate as much as possible. We were talking right before we started. I mean, both of us left L.A. Like L.A. to do anything, to start a new business or build a studio in your home or literally do landscaping outside of your house or anything, there's an obscene amount of regulations and rules and, you know, all these things that you have to pay and all of this stuff.

So where could deregulation hurt as it pertains to tech specific? Or just the average person. For any industry, like what do you think is going to get impacted by that the worst? I'm not really worried. Like, will there be something down the pike that they'll figure? I don't know if you had no building codes. I think there's probably ways you could privatize a lot of that stuff or at least make it a little more local focused than federally focused. I'm actually not worried about that at all.

Like, I'm sure there is something, right? Clearly, they will do something and there will be unintended consequences. I think it's all a risk worth taking right now. Like to me, if you just deleted, as Vivek said, if you just deleted the Department of Education tomorrow, we'll see what happens on the other side. And I actually think it's going to be a hell of a hell of, well, you can just, I mean, you can because it's a giant building

and those people will need jobs. But you know what? It's not going to be. That's the thing. That's the thing. None of these agencies are doing what they set out to do. The EPA was basically set out to kind of keep an eye on companies that were dumping sewage into the water.

But it basically became a law writing agency. So these things have become way too big. They have way too much power. And I think if you eliminated virtually all of them. I mean, their goal is to eliminate about 300 of them. But if you eliminated virtually all of them, then what would happen? Well, most policies would be kicked back to the states,

which is exactly what the founders intended. And I think that that, for the most part, I live in Miami. I want most of the things. things that I have to deal with in my life to be dealt with in Miami. And then from there, Florida, and then the stuff that we all have to deal with, say, the border, that should be dealt with the federal government. But the less agencies and middleman, I mean, this is what Trump, I mean, he started the thing about the deep state eight years ago. And nobody really talked about that. We didn't really realize, boy, there is this thing in D.C. that just exists. It just

exists, this middle management bureaucratic nonsense. And finally, people are seeing it. So I think, I'm telling you, they're going to do a lot. It is going to be like Malay and Argentina, and it's going to happen very quickly. What do you think the role of the government should be? Not much. Not much. I would say the founders basically got it completely right, that everything should be dealt with at the state and local level.

And then the federal government should have a couple things that they're supposed to do. So that would be border, make sure the states aren't warring with each other, you know, interstate commerce, couple things like that, foreign policy, which back then was way less of a big issue as it is now. the government shouldn't do much, and especially as technology innovates and as AI comes around, like there's just going to be more and more ability for you to live the way you want without governmental interference. You know, what does the government do particularly well? Not much. And I say that as someone that lives in Florida with a highly competent government. So for example,

you know, two years ago we had Hurricane E and basically a category five that hit Southwest Florida, it demolished Fort Myers, Sanibel Captiva, some of the barrier islands there. Immediately after the hurricane, everybody on the news was saying to rebuild the Sanibel Causeway, which is about four miles, was gonna take three years.

That's what everybody was saying. DeSantis basically had it rebuilt in a month because he brought in the right people, he cut regulation. I actually met one of the contractors at DeSantis's reelection night. A guy came up to me, said that he was one of the contractors that worked on it.

And he said, Dave, I just wanna tell you this, that this guy, he basically brought all the best contractors down. He took everybody to the bridge and basically said, what do we need to do? We gave him our recommendations and he started making it happen the next day. That's proper competent governance. We're just so not used to that. We're used to what you fled in California, an ever-growing state that taxes endlessly and punishes people for success.

And then it's like, how is it that I have nice, clean roads in Florida? How is it that we don't have homeless people? We don't have no homeless people. but why do things work with no income tax in Florida? And why does Cali tax the high hell out of you and have much worse services and much worse infrastructure and a whole series of other problems? So I would say as little as the government can do

is what I wanted to do. What about leaving it to the private sector? I would leave as much as possible to the private sector. I mean, this is where, okay, so should there be some regulations around environment, let's say, because you don't want every company dumping sewage into the river. that's like the base one that most people would ask about. Yeah, I think you can have some basic regulations around that.

But most, yeah, most things, I see, the thing is capitalism, the beauty of capitalism is that someone's always trying to make a better mouse trap. So if you're a company that's, that it is exposed to be doing horrible things. And this is also the beauty of the internet, by the way, because now we can expose things a lot quicker because we all have phones and we all have cameras and all of these things. It's like, if you're a company and whatever you're making, you're making, you're making, making glasses and it turns out that actually you're dumping a ton of toxic sludge into the water or into whatever into the fields behind you and there's schools there. It's like that will now be

exposed very quickly and there will be more competition for that. Because here's, I remember a while ago there's that big oil spill. I think it was like 2008 or 2009. I don't know anybody who was like, oh, that company had that big oil spill, but they're five cents cheaper. I'm not going to go there. They just look at the price. You're like, all right, well, it's cheaper. That oil spill, I didn't see it. Right. Well, it's always tricky to get people to care about things that aren't happening in their backyard, right? When it happens in your backyard, then it's like not in my backyard. And then suddenly you're screaming about it. But if it happens miles away, you don't realize all the reasons that it will potentially affect you or anything else. I think the world's changing. I think the world is changing in massive ways. And it's deep, it's definitely connected to what we're talking about with Twitter and YouTube and everything else. It's like the media used to just control that Overton window in such a tight way that the stories that we would see were, were so slim in nature and leaving out so much. And now it's like if there's an oil spill and something really terrible is happening, it's going to be covered in new media in a completely new way and it will get out there

more. Can you force people to care about it enough so that there are different regulations? Maybe, but, you know, the Exxon Valdez was a horrific, the Exxon Valdez was a horrific oil spill. We have regulations against oil spills. The captain, I think, was drunk and fell asleep. Like, there's no system that's perfect. So I would, personally, I would just be reining in all of that. And then you have to hope that enough good competition is out there so that companies will do better.

What about tariffs? What are your thoughts on that? I feel like people have a very poor understanding of tariffs. They really do. We played a lot of videos of people being very confused about tariffs on my show lately. The thing that confuses me so much, it's like, okay, I studied economics in college, but at the same time, now people have very, very convincing arguments on both sides of the aisle. People on the left say that people on the right don't understand tariffs, and people on the right

say that the people on the left don't understand tariffs. What's your understanding of tariffs? And then I'll ask you to steal man that argument. Sure. So, well, my version, I'll tell you why I agree with Trump's proposition for tariffs first, because that's what sort of brought this back, right? I mean, basically what's happening right now is that other countries are putting huge tariffs on our products, so we can't, as I played a video on my show, Mr.

What's his name from Sharpton? Kevin O'Leary, who's great. He was basically explaining that, you know, we can't sell an American car in Japan because they put 100% tariff on it. So no idiot in Japan is gonna be like, man, I really want that GM so bad. I have to have that escalate that I'm gonna pay for it, right?

And we don't do the reverse on their stuff here. So Trump is in effect using the threat of tariffs to get some sort of tariff parity. And then the hope would be that we would have enough competition in America to deal with that. And hopefully we would, I mean, from my perspective, I would then want people to be buying more American,

but I don't want it to be exorbitant to buy, to import cars or anything else, because we should be able to buy whatever we want to buy. But I'm basically with Trump on this that we have to at least threaten a little bit. It's sort of like Trump with NATO the first time around. You know, his whole thing, everyone was like, he's trying to destroy NATO.

And Trump was like, well, I'm not trying to destroy NATO, but why is it that we foot the bill on NATO and nobody else does, you know? And then what did Trump get? out of it, well, suddenly a whole bunch of other countries started paying into NATO as well. So I think I think that it needs to be a little bit more of an even game. That would be my basic version of it. It makes sense if we were to try to get the other countries to stop levying tariffs on the

United States. Then I feel like that would help out a ton. But in terms of just like increasing tariffs from other countries trying to sell in America. Well, I think the argument, his argument is if we say to Japan, if there is a hundred percent tariff. That's what, that's what Mr. Wonderful said, Kevin O'Leary. If there's a 100% tariff on American cars going into Japan, then if we say, okay, there's a hundred percent tariff on Japanese cars coming into America, then suddenly they'll be like, okay, well, actually, we're going to lower this. So I think he's using it as a point of leverage. I think what a lot of, I think what the other version of it

would be, if we were trying to steal me on the other version, it's something like, oh, okay, now Trump's going to do it and they're going to do it, and we're going to get in this, like, escalating price war. But that's not really how competition works. The idea is, oh, if you guys are going to have this crazy tariff, we're just going to do the exact same thing. And then the car manufacturers of Japan might be like, boy, this isn't such a great idea because we can't sell in America anymore

because it's too expensive to go there. So again, this is another one where I just think competition and why do we have such insane rules? You know what I mean? Like, can either one of you make the argument for that? You know, why do we have, why do we allow this with China and Japan and plenty of other countries?

Why do we, Try to make the argument. Well, I think we need cheap labor. I mean, when it really comes down to it, right? So if we're importing a lot from China, saves the average person here, a significant amount of money. They don't really see or notice the deficit in terms of national debt. It makes no difference for them.

But if they're able to get an iPhone for a grand instead of $3,000, the average person says, I don't care. Well, it goes to your other point that it's hard to make people care about things properly. And they don't really think about where their iPhone is coming from or the women that are literally using their fingers to, you know, put the chips in and all that stuff. But I would say basically if you can create a situation, and I think it's fairly obvious Trump is going to do this, if you can create a situation where other countries feel that they can't just rip off America anymore, that ultimately they will lower tariffs too. Like, it's actually insane. We make some pretty good cars in America. We didn't, you know, 50 years ago, but we do now, actually.

It's like, why can't we sell them in Europe? It's because of the tariff. So you threaten them basically say, hey, we're gonna do to you what you've been doing to us, and then they might just come around. But we'll see. I mean, we'll see if he actually does it and what comes to fruition.

I think it's a conversation worth happening. So, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. I feel like that's kind of the theme of this entire presidency. It's like, it'll be interesting to see kind of how it'll still. We'll not see me back. We'll see.

Well, I'm mostly thinking like RFK even, like what'll even happen with that? I think it's all just like, it's going to be such a massive shift. Yeah. It would be interesting to see. Well, we're not used to doing amazing things in America, at least in, you know, you guys are probably, how old do you guys?

34. 34. 26. So I'm 48. So you guys have a couple years on you. Like, we're just not used to doing amazing things anymore. America, we sent people to the moon. I mean, we were in a space race.

Like, we used to do incredible things. Elon is actually doing incredible things. But as a nation, we haven't been doing incredible things anymore. We've done a lot of unimpressive things, I would say. if you look a lot of our architecture and our infrastructure, and we've stopped dreaming in a lot of ways. So it seems to me that Trump now represents a restoration of the American dream, that it's like we're going to get government off your back.

We're going to look in and be like, well, what did happen during COVID? And why did we inject all these kids with this stuff? And why did we force doctors out of work if they didn't want to be injected with it? And why did we think we could lock people in their home? And how did these agencies get so powerful? And why did nobody get fired? Like we're actually going to look under the hood, to use a reference I used before with Twitter. We're going to look under the hood and be like, wow, we have been wasting insane amount of money.

We have been doing these crazy military adventures overseas without really understanding why or explaining it to the American people. And I think all of that, I think when people see a little bit more of how screwy things were and then they start realizing, boy, it didn't have to be this way. I think it will get more people more and more involved. I also think they're going to decentralize a bit of the D.C. power and move some of the agencies out. And I think when you do that, you know, it's like, why is the Department of Agriculture in D.C.? I don't know, maybe it should be in Iowa. Like, once you actually do that, then the power center will be less powerful and you will be giving back more power to the people. So interesting, that reminded me that we were talking to somebody and they were telling us about government spending. And they said that, and they experienced this firsthand where they had a certain budget for an area.

aircraft and because they didn't get the bud like they got really close to uh you know the budget by the end but they had to like use up they have to use it so they get more so what they ended up doing is just like flying planes yeah from coast to coast to yeah just to be able to hit and say okay we reached our budget and now we could get more money the next year and if we don't do that then they're going to cut the budget and by the way they're flying empty planes that was back and forth so that that's a perfect example of what's wrong with the government no business could obviously operate this way, right? You could never operate that way. You would never be like, I have to spend more. Otherwise, I won't magically get more money because there's no supply and demand there or anything

else. It makes no sense. But that's how the government has operated. So why is it that the government to build a bathroom in D.C. on the street costs, you know, 10 times what it would cost if somebody else was doing it. Like, this is consistently what we've seen with the government. So I think just pulling back on all of that stuff. And that's exactly what Dogey is going to do. They're going to look at all of that. You know, what did they just find out this week? The Pentagon has, has, literally passed a seventh audit. Seventh audit, like they're missing like $300 billion. It's like, it's completely insane. Or it's somebody there, even a year ago, there was something with one of the checks we wrote to Ukraine where a comma was in the wrong spot and we actually

accidentally gave them an extra couple. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're kidding. My interview with Rand Paul will have the exact numbers on that. But there's all sorts of evidence of this type of that never happens to me. Yeah, I know. No, and if it did happen, if it did. But if it did happen to you, your accountant would be in a lot of shit, right? Like, you'd be like, this can't happen again, and I probably have to fire you. Did anybody, like, on the receiving end of that check be like, well, hold on a second. You actually said this amount. No, of course not.

It wasn't found out until, like, a year later. I wish I could remember what the exact number was. No. No, because. Because it, same thing. It goes through so many filters and layers. And now I got on you. The person receiving, it probably doesn't know how much is supposed to be set.

They're like, oh, the money's here. All right. And that's a whole other rabbit one that I would prefer not to go down. But the point I would say broadly is that this is exactly what the problem is. People that are engaged that sort of care about these issues, they don't even really understand what's going on. And I think that when they peel back this stuff, we're going to see such a mess under there and it will be able to be cleaned quickly.

Did you see the video that Malay put out in Argentina, I think right before he got elected, where he's in front of the board and he has all the departments. Oh, yeah. The board. Afwera! Afwera! And he's ripping them off. And guess what?

he's done it. And now their GDP is growing by something like a budget surplus for the first time. Yeah, they've budget surplus. The GDP is, they get 8.4% growth. Like, and it's just because he was like, we will not do this anymore. It's just enough. And that's kind of where we're at. But in fairness, I haven't heard like much from the constituents of Argentina in terms of like how this is affecting them. I know for Naib Buckele, the guy from El Salvador, like that's actually treating people in El Salvador incredibly well. My roommate that I had back in college, he's El Salvadorian. And I actually texted him because I see all of this stuff on Twitter, but you never know what's real and what's fake. Sure. And so I texted him and like, hey, I know you're El Salvadorian. How is this actually

affecting people? I don't want to go by what, you know, some random, like, white dude in Minnesota is saying about, you know, El Salvador. I want to see from an actual constituent. And he said that he was actually able to go and visit his grandma for the first time in like a decade. Wow. Because it's finally safe enough to go and see her. So I've been to El Salvador a couple times before Bukali, because my brother-in-law was working with an organization that was helping. poor people get shoes, sidebar, but he had to live in an incredibly protected armed guard, barbed wire community that was basically for Americans that were trying to just help these communities. And when we went, I mean, you could not walk outside. You know, you basically knew if you walked

outside, first off, you literally couldn't because they had giant metal gates and armed guards there, but that they made it very clear. If you walk out of this thing, if you figure out how to get out of here without us, you will likely be killed or at least have all your stuff stolen and it's not like that anymore. I mean, they had, you know, you've seen the videos of him just wrangling these gangs. There were gang members basically took over the country. The gangs were running the country. They were literally just going into houses and saying, this is our house now. There's nobody to call. The police don't basically didn't exist. So Buckele has done something absolutely incredible. And I think it was this morning I saw he put up a screenshot of how much of El Salvador's

cash is now in Bitcoin. Did you see that? Yeah. And then it's like, it's like this guy's really revolutionizing his country. It's incredible. I mean, he could have been wrong. He, in fairness, he could have been drastically. And then, but he also tweeted, which I thought was even dangerous, because I would never say something like that, nor would I say what he said, which was, I told you so. Right. Did you see that tweet that he did? Like, once Bitcoin was skyrocketing, just like, I told you so. I think he's done a few of those. But now he's even doubling down off that first audacious move. And now people are going to have more artillery if it ever goes down to like, you know, just attack him with.

Right. There's absolutely a risk there because Bitcoin happens to be doing quite well right now, but clearly has had its ups and downs and you just, you just don't know. Like, what does that really mean? Okay, so you have that in Bitcoin. That's great. And El Salvador has that. But what does it really, really mean for the people?

It's still a little unclear to me at some point. It's a stored wealth, not, you're not spending it. So there's something to be said about what he's doing there. But I would say the fact that he's thinking about the world differently, that if he gave a speech at C. about a year ago where he basically said, look, we were the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere out of developed nations. We were the most violent and we're basically the safest. So I can't verify if it's absolutely the safest and by what metric they mark that

at, but that he's been able to change it quickly, that clearly Malay has been able to change it quickly. Again, I think goes to how Trump will be able to do this fairly quickly. Although really quick, before we go into that, if you run your own business, you understand how difficult it could be to manage your own finances. Cards, receipts, and payments pile up fast. But thankfully, with today's sponsor, Ramp, it doesn't have to be that way. So, guys, Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. With Ramp, spend policies are built into the card to control spending before it even happens. It automatically collects and categorizes receipts, so you'll never have to chase them down ever again. Plus,

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reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News. It's issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much to rant for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin and doing maybe like a strategic reserve? Well, I've got some Bitcoin and I've never paid for any Bitcoin because when I first started doing my show, somebody, you know, a lot of libertarians like me because I'm basically anti-regulation and not big on government. And people said put up a QR code, which I wasn't even sure what that was at the time on my website. And I just put it there.

and people started giving me Bitcoin. So I have a nice amount of Bitcoin, which I'm very excited about, particularly in the last week or so. I think that should we have some sort of reserve? You mean the government should have some sort of reserve? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now.

Like the world, I grew up in a world that the, I remember I got my first cell phone. It was right before 9-11. I lived in New York City in 9-11. I had a little candy bar black and white. All you could do is play snake on it and send a good game. Yeah, that was it. That was basically it. Like, think how fundamentally different the world is from that.

That was 23 years ago, basically. The world is changing so fast. Everything that's happening with AI, industries are disappearing, everything that's happening now with robotics. And that they're, you know, even now, it's like Amazon at their factories is doing so much automation and so much with robots and everything else. But the guy who drops the package off at your house is still a man.

But that's not really necessary, right? We can do it with drones. They'll do it with robots. Elon just, you know, know, optimists and all this stuff. So it's like there's so much changing right now that I think our currency needs to probably change along with it. So I would tell anybody, like you should get some Bitcoin at least. I'm definitely not an expert in it. Why don't you buy more? It seems like that stands for everything that you do. Well, first off, why aren't I buy more again? I never

bought any in the first place. So why not buy Bitcoin? So I like the idea that I just have this thing on the ledger that I've never bought like there's something fun about the idea, like literally also it hurt maybe to buy it since you were gifted. Well, right. So now it's like it's a hundred grand basically as we sit here right now, right? It's a 95 or something like that. I had the counter before you got here. I was watching it. What is it? It was 99. It was it. It could hit 100 today. Is it the first day it's ever been in 99? Yeah. Then that's probably people are excited to push it to a hundred. So why wouldn't I buy more? I mean, I'll be completely transparent with you. I just had a what is it. 99.5. So we're right there. By the peak. It's going to push through. And as soon as it breaks 100, then there's more news, more articles and it's going to push it more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, I will say, though, because I did watch this in 2017 when it hit 20. Yeah. And everyone, I was watching it on TV, watching it hit 20 for like a second and then boom, everyone started selling. Yeah. And it just plummeted. And then it was a slow descent from 20 down to like 35 hundred.

Right. So the same could happen theoretically. It hits 100. Everyone's like, all right, we're good. Sell. My sense is it's going to go down again. Maybe not all the way down to 20, but like, that's part of what's going to happen with this thing over time. I would say why I don't buy more is I just had a meeting with my financial

people this week and we were discussing what we have in Bitcoin versus everything else. And they actually felt that my ratio was exactly right. So, you know, based on what? Based on their, how they view people should be diversified in various things. Okay. BlackRock said the optimal allocation for Bitcoin and they said this in 2022 is 85%. BlackRock said that your Bitcoin allocation should be 85% of your assets? Yes. For the like the retail investor as the ideal portfolio should be 85% this was in 2022. How much Bitcoin is BlackRock have? Yeah. Jesus. Could be quite a bit. Yeah. But if it's 85% of their their portfolio was that it was such an asymmetric risk to take for the amount of upside. Like the amount of upside you take for the amount of

downside was so strong that it should be 85% of your portfolio. To maintain the proper allocation of like risk versus reward. Right, because at that time, Bitcoin was probably what? It was in the high 20s, mid to high 20s. I wonder what their percent would be now. Right. That would be interesting to see. Well, it would get kind of nutty because you'd only be only insanely, insanely wealthy people

would be able to do that. So this is where I listen to my financial guys. Like if you have people around you that you trust that you think are good, like you should take their advice. As I always tell my team, it's like, I will trust you guys until something goes horrifically awry. And since things haven't yet, I trust the people that I've brought in. On the topic of Trump presidency, he was flirting with the idea of zero percent income tax. Now, you being kind of in the nitty-gritty and knowing a lot of those people being in that

sphere, do you think this is truly possible? Or do you think this is just another thing that's thrown out over promise, under-deliver, which I feel like we've seen just every single campaign ever? It's probably a little bit of both. I think he really knows how to just throw things out and see what happens, like kind of just, it's just a balloon. You leave it out there for a little bit. It kind of floats around to people get interested or not. And then I think there's something real there, too. There's a lot of people on the more libertarian side of this that think a consumption tax is the way to go, that you basically get rid of income tax or the more traditional way would be that would be for a flat tax, which I would be for. I would be for a flat tax for sure.

That's what I wrote about in my first book. We could pick what the number would be. So, you know, you could say maybe it's 12 or 15 percent. Everybody pays it. And then to throw the to throw the lefties a bone, I don't know that this is moral or ethical or even financially sensible, but just to try to get something passed that you could get more people on board, maybe you exempt everybody under 50 grand, and then maybe if you're making, you know, over a couple mill a year, it ticks up a tiny percentage, but that basically, you know, you get like and are deductions or anything too, or is it just gross? I mean, the idea of a flat tax is you're going to eliminate all of that, and you'll have a one-page tax goods. Well, no, no, no, you'll have

deductions, but you'll get rid of all of the other craziness, right? It's you're going to have a one-page tax code with virtually no loopholes and that's it to me that would be a great way to do it a consumption tax makes a lot of sense though like i really like the idea of if you could actually get rid of the income tax altogether okay the government still needs some money to operate even post elan bebec crushing these agencies and all of the things the government still does need money every so unless you want to be like total and cap about this which i'm not um i like it intellectually but like i don't think we can fully operate that way in a country of 350 million people, I would say the consumption tax is a great idea. The more stuff that you buy and the more

money that you spend, you'll be taxed on that money. People are always going to buy things and they're always going to want things and need things. And in that sense, if you have a lot, it's not exactly that you're paying more in, but there's a, well, I suppose you are paying more in, but it's more voluntary in that sense, rather than, oh, you make this much and we're taking 39.7% of it. And that's that. But again, I would only liken it back to the, the state income tax issue, right, which is how does Florida somehow manage to have roads and police and fire departments? They hire property taxes there, right?

But it's marginally higher. Look at the property tax difference. I mean, you guys could try to pull it up if you want between L.A. and Miami. It's not that different. There are some things there. One to two percent. One to two percent. Sure, but you're saving 10 percent on income tax at least, you know, especially if you're

in the highest ratio. So I, there's a reason that people move to low, to know. income tax states. You know, people aren't very excited when they're suddenly like, all right, I'm moving to Cali in New York so I can pay more in income tax. So even though that's not why I left L.A., and I suspect that's not ultimately why you left Cali too. Wait, what's the, no, here there's no income tax, right? Not often. Right. So there's a reason it works. And 0.7% property tax here, by the way. You got a lot of space. Caped at 3%, which is crazy. Yeah. What are some of your predictions for a Trump presidency in terms of the economy, in terms of the Federal Reserve? I know,

that some people were flirting with the idea of even just like stopping the federal reserve? What are your predictions for the finances of the average American? I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now across the board. Again, you get rid of regulation. You start bringing in people that are going to make things more efficient. Look at what the economy was doing under Trump pre-COVID. Even if you care about some of the identity politics stuff, which I don't care about, his last state of the union speech, we have lowest black unemployment of all time, lowest Latino unemployment of all time. He went through these unbelievable numbers.

that we had. And the Congressional Black Caucus sat there like this. It's one of my favorite videos ever as they're talking about that because you think they might be going like this. Oh, that's pretty good. We're the Congressional Black Caucus. Black people have their lowest unemployment of all time. And they simply didn't care. That's a bit of a separate issue. But I would say by bringing in Elon, by bringing in Vivek, by bringing in all of these people, they are basically going to get America going in. You can even feel it. And, you know, the election was less than three weeks ago. And you can feel there is a reordering of the world right now. It is, it is very, very obvious that other countries are suddenly like,

hmm, America might be back. And I think all it actually takes is a little American attitude to start switching these things up and start, you know, we were on a sort of, I would say, a slow motion descent into hell. That's what I always say on my show. We didn't really realize how bad it was. And everything always seemed like it was getting worse. And it was like, oh, we can endlessly print money and we can endlessly give money to this thing or that thing. And, it'll just sort of work forever. And it was just kind of getting worse and worse. And we've been in some sort of like Frankenstein style democracy, basically, where the

media kind of lies about everything. The policies don't really make sense. The math doesn't add up. Nobody knows what's really going on, but we just keep doing it. And I think what's happening now is people are realizing we're not going to do that anymore. And I think just that notion alone is going to, and also because of the technological evolution that we're about to have or revolution, I think.

that we're gonna we're I'm telling you I've been saying it on my show we are going to have an 80s style revolution in this country it is coming it's good there is going to be a 10 year boom as short I would say the only hedge against that would be God knows what the machine can do against Trump you know does COVID-9 come out in the zombie apocalypse do they make we do they literally make world war three happen before he gets into office but short of like some crazy thing or you know some black swan event which absolutely could happen I think there's every indicator that we're about to go into an incredible time and what would you see to the The average person who feels like the American dream is dead, and they look at housing prices, and they say, it's so unaffordable, I can't buy a house.

Stocks are at their all-time high. My income is not kept up with inflation. Groceries are expensive. What would you say to that person? I would say you're right. I'd say you're right, and you should be very happy that Trump is president. I mean, I'm not a, I've built a couple businesses and I've done well in that sense, but I'm not an economist. I have no doubt you guys are more experts in that department than I am.

So when I'm talking about these things on my show, I try to talk about it. in the most simplest term. So the two ways that I talk about it usually are price of groceries and mortgage rates. To me, that's the easiest way. We all go into the supermarket and we all see the same things, right? It doesn't matter how much money you have.

I guess if you have an untold amount, you're a billionaire, you're probably not walking into the supermarket yourself. But all of us basically go in and what used to be like $5.99 for a pound of beef is now $11.99, literally more than double. Price of eggs, price of milk, all of those things. Something's not right.

And Kamala, her answer was, we're going to put price controls because it's the it's the groceries the grocers are basically and the stores are trying to gouge you and it's complete insanity she doesn't want to connect any of that to what gets that pound of beef into the store which of course includes fuel costs and it includes the cost of fertilizer and and a gigillion other things right her answer was oh at the end of the whole process let's just give governmental control so i talk about prices of food and then mortgage rates because i think one thing that i did well is that in i bought a couple houses and I've done well on all of them because I did it when interest rates were low.

And when interest rates are low, I've always liked paying my mortgage. I have a mortgage now. I like paying it because I got in when it was still low, like under three. And then it's like, wow, I was able to afford something that in essence I couldn't just buy in cash, but I'm able to now have something. I pay the bank a little bit extra, right? Not a crate. You know, now, what are mortgage rates now or interest rates like seven?

That's an insane amount of money. But now if you're at like two and a half, which they were during, during most of Trump's presidency, it's like, yeah, you have to pay the bank a little something to lend you money. That seems like a fair exchange. That's capitalism. That's pretty good. And then you get to own something and hopefully invest in it and make it better and then eventually sell that and do that again and again. Someone argued that Trump caused housing prices to go up so much, not directly, but during his presidency, because they lowered rates so much, people are locked into their mortgage, that they can't move because they got a two and a half. percent rate, if they were to move, their payment would double. I don't know that you could blame Trump. Well, the implication being that. Well, it would be the Federal Reserve, but it was, would be under his presidency. But is the, is the implication there that because rates have now gone up, the guys with the good rates are locked in?

I mean, I don't know how you can blame Trump for that, right? Well, you were saying under his presidency, uh, you could afford a house. Yeah. Because you got a two and a half percent mortgage. But my counterclaim to that is for those who didn't get a mortgage during that time. Yeah. They're now unable to because mortgages. were solo during that time.

I don't know that mortgages, I don't know that I'm fully qualified to answer the question actually. But like, I mean, I think basically it's because the Democrats largely screwed up the economy. I think it's partly COVID related, but I think it's an endless printing of money that then the banks are just like, all right, money is worth less. We're just not going to lend like we did. And, you know, we also had, we had banks that were too big to fail and then we somehow made them bigger.

So there's less competition with the banks now. So I think there's a series of problems there. But as a general rule, because I want the government out of the economy as much as possible, and out of everything as much as possible, I want there to be more banks, so there's more competition. So if you can't, if some bank is offering you 5%, you might find three other banks to start negotiating with them. And next thing, you know, you do get an interest rate or you get a mortgage at 3% or something like that. So, you know, some of this is like, okay, this president did this, this president did this. It all sort of ebbs and flows.

What are some of the biggest issues that you believe are not discussed enough? You know, it's funny because online, almost everything is being discussed now, right? Like, I mean, that's the beauty of what's happening online. There are a million podcasts discussing almost everything. From a mainstream perspective, which is crumbling, I would say the main thing that they didn't discuss honestly

was that there could be a type of person out there who was not a pure leftist that still was a good American. And they basically treated everybody that wasn't a Democrat or wasn't a lefty or didn't just pick the thing of the day that the lefties were into. They basically treated them like they were a Nazi or a horrible person or a garbage person, as Joe Biden said. And then I think what happened was you basically had a mainstream media that was that more and more people were waking up to the nonsense.

You had an ascendant alt media. And that really was what this election was about. So I think it's hard to say what isn't being discussed. because so much is being discussed now. But I would say the thing that I think has flourished to the top right now that desperately needed to be pushed to the top is free speech. I don't think people had any freaking clue how bad the free speech situation was. And then I think COVID started waking some people up,

you know, when you suddenly started getting a couple doctors that were like, all right, maybe this thing was from the movie. Also shadow banning on YouTube was a bit of a thing in terms of like saying vaccine or COVID and stuff like that. So I think it's ironic actually because, They basically, the media was so terrible, they created this alt ecosystem online. And then COVID comes in. And then COVID basically put like rocket fuel on the alt thing because then there were just online

people like me. And I'm obviously not the only one. But then I started talking to, say, Jay Baticharya, who might be the head of NIH now, who is a Stanford physician who was very skeptical of everything that was going on. So then more and more of us started talking about it. The government started censoring us more and more. and then it started feeding itself. I had a tweet in, I think it was July of 21,

that it was right after Biden said that if you get the vaccine, you will not get nor transmit COVID. And I said, not only was that not true, but I said the boosters don't work and they are prepping us for mandates. By the fall, mandates were coming. Anyway, my tweet got taken down

and then Jim Jordan, Congressman from Ohio, said that I was one of the people that they know when they went in and looked at what happened with Twitter and the government, they know that the government had Twitter take down that tweet. So, and you get nothing, by the way. The government fully can step on your First Amendment free speech rights and you get nothing.

You don't get a letter. You don't get an apology. I was at the Capitol with him. I was like, is there anyone here that I could go to and they might say sorry? He's like, no, there's literally nothing. You can't sue them. It's nothing you can do. So you accurately predicted consequences of, you know, COVID.

And then some government official agency, who knows, was putting pressure on Twitter for you to delete that tweet. Not for me to delete. They deleted the tweet. For Twitter to then remove the tweet. Yeah. And then the beauty of that actually is that, so that happened, I got deleted maybe two hours after I put it up, something like that. I said, I said the Vax is not working as promised.

You guys can probably find the tweet. The Vax is not working as promised and mandates are coming. And it was taken down. What I did was, fortunately, because I have an audience. First off, I called a couple of the higher profile people that I know. And I was like, guys, can you screenshot? I have a screenshot of it. Can you get this out there?

And fortunately, to whatever extent, Twitter was still free at the time. Enough people started doing that. I had also started my own tech company called Locals, where we were able to allow people to speak freely. So I was able to get people to follow me there. And still, I could still communicate with people and I could still directly chat with people and everything else. So there's always a better mousetrap.

I mean, more than anything else, I think that's my attitude about the world right now. As long as we are free, to whatever degree we are free, the human ingenuity will always solve all of the problems. So the fact that the government could go in and do that and that nobody is fired for any of that is a scary proposition. The fact that they fully violated my First Amendment rights, you would think that there'd be some repercussion. There simply isn't. But look where we are now.

Things are in a much better position. That's pretty unbelievable, actually, that you said something that happened and the government removed it from Twitter. But now, what if at the time they genuinely thought that what they were saying was correct? Doesn't matter. Your information could be detrimental. doesn't matter. I mean, the road to hell is paid with good intentions. It just doesn't matter. First off, you know, you have every right to be wrong about things. I mean, that's part of having a human mind. That's part of the human experience. I was also, it was at that time, if you remember,

I think it was in June of 2021, where Biden said that thing on stage. You will, if you get the VACs, you will not get nor transmit COVID. I knew at that point, we already knew that wasn't true. There were enough people paying attention to what was going on online that we knew it wasn't true, because there were people getting the vaccine still getting COVID. We 100% knew that. So it was just another one of, you know, everyone has their own little

sort of red pill journey. You asked me a little bit before about waking up to things. I think everybody over the last couple of years has just seen a series of things. Why is it that in 2019, I was tweeting about Biden having dementia. I'm not his doctor.

I'm not a doctor. But I was just watching this man who couldn't complete a sentence, who was slurring and confused and everything else. And now it's fairly obvious. that he either has dementia or blue body dementia or Parkinson's or something like that. But the point is we weren't even allowed to talk about that for about five years until the debate.

And then the debate was so terrible. And then suddenly that night, the mainstream media couldn't hold the narrative anymore. And then everybody started talking about it. And then two weeks later, he's not even the nominee anymore. So there's a weird, there's a weird control system that has been put in place. It's sort of matrixy, I would say. It's a control system partly through the government, partly through big tech. and I think we're seeing that kind of wash away right now

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there's so many things that you should be voting on before that. I would argue you should be voting for national security and safe borders, basic competence government and infrastructure and things of that nature. And then abortion, I think, in a sane world, you know, then you decide, is it my fifth most important thing or my tenth most important thing? But they have convinced, especially on the left, they've convinced particularly, middle-aged women, mostly, that abortion is the number one thing. And now you have the same women now saying, my body, my choice, are the same women who are screaming that everybody else should get

vaccinated. And I think that's also caused a certain amount of craziness because people's, people went on every side of every issue during COVID. And I think now it's been, we've been left with a bunch of people that really don't know what they think about a whole bunch of things. But abortion is by far the big one. You know, when we were supposed to have the red wave in November of 22 and it didn't materialize, it's because, for two weeks before that, uh, the entire media was screaming about the Republicans are coming for abortion and Roe v.

Wade is going to kill the reversal of Roe v. Wade is going to kill people. All the reversal of Roe v. Wade did was kick it back to the states, which I do think was the right decision, even though I am begrudgingly pro choice. Every state should be able to make up their mind on that. For example, Florida is six weeks. It's heartbeat, bill.

That's too strict, I would say for me personally. But then I have to decide as a Floridian. Is this the thing that I put at the top of the hierarchy? And if it is, I can leave and I can go to, California and have an eight-month abortion or fight for eight-month abortions there. But because so it's an ordering thing more than anything else. They have just convinced women that you have to think about abortion more than whether your streets are safe or why your kid is hooked on fentanyl or why it's not safe to go out in New York

City at night. And that, it's so dangerous and wrong. But before we get into that, if you run a small business just like us, you definitely know that doing things like payroll, taxes, and benefits can feel like a full-time job. But it doesn't have to with our sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is the all-in-one payroll, benefits, and HR solution built for small businesses just like yours. With Gusto, payday is a breeze. There's no more manual calculations or tax headaches. And with automatic tax filings in all 50 states, you could save hours a month. Plus, Gusto offers 401K plans,

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All you got to do is go to gusto.com slash iced to get started today. That is gusto.com slash iced or click the link down below in the description. Thank you so much to Gusto for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast. Why do you think we've become so divisive? I would like to blame social media algorithms. Yeah. To me, it just seems like the more outrageous you are. It's just like that gets boosted.

So people are incentivized to say like the most radical stuff that they want to or that they can because it makes the money. And platforms love it because they get. to show ants. Yeah, the system of selective pressures is not great right now, right? Like, yes, the crazier you do, the more clickbait stuff you do, all of that, for sure, you're right. Like, it's a part of the game. And it's something that, that even my team internally will, we'll discuss things, something related to thumbnails or titles or how we're doing this or that. And then at the same time, there's a game that's being played, whether you like it or not. And you can either

hate the player or hate the game. So it's a little complex to figure out how to, you want to build something that's good and just, I'm talking about you guys or just anyone. in general that's creating content. And yet you want to be in the system. So you want to be seen, right? Like, that's just reality. So I have no doubt the algorithms have done this to us. But I would say actually there's something worse than that,

which is also connected to everything else we've talked about here, which is just a horrible education system in this country. It's a horrible education system in this country where we've taught young people to hate the country. They don't understand the goodness of America. They don't understand what the melting pot is, that what we do here in this multicultural society is the dream that people 250 years ago

could barely even imagine and all of the goodness of this nation and we've just thrown that away. We've made them focus on identity and genitals and skin color and we've unearthed ancient hatreds that we put to bed. And all of that really starts

at the education level more than anything else. So I do think there's an algorithmic component to it for sure, but it's most, if you had people who were educated properly, really educated properly in a true classically liberal tradition, and you really scaled at a societal level, then if the algorithms were screwing with people,

society wouldn't get completely out of whack. It would actually start self-regulating, I think. But when you have a bunch of people who have been taught all of the wrong things, who are also being told that the Earth is going to end in 12 years because of climate change, and then you create this anxiety situation with young people, and they're told that they're living in a country

that shouldn't exist because of systemic racism or any of these things, it all just feeds itself to like a certain level of neurosis that I think particularly people younger than me are in right now. And we have to get out of that, which, by the way, I think by blowing apart the Department of Education, by pushing more school choice and charter schools and homeschooling and pod schooling and all of those things, we will do that. What's pod schooling? It's just like a version of homeschooling.

If you have a pod, like you might be the family in the community that has. I'm thinking podcast. That's your my mind. Podcast schooling. I'm like, yeah. People are learning. You will be teachers. Just put on a podcast.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know that pod schooling is technically like a term exactly. It's just like the idea that you have a pod at your house that would teach this, this subject. And someone else might have a pod at their house that teaches this subject, something like that. I see. Okay, I'm thinking podcast. It's for my mind. But actually podcast would be a...

It would probably be good. I mean, where are most of us getting our information these days for better or worse? It largely is podcasts and everything else. I was... When I was on the plane coming here, it's a five-hour flight from Miami to Vegas and the person next to me was watching CNN the entire time. So I can't hear it, but I'm just watching. And it's like, it's even more mind-numbing when you can't hear it because you just look at the chiron's. It's endless hysteria for, I kid you not, for the entire five hours that

I would just peek over every few minutes. It was just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. It's like, he's not in office yet. We might be veering towards World War III right now. There's some other stuff we could be talking about. What happened to Kamala? Where has she been for the last couple weeks. We thought this woman was going to lead the free world. But they've just dumbed down every, we're basically an idiocracy. But it just seems like they do that just to sell ad space. I mean, that's really what it is. Is that the more they throw out you, they, yeah, I think they can do it as long as they can do it. You know that rate, so I saw it today that Rachel Maddow, you know how much she gets paid? How much you think Rachel Maddow gets paid?

I don't know, 10 million a year, probably? Millions, probably five mil. 30 million a year. MNBC is now cutting her pay to $25 million a year. I am very successful. How is she going to survive? I have way more views on a daily basis on my live stream than she has. I do not make $30 million. I do not make $25 million.

I don't make $20 million a year. How is she going to, I know, how is she going to survive, you know? And it's like she has to give an awful lot of that for taxes, too, because I'm pretty sure she lives. So are you saying they make that much money? Because if they pay her that, they have to at least be making that to justify her to justify her coming from. If we were to take away the pharmaceutical ad money,

that might be a different proposition, right? I mean, during COVID, you would literally have Fauci on for an hour on Meet the Press, and then it would go to commercial and it would say, brought to you by Pfizer. And it's like, wait, what, what, what? The company that this guy was just shilling for is sponsoring the news right now. So one of the reasons that this hasn't fully shifted yet, like you guys are obviously in a similar business that I'm in here, is that industries don't just die overnight, right? Like the dinosaurs, they're sinking in the Librea tar pits,

but they don't just sink immediately. It takes some time for them to sink. So there's an entire world that exists around ad sales and corporate structure of the dying mainstream media that hasn't fully moved over. If I was being paid per view in any way of parity that she's getting paid per view, I'd be making a shit ton more than her.

It's fine. I'm not complaining about it, but it just kind of is what it is. But I would also say this, when you realize that that woman has been getting $30 million a year and then you were to go through the laundry list of things

that she got wrong. Did you ever see that five minute thing that she did talking about the vaccine saying, I mean, she did the exact same thing Biden did, you will not get COVID, you will not transmit COVID. This is the only way out of COVID.

Are those her opinions though or are she told, hey, here's a script when you just say these bullet points? I don't know, what would you say for $30 million a year? That's the question. That's the question. I don't know.

When it comes to being a news anchor, who did we talk to about this? Do you get to say your own opinions or do they give you points to say? Is it a little... Was it a little... Yeah, I think it was Don Lemon. Oh, good old Don Lemon. Yeah, yeah. I would say there is a reason they are paid to be in those chairs.

And that is the reason. I could never be as bad at my job doing a news show every day as Joe Scarborough is at his show every day. I could never be that. I couldn't live with myself, number one, but I think people would tune out. those and by the way that's what's happening now why is it that that two weeks after the election suddenly Comcast is like we're gonna sell MSNBC if the election had gone the other way and they real and the propaganda worked they wouldn't be selling MSNBC they're selling MSNBC they're selling MSNBC because they're like oh shit we've been paying these people this crazy

amount of money and the propaganda is not even working CNN is uh is they've just announced that they're going to fire a bunch of their on-air talent it's like why would you fire these people just after an election oh they're not really good at whatever it is you've put them out there to do. So I'm quite enthused that this is happening. But if you really think about it, you're basically asking, is it, are their intentions good? Do they not really, like, did Rachel Maddo really know what she was saying? Was she paid to say it? Did she write the script? I don't know what the exact answer. Like, I don't know what's in her heart. I don't know exactly what's in the mind of the producer. But I do know that she works at a giant corporation and she put out information

that was exactly the same as all the corporations wanted. And that was completely different than what was happening online. And that thing is the thing that's now flipped. And poor Rachel will only get $25 million to do that job. So when you're watching media like that, how do you know what's truthful and what's not? Like, how do you really get down to the fans? It's very. It seems like you watch Fox and you just, they're like, this is right.

You watch MSNBC and they say this is right. Well, I would large, it's like, this is right. Yeah. It's almost impossible. But I would say if you have just like a little bit of skepticism with most things, you won't fall for most of it. So I'm very, very proud of my track record on, on most of the issues.

I didn't fall for the Russia hoax. I didn't fall for the very fine people hoax. I didn't fall for the COVID nonsense or some of the other things that I mentioned. You remember the Jesse Smolett story? It was like somehow, why is it that AOC and Kamala, within five minutes, had both tweeted, this proves white supremacy in America

and black people are under assault and everything else. And the entire thing turned out to be a hoax. And yet when I saw the story come across, I was like, I don't know, something seems a little fishy about this. This seems a little bizarre I found him in the subway sandwich and there was a noose and they yelled

this is Trump country. I was like, I don't know. This just doesn't sound right. So I think just going in with a little bit of skepticism is probably your best armor against the bullshit. It's not perfect. We're all going to fall for different things

and be duped. You know, I'm not particularly good at predicting elections. I backed DeSantis in the primary. I thought we were ready for a wholesale change. So I would say I missed that one in the sense that one of my main fears

about Trump was that he wasn't going to be able to put himself around the right people. That I'm very happy. I'll have a full mea culpa on that. I'm very happy that I turned out to be wrong. And ironically, the whole time I was calling for people like Tulsi and RFK to come over to the Republican side of things.

But I think there's a fundamental difference being we could all be wrong about like, who's going to win the election? Will there be a red wave versus just do you directionally get most of what's happening right? Or are you just wildly wrong on most of it? And if you're watching people or listening to podcasts that are wildly wrong on most of it, you're probably watching the wrong shows. Yeah. But it's tough.

It's almost an impossible question to answer, and it's just going to get harder and harder. How has the whole tenant media thing shifted your perspective on, like, how you approach just information or what you're told or coming to your own conclusions on things? You know, I did a 10-minute or 15-minute interview with Megan Kelly about it, and I basically said that was last time I'm going to talk about it. Okay. But I would give you, like, 30 seconds of Lauren Chen, who was running Tenet. I've known her for a decade. I talked to Tim Poole about it and Benny Johnson and some of the other guys. And I literally, I asked for more information about who the backers are.

I spoke to someone on Zoom, now it's unclear who I spoke to, but that was through Lauren. And I would say you just need to be as skeptical. Actually, the exact same answer I just gave you. You should be as skeptical even when you know someone for a decade and you ask for information and you ask for resumes and you speak to someone that you might be told as a benefactor or anything else. You should just be as skeptical as possible. We'll also say in no way did that affect my content at all period zero, nor was I asked to, which was the bizarre part of it.

But I would rather leave it at that. I looked into it a pretty good amount. And I read the indictment and everything. And it seemed, and I watched a ton of media too from people on the left, people on the right. Sure. I know David Packman was talking about it. Sam Cedar was talking about it. I watched a legal eagle video on it, which I thought was really good.

And it truly did seem. like you had no idea. And, and- Well, that's the thing. Even the DOJ sent me an email a few days later saying that you, we believe you're the victim of a crime here. I wasn't accused of anything. Actually, you know, the funny part about it was, and I said this to Megan, so it's worth

repeating if you guys want to talk about it. The funny thing is I'm so used to reading dishonest things about myself. If the New York Times ever writes about me, it's a dishonest, or if any, you know, all these, whatever it is, it's always something dishonest or they misquote something or they take the word not out or something like that. when I read the indictment, I was like, oh, I'm commentator number one. I figured that out very quickly. And I was like, this is all true.

I did ask who the backer is. And I did ask for a resume. And I did ask to speak to somebody. And I did make sure they'd have no control over my content and a series of other things. So it was very bizarre to suddenly be in a controversy where I was where I was like, oh, the thing I'm not even being accused of anything. I'm the victim in this thing. And the DOJ is doing the right thing. That was like the craziest part for me.

People are going to see the amount of money you were getting paid, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in this contract. And they're just going to be like, you can't be a victim while you're making that amount of money at the same time. That I feel like... Well, I'm not saying I'm a victim. First of all, victim was their word. I don't regret anything that I did.

I did a silly show for them. The funny thing is this had nothing to do with Rubin Report. Do you even know the show that I did for them? I'm guessing you don't. Yeah, it wasn't reacting to things or something? Yeah, it was called People of the Internet. And what we did in the morning was my guys would literally select nonsensical viral videos

and I wouldn't see them in advance I didn't even know what they were and then I would just watch them live and it was like oh fat girl goes into Wendy's and gets hit with hamburger and then I'd be like oh that was something like the show was so stupid and so ridiculous

and yeah it's it I was confused what they got from that that's what I guess you'd have to ask them or you'd have to ask Lauren Chan I suppose yeah it reminds me somewhat similar to like Sam Bankman-Fried yeah I mean the only thing I would say is it's a weird

thing to think that you could know someone for almost a decade that exists in your space and that they would try to dupe you and other people that you know and everything else. But again, the funny thing is we've been talking for an hour here. You guys haven't asked me anything about Russia, Ukraine. I think I mentioned something about Ukraine or one or two things about the general money state affairs. It's just not even on my top 10 things. It's been ramped up now because it feels like the war might go hot at any moment. But like the biggest Dave Rubin fan in the world is not watching me because of my hot take

on Russia, Ukraine. I do free speech stuff. I do tech stuff. If I'm going to do foreign policy, I'm much better versed to talk about the Middle East. So the whole thing was extremely bizarre. I have no idea. Like I have literally no idea. Did Lauren know? I have no idea. Now, I got a question for you. What do you think is a valid criticism for yourself objectively? Well, people used to say, it's funny, people used to say that I, as an interviewer, I was too like a softball interviewer or something like that. I, first of a valid criticism. Anyone could criticize me for whatever they want. So my policy on interviewing, which has shifted actually a little bit over the years, but my general policy on interviewing was my hero was Larry King and growing up. And I became very good friends with Larry King over the years. And he was a mentor and a friend and sort of like a bonus. It was like half dad, half grandfather for me. But I remember growing up watching CNN. And this guy on any given night, he'd have the cast of Seinfeld on one night. He'd have the Pope on the next night. He'd have Magic Johnson on the next night. He'd have the animal guy on the

next night and then he'd have earth wind and fire on the next night and I was like he treats everybody the same he asked them interesting questions you get to find out a little bit more about them and I and it's pretty great so when I started interviewing that was really my policy and I still think that's the best way to interview somebody as a general rule I find that if you well it's similar to what you guys are doing here you're asking me questions and you're letting me talk and it's like if I don't know what I'm saying at some point you kind of see the person wrapped the noose around their neck that's why one or two things that you've asked me very specifically about the economy. Like, I don't have a problem saying I'm not an expert. Which I actually, I admired that. And I want to take a second

here to say that that that was really cool of you to say, not just to continually pat you on the back. I'm just saying it was good that you actually said, I don't think this is my area of expertise. I don't probably shouldn't listen to me in terms of this. Well, thanks. I mean, I don't mind doing that because I'm not, I'm not the sum of all things. And also, I'm an interviewer. I tell people what I think, you know. On your program yesterday, too, you made a correction. Yeah. Which I saw, and when I saw that, I was like, I was like taken aback because I never. Yeah. And I'm saying like, never see anybody from like legacy mainstream or even like the daily shows,

like daily podcasts, the things I listen to. Like people rarely ever say like, hey, I made a mistake. I said something that was inaccurate and here's me correcting this. I said it yesterday. I found out very quickly that it was wrong. And here I am like correcting it on my main thing. Well, thank you. On your main program.

That's actually probably a nicest thing you could say to me because I, because I, because I, it's not a big deal to me. It isn't. It's weird. So Phoenix, my producer is here. He knows, like, if I get something wrong, it doesn't happen that often, but you might get a number wrong or I'll slightly misremember it. What was, like, the Elon thing. I don't know. Was I there in September of 21 or was it a few months after? Like, some little thing. When I get the proper information, I think it's nice to fill in those blanks. And also, I don't think you have to be in, everyone wants everyone to be an expert in everything. So I would much rather, like if I was sitting down for if a five hours, someone was going to interview me for five hours, and we were just

like listing out the things that I'd love to talk about. Like the free speech stuff, the media stuff, that's what I love talking about. And I've been right in the center of it. And I think it's my core competency and that I've been able to communicate that really well. And my life has been deeply connected to it. And I started companies because of it and everything else. So like that would be my like favorite place to be. Like the economic stuff that we did here, I like doing it from like a more like a light sort of philosophic presence. Like I'm not an expert in the economy, but I know the precepts of liberalism, or classical liberalism or libertarianism, and I have the general notion of how I want the government to work. So we can do it in that sense. But when you ask me something very specific

there, I was like, it's fine to like, all right, I don't know everything. That's just fine. It's part of the problem that everyone now wants to know everything about everything. And it's like when anything happens, it's like, man, these people who can't tie their shoe want to tell you exactly what is going to happen if we reverse the Iran nuclear deal. And it's like, no, no. You said a valid criticism of yourself would be that you did softball interviews that you maybe didn't interview as hard as you should have in certain things. What do you think is an... Well, I'm saying that's what people said about me.

From a personal internal perspective, what do you think is a valid criticism of yourself? You know, Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4. All-electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle. The Volkswagen ID4 is fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads, plus a refined interior with innovative technology always at your fingertips.

The all-electric ID4, you deserve more fun. Visit vw.ca.com.ca to learn more. SUVW, German-engineered for all. It's interesting. I don't have many regrets because I think if you line things up properly in your life and then things start working, which they largely are working for me right now, I'm in a good relationship. I have two kids that are thriving.

I have businesses that are thriving. I'm surrounded by people that are thriving. My two best friends on this earth are my two best friends from childhood. I think that that says a lot about me. But I would say one thing for sure is I was closeted way too long in my life. about my sexuality and that it's very hard to live one life as a human being, like one honest, authentic life. It's really hard to live two or three or four or five. And I think that that did damage to me and delayed me in certain senses and whatever. And I've largely gotten over that.

But, you know, even the things that you get over in life, you have the ghosts of that kind of sit with you. So I sort of wish I would have dealt with that a little bit. What was it like to come out? Did you find that people were not accepting? No, no, it was way harder to come out not as a lefty. It was way harder to be like, I'm not a progressive than it was to come out as gay, I suppose. But also, I'm from a different generation. Like it wasn't, nobody really cared back then. I mean, that's sort of why I see this 80s, 90s revival coming.

Nobody really cares who you sleep with or like what you're doing. So anyway, to really answer your question, like coming out, it's not really fun for anybody. But I would say it's, you know, some people, as Homer Simpson said, Marge, I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming. and I'm not that flaming. So like a lot of people just had no idea. I play basketball, like video games, like normal guy things, whatever that is. So people were more like shocked by that.

But by the way, there's plenty of people like me. You know what I mean? And there's probably more people like me than the other way. But if you're over the, I actually, when I was first coming out, I kind of liked people that were more over the top gay in general because I was like, oh, you just are who you are. And there's no weirdness where I was like,

there must be something wrong with me because I act this way. So, you know, but you live and learn, I suppose. Yeah. Was there any negative consequence of coming out? No. Like anything bad that happened to you that was unexpected. No, I mean, you have your struggles.

Everyone has. Certain relationship. Yeah, you're going to have some, my dad wasn't thrilled at first, but has completely come around and loves my kids and me and everything else. Other family members sort of shock, something like that. But, again, it's very hard to live one life, one like good, authentic life as a human being. Try to live two. Try to live two.

Try to live two for one week and see how that goes. Like have a completely alternate life. What's that like? It's unbelievably stressful. And it's actually, you know, it's funny. It's not funny, actually. It's sort of depressing. But I have trouble remembering a good portion of my early 20s because of that, because

I was living two lives. So like I'd be with, you know, I was doing stand-up and I'd have my straight friends that I was playing basketball with. And then I'd have like a couple gay friends that I was going to bars with that night. But they, but those two worlds, never met. And it's very weird. You end up lying all the time, even if you're not directly lying. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't really directly lying to anyone, but it was like, it felt bad. Well, it was constant lying of omission. People would be like, where were you? And I, oh, well,

I was, I was downtown. Well, okay, then they would kind of leave it there. They didn't know what I was doing downtown or just any, you just end up lying all the time. And, you know, obviously Jordan Peterson is very important to me personally and professionally. And, you know, one of his main things is, you shouldn't be lying because it's the worst of you're going to end up with the worst of all conclusions one way or another and I think the more that all of us escape that the more we can get out of this this mess that we're in this might be too much I'm just I'm just curious because it's not often we've made it this far let's see what happened did you ever have like a girlfriend and I've probably bang more girls than the two of you combined

actually probably I mean yeah definitely how how did you do that Wait, you know. And when you're a certain age, like, like, it just works. Like, it just works. Like, it just works. It just works. It just works.

Interesting that you were, you were with girls. And did you, was there ever a time where you thought you liked it? There are a lot of, um. Also, guys, I'm straight. I know these questions kind of make it sound like I'm like crossing the line. Now we're starting to. I'm just curious because it's a little about, thou dot protest too much now. It's interesting because I was talking to Graham before this, uh, because obviously, you know,

the topic came up. But I was like, it's so rare. that you get to talk to somebody who has a complete different experience of life. And I'm not saying that just because you're gay, it means that you're completely different than me. But generally speaking... I wake up in the morning.

I have coffee. Generally speaking, I'm guessing that the thoughts in your mind are different than the thoughts in my mind, like a pretty predominant thought for a good amount of your life. So it's like you have a different experience, different lens that you're experiencing life through. So it's interesting to ask these questions to...

No, I have actually no problem with this again. It's not like... See, it's always funny because I'll have people that literally will be watching me for two years. And then I'll see a comment like, Dave, I didn't know you were gay. and then you just offhandedly mention something about your husband or something. And I kind of like that because I'm like, well, I'm doing a news show for the most part.

So I don't need to bludgeon people with my sexuality like any more than Wolf Blitzer would bludgeon anyone with his sexuality. And nobody wants to think about that. So it's like, no, but that's the. Not that I know of, but yeah. You never know. Wolf, who knows? Wow. I wouldn't judge him either way.

You get the point. Nobody wants to think of a wolf Blitzer. Now everyone's pitching Wolf Blitzer naked. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Okay. But I would say it's just like a, this is what the twist, the most twisted part that they've done in the last decade or so with identity politics is made you think that these things that are mutable about you, whether it's your skin color or it's your genitals or your sexual attraction or whatever it might be, that these are the most important things about you.

And they're just not. They're just not. But if you make people focus on those things all the time, they will become much bigger than they actually are. And that's why there's very few people on earth that have ever come out of the closet and been like, boy, I regret that. Because if you live your authentic self,

then it's probably better than all of the other versions of yourself that you could have lived, right? And so that to me is, in some sense, you have no choice. You have, you guys probably know somebody that's closeted. You probably do. You may not know you do or you don't. But we've all been around people that you're like, ah, maybe, you know, she really does love rugby, that girl,

and she hasn't had a boyfriend in 30 years. Or the guy who's, like, constantly going to musical theater. I don't know, whatever it might be. And it's like they're not, until they, like, if your friends don't know who you are, actually who you are, rather than who you're pretending to be or your family doesn't. Like, you're not going to get to whatever the end of the road that you're supposed to do here is,

you just won't. And I don't know that I'm gonna get to the end of the road there with any of us, whatever the purpose of life is, basically. I think it's largely, it would be some Yungian version of like, or if you watched Groundhog Day, it's like, I think we're here to solve as much of our shit

to the best extent that we can do it. And then maybe something else happens good after it, otherwise you're probably just doing it again. If you haven't seen a movie defending your life, I haven't seen it. Oh, great movie. Albert Brooks, probably his best movie around 1986, Merrill Street.

He ends up in purgatory on trial over his life. Great movie. What's it called? Defending Your Life. You mentioned Jordan Peterson. We had him on the show recently. He's just so impressive. Love Jordan Peterson.

I think I saw one of the clips. He has positively affected my life just so much through his lectures, through the podcast, everything. Love Jordan. You dealt with the sexuality. It's great. Not true. Not true at all, guys.

Not true. Sorry, Grandma. We'll hopefully see me with a wife in like five, ten years. We'll see you about that. Five, ten years. How old do you? 26. Let's wrap this thing up in the next two years.

Come on. How long should you date before you? Two, three years. Let's have, you should be having kids by 30. Actually, my only regrets in life. Early, I mean, he doesn't have kids. Are you married? Yeah.

And how long have you been married? A few months. And how old is your wife? 26. All right. So you're ballparking it. It's probably going to happen in the next two years. That would be my...

Three. Three to five, I've said. But even that's a long, that's a long delay than what our grandparents did, where they were all basically having kids at 21, 22, sometimes even younger. I'm not saying that that was perfect. But I do regret that we didn't have kids

until I was 46. And it's like I play basketball with these guys now, it's a great group of guys, mostly ages between about 35 and some into their mid-60s. And the guys that are in their 50s and 60s over the summer, they were bringing their kids who are now in college. And they were playing with us.

And I was like, how cool these dads get to play. You know, this 55-year-old guy gets to play with his 21-year-old. old son, I didn't have kids still 46. If I want to be playing with my son when he's 16, 17, 17, I really need to still be in as good shape as possible when I'm in my mid-60s, which then started getting me in better shape even.

So there's other reasons. Yeah, so it gives you reasons to work hard. No, no, so it's just, but it would be a lot easier had I done it way back, removing sexuality for a second and complexities around that and everything else. I'm just saying as a general rule, seeing those guys like, oh, you had kids, like my, my best friend my buddy John, I met him, we were four years old,

I met him the first day of kindergarten, literally remember meeting him. Now it's 45 years later, basically. He has a 23-year-old son. So think how funny that is. I grew up my whole life with this guy. Yeah. He has a 23-year-old son.

I got a two-year-old. But all that work in the beginning, you were able to maybe put into your career. Yes. And reap all the benefits of that early on so that maybe you could chill a little bit more later on life. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It is very possible, if not probable, that had I not focused on my career the way I did, and maybe it was for some of the wrong reasons. Like, doing stand-up at night made it very easy to have an excuse as to why I was not dating. I now realized that. I didn't realize it at the time. But basically, everybody would be like, oh, you're not dating. Well, you're in the clubs every night. You know, I was doing stand-up literally six or seven nights a week for 10 years, something like that. So, again, it was sort of like a lie of omission, but maybe all of the energy and everything that I put towards that. It clearly led to some skill set that led me to be able to be a talk show host and everything else that I do. So it's a regret, but I would say, yeah, there's probably a little asterisk there because it did lead to obviously other things that were good. Yeah. So on Jordan, I know one of the things that he like really popularized him was a Bill C-16, which is like basically mandating that, well, they tried to mandate use of preferred pronouns with like actual, I don't know if it was criminal or some sort of like penalty. If you,

didn't obey that law. I'm curious because he's a proponent of free speech. You're a proponent of free speech. What do you think the media's role in terms of like should they have come like some sort of obligation to tell you the truth? Are they, is there some sort of law that they should they then be obeying or would that then go against free speech if they just want to say whatever they want to say? Because they have a lot of power. They can influence elections. They can do so much. Should there ever be laws that that force the media hold their feet to the fire a little bit? Or do you think that's an infringement of free speech. Yeah, the one word answer is no. I mean, there's no law that you could put in place that will force them to tell the truth. And you can always whittle. I mean,

this is what lawyers do at trials, like getting people to whittle away and say things in certain ways so you're never really saying the truth or anything else. Like, we don't need more laws right right now. Actually, what we need is exactly what happened. The media lied about so much, we've already illustrated it several times here, that what happened, an entire new media ecosystem developed. Jordan Peterson, who I believe to the extent that someone might actually be a prophet on earth, I believe he could be. Like if you view the world, if there are prophets, if there are angels, if there are people that have some gift that is beyond us.

I think Jordan has done more good for this world than certainly anyone that I've ever known or been in contact with or anything else. Why Jordan rose because he went against a government that was trying to infringe on free speech. So I don't know that there could have, we have, we have, for my own. an American perspective, of course, because we have the First Amendment. We have all the laws we need around speech. I do not want any more laws. You know, basically, you can't violently threaten somebody. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater with the intent to do harm. And then we have

incredibly tight libel and slander laws. That's it. That basically is it. And I'm completely fine with that. Again, it's a better mouse trap argument. The argument would be let them lie. And as long as we have a free internet to whatever extent that it's free, then the better ideas will bubble up and you're going to get your Jordan Peterson's and you guys are going to be able to do whatever you want and I'm going to be able to do whatever I want and then the chips will forward why they may. You speak very positively of Jordan and you actually did like I think you've done like over 200 tours, not tours, but like stops on different tours with Jordan like opening for him or like talking on stage with him, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I think you might have been the first person to

interview him after the Bill C-16 video too, which is just crazy. I was like, yeah, it was eight years ago ago this week. It was November 18th, 2016. So you're very familiar with him. What would you say are some of the most impactful things that you've learned from him? And what is something about him that may surprise people? The best thing that I can say about Jordan is that he is the exact same person off camera that he is on camera, the exact same person. There is literally no daylight. I just, I was in Scottsdale doing his 500th podcast a couple days ago. And I'm literally, it's the end of the night. And I'm in the hot tub with Jordan, his wife, Dr. Oz, and his wife.

Nothing weird happened. But that Jordan Peterson in the hot tub at the end of a long day of work and interviews and writing and doing podcasts is the same exact guy talking about the same exact things that he's talking about on air. He is the most decent human being I've ever met. you know, try to imagine the level of fame that he's attained, but it's not just normal fame. It's one thing if you're a musician and you're famous

or you're an athlete and you're famous, you know, somebody comes up to you and they're like, oh, man, Michael Jordan, I love that move in the 92 finals and that, blah, blah, like, well, you, I play basketball better because you all, all that stuff, whatever. I love your music, whatever. Jordan literally has taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people and made them stand up straight

with their shoulders back, right? He's gotten people to clean their room first before they started cleaning the world. And I think some of the ordering that we're seeing in the world right now, is because of Jordan Peterson directly. And sort of where we started was, if I've had a little something to do

with elevating Jordan, that man, I did enough probably here on this planet. I really believe that. You know, the amount of people that he got off drugs, the amount of people who mended relationships with their parents or brothers or sisters, people that got better, like I could tell you so many stories of crazy things that happened.

Like when we were in Sweden and the plane was about to take off and they were literally moving the jet bridge, the bridge from the plane, and a guy in an orange vest, because he was one of the luggage guys from downstairs saw Jordan, and he ran onto the plane as the thing was moving

to tell Jordan in the craziest way, my God, you've changed my life, I got this job because of you, I was on drugs on the plane. And they were like, sorry, you're gonna have to get off the plane. But the guy probably got fired after that, who knows what happened. But like, that's just one of a million things that I saw.

To be on stage with this guy, I always thought it was incredible because I had the best seat in the house every night, because we'd be in front of five or eight or 10,000 people, but I would be right, right behind him on stage. So I could see everybody.

I could see him doing his walk back and forth. You know, and he's kind of like a panther, just going back and forth like this. And I could see everybody and almost without exclusion for however many hundreds of thousands of people we performed for, you'd never see anyone break eye contact, stare at him the entire time. But you'd see people crying. You'd see people crying. You'd see people with the most open look that they could possibly ever have because they were

having realizations about their lives. It was absolutely incredible. So the best thing I can say about him is that he is authentically the person that you know him to be. Where do you draw the line between free speech and hate speech? Well, I would say exactly where the Supreme Court did, which is that there's no such thing as hate speech. You can say mean things about people.

I can open up my Twitter right now and show you some horrible things and memes and images and all sorts of evil, god-awful things that people say about me. You can block them, ignore them, not pay attention to it. If you're walking down the street and someone tells you, hey, you're fucking motherfucking blah, blah, blah, you can just keep walking. If they are trying to incite a violent mob against you, well, we have laws against that.

That doesn't fall within the First Amendment. And then, as I said before you, we have extremely stringent laws as it pertains to libel and slander. You know, the fire in a crowded theater, you actually can yell fire in a crowded theater. You just can't do it with the intent to do harm. So there is no such thing as hate speech.

There are mean people who say mean things, And it is up to you as an adult to figure out how to take mean things and either not let them enter you or if they do enter you, how to extricate yourself from them as quickly as possible. And what are your thoughts on platforming certain people? And where do you draw the line on that? I know with us, you know, we have quite a few people who want to come on. And we always have to balance like giving them a platform versus just being genuinely curious and wanting to hear a different perspective. It's extremely tricky, I would say, until it's not tricky anymore. And for me, I was, especially when I started the show, and remember, it's a very different

internet than it is now. It was very wild west. There weren't a lot of interview shows. I was really, me and Rogan were the first sort of two long form interview shows. When I started doing the long form interview, obviously I didn't invent the long form interview, but they weren't doing it online, really, and they certainly weren't doing it in, you know, I built sets that looked like television sets. So I was doing something that appeared very professional

the way people had always seen before. So if I gave anyone a platform immediately a certain portion of the internet was like, holy shit, this doesn't look like it's in someone's basement or it doesn't even look like it's in Rogan's thing where he's smoking weed with them with the curtain in the background. It looks like it should be on television.

So I think I was held to a higher standard as it came to that. My general philosophy was something's close to what we discussed before, which was, I'll try to bring on as wide a variance of people as possible. and I'll talk to them and then my audience can decide. That was my general philosophy.

What interestingly happened as I did that was more and more people on the right were willing to talk to me. And the more I talked to people on the right, the less people on the left were willing to talk to me. And that I think probably, I'm going to guess that you guys probably have some version of that now happening to you too. I see this happening across the board now. And this is, unfortunately, it's become a cancer of the left that they've abandoned

all of their really, what I would say are they. true liberal principles in the name for this sort of hegemonic, very controlling attitude. And it's a shame because you're constantly finding enemies everywhere. You know, the day after the election, there were all these articles written about how the left has to find its new Joe Rogan. And it's like, dude, you guys had Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan, the mushroom eating, pot smoking, ayahuasca doing, MMA guy. Like, he is not supposed to be a conservative voting for a Republican, but you guys

purged even him, which is something that we sort of hit on before. So as a general rule, I think you should be as open to talking to whoever you want, but you also have to make decisions in your life and you have to decide what kind of show you want to do. And if you platform somebody, are you going to do the appropriate pushback where you think it should be done and who do you want to be associated with? I would say it's just you guys have to make a decision for yourselves and everyone's decision would be different.

As for the platform answer on that, as long as you're not breaking the laws of the United States, I don't have a problem with anyone being on a platform. And if you do break the laws of the United States, then you have a bigger problem than the platform. When we created locals, which was to deal with a lot of this stuff because people were getting kicked off these platforms left and right, the policy that we put in, which I really think is still the best policy,

is that we did a subscription platform. And I knew that if you literally charge people a quarter, literally 25 cents a month, it would eliminate 99% of the bad behavior because most of these people are on burner accounts. It's anonymous. A quarter put some sense. skin in the game, even though it's nothing, in essence. And that would eliminate 99% of it.

However, if someone wants to join my locals community, they can pay me the, we do $5 a month, they can pay me the $5 a month. And if they want to get in there and just yell at me all day, it's up to me. So I can either decide to take their money and say whatever they want, or I can kick them out of my community, but they're not off the platform. So then they would be out of the Rubin Report community, but they could be on Scott Adams' local's community. They could be on Bridger Fedazis or Michael Malice, et cetera. So, if you're a lot of the same, so, it's It's not a platform thing. We basically treated it like I treat my home.

You can say whatever you want about me outside of my house, but I'm not going to invite you into my home to say awful things about me. So I was just trying to create some version of the game that was a little more elegant, let's say, and I think we accomplished that. What you mentioned about certain people not wanting to come on the show,

that has been our experience. We have fortunately had some people that we're on the left that were willing to come on our show, such as Sasan, we've had Destiny, David Packman. Don Lemon claims he's independent. He came on our show. So there have been people that I've been willing, and we are-

Anacusperian. Anacusparian. Like, we are so, so, so appreciative of those people that we're willing to come on the show. But we do kind of run into that same issue where a lot of people, they see that we've talked to some other people

on the right are people that they disagree with. And I think that they're unwilling to come on the show. Well, I think one of the problems there is also that the ideas of the left have really run thin. And they use the false cries of race and bigotry and misogyny and all of those. It's a distraction.

Even some of those people that you mentioned, they've said unbelievably horrible things about me, and you cannot find me saying unbelievably horrible things about them. Because I'm just not, I'm not that interested in that game. But if you're, if the main cruddle that you have over people is, I'm gonna call everyone a racist and everyone a bigot, then I'll never debate their ideas. And then what happens is, then they don't wanna do a two and a half hour podcast with somebody,

because they don't wanna have to sit there and defend their ideas, because they're used to winning arguments just because they've said the worst possible things about people. So it would be much harder as a general rule to get someone who's not that seasoned and talk. Why didn't Kamala do Rogan? It was because they knew. It's not because Rogan is a hardcore interviewer, right? Rogan would be criticized. Actually, that's a criticism.

He gets the same thing as me, that he's a softball interviewer. He just talks to people. Well, okay. So why wouldn't she do that? There were two reasons she didn't do it. She didn't do it, number one, because she knew that the lefty base was going to go bananas, that she's talking to right-wing maniac Joe Rogan. already illustrated why that's complete nonsense. And then the other reason is it would be far scarier

for her to do a three-hour open-ended interview without any preparation, rather than even as bad as she was in the 60 Minutes interview or the really, you know, highly produced ones, even if her answers are terrible, it's all like, you know, 45 seconds of an answer, right? So even if she does all up her double speak and circular logic and all that nonsense, it's like somewhat tight. You put her three hours with Rogan, her head would have exploded because there aren't many people on the left that can explain their stuff other than Trump is evil. But with all that said, we do want to be very appreciative towards those people that are on the left that are willing to come on the shows and actually have the discussion. I think it's great. I think it's super, super, super

important. And it's unfortunate because we just want to talk to people and hear them out. But it's like we've consistently run up against that issue. But shout out to the people that are on the left that have came on the show. We really appreciate you guys. Lastly, you mentioned the subscription platform that you have. I'm curious because we actually started. out as a finance podcast. I'm sure you wouldn't want to disclose numbers, but in terms of percentages, what is the revenue like in terms of where is it, where's it all coming from for your media business? You mean for my media business or for locals? Because I don't own locals anymore. We merged with Rumble and then Rumble and public. And so I don't own that

anymore. So you mean for my own personal. Yeah, wherever your revenue is coming from, like subscriptions or you have sponsors. Right now, like I can ballpark you the end. on that subscription is probably about 20% something like that probably about 20% 20% and then sponsors is like a sponsors YouTube pre-rolls how else do we make money we get well so rumble sells our ads those are the ads that go everywhere so they're on Spotify they're on YouTube etc etc pre-rolls subscription obviously we have merch much have some other we must have some other stuff but that that's the bulk of it yeah yeah we wanted to get into

subscriptions maybe we're always considering it I think we should Jack I'm saying you a text you didn't get back to me on that they've tried okay well I still know the people at locals and my brother-in-law was my co-creator and it's a fantastic product and it's your community you do whatever you want you set the rules our live video on there is as good as Instagram in terms of interactions and everything else we live stream my show on there every day you'll set your rules as you see fit you decide how much you want to charge and and and all of the other principles that I think we've talked about here related to free speech and everything else. We just built you a house.

What you do in that house is completely up to you. Is there anything else that you want to mention while we have a couple minutes here at the end? Well, I'm looking forward to being in Vegas for a day. I've only been to Vegas one other time. It was in 2016 for the Democrat debate that they did here. It was Bernie versus Hillary at the time.

And I was at ORA TV, which was Larry King's Network. And they had no budget. and they basically were like, we'll get you the press passes, but we're not going to pay a dime. So I had to pay to bring my team here. And I didn't have any, I was maybe making $60 grand a year at the time,

something like that. So I didn't have any money. We drove from L.A., we brought our own stuff. It was very janky and whatever. We stayed at Circus, Circus. Have you been over there at Circus? Yes. I'm pretty sure I still have a disease from that night.

It was, so, and I'm not much of a gambler, but I do really like casinos in general. In Florida, we have the hard rock in Hollywood, in Hollywood, Florida. And even though I don't gamble, I like going to concerts there. And I just like the atmosphere. I like sort of like the liveliness.

I don't really have vices in that sense anymore. I like tequila. I'm coming out with the tequila next month. That's my next business project. But I just like, I like the stimulation of it. So I'm actually really, I was very happy when the guys told me we were doing this. Cause I wanted to chat with you guys.

And Phoenix has been a big fan of both years for years. And then I was like, oh, and we get to go to Phoenix. We get to Phoenix last week. We get to go to Vegas and be around some of that stuff, which I had. And so, no, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this. And I appreciate the kind words there. And you guys have built something really nice. You got a beautiful.

This is your house. It is. You got a beautiful house here. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I just like, I like just seeing other people that are doing something good. Like, it's not that complex. You know, there's so many people in our space or whatever this is that are constantly

trying to destroy each other and whatever. And it's like, I see no competition with anyone. To me, if I'm doing something good, if you build it, they will come. If you're doing something good, you will build it and they will come and everyone will come. That was a weird way to end. Yeah, no. That's what she said. All right.

There we go. Thank you guys for watching. Until next time. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Phoenix. Until next time.