This Week in Startups - Chime’s IPO, Databricks’ $1B Acquisition & Dave Rubin’s Media Empire | E2126

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Today’s show: Chime is finally going public with strong financials and a shot at matching its $25B 2021 valuation, signaling real momentum in the IPO market. Databricks just made a $1B bet on agentic AI by acquiring Neon, a Postgres-as-a-service startup riding the new database wave. Then, Dave Rubin joins to share how he built and sold Locals, his uncancellable creator platform, all while navigating the intense media landscape.Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Teaser(1:14) Jason and Alex open the show(1:42) Why Chime’s IPO is such a promising sign(7:22) Chime's financials and valuation(10:12) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(12:17) So why did Databricks buy Neon?(13:22) Where is the AI Integration Desktop App?(17:29) Jason’s plan to bring Americans back to the movies(20:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(21:58) Make movies All-you-can-eat!(26:26) Special Guest: Dave Rubin(30:39) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(31:41) Why Dave Rubin goes phone free for weeks at a time(45:24) Why Identity politics is killing business and sports(49:23) Can Locals reinvent subscription models?Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpLinks from episode:Rubin Report on Locals: https://rubinreport.locals.com/Follow Dave:X: https://x.com/RubinReportYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdKr0Bgd_5saZYqLCa9mngFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:12) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:10) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(30:39) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

When I closed my Patreon that night, the way I did it was I was on a live stream, and I said, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I was like, for every thousand subscribers we get, something like that, live while I'm on air, I'll do a shot of Patron, because I'm leaving Patreon. Anyway, about 12 shots later. 12,000 subs. Wow, you must have been. So I was, and I was really doing it. So not only was I wasted, but I doxed myself live on air, because when I went finally at the end of the night, when I went to delete the account, which we were showing. It had your address. Oh, no.

You press delete and then your email it pops out. Oh, no, your email, great. No, it wasn't my address. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use Offer Code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Northwest Registered Agent.

Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit Northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. And lemon.com. Hire pre-bedded remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.com. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startup. Dave Rubin's going to be with us in the second half of the show. You know him from the Dave Rubin show and locals. A voice of the right. Lots to talk about with him about the media business. But we have a full

docket I gave Lon some time off here so we can just ping pong and volley back and forth through this do a little bit faster than we normally do because there's a lot going on, Alex, and we need to get through this for our audience. I know Chime is going public. Explain what Chime is. Yeah. Explain the deal. All right. Chime is an American NeoBank, which means that it's a digital software service that is banking like things. It is an incredibly well-funded FinTech startup here in the United States. And its valuation went to, I think, about $20 billion back in 2021. And Jason, we've been waiting for this IPO for a very long time, given its scale of value, how much money was put into it, the number of investors. And finally, it's going to go public. So you want a

quick rundown of the numbers? Yeah, I think it's always a good idea. And this is, you know, absolutely fantastic. We're tracking M&A and we're tracking IPOs. So on the IPO train, ETO is filed. Yeah? They were going to go out. priced last night, Jason, and it's currently trading, and it's doing well. Oh, so Etro is out. That's the Canadian version of Robin Hood. Yep. Then there's Chime going public. And did we have any other IPOs this year so far that we've been tracking? Well, we're taking a look at Clarnah, of course. Clarnet, right, okay. And Stubb is in the wings. Perra pulled back. And of course, Corweave went out earlier this year. So that's

our current kind of list of things, but there are people keep telling me, Jason, that there There are so many companies in the pipeline. So I'm expecting, given that E. Toro priced above range, sold more shares, and is trading well, and we're seeing Chime list, I think we could see quite a few more offerings on Lock Shortland. Got it. So here's what I want. Just as we get going here in 2025, IPOs by month, we record them, we put it in the docket so that we can kind of track this and the velocity of an M&A above, you know, some minor amount,

let's say 50 million or more. Just so we're kind of tracking this on a monthly quarterly basis for our audience. All right. So Chime is like Mercury Bank. It's like Ramp. It's like that category of NeoBank. New Bank is the other one and New Bank for South America. These are extremely popular because Bank of America and other online banks are terrible.

Garbage. Right. And this is a really important lesson, I think. for startups. Banking seems like the most difficult group to go after, right? Like, how could you possibly take on big banks? It turns out they are amongst the most hated. So one of the great ways to make a startup is to look at the index of which companies are least trusted Alex and most hated. When you find companies that people feel abused by, it's really easy to construct. a better product. Now, they might try and stop you. There's regulation, et cetera. But if you were to look

at the drug companies, they're hated. And what do people love? Compounding pharmacies and cost plus drugs. People hate the cable companies and cable modems. What are people love? Starling. Or, yeah. So this is a tried and true model. People hate when there are monopolies that are captured. And my lord, if I'm Bank of America, I've got to be a little bit nervous because I was talking to a group last night, or I should say yesterday we had our first founder Tuesday here in Austin. I'm trying to get this whole in-person thing going. So we had a dozen founders here. We spent the day with them from 10 to 4. We got some barbecue at Stubbs in the middle. And I was amazed, they all use, you know, mercury chime, ramp cards. They are rabid consumers of this vertical.

Yeah. I'm a Chase customer of my personal life, and I used to have a Citibank account back in the day, but I moved out the Northeast and then out here, Citibank decided Jason to start charging me a monthly fee and then won't let me close my account unless I send them like a notarized letter. That is the level of customer service that you get from the existing banks. They're terrible. Now, Chime is writing the way that you outlined. So in 2024, revenue, $1.64 billion, up 31%. And that's a faster pace of growth than they saw the year before, 27. So Jason, a little bit of revenue acceleration over at chime. And also in the first quarter of this year, revenues, I think of about 550. So we're on a plus, you know, over $2 billion revenue revenue run for this company against a 2021 era valuation

of about 25. Now, I can see a lot of arguments why this company could get very close to that 2021 price. I don't know if it'll surpass it per se, but then again, I Toro did much better than I expected on a slower revenue growth pace. So the market does seem to have a lot of appetite for fintech products, which I think is going to throw a halo on your brexas, on your ramps, on your alpaca dot markets. There's a lot of companies out there right now that are in the fendix base who are probably cheering these two companies on as champions, really. For sure, gosh, darn DPI. And that's what I want to bring up next, Jason. So who owns chime? Well, 5% in greater shareholders include DST Global, Fossiling Capital, Access Industries,

General Atlantic, Minlo, Cathay Innovation, and our dear friends, of course, over at iconic. What's the share price going to be? Did we see that, nor it's not done yet. This is the first S1. That'll be in the first S1A. So we're dying for that. But the company seems super healthy. Really quick account creation growth, improving Arpoo, you know, improving gross margins. They had a period in 2023 when they actually managed to reduce some of their costs as they grew, Jason, which is how they managed to go from losing hundreds of millions a year to something like 25 million on a net basis last year. So essentially break even, lots of cash, growing just an EBITDA. It's a winner. They make their money from the transaction fees,

I guess, like other credit card companies or interchange fees, like banks make money from. Yeah, they get a percentage of the money flowing through the system. Yes, but what's really interesting is that's going down as a percentage of their total revenue. So the revenue mix is improving because there is a little legitimate risk, and they talk about this in filing, that local laws of the state or perhaps even federal level could undercut the interchange revenue stream that they enjoy. They give a couple of examples of that. So they're also doing other things like, you know, you can pay a fee and get your salary earlier.

They get fees from out-of-network ATMs. And all of that added up to about 28% of the revenue in the first quarter of this year. So slowly diversifying the revenue way, but they still make a lot of money uptransout. 10 times revenue. They're at 2 billion in revenue. They're going to go out for 10 times revenue would be 20. Yeah. Maybe it's 12 times revenue, 24 billion.

And that matches. they're a last private company. So this issue you've heard about here and on all in constantly and the hand-wringing of the private valuations got ahead of the eventual public ones. Well, I don't know when that last round was. Did you say it was last year or two years ago? August of 2021. So literally peaks. Four years ago. So think about that. Four years, they were at $25 billion. Four years later, they're going out at $25 billion. So the catch-up to the extraordinary evaluations we saw on peak zirp the overhang for a fast-growing company was four freaking years so that's a lot of pan-ringing congratulations to the board of that company and to the management team and all the

rank and file employees because four years of going sideways and hard work to get to the exit it's not fun you know you're you're used to the scoreboard going up and um they had the scoreboard to go sideways, but now comes the new, this is the new starting line for them. They're going to have a public currency. They can buy other companies. They can put this money to use. And it's going to raise their profile. When a company goes public, more people know about it, more people engage with it. People didn't know Airbnb and Uber in, you know, there's probably like a third of the country that didn't know about those companies. They hear them going public. Google when it went public. It just fills in like the last third of the laggards who don't know about it because they hear,

when public and they become more aware of it, they engage with it more. So maybe somebody sees Airbnb go public. They've heard about it, but they never used it. Maybe they go from being, you know, in that messy middle of, you know, adopters of technology. And they say, oh, you know, maybe I'll give it a shot because it's public. It legitimizes the company. So if somebody didn't want to use chime, maybe they would. E. Toro, they went public, priced at $52 a share, $5 billion evaluation ballpark. So that's another great one that got out the door. Any notes on E. Toro? All right, founders, let's talk about your website, huh? It might be a little bit of a sensitive subject. You might be a little embarrassed about it. Let's fix that right now. If you're

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dropped a $46 to $50 IPO price range. So they priced above that, always a bullish sign. They also sold more total shares than they're offering than expected. So the scale of the fundraise, Jason, was larger. Now, I think it was about half secondary. So it's not like all the money went to the balance sheet, but certainly unlocks a lot there. And as of right now, as we record this show, is trading for 6650, up 28%. That is enough of a gain that people will complain that it was mispriced, but I would say also provides enough of a cushion that it probably won't fall underneath its IPO price.

So frankly, straight up, not going to lie, this is a win. Shout out to them. I just, it feels so lovely to be talking about companies that are now trading versus companies that might in the future. Yeah. And it's a $5 billion dollar company. This isn't a $50 billion, $25 billion. This is the kind of IPO we want to see.

We want to see one, two, three, four, five, $10 billion dollar companies. company's getting out because that gives, you know, the public the chance to maybe ride up from $5 billion to $100. Maybe they can get a 20x or a 10x off their investment. And neon is selling to Databricks. Obviously, Databricks is a public company that's done very well. Yeah. No, it's still private.

It's still private. Okay. Snowflakes public. Databricks is remaining private. Wow. Yeah. They spend a billion dollars roughly on a startup called neon. And I'm going to tell people what it does and a little bit about it.

and not go too much deeper because we don't have that much time. It offers Postgres as a service. Postgres is an open source relational database. Jason, they took database tech, put it up in the cloud as a managed service, and are doing quite well with it. The reason why Databricks wants them is not strictly because they have cool technology, a growing customer base, and so forth. It's because in 2024, they discovered that Agentic AI and what they offered

had a really lovely marriage. And so they saw a lot of demand from the Agentic AI space. As a result, you know, Databricks wants people to build agents on top. of their store data inside of Databricks. Kind of a match made in heaven. The only thing I couldn't find for us today is what its last valuation was, though I'm going to go ahead and say at a billion dollars of Databricks stock, presumably, not cash.

Investors that back to this company are going to be very happy, given that it only raised like 120, 130. Yeah, you know, in the announcement, I saw the announcement on the Databricks page. And there was a really interesting fact I didn't think of. You know, AI agents are, they don't care. about resources, right? They just want to solve the task you're doing. So they're not thinking, oh, you know, what is this going to cost you? AI agencies says here, we're creating four times as many databases versus humans. In other words, agents are going to be like, I have some other

ideas of databases we could create. I'm going to just rip. And so if you look at this chart here, it shows humans versus AI agents in October of 2024. This means people are going to spend more. and if they're spending more and they're doing more work, they're probably going to have a stickier product. Yes. That's a reason to buy a company like this. If people get more value from your product and you're creating all these databases,

getting all these results, that means it's stickier. I was lamenting how terrible AI is in Slack. And then people are like, oh, do you not have the upgrade? I'm like, oh, my God, it's going to cost me $5,000 a year or something like that for a team of 20, 25 people maybe in our Slack instance. Now I've got to make a decision. It's like all this cognitive dissonance. I just hate when they make AI an upsell. But then somebody's like, oh, why don't you use, is it glue, David Sacks's AI first version of Slack? And I'm like, oh, I forgot about that. You know, like, I literally

forgot about it. Because when I went to try it last time, I was like, okay, it's a little early. Let me give them six months to kind of get these features we would need to move over. But now I'm seriously considering moving us out of Slack because of this AI issue, it's not AI first. And I'm trying to just simply summarize what happened. So then the Notion founder reached out to me and he turned on AI in our account. I'm going to meet with them later this week. Turns out Notion will ingest your Slack or has a Slack API. And people are saying that Notion does a better job of summarizing Slack than Slack does.

So that's super interesting. Then I was like, wait a second. Why don't I have a desktop client? I should have a desktop item. Like, isn't this the promise of co-pilot with Windows and obviously Apple's never going to get this done? But I downloaded a chat GPT desktop app. I need a desktop app. Somebody please let us know at TWA startups.

At mention us on Twitter X. Is there not a desktop app that will read my Slack client for me and just end run the application level and run the back end end and just read all. all my new messages and summarize them for me and then just, you know, on the side, say, hey, by the way, you know, while you were away, here's what's going on in the Slack production room, the investment team room, et cetera. Where is that? Where is that desktop app? Also, can that desktop app do my email too, read my email for me and like summarize them so I can quickly respond to people and just chew through it while I'm like taking a walk? If you use superhuman, I literally turned all this on in Superhuman just yesterday in the settings

because, you know, they've been rolling it out, and I'm like, I've got to be thoughtful about this, but I now have superhuman auto-labeling all my inbound email. So when I look at it, it says marketing, pitch, marketing, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, in my inbox. It doesn't do it, but it's doing it in my other box right now. And then it is reminding me if I don't get back to an important email. So that is built into superhuman, full disclosure, where the first investors in the company founder of HubSpot will claim he is. And Darmash is going to claim he is because we were both investors in

Reportive. And then Raul worked us both to be the first investors in Superhuman and then told us each we were the first investors. So I will take claim to that, even though maybe he got his check in first. I don't know whose wire came in first. I'm not going to get in between the two of you on that, but I do think if you were first or second money into a company doing that well, you're both going to get your credit in due time. Okay, fair enough.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay, what else do we got? I guess I did a tweet about AMC or just about the movie industry and how clueless they are. You know, before we run out of time, I think that's a really interesting story. Maybe you could tee it up for us.

All right. So Jason has a view here about how the movie industry should work on bringing more people in and AMC, big theater chain. If you don't know, also a meme stock out there. They're going to have a discount Wednesday promotion, Jason. Essentially, if you're a part of the AMC loyalty program, you get half off tickets for Wednesdays.

I presume Wednesday's the slowest day of the week for movie theaters. So why not offer tickets at a discount, get more bodies in, some more popcorn, etc. I thought it was kind of a winning idea. You had a very divergent view, and you thought it was kind of stupid.

And so I'm going to go ahead and bring up your tweet here, because I think it's somewhat speaks for itself. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think the movie industry is clueless. I might have said something, you know,

a little more colorful there. But, everybody has seen the example of the epic pass in skiing. Skying was this dying industry and this company Epic and another one, iconic and some others, bought a bunch of mountains, put together a consortium and said, all you can eat. Ski as much as you like. You want to ski five days a year, 500 bucks. You want to ski 50 days a year, 500 bucks.

And then they boiled the frog to the point in which my Epic passes a thousand a year. my icon pass might be 1,200, and buying a ski ticket in order to incentivize people buying these season passes, what they did was, it's now two or $300 to ski for a single day, which anybody can say, you know, by the fourth day, you're now in the all you can eat mode. So what do you do? You book a second trip. You book a second weekend, and then you enjoy it more, and then you become addicted to it. I mean, this is like all you can eat fentanyl. Like, if you could come up with a system, for like an epic pass for drugs. Like, I mean, you'd kill everybody, but that's what they did with skiing. They made skiing into a drug for a certain cohort of people where you just get that high,

you want to keep doing it. Movies have done the opposite. Movies have said, every time you want to come here, we're going to make it more painful for you. You want to buy a ticket and you bring your family of five? Great. You know, it's 10 bucks a ticket on average, 50 bucks. And you want to buy stuff at the concession stand. It's going to be 10 bucks per person, minimum, probably more like 15. So family of five, you know, if mom and dad sit it out and the kids get $15 each, now you're at $95. 95 bucks for two hours of entertainment. That's not cheap, right? And so people were, and then maybe you got the Epic Pass. Maybe you go skiing for the entire day for free. Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right

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Go to Northwest RegisteredAjan.com slash twist today. So people are making these tradeoffs in their mind. Then they were like, oh, yeah, we need more money. So how do we get more money? We're going to add $2 to everything for 3D. And we're going to make you watch a movie in 3D that you never asked for 3D.

Oh, and we're going to put it on IMAX. We charge another $3. So now you're getting to $16. Oh, yeah, we're going to make it a luxury theater. You're going to be able to order food to your seat. Now the $10 in popcorn and drinks went to $25. bucks to chicken fingers, et cetera. I literally spend $250 when I go to the movies now. Let that sink. Five people, $250 a person. I go to an IMAX. I like the IMAX dinner. That's $18

a ticket. And everybody orders dessert. And so it's basically combining dinner. Anyway, if they just went with an all you can eat model of $20 per person and then maybe if it's a family of five, you discount a little bit, you get to $50 per month for a family of five. We would go to the movies two or three times a week. They could do, I believe, what the ski industry did, which is make people addicted again to the experience of going out and seeing movies. But because there are different people in the ecosystem trying to optimize different things, the movie theater is trying to optimize the food. The movie industry is trying to optimize the ticket price. The cable TV providers are trying to optimize getting these things out of theater into their

streaming services to get your 15 bucks a month. So now you've got three different constituent. And then you got poor mom and dads, which you're not in this phase yet, but you will be in another couple of years, where you're just trying to do something with the kids on a Saturday or Sunday and laugh and have joy with them and keep them entertained and, you know, maybe have some shared experiences. You have four different people going in four different directions. There is only one direction. Enjoy yourself and give people a good deal. They should let the movie studios buy the theaters and then all you can eat. And Netflix, show, have a theater chain, Disney should have a theater chain, and they should have reciprocity where you can see unlimited Disney, unlimited Netflix, if you have either of those subscriptions, or they could balkanize it and be like Epic and Icon Pass where some people might pick both. People want All You Can Eat, so two really good ideas for founders to think about today. Can you create All You Can Eat? It was a movie pass that tried to do it.

Didn't work because they had to deal with these different folks. but Spotify did figure out an all-you-can-eat model. Netflix did, Disney did, etc. So try to look at a space and create an all-you-can-eat model and see what happens. Second, how interesting would it be to find something that's hated and make it all you can eat?

Sometimes people hate certain hotel chains. They charge too much? I wonder if I paid, let's think of a number, for unlimited stays in a hotel. Married hotels, unlimited stays, A married hotel on average is 300 a night, I'm thinking. Something in there.

Depends on the city, yeah. Okay. So a thousand hotel room nights would be 300,000. So anyway, 300, well, 300 times 300 is, you know, roughly, you know, 100,000. Yeah. So $100,000 paid in advance. You have unlimited stays in Bonvoy hotels. And if there's availability, you could say in another one.

I would pay that every year. Yeah. If I was a single guy, I would certainly pay. then just travel the world. I bet you they could sell that for $150,000 a year, $10,000 a month, $15,000 a month, and make it all you could eat. Or if you said you could buy $1,000 hotel rooms for $150,000 in advance and then just use them over three years, people would do these kind of deals. So it's something to think about when you're approaching entrepreneurship is to think about making people a dictature of product and giving them some extraordinary deal,

which would create a lot of press around it. So maybe what the movie theater change should do is say, we're going to sell 1,000 of these passes for out-limited for $1,000. And you can bring 1,000 for 1,000, and you can bring up to four people with you. I would buy it immediately. Immediately I would buy it.

And then charge the next 1,1,200, and see where demand goes, make a bunch of money, and it's free publicity. And, Jason, you made a really good important point. It's going to get people back in, to the theaters. Right now, they're too big, they're too empty, they're too expensive, and they have fixed labor costs. So, like, you need to have more bodies in there. And wouldn't it be great if it wants to be a good headline about the media business? Absolutely. All right, everybody,

special guest today, Dave Rubin, is with us. You know him because he's an entrepreneur. He's a podcaster. Former Lib now, Maga, I don't know how you like to describe yourself. You and I spoke. Everybody knows to Ruben Report. I don't have to like, you know, like drag this out here because you're you too famous. No, no. Let's see how long you can go with this intro. Come on. I mean, three more minutes off the top of your head. Let's roll. Last night we spoke at Joe Lonsdale Mutuals University of Austin. And 80 or so students in the first class, they're all picked because they're brainiacs. They got high SAT scores. We found out. And I was like, wow, you're in town. we should talk, because I wanted to talk to you just about the business and how your business,

specifically right-wing media, has, it became huge. And now maybe it's in a transition, but people also maybe don't know that you created locals, and then you sold that to Rumble. So you're, like me, a podcaster and an entrepreneur. We just have reverse entry points because I was a political guy that became a tech guy, I suppose, and you're a tech guy that became a political guy. So it's a nice meeting there. I got dragged into politics.

You started as a comedian. I mean, I really don't. I'm not as obsessed about politics. But is it exhausting to you? Because you do five days a week. Five days a week live plus however many interviews I do on top of that. It's exhausting. Talking about politics.

And the pace that Trump goes at and the vitriol now, like you have to be on one side. You are complex. You have many, I think, character. of people on the left, moderates, and the right. But you live in a world like I do where you're forced to pick sides. Yeah. So what's it like to be, I guess, in some ways, loved by the right as somebody who moved from the left. Yeah. And then also under this crazy scrutiny where, just like I was on the left, they want you to pass a purity test on the right. And there are some parts of the period test that maybe you pass or you don't. So what's it like and how do you manage

the psychology of being under constant scrutiny, assault, and just dealing with a pace of news, like the pace of news and tech, I mean, that's fast. Yeah. But in Trump politics, it's absurd. Right. Well, basically, it's like life has become endless doom scrolling on this thing, right? That's sort of the pace of everything is just, can I scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll? Oh, almost to the point where you see good things or positive things and you just don't even look at them and you're just waiting for some disaster. And, you know, back in the day and people don't remember this, but guys of our age remember it, websites used to have an ending. You'd go to CNN.com for the news. And there was an end to the page and it would say go back to the top. But then, you know, the endless scroll came in.

Daily mail. It was just some long stories. And it just goes. And it goes. And they just pump more to you. And, you know, our brains are not quite wired to that. So first, just quick on. the exhaustion part. It is exhausting, and politics is infuriating, and we talked about this a bit last night. Once you kind of know the people on both sides of it, you know how they are publicly and you know how they're privately and you see how the sausage is made, there's a lot of stuff that is not the-theatrics, performative. All of that. And then you kind of see the disconnect between how people behave in their private life and how they're publicly. All that stuff's kind of exhausting, I would say. But like you, I've built a great life doing this. So I am,

able, I've made it a very high priority for me to put this thing down. I do every August, I go off the grid for a month. I've done it eight years a row. No phone, no TV, no news. Where do you go? What do you do? I've done borobora a couple of times. We've done tree houses in Mexico. Literally just disappear. I read a little bit. Is the world there when you come back? Is the world still there? You think the world won't be. And you do miss things. One year I missed the Afghanistan withdrawal. I miss John McCain dying. I missed when Biden chose Kamala as VP. You miss things. Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup. You got a lot to do.

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And Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hired developer smarter. Visit lemon.io, select twist. But you come back and, you know, for the first like five days of it, every year, the same thing happens. I'm kind of freaking out. You know, my hands going to my pocket. Like where is the thing?

Where's the, you know. It's like a shadow arm, right? No, it really is. Like those people who lose an arm. And you feel it. And they reach for something with no arm. Well, it's like, you know, I'm sure you get it to, the phantom buzzing. You get the phantom buzzing.

I don't really get it. anymore, but it used to be a real thing with phantom buzzing that people were getting when we first had these things in our pockets. But I think by doing the disconnect that I do, this will be my ninth year doing it, that has been one of the things that's allowed me to stay sane because we know a lot of the same people and we're a lot of the same world. So many people go into the political thing with good, you know, most people do things for good intentions and they just, you know, the clicks, the fame, the money, whatever it is. It just starts making you crazy. Yeah, where do you fail currently and where do they love you?

Sure. So that is psychologically, I think part of the strategy is to, in your replies, attack, you get brigaded. Yeah. And I have had coordinated brigading. You know, Sax has sort of made fun of it on the pod where, you know, he called off like the mag of people. But I know how the brigading works because there's group chats that you and I. Is he able to control the people? That's good to know.

Well, no, he, I mean, that was the kind of the joke. Nobody can control it. But there are group chats where they will share a Dave Rubin tweet, a Jason Gallagana's tweet, a Sacks treat, and say, okay, go. Go. Yeah. And you know it when you're a super router and you have a following because, okay, this tweet just went from, you know, I think my average tweet gets 50,000 views or so.

And okay, this one's getting 400,000. This one has 1,800 applies the average one has 100. Yeah. What's going on here? And it turns out that suddenly none of these people follow. you and they're like, how did he get in my mentions the second I tweeted it out. You have 50 people telling you to go kill yourself. Exactly. You know, some version of that. It's siops. Yeah. No, well, they coordinate and telegram and they're doing it in, I don't know if it's 4chan or just

whatever these underbelly things are, but that's that is what they're doing. There's no doubt about it. And it does affect you psychologically if you're unaware of it. Yeah. And I noticed it when it came to Ukraine because I had like dictator bad as we follow us. Like, like, dictators are bad. democracies flawed as they can be are a better system. So just, you know, my basic operating system as a Gen Xer is like, yeah, more democracy good, less democracy bad. But man, the, because of Sachs and his position on it, which people couldn't understand, like, why is he so pro-Pooten? I just kept coming up in my replies. And I was like, oh, this is either like, you know, some Putin people trying to promote this or anti-Ukraine people or whatever, or it could

just be his followers. Like it's there's some coordinated effort here. And I was like, yeah, this actually reinforces my belief. Yeah. Well, that's one of the, actually makes me dig in. Well, that also is one of the reasons that you really better know what you think and why you think it. Otherwise, you will be pushed. You will suddenly tweet something that you think is fairly innocuous or not particularly dangerous politically. And you'll get owned by these people. And it will be unrelenting and it will go on for days. And suddenly you'll be like, wait a minute, Did I really miss the mark on that one? And then little did you know that it was a bot farm in Russia

or it was out of South Korea or it was just coordinated by the frog people on telegram or whatever it might be. And that's why it's really important. Well, it's also why it's important that once you have a certain following, you really shouldn't pay that much attention to the responses, which kind of sucks in a way because I want feedback, right? Like, of course you want feedback. That's why it's nice last night to sit in a room with, you know, 80 young people

and really like you could see they were really listening to us. The questions were great, by the way, and some were kind of combative, which was really nice, actually. Totally fine, yeah. But, you know, the anonymity of this thing, the distance of this thing, it has changed us so far. How old are you? I am 54. 54. So I'll be 49 next month.

So we're basically gen X. We're basically the same age. We're the last generation that fully grew up without this thing. We're the last generation that grew up. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Brooklyn, yeah. In Brooklyn. Okay.

So I'm from Brooklyn. Originally, I grew up in Long Island. Got it. Lived in New York City most of my life. But, you know, I would come home from school, get on my bike, and disappear with my friends for eight hours. And then I showed up for dinner and my mom, did you know, Renee? We were a last kid, kids. We were a free range.

But we were the last generation that fully, fully had that. And that is why I think Elon being involved with Trump has been so formative because we needed the boomers for some reason would not hand this thing over. Yes. And Elon, I think, just did an unbelievable job of finally being like, hey, there's a. There's another generation here. We're still, we have some, you know, experience. We're still young enough that our bodies work. We have some energy. Stop with you geriatric people. I'm endlessly sucking. Glitching on TV and then Biden. It's just, I don't know, it's gerocracy or whatever they

call it. Jerry, gerotocracy. I'm like, how are these, let them retire. It's a function. It's, well, it's, I think we would all gladly send them into retirement. So it's not about letting. It's that they for some reason have decided not to let go. I don't know if there's another example of this literally in world history of a generation that refused to let go. Now, you might blame us in a weird way. You might blame the Gen Xers for not grabbing it more. You know, like that there's something there,

that why didn't the Gen Xers be like, no, no, no, no, no, you guys can't do this anymore. You're 87 and you're running for re-election for the 40th year in a row and all of this shit. So whether it's our fault or their fault or whatever it is, part of what's going on here that feels so crazy in the world. It's a technological revolution, right? Which we're about to have another one because of AI. But it's also just this weird generational tension. I mean, even now, as you know, I'm a big Trump supporter, but the guy is

basically 80 years old. 81. He's double the age. And I said this in one of our mutuals, very public person, got really upset at me and was like, please don't say that. And I'm like, he's twice the age of the VP. Yeah, literally. Right. J.D. Young. JD's younger than me. JDs, a JD's 39, I think. So he's, if you doubled his age, he'd be three years younger than Trump. Right.

And look, I don't want to- that sink in. And the weird thing is, I don't want to be ages, so I don't hold that against him as long as he's cognitively there. The difference, I mean, I don't want to get it to the whole Biden thing,

which is, you know, but it's like that was, that, I was doing videos in 2019 talking about his obvious cognitive problems. I'm not a wizard. I'm not from the future. It was just pretty damn obvious. Oddly, though,

I didn't write a book about it, like Jake Tapper, which is now number one on Amazon. Great. I mean, good for him. I think that might be, I know it's a controversial, but I haven't read the book yet. I will give it a listen.

Might be self-aware or it could be C-YA. You could take the cynical, hey, it's C-YA, you know, he's part of the media, whatever. Or he could feel like I'm really kind of pissed off that you abused my trust. And there was this grand conspiracy, and I want to get to the end of it because I was a sucker at the poker table.

Which do you think? Because it seems fairly obvious to be. Could be a little bit of both. It could be he gave them the benefit of the doubt because of preexisting relationships and because maybe he's on that team. And he's as a journalist. You know, they said like, no, no, he's fine. You know, obviously he's older and he stutters and he's got a speech impediment

and he's had that for a long time. But yeah, he's sharp. Because when I talk to my friends, Mark Pinkis, Reid Hoffman, people have known for a long time and even Shemoth, like when's the last time you saw him? How was he? And it was always the same thing. Like, yeah, I had lunch with him, had breakfast with him. And he was great.

I mean, it wasn't like, it's still like talking to your grandpa. It's not as quick and he doesn't understand AI. But that in and of itself is a problem. On top of what you referenced last night related to the sundowning, that they were obviously hiding him at certain parts of the day. Yes. I mean, grandpa had a bad day. Yeah.

You know, and Dean Phillips, they give him so much credit. I don't know if you got to spend any time with Dean Phillips. No, no. He's worth having on your pod. By the time I wanted to have him on, he had already gotten out. Have him on your pot and talk to him. You'll be so impressed because he's a Clinton-like. Yeah.

He probably has more in common with you than Trump, you know, and you probably in a nonpartisan world would vote for him because he believes in, you know, whatever you're doing in your personal life is your personal life, which is, I think, a Republican position historically. Yeah. You know, it's your ranch. Limited government leaves it to you to live your life as you see fit.

Yeah. Literally when I moved to Texas, you know, maybe we'll talk about when I'm on your show and I'm the guest. But, you know, like, that was a. American value I really cherished was like, and when I came here and I bought my horse ranch and I was talking to the guy with the ranch, you, I was like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? He's like, sure ranch. You mean the one you just bought?

I'm like, yeah, he's like, yeah, you can do that on your ranch? I'm like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? You know, like shoot guns or whatever, have a shooting range. And he's like, yeah, yeah, no, it's your ranch, son. Sure ranch now. You can do that? I was like, can I? And he's like, son, I'm going to stop you right there.

It's a church. Do what you want. Don't bother your neighbors. and when the fence goes down, that's when you and your neighbor split the bill, and that's when you interact. Yeah. It's the fence.

And it is like a really ingrained here, that's the fence. And when I grew up in Brooklyn and you grew up in New York, we all took the subway. You had your seat. I had my seat. You have your space. I have my space. We deal with each other.

You're gay. I'm straight. I'm Irish. You're Greek. You're black, Hispanic, whatever. We just all deal with each other. Nobody cares. Yeah.

We all got to get to work. We're all suffering through the same, you know, delay on the subway. the same bullshit we got to deal with, rats on the subway plop and whatever it is. And we all just got along, but you kind of just respected each other for who you are. And it was just so beautiful. I don't know. What happened to this goddamn country where everybody has to be at each other's throat over your political affiliation? Who cares the least interesting thing about anybody is which party they're in?

Yeah. Well, I'm completely uninterested in which party. And I like assessing people on their beliefs and all of those. things, you're completely right. I use the subway a lot as an example because as someone that lived in New York City most of my adult life and I had grandparents that were in the city that I was always going to when I was a kid. You're right. Like you'd get on the subway and it was everybody from everywhere. United Nations. Age and color and background and religion and whatever. And it's not even that you respected them per se, but you just didn't get in their way and they didn't get in your way.

I mean, you'd all put cram in together and you'd elbow everybody, but you didn't elbow them like, Oh, I'll elbow the gay guy and not the Greek guy or something. It was just like we're all in it together. I got to get to work. And that's what the danger, I would say, of what the woke thing did to the country over the last decade plus. It started whittling us down to these very, very unimportant things, right? Like, okay, so you're Irish, fine. That means you have a heritage.

And, you know, okay, great. That's great. And hopefully there's probably some foods you like and traditions you have. Sure. And we just went to an awesome St. Paddy's Day thing in Miami. And I drank my, I'm not a beer guy. but I had a margarita that had some green stuff in. It was fantastic.

Everybody was wasted by 2 p.m. It was amazing. No judgments. But you don't look at somebody and be like, yeah, well, you're, exactly. But you don't look at people and be like, all right, you're Irish, I must think this about you. You're a Jew. I must think about this. You're a black.

I must think this about you. And once that thing crept into the system, it basically started shredding us apart. And I lay most of the blame on this on the good liberals. I'm not talking about the crazy progressives that did this or the market. or whatever, the good liberal who just said, I am so damn tolerant that I will let anyone say or do anything at all times. I will be tolerant of intolerance. And once they ushered that in, the progressive movement, the radical part basically was like, look at these suckers. What I always liken it to what I wrote about in my first book, that it's basically, I'm sure you've seen it,

the original alien movie from 1977. If you remember, which is the best of all the movie, Maybe the second one might be better, but... Ridley Scott, yeah. James Cameron did the second, I think, him. It's just perfection. Yeah. But if you remember at the end of the first movie, the, after the alien has now, you know, ransacked the ship,

killed everybody basically except Ripley, and the robot, who's the doctor. And you find out that he's a robot, you know, halfway through the movie. Yeah. He basically is saying how he admires the alien. Yeah. Because the alien has no morals. It just accomplishes what it wants to accomplish.

Yeah. And this is what I've tried to explain to people about the left, like the modern left or the progressive movement. You don't have to like what they're doing, but you have to respect that they have basically taken over the host. They took over the country. Incredible. And they destroyed so much. And you could say, oh, they're all idiots and they're purple-haired morons. And okay, well, it happened on your watch.

It was effective for a time. Yeah. I mean, I remember talking to, I think, our mutual Sam Harris about this. And he was on to identity politics and, like, radical. terrorism and fundamentalism. He was very, very early on this, which is why he got so much fame at an early point of the internet. Yeah, and he and I both lived in L.A. We had the same book agent. And so we met through our book agent, and I actually introduced him to Elon and we used to have dinner together, the three of us all the time in L.A. was that. That didn't end well, but I'm

going to try to bridge it and bring it back. But they're at each other's throats right now. But, you know, he described identity politics to me, you know, as a cul-de-sac. It's like, you know, you get into this thing and you just start spinning. It's never enough. So they've infected. I mean, they just, the amount of stuff that they have destroyed. I love basketball. Like basketball outside of my family, basketball is my thing.

Who's your team? So I don't even have a team anymore. And I'll tell you, I used to have a team. I'll tell you that in a sec. But the reason I don't have a team anymore is because politics destroyed the NBA. Once they put that BLM logo on the court, and then every time I turned on inside the NBA with Chuck and Kenny and Ernie Johnson, I was like, I'm listening to people lecture me about racism. That's just fine, but it's not what I'm coming to basketball for. So if you look at my YouTube search thing when I'm doing cardio every day, I watch the same games that I watched from late 80s, Lakers to the Bulls run in the 90s up to about the end of Kobe.

And then it became political. My favorite player of all time is a Texas guy, actually, Clyde the Glyde. Sure. I played for Houston with Blazers originally in Houston. And one of the greatest moments of my entire life was for my birthday about seven years ago. My agent just sent me, I open up my text. He says, happy birthday, and it's Clyde's phone number. And then we've become text buddies since then.

And I was like, that's like of all the little things that you get. You guys beat my Nixon, Patrick Ewing, and John Starks back in the day. Yeah. Well, so that was the 94. team. Clyde was traded to them in 95. But yes, that was game six. Great series.

You remember the Elycheon just nipping that John Stark shot in game six and that's what's incredible. That would have been our fan. And now it's this year might be my next year. You love that team that 94. I mean, I started going to Nick's games in the early 90s and that's been my passion ever since. And I literally went to the Pistons games in Detroit.

Yeah. Wonderful city, by the way. If you haven't been to Detroit, I know. I've been. Not in Samir. Incredible how they've turned that city around. The people are great. And it's awesome to go to road games because I'm a New Yorker or I lived in the valley,

like getting good seats was, you know, a five-figure affair in the first two or three rows, 10, $20,000 a seat, which is disconnected from reality. Yeah. So then I was like, wait a second. I live in Austin now. I'm just going to go to Philly. And second row or first row in Philly is like $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000. I got courtside in Detroit for $3,000 a seat, which would have been four rows back, five rows back at the Warriors, et cetera.

So I was like, oh my God, it's free. And I get to see a new city. It's incredible. So if the Knicks clear Boston and go to Indiana, which will be an incredible series, I'm going to literally just go to the Indiana games. What are they charged in first row? Probably 12 bucks. I think it's like 12 bucks for two. You and I can go.

And you get Reggie to bring you your chicken fingers. I stayed in the best hotel in Detroit, the Shinola Hotel based on the watch. comedy. Gorgeous. I was in a suite that was like the presidential suite, like 2,000 square feet. It was 400 bucks a night. I was like, God damn it. This is incredible.

I sat court side for the first time about two months ago. Now I'm going to name drop for a second. But Bill Maher called me, said, you want to come to the Laker game? Nice. Sat courtside with Bill. And it was just, as someone that loves basketball, I've never, I've been to a million basketball games. No, it's totally different when you're on the wood.

We probably went to the same games because I used to go to the Knit games all the time. especially when the Blazers or Houston was in town. And, but to sit courtside, when you're right and you hear the squeaking and you hear all the trash talk. And you can literally hear the sweat fly off them. It's incredible. It's so awesome.

If you love basketball, there is nothing better. It's literally the greatest thing ever. And I said to myself, like, if I ever make any money, like I, you know, I made a bunch of money. And I was like, I don't spend it. And I talked to my wife about it. And she's like, well, what do you love? And I was like, I love skiing.

And I love the Knicks. And she's like, well, you know, we have to spend like this amount of money per year. Yeah. If we're going to end with this amount of money for our daughters, like just a little, like, here's how it trails off for a 54-year-old. And I'm like, can't possibly spend that amount of money a year. Like, I'd have to start flying private or something. And I was like, but I could go to Japan and ski every year and treat myself to cat skiing, which is $1,000 a day, which is pretty, you know, rich compared to just using your house.

And I bought a ski house. And then I started sitting Corside at Nix Games during the playoffs. And I said, you know, during the playoffs, I'll just go. And I won't worry that I spent $10,000 on tickets. Yeah. I'll just go and enjoy it. I mean, what's the point of having it if you can't enjoy it? Exactly.

People feel all this guilt about success. And it's like, I used, it's funny, before I was successful, I had a weird thing about success in some sense. Like, I don't know. I was like, as I started because, you know, there's a weird thing about fame also. Sometimes you can kind of become famous and then people think you're automatically rich. So when I, when I first. started gaining notoriety on YouTube, I was still broke. I was making maybe 50 grand a year, maybe the first few years of doing it. And I was putting all that money back in. So I barely had

a dime, actually. But yet I was famous. So I'd go places and people would know me. Now, you did locals. Yeah. I know this because I, during COVID, discovered Scott Adams, who started doing this local things. I paid and subscribed to it for a while because I was like, I really want to see what's going on over here. And I remember Sam Harris was talking to me. I helped him set up his podcast. And he was originally on Patreon. But he started doing Casper ads and whatever. And he's like, oh, this advertising is not good because when I talk about, I don't know, radical Islam or whatever, you know, priests and Catholic Church issues, they're going to drop me. Where I can't have the advertisers. Oh, my God, I'm going to have to like have my business development. People go talk to

the advertisers every episode and give them credit. So he goes to Patreon. Then he's like, oh, my God, Patreon starts kicking people off. And he's like, okay, I'm going to roll my own and kind of roll. his own subscription service, and he's like, this is the way I'm going to do it. And you did locals. Great domain name. That's like a $500,000 domain name. How much did you pay for that? About $500,000, actually. But it turned out that one of our investors, a guy by the name of Andrew Condru, who's an old tech guy from, well, he's not that old, but I mean, he was like one of the original tech guys from like the 90s. He had it. He had it just sitting there. So originally he licensed it to us. He was an investor, but licenses to us. And then eventually when we sold the

Why did you decide to do a startup and then... So it's very connected to what you just described right there. I was on Patreon, just like Sam, Jordan Peterson, a couple other people. And then they started banning people for crazy reasons. One of the reasons was there was a guy by the name of Carl Benjamin, who's big British YouTuber. And he went on, not on his Patreon account, not on his YouTube show that was being funded by Patreon. He went on someone else's show. And he said the N-word.

But he didn't say it to be racist. he was mocking the alt-right at the time. So he was basically playing out a character, and he said the word. Without any warning, Patreon blew up his channel. That was it. They didn't send him a, you have to retract this,

you have to delete this, blew up his channel. That day, I was on tour with Jordan Peterson. We were both making a night. I was making most of my money on Patreon at that point. Oh, Patron. Jordan was already been selling books and on tour and whatever.

I was on tour with him making a nice amount, but most of my, I was making about 30 grand a month on there. That was basically the budget for my, show. And Jordan and I sat down and we were like, this is intolerable. We got to figure out something. Jordan and I then tried to do something together, but that was right when Jordan was getting sick. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I was like, all right, I'm going to try to do this on my own. My brother-in-law is an Israeli startup guy, as all the Israelis are. I was like, can you build me something? He's like, I'm going to need the five minutes, but I think I can do it. And basically-

Five million people. They got like seven million startups. I'm like, how do you got one point two each? You know, they're under a lot of pressure. It's a small piece of land. They're under a lot of pressure. But basically I said, can you build me? I'm going to leave Patreon.

Can you build me a subscription thing? That's it. And I want direct connection with my audience. I don't want any algorithmic nonsense. I want to own the data. I want to own the emails. All of, I want to do it the right way because it was for me.

Anyway, we did that. When I closed my Patreon that night, the way I did it was I was on a live stream. And I said for, I can't remember. exact numbers, but I was like, for every thousand subscribers we get, something like that, live while I'm on air, I'll do a shot of Patron, because I'm leaving Patreon. Anyway, about 12 shots later. 12,000 subs, wow, you must have been.

So I was, and I was really doing it. So not only was I wasted, but I doxed myself live on air, because when I went finally at the end of the night, when I went to delete the account, which we were showing, your address, oh, no. You press delete, and then your email pops out. Oh, your email, great. It wasn't my address, but my personal email. all popped up, which then, of course, was problem, blah, blah, blah.

Long story short, we delete that. And the next day, I was like, wow, I have a success here. And then I was like, I want to spawn this off to other people. So Scott Adams was one of the first two or three people we brought on board. We built it for him. Originally the way we were going to do it. And I think this is how you and I got in touch. Originally, what we were going to do was white label it to people.

So you would have your own app because I remember you were. Yeah, I was thinking about it too. I was like watching that area. And I was like, this is a super interesting area. I want to invest in it or start something. But then, you know, one of the things that happens is, as you know, if you figure out advertising and it takes off like this podcast, I've had 14 years, I was one of the first five podcasters. It's been sold out for 13 of the 14 years. That's incredible.

And it was only, only year it wasn't sold out was during COVID where we had maybe five advertisers. Two or three went out of business. And we let two push their ads to the next year because they were like, we can't do business. So please let us push our ads back. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just think it's such a great idea to do the subscription. Well, so, right. So subscription, look, if you have a base of people that like you, like, it's a great business.

Now, of course, you were eventually going to hit a ceiling on that. But basically, we thought, so originally locals was white label. So I had a Ruben Report app. Then once we brought on Scott, I think we had a prototype for his white label, but then suddenly, like 10 other people reached out to me in a week that were fairly well known. Michael Malice, who's here in Austin, a bunch of other people. And then we were like- Oh, Michael Malice is here. Yeah, yeah. Oh, but he's part of Daily Wire now.

Is he part of Daily Wire now? Michael, Malice is the- Michael Knowles. Michael Knows. Who's in Nashville. Michael Malice is the guy who's kind of... He's the Anacap. He's an anarchist.

Yeah, he's an anarchist. But he's not a white supremacist. No, not at all. He's the most one of the... You should have him on. He is one of the most wonderful people you will ever meet. But an anarchist. He's a complete anarchist.

He doesn't believe in government at all. Wow. He's been to North Korea. Like, the guy has a, you know, his parents came from Soviet Russia. He's got a really... I kind of probably would like to hang with a guy like that. Sounds like a good hang. He's here and awesome.

We should get drinks. Like he's a great, great human being. Anyway, he, I brought him on and a few other people. And then quickly we realized, all right, the white label thing isn't going to make sense. So let's just put it all into one app. It doesn't scale. Yeah. We do all that.

And then, and then it's really successful. I was like, holy, you know, oh, and then Sacks came on as an investor. And really once... Joe Lonsdale was an investor. Joe Lonsdale was an investor. But once we got Sacks, then everything else opened up. Because once we got sacks, suddenly Naval was like, I'll put in money and Joe put in money and all these other. It opened up. It just opened up all the doors for us. And the beauty of the Sacks thing is that we were at Peter Thiel's New Year's party in Miami. I don't know, this is like five years ago or so.

My invite got lost. It's a very gay New Year's. Yeah, I guess, you know. I wanted to go to that. For me, it was just the average of years. Yeah, I want to go to Peter Thiel's Very Gay New Year's Party. Can I be a year plus two? That can be arranged. So we go. And this very pretty woman comes up to me and she says she's a big fan and we're chatting for a while. And then she says, I want you to meet my husband David. And I chat with this guy, David, for like 15 minutes. And I was like, ah, he's a nice guy.

She was very nice. Whatever. I took a picture with her. And then I walk away and some guy's like, oh, how do you know David Sachs? I didn't even know who David was. Yeah, it was Jackie. I didn't know who David was. I wasn't really that.

Even though I was in tech at that point, it's not my world. I come from politics and comedy or whatever. The best thing that I can say about David is literally two days. later, I called him up. I was like, hey, listen, I know we just had a quick chat. Your wife seems to like me. We had a 15-minute conversation. I showed him some numbers. He called me the next day. He's like, let's do it. And then it just opened every door for us. And next thing, you know, we got acquired by Rumble and Rumble went public. So nice. And you owned a nice piece of Rumble. Yeah. We sold all for stock. I did not take one time. Smart. So you're good. I'm good. I'm good.

But I still got this jacket that you complimented me on. It's like a Chinese drop ship. It's okay. 30 bucks. Yeah, but $27 of that was the Trump tariff. So enjoy it. You don't think the Trump tariff stuff was crazy. You had to look at that and think. No, I didn't.

You can watch my videos from those days. Even when the market crash, I just thought it was a negotiation tactic and I thought everything would be fine. So you're in the 4D chess camp. Yeah, I mean, I guess I was just like, well, wait a minute. Is he really trying to crash the economy and is no country going to come back and be like, I'd like access to the American markets? That just seemed crazy to me.

So I was like, let's just give it a couple days. I did learn something about myself. Hopefully you learn the reverse thing, which is that when it comes to investing, I'm not that, I'm not that aggressive. Like when my guys were like, oh, it's dropping,

you should probably start buying. I was just like, you know what? Let's just kind of let it be. Oh, no, you always buy when it's question. I know. I didn't, though. I just let it be. And look, it's all come back, right?

I mean, is it even more now than we had nights? No, it's exactly even since. So Trump's flat, yeah, for the year. But as I think, maybe it was you or it was sacks that said on Allen, week or two ago, we'll only find out the results of this when the landing happens. And we're going to learn about that in the next couple of weeks. And if we get, look, if we get 40 countries that come back with better deals, and maybe we get

10 countries that, let's say it's a wash, and we get a few that it's not good. It still was a net good. The little pain point, as you just said, the market's back. So I just, you know, my take on it is, I want to get your opinion about the nature of Trump. Yeah. You know the guy. Yeah. He, I studied him before he came on All In.

I never really told this story, but I'll tell it on your podcast later when I'm on your pod. But I studied him, major. We're doing the rare back-to-back pod. We're doing the back-to-back pot. Yeah. It's a double feature. Yeah. But I studied him, and my perception of him is a key piece to his psychology is being respected.

Yes. You agree? Yes. Like, it is a major part of it. Yes. And even beyond respect, being loved, like actually people loving him for who he is. And he's not like the perfect character. He's obviously flawed in some ways.

And, you know, bombastic and people don't like his style. Maybe they love his style, whatever it is. But I just knew he would reverse all of this stuff with the tariffs if things went the wrong way. Because his overriding principle is to be loved by the American people. So do you think this wasn't the plan? No. I think he was doing a ton of trial balloons and floating things. And it wasn't well thought out. Because if it was well thought out, I think what you would have said is we have 150 trading partners. We can put them into these three buckets. These ones are inconsequential because we don't do a lot of trade with them. These five are 90% of it. It's a Pareto principle, the power law. These five are the ones that matter. And then these are the ones in between. So I've told Besson to do this group of people who are important. And then I'm putting, you know, Sacks and Elon or this person and that person, a Lutnik on these ones.

And here's the strategy we're going to pursue. It's going to be pretty aggressive. There's going to be some pain. Here's what you can expect. Instead, it was like, oh, you put it at 50? I'm making it 150. And it was this attention-seeking crazy, shake the globe. And now, shake the globe as a concept is fine.

They get the reality TV, the attention getting. You know, there's, you know, these concepts in negotiations to anchor, you know, in a crazy part. It's all like very well established. But I think when you're dealing with something that has second and third order downstream effects, you can't shake it too violently. And when you comes to the economy, you talk to anybody who does macroeconomics, like they're alchemists. They have a little bit of science, a little bit of magic, and they're trying to like read the Tileys, but they actually don't understand these systems. It's like weather systems, right? You can understand some pieces of them. It's quite possible we could break

things in the economy. And the thing that was going to break was, if he didn't relent, I was talking to all these startups who are in e-commerce specifically. No, I heard a lot from e-commerce. My brother-in-law's in e-commerce, yes. And they were like, we're going to have to do layoffs. We're going to not put our Christmas summer orders in. We are going to not do this new product line and we're not investing in this new thing. It takes a decade, five years, you know, minimum two or three years to set up these supply chains and get a business cranking. So I was talking to cuts clothing and I had him on the pod here at this weekend startups. And he was like, ah, I'm going to have, everybody in my group chat is laying people off. And I think they didn't fully realize exactly how this would go to mainstream.

Like when Besson was saying, this is a max seven problem, not a mainstream problem. Yes. First stroke of the pen, it's a max seven problem. It's a market problem. And then week six, it would have been massive layoffs. And the Trump layoffs would have made. him so hated that his operating system is to be loved. So winning the deal, going and getting all these wins in the Middle East, which is kind of a superpower, I think. And then, oh, the stock market comes roaring back. I knew he would reverse his entire position if it didn't go well. Right. So look, I don't think either one of us can speak to exactly what was in his mind at that moment. Like, was his plan to throw out the bomb, have it be crazy for three days and then have what happened happened? That seems

right to me, but I'll grant you, maybe it was he was going to throw out the bomb, had no idea what was going to happen. I would say either way, since we can't speak to what's in his brain, what we can't speak to is what has happened. And what has happened, I think, you would agree, has been pretty good, right? I mean, we're going to, assuming we get the landings that we think we're going to get. It's possible he will, yeah, have more fair trade deals over time. I think the way I would put this is when I was first coming around to Trump, so this is now

got to be six or seven years ago. Do you know Eric Weinstein? Yeah, of course. So I had Eric on the show, and he really, I was trying to get him to come along to. So sort of what I've been doing with Bill Maher for years. I've tried to bring these people along, right? And Eric just couldn't get there.

He's a bull in a china shop. He's a bull in a China shop. And I said, Eric, well, the thing is, what you seem to want is a Panther in a China shop. You want a Panther to walk in and be real sly and knock one thing off with its tail and then just close the door softly on the way out. But that's not the phrase.

And there's a reason it's not the phrase. It doesn't really exist. Would we all like in like our heart of hearts or in like if everything was as highly functional as we'd like it to be? Would we like him perhaps to be more, you know, now he's changed where I do think he's more statesman like. But could we have gone without some of that stuff? Sure.

Could we have gone without some of that? Sure. But that's just not exactly how the world works. So we finally got one guy that was willing to do all of the things that none of us were willing to do. And to me, the results of that have been a net positive. So that's why when you asked me last night and you asked me here, like, what's my criticism of him? I don't really have much. You just look at the output. At the end, I really do just look at the output. Like could he have not tweeted this or that or some of those things like maybe? But he was also now we see how

calcified the mainstream media was, how he was working against big tech. I mean, in retrospect, the fact that the old regime of Twitter took him out and what they did to parlor. And when you think of just all of these things. I would have given him a 30-day pause after January 6th. Just because the chances of January 6th could have been hundreds of Americans killed. If those police officers had done what most police officers would have done, which is when you're getting beaten, you know, take the guns out and start shooting people, they showed incredible restraint.

That could have been a much different outcome for America. Dave Rubin, I appreciate the hour. It has been a pleasure. Now I have to figure out how to get you for the next hour. We have a two. I'm going to talk to Lonsdale now. I got to think. And then I'll see you over the studio.

How can I get Jason? No. I mean, you and I are probably the closest to center of everybody in our circles. We probably are the two people who are criticized most by our constituents of like, oh, wow, they won't, like, fully take one side or they're thoughtful about this stuff. Like, I do, I'm kind of disappointed in some of my friends that. just are, had that Trump dedication syndrome. Who had that great joke? I would never be part of a club that would have me.

Who's, that would be Marks Brothers? Is that Marks Brothers? Is that Marks brother? Oh, that's Groucho Marx. There you go. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time in this week's service. Bye-bye.