Full transcript: Dave Rubin on London Real
0:48 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dave Rubin, the American political commentator, talk show host, international speaker and author. Your show, The Rubin Report, is recognized for its politically incorrect and open approach to discussing fundamental principles such as freedom of speech. You have millions of subscribers and regularly interview guests like Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens.
1:23 You’ve also toured with Dr. Jordan Peterson, hosting over 120 speaking events in 20 countries, and last year you released the New York Times bestseller Don’t Burn This Book, Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, the definitive account of our current political upheaval and your guide to surviving it. Dave, welcome back to London Real.
1:43 Dave Rubin: Brian, it’s good to be with you. And I’ve also done London Real once before, so I feel that my career is somewhat complete now.
1:50 Brian Rose: It truly is. I checked, and it’s just been over a year since you were here last time. Last time, I know. Last time we had to stream from our new Digital Freedom Platform, because I was going head-to-head with our censorship battle with YouTube, and we can talk about that. And then I decided to run for Mayor of London, Dave, so I might just bring it up to speed with what happened.
2:11 We spent nine months going head to head, and we nearly won. We spent millions of pounds. I went all in on this. We had a digital battle bus that I was driving around London and live streaming from the back. We logged 5,700 miles in the City of London.
2:28 We did the largest outdoor ad campaign in British history, a political history. We were ranked second in all the bookmakers worldwide for the whole campaign, actually ahead of the Conservative candidate. We created a 50-page manifesto with, like, detailed policies on the economy, crime, housing, transport. We had 10 million visitors to our website globally, one and a half million shares. We served up one and a half billion impressions of digital media.
2:54 We had serious attack ads going after the incumbent and calling him out on all of his policies. We got a hundred pieces of media, mainstream media, which was obviously pretty brutal on me, but two-page spread in the Times of London, two-page spread, and the Evening Standard, covered by The Sun, the BBC, ITV, of course, with their own spin on it, but in the end we were defeated by the woke Labor left-leaning mayor, and he kind of spun this narrative back to the people that they were actually looking out for the people when actually they weren’t growing the economy. They were taxing people a lot like what’s going on with you and Cali.
3:28 Also we got stopped by the police in the middle of the campaign, Dave, and I got banned from campaigning. They fined my team. They tried to intimidate us. It was crazy. We also got disinvited from debates.
3:41 We were not included on the mainstream media even though, like I said, we were in second place according to the bookies, and we really fought back, but we had our own media channels. I had more subscribers than some of the mainstream papers, and so we fought back, and I think we really made an impression here, but in the end, you know, this city got co-opted into this narrative that maybe you see happening in California or maybe nationwide, that this Labor Party is looking out for the working man, when, like I said, their taxes are regressive. They hurt them the most.
4:12 They had no solutions for the economy. They locked this whole place down for a year, and I was coming up with real policies, but they kind of feared everyone back into this election, so I’m telling you, I went through the ringer, Dave, and the upside is, though, is I think that YouTube now is a little bit more careful when it comes to banning me, but we’re gonna find out today, Dave.
4:35 Dave Rubin: Yeah, I suppose we will find out. I’m sure they’re not that thrilled with me these days as well.
4:41 Dave Rubin: Wait, so first off, how much longer then is Sadiq Khan’s reign of terror in London? How long has that now been extended to?
4:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, first of all, by the way, it was, he was unelected for a year because they postponed elections last year because of the Covid crisis, so literally he was in office making decisions for a year with no remit. Now it’s been extended for three more years. And we’ve got three more years of this nonsense.
5:06 I’m telling you, every taxi I get into now, and we’re after the election now, says, Brian, like, we voted for you. What are we going to do with all these road problems, the crime problems, the knife crime, the economy still hasn’t come back? And I said, look, we’re going to keep moving forward. We have our own political party, the London Real Party. We’re still pushing our agendas, but you know, it was a setback, and I’ll be honest, it, we really, really wanted, and thought we were going to win.
5:32 We were out there with the people in the streets. My team went all out, but it’s frustrating, and the reason I ran, Dave, is because I, I, I live in this city. It’s my home. My kids were born here. I plan on being buried here.
5:45 It’s, it’s like my home now. And so I just couldn’t sit by and watch these current politicians running into the ground, and, you know, if I hadn’t run, I don’t even think it would have been much of a race. So, you know, it was my first time. I learned a lot about the political process, more than a political science degree, that’s for sure. But yeah, we’ve got three more years of Sadiq Khan unfortunately.
6:06 Dave Rubin: Yeah, well, look, the fact that a guy like you got involved, a guy like Lawrence Fox got involved, outsiders who are trying to do something sane in an insane system, that is a good sign. You know, look, okay, so you didn’t win this time. I suspect it probably won’t be your last time, and if nothing else, you showed those people, the good decent people who are the citizens of London, the cab drivers and the people who work in the pubs and everything else, like, people have to get involved.
6:34 It’s one thing for us to talk about these ideas all day long, but one of the things that I mentioned on my show is that we can’t just talk. We’ve got to do. We’ve got to recall governors. We’ve got to build new places of education. We have to build new tech.
6:49 We have to do all of the things, because the progressives in an American context, sort of your Labor Party, our Democratic Party, they’re not for anyone. They’re not for small business. They’re not for minorities. They’re for power. Every single policy that they put forth is taking from someone to give to someone else, as long as it fits in their intersectional diagram of insanity.
7:13 If they wanted to be for people, if you wanted to be for people, what would you do? Well, first off, you wouldn’t take so much of their money. You’d say to people, hey, we, the government, don’t need to be this endless black hole of money sucking, you know, awfulness. What we could actually do is let you keep most of your stuff, and we, the government, will stay slim and trim, and basically we’ll stay out of your lives. We will fund roads.
7:37 We will fund the police. I know that’s very controversial in America, and apparently it’s starting to become controversial in the UK as well. That’s what a functional government would do. By the way, in an American context, that’s what functional governments are doing in places like Florida and places like Texas and places like Tennessee. Now, unfortunately, I’m here in California, which is a really a one-state, a one-party state.
8:01 The Democrats. I’ve got a ridiculous governor in Gavin Newsom who we are recalling, although unfortunately I don’t have much hope that he’ll actually be taken out, you know, because a recall just resets the election. It doesn’t automatically remove him. He can run again in the recall, and most likely he will win, because we don’t have a great crew of people doing exactly what you did, which is saying, I will, I’ll take the bullet. I will get involved in this thing.
8:25 I will put my life on the line. I, I mean that sort of literally and, and figuratively, because politics is so messy. I will take the salvos. I will let them write the hit pieces. All those things people just don’t want to do.
8:37 And I’m very empathetic to that. Obviously plenty of people have asked me to do it. I’ve had plenty of money people say, Dave, we’ll back you, just get involved, and it’s like, I don’t know that I could do all the awful things it would take to get through that machine, and in some ways I, that was Trump’s greatest credit, in a way, his greatest skill, that he was willing to do all of the bad stuff that you gotta do and work through it, but in the end it didn’t even work for him.
9:01 So, it’s politics is very messy, but generally speaking, we all are fighting the same thing right now, whether it’s you in London, whether it’s me in Los Angeles, whether it’s someone watching this in the Middle East or in India or in Mexico, the growing monster that is leftism, wokism, progressivism, Marxism, whatever you want to call it, this centralized power that wants to pit us against each other and reorganize the world order as it sees fit. That’s what we’re all fighting against, and I think the silver lining is that people are waking up, and the question always is, well, how much destruction can it brought before we actually do something about it? You know, I realized last year that we’re basically in an information war, and I know you’ve caught you’ve called it kind of similar things when you’re over there.
9:50 Brian Rose: I mean, when I got, you know, banned on YouTube, it was May 6, no, April 6, last year, second largest YouTube live stream in the world, then banned and deleted on YouTube. Afterwards, I started to realize that it really is an information war, and if people can control information, they can control people, control votes, control actions, and as long as that narrative continues to be able to take place in what typically is left-leaning technology platforms and media, it makes it really hard. And Dave, you’re right, they put me through the ringer here in the newspapers.
10:21 I mean, they were going after everything they could to try to rip me down, and yet when I spoke with for anybody on the public, on the streets, for five minutes, whether you know, they were young, they were old, they were an immigrant, they were not, whatever religion, within five minutes they said, okay, that makes sense, and we hate the current mayor. I would love to vote for you, but I couldn’t get that message out on a mass scale, even though I had the digital platforms. We got close, but it still feels like going up against a wave of this.
10:51 How do you see that, and do you see it changing?
10:54 Dave Rubin: Well, look, as a guy named Dave David, you know, David beat Goliath. That’s the old story, and I believe that Dave can beat Google. I believe the little guy can beat the big guy. It’s the greatest human story that there is.
11:10 I would say we’ve gone from an information war to really just a war on truth at this point. And the way I would say that shifted is, you’re right, we were in an information war, meaning for the last, let’s say, 10 years, we all got on Twitter, we all got on YouTube and Facebook and all these things, and we have simply no idea how they’ve been manipulating us. We have little hints about it. You know, when they’ve said, okay, you can’t post this, or we delete accounts, and we always know it, it always leans right when they’re getting rid of people and banning people, but we really have no sense the extent that shadow bans have hid information from people, the way they’ve been able to inflate certain stories and de-boost other stories and reorganize search results.
11:51 I mean, there’s so many pieces of this that truly, I don’t think anyone, I actually don’t even think whoever they are, I don’t think anyone really understands what this information war has now become. Like, I don’t know that Jack at Twitter truly knows who’s shadow banning who and when. Their shadow ban, and when Twitter people can read your DMs and all the rest of it, or that even the top engineer at Google truly understands the algorithm and how videos are suggested.
12:21 Like, I just don’t think, I think that there is some, the machines are on, you know what I mean? Like, we’re in the rise of the machines in essence, but the reason I would say we’ve gone from an information war for those 10 years, dealing with all that, to now a war on truth is that, you know, look, here in America, half the country, you know, wanted to open up, half the country wanted to lock down, half the country thought that the election was stolen, half the country didn’t half the country thought that Brett Kavanaugh was a race, a rapist. Half the country didn’t.
12:51 The half the country thought that Jussie Smollett was the victim of a hate crime. Half the country. I could go on and on with the endless amount of things that we are now split by, and the simple truth is it’s almost impossible to know what your neighbor thinks. So the people that literally live next door to me, I have no idea if they believe in a similar reality than I believe in, and I don’t know at this point, because big tech has become so ubiquitous, because we’re all wandering around with this device, and how it’s manipulating us, and whether it’s listening to us or reorganizing results based on what our interests are, whatever it might be.
13:28 I don’t know how we mitigate that. I don’t know how we get something to feel like a national ethos again. I’m not exactly sure how to do that. I think the best thing you can do is care about your local community. You know, start really within your household, your family, and then, and then build out, you know, a very bottom-up way of living, and I think a lot of people are turning to that.
13:49 I also think that there’s going to be more of a backlash against big tech growing. I think people are going to realize, you know, they called it social media. The implication was that it would make us more social, but we all know, you know, after the first couple years of Facebook, where you connected with some old friends and it was sort of fun, and, oh, I can’t believe that old high school friend is now doing this or that, next thing you know, you’ve started to hate everybody.
14:10 You’re angry at people all the time. We doom scroll on Twitter, where you just look for any things to make you angry, and then, of course, they built in these technological tricks like infinite scroll, where it never stops, so pages never stop, and your brain just keeps going and going and going. That’s why I do my August off the grid thing, but, but basically we have to figure out how do we, how do we connect a country? From an American perspective, we’ve got about 350 million people here.
14:38 Well, now we’re all starting to believe very, very different things, and how do we make sure that those founding documents that are so precious, that have freed so many people over generations, how do we make sure that they were still respected and honored and obeyed? I don’t know what the answer to that is. I don’t think anyone has a good handle on that right now.
14:57 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s very difficult, and I’ve spoken with some serious experts on my show about the phenomenon, about the technology Silicon Valley builds, and these are trillion dollars of capital going in to create devices that are more addictive than anything we’ve known, and you know, I, I, I struggle with drugs in my past life, but there’s nothing more addictive than what’s on your phone, and it can move your emotions up and down and left and right, and it can control this narrative, and you don’t even know what’s happening.
15:24 And you know, last year, Dave, I would meet people on the streets, and I’d say, I’m being censored right now on YouTube, and they’d be like, oh, I heard about that one thing, but that’s not anymore, is it? I’m like, every single thing is censored. I call it the Mr. Rogers channel now, because all I can do is put up Mr. Rogers content, because I can’t say anything about, you know, a disease, a mask, a vaccine, a lab. And so again, but they, that, but you know, people, they don’t all honestly know what’s happening, and the same with shadow bans and agenda engines, and I just don’t know if people have woke up to the fact that it’s happening.
15:57 And I, I don’t know, I feel like it’s going to get a little bit worse before it gets better. What I would say is that the more we, the more we come in contact with each other, the better. I mean, when I was out on the streets talking to people, then everything went along the wayside, and people said, oh, now I know who you are, Brian, I can see who you are, but when it’s my digital persona, it can be controlled and manipulated, and I agree with you. I think some of the people at the top, they don’t even know what’s going on, and that’s a little scary, because it can go somewhere that maybe they don’t even know where it is anymore.
16:32 Brian Rose: And maybe they can’t turn it off.
16:34 Dave Rubin: Well, that’s in essence, that’s sort of where we’re at, right? Like, the machines have turned on, from a Terminator perspective, Skynet is on, and we can’t shut it off. So there was a moment during, you know, every few months we have these nonsensical hearings on Capitol Hill, where they drag Zuckerberg from Facebook and Jack Dorsey from Twitter and the rest of them, and in one of the hearings I tweeted at Jack, and I said, do you shadow ban?
17:00 And he responded to me and wrote no, and I thought that was pretty interesting, because, okay, so now you’re saying you’re a shadow ban, but but does that really mean anything? Because however you define shadow ban, like, I don’t know how he defines shadow ban. So I think it’s become, it’s become so many lies are just sort of sitting everywhere. And by the way, I’m not saying this guy is purely evil. You know, he’s built something that I spend an awful lot of time on.
17:25 I wish I spent less time on it. I try not to be on it on the weekends, but I’m not saying these people are all evil. You know, in a weird way, Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes I have an odd amount of sympathy for him, because there was a real interesting moment in one of the hearings when AOC, who, who’s just the queen of ridiculousness, when she basically was saying to him, you need to censor hate speech, and which really was outsourcing tyranny, right? I mean, she’s a government official pressuring a private company, the head of a private company, to censor speech that’s against the First Amendment.
17:56 I mean, that’s in essence the government coercion on speech. He basically looked at her and he’s like, I can’t do that, that’s not what I do. Now, he’s made all sorts of, I think, mistakes and misjudgments along the way, but again, you know, it’s like these guys, they started something 20 years ago, they had no idea what it was going to turn into, and I think the best, the only thing we can do is get out there, talk to real people, really try to figure out new ways to connect with people, and the irony of course is that those new ways are really the old ways, which is just face-to-face meeting, and then, if you know, in the last year, have they locked us down, so we had a big tech problem, we had an information problem, and then suddenly they locked us down, and then we’re on these things.
18:39 Probably, I don’t know, everyone probably tripled their usage, if not more, in the last year and a half, which was probably the worst thing that we could have done.
18:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, really well said, and I guess I hadn’t thought of the Skynet reference, but I think you’re right, and the algo now is optimizing for clicks, emotions, and it’ll just keep spinning that algo up to maximize the attention grab, which probably turns into ad dollars, and that’s a little worrying. If that’s gotten,
19:05 Dave Rubin: well, Brian, think about it this way.
19:07 On YouTube, on any given moment, you know there’s suggested videos on the right side of the video. On the right side, right? So let’s say somebody really is enjoying this conversation between us. Well, YouTube could just decide, and I would love to talk to a YouTube engineer about this. By the way, these companies never, you would think they’re the giant, these giant sort of amorphous companies that are in every part of our lives.
19:29 It’s funny, they have no PR people. You never see anyone get interviewed anywhere. Remember Jack did go on Joe Rogan one time, but suddenly somehow they have no PR teams. No one ever explains anything. Imagine if you got locked out of your Gmail.
19:41 Could you call Google? I mean, it’s just incredible how big they’ve become. But just think about it this way. People that are watching this right now, let’s say they’re somewhat politically aligned with us, well, if YouTube wanted, could YouTube not very easily just say, boy, you know, Brian and Dave are pretty scary, we’re gonna suggest all counter stuff in that, in that bar right there, because we don’t want people watching too much of this? Now, I’m not accusing them of doing it, but I’m saying we just don’t know what they could be doing to us, and because their lack of transparency is so huge, it only can let you think about the worst.
20:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, it’s so true. I think about it sometimes, and we’re getting back into broadcasting, so I’m going to have to address this, you know, even more. You know, Dave, you said something about getting people more involved in the political process, and I know you’re talking about the recall, the governor, and one of the things we were doing is we were live streaming every single day from the back of the bus. I was asking, answering questions live on IG. I was out there talking to the people, and people walk up to me and they said, I’ve never seen a politician on the streets talking to as many people as they would want.
20:45 I’ve never seen anybody live streaming, answering questions in real time, and we were thinking, you know, maybe we can get people re-involved in this political process. I had 12-year-old kids that would ride by on a bike and say, you’re the mayor, in it, and I’d be like, I know you can’t vote, but I’m amazed you even know who I am, which at least is a positive thing. So I do think that if we see our politicians, and who knows, maybe you’ll be one of them, Dave, getting out there with their media platforms and streaming.
21:10 I mean, Trump did a little of this with Twitter, but imagine with video. Maybe we can re-engage people with the political process, because, you know, over here it seemed like most people started to care a day or two before the election. They kind of voted, and they kind of went on with their lives, and it was a little frustrating, because these people in power are controlling everything, their livelihoods, their children’s education, their health, their freedoms.
21:33 I don’t know. I’d like to think that hopefully we can get people more involved.
21:37 Dave Rubin: Well, I think the way we get people more involved is that the generations younger than us, old-timers talking right now, they are growing up in this time where the expert class has failed them related to politics, related to Covid and lockdowns, completely failed them. Every week, wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, stay in your house, don’t stay in your house, you’re gonna die, you’re not going to die.
21:58 They have, they don’t trust anybody. I mean, I, when I talk, when I do college events and I talk to 18- and 19-year-olds, if I say CNN, if I’m giving a talk and I just mention CNN, that’s the punch line to them. They laugh at CNN. So the entire trusted class that we grew up with, where, oh, you trusted an academic class, you trusted a scientific class, you trusted a political class or a media class, at least at some level, that has been completely blown up for these people.
22:25 Now, does that mean that everyone involved was bad all the time? Of course not. Of course not. And I try not to impugn everybody’s motives, and everyone has selective pressures and everything else, like Fauci, for example. I think, do I think he’s a truly bad man?
22:40 Probably not. I think he got way over his head, and then sort of enjoyed the fame, and he liked going on these shows, and then there’s some weird part of having power where you just want to exercise it all the time, and then it’s wear masks, don’t wear a mask, stay at home, lock down schools, and you just start saying stuff. So that’s not to excuse any of the things that any of these people have done, but the point is young people look at all of these people, and they’re like, man, you guys have failed us, and then you throw in some of the more crazy social justice stuff, where you’re not allowed to say that there are biological differences between men and women.
23:12 We all know that there are. So now a young person’s going, wait a minute, wait a minute, the my parents’ generation and the expert class literally can’t say that men have penises and women have vaginas, that’s too controversial for them, so they’ve, for them, I think the whole thing has been blown apart, and I think what we can do, and what I’m really trying to do, is show them that there are some adults still here. I’m not perfect at this, but I’m trying to do something.
23:42 Brian Rose: You’re trying to do something. There are voices that are trying to put the pieces together.
23:47 Dave Rubin: What I’m really trying to figure out is does the entire thing have to burn? Now, like, do all the universities have to go down? Does all the media have to go down?
23:55 Like, The New York Times is evil at this point. Absolutely evil. I, we covered this on my show yesterday. I don’t know if any of your viewers saw this. It was so extraordinary.
24:05 They ran a piece, an op-ed in The Times called The Myth of Coexistence in Israel, and they showed a map of a series of formats of Palestine shrinking. Well, it’s a completely fabricated map, because, as I’m sure you know, there was no country known as Palestine. And then, I don’t have to get into all the details about that, but then the next day they issued a correction where they said that the map that they showed next to this op-ed piece, it wasn’t supposed to be factual, it was just a work of art to illustrate the point in the op-ed piece.
24:37 So basically they’re telling you, we just make up things, we make up things, and we put it in our paper to fit our narrative. I think people have really woken up to this. I think nobody is watching CNN going, this is true. Yes, there’s a certain amount of sort of blue and on people that just don’t get it that are going that route, but the ratings are tanking. More people are getting their news from places like this, and we just got to keep pushing and pushing and have faith.
25:05 I always have faith in the human mind. That’s the thing I believe in. Human ingenuity. I believe that young people can fix things. And I believe that we can do it.
25:15 I don’t think the monster can eat all of us. I just don’t think it can, but how many of us can it eat, and how much destruction? That’s the million-dollar question.
25:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, that is the question, and you know, it’s something that Dr. Jordan Peterson said when he was in this studio on the speaking tour over here in London. He said, he said, Brian, you know, we’ve now realized that people aren’t as stupid as we thought they were, and he said we seen that they can now, you know, consume a long-form piece of content, or, you know, him debating Sam Harris on a stage at the O2 Arena, where Beyonce played a few months earlier, that I took my wife to, and people come to that in, by the tens of thousands.
25:53 Dave Rubin: I do agree with you. I think people now, we’re starting to realize they can appreciate a nuanced argument. They do see character behind headlines. So I agree with you. I guess we got to keep doing what we’re doing and keep pushing forward.
26:08 The tide is turning to independent. It’s just riddled with potholes of technology and other pieces, and what’s going on, what other tricks do they have up their sleeve, in essence, that’s the question, and they have quite a few.
26:20 Brian Rose: And look, The New York Times is a shame. I’m surprised I even still glance at it every now and then, but I do, but when I do, I just see, I just see agenda, agenda, agenda, now to where it almost makes me laugh out loud. It doesn’t even look like news to me, because it’s always through a lens of their own liberal or whatever agenda it is, and it’s so obvious to me.
26:40 Now it started becoming obvious a few years ago, but now it’s so blatant where it’s not even news anymore, and it’s just a shame that it purports to be that. And I hope you’re right. I think our younger generation is seeing it, and look, they are getting their news from other sources right now, and we had a YouTuber throw his hat in the race here, and the Mayor of London, who did quite well, and I think that was a vote from the kids saying we’re tired of the establishment, and again, you’ve got to listen to that, and I do think there’s some hope in that as well.
27:10 I want to ask you about Cali because it’s my home state. I was born in Costa Mesa, California. I moved to San Diego, California, when I was two years old. I spent 18 years of my life there before I went off to school at MIT in Boston. I spent a couple summers there working in the aerospace industry, and you know, it’s a place I always thought, I thought of as home.
27:31 I also lived in New York City, but I decided last year I would never move back to either one of those places, because it all seemed crazy. Now, Dave, you’re the last man standing in California, but in this space of the intellectual dark web, you’re one of the few left. You know, Shapiro picked up and left. Obviously Rogan went to Austin. I know you’re off there, you know, soon, and a lot of people gone with them.
27:53 You’ve decided to stay. You’ve decided to keep calling out the politicians. I know you know people want you to run for office. Tell me first of all, what’s it like being in California and why did you feel like it was necessary to stay?
28:05 Dave Rubin: Well, first, I should tell you that right when I end with you today, I’m get hopping on a plane and going to Austin, Texas, for a couple days, so I won’t say why, but I am doing that.
28:15 Okay, look, my feeling was that you have to at least try to stay and fight. So California has had really terrible progressive blue policies forever, and each individual city has been hurt worse depending on how blue they’ve gone so a place like San Diego, where you used to live, actually has done pretty well, because even though they’ve had some Democratic mayors, they’ve been a little more moderate. I think people in San Diego, because of the sunshine, are wired a little more cooly, and it’s sort of, it’s basically okay.
28:45 There, San Francisco, which everyone knows has become an abject disaster, well who was the mayor of San Francisco when everything started going to crap? It was Gavin Newsom, who of course now is the governor of California. We’ve got Eric Garcetti here, who’s just another leftist buffoon, who I’m told now is going to be our ambassador to India, which I guess is good that he’s going there, but, you know, they’ll probably, I don’t know who I don’t even know who the deputy mayor is, but I’m sure it will be someone just as bad as him, but what they, what they do in all of these cities is they raise taxes, that hurts business, they increase regulation, that hurts business, housing prices then go up, homelessness then increases, drug use then continues.
29:28 They then throw money at everything, that suddenly then they see homelessness, they start throwing money at it, but money doesn’t solve homelessness. Right? There’s mental health issues to talk about There’s infrastructure issues to talk about, but they just throw money at everything, and they take from all of their top producers and then what happens? I mean, we are watching this happen right now. All of the top producers and the idea capital people, they’re all fleeing to Florida right now, so Silicon Valley is no longer in San Francisco.
29:58 It is now in Miami Miami, with a Republican mayor, Francis Suarez. I’m going to Miami in a couple weeks to interview him. He’s saying, hey, come here, low taxes, low regulation, a great international city, like, let’s make it work, and all of the tech people are fleeing bringing their companies, bringing their ideas, and San Francisco is actually being destroyed. LA has a certain version of that as well. We brought in the former D.A., this guy George Gascon, who ruined San Francisco.
30:29 Well, now he’s our D.A. in Los Angeles. Of course he’s Bernie back, and he’s a straight white guy who deposed our first ever black female D.A. Now, I don’t care about identity politics, but you would think that Bernie wouldn’t be backing a straight white guy against our first ever black female D.A. She was far better than him, by the way. But yeah, we’re not arresting people over crimes.
30:51 You know, we’re allowing people to just riot in the streets where I live off the main drag over here. You know, you’ve still got stores boarded up and still closed, and it’s like how is any of this stuff gonna come back? And what will they do? Well, Newsom will just pump money into everything they feel that they can just keep printing money, that you can just keep taking money, and nothing will get better here. But, to truly answer your question, the reason I’ve stayed, at least for now, is that if we really are at the point in the United States where good decent people have to flee the blue states, if you want to live freely, well, then the idea of the United States of America is truly over.
31:33 Yes, we will have Florida and Texas and Tennessee. They’ll be part of the separatists or something, if you can do a Star Wars reference with me and then you’ll have this decaying thing, this decaying piece of a republic, and if we’re really there, then that’s a very scary place to be, because ultimately we’ll be warring between the states. I mean, if that’s really where we are, now maybe maybe we’re at the beginnings of that, but my feeling was, let me at least fight through the recall, so hopefully some decent people get involved.
32:03 You know, Caitlyn Jenner’s running. I, I don’t really think that’s much of anything other than a publicity stunt. I hope I’m wrong, but maybe some good people get involved. I just don’t think that can be me right now. You know, I can affect things from the outside, and as I said to you before, you know, politics is dirty, man.
32:21 It’s admirable what you did. I don’t think I could do the things that it would take to go against an evil, corrupt system here in California. But maybe you would. Who knows? Look, stranger things have happened, right?
32:34 Like, they can put you, you can push a man so far until he breaks. You can get somebody to the end of the road, and then they go, well, now what do I have to do?
32:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, if you had told me on our last episode a year ago that I would be running for mayor, I would have probably slapped you. I would have fell off my chair laughing. I just never entered my realm of thought until I was watching the situation.
32:55 I was watching what was happening, and I thought to myself, Dave, I got two young boys, they’re three and four years old, and they’re gonna ask me 20 years from now, what did you do, daddy, in the great you know, crisis of 2021, did you make some more YouTube videos, or did you actually do something? And I was just like, you know, what I’ve got to do something about it, but it’s definitely, it’s brutal. It’s a grind. About a month before the elections, I looked around, what was going on with me with all of the trolling, all of the media, all of the nastiness, all that stuff, and it’s one thing for me to handle it, but for friends and family, like, they take it personally, and I’ll be like, you know, tell my wife, I’m like, honey, stay off the damn forums, please.
33:34 I told you to, but everybody takes it personally, and I just thought to myself, very few people want to be in this situation, and I’ve also thought to myself, it’s, it’s probably a very strange person that can even be in this situation,
33:46 Dave Rubin: because, well, that’s, that’s the key part, right? Because people like us, we don’t think government is God. So I’m not here to, let’s pretend I was running, it would be like I’m not going to tell you I’m here to save your life.
33:58 I can’t save you. Ronald Reagan said the worst eight words in the American language, or “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.” It’s like they, but they’ve tricked everybody into thinking the reverse, that the government is supposed to help you and save you and organize your life and give you all of these things. So really, what we need, beyond getting decent people to run, we need better education. I mean, it sounds cliche at some level, but we need to show people that the way you’re thinking about your relationship with government is completely backwards.
34:27 Government should be staying out of your life, not interjecting it to every part of your life, but too many people think, oh, if I can just get enough power, if I can just get the guy who I want to run the freaking thing, then all of my problems will be solved, and I don’t know of a problem that government has really solved. Yes, we stopped Nazism. That was pretty good. We did that about 70 years ago. We’ve done some things when we can come together as a nation, believing in the American spirit.
34:58 But what, what has government done lately? What, what problem could you have? I can’t even think of a problem, truly, that I could have where I would think, my God, it must be the government. Now, yes, police, roads, a couple basic things. But what real issue do I think it’s the government’s job to make sure that I have a job, or make sure that I’m paid a certain amount, or something like that?
35:19 It’s just a crazy. Why would you think that system is going to treat you right? It’s going to treat you like a cog. That’s it.
35:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s really well said, and, you know, also I’m in the middle of the process, thinking you know, I’m going to take a massive pay cut.
35:32 I’m going to take all sorts of crazy amounts of hate. I’m going to have to try to push through my own policies with all sorts of resistance from all the other Labor council members and then at the end of the day, what I’m really trying to do is empower people to take their lives to the next level. That’s what I’ve been doing with this show for the past 10 years, and that is the message ultimately Yeah, you kind of want less government for that. You want less taxes, and you know, allow the people to move forward So yeah, it’s a strange conundrum.
35:57 But I mean, it’s, it’s at least worth discussing, and of course I’m on the tail end of this, so I can have a little perspective. You know, it’s interesting from London watching the differences between Florida Texas, California, and New York City. And again, we saw the UFC, Dana White, first live event in Florida. The governor was there. The mayor was there.
36:18 I think, was in Jacksonville. They all showed up to, you know, work with business to get the economy going again, and Jaina basically said, look, I’m willing to work with any city that wants to work with me, which means, guess what, we’re not going to Cali or New York City anytime soon, or to these other places. It was fascinating to just see this dichotomy in America, of a bunch of people who want to get on with their American lives and their freedoms, and then some other people that want to take a completely different agenda, and it’s very strange to watch.
36:48 Dave Rubin: I’m sure it’s strange for you. You’re living it. And yeah, I don’t know where it goes from here, but well, well, at some level it’s, it’s great in a way. I mean, in some ways, this is the federalism that the Founders set up. They wanted the states to have most of the control.
37:03 They wanted the federal government to not do much, which is why DC is not a state. Of course, the Democrats want it to be a state now, because they wanted it to be this transient place where politicians would go and leave. They wanted them to mostly live in their own states. Now they want this, the Democrats want this concentrated power in DC to become a state, and that we will federalize in essence everything. There’s nothing that the modern Democrats don’t want to federalize.
37:29 They want laws, one law for the land, but the Founders set it up so that most of the stuff, taxation, local laws, those things would matter depending on who you voted for in your local state. So right now, you know, even though it feels really nuts, and especially from a Californian perspective, it sucks here, but we are actually watching the system work. The system’s doing something really nice. It’s like Florida’s reaping the benefits of doing it right.
37:58 Like, the, the economy, as I just referenced, with all the tech people now going there, like, they’re at housing prices booming. California, for the first time in the history of California, in 2020 had a population loss. It’s never happened once in California. These things are not disconnected. So while it feels kind of crazy, I think you know from a, across the pond perspective, if you guys are looking at America and going, boy, it seems nuts, Florida’s so different than Texas and Jersey and Michigan.
38:27 It’s like, actually, what you’re watching is a beautiful system. What you’re watching when it’s done right is an experiment, a constant experiment going on, and you, at least for now, have the ability to say, hey, I ran the experiment in Cali, and I’m going to Texas, and by the way, nobody’s going from red states to blue states. I mean, there’s, there’s just nobody doing it. Nobody’s going, man, I wish I lived in more lockdowns and paid higher taxes. I’m moving to California.
38:55 It just doesn’t exist.
38:56 Brian Rose: Yeah, it is great data points, and it’s great to see, and you know, I won’t go down the whole, you know, road of the cases and all that, but when you look at, you know, warm climates like Florida versus California, and they’re completely different policies, and again, the economies, and then the movement of people, I mean, these are all massive data points to tell you what’s working and what people want. And I’ll be honest, if we don’t have that option here.
39:20 You know, we’ve got, we’ve got one country. It’s been locked down by the national government when it has. I can’t move around the country. I can’t go to Europe now without a bunch of other issues, and Europe’s got their own problems, and you know, they’ve got their own mess-ups over there, and sometimes they’re locking down worse than us. And so unfortunately, I can’t vote by jumping in my car and taking my family somewhere.
39:41 I’ve got to kind of ride this out. And I had someone come over the studio recently, and she said, she, I said, you know, they’re going to, you know, this winter there’s going to be another variant. You know, this is coming, and she said I’m leaving. I had enough of this. And I said, I said, I can’t leave.
39:56 I said, I said, leaders don’t leave. You know, I’m like, this is my show, London Real. I’m committed to the city. I, I’m gonna have to be here in the trenches doing something, but it’s not gonna be pretty to go through another cycle like this in the winter and I’m expecting some more bad news to come.
40:14 Dave Rubin: Yeah, I, I suspect you’re right, but I would also, I would hope that if people learned anything, if, if that red-pilling moment happened for any subset of people in the last year that when the lockdowns come again, because I agree they will come again, whether it’s specifically related to Covid or climate lockdowns or God knows what they’re going to come up with next, that I hope enough people will say, you know, no, we’re just not gonna do it this time, and you can’t arrest all of us.
40:43 You can’t send us all to gulags, and we’re, we’re gonna just not do it this time. We’re gonna live our lives as we see fit, and I think if enough of us do that, then we’ll basically be okay, but it’s admirable to stay and fight at the same time. you don’t want to be the last guy in Dodge.
41:00 Brian Rose: You know, yeah, I hope so. I really do.
41:02 I had a Russian friend who grew up in Russia, who lives here now, and he said, Brian, he said, I really expected the citizens of this city in London to push back earlier. He said that they do the same thing in communist Russia. They control the information. They basically give us enough to live on, throw us some entertainment and a narrative, and people accept it. He said, I see the same thing happening here, and what’s supposed to be a free Western country, they throw you a furlough payment, throw you a little media, you know, give you, throw you a bone, make you feel like you’ve got a liberty back after taking it from you, and everybody complies, and I was a bit surprised too.
41:36 So we will see. We’ll keep talking and educating. Let me ask you about technology, Dave, because you’ve got your hand in tech, and you have with Locals.com recently. I had George Farmer on last year, who’s just become the CEO of Parler, which is amazing. He’s a friend of ours.
41:51 We just had Candace on the show a few weeks ago when she said she’d be running, as VP in 2024 with Trump as well. We could talk about that shortly. You know, we raised a million and a half dollars for our Digital Freedom Platform last year and streamed 57 episodes, and don’t get me started, Dave, but much of those episodes that were being censored on YouTube, those things are now being discussed in mainstream media and by our president, things that I was called all sorts of nasty things for publishing last year, now it’s considered the normal narrative.
42:20 But we can talk about that shortly. You just raised, well, basically reality is just about three months after the [expletive]. That’s pretty much where we’re at. I was vilified for having some of those guests on my show, and much of what they said now is proving to be true, or very considered to be a possibility. It’s shocking.
42:38 You just got, I think, a 3.8 million dollar investment in Locals. Tell me about using tech to fight back, you know, against, you know, these trillions of dollars in this established, whatever, Silicon Valley, even if it’s displaced to other places, can it be done? How are you doing it, and what do you think we need to keep our eye on in order to be successful?
43:00 Dave Rubin: Well, it’s funny, because a couple years ago, you know, I’m a YouTube guy, just like you are, and we all saw these problems.
43:07 You know, I don’t think I’m sitting here like I’m Nostradamus. We all were like, something’s not right with the algorithm. You know, I get more subscribers, but my views go, go down because less people are seeing it. We’re being shadow banned. All of the stuff that we all knew about.
43:21 I was like, something’s not right here, and I kept, you know, I know enough people in the tech world through the show that I do, that I kept saying to people, why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? And everybody was just like, ah, it’s too political, you know, whatever. We create it, it’ll be thought of as right wing and scary and all that stuff, and I was just like, you know what, enough’s enough. I’m gonna start building something, and what I thought we could build, and this is really how Locals started, was we should build digital homes for creators, the same way that somebody, the house that I am in right now, but what I do in this house has nothing to do with them.
43:53 They built it for me, and they sell it to me, and then they get out of the way. What we do with Locals, we build you a community where it’s all your video, you own it. It’s all, or your audio, you own it. You own all the user data. You have a news feed that there’s no algorithmic manipulation.
44:08 People can like and comment. We have live chat. We have live videos streaming. Coming, I mean, you guys absolutely should be on there. I’ll be happy to connect you with the team afterwards, but in essence we give you the tools to be an independent creator online, and it’s subscription based, so there are no bulk, there are no bots, there are no trolls, because once you literally, if you put our minimum in a community, you set your minimum.
44:32 The minimum we allow on the platform is two dollars, but literally two dollars a month would keep out 99.9 of the trolls, and if someone wants to pay you to troll you, well, congratulations, now you’re profiting for it from, you know, from the trolling, or you can kick them out of your community. The same way, if someone came into my house and kept trolling me, I would say, you can’t be in my house, but you could do anything you want outside of my house, so you could still be in someone else’s local community. So I felt we built a really smart, bottom-up tech that seemed fairly obvious, and what was interesting is that two years ago, when I was initially going to Silicon Valley and telling everybody, nobody pushed back on the idea.
45:11 Everybody loved the idea, but it was all about, ah, we’re afraid to put money into something political, and I kept saying, guys, this isn’t actually political. I want gamers on there, and unboxers, and knitters, and anyone that has a community that they want to be able to connect with people, having nothing to do, you know, without the pipes of big tech. Long story short, it was a lot of work in the last two and a half years. But our last round was led by David Sachs, who’s the former CEO of PayPal, former Stanford colleague with Peter Thiel, and then that opened up a bunch of doors with not only great investors but true innovators, and we’re working on decentralized storage and decentralized payments, and all those things.
45:54 And I would say this: we’re just one part of the new ecosystem. So I would say we’re the community and subscription piece of the new ecosystem. So, like, I, you know, Patreon is sort of the old method. We’re the new method, where you own it. But then there’s other pieces in that ecosystem, you know, maybe Rumble will eventually replace YouTube, maybe Parler will eventually replace Twitter, and an entire new ecosystem can develop.
46:19 These, these are big ideas. These are things that we’re going to have to figure out. There’s technological issues, there’s legal issues, there’s philosophical issues related to free speech, all of those things. But I got to tell you, it’s been fun. You know, it’s a lot of work, but when you, just in these last two years that I just had an idea that then turned into something, and then I go to these meetings with people, and they’re like, hey, we want to give you money.
46:40 We believe in this. You know, I’m not pocketing that money. I, I own some of the company, obviously, but the, that they’re like oh, we believe in this, and let’s fight this thing together. I think more people are getting, getting a little brave. I think investors are starting to say this big tech stuff is out of control, and it’s not just that they’re coming for conservatives.
46:58 They’re coming for everybody, and let’s see if we can fight it. So it’s, it’s fun along the road, but it’s, it’s work. I mean, it’s real work.
47:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, seriously, congratulations on that raise, because you know, I, I ran a show here called Silicone Reel for a couple years, where I interviewed about a hundred of the top CEOs in tech here in London, that would go on to create these multi-billion-dollar companies, and I know how hard it is to do that, and to keep raising, and to get the right people, and, you know, to go up against some of the big guys that are, you know, tens of thousands of times bigger than you.
47:30 So I mean, I was so happy to see you got that raised, so congrats, and yes, I want to be a part of it. And as I remember, you created this, I think, when you and Jordan Peterson decided that Patreon was doing the wrong thing, when it was coming to withholding people’s money, and you guys, I mean, really went out on a limb, and I think earlier than you had to, and you guys said, wait a second, this is not okay, even though I don’t think they were taking your money away and you said, we’ve got to get off this platform, we don’t support this type of behavior, even though I think you probably both were making good money on there, and you said, we got to do something different. Can you talk about what happened there, and then how important that financial component is, because you know, this whole decentralized finance piece is crucial to the future?
48:13 Dave Rubin: I think, yeah, so that was way back when, in 2018. It was December of 2018, and without getting too far into the nitty-gritty, a guy by the name of Sargon of Akkad, one of your countrymen, Carl Benjamin, he was on Patreon, and he went on another show, not his own YouTube show that he was funding on Patreon. He was a guest on another show, and he said the N-word. Now, he didn’t say it to be racist or to be racially pejorative. He said it to mock the people who use language like that, but Patreon heard somehow that got to the higher-ups of Patreon, and they deleted his account with no recourse.
48:53 They just deleted him. This is where the guy made his living, and was doing a lot of very good stuff, and, and what was an even scarier escalation wasn’t that they could just delete him just like that, but they deleted him for, for something that he didn’t even do on their platform. He didn’t do it on Patreon, and he didn’t do it on YouTube that he was funding through Patreon. He did it on something else altogether, which in essence, that’s like, oh, could Patreon just boot someone if they happen to hear a private phone call that you have?
49:20 I mean, it was a massive escalation. So Jordan and I both felt that was the moment to do something. We were on tour together. For me to get off Patreon was a massive lift, because my company was making about 80 of our rev on Patreon, and you know, I have employees, so I was taking a massive risk, but I felt, I felt, if you do the right thing and you keep your head on straight and you have a plan, that things will be better on the other side. It was a little less risky for Jordan, obviously, because 12 Rules for Life was selling at such an extraordinarily high rate, and the tour, and, you know, I’m not, I’m not saying I’m destitute.
49:57 You know, I was on tour with Jordan, so it’s not nothing, obviously, but basically we plotted, and on June, January 15th of 2019, we both officially closed our accounts, and I started rubinreport.locals.com, which was the first community of Locals, and get this, this was the cool part. By doing what I thought was right, by taking a risk, my revenue almost overnight jumped by 30 percent, because people were like, whoa, you did something. You fought, and you know, that idea I’ve often heard referred to, and I’ve called the bravery deficit, that a lot of people are outsourcing bravery right now, so they’re willing, they’re happy to say, hey, I’ll give you five bucks a month because you’re fighting the fight that, that is important to me in my life, but maybe I can’t do it for whatever personal reasons I have, but in essence, once we did that and we saw the revenue jump, then we were like, whoa, now there’s a real opportunity to build something much bigger, and that’s really where Locals started to take off.
50:58 Brian Rose: It’s a great story, and it’s a great thing for people to remember. You know, the exact same thing happened with us last year. It was April 6th. We got banned and deleted from YouTube. I started fighting back.
51:08 My initial reaction, David, was to re-upload the video and upload vlogs complaining about that. Like, my initial reaction was, this is not okay, and I had never asked for a donation in nine years of London Real. I just thought, I, I, I’m not going to do that. I was trying to create products and deliver value, and we thought, you know what, we’re going to create our own platform, stream it live from this platform. This is during lockdown and stuff, where you actually couldn’t even create a page on one of these crowdfunding sites, because no one was around, and then I also knew they would probably pull my page anyways, because of what I was doing, and so we did it all for my team here, all from scratch, and we raised 1.5 million dollars in about 30 some days.
51:47 It blew my mind. I mean, we figured we needed about a hundred grand to do the live stream. We got the people from the Super Bowl to do it, but, but once we saw that people were all in, and they really wanted to, like, see someone stand up, for, because they didn’t see anybody doing that. It blew us away, and it allowed us to do 57 more episodes and have all the conversations that last year were crazy and this year are trendy. And but again, it was also really, you know, revealing to me that there was a need, and we got an amazing community on the back of it.
52:17 One thing that did happen, Dave, that I haven’t really talked about is we got dropped from many platforms. PayPal suspended our account for six months, so we were raising money on PayPal through that. They held it for six months. Most people couldn’t even handle that. Dropbox deleted our accounts, which means they must have been watching the videos inside Dropbox, because it was censored content.
52:39 Facebook pulled me. I mean, it’s probably seven different platforms yank me, I thought my bank was going to close down my account at one point, my actual terrestrial bank here, and so it showed me how important the finance was. We had to go from payment platform to payment platform to payment platform, because each one kept pulling us as soon as they saw some word on our site that we were talking about, whether it was lockdown or whatever, Covid or masks or something, so I know what that’s like to have your money stopped, you know, by other forces, and that’s why we’re really going hard on this whole decentralized finance ecosystem, and I actually started working on Wall Street in 93.
53:19 I came to London to work in banking for nine years, and when I’m looking at decentralized finance, the stuff that’s happened in the last 12 to 18 months, it’s incredible, and it’s not, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. I mean, I, I put together some pretty complicated derivative trades in the 90s, and I’ve seen what they developed in the last 12 months. It took Wall Street 30 or 40 years to develop some of these systems in tech, and so we’ve just created our DeFi Academy, and we’re going to basically bring in people that want to invest in this infrastructure for the future, and I think it’s going to be the solution to all of these banks and governments trying to pull people’s money, because if people knew the information their banking institution had about them, I mean, forget about your browser data.
54:04 If I know where you’ve spent every dollar for the past 10 years, Dave, I know more about you probably than any other source of information, and yet we don’t think about it. We allow the banks to make us jump through hoops. So many people in this world, billions of people don’t even have access to banking. They have to send money through Western Union for these ridiculous fees, so yeah, I’m really bullish on DeFi, which is different than crypto. Crypto’s just one of the building blocks at DeFi, and I’m sure you’ve gone down the rabbit hole, but it’s exciting, and we’re going all in on it.
54:33 Dave Rubin: Oh, it’s super exciting, we’ve gone down the rabbit hole. I, I can’t tell you every rabbit hole that I’ve gone down, because we’ve got lots of conversations with some, with interesting people about decentralized finance, and because obviously you don’t want to be reliant solely on the banks, you don’t want to be reliant solely on the usual payment processors, PayPal, etc. But what a cool, I mean, everything that you just said there, in essence, is you believe in human ingenuity, that in a year and a half human ingenuity figured out something that took 30 years before to figure out, and because of that, we can figure out ways to solve problems, and that’s what I love.
55:10 And again, I can always do a sci-fi reference with almost everything, but we’re in the Matrix right now, and we’re fighting the machines. The machines are everywhere. You know, the agents are everywhere, but a few of us that are awake, we can figure something out, and it’s just not going to be easy. Neo, Neo wasn’t the happiest guy in the world. Morpheus wasn’t thrilled with life every day, but he had a mission to accomplish, and that gave him purpose, and they fix the world, although Part Four is coming out, so who knows how it ended.
55:38 Brian Rose: Is it? Wow. Yeah. It all comes down, it all comes down to freedoms and empowering people, and again, there’s this old book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. I mean, the innovators are never those that are currently the winners in the status quo.
55:50 It always needs an outsider, and when I watch this, I see all these outsiders, and I worked in the banking world for a long time. It’s a place that’s very old school. It’s set in its ways, and it doesn’t have to innovate, and it’s exciting to see this world. Just a few, you know, a few more things. What’s your future look like?
56:06 Are you going to be out on the road, maybe with Jordan Peterson? I see he’s, he’s got his new book out, he’s doing shows. Is that possible? You guys might be coming back to London. Tell me,
56:15 Dave Rubin: I would love to come back.
56:16 You know, I, I missed my entire book tour because Covid, so we had, you know, I had about 30 stops in the US, and then we were putting together the European piece of that, and I loved, loved, love, love going to London and going all over the UK. Actually, I found that the audiences were hungry and fun and energetic and really great. So, uh, whether it’s with Jordan or not, you know, he’s hinted once or twice that he would like to get back out on the road.
56:41 You know, he lives in Canada, though. Canada is under a worse lockdown than us here. So you know, I think, I think once the fall rolls around, let’s, let’s kind of get through the summer, and then I sense we’ll really have a better picture.
56:53 Brian Rose: Is the U.S. fully open, or is it just going to be certain states are? And then what are we gonna do?
56:58 Dave Rubin: But yeah, I miss, I miss being out there with the people. I, I love that what you described about meeting people on the streets. To me, that when you get a live crowd in front of you, it’s, it’s as good as it gets.
57:08 Brian Rose: All right, what’s happening in 2024? Is it Trump, Owens, is it happening?
57:12 Dave Rubin: If I had to guess, if I absolutely had to guess, it’s DeSantis. Somebody, maybe Owens, maybe Nikki Haley, maybe Dan Crenshaw. I think there’s actually a really rich crop of people that it could potentially be. Tim Scott would be phenomenal, the, the South Carolina senator. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to me.
57:35 Trump, if Trump really wants to take this thing to the end, it’s like, be the guy on the outside, so that, so that DeSantis can run right through the middle. Be the blocker. The media is coming. Big tech’s coming. You know how to fight it.
57:49 You’ve done it. Now put the ego aside and just do that thing, and let DeSantis run right through the middle. That would be a beautiful story. Can Trump do that? Does Trump want to do it?
57:59 I, I don’t know. I suspect we’ll find out over the next couple months, but DeSantis seems like the right guy. He’s got the right energy. He’s got the right ideas. I think he’s only 42 years old, former member of the military, he’s willing to fight.
58:11 It’s like the guy’s got the whole package.
58:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s been great watching him, and we had Crenshaw on the show last year. It’s amazing to see how, how, even how much further he’s even gone in the last year. You know, his, yeah, he’s just so relevant. He always has the right take on things.
58:26 It’s a right measure of you know, of time to fight, and the time to try to say, okay, let’s be reasonable. It’s, it’s great to watch him, and so it’s nice to see a rich field like you said, as opposed to just one person. There’s gonna be a great rich crop of diverse, in the best sense of the word, Republicans, and it’s funny when you said about Trump working behind the scenes, I thought of Bezos, because Bezos, you know, he’s, I think he’s now, what, he’s resigned as CEO, Amazon, or he’s going to remove, because he probably doesn’t want to be rolled out in front of Congress again, and so again he’s decided, wait a second, I don’t want to be in the front taking all the heat, that I’d rather, once you’ve got the 4 trillion, you can probably find other things to do.
59:04 Dave Rubin: You know, yeah, but there’s better places to be than right in the fire.
59:07 Brian Rose: Last thing, Dave, you started in comedy, and we’re seeing comedy in a weird place right now, where in some ways they’re the only speak, people speaking the truth, but in some ways they feel like they can’t say what they used to say, and you know, we see shows that were made five, seven years ago that couldn’t be made now, even, you know, one-hour specials that couldn’t be made now. I know that’s where your roots were.
59:27 What do you see in the comedy landscape, and will it ultimately be our savior somehow?
59:31 Dave Rubin: It’s true, Brian, I used to be funny a long time ago. That’s what I miss about the live thing. I mean, that’s what I was doing with Jordan. I was warming up the crowd.
59:39 I was having fun with everybody, and, you know, on the off nights of the tour, I would sell out a comedy club and just get up there, and, you know, I got, I got five jokes, but I know how to get up there and just have fun with everybody and talk about the news and what’s going on in the world, and that kind of thing. Comedy has been decimated by wokeism. I mean, people that were funny, I suppose, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, these people that were once funny have all become hysterical woke progressive activists.
1:00:04 By the way, several of the people I just mentioned have also been in blackface, so usually it’s that they’re just covering up their own sins. You know, that’s, that’s what they’re often doing. Jimmy Kimmel, who’s in blackface, Carl Malone for years he was doing this, and now he’s the biggest social justice warrior on the planet, and we’ll run around telling you that you’re racist and that America is racist. I mean, the guy’s just a clown. I do sense that there’s going to be this rebirth of it, and that would be connected to what we were talking about earlier about young people that are just like, screw all of you, like we are not going to live by these ridiculous rules.
1:00:36 We’re not going to be afraid of our shadow and what we say all the time, and the rest of it. So I’m, I’m bullish on that. New young comics will, will come around, and that’s the other piece. I just, I just want to get back out there. We were thinking about maybe doing, like, a monthly live show in L.A., just to get in front of people.
1:00:53 I want people to laugh together, to, to break bread together, to drink together again. You know, it’s been basically a year and a half since I went to a bar. You know, even, even here in LA, where we’ve opened up to some degree, you can’t sit at a bar. I mean, it’s just nonsense, but you know, I used to like going to a bar, sit down, next thing you know, you’re chatting with somebody, next thing you know, you’re chatting with four people. Pretty cool.
1:01:16 We don’t do any of that anymore, so we got to rebuild those human connections, and a lot of it does of course come through comedy.
1:01:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely. And The Rubin Report, I mean, man, there’s no flies on you. I mean, you’re producing content every single day, it seems. It’s slick, it’s well produced, you’ve got great guests.
1:01:31 I mean, it’s really, it’s, it’s blossomed and gone a little exponential. Obviously that’s intentional on your part. But how do you do all that, and where’s it going in the future?
1:01:41 Dave Rubin: You know, I like doing it. I mean, that really is the truth.
1:01:44 We’ve shifted a little bit away from interviews. I’m doing one or two interviews a week, and I’m doing the daily direct-to-camera thing, which I love doing. I wake up my producer, and we go through some stories. Hey, what’s interesting to talk about? I have basically no script, you know, I have a cup, I know I have to have the three stories, maybe, that I’m talking about, one or two data points, but it’s basically just me doing a brain dump, you know, just, here’s what’s on my mind, let’s do it, and I try to be a little, a little sillier and not make everybody depressed and angry.
1:02:11 So I’m loving that. You know, we, we do the interview once or twice a week, as I said. I’d love to start doing some more live stuff, so hopefully doing some, you know, in front of crowds, that kind of thing, and then we’ll just kind of see where it continues to go, you know, as Locals continues to explode. You know, we’re on a nice trajectory with that, and that’s obviously deeply connected to what’s going on with the show, and if, if the show can continue to be a hub of, you know, where sane people can come together and get the word out on a little, a little decency, then I’ve done something.
1:02:42 Brian Rose: All right. And YouTube is still playing nice with you, relatively, you know?
1:02:47 Dave Rubin: Nobody knows. We are all, it is by the grace of Susan Wojcicki that any of us exist.
1:02:53 Brian Rose: It’s so true.
1:02:54 It’s so true. And you think that the interviews over the last five years allowed you to do the two-camera stuff as well as you do it now? Do you think having that knowledge base, because I know it did for me, I don’t think I could have done that.
1:03:06 Dave Rubin: You know, you know this, you know this as an interviewer. The best part of being an interviewer is that if you’re interviewing the right people, you can get a little something from everybody.
1:03:15 Dave Rubin: You know, if you sit down with Jordan Peterson long enough, if you don’t get something from him, really learn something, then, then there’s something wrong with you. If you don’t, if you sit down with Peter Thiel and you don’t get something from him, something’s wrong with you. And then if you do that over years and years with a really varied collection of people, Thomas Sowell, I mean, some of the people I’ve been so honored to sit now with, each one of them, I was able to take something from them in the best sense of it.
1:03:39 I was able to incorporate their world view, their ideas, so it allowed me now to speak very clearly about the things that I care about. So I think it actually feels to me like a very natural progression of, oh, I, I was an interviewer for, let’s say, five years, that’s mostly what I was known as, where now I’m known as something else. I’m known as, you know, somebody that’s, that’s talking for a living, rather rather than listening, although I enjoy the listening part too.
1:04:05 It refined all of it, and, you know, who knows where it’ll be in five years?
1:04:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, same thing with me. I mean, I spent almost 10 years listening, and then the last nine months I was doing a lot of talking, you know, running for office, and it, you know, it was a transition, but I learned so much from sitting in the room with so many incredible people, and I got to practice my own articulation, and then it was kind of time, you know, to let it all out there, and it’s a beautiful thing, and again, listening is so important.
1:04:32 And, you know, I just want to say one final thing. You know what’s special about you, Dave, is that you are a listener, and you also, you see humanity in people, where a lot of people in your space don’t. They quickly vilify them and turn them into the other, and I really appreciate how you first of all have been honest about your whole history. Look, I used to be left and now I’m right. You actually allow people to finish their sentences on your shows, which is incredible.
1:04:55 And also you’re, you’re the first one to say, look, Dorsey’s a human, because he actually is. You know, and to say, look, look at the humanity in these people, as far as we know
1:05:05 Dave Rubin: Yeah, exactly. But like, that’s the only way I think we’re gonna ever get anywhere, is if we actually be able to still have conversations with everybody, because I’m a believer in humans in the long run, if we can get enough of us in the same room and come to a consensus, maybe like the old school we used to do in the town halls and stuff, you know, that we know that would work.
1:05:26 It’s when you divide us with the tech and the separation and the media wars and the InfoWars, when things kind of go wrong.
1:05:33 Brian Rose: So I just appreciate the way you handle things. And again, you always, I, it seems to me you go out of your way to remind people that there is a we’re all humans in this, and I appreciate that. So thank you.
1:05:43 Dave Rubin: I’m trying.
1:05:44 I appreciate your work as well, and I hope we can do this actually in person. I, I will make it to London if Sadiq let me in, so we’ll, we’ll figure it out.
1:05:52 Brian Rose: All right, we’ll do that. We’d love to see you here in studio. We would love to get you to get your book tour over here as well.
1:05:58 Locals.com, I’m going to be a part of it, so I’ll hook up your people as far as that. And again, people should subscribe to The Rubin Report, still get your book. You got another book coming out next year.
1:06:08 Dave Rubin: Rumor is right, it’s coming out next April.
1:06:10 Brian Rose: Okay, that’s exciting.
1:06:11 Dave Rubin: Excellence is slow man, and let’s keep Rock Heston on YouTube as long as we can,
1:06:17 Brian Rose: and yeah, again, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you and what you do.
1:06:21 Dave Rubin: Likewise. Brian, good seeing you.
1:06:23 Brian Rose: All right, great stuff.
1:06:25 Thank you all. We appreciate. See you next time on London Real. You
