Ep 117: Dave Rubin on the Woke Right, Free Speech vs Conspiracy Theories & His New Tequila Company

22:44I was born in it. Like I was born in that thing. He was already successful by the time cancel culture came around. So I can be somewhat sympathetic to that. Maybe it just got a little out of hand. The part that I don't like is that I'm sure you saw at least some of the clips of when he was on Rogan about three or four months ago and they started talking about this stuff. And he basically was like, he's like, yeah, the government was calling us and it was brutal. It was brutal. They were calling us and telling us to take all these things down and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, so you're about to have your mea culpa and your mea culpa should be either we shouldn't have done it or I apologize or something.

23:16But it's like, then give us some names. So, okay, if government agents called you and said, you have to take this down, you're not the bad guy in the story. Now you're under the pressure of the federal government to do something that apparently you weren't happy with. Go a little bit further. And I think that that's like the weird part with him. It's like, I don't think he's the evil thing that a lot of people have made him out to be, but get a little bit closer to the end of the road so that all the people that are kind of 50-50 on you would be like... There's a cowardice about fighting back and it's probably coming from his lawyers, I'm sure.

23:48You have to remember this guy's being coached by a million annoying people. And it's like, I mean, I will say like Gary Gensler at the SEC, for example, was like abusing his power and doing things that are totally out of line. And, you know, my friends, the Michael Voskens are disgusted by the fact that MIT or whoever's hired him in the Republic about that. And I like that. I respect that they're willing to like take that swing. He's not willing to take that swing. And so he's, he's not, he's not a guy's guy, you know? And which is a funny cause he's trying to talk about masculinity. No, now he's all like.

24:12But like being a guy's guy means the people who fucked with you, pardon my French. They don't fuck with you. Yeah. They, they learned not to again, cause it was wrong. And that's something that this Silicon Valley culture, the legal culture just missing. Well, that, I think that's the key point because if he wants to take everybody into the metaverse and have us all walking around with that strap on, on our head and all that craziness, that's a different that's coming that where you just went mentally that's like three steps down he's gonna strap us into this first and then there'll be other trap bonds for sure that's coming obviously like we all know where this is all going to sex bots no one's gonna ever touch another human again and all that but putting that aside like it's like dude if you want to take us down that road which he wants us to go into that metaverse with him then is there any reason to believe the pressure won't come exactly what you just pointed out you have to show the trust right now.

24:59And I think that's where it's like the idea that I would follow him down that road again, maybe if you had the full mea culpa, but that's not what he did. He's not sure he's going to be a warrior, which is frustrating. Although he did get a little more tan and he lost some weight and he must be on TRT. But it's impressive overall. Let's talk a little bit about, because this guy, obviously he got tied into the whole thing with the election in 2020 and 2024. 2024 was even more of a podcast selection than the last one. I think you were very influential. Joe Rogan lives down the road here was very influential, obviously, as well.

25:31Like, and this is, I think overall, it was probably a good thing in the sense that you have all these different voices and different perspectives, kind of breaking through the broken legacy media. But we were also talking about this last night. There's ways in which it's also sometimes a crazy thing where you have people who have no expertise on history, don't really know the truth. And they're opening up these insane conversations about how we have a statue of Churchill here. You were joking with that guy. Look at that smug bastard. Look at him. Look at him. I'm going to take over the world. That was my British Winston Churchill.

26:00That was pretty good, right? That was all right. He wrote a bunch of my favorite books. I love how he was the first Lord of the Admiralty before World War I. And he actually got to get rid of all these bureaucrats to make the Navy strong enough to confront the Germans. And he did a lot of things over his career. Bad dude. Bad dude. Amazing guy. Apparently responsible for modern Britain's problems, which is quite a stretch to me. But how do you think about this? That line. How do you think about this? Yeah. Well, okay. So, first off, that line, just real quick. So Tucker said that line that basically was like, well, Churchill's the bad guy because look at Britain now.

26:30And it's like, dude, he stopped Hitler. Now I get – let's put aside the Hitler thing for a second. But you can't blame someone for some stuff that's happening 70 years later. Curtis Yarvin, the famous crazy monarchist, he's like – he'd probably blame the glorious revolution for Britain's problems. For 1688, which is comical to me. But I mean you can blame William the Conqueror as they used to call him William the Bastard. Maybe it was his fault. Of course. Yes. For the trans people. Right. Exactly. So I guess you can do that if you want. You can always lay blame elsewhere and you can always go back another decade and find another person who is not perfect.

27:05The War of the Roses ended the wrong way. Exactly. Now the trans people are in charge. Exactly. So like you can do that, right? You absolutely can do that. I don't think it's the most sensible thing to do. But to your broader point of like, OK, this was the election of the Internet. There's the ascendant new media. There's the descendant old media. I mean, even right now, as we're watching this fight right now because of Jake Tapper's new book, and it's like the very people who hid Biden's incompetency are now writing books and doing media appearances. And now the new media is attacking them for it.

27:33It's a perfect example of all of this lunacy. It's frustrating because they don't necessarily have any context on actual history, and they just make things up. Churchill, by the way, the Socialists took over and broke a lot of things. You know what his line was in the bathroom when the opposition leader, Clement Attlee, went to stand next to him? and he's he got he's i'm very uncomfortable with this uh because clinton was looking he said whenever you guys see something particularly large you always attempt to nationalize it so you're like moved away oh that's funny he's a witty guy who was against the socialists but these guys have no context on the history in general which and and i think free speech is important but it's kind of scary for our culture that there's wacky people taking millions of people down a direction it's just right so let's let's leave aside churchill and hitler and everything else let's just talk about the free speech component yeah so okay so i have no doubt that you and I agree that if someone wants to have a podcast and talk about whatever the hell they want to talk about, they are welcome to talk about it, right?

28:22So in no way whatsoever am I calling to censor anybody. If you break the law, meaning if you use your podcast to say, go kill those people, or here's how to build a bomb or, you know, the things that are actually illegal, then you have a bigger problem. But in terms of the pure, the pure, because this is definitely the part that will be clipped of this episode in terms of the pure free speech part and the freedom of association and everything else. I am allowed to interview whoever I want. You are. Joe Rogan is everybody else. Now, to your broader point of in this world where now everything has been decentralized and we don't go to, you know, quote unquote, authoritative sources who in many cases failed us terribly.

29:01And that became very obvious during COVID. The question is, do any of us that have large audiences, do we have some sort of responsibility to the truth as opposed to just taking everybody down every rabbit hole and seeing where that goes and just being like, well, I'm just doing what I want to do. My response to that is yes, I do feel that I have a responsibility as someone of some level of influence that tries to communicate the news honestly to people. I take that very seriously. That doesn't mean I'm not going to make mistakes. It doesn't mean I'm not going to interview somebody and miss something or whatever it might be, but I take that seriously.

29:40Now it might just be that there are other people who are bigger than me that just don't feel that way. That are just like, I'm around and I'm just going to talk to anybody and unearth every crazy conspiracy theory. Some of these guys love conspiracy theories and it's almost just like a way of being is they're going to delve into conspiracy theory and everyone kind of knows it's conspiracy. But then I guess the problem is not everyone does know it's a fake conspiracy. Right. And look, at the end of the day, the only way you can solve for that unless you want some centralized department of truth, like right out of George Orwell, which none of us want.

30:10The only way you can solve for that is more speech. So it's like, I would never tell Rogan not only who he can have on a show or who he can't, but if he wants to have every conspiracy theorist on all the time, that's fine. The hope would be that we have a smart enough population. And this is where also education has so failed us, but maybe AI can help in this, that people will watch certain things. It's what I described last night. I've been saying on my show all week. It's the ancient alienification of all of these things. We've basically decided to take ancient aliens and just be like, how did the Egyptian pyramids get here?

30:41Well, ancient alien theorists think that, and it came from Martians. We've done that now with Churchill. We've done that now with the JFK files. We've done that with this, that, the other thing. And once you break down every barrier about the known world, it might get a lot uglier on the other side. So I think all, for the people that are concerned about this, which I would include both of us. All I'm saying is we're just trying to, I think, figure out what are proper guardrails, not to stop people from speaking, but how to sort of, how to sort the truth from the bullshit. And I don't know what the answer to that is.

31:15I want to turn this to some of the other battles in this world around us. And, you know, so my concern, by the way, in the background on this is it does seem like a lot of forces have conquered our education in our country, the teachers unions, a lot of leftists kind of marched through these things. And they put these kind of woke oppressor, oppressed narratives in. And it's, it's, it's scary for me as my mom's side is Jewish. My dad's side is Catholic. Our kids are Jewish. And it's scary for me from that perspective, because if you truly believe the only main reason people are not doing well is racism, then you also kind of have to believe that the reason some minorities are doing better must be oppression.

31:46And so, and so you get all these young people in our population are very primed to see Jews as oppressors. And then, and then you've always had these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And so when you share them, the population has already kind of been programmed to maybe believe this stuff. And so you just get millions of people going along with it. In this context, you have the Ben Shapiro and Tucker situation. And Tucker's someone I actually agree with on a lot of things. And I have a lot of respect for a lot of other things you stood up for. But on this respect, it's clearly kind of like whistling along those lines.

32:15And it's crazy. What's your impression of this situation? Well, I agree with that. It's been sort of disappointing to see Tucker do this. It's just kind of obvious what he's doing is what i would say like he's bringing on people always to kind of further yeah it's the jews like it's just one thing after another he goes out of his way to do we are pretty awesome so i know why people are annoying no well well well people people like their minorities oppressed and jews had a lot of oppression and then suddenly thanks to the freedom of america jews got over oppression but that doesn't put you in the oppressor class immediately if you view the world in this, you know, And there are a lot of annoying lefty Jews for people on the right to attack.

32:55I'm not one of those, but I get it. I get why they're annoyed at those people. Sure. Well, you should be annoyed at lefties in general. So if you happen to meet a lefty who's a Jew, okay. And if you happen to meet a lefty who's a black, but that doesn't mean that all black people are lefties or annoying or Jews or anything else. This, I mean, what this really boils down to is the difference between individualism and collectivism, obviously. If you're going to look at three guys and be like, well, those three are Jews and those three are blacks and I'm going to judge everyone by that. it's insane right like it's absolutely that's why some people call it woke right i guess is that a term that you think stupid or does it kind of make sense um i think it makes sense because they're starting to use that it's not that they're into the exact same idea set but they're starting to use the same tools and they're starting to use some of the same language what i would say as it pertains to tucker is i would love to see again tucker can run his show however he wants and i don't want tucker kicked off anything or anything else i was texting with him last week so i'm not sitting here like shitting on him.

33:50But what I would like to see is, okay, Tucker, if you have whatever these beliefs are and you keep bringing all of these people on and you're such an arbiter of truth as I think he purports to be, well then you have to, don't just talk about Ben Shapiro every week, invite him. He texted me, said he's welcome on a show, but he won't publicly invite him. So it's like publicly invite him or I'll go on and discuss this stuff. Or I'm sure you would. There's videos of him two years ago saying Douglas Murray is the most important public intellectual we have and nobody knows more about anything. And now he's mocking him every week.

34:21So I think we're all just asking him to maybe be a little bit more open than he is or something like that. I'm not calling to censor him at all. I don't think he's evil. I think there are some people who are genuinely bad actors in this space. Is this him responding? We mentioned this last night as well with the students. There's all these crazy incentives where you have a big audience and the audience kind of like responds well to certain things. And so you're, you as a, as a journalist or media personality, you start thinking in terms of what your audience wants to hear, what they're going to share.

34:52Like, is he responding to certain people on the right and kind of echoing what they want to hear right now? So again, I can't speak to what's in his heart, but what I can speak to is that this is a guy who is in cable news, right? He was huge on cable news. It was the number one rated show in cable news when he got axed, but he was in a certain box and it had certain, you know, it was like a, like bumper bowling. Like it was just in these kind of lanes. Right. Then he, and when Tucker at the height of his career, he came to my house to do my show. He walks into my garage and he sees my studio and I had a TV well before, you know, this is before COVID.

35:25So like I was early in on the home studio thing and I had a, as good a studio at five, you know, as they have on network TV, he opens up the door to my garage. His exact words were holy fucking shit, you did it. He could not believe how free I was, right? And I think, so that got in his mind. I'm not saying it was just me, but like the idea that there's freedom on the other side, you can do whatever you want. So then he gets fired by Fox for whether it had to do with the election stuff or whatever it was, he gets fired by Fox. Now he's free. He's in a completely different world where the pressures are completely different.

35:59And then with algorithms and everything else. Yeah. If you just keep giving red meat to your people and the algorithm keeps pushing them that direction, you, you, you know, it's basically like if you were to walk in the ocean and you had your eyes closed and you know, if you were walking sort of horizontally to the waves over time, you're going to keep moving and not even realize that you moved. And I think that that probably is a better explanation. I prefer that be the explanation rather than he somehow is racist or something. I hope that's what it is. And I've noticed this too this is obviously not what i do for a living i'm doing it for fun yeah i thought the other day someone thought i was that would be nice i wish i was doing it for fun it was great that someone thought i was a podcaster i want to be super rich and do this for fun and and and i have noticed though if i want to get like a lot of views i just like say like crazy populist right things it's a good thing that's not how i'm making my money because it is it does push you that way a little bit it does and i would also say that you know part of the problem is that speaking calmly about things and really trying to like dissect things properly and really like, well, it just doesn't go viral.

36:58It just doesn't go viral. So like someone could be watching this right now, right? And they're going, boy, you know, Joe's good interviewer. I like Dave, whatever. Okay. They're having an interest, but they're not at the edge of their seat right now. Like I'm going to clip that and put it up and destroy those people. But if you do the other thing, if you do the other, ah, the fucking Jews did it or well, then you can create all of the viral moments. And if you watched any of that Douglas Murray, Dave Smith debate on Tucker, it was like it didn't really matter what happened for three hours of the conversation.

37:27It was just like, could someone get a 15 second snippet? Because that then becomes the fire of the Internet. They mock them and it goes that way. And then that's the thing that the rest of the Internet models after. So these are all the things that are changing so fast in how we communicate with each other that we're going to have to come to some reckoning with this. Well, I hope so, because otherwise our politics are screwed. Like the Democratic Party, for example, right now, I have some pretty rational, moderate Democratic friends. I'm not allowed to say that for some people on the road. But I think there are some of them that are rational.

37:54I'd love to meet them. Exactly. Which is fine. And then it seems like they're like 20 to 25 percent of the party. And actually, though, what's crazy is 70 percent of the party doesn't even agree with the crazy trans issues. But the 30 percent that does and all these are people who are afraid in the middle are like pulling it in all these crazy ways. And like, is AOC and Bernie going to be in charge of it? Are we going to be able to swing it back to the same place? I don't want to be as involved in politics as I am. But if AOC and Bernie are the other option, it's actually like, it's almost like the right wants them to be too, because now I have to be more involved in the right.

38:24Well, that's a great way of laying it out, because that's why I'm so interested in all of these tech guys that became political, because most of you guys just wanted to build things. And usually people that want to build things are pretty libertarian in nature, right? You just want the government pretty much off your back. So you don't have a lot of regulation. Don't break things, keep things functional. Yeah. Just don't do anything too crazy and let me keep my money so I can build more things. Like that's a generally very American way of looking at the world. Then, unfortunately, because of the soft underbelly of liberalism, which puts tolerance at the top of the hierarchy, we are tolerant.

39:00We are diverse. That's what liberals love more than they are. We're talking to liberals too, though. But that's the problem. It's Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance. You don't want to be tolerant of intolerance. But the liberals were so focused on tolerance, they let the intolerant people in. So when you see this weird red-green alliance, why is it that the masked jihadis for Hamas are hanging out with the queers for Palestine? This doesn't end well for those guys. Well, they eventually kill the queers once they're in charge, but for now they're useful idiots. No, they're useful idiots because they were like, boy, we can usher in an awful lot of authoritarian lunacy with these guys.

39:32We can't just march in being like, okay, we're jihadists, we're taking over. No, you could take over a political party slowly and that's largely what they've done. So I would say to any of your, I'd like to meet these people, by the way, to any of your moderate Democrat friends at this point, why not just be a moderate Republican? Meaning that Trump is, I think, largely defending the right ideals of America. I think that the social issues have kind of all shaken out already. We're sort of past that from an American perspective? And why not be in line with, say, Tulsi, who ran for president as a Democrat four years ago, or Bobby Kennedy, who ran for Democrat president only a year and a half ago, or someone like Rogan, who didn't endorse Trump till the day before the election, or someone like me, or probably in some sense, someone like you, who obviously strikes me as a moderate that probably would have been a Democrat 15 years ago.

40:22So I just don't see what - I'm a little more hardcore pro-liberty, but that's fair. Okay. All right. But, but within reason, if the Democrat party was the Democrat party of 20 years ago. A lot of my friends would still be in that category and I would be to their right. And now it's funny because now they're, they've ran past me in terms of their enthusiasm. Well, that's, I mean, I'm telling you, I see that every day in Miami now because we're still getting such an influx of people like you guys are here in Austin. And the people that I now see are the craziest, reddest. Well, they're refugees.

40:51They're refugees. But, you know, refugees 20 years ago, you'd move from Cali to Utah because your taxes were too high. And then you'd get to Utah and vote the same stupid way. Right. But these people come and they've got a story to tell. Oh, yeah. Well, California was conquered. I'm sitting here today literally texting like friends in the Texas house. Like, why the hell aren't we passing this thing to cut off the blue lobbyists and all these from the cities, all this stuff? And it's like they're like, why are you so? I'm like, you have to realize we're coming from a place that was conquered. We got we got to fight, you know.

41:18And I feel that too. Florida's got a bit as good as DeSantis is. And as red as the state has gone, Florida's got some weird stuff going on in the legislature right now that he's got a big fight on his hands on a couple of different fronts. But good, Joe, you're in the right place and fight for it. It's a lot more. Look, I fought very hard to get rid of Gavin Newsom and the recall and all that stuff. It's worth it to fight against things. It really is when things are going haywire. At this point in my life, I like fighting for things. So I like being in a place that's flourishing and helping it flourish.

41:46But we all go through phases in life when sometimes you want to fight against something. And I guess usually you're younger and dumber. And then sometimes it's nice to fight for something. No, I know. You know, in my policy group, we have teams like 20 states. We're fighting like hell for the country right now. And I'm excited about it. On that policy note before we end, I want to ask you, what do you think of Trump's second term? What's going on with politics? How are we doing? I think it's basically been flawless. It's been as good as you could possibly imagine. He's like 120 days in. I think the trade deals, you know, as Sack said on all in a week or two ago, we have to see where they land.

42:17But for the most part, well, first off, the market completely came back after three days of craziness. It seems to me we are going to get good deals. Like it seems fairly obvious that we're going to get good deals out of probably 60 countries or at least better deals than we had. The border has been closed. We are doing deportations. I am for getting rid of as many illegals as we can. We're not doing enough deportations, are we? No, we're not doing them as fast as Bill Clinton. The numbers are really small. Yeah. So, well, because suddenly the Democrats care about due process. They didn't care about it under Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.

42:46It's incredible. These people hate the system until they don't have control of the system. And then they're very concerned about all the things they used to hate. They love the courts now. They wanted to pack the courts before. Now they love the courts because the courts are doing what they want. I mean, it's all so obvious once you see it. But I would say on virtually every front, even Trump the last couple of days in the Middle East, like he's thinking about these things in a different way. I don't know that he can fully get all everybody to sign on to the Abraham Accords, but if we could basically push Hamas out of the equation, get the hostages back, and then all you have to do really for these other countries is just say, guys, look, it's been a fun run just blaming everything on the Jews while you abused your own people.

43:26But enough of that, which is basically what he said, enough of that, stop hating this one place, and then everybody here can prosper. And that actually is the truth. And it took a guy like him to say it, to go to Saudi Arabia and say it and go to Qatar. And I'm not defending Qatar because they funded a lot of the Hamas stuff and everything else. And they've funded an awful lot of what's gone on at our universities and all of that stuff, right? So it's not a defense of them. But he went in and he took a very pro-America, pro-capitalism, not we're going to nation build. But he basically said, hey, we're back.

44:01And if you want to join the party, you're welcome. But we're not taking everybody into the party. Like there's going to be some rules here. So I, I just, you know, people want me to criticize him more. They just want it badly. Okay. The optics of the plane kind of weird. The optics of the plane are weird for sure. I'm eight. I'm eight out of 10 and I love this administration and I'm helping on a bunch. So I think the optics of some of the pardons I didn't love, there's some people I wouldn't, don't think deserve pardons. Sure. So I could probably get on board some of that. So yes. Can we always find, like if we sat here, you can always find things to criticize.

44:31Of course we could find a couple of things here and there, but in terms of all of the big stuff and, And Doge, I mean, we don't even talk about Doge. Like when you really look at what's going on here, I don't see how you could objectively be like, oh my God, this is terrible. Like it's been pretty damn good. We have a lot of smart friends in Doge. Yeah, and just look at it this way. When the election, day before the election, if you had known that Kamala was gonna be president, you know, 90 days later, you would basically be like, man, hope is lost. I was at Jordan Peterson's art conference in February and about a hundred countries were represented there.

45:05And everybody there, this is now, you know, Trump's a month back in at this point because it's February. Everyone there was like, thank God Trump won because our countries cannot lead. We don't, we're not brave anymore. We, we need, if America leads, maybe we can follow. But there was no one there from Spain or Germany or South America or Asia that was like, yes, we'll take the reins on this and go. Everybody was like, it's America or bust. I was losing a lot of sleep worrying about the election. I totally agree with you. And so this is a positive direction. We got it. We have a lot to execute.

45:37And the HHS has great people there. We have to make a lot of hires to fix a lot of these things. DOD has gone the right direction. There's still a lot to fix, but it's positive. You know, I want to ask, coming back to America and optimism, there's a lot of fear and division right now. It's actually, it seems like more than in my lifetime. It has been before, even now, unfortunately, with his presidency. And that gets more clicks, some positive news. This is your business. Does it have to be that way? How can we move our cultural dialogue a positive direction? How can we be in a great place in a few years?

46:04What's that going to take? Well, I love the line that Trump said before the election, which is when they were really focused on that he was going to take revenge against people. And he said, success will be my revenge, right? I love that line. And I think that's the truth. For the stuff that you're concerned about as it pertains to this set of people that are blaming everything on the Jews or whatever weird things happening on the right, combined with the toxicity of the left, the best antidote to all of it is American success. The more that the economy is chugging along, the more that the border is safe, the more that you could go into the city with your family and not feel like you're going to get mugged because you're going to a show in Times Square or someone's going to stick you with fentanyl because you walk to the opera in San Francisco or whatever.

46:43Like the more that it works, it just makes the crazy parts dissipate, right? Like if the country is really working and then there's a huge YouTuber or whatever online, that's just like, people are just going to be like, okay, well, I'm going to go out and have dinner with a friend because I can afford that. And I'm going to go have a good time and live my life. So success to me is the answer to everything. It's partly why one of the things that I've really tried to do with my show in the last couple of months, post post-election has been, I'm giving people as much positive news as I can. Like, I know that that's not necessarily like the stuff that's going to get you the click.

47:18Like if I just go to fat lady at, at Wendy's throws a hamburger into somebody's face and then seven other fat people attack each other. But yes, people love, if you get like a bunch of like fat women throwing hamburgers at each other. People love it. And I understand. That's also American. No, and that's very American. And I'm not saying there isn't a place for it. There is a place for it. It's called Wendy's. Go there and do that. But there's other good things happening. You know what I'm saying? And I think if we can just focus on that, actually less fat people will throw hamburgers at each other because they'll take more personal responsibility.

47:52This has been sponsored by Wendy's. Yeah, we did. Sorry. Actually, it should be sponsored by the glass that they now put up so that you can't throw them. Do they really? Well, they've had all these things. Did you see the story out of McDonald's? No. Where was it? Where was it? Arlington, Virginia. There were so many fights breaking out at this McDonald's that it's now 21 and over to eat in the McDonald's. Wow. Does that tell you something might be wrong? The place that created the Happy Meal for children, now you have to be 21. Well, I'm glad to focus mostly on the optimistic side. I feel we did some optimism here.

48:29Let's keep building and keep employing people. Thank you, Dave, for being here. My pleasure.