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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  What does the government do particularly well? Not much.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  The government has become just an insane monster.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  It's just an ever growing monster that just keeps eating more money, eating more resources. None of these agencies are doing what they set out to do.

• 0:51Jack Selby?

  What do you think the role of the government should be?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Not much. I would say the founders basically got it completely right, that everything should be dealt with at the state and local level, and then the federal government should have a couple of things that they're supposed to do.

• 1:04Jack Selby?

  What are your predictions for the finances of the average American?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now, across the board. I think the world is changing in massive ways.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  We're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now. I think we're in for an incredible time in America. It doesn't matter how much money you have, but as a general rule, I would tell anybody.

• 1:32Jack Selby?

  Dave Rubin, thank you so much for coming on the Iced Coffee Hour. We really appreciate it.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Good to be with you guys. We are drinking our psychotropic drink and we'll see what happens in about a half hour.

• 1:42Jack Selby?

  Shout out Chris Williamson. His way forward to kick in.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I walked in, I said, what do you got with caffeine? Thinking there might be some iced coffee involved and now we got mushrooms and God knows what. So we'll see what happens.

• 1:54Jack Selby?

  So we first wanted to discuss the cultural conservative shift that I feel like has really been hitting hard the past, probably, I mean, started maybe even like seven or eight years ago, and then slowly it's been ramping up. And then recently it's just exploded. I mean, you have Joe Rogan, who's just. A lifelong liberal going to the right. You have Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, even lending credence to Donald Trump after the the attempt. And you actually started as a liberal commentating for The Young Turks. And then you started to see things a little bit differently and started going to the right. Where do you think that all started from?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  So I started with The Young Turks in about 2014. And although I don't have a lot of great things to say about Jenk from The Young Turks, I do always give the guy credit for he was early in on digital media, which now has completely dwarfed mainstream media. And even just this morning, when I was on the plane, I was flipping through Twitter and it's like MSNBC is being sold off and CNN is about to fire half their people. And there's just complete upheaval now. So I do give credit to the guy for for kind of getting in early on that. I was always kind of a liberal growing up. I'm from New York. I was just sort of like a New York old school liberal, which is very, very different. As I'm sure you guys know, from what the modern sort of framing of what a liberal is. I was liberal in that, like, I didn't really care who you married. I didn't

• 3:11Speaker 01

  care what you smoked. In some sense, I'm still at least, I consider myself begrudgingly pro choice. But that was sort of when things work, you can kind of be liberal. And that was what most people were in America at the time. I'm a child of the 80s. I'm 48. Like, that was really how things were. And then conservatives were thought of as a little more conservatives kind of, you know, were more about business and war, something like that. They were meaner. Or, you know, you picture like The Simpsons, all the rich guys in the room with Mr. Burns and the lightning in the background and Dracula's there and everybody else. And I started at The Young Turks. And they were kind of, to me, they were like liberals, but they were hopped up on caffeine. They were just screaming all the time. Everybody was a racist and a bigot and a buffoon that they

• 3:56Speaker 01

  were fighting. And I kind of liked it. And I think that that's actually what caught on culturally for the progressives is that they were just like juiced up about everything all the time. And they were just so right. And everybody else was so wrong. And then after about a year there, I started thinking, something is not right here. Like, you know, sometimes when you just feel something for a while, and then you don't, you don't have like, the exact touch point yet. But I was just kind of feeling like this can't make sense. Like, how are we so right about everything? And it's all so obvious. And all of these people are just evil and bigots and racist. Like, it can't be. And then there were a couple moments along the way that that kind of broke me. The most famous one that I think became

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Way bigger than me was when Sam Harris was on Real Time with Bill Maher with Ben Affleck. And Affleck was on and people think he maybe was getting a little juiced up for Batman at the time. And they started discussing radical Islam and Sam was trying to explain that you have to be able to criticize ideas without being bigoted towards people. And Affleck just jumped all over Sam Harris, who's a very soft spoken atheist. He was on the show to talk about mindful meditation, basically a new book he had about that. And Bill Maher, who was a lifelong liberal, live and let live kind of thing. And basically was he called them gross and racist. That was the line. And I was watching it. I remember watching it live that night. And I was watching it and I thought, holy shit, this, this, right

• 5:19Speaker 01

  now, what was happening right in front of me, this is what I've been trying to formulate in my head that I knew was wrong, that, that the liberals, the progressives somehow were completely unable to separate how you should be able to talk about ideas, criticize ideas, without being bigoted towards people. And once I saw it, like so perfectly, and it maybe it had something to do with Affleck being kind of like an A-list star and kind of over the top. So it was so emotive. I just started talking about that on my show. And suddenly, all these people started coming to me like, Dave, I'm seeing something wrong here, too. And then really what happened was I started talking to some conservatives. I started talking to Larry Elder. There was a very famous moment we had. I started talking

• 6:01Speaker 01

  to Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, all of these guys. And what I found was even though I disagreed with them about some stuff, there was an awful lot of just, oh, live and let live, America's kind of good. Like, let's see if we can talk this stuff out. And really, all I was getting on the other side was scorched earth. So anyway, to, to kind of get that to exactly where your question is, this new thing that's happening right now, I don't really describe it as conservative as much as it's just pro-America, right? Because Tulsi is definitely not a conservative. Tulsi is definitely pro-choice. And, you know, the war thing has now flipped because the Democrats have become the party of war. But RFK is definitely not a traditional conservative. But what's bringing all these guys together, it's basically

• 6:43Speaker 01

  a love for America, and it's a love for free speech, and hopefully a restoration of those things. So I would say it's like, it's a wide tent, new conservative movement, if you want to use the conservative word. I mean, I'm married to a guy. Like, that's not the most conservative thing out there. So like, there's something really interesting brewing, and I'm very

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I've been getting a lot of cred for the last couple of weeks because it's so connected to my journey, but I'm very proud that I had anything, whatever, to whatever extent I had anything to do with it. I'm very proud because I think, I think America's back and we had a little something to do with it.

• 7:16Jack Selby?

  I genuinely think one of the biggest catalysts to Trump winning this election was Elon buying Twitter.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:21Jack Selby?

  Now X.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:22Jack Selby?

  And now he's wanting to run the DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jack Selby?

  Which I personally am like absolutely thrilled about.

• 7:30Graham Stephan?

  Oh, my gosh. Me too.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  No, it could, it could not be better. It literally could not be better.

• 7:34Jack Selby?

  And you speak with Elon, or you have quite a bit, actually. Do you think that this is something that's actually, actually going to come to fruition?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 7:42Jack Selby?

  Actually going to make a difference?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 7:45Graham Stephan?

  How do they have any authority? Because my understanding is that they could make recommendations, but they can't implement anything themselves.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Well, we don't know exactly yet because it's a new department. So there's a, there's a certain irony here, right? Their whole goal is to eliminate departments, right? We have something like 479 departments. You know, it's more than two a year, basically, in the history of the United States. And they're adding a department to get rid of departments. So we don't know like the technical mechanism yet. I saw all these people like Elizabeth Warren like is like, oh, it's how are they going to be so efficient? They need two people to do the job, you know, implying it should be a one-person job. But it's like, first off, Elon has 20 other jobs at least. The guy is literally sending us to Mars. He's building tunnels under LA.

• 8:24Graham Stephan?

  He's the top player Diablo, too.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:26Graham Stephan?

  He's the number one player in the world.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Is he really, is he, wait, is he literally the top player?

• 8:32Jack Selby?

  No, he's not the top player. He did actually recently speedrun something and set the world record in Diablo, but I think that he's officially top 20 leaderboard in the world, which is insanely competitive. Because he, he's, I mean, you have people that dedicate their lives to Diablo.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:47Jack Selby?

  Probably thousands, tens of thousands of people, and he has all of these lives and jobs and still he's top 20.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you a story, not, not about Diablo specifically, but maybe about a little bit about his psyche that might explain that. Because the first time that I met him was right after he bought Twitter. So it was about two weeks after he bought Twitter and I got a message from somebody saying Elon wants you to, wants to meet you. Can you come? And I was in Florida where I am in Miami and obviously there in San Francisco. I called every friend I know with the plane and I was like, somebody, you gotta get me there immediately. Like he wants to meet me tonight and nobody get me on plane. I get on the, finally, there was one flight that I could get on. I get, it was literally the last seat, you know, at, you know, 37B, right in the middle to go meet Elon. I show up at Twitter at about midnight. And there's, I don't know, like 50 or 75 people up there.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  And he immediately walks out. He says hi. He's like, and his eyes were kind of bloodshot. It was a long day, you know, he's just dressed in like a ratty T-shirt and he's got sneakers on and kind of, you know, just average jeans, like could not, if you had just seen him down the street, you'd just be like, that's any guy like. And, and he's like, Dave, uh, you know, they told me there's some weird stuff going on with your Twitter account. He's like, I'm really tired, but if you want me to look at this now, we could spend a couple of hours. Otherwise, if you could just come back in the morning. And I was like, just that right there tells you everything you need to know about the guy. Like I am one of a zillion people, like that you're gonna now at 12:30 AM, we're gonna sit down and go under the hood and look in my Twitter and see what happens. So I was like, I was like, it's okay. Uh, you, we could do this in the morning.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  I did spend a couple of hours that night with the, with the programmers going through the stuff. But then the next day I met with him and I subsequently met with him a couple of other times. And the guy's just doing a million things. Like if you're supposed to be on a, on a journey in life, if you're supposed to find something that you want to do and do it. I don't know that anyone's doing a better example of that. So to answer the question, I think they absolutely are going to go in. And as, as Vivek said, they are going to delete departments. I think almost nothing is off the table. They are gonna, the government has become just an insane, um, I would say, uh, monster. It's just an ever-growing monster that just keeps eating more money, eating more resources.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  This is the deep state that, you know, Trump's been talking about for years. And they're gonna go in and, and they're gonna do it quick, sort of like what's happening in Argentina right now. And then suddenly people are gonna be like, holy, they did save two trillion, uh, in the budget. And, uh, people are gonna get some of their tax money back and we're not gonna have all these wasteful departments and things are still gonna work. And that's what I think the, the left is now worried about more than anything else. It's not that he's Hitler. Nobody thinks Donald Trump is Hitler, honestly. Maybe there's some people that are very, very confused because they watch too much MSNBC. But what they're really afraid of is this guy's gonna get in and now he has the right people around him. He didn't have the right people around him last time, but now between RFK and Tulsi and Elon and Vivek. And the list goes on and on. I think Rubio is going to do a great job, Secretary of State.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  It's like, they can really do things right now. And I think we're in for an incredible time in America.

• 11:49Graham Stephan?

  Why didn't nobody think to do this sooner? Because we've all been talking about wasteful government spending. I mean, it's nothing new. You see like the toilets going up in San Francisco that costs like a million dollars for like a toilet.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think the main reason for it was the culture wasn't ready for it. You know, like the people that were like, oh, taxes are too high, or government's not efficient, or there's too many agencies, or you go to DC and there's these giant buildings where nobody's working. And you're like, what the hell is going on here? I just don't think it was like culturally cool enough to move anything, really. So like, there was never going to be a great, you know, every now and again, you'd get a politician, Rand Paul, I like a lot, obviously Libertarian Senator from Kentucky. It's like, he gets in there and he constantly talks about budgets and why, what are we, you know, if we're giving money to Ukraine, let's say, can we get a receipt? Like, basic stuff. And he just gets, he gets no traction with any of that. But he's, I think, respected by, let's say, smart people. I think they needed a cultural movement behind it.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  And I think largely what happened was, uh, once COVID hit and we saw the, just the absolute disastrous response across the board from the NIH and the CDC and the Department of Ed and just every department that you can think of, um, then suddenly there was enough of like a wake up around people. And then it's also because of, it's because of this, it's because of podcasts and people talking about things honestly in a way that they weren't seeing on media. So there was just like a confluence of things and I would say it was sort of perfect timing and then the right group of people and that were on the precipice of fixing it. Which, by the way, will not be easy or anything else, but I do think some major things are gonna happen.

• 13:23Jack Selby?

  But before we get into that, even if you think it is a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from molecular medicine to business efficiency, all the way to self-driving cars. And if it's not in your industry yet, and it will be very soon. But the problem is that AI requires a lot of speed and processing power. So how can you compete without costs spiraling out of control?

• 13:41Graham Stephan?

  That's why it's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or our sponsor, OCI. For those unaware, OCI is a blazing fast and Secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all of your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI also costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. So you're able to save a pile of money. Not to mention, thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including MGM Resorts, Specialized Bikes, and Fireworks AI.

• 14:11Jack Selby?

  Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. This is for new US customers with minimum financial commitment, and the offer ends December 21st of this year. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com/iced. That's oracle.com/iced. Thank you so much, Oracle, for sponsoring this episode, and back to the podcast. So when you went into Twitter headquarters, you said that there were some issues with your Twitter account. What issues did you see? And also, what did you learn from the people that were running Twitter? Was there actually stuff that was being like shadow banned, like truly from the inside?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 14:45Jack Selby?

  Like, what was the problem there?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first off, it was like, it's hard to even go back that year and a half or whatever. Was it two years even already that he bought that thing? It might have been about two years now.

• 14:56Graham Stephan?

  It's been more.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, time has gotten very weird lately. That's what endless scrolling does to all of our brains.

• 15:02Graham Stephan?

  It's terrible, I hate it.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Really, it just like crushes the time shift or something. It was about two weeks after he bought it, and it was just chaos there because he was firing people left and right. You know, now it sounds like he's fired up to about 80% of the entire company. But remember, when he got in, he immediately fired a whole bunch of people. So it was huge offices there. I mean, their commissary is massive, and there was just nobody there. I'm talking about even the next day when I went back at normal office hours, not when I was there, just at 1 a.m.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  He also felt that there were people there that were still moles, you know, because they were still dealing with, we knew that there were people that either were working with the CIA or the FBI or somebody was government-related was in at Twitter. So he didn't know who, how many people were there. He didn't, he was worried that if he started firing people, that somebody could just take down Twitter altogether. I mean, that was part of the complexity of how do you fire the right people? Because They could do things that would make it completely useless and you just bought the thing for, you know, 44 bill. So anyway, when we sat down and started looking at my account. So, well, I should back up for one second and say that, you know, uh, you know, I've been on Twitter for like 12 or 13 years, something like that. And you can sort of see and being

• 16:14Speaker 01

  on YouTube and all these things, you can sort of see when things are kind of working and it feels roughly right. It's not that you get the exact same amount of views every day or anything else, but you don't see like these insane spikes. And then like you put out the same type of thing a few days later and get, you know, no views. And I was going through all these like crazy versions of this for a while. And again, it wasn't just Twitter. I was seeing this on YouTube too. Um, anyway, I went in there and the programmers, basically, they just kind of opened up the hood and showed me what was going on there. And it was really extraordinary because Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter during the, the old days, he, if you remember, he testified under oath, Ted Cruz asked him,

• 16:55Speaker 01

  do you guys shadow ban? And he said, no, under oath. Now, he probably was using a little bit of a linguistic trick there because shadow ban isn't a technical term in some sense, right? So we could all define it a little bit differently. But in essence, do you do something that depresses views for some people in a, in a feed that should be um, chronological? And he said, no. They showed me. I mean, they showed me the entire system. The entire system was built to do that. It wasn't that it wasn't a bug. It wasn't a bug. It was a feature. Like the entire system was literally built with endless amounts. I can't even tell you how many tags there were related to words or connections, or you tweeted at this person, or you tweeted this topic on this day. Like it was the craziest.

• 17:40Speaker 01

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

• 18:25Speaker 01

  election as he was before. So that there's an implication. Okay, maybe we're fiddling around a little bit less on the electoral.

• 18:30Graham Stephan?

  Even Bezos made some statements.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Bezos, Washington Post didn't even endorse Kamala. They didn't endorse a candidate at all. So you can see by, I think basically by Elon being brave, we needed somebody that was bigger than the, the me or Shapiro or even Rogan. We needed like, we needed like huge forces. And I think when Elon basically teamed up with Trump, that, that fully shifted something in the culture. And that has now led to this, to this incredible moment.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.

• 19:29Graham Stephan?

  Now, it seems like, speaking of that, a lot of people are going towards deregulation at this point. And they're thinking that's going to be better for our economy, better for the average person. Where do you think that deregulation could actually hurt people?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm a big deregulation guy, so I would, I would try to deregulate as much as possible. We were talking right before we started. I mean, both of us left LA, like LA to do anything, to start a new business or build a studio in your home, or literally do landscaping outside of your house or anything. There's an obscene amount of regulations and rules and, you know, all these things that you have to pay and all of this stuff. So where could deregulation hurt as it pertains to tech specifically?

• 20:08Graham Stephan?

  Or just the average person? For any industry, like what do you think is going to get impacted by that the worst?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  I'm not really worried. Like, will there be something down the pike that they'll figure? I don't know. If you had no building codes, I think there's probably ways you could privatize a lot of that stuff, or at least make it a little more local focused than federally focused. I'm actually not worried about that at all. Like, I'm, I'm sure there is something, right? There, clearly they will do something and there will be unintended consequences. I think it's all a risk worth taking right now. Like, to me, if you just deleted, as Vivek said, if you just deleted the Department of Education tomorrow. We'll see what happens on the other side. And I actually think it's gonna be a hell of a. Well, you can, because it's a giant building and those people will need jobs. But you know what? It's not going to be. That's the thing. That's the thing. None of these agencies are doing what they set out to do.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  The EPA was basically set out to kind of keep an eye on companies that were dumping sewage into the water. Like, but it basically became a law writing agency. So these things have become way too big. They have way too much power. And I, I think if you eliminated virtually all of them, I mean, their goal is to eliminate about 300 of them. But if you eliminated virtually all of them, then what would happen? Well, most, most policies would be kicked back to the states, which, which is exactly what the founders intended. And I think that that, for the most part, I want, I live in Miami. I want most of the things that I have to deal with in my life to be dealt with in Miami. And then from there, Florida, and then the stuff that we all have to deal with, say, the border, that should be dealt with with the federal government.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But the less agencies and middleman, I mean, this is what Trump, I mean, he started the thing about the deep state eight years ago. And nobody really talked about that. We didn't really realize, boy, there is this thing in, in DC that just exists. It just exists, this, this middle management bureaucratic nonsense. And finally, people are seeing it. So I think, I'm telling you, they are going to do a lot. It is going to be like Malay and Argentina, and it's going to happen very quickly.

• 22:08Graham Stephan?

  What do you think the role of the government should be?

• 22:10Speaker 01

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

• 22:52Speaker 01

  So, for example, you know, two years ago, we had Hurricane E and basically a. Category five that hit southwest Florida demolished Fort Myers, Sanibel Captiva, some of the barrier islands there. Immediately after the hurricane, everybody on the news was saying to rebuild the Sanibel Causeway, which is about four miles, was going to take three years. That's what everybody was saying. DeSantis basically had it rebuilt in a month because he brought in the right people. He cut regulation. I actually met one of the contractors at DeSantis's reelection night. A guy came up to me, said that he was one of the contractors that worked on it. And he said, Dave, I just want to tell you this, that this guy, he basically brought all the best contractors down. He took everybody

• 23:35Speaker 01

  to the, to the bridge and basically said, what do we need to do? We gave him our recommendations and he started making it happen the next day. That's proper competent governance. We're just so not used to that. We're used to what you fled in California, an ever-growing state that taxes endlessly and punishes people for success. And then it's like, how is it that I have nice, clean roads in Florida? How is it that we don't have homeless people? We don't have no homeless people, but why do things work with no income tax in Florida? And why does Cali tax the high hell out of you and have much worse services and much worse infrastructure and a whole series of other problems? So I would say as, as little as the government can do is what I want it to do.

• 24:15Graham Stephan?

  What about leaving it to the private sector?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  I would leave as much as possible to the private sector. I mean, this is where, okay, so should there be some regulations around environment, let's say, because you don't want every company dumping sewage into the river? That's like the, the base one that most people would ask about. Yeah, I think you can have some basic regulations around that. But most, yeah, most things, I, see, the thing is capitalism, the beauty of capitalism is that someone's always trying to make a better mousetrap. So if you're a company that's, that it is exposed to be doing horrible things, and this is also the beauty of the internet, by the way, because now we can expose things a lot quicker because we all have phones and we all have cameras and all of these things. It's like, if you're a company and whatever you're making, you're making glasses, and it turns out that actually

• 25:00Speaker 01

  you're dumping a ton of toxic sludge into the water or into whatever, into the fields behind you and there's schools there. It's like that will now be exposed very quickly and there will be more competition for that.

• 25:10Graham Stephan?

  Because here's, I remember a while ago, there's that big oil spill. I think it was like 2008 or 2009.

• 25:16Jack Selby?

  I don't know anybody who's like, oh, that company had that big oil spill, but they're five cents cheaper. I'm not going to go there. They just look at the price. You're like, all right. Well, it's cheaper. That oil spill, I didn't see it.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Right. Well, it's always, it's always tricky to get things, get people to care about things that aren't happening in their backyard. Right. Um, right. When it happens in your backyard, then it's like, not in my backyard. And then suddenly you're screaming about it. But if it happens miles away, you don't realize all the reasons that it will potentially affect you or anything else. Um, I think the world's changing. I think the world is changing in massive ways. And, and it's deep, it's definitely connected to what we're talking about with Twitter and YouTube and everything else. It's like, the media used to just control that overdone window in such a tight way, that the stories that we would see were so slim in nature and leaving out so much. And now it's like, if there's an oil spill, and something really terrible is happening, it's going to be covered in new media in a completely new way, and

• 26:07Speaker 01

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

• 26:37Jack Selby?

  What about tariffs? What are your thoughts on that? I feel like people have a very poor understanding of tariffs.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  They really do.

• 26:45Jack Selby?

  Well, the thing that can-

• 26:46Speaker 01

  We've played a lot of videos of people being very confused about tariffs on my show lately.

• 26:49Jack Selby?

  The thing that confuses me so much, it's like, okay, I studied economics in, in college, but at the same time, now, people have very convincing arguments on both sides of the aisle. People on the left say that people on the right don't understand tariffs, and people on the right say that the people on the left don't understand tariffs. What's your understanding of tariffs? And then I'll ask you to steel man that argument.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Sure. So, well, my version, I'll tell you why I agree with Trump's proposition for tariffs first, because that, that's what sort of brought this back, right? I mean, basically what's happening right now is that other countries are putting huge tariffs on our products, so we can't, as I played a video on my- Mr. Wonderful, what's his name from Shark

• 27:28Jack Selby?

  Kevin O'Leary.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Kevin O'Leary was great. He was basically explaining that, you know, we can't sell an American car in Japan because they put 100% tariff on it. So no idiot in Japan is going to be like, man, I really want that GM so bad. I have to have that Escalade that I'm going to pay for it, right? And we don't do the reverse on their stuff here. So Trump is in effect using the, the threat of tariffs to get some sort of tariff parity. And then the hope would be that we would have enough competition in America to deal with that. And hopefully we would, I mean, from my perspective, I would then want people to be buying more American, but I don't want it to be exorbitant to buy, to import cars or anything else because we should be able to buy whatever we want to buy.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  But I'm basically with Trump on this, that we have to at least threaten a little bit. It's sort of like Trump with NATO the first time around. You know, his whole thing, everyone was like, he's trying to destroy NATO. And Trump was like, well, I'm not trying to destroy NATO, but why is it that we foot the bill on NATO and nobody else does, you know? And then what did Trump get out of it? Well, suddenly a whole bunch of other countries started paying into NATO as well. So I think, I think that it needs to be a little bit more of an even game. That would be my, my basic version of it.

• 28:38Jack Selby?

  It makes sense if we were to try to get the other countries to stop levying tariffs on the United States, then I feel like that would help out a ton. But in terms of just like increasing tariffs from other countries trying to sell in America.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  I think the argument, his argument is if we say to Japan, if there is 100% tariff, that's what, that's what Mr. Wonderful said, Kevin O'Leary. If there's a 100% tariff on American cars going into Japan, then if we say, okay, there's 100% tariff on Japanese cars coming into America, then suddenly they'll be like, okay, well, actually we're going to lower this. So I think he's using it as a point of leverage, right? I think what a lot of, I think what the other version of it would be if we were trying to steel man, the other version, it's something like, oh, okay, now Trump's going to do it and they're going to do it. And we're going to get in this like escalating price war, but that's not really how competition works. The idea is, oh, if you guys are going to have this crazy tariff, we're just going to do the exact same thing. And then the car manufacturers of Japan might be like, boy, this isn't such a great idea

• 29:34Speaker 01

  because we can't sell in America anymore because it's too expensive to go there. So again, this is another one where I just think competition and, and why do we have such insane rules? You know what I mean? Like, can either one of you make the argument for that? You know, why, why do we have, why do we allow this with China, China and Japan and plenty of other countries? Why do we, what, try to make the argument.

• 29:56Graham Stephan?

  Well, I think we need, we need cheap labor. I mean, when it really comes down to it, right? So if we're importing a lot from China, saves the average person here, significant amount of money. They don't really see or notice the deficit in terms of national debt. It makes no difference for them. But if they're able to get an iPhone for a grand instead of $3,000, the average person says, I don't care.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Well, it goes to your other point that it's hard to make people care about things properly. And they don't really think about where their iPhone is coming from, or the women that are literally using their fingers to, you know, put the chips in and all that stuff. But I would say basically, if you can create a situation, and, and I think it's fairly obvious Trump is going to do this. Uh, if you can create a situation where other countries feel that they can't just rip off America anymore. That ultimately they will lower tariffs too. Like, it's actually insane. We make some pretty good cars in America. We didn't, you know, 50 years ago, but we do now, actually. It's like, why can't we sell them in Europe? It's because of the tariff. So you threaten them, basically say, hey, we're going to do to you what you've been doing to us. And then they might just come around. But, but we'll see. I mean, we'll see if he actually does it and, and what, what comes to fruition.

• 31:05Graham Stephan?

  I think it's a conversation worth having. So, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. I feel like that's kind of the theme of this entire presidency. It's like, it'll be interesting to see kind of how it all pans out.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 31:18Graham Stephan?

  Well, I'm mostly thinking like RFK even, like what'll even happen with that. I think it's all just like, it's going to be such a massive shift. It'll be interesting to see.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Well, we're not used to doing amazing things in America, at least in, you know, you guys are probably, how old are you guys?

• 31:32Graham Stephan?

  34.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  34.

• 31:33Graham Stephan?

  26.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  26. So I'm 48. So you guys have, I have a couple of years on you. Like, we're just not used to doing amazing things anymore. America, we, we did, we sent people to the moon. I mean, we were in a space race. Like, we used to do incredible things. Elon is actually doing incredible things. But as a nation, we haven't been doing incredible things anymore. We've done a lot of unimpressive things, I would say. And if you look a lot of our architecture and our infrastructure, and we've stopped dreaming in a lot of ways. So I, it seems to me that Trump now represents a restoration of the American dream. That it's like, we're going to get government off your back. We're going to look in and be like, well, what did happen during COVID? And why did we inject all these kids with this stuff? And why did we force doctors out of work if they didn't want to be injected with it?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And why did we think we could lock people in their home? And how did these agencies get so powerful? And why did nobody get fired? Like, we're actually. Going to look under the hood, to use a reference I used before with Twitter. We're going to look under the hood and be like, wow, we have been wasting insane amount of money. We have been doing these crazy military adventures overseas without really understanding why or explaining it to the American people. And I think all of that, I think when people see a little bit more of how screwy things were and then they start realizing, boy, it didn't have to be this way. I think it will get more people more and more involved. I also think they're going to decentralize a bit of the DC power and move some of the agencies out. And I think when you do that, you know, it's like, why is the Department of Agriculture in DC? I don't know, maybe it should be in Iowa.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Like, once you actually do that, then the power center will be less powerful and you will be giving back more of the power to the people.

• 33:07Graham Stephan?

  Interesting. That reminded me that we were talking to somebody and they were telling us about government spending. And they said that, and they've experienced this firsthand, where they had a certain budget for an aircraft. And because they didn't get the bud, like, they got really close to, you know, the budget by the end, but they had to, like, use up.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  They have to use it so they get more.

• 33:28Graham Stephan?

  So what they ended up doing is just, like, flying planes.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:31Graham Stephan?

  From coast to coast.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Because then they know.

• 33:33Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, just to be able to hit and say, okay, we reached our budget and now we could get more money the next year. And if we don't do that, then they're going to cut.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Then they literally cut the budget. And by the way.

• 33:43Graham Stephan?

  They're flying empty planes. That was just back and forth.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  So that's a perfect example of what's wrong with the government. No business could operate this way, right? You could never operate that way. You would never be like, I have to spend more, otherwise I won't magically get more money because that, there's no supply and demand there or anything else. It makes no sense. But that's how the government has operated. So that, why is it that the government, to build a bathroom in DC on the street costs, you know, 10 times what it would cost if somebody else was doing it? Like, this is consistently what we've seen with the government. So I think. Just pulling back on all of that stuff. And that's exactly what Doji is gonna do. They're gonna look at all of that. You know, what did they just find out this week? The Pentagon has, has

• 34:23Graham Stephan?

  Oh, passed a seventh audit.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Seventh audit, like they're missing like $300 billion. It's like, it's completely insane. Or somebody there, even a year ago, there was something with one of the checks we wrote to Ukraine, where Akama was in the wrong spot and we accidentally gave them an extra couple. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:40Graham Stephan?

  You're kidding.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  My interview with Rand Paul will have the exact numbers on that. But there's all sorts of evidence of this type of nonsense.

• 34:46Graham Stephan?

  Never happens to me.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, it does. No, and if it did happen, if it did happen to you, your accountant would be in a lot of shit, right? Like, you'd be like, this can't happen again, and I probably have to fire you.

• 34:55Jack Selby?

  Did, did anybody like on the receiving end of that check be like, well, hold on a second? You actually said this amount, but

• 34:59Speaker 01

  No, of course not. It wasn't found out till like a year later. I wish I could remember what the exact number was.

• 35:04Jack Selby?

  Did you think they detected that and they're, no.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  I, no, because

• 35:07Jack Selby?

  Because it, same thing, it goes through so many filters and layers and they're like

• 35:10Graham Stephan?

  The person receiving it probably doesn't know how much is supposed to be set. They're like, oh, the money's here, all right.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  And that, that's a whole other rabbit hole that I would prefer not to go down. But the point, I would say broadly, is that this is exactly what the problem is. People that are engaged, that sort of care about these issues, they don't even really understand what's going on. And I think that when they peel back this stuff, we're gonna see such a mess under there, and it will be able to be cleaned quickly. Did you see the video that Malay put out in Argentina, I think right before he got elected, where he's in front of the board and he has all the departments on the board? Afuera, afuera! And he's ripping them off. And guess what? He's done it. And now their GDP is growing by something like

• 35:50Jack Selby?

  Don't they have a budget surplus for the first time?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have a budget surplus, the GDP is, they got 8.4% growth, like, and it's just because he was like, we will not do this anymore. It's just enough, and that's kind of where we're at.

• 35:59Jack Selby?

  But in fairness, I haven't heard like much from the constituents of Argentina in terms of like how this is affecting them. I know for Nayib Bukele, the guy from El Salvador, that's actually treating people in El Salvador incredibly well. My, my roommate that I had back in college, he's El Salvadorian. And I actually texted him, because I see all this stuff on Twitter, but you never know what's real and what's fake.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:20Jack Selby?

  And so I texted him, I'm like, hey, I know you're El Salvadorian. How is this actually affecting people? People. I don't want to go by what, you know, some random like white dude in Minnesota is saying about, you know, El Salvador. I want to see from an actual constituent.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Jack Selby?

  And he said that he was actually able to go and visit his grandma for the first time in like a decade.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 36:37Jack Selby?

  Because it's finally safe enough.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Jack Selby?

  To go and see her.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  So I've been to El Salvador a couple of times before Bukele because my brother in law was working with an organization that was helping poor people get shoes. Sidebar, but he had to live in an incredibly protected armed guard barbed wire community that was basically for Americans that were trying to just help these communities. And when we went, I mean, you could not walk outside, you know, you basically knew if you walked outside, first off, you literally couldn't because they had giant metal gates and armed armed guards there, but that they made it very clear. If you walk out of this thing, if you figure out how to get out of here without us, you will likely be killed or at least have all your stuff stolen. And it's not like that anymore. I mean, they had, you know, you've seen the videos of him

• 37:22Speaker 01

  just wrangling these gangs. They were gang members basically took over the country. The gangs were running the country. They were literally just going into houses and saying, this is our house now. And there's nobody to call. The police don't, basically didn't exist. So Bukele has done something absolutely incredible. And I think it was this morning I saw he put up a screenshot of how much of El Salvador's cash is now in Bitcoin. Did you see that?

• 37:44Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like this guy's really revolutionizing his country. It's incredible.

• 37:49Jack Selby?

  I mean, he could have been wrong. He, in fairness, he could have been, he could have been.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  It's a drastic, drastic rate.

• 37:56Jack Selby?

  And then, but he also tweeted, which I thought was even dangerous because I would never say something like that. And nor would I say what he said, which was, I told you so.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:04Jack Selby?

  Did you see that tweet that he did? Like once Bitcoin was skyrocketing, it's like, I told you so.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  I think he's done a few of those.

• 38:09Jack Selby?

  But now he's even doubling down off of that first audacious move. And now people are going to have more artillery if it ever goes down to like, you know, just attack him with.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Right. There's absolutely a risk there because Bitcoin happens to be doing quite well right now, but clearly has had its ups and downs. And you just, you just don't know. Like, what does that really mean? Okay. So you have that in Bitcoin. That's great. And El Salvador has that. But what does it really, really mean for the people? It's still a little unclear to me at some point. It's, it's a stored wealth. Not you're not spending it. So there's something to be said about what he's doing there. But I would say the fact that he's thinking about the world differently. That if he gave a speech at CPAC about a year ago, where he basically said, look, we were the most violent country in the in the Western Hemisphere. Out of developed nations, we were the most violent and we're basically the safest. So I can't verify if it's absolutely the safest and by what metric they

• 39:00Speaker 01

  mark that at, but that he's been able to change it quickly, that clearly Malay has been able to change it quickly. Again, I think goes to how Trump will be able to do this fairly quickly.

• 39:10Graham Stephan?

  Although really quick before we go into that, if you run your own business, you understand how difficult it could be to manage your own finances. Cards, receipts and payments pile up fast, but thankfully with today's sponsor Ramp, it doesn't have to be that way.

• 39:22Jack Selby?

  So guys, Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. With Ramp, spend policies are built into the card to control spending before it even happens. It automatically collects and categorizes receipts, so you'll never have to chase them down ever again. Plus Ramp enforces compliance by flagging violations and locking cards for non-compliance.

• 39:43Graham Stephan?

  Ramp also helps streamline your entire financial workflow, expense reporting, reimbursements and vendor payments all in one place. And businesses save an average of 5% in their first year by using Ramp. Plus now you could get $250 when you join Ramp. Just go to ramp.com/ICH with the link down below in the description. Again, that's R A M P dot com slash I C H with the link in the description.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 40:37Jack Selby?

  It's issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much to Ramp for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast.

• 40:44Graham Stephan?

  What are your thoughts on Bitcoin? And doing maybe like a strategic reserve?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Well, I've got some Bitcoin and I've never paid for any Bitcoin because when I first started doing my show, somebody, you know, a lot of libertarians like me because I'm basically anti-regulation and not big on government. And people said, put up a QR code, which I wasn't even sure what that was at the time on my website. And I just put it there and people started giving me Bitcoin. So I have a nice amount of Bitcoin, which I'm very excited about, particularly in the last week or so. I think that should we have some sort of reserve? You mean the government should have some sort of reserve? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we're in such an absolute massive technological shift right now, like the world. I grew up in a world that the, I remember I got my first cell phone. It was right before nine 11. I lived in New York City in nine 11. I had a little candy bar, black and white, and all you could do is play snake on it. And then

• 41:33Graham Stephan?

  It's a good game.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it. That was basically it. Like, think how fundamentally different the world is from that. That was 23 years ago, basically. The world is changing so fast. Everything that's happening with AI, industries are disappearing. Everything that's happening now with robotics and that they're, you know, even now, it's like Amazon at their factories is doing so much automation and so much with robots and everything else. But the guy who drops the package off at your house is still a man. But that's not really necessary, right? We can do it with drones. They'll do it with robots. Elon just, you know, optimists and all this stuff. So it's like, there's so much changing right now that I think our currency needs to probably change along with it. So I would tell anybody, like, you should get some Bitcoin at least. I'm definitely not an expert in it.

• 42:17Graham Stephan?

  Why don't you buy more? It seems like that stands for everything that you do.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  First off, why aren't I buying more? Again, I never bought any in the first place.

• 42:23Graham Stephan?

  So why not buy Bitcoin?

• 42:24Speaker 01

  I like the idea that I just have this thing on the ledger that I've never bought. Like, there's something fun about the idea, like literally.

• 42:31Graham Stephan?

  Also, it would hurt maybe to buy it since you were gifted.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Well, right. So now it's like, it's a hundred grand, basically, as we sit here right now, right? It's at 95 or something like that?

• 42:39Graham Stephan?

  I had the counter before you got here. I was watching it.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 42:42Graham Stephan?

  It was 99, 350.

• 42:44Jack Selby?

  It could hit 100 today. Because is it the first day it's ever?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Ninety nine.

• 42:47Jack Selby?

  Uh, yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:48Jack Selby?

  Then, then, then that's probably, people are excited to push it to a hundred.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  So why wouldn't I buy more? I mean, I'll be completely transparent with you. I just had a, what is it?

• 42:55Graham Stephan?

  Ninety nine, five.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  So we're right there.

• 42:57Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  By the.

• 42:58Jack Selby?

  It's gonna push through and as soon as it breaks a hundred, then there's more news, more articles and it's gonna push it.

• 43:02Graham Stephan?

  Ninety nine, seven.

• 43:03Jack Selby?

  Forty was the prediction right there.

• 43:05Graham Stephan?

  Now, I will say though, cause I, I did watch this in 2017 when it hit 20.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:10Graham Stephan?

  And everyone, I was watching it on TV, watching it hit 20 for like a second and then boom, everyone started selling.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:17Graham Stephan?

  And it just plummeted. And then it was a slow descent from 20 down to like 3500.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:22Graham Stephan?

  So the same could happen theoretically. It hits a hundred. Everyone's like, all right, we're good. Sell.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  My sense is it, it's gonna go down again. Maybe not all the way down to 20, but like, that's part of what's gonna happen with this thing over time. I would say why I don't buy more is I just had a meeting with my financial people this week and we were discussing what we have in Bitcoin versus everything else. And they actually felt that my ratio was exactly right. So, you know. Based on what? Based on their, how they view people should be diversified in various things.

• 43:54Graham Stephan?

  Okay. BlackRock said, uh, the optimal allocation for Bitcoin, and they said this in 2022 is 85%.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  BlackRock said that your Bitcoin allocation should be 85% of your assets?

• 44:05Graham Stephan?

  Yes.

• 44:05Jack Selby?

  For, for the, like, like at the retail investor?

• 44:08Graham Stephan?

  As, as the ideal portfolio should be 85%. This was in 2022. I didn't believe it.

• 44:12Jack Selby?

  How much Bitcoin does BlackRock have?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:13Graham Stephan?

  Could be quite a bit.

• 44:14Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  If it's 85% of their.

• 44:17Graham Stephan?

  Their rationale was that it was such an asymmetric risk to take for the amount of upside. Like the amount of upside you take.

• 44:25Jack Selby?

  Interesting.

• 44:26Graham Stephan?

  For the amount of downside was so strong that it should be 85% of your portfolio.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Right. So well, I guess.

• 44:33Graham Stephan?

  The proper allocation of like risk versus reward.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Right. Because at that time Bitcoin was probably what?

• 44:38Graham Stephan?

  It was in the high twenties, mid to high twenties.

• 44:40Jack Selby?

  I wonder what their percent would be now, but that would be interesting to see.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Well, it would get kinda nutty because you'd only be, only insanely, insanely wealthy people would be able to do that. So, um, this is where I listen to my financial guys. Like if you, if you have people around you that you trust, that you think are good, like. You should take their advice. As I always tell my team, it's like, I will trust you guys until something goes horrifically awry. And since things haven't yet, I trust the people that I've brought in.

• 45:06Jack Selby?

  On the topic of Trump presidency, he was flirting with the idea of 0% income tax. Now, you being kind of in the nitty gritty and knowing a lot of those people being in that sphere, do you think this is truly possible? Or do you think this is just another thing that's thrown out? Overpromise, underdeliver, which I feel like we've seen just every single campaign ever.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  It's probably a little bit of both. I think he really knows how to just throw things out and see what happens. Like, kind of just, it's just a balloon. You leave it out there for a little bit. It kind of floats around. Do people get interested in it or not? And then I think there's something real there, too. There's a lot of people on the more libertarian side of this that think a consumption tax is the way to go, that you basically get rid of income tax, or the more traditional way would be that you be for a flat tax, which I would be for. I would be for a flat tax for sure. That's what I wrote about in my first book. We could pick what the number would be. So, you know, you could say maybe it's 12 or 15%. Everybody pays it. And then to throw the, to throw the lefties a bone, I don't know that this is moral or ethical or even financially sensible, but just to try to get something passed that you could get more people on board,

• 46:09Speaker 01

  maybe you exempt everybody under 50 grand. And then maybe if you're making, you know, over a couple mill a year, it ticks up a tiny percentage, but that basically, you know, you get like 99.

• 46:19Jack Selby?

  Deductions or anything too, or is it just gross?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I mean, the idea of a flat tax is you're going to eliminate all of that and you'll have a one-page tax. Well, no, no, you'll have deductions, but you'll get rid of all of the other craziness, right? It's like you can have a one-page tax code with virtually no loopholes, and that's it. To me, that would be a great way to do it. A consumption tax makes a lot of sense, though. Like, I really like the idea of if you could actually get rid of the income tax altogether, okay, the government still needs some money to operate. Even post Elon Vivek crushing these agencies and all of the things, the government still does need money. So unless you want to be like total ANCAP about this, which I'm not,

• 46:56Speaker 01

  I like it intellectually, but like, I don't think we can fully operate that way in a country of 350 million people. I would say the, the consumption tax is a great idea. The more stuff that you buy and the more money that you spend, you'll be taxed on that money. People are always going to buy things and they're always going to want things and need things. And in that sense, if you have a lot, you're, it's not exactly that you're paying more in, but there's a, there's a, well, I suppose you are paying more in, but it's. It's more voluntary in that sense, rather than, oh, you make this much and we're taking 39.7% of it, and that's that. But again, I would only liken it back to the state income tax issue, right? Which is, how does Florida somehow manage to have roads and police and fire departments?

• 47:37Jack Selby?

  They have higher property taxes there, right?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  But it's marginally higher. Look at the property tax difference. I mean, you guys could try to pull it up if you want, between LA and Miami. It's not that different. There are some things there.

• 47:48Jack Selby?

  It's like 1 to 2%.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  1 to 2%. Sure, but you're saving 10% on income tax, at least, you know, if you're, especially if you're in the highest ratio. So I, there's a reason that people move to low, to no income tax states, you know? People aren't very excited when they're suddenly like, alright, I'm moving to Cali in New York so I can pay more in income tax. So even though that's not why I left LA, and I suspect that's not ultimately why you left Cali too. Wait, what's the, no, here there's no income tax, right?

• 48:14Jack Selby?

  Not often.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Right. So there's a reason it works.

• 48:17Jack Selby?

  And 0.7% property tax here, by the way.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  You got a lot of space.

• 48:21Jack Selby?

  Capped at 3%, which is crazy.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:23Jack Selby?

  What are some of your predictions for a Trump presidency in terms of the economy, in terms of the Federal Reserve? I know that some people were flirting with the idea of even just like stopping the Federal Reserve. What are your predictions for the finances of the average American?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I'm extremely bullish on the American economy right now, across the board. Again, you get rid of regulation, you start bringing in people that are going to make things more efficient. Look at what, look at what the economy was doing under Trump pre-COVID. Even if you care about some of the identity politics stuff, which I don't care about, his last State of the Union speech, we have lowest black unemployment of all time, lowest Latino unemployment of all time. He went through these unbelievable numbers that we had, and the Congressional Black Caucus sat there like this. It's one of my favorite videos ever, as they're talking about that, because you think they might be going like this, oh, that's pretty good, we're the Congressional Black Caucus, black people have their lowest unemployment of all time. And they simply didn't care. That's a bit of a separate issue. But I would say by bringing in Elon, by bringing in Vivek, by bringing

• 49:20Speaker 01

  in all of these people, they are basically going to get America going. And you can even feel it, and you know, the election was less than three weeks ago, and you can feel there is a reordering of the world right now. It is, it is very, very obvious that other countries are suddenly like, hmm, America might be back. And I think all it actually takes is a little American attitude to start switching these things up and start, you know, we were on a sort of- I would say a slow motion descent into hell. That's what I always say on my show. We didn't really realize how bad it was. And everything always seemed like it was getting worse. And it was like, oh, we can endlessly print money and we can endlessly give money to this thing or that thing and it'll just sort of work forever. And it was just kind of getting worse and worse.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  And we've been in some sort of like Frankenstein style democracy, basically, where the media kind of lies about everything. The policies don't really make sense. The math doesn't add up. Nobody knows what's really going on, but we just keep doing it. And I think what's happening now is people are realizing we're not going to do that anymore. And I think just that notion alone is going to, and also because of the technological evolution that we're about to have or revolution, I think that we're going to, I'm telling you, I've been saying it on my show, we are going to have an eighties style revolution in this country. It is coming. There is going to be a 10 year boom. As short, I would say the only hedge against that would be, God knows what the machine can do against Trump. You know, does COVID nine come out, the zombie apocalypse?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Do they make, do they literally make world war three happen before he gets into office? But short of like some crazy thing, you know, some black swan event, which absolutely could happen. I think there's every indicator that we're about to go into an incredible time.

• 50:59Graham Stephan?

  So what would you say to the average person that who feels like the American dream is dead? And they look at housing prices and they say, it's so unaffordable. I can't buy a house. Stocks are at their all time high. My income is not kept up with inflation. Groceries are expensive. What would you say to that person?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I would say you're right. I'd say you're right and you should be very happy that Trump is president. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a, I've built a couple of businesses and I've done well in that sense, but I'm not an economist. I have no doubt you guys are more experts in that department than I am. So when I'm talking about these things on my show, I try to talk about it in the most simplest terms. So the two ways that I talk about it usually are price of groceries and mortgage rates. To me, that's the easiest way. We all go into the supermarket and we all see the same things, right? It doesn't matter how much money you have. I guess if you have an untold amount, you're a billionaire, you're probably not walking into the supermarket yourself. But all of us basically go in and what used to be like $5.99 for a pound of beef is now $11.99, literally more than double.

• 51:55Speaker 01

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

• 52:38Speaker 01

  have a mortgage now. I like paying it because I got in when it was still low, like under three. And then it's like, wow, I was able to afford something that in essence I couldn't just buy in cash. But I'm able to now have something. I pay the bank a little bit extra, right? Not a crazy, you know, now, what are mortgage rates now? Or interest rates? Like seven? That's an insane amount of money. But now, if you're at like two and a half, which they were during during most of Trump's presidency, it's like, yeah, you have to pay the bank a little something to lend you money. That seems like a fair exchange. That's capitalism. That's pretty good. And then you get to own something and hopefully invest in it and make it better and then eventually sell that and do that again and again.

• 53:16Graham Stephan?

  Someone argued that Trump caused housing prices to go up so much, not directly, but during his presidency, because they lowered rates so much, people are locked into their mortgage, that they can't move because they got a two and a half percent rate. If they were to move, their payment would double?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  I don't know that you could blame Trump. Well, the implication being that-

• 53:34Graham Stephan?

  Well, it would be the Federal Reserve, but it would be under his presidency.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  But is the implication there that because rates have now gone up, the guys with the good rates are locked in? I mean, I don't know how you can blame Trump for that, right?

• 53:44Graham Stephan?

  Well, you were saying, under his presidency, you could afford a house.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:49Graham Stephan?

  Because you got a two and a half percent mortgage. But my counterclaim to that is- For those who didn't get a mortgage during that time.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:56Graham Stephan?

  They're now unable to because mortgages were so low during that time.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  I don't know that mortgages, hmm, I don't know that I'm fully qualified to answer the question, actually, but like, I mean, I think basically it's because the Democrats largely screwed up the economy. I think it's partly COVID related, but I think it's an endless printing of money that then the banks are just like, all right, money is worth less. We're just not going to lend like we did. And, you know, we also had, we had banks that were too big to fail, and then we somehow made them bigger. So there's less competition with the banks now. So I think there's a series of problems there. But as a general rule, because I want the government out of the economy as much as possible, and out of everything as much as possible, I want there to be more banks. So there's more competition. So if you can't, if some bank is offering you 5%, you might find three other banks to start negotiating

• 54:44Speaker 01

  with them. And next thing you know, you do get an interest rate, or you get a mortgage at 3% or something like that. So, you know, some of this is like, okay, this president did this, this president did this, it all sort of ebbs and flows.

• 54:56Graham Stephan?

  What are some of the biggest issues that you believe are not discussed enough?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, because online, almost everything is being discussed now, right? Like, I mean, that's the beauty of what's happening online. There are a million podcasts discussing almost everything. From a mainstream perspective, which is crumbling, I would say the main thing that they didn't discuss honestly was that there could be a type of person out there who was not a pure leftist that still was a good American. And they basically treated everybody that wasn't a Democrat, or wasn't a lefty, or didn't just pick the thing of the day that the lefties were into, they basically treated them like they were a Nazi, or a horrible person, or a garbage person, as Joe Biden said. And then I think what happened was, you basically had a mainstream media that

• 55:44Speaker 01

  was, that more and more people were waking up to the nonsense. You had an ascendant alt media, and that really was what this election was about. So I think. I think it's hard to say what isn't being discussed because so much is being discussed now. But I would say the, the, the thing that I think has flourished to the top right now that, that desperately needed to be pushed to the top is free speech. I don't think people had any freaking clue how bad the free speech situation was. And then I think COVID started waking some people up, you know, when you suddenly started getting a couple doctors that were like, all right, maybe this thing was from.

• 56:17Jack Selby?

  Also, shadow banning on YouTube was a bit of a thing in terms of like saying vaccine or COVID and stuff like that.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  So, so I think it's ironic actually because they basically, the media was so terrible. They created this alt ecosystem online and then COVID comes in and then COVID basically put like rocket fuel on the alt thing because then there were just online people like me and I'm obviously not the only one. But then I started talking to say Jay Bhattacharya, who might be the head of NIH now, who was a Stanford physician, who was very skeptical of everything that was going on. So then more and more of us started talking about it. The government started censoring us more and more, and then it started feeding itself. I had a tweet in, I think it was July of 21, that it was right after Biden said that if you get the vaccine, you will not get nor transmit COVID.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  And I said, not only was that not true, but I said, the, the boosters don't work and they are prepping us for mandates. By the fall mandates were coming. Anyway, my tweet got taken down and then Jim Jordan, Congressman from Ohio, said that I was one of the people that they know when they went in and looked at what happened with Twitter and the government. They know that the government had Twitter take down that tweet. So, and you get nothing, by the way. The government fully can step on your First Amendment free speech rights and you get nothing. You don't get a letter, you don't get an apology. I was at the Capitol with him. I was like, is there anyone here that I could go to and they might say sorry? He's like, no, that there's literally nothing. You can't sue them. It's nothing you can do.

• 57:42Jack Selby?

  So you accurately predicted consequences of, you know, COVID. And then some government official agency, who knows, was putting pressure on Twitter for you to delete that tweet.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Not for me to delete, they deleted the tweet.

• 57:54Jack Selby?

  For Twitter to then remove the tweet.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Which they did, yeah.

• 57:58Jack Selby?

  Inch and

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the beauty of that actually is that so that happened. I got deleted maybe two hours after I put it up, something like that. I said, I said, the vax is not working as promised. You guys can probably find the tweet. The vax is not working as promised and mandates are coming. And it was taken down. What I did was fortunately, because I have an audience, first off, I called a couple of the higher profile people that I know. And I was like, guys, can you screenshot? I have a screenshot of it. Can you get this out there? And fortunately, to whatever extent Twitter was still free at the time, enough people started doing that. I had also started my own tech company called Locals where we were able to allow people to speak freely. So I was able to get people to follow me there and still I could still communicate with people and I could still directly chat with people and everything else. So there's always a better mousetrap. I mean, that more

• 58:43Speaker 01

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

• 59:09Jack Selby?

  And that's pretty unbelievable, actually, that you that you said something that happened and the government removed it from Twitter.

• 59:15Graham Stephan?

  Now, what if at the time, they genuinely thought that what they were saying was correct?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter.

• 59:19Graham Stephan?

  And that your information could be detriment.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter. I mean, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It just doesn't matter. First off, you know, you have every right to be wrong about things. I mean, that's part of having a human mind. That's part of the human experience. I was also, it was at that time, if you remember, I think it was in June of 2021, where Biden said that thing on stage, you will, if you get the vax, you will not get nor transmit COVID. I knew at that point, we already knew that wasn't true. There were enough people paying attention to what was going on online that we knew it wasn't true because there were people getting the vax and still getting COVID. We 100% knew that. So it was just another one of, you know, everyone has their own little sort of red pill journey. You asked me a little bit before about waking up to things. I think everybody over the last couple

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  of years has just seen a series of things. Why is it that in 2019, I was tweeting about Biden having dementia? I'm not his doctor, I'm not a doctor, but I was just watching this man who couldn't complete a sentence, who was slurring and confused and everything else. And now it's fairly obvious that he either has dementia or body dementia or Parkinson's or something like that. But the point is, we weren't even allowed to talk about that for about five years until the debate. And then the debate was so terrible. And then suddenly that night, the mainstream media couldn't hold the narrative anymore. And then everybody started talking about it. And then two weeks later, he's not even the nominee anymore. So there's a, there's a weird, there's a weird control system that has been put in place. It's sort of matrixy, I would say. It's a control system, partly through the

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  government, partly through big tech. And I think we're seeing that kind of wash away right now because of, mostly because of Elon.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:01:24Graham Stephan?

  What do you think are some of the biggest non-issues that are discussed too much?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Abortion, for sure, for sure. It's not that it's a non-issue, but it has somehow placed wedged itself as like the number one thing in the hierarchy of importance for a huge amount of voters, largely women. I think you could probably argue something like 30 or 40% of the people of America vote as abortion being their number one issue. There's so many reasons that that just does not make sense. Putting aside what any of our personal views on abortion are, or when life starts, or anything else, there's so many things that you should be voting on before that. I would argue should be voting for national security and safe borders, basic competence government, government and infrastructure and things of that nature. And then abortion, I think in a sane world, you know, then

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  you decide, is it my fifth most important thing or my 10th most important thing? But they have convinced, especially on the left, they've convinced particular- Middle aged women mostly, that abortion is the number one thing. And now you have the same women now saying my body, my choice are the same women who are screaming that everybody else should get vaccinated. And I think that's also caused a certain amount of craziness because people's, people went on every side of every issue during COVID. And, and I think now it's been, we've been left with a bunch of people that really don't know what they think about a whole bunch of things. But abortion is by far the big one. You know, when we were supposed to have the red wave in November of 22, and it didn't materialize, it's because for two weeks before that, the entire media was screaming about the Republicans are coming for abortion and Roe v.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Wade is going to kill, the reversal of Roe v. Wade is going to kill people. All the reversal of Roe v. Wade did was kick it back to the states, which I do think was the right decision, even though I am begrudgingly pro-choice. Every state should be able to make up their mind on that. For example, Florida is six weeks. It's heartbeat bill. That's too strict, I would say for me personally. But then I have to decide as a Floridian, is this the thing that I put at the top of the hierarchy? And if it is, I can leave and I can go to California and have an eight month abortion or fight for eight month abortions there. But because, so it's an ordering thing more than anything else. They have just convinced women that you have to think about abortion more than whether your streets are safe or where, why your kid is hooked on fentanyl or why it's not safe to go out in New York City at night. And that, that it's, it's so dangerous and wrong.

• 1:03:40Jack Selby?

  But before we get into that, if you run a small business just like us, you definitely know that doing things like payroll, taxes and benefits can feel like a full-time job. But it doesn't have to with our sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is the all-in-one payroll, benefits and HR solution built for small businesses just like yours.

• 1:03:56Graham Stephan?

  With Gusto, payday is a breeze. There's no more manual calculations or tax headaches. And with automatic tax filings in all 50 states, you could save hours a month. Plus Gusto offers 401k plans, health insurance, time tracking, and even access to certified HR experts all in one place. That way you could focus on what you love, which is growing your business. So join over 300,000 other small businesses that use Gusto and see why it's rated G2's number one payroll product.

• 1:04:24Jack Selby?

  And here's the best part, you can try it for free for three months. And guys, this is a full circle moment for me because when I established my first ever. S corp, I needed to do payroll. And guess what service I used? I used Gusto. I have literally been using Gusto for four years now. I've never had a problem. I seriously recommend the product. When I signed up, I didn't get three months for free. You guys can get three months for free with the link down below in the description. All you gotta do is go to gusto.com/iced to get started today. That is gusto.com/iced or click the link down below in the description. Thank you so much to Gusto for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast.

• 1:04:57Graham Stephan?

  Why do you think we've become so divisive? I would like to blame social media algorithms. To me, it just seems like the more outrageous you are, it's just like that gets boosted. So people are incentivized to say like the most radical stuff that they want to or that they can, because it makes them money. Platforms love it because they get to show ads.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the system of selective pressures is not great right now, right? Like, yes, the crazier you do, the more clickbait stuff you do, all of that, for sure. You're right, like it's a part of the game and it's something that, that even my team internally will, will discuss things, something related to thumbnails or titles or how we're doing this or that. And then at the same time, there's a game that's being played, whether you like it or not. And you can either hate the player or hate the game. So it's, it's a little complex to figure out how to, you want to build something that's good and just, I'm talking about you guys or just anyone in general that's creating content. And yet you want to be in the system. So you want to be seen, right? Like it's, that's just reality. So I have no doubt the algorithms have done this to us. But I would say actually it's, there's something worse than that, which is also connected to everything else we've talked about here,

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  which is just a horrible education system in this country. It's a horrible education system in this country where we've taught young people to hate the country. They don't understand how the goodness of America, they don't understand what the melting pot is, that what we do here in this multicultural society is the dream of, that people 250 years ago could barely even imagine and all of the goodness of this nation. And we've just thrown that away. We've made them focus on identity and genitals and skin color. And we've unearthed ancient hatreds that we put to bed. And all of that really starts at the education level more than anything else. So I do think there's an algorithmic component to it for sure. But it's most, if you add If you had people who were educated properly, really educated properly, in a true classically liberal

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  tradition, and you really scaled at a societal level, then if the algorithms were screwing with people, society wouldn't get completely out of whack. It would actually start self-regulating, I think. But when you have a bunch of people who have been taught all of the wrong things, who are also being told that the earth is going to end in 12 years because of climate change, and then you create this anxiety situation with young people, and they're told that they're living in a country that shouldn't exist because of systemic racism or any of these things, it all just feeds itself to like a certain level of neurosis that I think particularly people younger than me are in right now. And we have to get out of that, which by the way, I think by blowing apart the Department of Education, by pushing more

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  school choice and charter schools and homeschooling and pod schooling and all of those things, we will do that.

• 1:07:32Graham Stephan?

  What's pod schooling?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  It's just like a version of homeschooling. You know, if you have a pod, like you might be the family at the, in the community that has.

• 1:07:40Graham Stephan?

  I'm thinking podcast. That's where my mind.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Podcast schooling.

• 1:07:43Graham Stephan?

  I'm like, yeah.

• 1:07:44Jack Selby?

  People are learning.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  You will be teachers.

• 1:07:46Graham Stephan?

  You just put on a podcast.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  I don't know that pod schooling is technically like a term exactly. It's just like the idea that you have a pod at your house that would teach this, this subject, and someone else might have a pod at their house that teaches this subject, something like that.

• 1:07:59Graham Stephan?

  I see. Okay, I'm thinking podcasts. That's where my mind.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  But actually podcasts would be a.

• 1:08:04Graham Stephan?

  That'd probably be good.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  I mean, where are most of us getting our information these days, for better or worse? It largely is podcasts and everything else. I was, when I was on the plane coming here, it's a five hour flight from Miami to Vegas, and the person next to me was watching CNN the entire time. So I can't hear it, but I'm just watching. And it's like, it's even more mind numbing when you can't hear it because you just look at the Chyrons. It's endless hysteria for, I kid you not, for the entire five hours that I would just peek over every few minutes. It was just, it was just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. It's like, he's not in office yet. We might be veering towards World War III right now. There's some other stuff we could be talking about. What happened to Kamala? Where's she been for the last couple weeks? We thought this woman was going to lead the free world. But they've just dumbed down every, we're basically an idiocracy.

• 1:08:46Graham Stephan?

  But it just seems like they do that just to sell ad space. I mean, that's really what it is, is that the more they throw at you, the more money they make.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  I think they can do it as long as they can do it. You know that, so I saw today that Rachel Maddow, you know how much she gets paid? How much do you think Rachel Maddow gets paid?

• 1:09:00Graham Stephan?

  A hundred million a year, probably.

• 1:09:02Jack Selby?

  Millions, probably five mil.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Thirty million a year. MSNBC is now cutting her pay to 25 million a year. I am very successful. I have way more views on a daily basis on my live stream than she has. I do not make 30 million. I do not make 25 million. I don't make 20 million a year. How is she gonna, I know, how is she gonna survive? You know, and it's like she has to give an awful lot of that for taxes too, because I'm pretty sure she lives.

• 1:09:26Graham Stephan?

  So are you just saying they make that much money? Because if they pay her that.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Graham Stephan?

  They have to at least be making that to justify.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Well, if we were to take away the pharmaceutical ad money, that might be a different proposition. Right? I mean, during COVID, you would literally have Fauci on for an hour on Meet the Press. And then it would go to commercial and it would say, brought to you by Pfizer. And it's like, wait, what, what, what? The company that this guy was just shilling for is sponsoring the news right now? So one of the reasons that this hasn't fully shifted yet, like you guys are obviously in a similar business that I'm in here. Is that industries don't just die overnight, right? Like the dinosaurs, they're sinking in the La Brea tar pits, but they don't just sink immediately. It takes some time for them to sink.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  So there's an entire world that exists around ad sales and corporate structure of the dying mainstream media that hasn't fully moved over. If I was being paid per view in any way of parody that she's getting paid per view, I'd be making a shit ton more than her. It's fine. I'm not complaining about it, but it just, it just kind of is what it is. But I would also say this, when you realize that that woman has been getting $30 million a year and then you were to go through the laundry list of things that she got wrong. Did you ever see that five minute thing that she did talking about the vaccines? I mean, she did the exact same thing Biden did. You will not get COVID. You will not transmit COVID. This is the only way out of COVID.

• 1:10:53Graham Stephan?

  Are those her, are those her opinions though? Or is she told, hey, here's a script. We need you to say these, these bullet points.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. What would you say for $30 million a year? That's the question. That's the question.

• 1:11:03Graham Stephan?

  I don't know. When it comes to being a news anchor, who did we talk to about this? Of like, do you get to say your own opinions or do they give you points to say?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  I would say it's a little.

• 1:11:11Graham Stephan?

  Was it Don Lemon? Was it, yeah, I think it was Don Lemon.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Ah, good old Don Lemon. Yeah, yeah. Um, I would say there is a reason they are paid to be in those chairs. And that is the reason. I could never be as bad at my job doing a news show every day. As Joe Scarborough is at his show every day. I could never be that. I couldn't live with myself, number one, but I, I think people would tune out. Those, and by the way, that's what's happening now. Why is it that, that two weeks after the election, suddenly Comcast is like, we're going to sell MSNBC? If the election had gone the other way and they, and the propaganda worked, they wouldn't be selling MSNBC. They're selling MSNBC because they're like, oh shit, we've been paying these people this crazy amount of money and the propaganda is not even working. CNN is, uh, is they've just announced that they're going to fire a bunch of their on air talent.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  It's like, why would you fire these people just after an election? Oh, they're not really good at whatever it is you've put them out there to do. So I, I'm quite enthused that, that this is happening, but if you really think about it. You're basically asking, is it, is it, are their intentions good? Do they not really like, did Rachel Maddow really know what she was saying? Was she paid to say it? Did she write the script? I don't know what the exact answer, like, I don't know what's in her heart. I don't know exactly what's in the mind of the producer. But I do know that she works at a giant corporation and she put out information that was exactly the same. As all the corporations wanted, and that was completely different than what was happening online. And that thing is the thing that's now flipped and poor Rachel will only get 25 million to do that job.

• 1:12:40Graham Stephan?

  So when you're watching media like that, how do you know what's truthful and what's not? Like, how do you, how do you really get down to the facts? It's very, it seems like you watch Fox and you just, they're like, this is right. You watch MSNBC and they say, this is right.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Well, I would largely.

• 1:12:52Graham Stephan?

  This is right.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost impossible, but I would say if you have just like a little bit of skepticism with most things, you won't fall for most of it. So I, I'm very, very proud of my track record on, on most of the issues. I didn't fall for the Russia hoax. I didn't fall for the very fine people hoax. I didn't fall for the COVID nonsense or some of the other things that I mentioned. When you remember the Jesse Smollett story, it was like somehow, why is it that AOC and Kamala within five minutes? Had both tweeted, this proves white supremacy in America and black people are under assault and everything else. And the entire thing turned out to be a hoax. And yet, when I saw the story come across, I was like, I don't know, something seems a little fishy about this. This seems a little bizarre.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  They found him in the subway sandwich and there was a noose and they yelled, this is Trump country. I was like, I don't know, this just doesn't sound right. So I think just going in with a little bit of skepticism is probably your best armor against the bullshit. It's not perfect. We're all gonna fall for different things and be duped. You know, I'm not particularly good at predicting elections. I backed DeSantis in the primary. I thought he, I thought we were ready for a wholesale change. So I would say I missed that one in, in the sense that one of my main fears about Trump was that he wasn't going to be able to put himself around the right people. That, I'm very happy, I'll have a full mea culpa on that. I'm very happy that I turned out to be wrong. And ironically, the whole time I was calling for people like Tulsi and RFK to come over to the Republican side of things. But I think there's a fundamental difference being, we could all be wrong about,

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  like, who's gonna win the election? Will there be a red wave? Versus just, do you directionally get most of what's happening right? Or are you just wildly wrong on most of it? And if you're watching people, or listening to podcasts that are wildly wrong on most of it, you're probably watching the wrong shows.

• 1:14:33Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  But it's tough. It's, it's almost an impossible question to answer, and it's just gonna get harder and harder.

• 1:14:38Graham Stephan?

  How has the whole Tenet media thing shifted your perspective on like, how you approach, uh, just information or what you're told, or coming to your own conclusions on things?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  You know, I did a 10 minute or 15 minute interview with Megyn Kelly about it, and I basically said that was last time I'm gonna talk about it.

• 1:14:54Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  But I, but I would give you like 30 seconds of Lauren Chen, who is running Tenet. I've known her for a decade. Uh, I talked to Tim Poole about it, and Benny Johnson, and some of the other guys. And I literally, I asked for more information about who the backers are. I spoke to someone on Zoom, who it's, now it's unclear who I spoke to, but that was through Lauren. And I would say you just need to be as skeptical, it's actually the exact same answer I just gave you. You should be as skeptical, even when you know someone for a decade, uh, and you ask for information, and you ask for resumes, and you speak to someone that you might be told is a benefactor or anything else, you should just be as skeptical as possible. But I will also say, in no way did that affect my content at all, period, zero, nor was I asked to, which was the bizarre part of it. But I would, I would rather leave it to that.

• 1:15:40Graham Stephan?

  I, I looked into it a pretty good amount, and I read the, uh, the indictment and everything.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Graham Stephan?

  And it seemed, and I watched a ton of media too, from people on the left, people

• 1:15:50Jack Selby?

  On the right, like, I know David Pakman was talking about it. Sam Seder was talking about it. I watched the Legal Eagle video on it, which I thought was really good. And it truly did seem like you had no idea. And, and

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. Even the DOJ sent me an email a few days later saying that you, we believe you're the victim of a crime here. I wasn't accused of anything. Actually, you know, the funny part about it was, and I said this to Meghan, so it's worth repeating if you guys want to talk about it. The funny thing is, I'm so used to reading dishonest things about myself. If the New York Times ever writes about me, it's dishonest. Or if any, you know, all these, whatever it is, it's always something dishonest or they misquote something or they take the word nod out or something like that. When I read the indictment, I was like, oh, I'm commentator number one. I figured that out very quickly. And I was like, this is all true. I did ask who the backer is and I did ask for a resume and I did ask to speak to somebody. And I did make sure they'd have no control over my content and a series of other things.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  So it was very bizarre to suddenly be in a controversy where I was, where I was like, oh, the thing I'm being accused, I'm not, I'm not even being accused of anything. I'm, I'm the victim in this thing and the DOJ is doing the right thing. That was like the craziest part for me.

• 1:17:00Jack Selby?

  The thing, people are going to see the amount of money you're getting paid, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in this contract. And they're just going to be like, you can't be a victim while you're making that amount of money at the same time. That I feel

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  I'm not saying I'm a victim. They, first of all, victim was their, their word. I don't regret anything that I did. I did a silly show for them. The funny thing is this had nothing to do with Rubin Report. Do you even know the show that I did for them? I'm guessing you don't.

• 1:17:20Jack Selby?

  Yeah, it wasn't reacting to things or something.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was called People of the Internet. And what we did in the morning was my guys would literally select nonsensical viral videos. And I wouldn't see them in advance. I didn't even know what they were. And then I would just watch them live. And it was like, oh, fat girl goes into Wendy's and gets hit with hamburger. And then I'd be like, oh, that was something like, the show was so stupid and so ridiculous. And yeah, it's

• 1:17:43Jack Selby?

  I was confused what they got from that. That's, that's what I was

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I guess you'd have to ask them or you'd have to ask Lauren Chen, I suppose.

• 1:17:51Jack Selby?

  Yeah. It reminds me so much similar to like Sam Bankman Freed.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the only other thing I would say is it's, it's a weird thing to think that you could know someone for almost a decade that exists in your space. And that they would try to dupe you and other people that you know and everything else. But again, they, you know, the funny thing is, We've been talking for an hour here. You guys haven't asked me anything about Russia, Ukraine. I think I mentioned something about Ukraine, or one or two things about the general money state affairs. It's just not even on my top 10 things. It's been ramped up now because it feels like the war might go hot at any moment. But like, the biggest Dave Rubin fan in the world is not watching me because of my hot take on Russia, Ukraine. I like, I do free speech stuff, I do tech stuff. If I'm gonna do foreign policy, I'm much better versed to talk about the Middle East. So the whole thing was extremely bizarre. I have no idea. Like, I have literally no idea. Did Lauren know? I have no idea.

• 1:18:39Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Now, I got a question for you. What do you think is a valid criticism for yourself, objectively?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Well, people used to say, it's funny, people used to say that I, as an interviewer, I was too like a softball interviewer, or something like that. I, first off, valid criticism, anyone could criticize me for whatever they want. So, my policy on interviewing, which has shifted actually, a little bit over the years, but my general policy on interviewing was, my hero was Larry King, and growing up, and I became very good friends with Larry King over the years, and he was a mentor and a friend, and sort of like a bonus. He was like half dad, half grandfather for me. But I remember growing up, watching CNN, and this guy, on any given night, he'd have the cast of Seinfeld on one night, he'd have the Pope on the next night, he'd have Magic Johnson on the next night, he'd have the animal guy on the next night, and then he'd have Earth, Wind & Fire on the next night.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  And I was like, he treats everybody the same. He asks them interesting questions, you get to find out a little bit more about them, and it's pretty great. So when I started interviewing, that was really my policy. And I still think that's the best way to interview somebody. As a general rule, I find that if you, well, it's similar to what you guys are doing here. You're asking me questions, and you're letting me talk. And it's like, if I don't know what I'm saying, at some point, you kind of see the person wrapped the noose around their neck. That's why one or two things that you've asked me very specifically about the economy, like, I don't have a problem saying I'm not an expert.

• 1:20:00Jack Selby?

  Which I actually, I admired that, and I want to take a second here to say that that was really cool of you to say, not just to continually pat you on the back, I'm just saying, it was good that you actually said, I don't think this is my area of expertise, and people probably shouldn't listen to me in terms of this.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. I mean, I don't mind, I don't mind doing that, because I'm not, I'm not the sum of all things. I'm an interviewer. I tell people what I think, you know.

• 1:20:21Jack Selby?

  On your program yesterday too, you made a correction.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Jack Selby?

  Which I saw and and when I saw that I was like, I was like taken aback because I never.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Jack Selby?

  And I'm saying like, like never see anybody from like legacy mainstream or even like the daily shows, like daily podcasts, the things I listen to, like people rarely ever say like, hey, I made a mistake. I said something that was inaccurate and here's me correcting this. I said it yesterday. I found out very quickly that it was wrong. And here I am like correcting it on my main thing.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:20:50Jack Selby?

  On your main program.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  So that, so we can do it in that sense. But when we, when you asked me something very specific there, I was like, it's fine to like, all right, I don't know everything. That, that's just fine. It's part of the problem that everyone now wants to know everything about everything. And it's like, it's like, when anything happens, it's like, man, these people who can't tie their shoe want to tell you exactly what is going to happen if we reverse the Iran nuclear deal. And it's like, no, no.

• 1:22:28Jack Selby?

  You said the, a valid criticism of yourself would be that you did softball interviews that you maybe didn't interview as hard as you should have in certain things. What do you think is an?

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Well, I'm saying that's what people said about me.

• 1:22:38Jack Selby?

  What do you think, from a personal internal perspective, what do you think is a valid criticism of yourself?

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  It's interesting, I don't have, I don't have many regrets because I think if you, if you line things up properly in your life and then things start working, which they largely are working for me right now, I'm in a, I'm in a good relationship. I have two kids that are thriving. I have businesses that are thriving. I'm surrounded by people that are thriving. My two best friends on this earth are my two best friends from childhood. I think that that says a lot about me. But I would say one thing for sure is I was closeted way too long in my life about my sexuality and that it's very hard to live one life as a human being, like one honest, authentic life. It's really hard to live two or three or four or five. And I think that that did damage to me and delayed me in certain senses and whatever. And I've largely gotten over that, but you know, even the things that you get over in

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  life, you have the ghosts of that kind of sit with you. So I sort of wish I would have dealt with that a little bit.

• 1:24:05Graham Stephan?

  What was it like to come out? Did you find that people were not accepting?

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  No, no, it was way harder to come out not as a lefty. It was way harder to be like, I'm not a progressive than it was to come out as gay, I suppose. But also I'm, I'm from a different generation. Like it wasn't, nobody really cared back then. I mean, that's sort of why I see this eighties, nineties revival coming. Nobody really cares who you sleep with or like what you're doing. So anyway, to really answer your question, like coming out, it's not really fun for anybody, but I would say it's, you know, some people, as Homer Simpson said, Marge, I like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming. And I'm not that flaming. So like a lot of people just had no idea. I play basketball, like video games, like I like normal guy things, whatever that is. So people were more like shocked by that. But by the way, there's plenty of people like me, you know what I mean? And there's probably more people like me than the other way.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  But if you're, if you're over the, I actually, when I was first coming out, I kind of liked people that were more over the top gay in general, because I was like, oh, you just are who you are. And there's no, there's no weirdness where I was like, there's must be something wrong with me because I act this way. So, you know, but you live and learn, I suppose.

• 1:25:11Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. Was there any negative consequence of coming out?

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:25:14Jack Selby?

  Like, anything bad that happened to you that was unexpected?

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  No, I mean, you have your struggles. Everyone has.

• 1:25:20Jack Selby?

  Certain relationships.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna have some, my dad wasn't thrilled at first, but has completely come around and loves my kids and me and everything else. Other family members sort of shocked, something like that. But again, it's very hard to live one life, one like good, authentic life as a human being. Try to live two, try to live two, try to live two for one week and see how that goes. Like, have a completely alternate life.

• 1:25:42Jack Selby?

  What's that like? Like, explain it.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  It's unbelievably stressful and, and it's, it's, it's actually, you know, it's funny, it's not funny, actually, it's sort of depressing, but I have trouble remembering a good portion of my early twenties because of that, because I was living two lives. So like, I'd be with, you know, I was doing stand up and I'd have my straight friends that I was playing basketball with and then I'd have like a couple gay friends that I was going to bars with at night, but they, but those two worlds never met. And it's very weird. You end up lying all the time, even if you're not directly lying. Like, I wasn't, I wasn't really directly lying to anyone, but it was like.

• 1:26:14Jack Selby?

  But it felt bad.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Well, it was constant lying of omission. People would be like, where were you? And I, oh, well, I was, I was downtown. Well, okay, then they would kind of leave it there. They didn't know what I was doing downtown or just any, you just end up lying all the time. And, uh, you know, obviously, Jordan Peterson is very important to me personally and professionally. And, you know, one of his main things is you shouldn't be lying because it's the worst of, you're gonna end up with the worst of all conclusions, one way or another. And I think the more that all of us escape that, the more we can get out of this, this mess that we're in.

• 1:26:46Jack Selby?

  This might be too much, but I'm just, I'm just curious. It's not often.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  We've made it this far. Let's see what happens.

• 1:26:50Jack Selby?

  Did you ever have like a girlfriend?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  And I've probably banged more girls than the two of you combined.

• 1:26:57Jack Selby?

  Actually, probably, I mean, probably, definitely.

• 1:27:02Graham Stephan?

  Jack's like, how? How did you do that?

• 1:27:05Jack Selby?

  Wait, so.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  Well, when you're a certain age, like, like, it just works. Like, it just works.

• 1:27:11Jack Selby?

  What do you mean it just works?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  It just works. It just works.

• 1:27:13Jack Selby?

  Interesting that you were, you were with girls and did you, was there ever a time where you thought you liked it?

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  There are, there are a lot of, um.

• 1:27:19Jack Selby?

  Also, guys, I'm straight. I know these questions kind of make it, make it sound like I'm like. Crossing the line.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Now we're starting.

• 1:27:25Jack Selby?

  I'm just curious because.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  It's a little thou doth protest too much now.

• 1:27:28Jack Selby?

  It's interesting because I was talking to Graham before this, uh, cause obviously, you know, the topic came up. But I was like, it's so rare that you get to talk to somebody who has a complete different experience of life. And I'm not saying that like, just because you're gay, it means that you're completely different than me, but like generally.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  I wake up in the morning, I have coffee.

• 1:27:44Jack Selby?

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

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  No, I have actually no problem with this. Again, it's not like, I see, it's always funny because I'll have people that literally will be watching me for two years. And then I'll see a comment like, Dave, I didn't know you were gay. And then you just offhandedly mentioned something about your husband or something. And I, I kind of like that because I'm like, well, I'm doing a news show for the most part, so. I don't need to bludgeon people with my sexuality like anymore than Wolf Blitzer would bludgeon anyone with his sexuality. And nobody wants to think about that. So. No, but that's the.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Not that I know of, but, but, but yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Wolf, who knows, you know, I wouldn't judge him either way. You, you get the point.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Nobody wants to think about Wolf Blitzer. That were, everyone's pitching Wolf Blitzer naked.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  But I would say it's just, it's just like a, this is what the, the twist, the most twisted part that they've done. In the last decade or so with identity politics is made you think that these things that are mutable about you, whether it's your skin color. Or it's your genitals or your sexual attraction or whatever it might be, that these are the most important things about you and they're just not, they're just not. But if you make people focus on those things all the time, they will become much bigger than they actually are. And that's why there's very few people on earth that have ever come out of the closet and been like, boy, I regret that. Because if you are, if you live your authentic self, then it's probably better than all of the other versions of yourself that you could have lived.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Right? Um, and so that to me is you, you, in some sense, you have no choice. You have, you have no, we, you guys probably know somebody that's closeted. You probably do. You may not know you do or you don't. But we've all been around people that you're like, ah, maybe, you know, she really does love rugby, that girl. And she hasn't had a boyfriend in 30 years and, or the guy who's like constantly going to musical theater. I don't know, whatever it might be. And it's like they're not until they like, if your friends don't know who you are actually who you are, rather than who you're pretending to be, or your family doesn't like, you're not gonna get to whatever the end of the road that you're supposed to do here is, you just won't. And I don't know that I'm gonna get to the end of the road, there was any of us,

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  whatever the purpose of life is, basically. I think it's largely, it would be some Jungian version of like, or if you watched Groundhog Day, it's like, I think we're here to solve as much of our shit to the best extent that we can do it. And then maybe something else happens good after it. Otherwise, you're probably just doing it again. If you haven't seen the movie Defending Your Life.

• 1:30:21Jack Selby?

  I haven't seen it.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Great movie. Alba Brooks, probably his best movie around 1986, Meryl Streep. He ends up in purgatory on trial over his life. Great movie.

• 1:30:31Jack Selby?

  What's it called?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Defending Your Life.

• 1:30:32Jack Selby?

  You mentioned Jordan Peterson. We had him on the show recently. He's just so impressive. Love Jordan Peterson.

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  I think I saw one of the clips.

• 1:30:40Jack Selby?

  He has positively affected my life just so much through his lectures, through the podcasts, everything. So, love Jordan.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  You dealt with the sexuality. It's great.

• 1:30:47Jack Selby?

  Not true. Not true at all, guys. Not true.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Sorry grandma. Sorry grandma.

• 1:30:52Jack Selby?

  They'll hopefully see me with a wife in like five, 10 years. We'll see about that.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Five, 10 years. How old are you?

• 1:30:58Jack Selby?

  26.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  26. Let's wrap this thing up in the next two years. Come on.

• 1:31:01Jack Selby?

  How long should you date before you?

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  Two, three years. Let's have, you should be having kids by 30. What, actually, my only regret in life.

• 1:31:09Jack Selby?

  He doesn't have kids.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  How, are you married?

• 1:31:11Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  And how long you been married?

• 1:31:13Jack Selby?

  A few months.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  And how old's your wife?

• 1:31:15Jack Selby?

  26.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  All right. So you're ballparking it. It's probably gonna happen in the next two years. That would be my.

• 1:31:21Jack Selby?

  Maybe three, three to five, I've said.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  But even that's a long, that's a long delay than what our grandparents did where they were all basically having kids at 21, 22, sometimes even younger. I'm not saying that that was perfect. But I do regret that we didn't have kids till I was 46. And it's like, I play basketball with these guys now. Which is a great group of guys, mostly ages between about thirty five and some into their mid sixties. And the guys that are in their fifties and sixties over the summer, they were bringing their kids who are now in college. And they were playing with us. And I was like, how cool that these dads get to play and this fifty five year old guy gets to play with his twenty one year old son. I didn't have kids till forty six. If I want to be playing with my son when he's sixteen, seventeen, I really need to still be in as good shape as possible when I'm in my mid sixties. Which then started getting me in better shape even. So there's.

• 1:32:08Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, so there's a good thing.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:32:10Graham Stephan?

  It gives you reasons to work hard.

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  No, no, so but it would be a lot easier had I done it way back, removing sexuality for a second and complexities around that and everything else. I'm just saying, as a general rule, seeing those guys like, oh, you had kids, like my best friend, my buddy John, I met him, we were four years old. I met him the first day of kindergarten, literally remember meeting him. Now it's forty five years later, basically. He has a twenty three year old son. So think how funny that is. I grew up my whole life with this guy. He has a twenty three year old son. I got a two, I have two.

• 1:32:41Graham Stephan?

  But all that work in the beginning, you were able to maybe put into your career.

• 1:32:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:45Graham Stephan?

  And reap all the benefits of that early on so that maybe you could chill a little bit more later in life. That's the way I kind of see it.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. I, there is, it is very possible, if not probable, that had I not focused on my career the way I did. And maybe it was for some of the wrong reasons, like doing stand up at night made it very easy to have an excuse as to why I was not dating. I now realize that. I didn't realize it at the time. But basically, everybody would be like, oh, you're not dating guy. Well, you're in the clubs every night. You know, I was doing stand up literally six or seven nights a week for ten years, something like that. So again, it was sort of like a lie of omission, but maybe all of the energy and everything that I put towards that. It clearly led to some skill set that led me to be able to be a talk show host and everything else that I do. So. So it's a regret, but I would say, yeah, there's probably a little asterisk there because it did lead to obviously other things that were good.

• 1:33:37Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. So on Jordan, I know one of the things that he like really popularized him was a Bill C sixteen, which is like basically mandating that, well, they tried to mandate use of preferred.

• 1:33:49Jack Selby?

  Pronouns with like actual, I don't know if it was criminal or some sort of like

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Jack Selby?

  Uh, penalty if you didn't obey that law. I'm curious because he's a proponent of free speech. You're a proponent of free speech. What do you think the media's role in terms of like, should they have come like some sort of obligation to tell you the truth? Are they, is there some sort of law that they should they then be obeying? Or would that then go against free speech if they just want to say whatever they want to say? Because they have a lot of power. They can influence elections. They can do so much.

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Jack Selby?

  Should there ever be laws that that force the media hold their feet to the fire a little bit? Or do you think that's an infringement of free speech?

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, the one word answer is no. I mean, there's no law that you could put in place that will force them to tell the truth. And you can always whittle. I mean, this is what lawyers do at trials, like getting people to whittle away and say things in certain ways. So you're never really saying the truth or anything else. Like it, we don't need more laws right, right now. Actually, what we need is exactly what happened. The media lied about so much. We've already illustrated it several times here. That what happened, an entire new media ecosystem developed. Jordan Peterson, who I believe to the, to the extent that someone might actually be a prophet on earth. I believe he could be like, if you view the world, if there are prophets, if there are angels, if there are people that, that have some gift that is beyond us.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  I think Jordan has done more good for this world than certainly anyone that I've ever known or been in contact with or anything else. Why Jordan rose? Because he went against a government that was trying to infringe on free speech. So I don't know that there could have there, there, we have it from an American perspective, of course, because we have the first amendment. We have all the laws we need around speech. I do not want any more laws, you know? Basically, you can't violently threaten somebody. You can't yell fire in a crowded theater with the intent to do harm. And then we have incredibly tight libel and slander laws. That's it. That basically is it. And I'm completely fine with that. Again, it's a, it's a better mousetrap argument. The argument would be let them lie. And as long as we have a free internet, to whatever extent that it's free,

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  then the better ideas will bubble up and you're gonna get your Jordan Petersons and you guys are gonna be able to do whatever you want and I'm gonna be able to do whatever I want and then the trips will follow where they may.

• 1:35:58Jack Selby?

  You speak very positively of Jordan and you actually did, like, I think you've done like over 200 tours, not tours, but like stopped on different tours with Jordan, like opening for him or like talking on stage with him, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I think you might have been the first person to interview him after the Bill C-16 video too, which is just crazy. I was like, how many, eight years ago or something?

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  It was eight years ago this week. It was November 18th, 2016.

• 1:36:23Jack Selby?

  So you're very familiar with him. What would you say are some of the most impactful things that you've learned from him? And what is something about him that may surprise people?

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  The best thing that I can say about Jordan is that he is the exact same person off camera that he is on camera. The exact same person. There is literally no daylight. I just, I was in Scottsdale doing his 500th podcast a couple of days ago and I'm literally, it's the end of the night and I'm in the hot tub with Jordan, his wife, Dr. Oz and his wife. Nothing weird happened. But that Jordan Peterson in the hot tub at the end of a long day of work and interviews and writing and doing podcasts is the same exact guy talking about the same exact things that he's talking about on air. He is the most decent human being I've ever met. You know, try to imagine the level of fame that he's attained, but

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  it's not just normal fame. It's one thing if you're a musician and you're famous or you're an athlete and you're famous, you know. Somebody comes up to you and they're like, "Oh man, Michael Jordan, I love that move in the 92 finals and that, blah, blah, blah. I play basketball better because you all, all that stuff, whatever. I love your music, whatever." Jordan literally has taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and made them stand up straight with their shoulders back, right? He's gotten people to clean their room first before they started cleaning the world. And I think some of the ordering that we're seeing in the world right now is because of Jordan Peterson directly. And sort of where we started was if I've had a little something to do with elevating Jordan. And man, I did enough probably here on this planet. I really believe that. You know, the amount of people that he got off drugs, the amount of people who mended

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  relationships with their parents or brothers or sisters, people that got better job. I like, I could tell you so many stories of crazy things that happened. Like when we were in Sweden and the plane was about to take off and they were literally moving the jet bridge, the bridge from the plane and a guy in an orange vest, because he was one of the luggage guys from downstairs, saw Jordan and he ran onto the plane as the thing was moving to tell Jordan in the craziest way, "My God, you've changed my life. I got this job because of you. I was on drugs on the plane." And they were like, "Sorry, you're gonna have to get off the plane." But the guy probably got fired after that. Who knows what happened? But like, like, that's just one of a million things that I saw. To be onstage with this guy, I always thought it was incredible because I had the best seat in the house every night because, you know, we'd be in front of five or eight or 10,000 people, but I would be

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  right behind him onstage. So I could see everybody. I could see him doing his walk back and forth, you know, and he's kind of like a panther, just going back and forth like this. And I could see everybody and almost without exclusion for however many hundreds of thousands of people we performed for. You'd never see anyone break eye contact, stare at him the entire time, but you'd see people crying, you'd see people crying, you'd see people in with the most open look that they could possibly ever have because they were having realizations about their lives. It was absolutely incredible. So, so the best thing I can say about him is that he is authentically the person that, that you know him to be.

• 1:39:23Graham Stephan?

  Where do you draw the line between free speech and hate speech?

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Well, I would say exactly where the Supreme Court did, which is that there's no such thing as hate speech. You can say mean things about people. I can open up my Twitter right now and show you some horrible things and memes and images and all sorts of evil, god awful things that people say about me. You can block them, ignore them, not pay attention to it. If you're walking down the street and someone tells you, "Hey, you're a fucking motherfucking blah, blah, blah," you can just keep walking. If they, if they are trying to incite a violent mob against you, well, we have laws against that. That doesn't fall within the First Amendment. And then, as I said before you, we have extremely stringent laws as it pertains to libel and slander. You know, the fire in a crowded theater, you actually can yell fire in a crowded theater. You just can't do it with the intent to do harm. So I don't, we, so there is no such thing as hate speech.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  There are mean people who say mean things and it is up to you as an adult to figure out how to take mean things and either not let them enter you, or if they do enter you, how to extricate yourself from them as quickly as possible.

• 1:40:24Graham Stephan?

  And what are your thoughts on platforming certain people? And where do you draw the line on that? I know with us, um, you know, we have quite a few people who want to come on and we always have to balance like giving them a platform versus just being genuinely curious and wanting to hear a different perspective.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  It's, it's extremely tricky, I would say, um, until it's not tricky anymore. And for me, I was, especially when I started the show, and remember it's a very different internet than it is now. It was very Wild West. There weren't a lot of interview shows. I was really, me, me and Rogan were the first sort of two long form interview shows. When I started doing the long form interview, obviously I didn't invent the long form interview, but it was, but they weren't doing it online really. And they certainly weren't doing it in, you know, I built sets that looked like television sets. So I was doing something that, that appeared very professional, the way people had always seen before. So if I gave anyone a platform, immediately a certain portion of the internet was like, holy shit, this doesn't look like it's in someone's basement, or it doesn't even look like it's in Rogan's thing where he's smoking weed with them with the curtain in the background.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  It looks like it should be on television. So I think I was held to a higher standard as it came to that. My general philosophy was something's close to what we discussed before, which was I'll bring, I would try to bring on as wide a variance of people as possible. And I'll talk to them and then my audience can decide. That was my general philosophy. What interestingly happened as, as I did that was more and more people on the right were willing to talk to me. And the more I talked to people on the right, the less people on the left were willing to talk to me. And that, I think, probably, I'm gonna guess that you guys probably have some version of that now happening to you too. I see this happening across the board now. And this is, unfortunately, it's become a cancer of the left, that they've abandoned all of their really, what I would say are their true liberal principles in the name

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  for this sort of hegemonic, very controlling attitude. And it's a shame, because you're constantly finding enemies everywhere. You know, the day after the election, there were all these articles written about how the left has to find its new Joe Rogan. And it's like, dude, you guys had Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan, the mushroom-eating, pot-smoking, ayahuasca-doing, MMA guy. Like, he is not supposed to be a conservative voting for a Republican, but you guys purged even him, which is something that we sort of hit on before. So, I, as a general rule, I think you should be as open to talking to whoever you want, but you, but you also have to make decisions in your life, and you have to decide what kind of show you want to do. And, and if you platform somebody, are you gonna do the appropriate pushback where you think it should be done? And who do you want to

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  be associated with? I would say it's, it's just, you guys have to make a decision for yourselves, and everyone's decision would be different. As for the platform answer on that, as long as you're not breaking the laws of the United States, I don't have a problem with anyone being on a platform. And if you do break the laws of the United States, then you have a bigger problem than the platform. When we created Locals, which was to deal with a lot of this stuff, because people were getting kicked off these platforms left and right, the policy that we put in, which I really think is, is still the best policy, is that we, we did a subscription platform. So, and I knew that if you literally charged people a quarter, literally 25 cents a month, it would eliminate 99% of the bad behavior, because most of these people are on burner accounts, it's anonymous. A quarter

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  puts some skin in the game, even though it's nothing, in essence. And that would eliminate 99% of it. However, if someone wants to join my Locals community, they can pay me the, we do $5 a month, they can pay me the $5 a month. And if they want to get in there and just yell at me all day, it's up to me. So I can either decide to take their money and say whatever they want, or I can kick them out of my community, but they're not off the platform. So then, they would be out of the Rubin Report community, but they could be on Scott Adams Locals community, they could be on- Bridge of Fetazies, or Michael Malice, etc. So it's not a platform thing. We basically treated it like I treat my home. You can say whatever you want about me outside of my house, but I'm not going to invite you into my home to say awful things about me.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  So I was just trying to create some version of the game that was a little more elegant, let's say. And I think, I think we accomplished that.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:44:54Jack Selby?

  What you mentioned about certain people not wanting to come on the show, that has been our experience. We have fortunately had some people that were on the left that were willing to come on our show, such as Hassan, we've had Destiny, David Pakman. Don Lemon claims he's independent. He came on our show. So there have been people that have been willing, and we are Anaxasparian. Anaxasparian, like, we are so, so, so appreciative of those people that were willing to come on the show. But we do kind of run into that same issue where a lot of people, they see that we've talked to some other people on the right, people that they disagree with, and I think that they're unwilling to come on the show.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the problems there is also that the ideas of the left have really run thin. And they use the false cries of racism and bigotry and misogyny and all of those.

• 1:45:39Jack Selby?

  It's a distraction.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  Even some of those people that you mentioned, they've said unbelievably horrible things about me. And you cannot find me saying unbelievably horrible things about them. Because I'm just not, I'm not that interested in that game. But if you're, if the main crudle that you have over people is, is I'm going to call everyone a racist and everyone a bigot, then I'll never debate their ideas. And then what happens is then they don't want to do a two and a half hour podcast with somebody because they don't want to have to sit there and defend their ideas. Because they're used to winning arguments just because they've said the worst possible things about people. So it would be much harder as a general rule to get someone who's not that seasoned. And talk, why didn't Kamala do Rogan? It was because they knew, it's not because Rogan is a hardcore interviewer, right?

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  Rogan would be criticized, or actually, that's the criticism he gets, the same thing as me, that he's a softball interviewer. He just talks to people. Well, okay, so why wouldn't she do that? There were two reasons she didn't do it. She didn't do it, number one, because she knew that the lefty base was going to go bananas, that she's talking to right wing maniac Joe Rogan. We've already illustrated why that's complete nonsense. And then the other reason is, it would be far scarier for her to do a three hour, open ended interview, without any preparation, rather than even as bad as she was in the 60 Minutes interview, or the really, you know, highly produced ones, even if her answers are terrible, it's all like, you know, 45 seconds of an answer, right? So even if she does all of her double speak and circular logic and all that nonsense, it's like somewhat tight.

• 1:47:01Speaker 01

  You put her three hours with Rogan, her head would have exploded, because there aren't many people on the left that can explain their stuff, other than Trump is evil.

• 1:47:09Jack Selby?

  But with all that said, we do want to be very appreciative towards those people that are on the left, that are willing to come on the shows and actually have the discussion.

• 1:47:17Speaker 01

  I think it's great. I think it's great.

• 1:47:19Jack Selby?

  I think it's super, super, super important. And it's unfortunate, because we just want to talk to people and hear them out, but it's like, we've consistently run up against that issue. But shout out to the people that are on the left that have came on this show, we really appreciate you guys. Lastly, you mentioned the subscription platform that you have. I'm curious, because we actually started out as a finance podcast. If, I'm sure you wouldn't want to disclose numbers, but in terms of percentages, what is the revenue like in terms of where is it? Where's it all coming from for your, for your media business?

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  You mean for my media business or for locals? Because I don't own locals anymore. We merged with Rumble and then Rumble and Public, and so I don't own that anymore. So you mean for my own personal?

• 1:47:58Jack Selby?

  Yeah, wherever, wherever your revenue is coming from, like, like subscriptions, or you have sponsors.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Right now, like, I can ballpark you the answer on that. Subscription is probably about 20%, something like that, probably about 20%.

• 1:48:13Jack Selby?

  20% and then sponsors is like?

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  Sponsors, YouTube pre-rolls, how else do we make money? So Rumble sells our ads, but those are the ads that go everywhere. So they're on Spotify, they're on YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. Pre-rolls, subscription, obviously we have merch.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  We must have some other, we must have some other stuff, but that, that's the bulk of it. Yeah.

• 1:48:34Jack Selby?

  Yeah, we wanted to get into subscriptions, maybe. We were always considering it.

• 1:48:38Graham Stephan?

  I think we should, Jack. I sent you a text. You didn't get back to me on that.

• 1:48:40Jack Selby?

  We've tried to, okay, we've tried to.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Well, I still know the people at Locals and my brother-in-law was my co-creator and it's a fantastic product. And it's your community. You do whatever you want. You set the rules. Our live video on there is as good as Instagram in terms of interactions and everything else. We live stream my show on there every day. You'll set your rules as you see fit. You decide how much you want to charge and, and, and all of the other principles that I think we've talked about here, related to free speech and everything else, you, we, we just built you a house. What you do in that house is completely up to you.

• 1:49:11Jack Selby?

  Is there anything else that you want to mention while we, we have a couple minutes at the end?

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'm looking forward to being in Vegas for a day. You know, I've only been, I've only been to Vegas one other time. It was in 2016 for the Democrat debate that they did here. It was Bernie versus Hillary at the time. And I was at Ora TV, which was Larry King's network, and they had no budget. And they basically were like, we'll get you the press passes, but we're not going to pay a dime. So I had to pay to bring my team here and I didn't have any, I was maybe making 60 grand a year at the time, something like that. So I didn't have any money. We drove from LA. We brought our own stuff. It was very janky and whatever. We stayed at Circus Circus.

• 1:49:49Jack Selby?

  There you go.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  Have you been over there to Circus Circus? I'm pretty sure I still have a disease from that night. It was, uh, so, uh, and I'm not much of a gambler, but I do really like casinos in general. In Florida, we have the, the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida. And even though I don't gamble, I like going to concerts there and I just like the atmosphere. I like sort of like the older simulation. I don't really have vices in that sense anymore. I like tequila. I'm coming out with a tequila next month. That's my next, that's my next business project. But I just like, I like the stimulation of it. So I'm actually really, I was very happy when, when the guys told me we were doing this. Cause I wanted to chat with you guys and Phoenix has been a big fan of both yours for years. And, uh, and then I was like, oh, and we get to go to, we get to go to Phoenix.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  We get, I was in Phoenix last week. We get to go to, uh, to Vegas and, and be around some of that stuff, which I hadn't saw. No, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this and, and I appreciate the kind words there. Guys have built something really nice. You got a beautiful, this is your house.

• 1:50:43Graham Stephan?

  It is.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  You got a beautiful house here.

• 1:50:44Graham Stephan?

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  And I just like, I like just seeing other people that are doing something good. Like, it's not that complex. You know, there's so many people in our space, or whatever this is, that are constantly trying to destroy each other and whatever. And it's like, I see no competition with anyone. To me, if I'm doing something good, if you build it, they will come. If you're doing something good, you will build it and they will come, and everyone will come. That was a weird way to end this.

• 1:51:08Jack Selby?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:51:08Graham Stephan?

  That's what she said.

• 1:51:09Jack Selby?

  All right.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  All right, there we go.

• 1:51:11Jack Selby?

  Yeah. Thank you guys for watching.

• 1:51:13Graham Stephan?

  Until next time.

• 1:51:14Jack Selby?

  Thank you, Phoenix. Till next time.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.