The Pomp Podcast - #587: Dave Rubin on Thinking for Yourself

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

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What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Dave Rubin is a political commentator, YouTube personality, and talk show host. He's the creator and host of The Rubin Report, a political talk show on YouTube and the network Blaze TV. Dave is also the co-founder of Locals, a new subscription service built for creators. In this conversation, we discuss critical thinking skills, eroding trust in institutions, censorship, decentralization, owning your audience, first principles, personal responsibility, democracy, and capitalism. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investments you should not treat any opinion expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys bang bang i've got dave here ready pomp i'm in miami in florida a free city in a free state i'm very excited are you gonna move here eventually well we just moved my company down here we moved locals here uh i'm thinking about it i sat down with my business managers and i know you know a little something about dollars and cents and they basically looked at

me and were like you're an idiot for living in los angeles and uh i mean in effect we crushed the numbers i could live for free you know what i mean like my every no matter what i bought here I would, in essence, be living for free. I'm a little, you know, the humidity, my hair is a little lower here. I got to do like just the tighter cut like you, then I would be all right. That's the main thing.

But no, I have to get here at some point. Like what is going on in Miami is just extraordinary. Yeah, like literally you sent out a tweet, something about locals, and then the mayor tweeted at me, and now I'm here to interview him tomorrow. Like that's so the reverse of the bananas bullshit that I'm living through in LA

where I hate the mayor and hate the governor. So it's like, yeah, I got to get here. Maybe the governor's like breaking the law in California. I want that man in jail. That Gavin Newsom is an evil Disney cartoon villain who should be in jail. Just, I mean, I know, you know, but like the French laundry thing alone should have taken him down. All right.

So let's just start with a topic that I know that we've talked about before, which is politicians for the most part have this like immunity to criminal charges or the legal system. There is social pressure, which we saw some of that happen over the last year or so. But the actual like checks and balances of our democracy that are supposed to hold people accountable for doing things that are legal versus not legal, they just don't apply if you are in certain political offices. And so like, let's just start. Is that like just a perfect example of how the whole system screwed up? yeah that's a great place to start because basically what you're saying is nothing works anymore and that's we're kind of in the show must go on version of democracy at this point like everyone knows it's not working but we got to keep pretending it's working because otherwise we'd really have to look in the mirror and be like what what are we right now is it what are we well i would say we're basically a somewhat functioning democracy at some level at this

point but it's very tenuous right now like there are so many things that are upside down right now like like it could basically turn like this like they could pack the courts they could change the electoral college these are not things that i'm making up these are things that they're saying that the lefties basically are saying they want to do and then it's like the game really is over on top of the fact of all the stuff that you're always talking about relative to finances and everything else it's like does anyone really trust that these things make sense that your money is insured that the banks aren't just going to collapse like it all feels kind of crazy right now. And what sucks is we don't have trusted voices. Like how many people, when you wake up

in the morning and you're scrolling Twitter, like usually, and you follow people by choice, but usually I'm like, man, that guy's an idiot. And this is a moron. That's a sellout. This is a grifter. And it's like, it's really hard to find people that are basically trustworthy. I'm not saying they get everything right, but just like ballpark estimate of like where we're at, where we've been, where we're going. It's really, I'm trying to be that for some people. And I think I have been, but it doesn't mean I'm right all the time, but we've lost that trusted group. It's just almost completely gone. I think that there's three groups of people that are trusted in the sense of if they're good at what they do, there's a reason why they're trusted. One is macro hedge

fund investors. All they think about all day long is risk. Yeah. And they think about complex systems and then they wager money. If they're right, they make money. If they're wrong, they lose money it's the ultimate skin in the game and they can always get bailed out one way or another so that's some of them yeah but for the those folks uh there's this natural sense of you can't bullshit the actual asset going up or down it's going to do it with or without you and therefore for the most part your money being wagered you have to think a certain way right you have to seek truth there's basically some sense of reality there you can't just make up the whole thing right yes yeah the second group is uh what i will call the silicon valley uh outcast and so what i mean

by that is not all silicon valley investors not all silicon valley founders because i actually think some of them are the worst offenders of a lot of this stuff but the folks that are well respected in silicon valley yep but definitely are a little kind of eh they're they're kind of out there like i don't know if i want to do deals with them you know one let's take like a founder's one yeah uh heretic con was a conference that they were gonna put on yes i was i was at one of the meetings discussing what was gonna happen there so like those people obviously aren't very worried about what other people think about them yeah they're here to take a path that is not well worn yeah so i think that like there's i like a lot of those guys well they're seeking of truth

yeah right you may agree with them disagree with them whatever but like they're trying to head in a direction i think that that's it and the third one is like what i'll call like pure independence and one of the uh one of the people that recently has gone from and maybe it was i wasn't paying attention before and now just i have been or i don't know why glenn greenwald feels like he came out of nowhere from i'm a journalist to like i've taken every weapon out and i am ready for battle every day yeah and he's going after people and he's doing all stuff i'm kind of reading i'm like the guy's not wrong well i will pat myself on the back a little bit here which by saying he's kind of repeating a lot of the stuff that I was saying four years ago from from a political

perspective because I was a lefty too so Glenn if you think of Glenn he's like a traditional lefty he and I think what does that mean well he's a lefty in that he if you look well so first off I would say we shouldn't look at things left and right anymore you should look at things as sort of top bottom that you should look at them as you know you're either for centralized power or decentralized power so that would be the basic thing but in a traditional sense lefty meaning you're a democrat you believe the government should and can do certain things or you're more of a conservative or republican and you basically believe the government's not supposed to do a lot don't tread on me low taxes states rights things like that so he definitely comes from more of like

centralized democratic that's right so he comes from that world okay i come from that world too then i woke up very publicly over the last couple years that's kind of what put me on the map And he was sort of staying in that spot. And then I think what happened and this is where I think you woke up to him was Trump. And what he realized was, and I think a lot of lefties realize this, is that Trump was not this evil right wing crazy monster that they made him out to be. in many respects, he was doing a lot of the things that we all wanted. Let's get us out of wars. Let's not pay countries to do things that often work against our interests. Let's get rid of regulation. Let's try to get the economy going. So a lot of economic populists that were on the left started liking Trump. So I think, and then what for Glenn that I think really cut close to him was to watch people that pretend that they're journalists, but they're actually journalists,

to watch them basically all day long nitpick every little sentence with Trump and suddenly take all the reverse positions they used to. That's really what I think like blew it up for him. And then, and then he really has gone in that direction, but we've seen a lot of people in our world kind of go in that direction since where I would say they're now in effect, I would say they're libertarians, basically they're old school liberals at some level, but really you're woke or conservative is sort of what I would say at this point. It doesn't mean you're conservative like in the way we all think of like a traditional conservative like i think i know most of your political views but like i don't like off the top of my head i don't know if you're pro

choice or not let's say but i would say you're conservative either way in a certain sense like nobody really wants to hear that because the word is kind of scary and then people think you're mean or something like that but that's what it is if you want to if you want america to continue in some way if you respect freedom and individual choice and any of those things i would say in essence your your well it's capitalism it's individualism it is uh personal responsibility right independent thought very scary ideas we should actually stop talking yeah what was it for you that kind of woke you up in terms of when you talk about like being a democrat because i think that's one of the things that most people uh they use is like the the mud

slinging against people who have views that you or i may have uh they would say oh you've always been that way like you're the hardcore right but you actually was a Bernie supporter I was a Bernie you can see videos I'm not proud of them but you can see videos of me in like 2015 I agree with Bernie on everything and the thing is with the lefties and the progressives have done this really well everything they say kind of sounds right unless you think about it for two seconds like it all sounds right in that initial thing like $15 minimum wage well of course it sounds right like yes we want poor people or people on the lower end of the economic class to make more money that sounds right but then there's no economic theory behind that you can't just

artificially tell businesses that they have to pay people this much blah blah blah and then of course you're just picking a number so why not 20 why not 30 by the way rashida talib you know one of the progressives in in the house she's pushing for 20 and sometimes 25 and it's like well yeah why i guess she's more moral than than old bernie well the the government is just going to print it all so then the business owners won't even have to pay it they'll print it all so that's the other thing that they do i'll get back to the question in a sec but they they print it all and then at the same time they always want to raise taxes so then what's the purpose of raising taxes other to otherwise than punishing people you know what i mean if they believe they can just print print

print print well then why would you need to be raising taxes unless you're actually trying to punish the producers at the same time my favorite statistic in all of the government conversation politics economics etc 2011 i think or it was 2009 i can't remember but since 2009 or 2011 the u.s federal government has taken in more federal income tax every single year than the year prior so for a decade every year they've collected more right they've made more money from a revenue standpoint at the exact same time every single year the inter-year deficit yeah has widened that is not an income problem right it's not that's so that's the first part that's what lefties never want to hear about that it's not an income problem oh if we just

gave them more education we need just more money for teachers it's like no because if any of that ever worked then education would be getting better but is anyone in california like boy we really have a great public education over here uh but to answer your question directly there were a couple moments that really like starkly and i think for a lot of lefties you need to be like literally like basically hit in the head with a frying pan to realize what's going on because it's so it's so much part of your ethos like if you just if you grow up in america from a cultural perspective you're a lefty right like it's like democrats are good liberals are nice republicans are mean and care about money and war so you really have to be like whacked

with something so one one moment was when did you get whacked when did i i got whacked i got whacked a couple times but one of them i'll give you was uh i was on air with the young turks and their far left progressive network when i was one of them and they're playing a video of this guy david webb do you know david webb he's a serious xm host conservative so he's a fox news guy also he's a conservative who happens to be black okay so you can already see where this is going and they're watching they're playing a clip of him and they're calling him an uncle tom and a self-hating black man and you know just all of the worst stuff you could possibly say about somebody what they didn't know was i had had a show years before on serious xm and i used

to see David in the hallway and I would go on his show. I was a lefty. He was on the right. We'd battle it out. And then we'd go downstairs to Del Fresco's and have steak and have whiskey and have a great time. And we became great friends. He's still a good friend of mine to this day. And I'm sitting there watching them and I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. I know David Webb. I know this is a good man. I know he believes what he believes. He fights for what he believes. He's, he's put himself out there. It's not easy to say I'm a black conservative. It's like saying I'm a gay conservative or whatever else. And here you have the so-called tolerant people saying all the worst things you can possibly say about a black man. And they're

doing it in the name of tolerance. You know what I mean? Oh, you black man, you don't behave the way we want black people to behave. You're a bad guy. And suddenly in that moment, because I knew him, it wasn't just like a guy I was seeing on a TV screen. Is it fair to call him a friend? Yeah. He's a very good friend of mine. But so here I have, they're saying all the worst things in the world about a friend of mine who I know is forthright and honest. And then it hit me. It was like, you guys call everybody else racist, but you are the racist because what is racism prejudice prejudge? Well, they see a black man and by the color of that black man's skin, they think, oh, black man must think these things, black man allowed to think these things. And I literally

remember looking at them, like looking at my other panelists and it hit me. I was like, these are the racist. And then once you realize that, that they're looking at the world through a prism that is that is very very backwards pretty much the rest falls apart so that's the beauty of the red pill thing if you can get someone to have their red pill moment whatever it is the others you only need to have one red pill moment the other now some people snort it right so some people that's what i told i told candace owens i told candace owens she like crushed it up and snorted it and then she was gone like she was a lefty she snorted it and then bam she's like supporting trump like that that's not how most people do it most people it's like a slow release little time

release kind of thing and it can literally take years but once the process starts it started it's like neo in the matrix like he didn't want to see it the second he saw it but once you see it it affects absolutely everything in your life that was moment one what was the next major one do you remember um so there were there were two others i'll give you one other which which actually happened right before but this was the one that that like fully that started the process so i probably should have done this one first uh i was watching real time with bill maher and did you ever see this there's a very famous episode when sam harris was on with ben affleck and they were talking about radical islam do you remember this okay so basically you live in a world that

i don't really understand that well so i'm gonna get an education today no no we're both gonna get an education so um so sam was on the show you know when bill does a show he does the panel so there's three people on the other side and they're doing like hot topics and then you know he does like a protected interview at the end of the show where it's just you and Bill, right? So Sam was on that side of the table. So it was really supposed to just be Sam and Bill going back and forth. Bill Maher, biggest lefty liberal in America for the last 20 years. And Sam Harris, who I didn't even know who he was at the time, but this mild-mannered, you know, nice suit, very soft-spoken neuroscientist talking about inner peace. He was on a book tour for a book called Waking Up, A Guide to

Spirituality Without Religion. So this was not someone that was coming on the show to fight with people. Anyways, Bill, obviously not a fan of religion, right? And Sam is like sort of the most well-known atheist in America. They start talking about religion and Ben Affleck, who was about to do Batman for the first time, and he was very jacked up. I don't know if it was all natural, just saying he was like huffing and puffing and red in the face. They started talking about Islam and basically Sam said that you should be allowed to criticize any set of ideas, but you don't want to be bigoted towards people. And we all know this to be true. Of course you could criticize the the platform of the Republican party, that doesn't mean you hate all Republicans, right?

Separate the person from the idea. Simple as that. So you could criticize the Old Testament. It doesn't mean you hate all Jews. And in this case, Sam was saying, well, you should be able to criticize the ideas of the Quran, but you don't want to be bigoted towards Muslims. Everyone gets that. It's such a, well, I can't say everyone gets it. Obviously everyone doesn't get it, but it's a fundamental, if you want to be like a truly honest person in the world, it's a fundamental thing that you must understand. Affleck went bananas on the two of them. And the line that blew up was he, he said to Bill Maher and to Sam Harris, you're gross and racist. And he was screaming and huffing and

puffing and pounding the table. And suddenly, so I should have told you this story first. Cause when you're talking about that wake up moment, the next day, basically, so I'm watching this and I'm going, Whoa, this, this gets to what I've been trying to piece together. You know, when you're thinking something for a long time and then something happens and then like the Legos come together. And that's what it was like. Cause I was like, this is what the progressives do with everybody. They keep telling you that decent people, Bill Maher, no one in their right mind thinks Bill Maher is a racist. You can think whatever you want about Bill Maher. I don't think anyone honestly thinks he's a racist. And here's this neuroscientist talking about,

you know, inner peace, but suddenly Bill Maher, uh, in effect Affleck thinks he has the right to just call them racist without think about what it would be like in a conversation. If you just met somebody, like it would take a while before you told them that they were racist, right? But like within two minutes, he sits down and they're racist. And then what I watched happen over the next couple of days, suddenly everybody, HuffPo, Vox, all the lefty things, suddenly all these articles, Bill Maher's a racist. Ben Affleck called Bill Maher a racist. He's a racist. Sam Harris is a racist. And once I saw that, I realized how the framing was completely backwards. There's a set of people who are trying to talk about extremely difficult things. You could argue

that that might be the most difficult because you're talking about religion, you're talking about Islam, terrorism, all these things. That might be the most hard thing to talk about. And there's a sliver of people trying to talk about it honestly. And what is your reward from the lefties? The reward is you're a racist.

Now, I'll just say one other thing on that, which is that Bill Maher, who has been the standard bearer of the left for almost 30 years in America at this point, he was doing politically incorrect before that. People on the right like Bill Maher now. People on the left hate Bill Maher. Why?

Why? Because he defends free speech. He defends free speech. So people on the right basically are like, Bill Maher, you're a lefty. You don't really get it. We disagree with you on abortion. We disagree with you on taxes, blah, blah, blah. But you defend free speech. And that's so important to us that basically people on the right, if you say to the average conservative, what do you think about Bill Maher? They'll be like, ah, you know, he's okay. I disagree with him on some stuff, but he's okay. You ask the average like lefty foot soldier, MSNBC person, what they think about bill maher he's a racist and and that fundamental disconnect is is so it's so intertwined with what's wrong with the left right now is there like a central viewpoint right like i i think it's

some crazy way yeah and this is me coming from somebody who uh i understand very little about politics uh i like to think no but you get first principles which is more important maybe i uh that would be a kind thing to say to me but well politics is a game you get the philosophy behind yeah which i think is and so it to me it's like uh there's the labels and like all this kind of stuff and if you kind of strip all that away it feels like okay you have two groups of people they have different views about all these different topics uh but naturally it's like uh almost like a bell curve yeah like is there some people in the middle who are just like you know what like i think a i don't feel super strong about it right like it's not like i'm like an extremist in that

end by the way if you show me some information and data and i might change my mind a little bit and like move a little bit more you know to the left or the right or whatever but like that central piece it almost feels like that's like either disappeared or just like they're like nope i'm not participating like i'm gonna shut the hell up and i'm getting out of here yeah well that's like what happened that's partly a function of social media because if you're in the center let's say well then you're gonna get hit from both sides and that's nobody so neither one of the extremes like the center because they're not on their side because it's like well at this point i would say as I defined things before where you're sort of woke or conservative, I would say the center,

the center is if you think that the constitution is decent, that the founding of America, I'm doing this all from an American perspective, let's say, if you think the founding of America was good, if you think individual rights are good, if you think rule of law is good, the bill of rights are good, that we have God given rights. So the government didn't give us rights. It can protect them. And then whether we agree on marginal tax rates or the estate tax or the wealth tax or even abortion or any of those other things are irrelevant. So that's the fight right now. So I would say most, almost everybody, except the Antifa foot soldiers that are literally burning down cities, and then the journalists on MSNBC and CNN, and

then sort of the big tech oligarchs that can figure out ways to pit us against each other, that's the woke thing. And then there's like an academic version of it. Obviously, there's a lot of brainwashing at colleges. Most of us are the first thing. Most of us are just like live and let live. This place is pretty good. It ain't perfect. We can acknowledge that we can always make it better, but I don't want your stuff. I'm not entitled. Like most people really understand that. Most people are rational actors, rational self-interest, but I mean that really, most people are decent. I fundamentally believe that, but I don't believe that the machine is decent. And what the lefties seem to believe is if we could just give the machine enough power,

if Bernie could just have enough power or now Biden, if we, if he could just take more from some people. If we could just fix all these things in the history that he never fixed. I mean, Biden's been in politics for 47 years. He never mentioned systemic racism before. Now it's his life's cause. It's like, come on. So you either believe that humans are imperfect creatures and that we can just deal with the mess and that you're going to figure out your life the best way you know how. And I'm just not entitled to your stuff. And if you make a lot of money more than me, maybe I can look at that as the star that I want to get to if that's important to me. or you believe that a bunch of imperfect creatures

can create a perfect system. And that's what these people are doing. I mean, this is Marxism. They basically want a whole bunch of flawed people. We're all flawed to create a system that if you just behave within that system, if you just act as a cog in that system, you'll get, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

That's like the meme out there. But going back, those rules don't apply to them. No, it never applies to them. Of course. I mean, look at the leader of Black Lives Matter who bought a house in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles, which is 99.7% white. Now, I don't care about any of that stuff. She's the one that purports to, but she's bought something like $4 million worth of real estate in the last couple of years. It's like, this is the greatest grift

going of all time. Have they sent any young black people to colleges? Have they built any institutions? No, they're just here to tear everything down. That's the fundamental difference. I think liberty minded people or individualist minded people want to build things. And if you want to build things, that's hard. You know about that. You know, it is hard work to build a company, to build institutions, to build places of higher learning. Notice they don't do any of that. What they're really good at is America's horrible. We're going to destroy the whole thing. There was a beautiful moment in the Democratic debate early on before everybody dropped out and they all got behind the guy with dementia.

I think we'll get to that in a little bit. But there was a beautiful moment where Mayor Pete turned to Bernie and he said, Bernie, you want to burn it all down. I don't. That was actually the one true moment in the whole thing. That's what they're here to do. We could all do that. we could all set fire to something but to build something is is way harder when you think about

um kind of this whole thing right uh and it is economic it is political it is uh kind of cultural philosophy you know uh philosophical like there's all these different elements to it is there one point where you say like if we could fix this one element the rest of the system would kind of uh self-correct is it the media is it the economist is it uh literally the politicians is it the education system or is it no this is a complex system and like there is no one place to kind of solve if you that's probably right that's probably it's a complex system in a country of 350 million people that is an idea dennis prager talks about this a lot that the beauty of america is that it's this idea

that people can come from all over the world with whatever their traditions are, their food, their family structures, all of those things, you can come here and America says, hey, go for it. We're not gonna get in your way, go for it. We're gonna treat you all equally. That's the thing they're trying to undo right now.

But I would say the system, because you got 350 million people with all sorts of different beliefs and backgrounds and all that. To me, the best system is one that just gets the freaking hell out of the way, which is exactly what was set up. I guess probably the most sensible answer

the question would be that it would be education if if young people were actually taught like good decent principles that we probably were you you grew up in jersey right uh north carolina in north carolina okay wait i thought you were a jersey guy my entire family is from your tri-state area but uh right my dad and mom ran away and uh right right right i grew up in north carolina all right so but all right so i grew up new york and most of my family lived in jersey public schools and there were good decent public schools it doesn't mean they did everything right but you got like some sort of sense of like a robust education all that the schools have been so like can you imagine having sending your kids to a public school right now to be taught that boys have vaginas and girls

have penises and that if they're white they're automatically racist and that the history of the country didn't the country didn't start in 1776 it started in 1619 and that the prime the primacy of everything of the country was driven by racism and slavery i mean you'd be sending you're basically sending your kids to a brainwashing institution. So I guess fixing education would be number one. I think that's long gone. I think the ship has freaking sailed. The teachers unions are so deeply corrupt. They have been infected by the woke virus. They're gone. I think maybe the other answer would be, yeah, if we had a decent media, if we had imagine there was just 10 people in the media like mainstreamers. So I'm not talking about somebody that maybe woke

up recently like Glenn Greenwald. I'm talking about if we could turn on a channel and reincarnate Walter Cronkite. And maybe he wasn't that great and we've just sort of canonized him now. But imagine if there was like a couple people in America that you really felt, boy, you're really getting some honest, true assessment of what's going on here. That would help a lot because otherwise the fraying that we have right now is just going to keep going. But I just don't know. It's a good question because it's like, is this thing just too big? Probably is. It's too big to fail in some way, but now it's too big to succeed. The woke virus, as you described it, the wokeness um we've talked about in the past i have example after example of uh a virtue

signaling element of it right where people basically are saying one thing when given the opportunity to do something uh with money or time or whatever they don't follow through with what you would like other people's money yeah that is one way to put it yeah uh is this just a natural evolution of a society like yeah you you kind of ascend to the global superpower you won right like like you're the top uh everyone gets fat and happy complacent yep and then rather than stay on guard and uh and be worried about what comes next you basically just turn inward and all the fat you know uh rich people also are screaming at each other about oh you know give me your food give me your plate you know you almost imagine like ancient rome yeah right yeah like the

fat guys laying around like just trying to like yell and scream at each other and then eventually like rome falls yeah that well i'll i absolutely think that's right the analogy i was always giving related to trump was that trump was the guy guarding the gate at the castle and all of the elites instead of being like maybe we should help that guy they were actually mocking him and trying to take him out they were basically like trying to cut his achilles heel while the barbarians were at the gate. And in this case, the barbarians, I mean the wokesters, the people that have decided that this thing that we are a part of is not good. Notice nobody leaves, right? Nobody leaves America. Everyone's still, if we fully opened up our borders the way they would like, we would be

overrun overnight. Anyone can leave America. No one's going. The craziest, most bananas, Carl Reiner, just pick any of these lefty Hollywood people. They never leave. They never leaving. Why? Because it's pretty freaking spectacular here. And they would never make the money they make or live the life they make. And it's geographically great. And they know it's good. They're making money off very confused people. So I think basically you had all of the elites just mocking the guy who was guarding the gate. And yes, it's that we got fat on freedom. We got it's been so good here for so long. The levels of freedom and wealth that we've done for everybody is so extraordinary and is is the jealousy the world over that we turn.

Yeah, you're right. We turned it on ourselves. We were suddenly like, oh, is any of this good? And then, you know, you couple that with just with really bad education, as we've talked about before and everything else. And then it's like, yeah, now the system is just like it's just kind of hanging on. and you know to me it's like there we had a real chance it's very odd for me i did not support trump until september of 20 uh was 2019 no 2020 was the election so 2020 and now it's like so you were anti just uh because i don't know this so i was anti trump i voted for gary johnson in 2016

okay um you know the libertarian gary johnson he was not a great candidate that's the uh a lepo Aleppo. He didn't know what Aleppo was. And, and just like, he wanted the baker to bake the gay cake, which made no sense from a libertarian perspective. He, and he was also just, I've hung out with the guy actually. And he's been on my show. He's a nice guy. Like I'd like to smoke weed with him and go skiing. That's what he really wants to do. But instead he pretends he's a politician. So I voted for him. And then I had three years of, of really like the red pilling process. And really at the end of it, it was like, well, then I might have to like, kind of suck it and be like, yeah, that guy who talks funny,

who's a bit of a dick and a troll and yeah, maybe he is the only thing that the system could choke out. That's what I kind of came to on Trump. It was like, it wasn't that he was this great statesman that we all would have wanted, right? Like I would much prefer that we have a true statesman, like get me JFK again, but that doesn't exist. A broken system can only give you broken people in a way.

And Trump was just like, I'll do it. I don't wanna do it, but I'll do it. But if you wanna watch something interesting on YouTube, to go and watch Trump interviews in the 80s with Oprah when she's begging him to run for president and he's on Donahue he's saying the exact same things now there's a Netflix there's a Netflix special oh is there there's a Netflix uh it's called the the American Dream and he's 33 years old or 32 years old and he's in his office and a reporter basically is like you know you're gonna run for president one day if you listen to it and you didn't see him you would have thought he was

75 years old saying the same i mean it's almost to a t yeah exactly no he was saying the same stuff he's not as orange he's not as gruff his uh the way he speaks is a little bit different you know now it's it blew my mind by the way like it like it was no it was shocking because i was like oh my god like this i didn't know that like i'm not old enough to have understood that like literally here is a video uh wow does he say the line in that does he say the line well i want other people to do it first he's always because every time that i heard him say it in the 80s when I've watched these videos, he always says the same thing, which is, well, he's like, well, I wish somebody else will do it. Like, I hope, I hope I don't want to do it. And that to me is

what you'd want out of a president. You'd want somebody that would be like, I really don't want to rule the world, but if everything else is so messed up, then maybe it takes like this crooked New York city, uh, you know, builder. I mean, to be a builder in New York city, like you're gonna have to do some shady stuff but maybe that was the only chance so put trump aside for a second yeah uh and i want to come back to the presidential futures that we have uh but um my favorite episode i've ever had on the podcast is uh somebody dm me on twitter and he said hey man uh i'm a regular dude you don't know me no reason why you ever will know me i like to come on your podcast and talk about why i like bitcoin i probably got that message a hundred times over the years

never even responded to any of them for some reason just something in me just said respond responded i said great why don't you come on the podcast tomorrow or two days from now we did a remote interview and uh afterwards he tells me that he literally was so nervous that he got his wife to take their kids and their dog and like get the hell out of the house and he like put this whole thing set up and he had lamps and like he was into it right yeah and it's my favorite interview because he said one sentence to me that is like seared in my brain he said look man he's a he did a tile and flooring in canada i don't want to rule the world i just want to create a better life for my family that's it and i just always think like that is majority

of the population yeah there are psychos who want to rule the world but majority of people do not give a shit about other people or other things or whatever they're just saying if i can create a better life for my family be happy and spend time with people i love great life that's it that's how you find purpose and meaning and everything else right like think about it right now i'm i don't know i met them on the street but like i don't know what my neighbor thinks about anything basically he could be a communist do you think they know what you think they probably know what i think which i can always tell when they know because then i people well before covid people used to cross the street now i know why they cross the street but but usually when when people see me

that almost oh we were just at west elm before we walked in here a guy came right up to me like it's funny because on on twitter people are horrible because anonymity and all that people in real life super nice no one has ever come up to me and said anything negative i'll get i'll get some mean looks but no one has ever and i hope you know knock on wood that continues but don't worry i got a couple brothers we can change that he's got this studio on the street over here um but but in essence um i don't know what my neighbor does what they believe in any of that stuff and i don't care as long as the toxic goo of whatever they're doing doesn't leak into my property as long as they're not doing anything to affect my life that's the beauty of america

yeah do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anybody yeah i mean that in essence that's the most libertarian approach to everything or or like you know some way it's a very like and cap approach that there's just no interference in anything i'm not fully there on all that i think we need some basic guardrails you know like it's just you need some reality um but that's that's it. So when, when you, again, when you ask about that center thing and like what most we are, but, but good people are afraid to say that. Think how many people you probably know in your own life who are just afraid to say that because the woke have tricked them into thinking if you don't say you're woke or post a black picture on Instagram or virtue signal that you

were at some rally, even though you don't know why they're there. I love those videos where they send interviewers in and they're like, who died and why are you here? And they're like, what, what you know like all of that nonsense but yes most people are live and let live i firmly firmly believe that when i have dinner in private with people i always like to ask one of two questions uh one we're not going to talk about because we don't have time but the second one i want to talk to you about first question i always ask is what's the one thing you believe that you would feel is politically incorrect to say in public and you get a whole plethora of answers from climate change stuff to political stuff to literally you know uh sexual preference i mean all kinds of crazy

stuff right so like that's just a great thing because they're like you really understand who somebody is and how they think whatever the second question i like to ask because it's just pure freaking entertainment and my wife always just rolls her eyes i say who's the craziest most unassuming future president that you could see like who's the person that you think could be president yeah that other people would be like that's nuts and i've always said two people and then i want to hear your answer yeah the first is the rock yeah i genuinely believe yeah the rock is going to be the president united states he's charismatic he's intelligent he's funny there's a bunch of studies that show the most physically kind of dominant person if you put him up on stage

like people just vote like oh that's supposed to be the leader uh and i used to joke that you know trump's like a big guy six four or whatever right yeah standing next to dwayne johnson and he said something stupid dwayne johnson like shut your candy ass up everyone would laugh and like you could just very quickly see like he could navigate his way to become the president popularity contest the second person which now people are like all right this guy's crazy kim kardashian super recognizable many people think she's attractive she has a very very high degree of expertise in transitioning from let's call it a sex tape stage to reality star to now criminal justice reform and lawyer to maybe governor to president like you could see a path where somebody

is actually very intelligent you listen to like the david letterman uh interview she does on netflix you listen you're like that's not what the media has portrayed her as like she's actually very very intelligent uh and then you add in all these other things around fame and popularity and and culture etc and you start to realize like is this just gonna be a popularity contest yeah like is it literally just gonna come down to like who runs the high school like uh student body president campaign and hands out lollipops right like they win they'll be handing out ubi is what they'll be handing out it's not like is that is that like how we determine president moving forward it's just like who's the most popular who's the biggest social media following they win

probably yes right like that's probable but that's the best argument for limited government that there possibly is that that whatever happens so whether it's the rock or kim kardashian or who or the ghost of gary coleman whatever it is it's like whatever it is that it won't affect you that much so who that that's a good question i mean like who's the the person that is the most out of left field but you still believe they could become president well this isn't out of left field at all but i honestly believe that candace owens could become president really yeah yeah okay explain because i think that will surprise a lot of people well first off she's been you know she was a lefty she then you know she went all the way from left to trump supporter as i said

she snorted that thing and then bam she was off the red pill of all red pills the red pill of all yeah and she she's absolutely clear about her opinions she's completely fearless she has fought the machine she never lets the machine beat her she fights and fights and fights it's it's extraordinary i also know her very well this is a great human being like she really is a great her tactics are a little different than mine you know what i mean we always talk about that like sometimes i don't even do it as much anymore but i used to try to win more with candy than always be on the attack i'm i'm on the attack more now than i used to be because i think there's just not a lot of ways to get these people related to decency and logic and all that kind of stuff

i think she's just prepared and and but i guess that's not out of left field you want you want out of left field um like somebody who's not involved in politics maybe like a matthew mcconaughey you know like he's kind of waking up now he did a couple shows with jordan peterson he understands like purpose he's really into purpose and hums a little bit pounds his chest yeah there's and everyone's like all right i've seen the right right he whispers and you know and he went to whatever he did in interstellar i just watched that again the other day like like something like you know but again that's just the celebrity thing yeah but but there's substance there oh yeah no no there's absolutely substance there but but it's unfortunate because

if you go back i mean literally if you say this is like the nerdiest thing i could possibly tell you but if you looked at the like books and uh literature that i have in my bathroom like when i'm reading on the toilet i have like tons of like founding documents from the united states and what these people what jefferson was writing to adams and all these things you read these things like literally spend two minutes glancing through one of these things you will think my god these people were so much better than us. They were so, for as much as I like Trump, as I said, he was just necessary at that time. He has nothing on these guys, like their understanding about what the world was, what freedom was, what believing in things outside of yourself, bigger than you

allowing people to do what they want next door to you. Like, so it's like, we need those people back but our system and twitter and algorithms and gotcha and a dishonest media none of that adds up to a good decent learned man becoming president of the united states i always think about and um it's a sad thought uh but i talk to friends about all the time i do not have any of my smartest friends who want to go to be a teacher or a politician not one of my smartest friends even remotely has considered it yeah that tells you all you need to know and i'm like man what are you guys going to do technology or wall street well that's kind of beautiful actually so let's take the good version okay the good version of it is that the good people that you know like the

most thoughtful interesting probably creative they're gonna do stuff right like instead of teaching about it and you know i'm not fully saying this but you know the old adage is those who can't do teach so the people that you're talking about they're gonna go build these things that's what's so cool about miami right now it's like literally i got off the plane i could like feel it it felt real to me i was like whoa there's something going on here it's happening here you know that's exciting and awesome and it also breeds more of it you know what i mean there's a little bravery there and then you see all of this new stuff happening and then other people are like wait there's something new there i want to go some fine it feels like the new land bingo

it's it's the wild west that's what i say it's like they're they're actually finding what you guys are doing here and what i now think we're doing by bringing locals here is we are now finding the undiscovered country and let's let's build it together it's it's awesome and by together i mean we're going to build it individually and then see how that thing kind of kind of gets bundled but so that's the good version of it that those people probably did great things the bad version is yes then you will only get these broken corrupt bankrupt morally or or financially so they're doing it for money you know how many politicians go in with very average lifestyles and go out with mega millions way too many of them we just won't get look i've had a ton

of people beg me to run for governor of california because i've been so outspoken about the recall that's a maybe that looks like a maybe i wouldn't say zero but the state is so freaking corrupt that the idea that you could do anything is how would you do it well how would i do what i thought about that all right so i've asked mark cuban before if he ever ran for president how would do it yeah and he had a fascinating answer uh and to his credit uh it was a thoughtful answer given that he probably hadn't spent that much time thinking about it but like if you sat down right now you said okay i have to run for governor like how do you win well i would i mean that i've thought about it okay which would be that i would take zero dollars other than fundraising for

whatever the absolute minimum would be to be on all the ballots so just i just want to be on all the ballots i would do no mainstream press period i will not go on msnbc i will not go on cnn i can't say i wouldn't go on fox actually because they they've actually been very good to me they let me go on and say whatever i want even when it's counter to the say conservative or republican narrative um but i would not play with those children that have just completely wrecked media i have a show i have a voice i would i would talk to youtubers i would go on podcasts and i would say here's what i want to do to fix california we're going to lower taxes for everybody 25 tomorrow we're cutting the budget by 40 tomorrow sorry sorry like these things don't work you know

what's happening in california right now because we have the recall so newsome who is an evil disney cartoon character villain this is a horrible human being uh he's suddenly getting rid of the homeless people they're suddenly disappearing i don't know what he's doing to them but where i live under the underpass has been a freaking massive like you almost have to be like actually you have to admire the ingenuity of these people i'm like you guys are building like three level tents like this is impressive but it's been there for like a year last week suddenly gone and i'm noticing now around parts of LA, it's starting to disappear because he knows he has about a three-month window before the recall election to fully clean the place up so everyone forgets. So he's just truly evil.

But I would say the reason I don't want to do it is because of what you just laid out. I want to build awesome things. I love talking about the ideas that we're talking about here. I love the fact that I'm in the tech world now, which I never, never expected this. And now I spend probably it's probably more than half my day doing locals related things and talking to people about all the solutions whether they're technological or philosophical or legal or whatever it might be and i love that so i feel like i'm a productive member of society why would i be governor like they're gonna call me at 3 a.m be like governor rubin there was a earthquake in santa barbara and it's like all right you know call me in the morning like what do you want me to do

so that would be a horrible governor no i'd be a horrible governor well i'd be like somebody should do something about that but but that also is part of it if you're really a thriving person in this world right like i consider myself a thriving person not a perfect person but i consider myself a thriving person why would you want to be in government why would i want to be in the thing that's there to control people which by the way that's why you get horrible people in government they can't really so andrew yang i think is a really interesting one because he's sort of loved in our circles. And I always think it's really bizarre. It's like, why aren't you doing more than why aren't you building great tech and great things? Why do you keep wanting

to go into government? It doesn't really make sense to me. Like, you know, you failed presidential bid. Then you went to Georgia because you wanted to help the Democrats win, which I guess did happen or it did happen. Now you're running for mayor. It doesn't look like that's going to happen. I guess after this, he's going to run again. It's like you seem like all the tech people seem to like you or yeah i don't really like him either i can sort of read your i uh i just think i think it's all hype i think it's all hype go ahead i have a story he also threw me under the bus in the new york times okay so you don't like him well because the the questioner uh asked said why do you go on these right-wing shows like like the dave rubin show which isn't even a show that's

not the name of my show where he read the quote was where he regularly hosts white supremacists and not only did yang not push back on that um but he basically was like well if the lefties would be nicer i wouldn't have to do shows like that and i was like what's your policy on cursing you do i was basically like fuck you man like that's that's such why people think you're just a cardboard nothing because like you beg not no i can't say he begged me to do my show he wanted to do my show i was thrilled to have him i treated him with the same respect i treat everybody else and now a New York Times person basically calls me a white supremacist and you kind of, you know.

It's just like, it's just gross. It's just gross. All right, so here's my Yang story. Isn't it funny though, I could read it from you just by like, your eyebrow basically was like. Well, here's why. I don't know him. So I have to carry out that.

I've never had a one-on-one conversation with him. So like in all these situations, I'm always like, man, the best thing ever would be that you could sit down with each candidate, have a hour long meal with them and then walk away big, all right, this is what I'm about. Like, you know. Tulsi Gabbard, I did that with her on the show i freaking loved her and we become good friends and she's an honest good woman before yang said

he was running for president i happened to go to a conference that he spoke at i was very off put to the point of like i was like man that guy something doesn't make sense well and at the conference i think it was at the conference or maybe right after the conference he announced he was running for president and i literally remember being like what like like that can't be real what was it that he was saying that that it wasn't even like a a specific thought like a specific idea of like hey i'm going to do this or i'm going to do this or whatever it was just this idea of like man that is commentary on somebody who is talking about a topic but hasn't done the topic i totally agree and it was just a very very weird feeling you just you you can tell it's like

when you listen to a professor talk about like uh economic policy and you're like man you have never wagered money in the market because let me tell you anyone you would be broke yeah like you would be bankrupt already yeah and uh and for whatever reason i don't know why no i get it i actually think that he's like seems like a really personable people people love him like all this and like i feel bad even saying any of this but for whatever reason that was my experience i could be a hundred percent off i'm wrong all the time about people but like in that one moment i remember thinking to myself like there's zero shot and then when i like saw you know six months 12 months later whatever it was and like how far he or maybe it was like two years before the the actual

election this had happened yeah i remember being like whoa he got really far and along the way like i think the machine worked against them and like the whole yang blackout like like i'm all in on all the complaints as to why like he probably didn't do as well as he could have done but then he needed to fight it you know what i mean like if he'd never talked about it yeah yeah so like but but just like that i think was the closest that i got to talking to one of the candidates yeah and i remember being like wow if like you got that far even though the machine was working against you like huh okay you know data point right but so it's interesting because what you're saying actually totally like puzzle pieces with what i said i mean it's it's sort of the same

thing like it was sort of with him it was just like there's no there there and i actually it's interesting you say because i i really don't i go out of my way on my show not to talk about people other than politicians or media members i don't find like the average pundit or just like guy on the street to like be railing on but yes i'll make fun of aoc and i'll make fun of biden and whatever but it's interesting because yeah it's like i saw all my kind of tech friends and my media people everyone loved him and i was like i'm always careful with this though because you see it because it was their way of just saying i'm not voting for trump that's what it was it was basically all the all the decent remaining liberals like the non-woke liberals who all knew

that trump wasn't as bad and foresee and a freaking a lot of them voted for trump privately a lot of them i'm talking public people like a lot of them did and i just didn't want to do that i didn't feel that i could lie to my audience in that way um but i think they saw yang as like all right he's not an insane democrat like so i'll just pretend i'm doing that and then when yang went out then they all just sort of backed biden and whatever it was yeah uh let's talk about the media yeah which uh you have no opinions about um it feels like uh i'm going to tell you the framework that i've used in the past i usually talk about the financial media that's where i spend most of my time uh but i'm interested if this is how the political media works as well so you're good on

those shows by the way i've seen you on a bunch of those shows you know why i grew up with four brothers and we just talk shit all the time like that's like that's it that really is it i can see it when you have like a good line ready to drop and you know you have a good line and yeah it's like okay so you're gonna bring three or four people you're gonna like throw out a topic we're all gonna argue yeah okay that's basically what i did up my entire life growing up and my brothers by the way they're like watching like oh my god you know like this is a complete joke that this is like literally on television people are gonna watch this um but the the framework that i use is uh so there's journalists people who do real journalism uh unequivocally you put them in that

category they write unbiasedly as as best as a human can do they talk to sources they they uh actively pursue the truth and they're doing journalism yeah you can say that maybe they're not perfect or whatever but like they're doing journalism they're they're journalists and that's what they're doing not many of those not many of them but that's what they're that that's the bucket you put them yeah then there is uh on the other extreme i call market participants so in finance these are people who are investors who are founders or whoever uh they are actively participating in the market and they uh everything from blogs to podcasts to like these other things they're very clearly not journalists uh and they say look the reason why i'm talking about this is

gonna spend all day doing this i put my time and effort or i put capital at risk and i win or lose and there's skin in the game for what i'm doing and then there's the middle group in the middle group i call the bloggers masquerading as journalists they are highly biased yeah they don't even hide it like if you go to some of these websites it's opinion pieces that are literally written as articles like they're like they're like where is the opinion component of this try the new york times and so this is what i want to hear and then the other piece that's fascinating to me about this is when you look at the the content itself so there's the process of which the content gets written so if i just sit down every morning and i just write my personal

opinion about stuff in my analysis i'm not a journalist right right like i am a talking head i'm an opinion writer by the way that's fine but the problem with that is if you're wrong over and over and over and over again there's no punishment because you don't get fired and you didn't lose any money so like you basically just can keep bullshitting over and over and over yeah but the content is literally just a regurgitation of the state talking points it is like i mean if you go back and you read like throughout the entire pandemic it was like we should give everyone money all of the wall street firms are bad people we shouldn't help them but we should help all the poor people and uh the debt won't matter there'll be no inflation and like just go go go go help the

people i can't believe you're not helping the people and now it's like well time out everyone who has any money and any intelligence was like you can't print trillions of dollars and not get inflation and now they're like oh it's transitory or even worse they just gaslight and they're like we knew it was going to be transitory of you're like what planet are we living on but by the way they do that with everything so i love the fact that you're talking about it from the financial world which is not totally my world but the thing that you see is the same thing that i see coming from more the political okay and it's the same thing that i think people see from the say scientific world or from any discipline so like it's like fauci is now kind of like oh we always

sort of were saying that maybe it was a lab leak i'm not telling you it's a lab leak i'm saying that we should at least be allowed to talk about it and suddenly you know it's like john stewart now mentioned it on colbert the other night so now all the good liberals who were trying to get everybody banned from twitter who when trump said this a year ago you know he's a racist and he's you know trying to get chinese people killed or whatever it's like well now the liberal leader said it so now they're all allowed to say it so john stewart said it on the show as like on colbert he basically was like yeah it could be a lab leak and he and by the way him doing that on colbert that's the system if you like when we talk about like whatever the system is i don't know how to

exactly my favorite question asked me was like who runs the system right so nobody knows nobody knows but but when you think about what is the system yeah the system is john stewart who's basically been mia for years there's been a lot of things to talk he was in his attic doing joe rogan yeah right exactly literally um but the system having john trotting out john stewart the sort of good guy media liberal you know more young people got their news from the daily show than anywhere else which was just a meme of nonsense but like the media loves this guy him going on colbert to say the lab leak hypothesis is possible it's at least worthy of being talked about that's the system a year before somebody got banned from twitter zero hedge got banned

from twitter zero hedge got banned from twitter trump literally said it and they called him a racist and said he was insane yep um but that's the system so i don't know who's running that so who's running that i don't know the agents that put the thing like it's not the agent so it's like i don't know we can keep going up to some is it fair to say and this is where it's the airlock that's my point it's the airlock yeah is it fair to say though that you're separating out john stewart from again the idea that a year ago you could you could not say things now you can say things and because they're different groups saying those things and it's a year apart also we treat it completely different yeah because because in essence what happens there is an apparent you

know it seems like in the last say month the lab leak hypothesis was gaining so much traction online that the system then has to be like okay we have to we can't ignore this anymore do we get kicked off youtube now for talking about lab leaks or is that no i think no now we're okay not only now we're okay but facebook will now allow you to do it they were kicked a year ago there was no i literally would tell guests like time out we can't talk about this stuff you know on my show this is slight sidebar but on my show for the first time ever we had to edit for content i've interviewed i don't know thousands of people never once edited for content well one time because i i guess come in so drunk and stoned that we had to get rid of about half the interview because i thought it was

just going to ruin their career but a few weeks ago i had david horowitz on he is uh he was the original sort of why i left the left guy that's sort of what i'm thought of as now this is a guy he's 83 years old oh his son is uh is ben horowitz oh okay all right yeah yeah the audience will know the audience but his dad his dad was the why i left the left guy was a was a communist as a kid anyway when reagan was being re-elected and his parents were marxist when reagan was being re-elected he was a lefty but decided that he wanted to support reagan and then basically his whole life since then has been the left trying to destroy him he's really really fascinating guy anyway ben horwitz by the way is absolutely fascinating because uh he sits at the intersection

of so many different religion race technology industry now his dad politics like yeah fascinating every time i learn more about him he's just like i've actually only talked to him once he's obviously a fascinating guy but his so his dad in essence on my show a few weeks ago said he said his own personal opinion about the results of the election and i let people say what they want on my show and we had to we blurred it where we bleeped it and we put the full thing on locals but i knew my youtube channel could have been taken out just like that really that's you know we can get into tech and censorship censorship and all that but in essence what i think happened with john stewart was the thing was bubbling up so much online and by the way this is exactly

what's going to happen with biden and dementia because now it's everyone's talking about it accept mainstream media and they can't hide it much longer so then what happens is the system has to basically be like all right we have to normalize this now we we can't hide it anymore too many people know so then oh why don't we bring out john stewart the trusted name in america who hasn't had an opinion on anything at all in four years since leaving the show let's bring him out he'll say it then all the conspiracy theorists and the right-wing crazy people they were actually all crediting john they were like oh that's so nice to hear now the problem is that john won't make the full like the full like get there you got to leave the democratic party you know the

joke now right what conspiracy theorists are just people who are early yeah exactly that's it we're all just three like alex jones is looking pretty good these days you may want to edit that part honestly god right so take take jesus christ take take all of the people that are like the actual hardcore conspiracy not the people who like are on twitter saying stupid stuff yeah right like i'm talking about like people who legitimately you would put in the category of conspiracy theorist I'll go out on a limb and I will say, although most of us wish it wasn't true, they're more right than we originally gave them all credit for, which is scary. Because it goes to everything we're talking about here, that the media cannot be trusted

anymore, that the institutions can't be trusted, that big tech is doing, big tech is manipulating us in ways we cannot imagine. It's not just the ways you and I are fairly versed in tech. It's like, it's not just the ways that they can manipulate us through searches and de-boosting and shadow banning. i'm worried about the things we can't even think of that they can do to us you know what i mean the way that that that if you have one political opinion the way that they could just force feed you other videos to just change your opinion on anything like we're basically all in this mass

we're in this mass dystopian experiment right now but long story short i think they they basically trotted john stewart out there because it was like we can't hide this anymore let's legitimize it now because now there must be something to it and this is exactly what's going to happen with biden did you see um when all this was happening uh there was a pseudonymous uh report on covid that got put out you see this so i'm not sure i'm not gonna remember all the details so already i'm wrong right but but uh conspiracy theory basically yeah a group of people and i don't think it was one person but i don't think it was necessarily a hundred people right but a group of people got together they did not put their names on it it was a pseudonymous thing and it wasn't a google

document but it was like some sort of collaborative software that they used they basically wrote a report and this was widely shared in the tech community specifically a lot of folks who spent their time as investors or founders like in the early part they were trying to figure out data and you know i joked like over the last year i didn't realize how many uh virologists how many epidemiologists how many uh economists you know you know um political uh voter legal experts i had in my feed right but like all of a sudden people started popping up yeah but this report literally was probably one of the best things i read and it was all written in uh using pseudonymous names and what fascinated me was they did it to protect themselves but it was very obvious these

were intelligent people i'm sure it wasn't 100 right i'm sure there was errors whatever but given the information they had at the time they wrote a very compelling piece and they touched on everything from like here's how big it could get like all the things you would want to read and like understand it right and i start to think more and more and more you've mentioned a couple times like the machine working against people people who are on the left want to go more to the right people on the right uh you know the everyday person or or elites or whatever and it just feels like a Balaji Sreenivasan's whole like pseudonymous economy and pseudonymous world. That's where we're headed because people are literally just going to be so fearful of like

anything I say with my name on it is literally going to be used against me later. So the irony is I did a video a year ago when my book came out. We released it that day for PragerU called The Bravery Deficit. And that's what we have in the country. We just have a bravery deficit. What is that? A bravery deficit in essence is that not enough people are just willing to say what they think. That's the way we defeat this thing. If you wanted wokeness to be blown out of the water tomorrow, like it would literally just, all it would take would be enough people just lying in the sand. This is who I am. This is, I'm going to fight for the things I believe in. By the way, we're starting to see a little bit of it more. You know, you keep seeing

these videos of like these angry moms going to school board meetings and yelling, you're telling my five-year-old boy that he's a girl and that he's racist, like no more of this bullshit. So more and more people are getting brave because we're seeing that the machine the machine can't destroy all of us it it preys on the fact that the fear keeps us all sort of just docile in essence um but i think that so we have to just get oh if we can get over the fear thing we we will defeat that and then wait what was the question exactly well which just as the pseudonymous economy like grows uh it's going to be out of that fear of people putting their name on things. Right. So look, there's great arguments to be made both ways here. I completely get why

people are anonymous online. You don't want to, they don't go for your job. They're going to go for your family. We've allowed for political violence now in the streets of America. Like I fully get it. On the other hand, the fact that so many people are on anonymous online constantly encourages the worst behavior possible. So if I was to ever, I actually don't look at my Twitter mentions anymore. I look at the verified ones, but I don't look at the, the just regular ones and that kind of sucks because it used to be fun but then i think you have a version of this too when you get to a certain amount of followers the bots and the trolls and just i used to respond to every single person oh god not anymore yeah not anymore not anymore man you want to stay sane

but but what happens is if you on the rare occasion that i do actually can click there's a way you can click through even if you're hiding them and see them what i notice is virtually everyone that says the horrible shit that they're saying to me all day long that i don't see they're all anonymous so you've incentivized horrible behavior and then you have the so i always think it's hilarious when i see people in our world that are like really well-known phds and doctors and lawyers and you know tech leaders and they're arguing with anonymous people all day long it's like if you want to spend time arguing online then at least argue with non-anonymous people so that there's some some level of so you know you look them in the eye when you're arguing like a little

bit right a little bit but on the other hand i get that's not me going after the the people that for legitimate reasons that are just decent americans or forget americans that are just decent human beings that feel they need that so we are gonna have to figure out this pseudo anonymous like are we all did you ever see uh scanner darkly no it's a philip k dick story it was a movie with keanu reeves and uh it's like an animated movie with keanu reeves and a couple other people where basically we're all walking around with these masks on all the time and then we don't know who's who at any given time and we can all be anybody and we're all nobody a lot of that kind of stuff and there's it's a really great movie actually um but yes we're that's also what the

next part of the internet's gonna have to figure out because there's too many burner accounts there's too many ways to do horrible things too many ways to coordinate assaults on websites and destroy book reviews and just drive people freaking crazy you know what i mean if the people that hate bitcoin just want to say we're gonna freaking attack pomp maybe they're doing this all the time they probably are we're every time he tweets we just have it set in some program and then we have a bunch of losers that we're paying a dollar or whatever and we're just gonna blow up his feed every freaking day till we just break this guy because they do it they do it all the time they just don't read it no no so that but you've gotten to the point where you're like

all right it's not going to affect me i know what i'm doing but you also have very thick skin you got a thick skin and also like did any of this make us more social you know it's called social media it actually made us far more anti-social and hateful and distrustful that's why i'm so proud of what we did with locals because i opened my locals account it's freaking love in there it is it is love and good and decent and i think it's the promise of what social media was supposed to be i'm not telling you it's all perfect and again i don't believe in perfect systems but like something that is happening in the way we are all communicating on twitter and facebook and youtube is just wrong and by the way that's why i never call for regulating them because the

second you freaking regulate these things you solidify their existence in the system forever well and the regulation makes it worse and it'll crush competition yeah i don't think um i don't think people understand that and uh there's someone close to me who always says uh the the people who do the canceling will stop when they get canceled yeah right like it's like it's all fun and games until somebody turns it on you well that's when you see that's always the best when you see these lefties who have, I don't want to make everything about politics, but when you see these people that have spent their lives trying to destroy everybody who they disagree with by calling them bigots and racists and everything, and make them make it so that they can't get jobs

and we're going to ruin your public, you know, personal, your public life and everything else. And then it suddenly turns on them. And it's like, and then sometimes I'm like, ah, maybe this one does seem unjust. Maybe I should defend them. And I'm like, you know, we all only have like a certain, a certain amount of ammo. There's all these problems. You went independent when?

the idea of, well, it was a, it was a couple steps to go independent. So I left a few networks. I originally left the Young Turks and then I was on Aura TV, which was a digital network. Then I left there and I was on Patreon and I was kind of the first of the politics guys to be on Patreon. It was mostly gamers and anime people. And I, I, the reason I wanted to leave Aura TV was a digital network founded by my friend and mentor, Larry King. The reason I wanted to leave was because our show was blowing up. And in essence, I think you'll really like this story. actually because we we were just like larry king like larry king live larry king larry king live we were becoming bigger than the network so we were crushing it and what was happening was they

were taking resources from our show in essence to support things that weren't working and they were constantly asking us to hit bigger and bigger metrics and i was like this doesn't make sense like we're crushing it we're doing really good stuff but they're basically taking from us and and i mean you get the socialist part of this so i was like i was like let's just go let's try it Let's try to do this on our own. See if we can do it, build a studio, do the whole thing. Took my producer and my director, all quit our jobs, salaries, healthcare, the whole thing.

We launched on Patreon and it was a Monday morning. This is now around 2016 or so, in May. So only five years ago. Yeah. Okay. And this was just the first step in true independence. And I said to my guys, it was Sunday night at like 1130, we were about to go to bed, just launch it first thing in the morning.

I said, I may have completely fucked up our lives. I like I may have like we're screwed if this doesn't work within about 10 minutes the next morning once we launched we were at about 30 grand a month and I was like we're gonna be okay and then that really that then and you were pumping it through social media in terms like promoting it pushed it everywhere I could and people were people were excited that somebody was going independent standing up for what they believe in all of that kind of stuff then from there eventually built my own studio so that was the next part of being independent I wasn't renting studio space anymore.

What you guys have done here, you own this. Nobody, you know, maybe somebody is going to, you know, chop the wire to shut off the lights, but otherwise, you know, as long as you pay your bills, you're good to go. So that was the next part. And then really what, what fully did it was December of 2018. I was, it was just about wrapping up, you know, I toured with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half, which was unfreaking believable. I look back on it like it was a dream.

We did about 120 shows in 20 countries in a year, in essence. And you guys were just talking at the shows. so i did warm up i i would do about 15 minutes a crowd warm-up just get everybody laughing and having a good time um then he would give a i mean this guy is truly incredible like when people think that this guy is incredible he would give an hour and a half lecture a different hour and a half lecture every night i never heard the guy give the same speech twice sometimes sometimes he'd be you know it was 12 rules for life was the book so sometimes he would go through all 12 rules sometimes he would do one rule sometimes he would do no rules if he was just angry at the new york

times he would do an hour and a half on that like literally sometimes he would be like you know i bumped into somebody before the show who told me uh that they're struggling with drug addiction and then he talked about like it was it was truly and the coolest part of it was that i would see him push his intellectual limits every night and then he would stop like he would literally be like he would be talking about something and then he'd be like you know that's all i can say about that tonight i'm gonna think about it a little bit more and then the next day he'd start the show by saying you know last night i was talking about this and i thought about it today so i was basically watching a choose your own adventure i was watching a book being written throughout the

whole thing anyway uh we're on tour december 2018 and i was on patreon that's where i was making like i don't know probably 80 or 90 percent of my company's rev and there was a guy by the name of carl benjamin sargon of akata on youtube he was like an old school british liberal decent guy he went on another channel so now not his patreon channel not his youtube channel that was being funded on Patreon. He went on somebody else's channel and he said the N-word. Now, he did not say it to be racist. He was mocking the people who use that word. Patreon immediately deleted his account. This is where he was making most of his money running a business. Now, they offered no chance of respite. There was no way he could talk to them. And to me, that was such an

extraordinary escalation because it's one thing for a tech company to police what you're doing on the with what you do on their site but if they're basically watching you watching what you say on other sites now we that's like can they go after you for whatever you do in your personal life so jordan and i discussed it and we had both had we were both friendly-ish at least with uh with carl carl uh sargon of god and we both said okay it's time to leave patreon and this was a big deal when you guys left right oh it was i think it was front page new york times actually yeah for some reason we didn't know each other at the time but i feel like i remember it was like a one-two punch almost yeah and like it'd be like okay like that's an interesting data

point yeah and then sam harris left the next day and he was making a ton on there and then and then a few other people left but that is where they where'd they all go like where'd you guys all go so what happened so basically so asaf right over there is my brother-in-law and he's a tech guy and i called him and i said listen i want to leave patreon i need you to put down what you're doing and build me a subscription model because that's the first piece the first piece is i need to be financially free and just replicate like the bare bones patreon stuff then i contacted um patrick hollison at stripe we had become friendly a little bit and i said what is the best example of a subscription page that we can basically replicate and build for me not not locals as a

bigger idea just solve this problem for me he told us one asaf built it and then from basically middle of december to january you like how a tech company gets built well i i just like the fact that you're like yeah what's the best one right you're the person who probably knows what the best one is no that was it i was like i don't know patrick this is what you do and he said this is the one and i said that's the one we're going to build and to a sob's credit we built it and basically i used about three weeks the end of december into january to tell all of my people that I am deleting my Patreon on January 15th and I am launching RubinReport.com,

which ultimately became the first test model for locals. And by doing it on that day, and I did it on a live stream, I actually deleted it live stream and I doxed myself like a moron because I didn't realize that when I pressed delete on the Patreon thing, my personal email was gonna pop up.

So I literally doxed myself and I was drunk because I was doing shots of Patron in honor of leaving Patreon. So for every thousand dollars I think that we made, I was going to do a shot. So I literally did like eight shots of tequila. I doxed myself. I mean, it was quite a day. Uh, so there's some lessons. Did you know that, did you know that you doxed yourself when you did it? I knew immediately. And these people, these sick twisted freaks online, I have been signed up for every porn site. You can imagine people literally paying for porn for me.

I mean, people anyway, uh, the next day though, that like that's commitment. Like when you literally are like oh i found someone that i don't like's email address i'm now going to it's not that they just signed me up for free sites people literally i was getting things like here's your password do you still use that email it's long gone it's long gone but i but you know it's hard to get rid of an email address so like you know i pushed you know whatever anyway this is the cool part and this is what really was the the genesis of locals january 15th closed down patreon the next morning i woke up and our rev jumped by about 30 35 percent from what i was doing on patreon so you actually were making more on day one yeah more on day one and i wasn't doing

rewards so you know patreon is like tiered rewards you send them a t-shirt or you sign things or you do zoom calls with people we decided to get rid of all of that if you want to support me being independent talking about the things you care about giving me a chance to get more interviews out there expand these ideas join us we're not doing rewards anymore so i took away rewards but it's the bravery thing people want to support people that they think are fighting for the things in their world that they care about it's why people love you over bitcoin they believe in bitcoin and then here you are freaking screaming about this thing even in the last couple weeks where it's been very messy your guys love you even more because it's become because it's now

has more of a cost for you right it's not at its peak right now and all that stuff so we jump by about 35 and then i said to us off now we got something here because now well what else would i need to be free i can't just be reliant youtube could shut me down tomorrow right twitter could shut me down. So let's replicate these things. So we said, all right, we got to build our own video player. We got to build audio. We got to build a community, a newsfeed that's unmanipulated by an algorithm. And by the way, having a paywall, there's no trolls, there's no bots. It's all good behavior in there. And if you want to pay me to troll me, well, now I can either profit off you or I boot you out of my locals community, but you could still be in anyone else's locals community,

which is very different because on Twitter, if you're booted, you're de-platformed altogether. together. So I think by building something that was right for me as a creator, we have built something that I think solves probably 95% of the problems for 95% of the people. It doesn't solve Alex Jones's problems. And I don't know that I want to be in that business, but, and now we have awesome investors that are helping us. What are his problems? Well, he can't be on Stripe, for example. So Stripe is our primary payment processor. It's your own Stripe account. It's not ours. We get 10%, which is the same amount as Patreon, but we have a much better product than patreon because you own all of it you own the data you

own the users like if you nobody leaves us but if you leave it's all yours you can take it with us if my channel locals has done so well that if my channel blew up if youtube just took me out tomorrow man you talk to pomp you're done if they took me out tomorrow um my business is still thriving like i have something like 1.6 million subscribers on youtube i make way more with my thousands of subscribers on patreon so i've built a steady model to make myself uncancellable and that's what we then were like all right now we've got a business here let's let's what are the ingredients so i think there's a lot of people who are interested in this some of them are interested because uh they literally fear being canceled for what they say yeah there's people who fear

the platforms are just manipulating things there's people who fear that distribution goes away there's people who fear that they will get caught up by association right they interview somebody whatever uh and then there's literally people who just fear like chaos you know i did nothing i talked to nobody like i just have an account that usually doesn't work either like just like something bad happened right um and you see you know somebody on twitter gets suspended and they're like i haven't even tweeted in three days or whatever and usually it's like some stupid thing where uh um there's a founder that i invested in his company uh there was an event that happened in the world he started to get a bunch of followers next you know he's suspended my

guess is that literally there's like an automated system it looked like spam to them because it literally was like an explosion of followers or something it's suspended then all the point is you don't know we don't know the problem but still just that stuff can happen or whatever so i guess like when you think about all of that what are the ingredients to be quote-unquote independent or like to really be resilient on the internet today so you first off you have to have direct access to your audience that's number one so when i tell you i have whatever it is 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, I can't get videos out to them because the algorithm now, they've decided that you're subscribed. This is just what they've decided at YouTube. Your subscribers actually have

less weight now. So they're sending you videos usually now based on your viewing habits, which by the way, can really pigeonhole you into a certain political belief or religious belief or whatever it might be. Or for me, it's just sending me a lot of 80s basketball and Star Wars videos all day long. Like I'm watching, you know, that that's really the way to get to know somebody. just look at their youtube history it's like man i have watched the 1992 nba season every game backwards and forwards i don't watch regular basketball anymore i can't take it because it's all political and whatever um but you you want direct communication with your audience so what we built i mean the locals app is awesome you get push notifications when i post things so that's

just one like you will get my stuff we're not manipulating it with an algorithm the news feed is unmanipulated so that's part and it's uh reverse chronological so if i sign in the last thing you posted is first i can kind of go back and just see and you can similar like a facebook profile page or something right and it's uh you can either filter it if you're in the rubin report community you can filter it just by what i'm posting or we let all our users post and by the way we're getting something like what's the number 80 of the content something like 80 of the content in my community is from the users not from me and what's interesting about that is they're posting recipes they're posting music they're posting things about sports all kinds of stuff things

that they know i like but then people are sort of coming to social media in with fresh eyes because as opposed to you post a pic your a picture or you post a recipe you know you make chicken parm you post it on facebook next thing you know your grandma's fighting with some random person about trump and it's like man this all became evil and now grandma doesn't seem as nice as grandma's supposed to be and i don't know who that person is but oh it turns out i was i went to high school with them 20 years ago and now and but it all feels awful on there we have people coming to, there's a common, what I want every locals community to have, and this is what they all have, is you could just come together for some common cause. So for a guy like you would be,

okay, I love Bitcoin. I believe this is the future of commerce and the engine that's going to lead us to the new world. And then people are like, oh, Pomp's cool. Like I'm going to come into this community. We're going to talk about stuff. And then what you're going to find is they're going to start talking about a lot of other stuff. So it's, it's what social media was supposed to be. And again, because of the paywall, you get rid of all, if you had a 10 cent paywall, as I said, on locals ours i think i said this you're right before sorry our minimum is two dollars but if we had a 10 cent paywall that would eliminate almost all the bad actors so really what you're doing is you're basically taking patreon or kind of pay right so sub stack would be another example all

these kind of paywall based individual products you're bringing it all together on one platform you're saying hey everything from video to text to audio whatever you can basically come and do behind this paywall in a community uh you as the individual that owns the community or uh as kind of the creator you're the mayor in essence and you can then bring everyone together they all can communicate with each other they can communicate with you and it's kumbaya off to the races and because it's a paywall because people have to subscribe because they want to hear from you it changes the dynamics rather than just like you know just mass chaos on twitter yeah not only does it completely change the dynamics but you set the rules so if if in your community

let's say you said like i i made an announcement very early on i was like listen you guys can say whatever you want here you say whatever don't break the laws of the united states but if you break the laws of the united states you got a bigger problem than me or locals right so don't break the laws of the united states and we don't allow for porn that's pretty much it if you want to i have plenty of people that come in there and there's bad people no porn like well there's enough there's enough people doing porn online like the porn only fans i just saw they're trying to raise it over a billion dollars that's fine i just saw that in forbes it's like jesus they're doing all right but but well people were giving me shit about it i was just like you know what

like they really were yeah like well because why dave you're the free speech guy like porn's free and this is not even me making a commentary on porn. I was just like, there's enough stuff going on. Like we don't need to be in that world. And by the way, it also complicates things, as you know, with payment processors and a whole bunch of other stuff. So it was just like, you just,

you pick what your battles are. That's the problem with being the free speech guy. No, it is. Well, that's the thing. So when people, so that's why we did it this way. That speech is left up to you as the creator that because you're creating your community, it's like having your home.

So you come into my house, you can't just walk into my house and be like, dave you're a fucking asshole like then you got to leave my house so that's how we treat you know like that's pretty simple but you can say whatever you want outside of my house so so we leave it on to you as the creator and by doing that i think that that's the spirit of what free speech is like i'm not here to go i can't you want me to have a policy around hate speech okay well what's one person's free speech is someone else's hate speech so that's how much of the uh the users that are on there are politics related versus other things right and and the reason why i ask

this is um one of the things that fascinates me is it's very clear in uh the political circles people who think about this a lot who spend time there uh censorship uh deplatforming like it seems like a lot of that happens there yeah now actually maybe it's happening in some other places right across various platforms and not just the united states and you know internationally as well so just like out of curiosity how much of it is politics related communities versus others yeah I don't know that I can give you an exact percentage. Maybe you can. But what I can tell you is this.

You think it's over or under 50% politics? Probably over, right? It's probably a little bit over. Nutrition. So first off, I would first answer that by saying locals is for everybody. If you have an interest and you have people that care about your interest, you should be on locals. We have a great product. And it's not even just a creator.

I have a friend who runs like a Babe Ruth Baseball League in Jersey. It's like we're onboarding him because he's got this community. He doesn't want it to be on Facebook anymore because Facebook's melting down. And it's like if you have a community of any knitters, unboxers, whatever it is, we want you to be on there. That's the first part. The second part, as for the percentage, I'm not totally sure, but I will tell you this. For sure, it's leaning political because the people who are the early adopters on this stuff who are sensitive about free speech and censorship are in the political world. So it's just, it's a function, but I think you'll find this really interesting, which is when we

were raising funds originally, we would go into, we went into every, whoever's in your head right now in the catalog of the investors in Silicon Valley, we went into every office. We never once, I kid you not, heard anyone complain about the tech, say that we had some massive weakness or it wasn't right. Nobody said that the mission wasn't right. Everybody loved all of that stuff. When we got nose, the nose always came down to one thing. It's political. Dave, you're thought of as a little bit right or something something we got to be careful you know when this all changed covid well a little bit after covid but it's actually connected to covid because covid basically we all had a big tech problem and then what happened because of

covid we all got more obsessed with big tech it all changed on january 6th interesting well actually i guess january 12th or so like four days later when they blew up the parlor servers because when amazon blew up the parlor servers parlor had 23 million people on there all right uh because i'm I'm not familiar with all the details. Parler was a app that was- Like a Twitter, it was basically a Twitter clone that people that were frustrated with Twitter, mostly conservative leaning people,

were starting Parler accounts. They were leaving Twitter and going to this other place. I remember seeing- Or at least being there both, but trying to migrate to Parler. So there was an effort to go. I think you just said that they had 23 million users? Yeah.

That's a big number. Huge number. And it was really- 23, I mean, how many, Twitter has 300 million? is that right i think so which is probably really like seven people but let's just say that uh but i should be clear i really like jack i don't know if you like jack or not no okay all right i mean i've never met him and i would like to meet him but i like him because of all the bitcoin stuff and i think he's got a very unique view of the world and special

uh he's in a unique seat where he can have an outsized impact because of twitter square and like his view and how important he thinks he is we can talk about that later yeah well can i just let me just say one thing about him which is that he should just have a different job in my opinion I'm sure he's a decent person and I know he's doing good stuff leading the Bitcoin revolution and all that. But like, to me, it's like the Twitter part of it where there were so many important things

related to all the societal stuff that we're talking about here. He just needed to hand that job to somebody who was more capable of dealing with those issues. Did you see, I don't know how we got, yeah, I don't know how we got to Jack, but he did a, I think he went on first. It was Jack and Joe Rogan.

Yeah, yeah. And they had a conversation. And then there's a second episode and it's like Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, Jack, and I forget the woman's name, but she runs like a kind of policy and is like, she seems to be the person who was like really into like who gets to stay, who doesn't, whatever. I actually took away from that conversation. I think I listened to it twice or yeah, I think I listened to it twice. Way more complex than most people give it credit, right?

In terms of like, I can't believe you guys did this or whatever. the second thing was like they actually had some like good frameworks for how they evaluate how they get applied you can debate or whatever and it seemed to me like the classic example of like jack twitter and the team is like on one side like tim pool really was like a completely different side and then they kind of like maybe they didn't meet in the middle but like they got a lot closer during the conversation my biggest takeaway from the whole thing was like man people who disagree if they just sat down and talked to each other like the world would be so much further ahead it was an incredible discussion actually all all i would say on that so we don't

get too lost on jack is it just seems to me he should probably have some other job that they should probably have someone that's a little more engaged and a little more i think he takes a step further yeah i think he's publicly said that he nor does he want twitter to be in the position of making those decisions like the whole like but at the end of the day if you boot if you boot donald trump and you're the ceo of the company then right so okay okay we don't have to get lost on jack though don't talk shit about jack i'm sure you know like i don't think he's a bad that's the problem that all of us in in this public thing are put in it's like you have to have opinions about yeah we have opinions about these things not have to we have here's the other

thing that i will say uh that's really fascinating and and maybe jack's actually a pretty good example uh humans are really complex yeah because we live in a complex world and so in some crazy way uh i bet you if you ask jack and he may kill me for saying this but if you asked him he could probably with great accuracy say here's my beliefs on bitcoin here's my beliefs on free speech here's my beliefs on twitter here's my beliefs on square here's my beliefs on whatever else and then he could retroactively almost look at like how everything's played out at square and twitter and with bitcoin and like pretty accurately probably identify i wish we did this better i i think that that went right i know people didn't like this idea but i still think that was the

right decision like and when you do that i think it's um this interesting thing of uh it's kind of like with trump when he first became president uh i remember saying to a couple people i don't really know anything about this guy but steve schwartzman and all these folks who for all intents and purposes seem pretty intelligent yeah they all keep going in meetings with him and walking away and saying like pretty high praise again they can be full of shit they could actually be morons never talked to him before you know like all the stuff yeah like that's interesting and i think that a lot of these uh leaders of these big companies when you talk to the people who know them like elon elon was loved in the bitcoin community now he's like you know basically

everyone's like on the screen about whatever yeah uh you talk to people who know him and they're just like dude he's like a dude like if he came and sat down right now being he's just a we would all talk to him and be like you know that guy's like super scary smart right uh by the way like he probably has a sixth sense of humor like in some areas and like he's a twitter account right the takeaway wouldn't be oh he's a dick or like he's like truly evil so that's i'm honestly i'm not i really try not to go after people's motives i actually think it's very possible that what you're saying there when he took all of those things that he had in front of him and how they all mapped together but then twitter became something that no one could have ever that's

the thing. No one could have ever imagined what these tech companies became. Setting up my Twitter. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Like, yeah, there you go. Like, we couldn't have imagined. And he was just the guy that was in charge of it. And that doesn't make him God or evil necessarily. So yes, when even though I can be critical of some of the mistakes, I mean, trust me, you know, I'm now partly running a tech company. Like, am I going to make mistakes? And are people going to go on podcasts saying they don't like Dave Rubin? They will. It's okay. I think they've already said that somebody definitely said that again again my twitter mentions are not on so i wouldn't know i wouldn't know all right but parlor is where you were going yeah so it starts to become popular

yeah 23 million users whatever let's say that's a five to ten percent of twitter's audience i think yeah uh what happened so in essence what happened was it was it was all the conservative right leaning people tons of trump people on there and parlor was basically doing no moderation whatsoever apparently apple did ask them a couple times to do some moderation and they just weren't doing it we had a couple conversations with them because we thought maybe we could work with them very early on and it became sort of clear to us that they were just going to play by their own rules and and the truth is even for all of us that don't like rules there's a system in place as we're talking about and sometimes you got to play within that system right you can't just do

everything at once um and apple was asking them to moderate like whatever they considered breaking the law type stuff or so i think it was well i think they were doing something a little closer to hate speech which is always that sort of amorphous like well what is hate speech exactly and can you say this about this protected group but not about this protected group and all that but of course they didn't want this is you you live in that world that's that's like a world that is a freaking murky it is a murky swamp it's uh i think myself i can speak for myself and i think a lot of people that i can spend time with uh they like things like bitcoin or technology or whatever because it's like it either works or it doesn't like the code either works or it doesn't

or whatever and when you get into this whole world of like politics and uh and hate speech and like whatever uh i think there's a lot of things that people somebody may say and they're like yep that goes in good or bad bucket right and it's like very obvious if i say i love you good bucket if I say, you know, the N word at you, bad buck, like all this stuff. Then there's stuff that's kind of in like the gray area. And I think that's kind of what you're getting at is like, it almost, then you start asking comments, well, like who said it, who did they say it to? And that's where I think a lot of technologists are just like, uh, there's, there's no like, yes, no, there's no one, one or zero. Right. And so like, that's just like a whole different world.

Well, that's why I'm also telling you, I have sympathy for Jack. You know what I mean? That's why I'm saying he got involved in something that he did not intend to get involved in that became something so massive he could have never imagined it so like just real quick on like the hate speech part the supreme court of the united states says there's no such thing as hate speech meaning if you do like there isn't yeah because you can if you break the laws of the united states you're in trouble but you're allowed to say mean things about people you can't directly coordinate a violent terrorist attack or tell a mob to kill somebody or yell fire in a crowded theater with the intent to do harm you actually people don't know this you actually can yell fire in a crowded

in a funny context or, but if you're doing it to gin up people, that's with intent and you can't do it. But the point is beyond those things and then the very, the almost never used laws around slander and libel, which are pretty much never used because they're so strict, there's no such thing as hate speech. You're allowed to say, I don't like Jews. I would prefer that people not say it, but you're allowed to say it. You're allowed to say, I don't like black people. I don't like gay people, but you can't say go kill all those black people or that sort of thing. so the point is we've now asked technology companies to do things that the united states government has decided it can't do so it's like we're trying to empower them in some ways to be

more powerful so parlor basically was just like we're not gonna you do whatever the hell you want to do on here then the january 6th capital riots happen and then really what happened that nobody's written a proper story on um is that the answer five or six days later was to blow up the parlor servers so what does that mean so amazon just took down the parlor servers i don't know what that you probably know more than me like i don't know is that a button is there a button at amazon like you said blow up okay there's something i don't know that's coming next i think the next version i'm not kidding actually but the next version of like this information war is that they will literally blow up server farms but putting aside that for a second jesus christ

that's good for the decentralized people so we're doing all right um but but i don't know i honestly don't know like what how does amazon just shut probably just shut down the amazon like the aws like ec2 instance or whatever is that pulling a plug like i don't know what you're doing there it's a button it depends where they do it they probably have multiple ways to take down the server right but i would like to think it's something dramatic not just like tapping a button like it would like to be like some sort of it's probably more a button than physically hey go over to row seven in this data center pull the plug that actually but that for the movie version of this seems better you know they bob go in row seven for yeah um whose server is it

Anyway, what happened there when Amazon did that was a massive, or yeah, when Amazon did that was a massive escalation, because this wasn't like kicking off individual people or kicking off a group or even kicking off the president of the United States, which was happening at the exact same time. This was saying this entire network of 23 million people cannot be online. And subsequently what we've found out now, I mean, there's many articles written about this, is that there was far more coordination for the January 6th events, regardless of what you think about them, far more coordination on Facebook than on Parler. So if anything was supposed to be blown up, if that's what you think the answer to this was, it should have been Facebook, not Parler.

So in essence, what really happened there was the tech guys all saw, oh, that's actual competition and it's not funded by any of our people. It's not funded by any of the tech world people. And it was a mafia move. It was just like, you can't encroach. You're from Jersey mafia. You know your ground new york you know your ground you can't play over here and we're just going to take you out so that's what happened oh but the reason is it back up so parlor is back okay it's a little unclear if they're getting a lot of traction right now we've had some talks with them like i want it to succeed because i love competition and i love i love just more i want more stuff to be out there to hopefully make these products better it's like if parlor can do

something that that is some feature let's say or something that twitter is like oh we got to do that well then maybe they buy them maybe they build a better feature like that's the beauty of all of it anyway after that happened and parlor went down suddenly our phones were ringing off the hook from investors because everybody was like whoa whoa whoa something the war just majorly leveled up like this is not about booting individual people anymore now we see like the true power that these guys have over us and then fortunately because of that we got awesome investors and and the company's growing and are you able to say so i invested yeah who else is in that round are you able to say so david sacks led around from craft and he's just been like

extraordinarily awesome he's he's opened doors for us and just he really literally in the if i've learned one thing i'm sure you have your versions of this in investing all the people that want to have long meetings never invest and they just want to talk and it's just in retrospect it's bullshit and they're just mining you for data and hours and seven follow-up meetings and i'll talk to this guy and they just take all your shit the all the people and you included we literally had like a two-minute conversation i i actually don't even think we asked within like 30 seconds you were like i want in like let's do this literally i'm not making that up oh okay you guys are going to uh be resilient all right yeah no that's you were kind of like i like what you're doing you're

fighting like this is a mess like let's figure it out and and sax was like that and bellagio who you mentioned before is in and Naval is in and uh give me some other names Oren Hoffman's in and uh Christian Angermeyer and we just got like a he's the mushroom guy um we should start that by the way after the article Christian I love you but after that article where it was like you know uh was a German billionaire uh finally figured out bitcoin on mushrooms like we should just call him the mushroom guy well I I told you right before we started I don't think he would have a problem me saying this publicly but I've been we've become good friends and I've been to many parties with him where i always thought he was drunk and then he did my show where we're going

to release it in like a week or so and he said in the show that he's never had alcohol yeah never but he's always on you know like a low dose of mushrooms so he's always got that look in his eyes and he's smiley kind of like you right now he's got that look just happy and i'm not on mushrooms and yet you're still into bitcoin that's odd yeah uh the other thing he told me which was fascinating, is he tries his best to not get on the Autobahn in Germany because he's really into longevity. And so if you look at all the data, car accidents are one of the highest reasons why you would have a shortened lifespan.

One of my basketball heroes growing up, Drazen Petrovic from the New Jersey Nets, died on the Autobahn, peak of his life. There you go. All right. So as we kind of continue down this road, the number one question that now I think we've been talking for like an hour and 40 minutes and we haven't asked you yet. everyone wants to know what do you think about bitcoin so so that was where this was so we're talking about everything else what do you think about bitcoin this was a hell of a lead-in that

you did there uh that was amazing um so i honestly believe this is all the future so i cannot what does that mean so first off let me say i cannot talk about bitcoin at the technical level that is going to impress you at any level whatsoever or any of your viewers if i get into any of this like it's it's not my world and it's a world that i'm just can you talk to us about the minor signaling for taproot uh i can do activation pretty extensive dissertation on that specifically um the idea of decentralized finance is so connected to everything that we've talked about here and a bottom-up economy and that people need the ability to have unfettered access to the goods and services and people that they want to communicate with without central banks and

without federal reserve and all of those things, that is where I can sort of do this at the idea level. Like this, it's so obviously the answer. It's so obviously the answer. All the specifics on what the best coins are and all that kind of stuff is not my thing. However, I will say that as we're building out Locals, like we're working on all sorts of decentralized payments

right now and trying to figure out, you know, subscription models with different cryptos, which is extremely complex because obviously the prices are going up and down and all that. I have some Bitcoin. It's locked. own bitcoin i own bitcoin all right i have seven bitcoin do you seven yeah that were all given to me by the way i never i never spent a dime on bitcoin wait what very very well because very

early on when i left the patreon thing and i did that people because a lot of my audience is libertarians and they were like hey put a bitcoin wallet up there and i put a wallet up and people would give me little bits here and there and i was just like all right let's see what happens and this is kind of fun it's like three hundred thousand dollars and now i've got seven of them it's on a ledger and the ledger is in a safe thing and i got the thing and the thing yeah you're uh you're further along than most people yeah do you remember the first time we heard about bitcoin i think it was it was right when we left so like 27 it was right when we left patreon so that's like 2016 2016 okay very early on because i remember yeah i do remember we were leaving

patreon and i was i had a paypal you know a page that you go to to donate or whatever i think i I had a PayPal and maybe that was even before Stripe and my libertarians that were in my comment section, they were, Dave, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, open a wallet. And I really didn't know what it was, but like, but what was cool about it was like, I was like, oh, well, here are these people who like whatever it is I'm talking about. So I'm talking about freedom and free speech and states rights and all of these things and low taxes and blah, blah, blah. And they're all into something.

So there's got to be something here. So that was sort of how I kind of entered this world. And now it's like, well, now I'm in it because we got a tech company and I want to solve these problems. So it's like the Stripe thing is really interesting one. Again, I like Patrick Hollis and I think Stripe is a great company and it's been great for us. But like, do I want only people who are on Stripe to be on Locals? No, I do want it to be more open than that. So it's less about get off Stripe and it's more about Stripe plus other options and have diversification across payment channels and almost let people choose what payment channel

do you want to use? Can I say that? Because that's what I want. Yes. All right. I got clearance i got clearance from the big man um no well that's that's more a soft world but uh but yes we want as many options out there because otherwise the choke points you know what's what's accepted to be said at least at this time in america is going to continue to be like this from a mainstream perspective so you want as many options when it comes to payments we want as many options when it comes to servers right we don't want you know amazon to blow us up or this or that I probably can't talk about all that we're working on on that front because just for security reasons, you know what I mean?

But like you want to create something that is as, or not you, well, you, I think, yes, but like I want to create something that is as free and accessible and decent and neutral as is humanly possible. When you think of Bitcoin and kind of that entire world, that entire audience, are there things that you see that kind of align from how you think about the political standpoint the free speech uh other nation states like it just feels like bitcoin is such a natural thing given everything else you talk about you think about all day long um are you surprised that maybe like more people in that world haven't flocked to bitcoin or kind of embraced it or is there like

some sort of like obstacle in terms of it's a technology thing and that's just a that's different or yeah um well on the purely ideological part as i said it fits because most of my audience is they're not necessarily like card carrying libertarians but like they get like there's a philosophical line right so the philosophical part is there i would say for a certain part this would probably be like sort of like my parents like there's like this other piece of like what do you mean it's not backed by something or it's back but it's all on computers or they're miners but what are they mining where are the mines like all of that kind of stuff getting a certain person and and that's it's so that's actually so consistent with what's going on in

the world right now like everything is changing and then because of social media it's changing so fast that it's like it's really hard to say to somebody that like put all their money in stocks and bonds and you know i put all this money into my ira all these years and all that like even when i was talking to my business managers a few months ago as we're as we're doing you know planning and my guy's like you know i want you to put x amount in your ira every year for the next blah blah and then you're going to have this and you know and i'm thinking well hey like does that maybe exactly but that's not a thought that someone really would have had 10 years ago the belief that the system itself would keep marching along no matter what was there but you know if you talk to somebody

in greece as they watched all of their money disappear and going to the atm you know you're getting you know no drachmas are showing up or when they do they're they're worth nothing it's like that piece of it it's like for all the reasons that i went independent in terms of my content i want to be free on my on the economic side as well yeah it's fascinating that there's now a piece of technology that embodies so much of this and as people learn about it they're like oh yeah like of course that's going to be a thing but that's why it's so so like i think the way i came across you was somebody retweeted you into my feed something about bitcoin and then it's like all right you know you know how twitter works and suddenly you click on somebody's profile you

quickly kind of looking around and it's like you were not talking about politics per se but it was just obvious that the way you look at the world is similar to the way that i look at the world and again i don't know what all your political beliefs are and it's completely irrelevant to me if we if we i think we're going out to dinner after it's like if we go out to dinner we're knocking back tequila and then it turns out we disagree on every policy it would be irrelevant you know what i mean it would be like utterly irrelevant you're a good guy you care about what you're doing like i like people who are doing things and passionate and you know all that stuff you you've said multiple times about somebody they're decent they're a decent human and i actually think uh well it's

somewhat of an elementary well it's like an elementary term yeah but it's actually like a pretty good bar right of because you can disagree with somebody on everything but you know decent person yeah like that's actually like a good way of viewing are they a good person or not like are they decent just decent like are you just decent like not you get everything right not that you're so spectacular not that you're really great anything but like are you just a you know and you know it when you're with someone you know is this a decent person or not a decent person that's Like, and it's sort of like, you know, people say, you know, what is, what is porn? Well, you'll know it when you see it sort of thing.

And that's kind of like a decent person. But, but anyway, that's why I think what's happening right now and why I'm so excited to move locals down here and be here right now and just like be part of what's going on in Miami. It's like, and the fact that I'm going to talk to the mayor who's retweeting me left and right now, thanks to you. It's like, it's like, whoa, there's a new world on the horizon. Like it is, it is the, um, you know, what do you call it?

It's, it is that synth wave future that the libertarians want. And I love those colors, that color scheme, like, and I've always, and I love dystopian movies and I love like all of that future stuff, but we have a chance to really build it right now. We really do. And there's a lot of people who are just holding on and they're holding on and you can, and in some ways you can't blame them. It's sort of like we were like the Jack thing in a way.

It's like, you can't blame people who are seeing something in a certain way when the world was set up in one way for such a long time like i can't blame my dad i have a wild idea yeah if i could get jack to sit down with you would you sit down of course of course yeah he had agreed a few times with his pr people and then it just never came through now i've gone after him pretty hard on on twitter you remember i would have i would have i promise you if you can set it up i will have no problem starting the conversation by saying i i apologize for anything that i said i cannot make any promises at all uh that would be like a pretty out of left field thing but uh let me see that i would be interested to see you two sit down and have a

conversation i would i would i would learn from both of you i think you you could moderate it you could set the rules but no you can't but but i honestly if if you can tell him when you started off with you get moderated and set the rules i'm out pop you're a decent guy you're a decent guy jack's decent too jack's decent too all right three decent guys yeah all right all right i ask the same three questions everyone before i finish up you get to ask me one at the end uh most important book you ever read most important you know i've read so many books in the last so one thing when i started the show i used to read every book every book from a guest every single one and then just life got busier and i just can't do it anymore um this is going

to sound a little cliche but not only because i was on tour with him but 12 rules for life really changed my life really like if you read that book and you put those ideas into practice whether it's standing up straight with your shoulders back telling the truth like he's laying out the things that if you do these things i saw this guy freaking change the world and and in the course of changing the world he changed my life so that's that's a great uh simple yet powerful uh book sleep schedule our friends at eight sleep yeah uh who now i've invested i beg them to invest they finally let me invest so now i feel like i can really ask this question people to invest these guys listen they uh they have a mattress that i used to sleep like five or six hours like

literally i think uh one time i told my uh girlfriend at the time now wife uh wolves don't sleep she was like why don't you say the wolves don't sleep right she was like you're an idiot and i was probably uh now i see like eight or nine hours completely changed my life and when i sleep on this uh you can make it hot or cold i sleep on it like it's like an ice cube yeah i like and uh their ultimate goal is to take eight hours of sleep compress it down to six but you get the same amount of deep sleep and therefore it's like better or whatever wait what's it called eight sleep okay i need to know about eight hours of sleep right now genius uh marketing yeah what is your sleep schedule now and then what was it like through the years and how's that evolve oh

it's a great question so i i hugely i believe in sleep you need sleep especially when you're just doing stuff with your brain all day long and talking all day long and listening all day long and that's not to diminish people that are just doing things with their hands all day that may seem trivial but but are not actually um i basically go to sleep usually about 11 30 or so okay um i wake up about six i'm very functional in the morning if i wake up i have coffee and i just work work work work work and then at some point it's like four o'clock and i'm like whoa i should just like breathe for a sec sometimes i forgot to have lunch i've done five shows you know that kind of stuff um i really do like taking a 20 minute nap if i can around three o'clock

if i can just little siesta or just literally it's not even a nap like i'm sleeping but it's literally just close my eyes for 20 minutes and just like let myself reset um i think is absolutely key um i'm not the greatest sleeper though so i am interested in this six and a half hours is not a lot yeah yeah you should try to get eight because you go to sleep at 10 is there some sort of company you've invested in that maybe could help me in this department is that we'll work on it All right, aliens, believer or non-believer? I could give you a couple answers here. What do you know that we don't know?

Yes, yes, there is other life out there. Okay, why? Because I think there just has to be like, well, look, there's a beautiful way to say no to it. The beautiful way is no, that this thing that we're doing right now in our existence here is so unique and so special. And the majestic, magical cosmos

that put the earth so close to the sun and all the elements were right and that it was all just like this magical, incredible, godlike event that, and then we're here and it's just us and like that's actually rare and precious and beautiful and I actually love that answer. The other part of me that is most of me

is just like, we're here, there's gotta be some other stuff out there and over time, we will find that. I would direct people to watch the movie Contact by Carl Sagan and it's something like that. if you had to this is a fourth question i'm cheating uh if you had to choose are you more worried about what's in the ocean or what's in space would you rather go to the depths of the ocean or go to space yourself um i well personally which would i like to go to yeah space like i just

love sci-fi stuff and like all right you know star wars like to find my life for so long before they ruined it and like there's something about the depths of the ocean you like the depths of the no i'm out oh you know you're you don't like if i put you in like a submarine and i'm just like all right we're gonna send you down like two miles and then i'm out it's it doesn't seem possible really you know well and then like you like see things that like you're like i didn't even know that was an animal like you ever seen like some of these videos you're like uh what no that is pretty that changed colors like it just moves shape like i i don't know but are those aliens that's always a question that's a good question that's always a question i don't know

all right well one question yeah i get to ask you a question that's a good one i was thinking about this is like the scariest thing in the world is letting you ask me a question yeah all right all right and the more you think about it the more nervous i get well i think you you've addressed this a little bit all right but i think it's the it's the question that would be on my mind to ask you the most all right which is what do you really think is going on with elan and bitcoin oh is that too cliche you want no no no uh i think everyone's overthinking it i literally think that uh let me address all of it as kind of a um on like a grand scale yeah can i add one sentence in first just the layman's version because i saw him pumping it up we're gonna and again this isn't totally

my world he's pumping it up we're taking it for tesla blah blah blah then he goes on snls which is like a mainstream airlock moment for him there's all the controversy around that and then you know in essence five days later you know we're out so that all just in my world the way i piece together very chaotic just feels very chaotic and also oddly coordinated and whatever yeah so um i always want to assign he's a decent guy though i just want to say he's very decent guy uh like ignorance not malice in a lot of situations i literally go back to you don't have a master plan i don't have a master plan i don't think elon has a master plan like yes he is the most or second or third most rich uh person in the world i literally don't think he thinks of

him that way right i don't think he like wakes up he's like you know what third richest guy in the world like screw you guys right they just don't think that like you get to that point and that's how you think every day maybe i'm wrong the second thing is uh i think that he is a um rational economic actor from the sense of he saw an asset that he believed could be valuable uh he had capital he bought some of it he said hey you guys can pay me some of it not that many people i think zero or one cars were bought with bitcoin like less than five for sure and that's surprising though well i mean it's an intelligence test am i gonna am i gonna spend bitcoin right right if i own bitcoin i probably think it's gonna go you know higher in us dollar

value over time and buy a car like okay so like counterintuitive at first when you think about it like okay makes sense why no one would okay then the second aspect is they sold bitcoin 10 of their stake they tested liquidity of the market um happened that they could really beat on an earnings report and like so there's all these like components to it and i just say all of us have all these conspiracy theories throw them all out the window i literally think he's having fun which you can argue good bad hurting people helping people like like there's all these ramifications of it forget all the ramifications for a second what drives the tweet every time he tweets positive or negative i literally think he's like the rest of us we grab our phone and

we're like i gotta watch this he rips the tweet yeah and sometimes he's people are attacking him and he's like you know i'm gonna stick it to the bitcoiners and he fires off a dogecoin tweet yeah and then sometimes he's like all giddy and he i really believe in bitcoin you know but that would be kind of psycho stuff though if you knew you could have that much influence on people's lives and like the course i think human history i think you i him and anyone with a big account completely forget and are not oblivious oblivious would be too strong of a word uh we drastically underestimate the impact like i when i tweet i forget that there are a million people right so it's the accidental psycho sort of at some level i think in some crazy way we're all

regardless of what we want to say we all want to like virtually be like oh i'm not addicted whatever like how many times you pick up your phone if you go on apple you can look it up like one time i looked i never want to look again like there's a lot of things that i would rather do than ever look at my uh how many times i pick up my phone you know i do off the grid august where i lock my phone in a safe for a month wait what does this be my fifth year doing it okay I literally, I did it as a test four years ago and I literally locked my phone in a safe, my computer, my iPad, no nothing. I do no news. I do no current events. I don't even go to the gym because they have TVs everywhere. And then I come back on the grid and I've had, Ben Shapiro did it

with me once, Glenn Beck, Michael Knowles, a couple of other guys. We do it live where they fill me in on everything that I've missed. And I watch no TV, nothing electronic. What's the craziest thing that happened while you were gone? well you think that crazy like one year john mccain died one year well last year the big thing was that the song wap came out that seems to be the biggest thing and i guess uh what's her name is that rihanna no i don't know great song her pussy's dripping i don't know whatever he's got a bucket or something but uh no you realize very quickly that actually it's okay you know like yeah some stuff the republicans voted on this and they're up there something blew up in

lebanon or something and like and it's just like the world goes on but i find it just like you a whole month a whole month that's great yeah go lay out on the beach stare at the ocean and you call it what do you call it off the grid august yeah i'm gonna challenge some people publicly i know you can't do a month but maybe could i get you on a weekend you think you could do a weekend you can do a weekend you want you want to hear actually something pretty crazy um it's happened twice so three years ago or so i took two weeks off i cheated a little bit like i would still go on twitter and read a little bit yeah uh but i didn't tweet and i really really stayed off and i always joke that i knew that it was working because uh multiple times when i was living in

new york uh my wife and i would go for a run and i would leave my phone behind which would be blasphemous you know any other time and uh i didn't care call me whatever i just don't care right uh and the second time was uh when i went to iraq and i came back i didn't have a cell phone for a year and i was young i was you know 21 or whatever uh when i came back and i remember wait did you serve in Iraq? Oh yeah. Oh wow. I didn't know that. Oh, I got lots of thoughts. Let's not go there. Uh, and so when I came back, I just didn't care. Like, like I didn't have to have it with me all the time or whatever. And so it was like this really interesting thing of just like, we are all addicted. We all say we're not whatever. When you wake up, you grab your phone.

When you walk into the room, you go on your computer. Like when there's email, phone calls, social media, whatever, like we are all addicted. Can I give you one that maybe your, your mattress guys can work in with some kind of promotion don't bring your phone in your bedroom yeah i don't do it i actually leave it outside the bedroom i usually leave it in the kitchen but the last thing that you do before you go to bed should not be scrolling to doom scrolling twitter or you know just like that you know infinity scrolling into your mind is turning into scrambled eggs and the first thing that you do in the morning should not be whether it's just email yep it just should not be that like it should not be and yet almost

everyone before you freaking pee in the morning which is really what you have to do yep you do this thing so i really really try not to have this in my bedroom very rarely does this ever happen um but there's been a couple times i've woken up to text messages and usually it's like some catastrophic i put that in air quotes right some catastrophic event happened with like a founder we've invested in or something and they're freaking out and you notice like i woke up i was like pretty chill and calm i got my eight nine hours on the eight sleep and then it literally is like i just got whacked by an 18 with a game on yeah and you're like okay here we go and there is this element of like if you can avoid that like i do think it's better for you yeah well i don't

do it i'm horrible i don't listen to my own advice but like i do i do agree with that so that's my challenge to you all right i got to ask you a question now i added something to the podcast we are not going to start challenge me no no i like that for now and all your guys have to challenge you with something which is just whatever on the weekends no phone you know the first thing people are going to challenge me they're going to start bringing me all their coins and tell me to buy that that's like i already know where that is i've seen your mentions i know i know what's going on i've seen your mentions more than i see my mentions that's all right where can we send people i feel like everyone knows where you are but we're going to

send people on the internet i'm not going to send them to big tech go to rubenreport.locals.com rubenreport.locals.com and you can create an account locals account for free and you can look around see what's what and if you want to interact then it costs a couple bucks but i i promise you it will be worth it but if you just want to see what's what and we're building out some incredibly cool stuff and uh we're gonna save the world locals we're gonna save the world i like that you're you were like well i i did invest i'm a podcaster i have to be honest here you know this is not uh something that i'm keeping quiet you know good yeah whatever i just tell the truth. All right. Ruben report.locals.com. That's it. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks man.