Chime’s IPO, Databricks’ $1B Acquisition & Dave Rubin’s Media Empire | E2126

24:53Okay. So 1 ,000 hotel room nights would be 300 ,000. So anyway, 300, well, 300 times 300 is roughly 100 ,000. Yeah. So$100 ,000 paid in advance, you have unlimited stays in Bonvoy hotels. And if there's availability, you could stay in another one. I would pay that every year. Yeah. If I was a single guy, I would certainly pay that and just travel the world. I bet you they could sell that for 150 ,000 a year, 10 ,000 a month, 15 ,000 a month, and make it all you could eat. Or if you said you could buy 1 ,000 hotel rooms for$150 ,000 in advance and then just use them over three years, people would do these kind of deals.

25:36So it's something to think about when you're approaching entrepreneurship is to think about making people a dictature product and giving them some extraordinary deal, which would create a lot of press around it. So maybe what the movie theater chain should do is say, we're going to sell a thousand of these passes for Unlimited for a thousand dollars. And you can bring a thousand for a thousand and you can bring up to four people with you. I would buy it immediately. Immediately, I would buy it. And then charge the next 1 ,200 and see where demand goes, make a bunch of money. And it's free publicity.

26:11And Jason, you made a really good important point. It's going to get people back into the theaters. Right now, they're too big. They're too empty. They're too expensive and they have fixed labor costs. So like you need to have more bodies in there. And wouldn't it be great if for once we had a good headline about the media business? Absolutely. All right, everybody. Special guest today. Dave Rubin is with us. You know him because he's an entrepreneur. He's a podcaster, former lib, now MAGA. I don't know how you like to describe yourself. You and I spoke. Everybody knows the Rubin Report. I don't have to like, you know, like drag this out here because you're YouTube famous.

26:47Let's see how long you can go with this intro. Come on. Give me three more minutes off the top of your head. Let's roll. Last night we spoke at Joe Lonsdale Mutual's University of Austin. And 80 or so students in the first class, they're all picked because they're brainiacs. They got high SAT scores, we found out. And I was like, wow, you're in town. we should talk because I wanted to talk to you just about the business and how your business, specifically right-wing media, it became huge. Now maybe it's in a transition, but people also maybe don't know that you created Locals and then you sold that to Rumble.

27:29You're, like me, a podcaster and an entrepreneur. Right. We just have reverse entry points because I was a political guy that became a tech guy, I suppose, and you're a tech guy that became a political guy. So it's a nice meeting there. I got dragged into politics. You were started as a comedian. I mean, I really don't, I'm not as obsessed about politics, but is it exhausting to you? Because you're due five days a week. Five days a week live, plus however many interviews I do on top of that. It's exhausting. Is it exhausting? Yes. Talking about politics and the pace that Trump goes at and the vitriol now, like you have to be on one side.

28:03You are complex. You have many, I think, characteristics of people on the left, moderates, and the right, but you live in a world like I do where you're forced to pick sides. Yeah. So what's it like to be, I guess, in some ways loved by the right as somebody who moved from the left? Yeah. And then also under this crazy scrutiny where, just like I was on the left, they want you to pass a purity test on the right. And there are some parts of the purity test that maybe you pass or you don't. So what's it like and how do you manage the psychology of being under constant scrutiny, assault, and just dealing with a pace of news, like the pace of news and text?

28:52I mean, that's fast. Yeah. But in Trump politics, it's absurd. Right. Well, basically, it's like life has become endless doom scrolling on this thing, right? That's sort of the pace of everything is just, can I scroll and scroll and scroll? Almost to the point where you see good things or positive things and you just don't even look at them and you're just waiting for some disaster. Yes. And back in the day, and people don't remember this, but guys of our age remember it, websites used to have an ending. You'd go to CNN.com for the news and there was an end to the page and it would say, go back to the top.

29:22But then the endless scroll came in. Daily mail. Those are some long stories. And it just goes and it goes. and they just pump more to you. And, you know, our brains are not quite wired to that. So first, just quick on the exhaustion part. It is exhausting and politics is infuriating. And we talked about this a bit last night. Once you kind of know the people on both sides of it, you know how they are publicly and you know how they're privately and you see how the sausage is made. There's a lot of stuff that is - Theatrics, performative. Yeah, all of that. And then you kind of see the disconnect between how people behave in their private life and how they are publicly.

29:58All that stuff's kind of exhausting, I would say. but like you, I've built a great life doing this. So I am able, I've made it a very high priority for me to put this thing down. I do every August, I go off the grid for a month. I've done it eight years in a row. No phone, no TV, no news. Where do you go? What do you do? I've done Bora Bora a couple of times. We've done tree houses in Mexico, literally just disappear, disappear. And I read a little bit. Is the world there when you come back? Is the world still there? You think the world won't be and you do miss things. One year, I missed the Afghanistan withdrawal.

30:32I missed John McCain dying. I missed when Biden chose Kamala as VP. You miss things. Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup. You got a lot to do. And Lemon.io is going to save you time. They're going to save you money and a ton of headaches. And they're great at what they do. They've done work to find and vet developers who are experienced, result-oriented, and they charge competitive rates. And you also know that great developers can be hard to find and integrate into your team. So Lemon.io handles all that for you.

31:10Startups choose Lemon.io because they only offer hand-picked developers with at least three years of experience and who are the best of the best, the creme de la creme. A bunch of launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and they had great experiences. Here's your call to action. Go to Lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer. or a tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15 % off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io. Select Twist. But you come back and, you know, for the first like five days of it, every year the same thing happens.

31:46I'm kind of freaking out. You know, my hand's going to my pocket. You're jonesing. Like, where is the thing? Where is the, you know? It's like a shadow arm, right? No, it really is. Like those people who lose an arm. And you feel it. And they reach for something with no arm. Well, it's like, you know, I'm sure you get it too. the phantom buzzing. You get the phantom buzzing. I don't really get it anymore, but it used to be a real thing with phantom buzzing that people were getting when we first had these things in our pockets. But I think by doing the disconnect that I do, this will be my ninth year doing it.

32:10That has been one of the things that's allowed me to stay sane because we know a lot of the same people and we're a lot of the same world. So many people go into the political thing with good, you know, most people do things for good intentions and they just, you know, the clicks, the fame, the money, whatever it is, it just starts making you crazy. Yeah. Where do you fail currently and where do they love you? Sure. So that is psychologically, I think part of the strategy is to, in your replies, attack, you get brigaded. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I have had coordinated brigading. You know, Sax has sort of made fun of it on the pod where, you know, he called off like the MAGA people.

32:53But I know how the brigading works because there's group chats that you and I. Is he able to control the people? That's good to know. Well, no. I mean, that was kind of the joke. Nobody can control it. But there are group chats where they will share a Dave Rubin tweet, a Jason Calacanis tweet, a Saks tweet, and say, okay, go. Go. Yeah. And you know it when you're a super router and you have a following because, okay, this tweet just went from, you know, I think my average tweet gets 50 ,000 views or so. And, okay, this one's getting 400 ,000. This one has 1 ,800 replies. The average one has 100.

33:25Yeah. What's going on here? And it turns out that suddenly none of these people follow you. And they're like, how did he get my mentions the second I tweeted it out? You have 50 people telling you to go kill yourself. You know, some version of that. It's psyops. Yeah. No, it really, well, they coordinate in Telegram and they're doing it. And I don't know if it's 4chan or just whatever these underbelly things are, but that is what they're doing. There's no doubt about it. And it does affect you psychologically if you're unaware of it. Yeah. And I noticed it when it came to Ukraine because I had like dictator bad as we follow.

33:57Like, hey, dictators are bad and democracies flawed as they can be are a better system. So just, you know, my basic operating system as a Gen Xer is like, yeah, more democracy good, less democracy bad. But man, the, because of Sachs and his position on it, which people couldn't understand, like, why is he so pro Putin? That just kept coming up in my replies. And I was like, oh, this is either like, you know, some Putin people trying to promote this or anti-Ukraine people or whatever, or it could just be his followers. Like there's some coordinated effort here. And I was like, yeah, this actually reinforces my belief.

34:35Yeah. Well, that's one of the - It actually makes me dig in. Well, that also is one of the reasons that you really better know what you think and why you think it. Otherwise, you will be pushed. You will suddenly tweet something that you think is fairly innocuous or not particularly dangerous politically, and you'll get owned by these people and it will be unrelenting and it will go on for days. And suddenly you'll be like, wait a minute, did I really miss the mark on that one? And then little did you know that it was a bot farm in Russia or it was out of South Korea or it was just coordinated by the frog people on Telegram or whatever it might be.

35:09And that's why it's really important. Well, it's also why it's important that once you have a certain following, you really shouldn't pay that much attention to the responses, which kind of sucks in a way because I want feedback, right? Like, of course you want feedback. That's why it's nice last night to sit in a room with, you know, 80 young people and really like, you could see they were really listening to us. Like they were real, the questions were great by the way. And, and some were kind of combative, which was really nice actually. Totally fine. Yeah. But you know, the, the anonymity of this thing, the distance of this thing, it has changed us so far.

35:39How, how old are you? I am 54. 54. So I'll be 49 next month. So we're basically Gen X. We're basically the same age. We're the last generation that fully grew up without this thing. We're the last generation that grew up. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Brooklyn, yeah. In Brooklyn. Okay. So I'm from Brooklyn originally. I grew up in Long Island, lived in New York City most of my life. But, you know, I would come home from school, get on my bike and disappear with my friends for eight hours. And then I showed up for dinner and my mom, did you have a day? Yeah, we were latchkey kids. We were free range.

36:07But we were the last generation that fully, fully had that. And that is why I think Elon being involved with Trump has been so formative because we needed – the boomers for some reason would not hand this thing over. Yes. And Elon I think just did an unbelievable job of finally being like, hey, there's another generation here. We're still – we have some experience. We're still young enough that our bodies work. We have some energy. Stop with you geriatric people. endlessly sucking. I mean, Mitch McConnell glitching on TV and then Biden. It's just, I don't know, this geriatocracy or whatever they call it, geriatocracy.

36:46I'm like, how are these, let them retire. Let them retire. Well, I think we would all gladly send them into retirement. So it's not about letting, it's that they, for some reason, have decided not to let go. I don't know if there's another example of this literally in world history of a generation that refused to let go. Now you might blame us in a weird way. You might blame the Gen Xers for not grabbing it more, you know, like that there's something there that why didn't the Gen Xers be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You guys can't do this anymore. You're 87 and you're running for reelection for the 40th year in a row and all of this shit.

37:22So whether it's our fault or their fault or whatever it is, part of what's going on here that feels so crazy in the world, it's a technological revolution, right? Which we're about to have another one because of AI, but it's also just this weird generational tension. I mean, even now, as you know, I'm a big Trump supporter, but the guy is basically 80 years old. 81. He's double the age. And I said this in one of our mutuals, very public person got really upset at me and was like, please don't say that. And I'm like, he's twice the age of the VP. Yeah, literally. Right, JD's younger than me. Two JDs, a JD's 39, I think.

37:59So he's, if you doubled his age, he'd be three years younger than Trump. Right, and look, I don't want to - Let that sink in. And the weird thing is, I don't want to be ageist, so I don't hold that against him as long as he's cognitively there. The difference, I mean, I don't want to get into the whole Biden thing, which is now, you know, but it's like, that was, I was doing videos in 2019 talking about his obvious cognitive problems. I'm not a wizard, I'm not from the future. It was just pretty damn obvious. Oddly though, I didn't write a book about it like Jake Tapper, which is now number one on Amazon.

38:26Great, I mean - Good for him. I think that might be, I know it's a controversial, but I haven't read the book yet. I will give it a listen. Might be self-aware or it could be CYA. You could take the cynical, hey, it's CYA. He's part of the media, whatever. Or he could feel like, I'm really kind of pissed off that you abused my trust. And there was this grand conspiracy and I want to get to the end of it because I was a sucker at the poker table. Which do you think? Because it seems fairly obvious to me. A little bit of both. It could be he gave them the benefit of the doubt because of preexisting relationships and because maybe he's on that team and he's as a journalist.

39:08You know, they said like, no, no, he's fine. You know, obviously he's older and he stutters and he's got a speech impediment and he's had that for a long time. But yeah, he's sharp. Because when I talk to my friends, Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, people I've known for a long time, and even Chamath, like when's the last time you saw him? How was he? And it was always the same thing. Like, yeah, I had lunch with him, I had breakfast with him. And he was great. I mean, it wasn't like, it's still like talking to your grandpa. It's not as quick and he doesn't understand AI, but. That in and of itself is a problem.

39:35On top of what you referenced last night related to the sundowning, that they were obviously hiding him at certain parts of the day. Yes. I mean, grandpa had a bad day. Yeah. You know, and Dean Phillips, they give him so much credit. I don't know if you got to spend any time with Dean Phillips. No, no. He's worth having on your pod. By the time I wanted to have him on, he had already gotten out. Have him on your pod and talk to him. You'll be so impressed because he's a Clinton-like, he probably has more in common with you than Trump, you know, and you probably in a nonpartisan world would vote for him because he believes in, you know, whatever you're doing in your personal life is your personal life, which is, I think, a Republican position historically.

40:12Yeah. Limited government leaves it to you to live your life. Yes. Like literally when I moved to Texas, you know, maybe we'll talk about when I'm on your show and I'm the guest, but you know, like that was an American value I really cherished was like And when I came here and I bought my horse ranch and I was talking to the guy with the ranch, I was like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? He's like, it's your ranch? You mean the one you just bought? I'm like, yeah. He's like, yeah, you can do that on your ranch. I'm like, hey, can I do this on my ranch? You know, like shoot guns or whatever. I have a shooting ranch.

40:43And he's like, yeah, yeah, no, it's your ranch, son. It's your ranch now. You can do that. I was like, can I? And he's like, son, I'm going to stop you right there. It's your ranch. Do what you want. Don't bother your neighbors. And when the fence goes down, that's when you and your neighbor split the bill and that's when you interact. It's the fence. And it is like a really ingrained here, that's the fence. And when I grew up in Brooklyn and you grew up in New York, we all took the subway. You had your seat. I had my seat. You have your space. I have my space. We deal with each other. You're gay.

41:12I'm straight. I'm Irish. You're Greek. You're black, Hispanic, whatever. We just all deal with each other. Nobody cares. We all got to get to work. We're all suffering through the same delay on the subway, the same bullshit we got to deal with, rats on the subway platform, whatever it is. And we all just got along, but you kind of just respected each other for who you are. And it was just so beautiful. I don't know. What happened to this goddamn country where everybody has to be at each other's throat over your political affiliation? Who cares? The least interesting thing about anybody is which party they're in.

41:46Yeah. Well, I'm completely uninterested in which party you're in. I like assessing people on their beliefs and all of those things. You're completely right. I use the subway a lot as an example because as someone that lived in New York City most of my adult life and I had grandparents that were in the city that I was always going to when I was a kid. You're right. Like you'd get on the subway and it was everybody from everywhere of every age and color and background and religion or whatever. And it's not even that you respected them per se, but you just didn't get in their way and they didn't get in your way.

42:17I mean, you'd all put cram in together and you'd elbow everybody, but you didn't elbow them like, oh, I'll elbow the gay guy and not the Greek guy or something. It was just like, we're all in it together. I got to get to work. And that's what the danger, I would say, of what the woke thing did to the country over the last decade plus. It started whittling us down to these very, very unimportant things, right? Like, okay, so you're Irish, fine. That means you have a heritage and, you know, okay, great. That's great. And hopefully there's probably some foods you like and traditions you have. And we just went to an awesome St.

42:48Paddy's Day thing in Miami. And I drank my, I'm not a beer guy, but I had a margarita that had some green stuff in it. It was fantastic. Everybody was wasted by 2 p.m. It was amazing. No judgments. But you don't look at somebody and be like, yeah, well, you're, come on. But you don't look at people and be like, all right, you're Irish. I must think this about you. You're a Jew. I must think about this. You're black. I must think this about you. And once that thing crept into the system, it basically started shredding us apart. And I lay most of the blame on this on the good liberals. I'm not talking about the crazy progressives that did this or the Marxists or whatever.

43:23The good liberal who just said, I am so damn tolerant that I will let anyone say or do anything at all times. I will be tolerant of intolerance. And once they ushered that in, the progressive movement, the radical part basically was like, look at these suckers. What I always liken it to, what I wrote about in my first book, that it's basically, I'm sure you've seen it, the original Alien movie from 1977. If you remember, which is the best of all the movies, maybe the second one might be better. Ridley Scott, yeah. James Cameron did the second, I think. It's just perfection. But if you remember at the end of the first movie, after the Alien has now ransacked the ship, killed everybody basically except Ripley, and the robot who's the doctor.

44:07Yes. And you find out that he's a robot, you know, halfway through the movie. He basically is saying how he admires the alien because the alien has no morals. It just accomplishes what it wants to accomplish. And this is what I've tried to explain to people about the left, like the modern left or the progressive movement. You don't have to like what they're doing, but you have to respect that they have basically taken over the host. They took over the country. Incredible. And they destroyed so much. And you could say, oh, they're all idiots and they're purple haired morons. And okay, well, it happened on your watch.

44:39It was effective for a time, yeah. I mean, I remember talking to, I think, our mutual Sam Harris about this. And he was on to identity politics and radical terrorism and fundamentalism. He was very, very early on. Very early. Which is why he got so much fame at an early point of the internet. Yeah. And he and I both lived in LA. We had the same book agent. And so we met through our book agent. And I actually introduced him to Elon. and we used to have dinner together, the three of us all the time in LA. That didn't end well, but. Well, it didn't end well, but I'm gonna try to bridge it and bring it back.

45:12But they're at each other's throats right now. But he described identity politics to me as a cul-de-sac. He's like, you get into this thing and you just start spinning. It's never enough. So they've infected. I mean, they just, the amount of stuff that they have destroyed. I love basketball. Like basketball outside of my family, basketball is my thing. Who's your team? So I don't even have a team anymore. And I'll tell you, I used to have a team. I'll tell you that in a sec. But the reason I don't have a team anymore is because politics destroyed the NBA. Once they put that BLM logo on the court, and then every time I turned on Inside the NBA with Chuck and Kenny and Ernie Johnson, I was like, I'm listening to people lecture me about racism.

45:55That's just fine, but it's not what I'm coming to basketball for. So if you look at my YouTube search thing when I'm doing cardio every day, I watch the same games that I watched from late eighties Lakers to the bulls run in the nineties up to about the end of Kobe. And then, and then it became political. Um, my favorite player of all time is, is a Texas guy, actually Clyde the glide. Uh, I've played for Houston with blazers originally in Houston. And one of the greatest moments of my entire life was for my birthday, about seven years ago, my agent just send me, I opened up my text. He says, happy birthday.

46:27and it's Clyde's phone number. And then we've become text buddies since then. And I was like, that's like of all the little things that you get when you're doing this. You guys beat my Knicks and Patrick Ewing and John Starks back in the day. Well, so that was the 94 team. Clyde was traded to them in 95. But yes, that was game six. Great series. You remember the Elijah Juan just nipping that John Starks shot in game six. And that's what turned the whole thing around. So that would have been our favorite. And now it's this year might be my Knicks year. You love that team, that 94. I mean, I started going to Knicks games in the early nineties and that's been my passion ever since.

47:02And I literally went to the Pistons games in Detroit. Yeah. Wonderful city, by the way. If you haven't been to Detroit, I know. I've been, not in some years. Incredible how they've turned that city around. The people are great. And it's awesome to go to road games because I'm a New Yorker or I lived in the Valley, like getting good seats was, you know, a five figure affair in the first two or three rows, It was like$10 ,000,$20 ,000 a seat, which is disconnected from reality. Yeah. So then I was like, wait a second. I live in Austin now. I'm just going to go to Philly. And second row or first row in Philly is like$1 ,000 or$2 ,000 or$3 ,000.

47:39I got courtside in Detroit for$3 ,000 a seat. Damn. Which would have been four rows back, five rows back at the Warriors, et cetera. So I was like, oh, my God, it's free. And I get to see a new city. It's incredible. So if the Knicks clear Boston and go to Indiana, which would be an incredible series, I'm going to literally just go to the Indiana games. What do they charge in first row? Probably 12 bucks. I think it's like 12 bucks for two. You and I can go. And you get Reggie to bring you your chicken fingers. I mean, literally, I stayed in the best hotel in Detroit, the Shinola Hotel based on the watch company.

48:10Gorgeous. I was in a suite that was like the presidential suite, like 2 ,000 square feet. It was 400 bucks a night. I was like, God damn it. This is incredible. I sat courtside for the first time about two months ago. Now I'm going to name drop for a second. Bill Maher called me, said, you want to come to the Laker game? I sat courtside with Bill. And it was just, as someone that loves basketball, I've never, I've been to a million basketball games. No, it's totally different when you're on the wood. We probably went to the same games because I used to go to the Knick games all the time, especially when the Blazers or Houston was in town.

48:42But to sit courtside when you're right and you hear the squeaking and you hear all the trash talk. You can literally hear the sweat fly off them and land on it. It's so awesome. If you love basketball, there is nothing better. It's literally the greatest thing ever. And I said to myself, like, if I ever make any money, like, you know, I made a bunch of money. And I was like, I don't spend it. And I talked to my wife about it. And, you know, she's like, well, what do you love? And I was like, I love skiing. And I love the Knicks. And she's like, well, you know, we have to spend like this amount of money per year if we're going to end with this amount of money for our daughters.

49:20Like just a little like, here's how it trails off for a 54-year-old. And I'm like, can't possibly spend that amount of money a year. Like I'd have to start flying private or something. And I was like, but I could go to Japan and ski every year and treat myself to cat skiing, which is$1 ,000 a day, which is pretty, you know, rich compared to just using your app. and I bought a ski house. And then I started sitting courtside at Knicks games during the playoffs. And I said, you know, during the playoffs, I'll just go. And I won't worry that I spent$10 ,000 on tickets. I'll just go and enjoy it. I mean, what's the point of having it if you can't enjoy it?

49:50People feel all this guilt about success. And it's like, I used, it's funny, before I was successful, I had a weird thing about success in some sense. Like, I don't know, I was like, as I started, because, you know, there's a weird thing about fame also. Sometimes you can kind of become famous and then people think you're automatically rich. So when I first started gaining notoriety on YouTube, I was still broke. I was making maybe 50 grand a year, maybe the first few years of doing it. And I was putting all that money back in. So I barely had a dime actually, but yet I was famous. So I'd go places and people would know me.

50:23Now you did locals. I know this because I, during COVID discovered Scott Adams, who started doing this local things. I paid and subscribed to it for a while because I was like, I really want to see what's going on over here. And I remember Sam Harris was talking to me. I helped him set up his podcast. And he was originally on Patreon. But he started doing Casper ads and whatever. And he's like, oh, this advertising is not good. Because when I talk about, I don't know, radical Islam or whatever, you know, priests and Catholic church issues, they're going to drop me. Or I can't have the advertisers.

50:55Oh, my God. I'm going to have to, like, have my business development people go talk to the advertisers every episode and give them credit. So he goes to Patreon. Then he's like, oh, my God. Patreon starts kicking people off. and he's like, okay, I'm going to roll my own. And he kind of rolls his own subscription service. And he's like, this is the way I'm going to do it. And you did locals. Great domain name. That's like a$500 ,000 domain name. How much did you pay for that? About$500 ,000 actually. But it turned out that one of our investors, a guy by the name of Andrew Condru, who's an old tech guy from, well, he's not that old, but I mean, he was like one of the original tech guys from like the nineties.

51:30He had it. He had it just sitting there. So originally he licensed it to us. he was an investor but licenses to us and then eventually when we sold the company we had to buy why did you decide to do a startup and then so it's it's very connected to what you just described right there i was on patreon just like sam sam uh jordan peterson a couple other people and then they started banning people for crazy reasons uh one of the reasons was there was a guy by the name of carl benjamin who's big british youtuber and he went on not on his patreon account not on his YouTube show that was being funded by Patreon.

52:02He went on someone else's show and he said the N word, but he didn't say it to be racist. He was mocking the alt-right at the time. So he was basically playing out a character and he said the word. Without any warning, Patreon blew up his channel. That was it. They didn't send him a, you have to retract this, you have to delete this, blew up his channel. That day I was on tour with Jordan Peterson. We were both making a night. I was making most of my money on Patreon at that point. No, Jordan was already had been selling books and on tour and whatever. I was on tour with him making a nice amount, but most of my, I was making about 30 grand a month on there.

52:35That was basically the budget for my show. And Jordan and I sat down and we were like, this is intolerable. We got to figure out something. Jordan and I then tried to do something together, but that was right when Jordan was getting sick. We remember that year where he really got quite ill. And then I was like, all right, I'm going to try to do this on my own. My brother-in-law is an Israeli startup guy as all the Israelis are. I was like, can you build me something? He's like, I'm going to need five minutes, but I think I can do it. And basically - Five million people, they got like seven million startups.

53:07I'm like, how have you got 1.2 each? You know, they're under a lot of pressure. It's a small piece of land. They're under a lot of pressure. But basically I said, can you build me, I'm going to leave Patreon. Can you build me a subscription thing? That's it. And I want direct connection with my audience. I don't want any algorithmic nonsense. I want to own the data. I want to own the emails. I want to do it the right way because it was for me. Anyway, we did that. When I closed my Patreon that night, the way I did it was I was on a live stream and I said for – I can't remember the exact numbers, but I was like for every thousand subscribers we get, something like that, live while I'm on air, I'll do a shot of Patron because I'm leaving Patreon.

53:42Anyway, about 12 shots later – 12 ,000 subs. It was nuts. Wow, you must have been – And I was really doing it. So not only was I wasted, but I doxed myself live on air because when I went finally at the end of the night, when I went to delete the account, which we were showing. It had your address. Oh, no. You press delete and then your email pops up. Oh, your email. Great. It wasn't my address, but my personal email popped up, which then, of course, was blah, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, we delete that. And the next day I was like, wow, I have a success here. And then I was like, I want to spawn this off to other people.

54:15So Scott Adams was one of the first two or three people we brought on board. We built it for him originally the way we were going to do it. And I think this is how you and I got in touch. Originally, what we were going to do was white label it to people. So you would have your own app because I remember you would. Yeah, I was thinking about it too. I was like watching that area and I was like, this is a super interesting area. I want to invest in it or start something. But then, you know, one of the things that happens is, as you know, if you figure out advertising and it takes off, like this podcast I've had 14 years.

54:44I was one of the first five podcasters. It's been sold out for 13 of the 14 years. And it was only, only year it wasn't sold out was during COVID where we had maybe five advertisers, two or three went out of business and we let two push their ads to the next year because they were like, we can't do business. So please let us push our ads back. But yeah, I mean, I just think it's such a great idea to do the subscription. Well, so, right. So subscription, look, if you have a base of people that like you, like it's, it's a great business. Now, of course you're eventually going to hit a ceiling on that, but basically we thought, so originally locals was white labeled.

55:15So I had a Rubin report app. Ah. Then once we brought on Scott, I think we had a prototype for his white label. But then suddenly like 10 other people reached out to me in a week that were fairly well-known. Michael Malice, who's here in Austin, a bunch of other people. And then we were like - Well, Michael Malice is here. Yeah, yeah. Oh, but he's part of Daily Wire now. Is he part of Daily Wire now? Michael Malice? Oh, no, Michael Malice is the - Oh, you're thinking of Michael Knowles. Michael Knowles. Who's in Nashville. Michael Malice is the guy who's kind of - He's the ANCAP. I call him the - He's an anarchist.

55:43Yeah, he's an anarchist. But he's not a white supremacist. No, not at all. He's the most one of the, you should have him on. He is one of the most wonderful people you will ever meet. But an anarchist. He's a complete anarchist. He doesn't believe in government at all. Wow. He's been to North Korea. Like the guy has a, you know, his parents came from Soviet Russia. He's got a really. I kind of probably would like to hang with a guy like that. Sounds like a good hack. He's here in Austin. We should get drinks. Like he's a great, great human being. Anyway, I brought him on and a few other people.

56:09And then quickly we realized, all right, the white label thing isn't going to make sense. So let's just put it all into one app. It does the scale, yeah. We do all that. And then it's really successful. I was like, holy, you know, oh, and then Saks came on as an investor. And really once - Joe Lonsdale was an investor. Joe Lonsdale was an investor. But once we got Saks, then everything else opened up. Because once we got Saks, suddenly Naval was like, I'll put in money and Joe put in money and all these other - Oh, yeah, that's a preference Saks starts, yeah. It just opened up all the doors for us.

56:34And the beauty of the Saks thing is that we were at Peter Thiel's New Year's party in Miami. I don't know. This is like five years ago or so. My invite got lost. It's a very gay New Year's. Yeah, I guess. I wanted to go to that. For me, it was just the average New Year's. Yeah, I want to go to Peter Taylor's very gay New Year's party. Can I be your plus two? That can be your age. So we go, and this very pretty woman comes up to me, and she says she's a big fan, and we're chatting for a while. And then she says, I want you to meet my husband, David. And I chat with this guy, David, for like 15 minutes.

57:05And I was like, ah, he's a nice guy. She was very nice, whatever. I took a picture with her. And then I walk away, and some guy's like, oh, how do you know David Sachs? I didn't even know who David was. It was Jackie Sachs. Yeah, it was Jackie. I didn't know who David was. I wasn't really that, even though I was in tech at that point, it's not my world. I come from politics and comedy, whatever. The best thing that I could say about David is literally two days later, I called him up. I was like, hey, listen, I know we just had a quick chat. Your wife seems to like me. We had a 15 minute conversation.

57:33I showed him some numbers. He called me the next day. He's like, let's do it. And then it just opened every door for us. And next thing you know, we got acquired by Rumble and Rumble went public. So nice. And you owned a nice piece of rumble. Yeah. We sold all for stock. I did not take one down. Smart. Yeah. So you're good. I'm good. I like it. I'm good. But I still got this jacket that you complimented me on. It's like a Chinese drop ship. It's okay. 30 bucks. Yeah. Pretty good. $27 of that was the Trump tariff. So enjoy it. You don't think the Trump tariff stuff was crazy. You had to look at that and think.

58:07No, I didn't. You can watch my videos from those days. Even when the market crashed, I just thought it was a negotiation tactic. and I thought everything would be fine. So you're in the 4D chess camp. Yeah, I mean, I guess I was just like, well, wait a minute. Is he really trying to crash the economy and is no country gonna come back and be like, I'd like access to the American markets? That just seemed crazy to me. So I was like, let's just give it a couple of days. I did learn something about myself. Hopefully you learned the reverse thing, which is that when it comes to investing, I'm not that aggressive.

58:36Like when my guys were like, oh, it's dropping. You should probably start buying. I was just like, you know what? Let's just kind of let it be. Oh, no, you always buy when it's crushing. I know. I didn't, though. I just let it be. And look, it's all come back, right? I mean, is it even more now than we had? No, it's exactly even. So Trump's flat, yeah, for the year. But as I think maybe it was you or it was Sachs that said on All-In a week or two ago, we'll only find out the results of this when the landing happens. And we're going to learn about that in the next couple of weeks. And if we get, look, if we get 40 countries that come back with better deals, and maybe we get 10 countries that, let's say it's a wash, and we get a few that it's not good.

59:11It still was a net good. The little pain point, as you just said, the market's back. So I just - You know, my take on it is, I want to get your opinion on this, about the nature of Trump. Yeah. You know the guy. Yeah. He, I studied him before he came on All In. I never really told this story, but I'll tell it on your podcast later when I'm on your pod. But I studied him, major. We're doing the rare back-to-back pod. We're doing the back-to-back pods. Yeah. It's a double feature. But I studied him and my perception of him is a key piece to his psychology is being respected. Yes. You agree? Yes.

59:51Like it is a major part of it. Yes. And even beyond respect, being loved. Like actually people loving him for who he is. And he's not like the perfect character. He's obviously flawed in some ways and bombastic and people don't like his style. Maybe they love his style, whatever it is. but I just knew he would reverse all of this stuff with the tariffs if things went the wrong way because his overriding principle is to be loved by the American people. So do you think this wasn't the plan? No. I think he was doing a ton of trial balloons and floating things, and it wasn't well thought out because if it was well thought out, I think what you would have said is we have 150 trading partners.

1:00:35We can put them into these three buckets. These ones are inconsequential because we don't do a lot of trade with them. These five are 90 % of it. It's a Pareto principle. It's the power law. These five are the ones that matter. And then these are the ones in between. So I've told Besant to do this group of people who are important. And then I'm putting, you know, Sachs and Elon or this person, that person, Lutnik on these ones. And here's the strategy we're going to pursue. It's going to be pretty aggressive. There's going to be some pain. Here's what you can expect. Instead, it was like, oh, you put it at 50?

1:01:05I'm making it 150. And it was this attention-seeking, crazy, shake the globe. And now shake the globe as a concept is fine. I get the reality TV, the attention-getting. There's these concepts and negotiations to anchor in a crazy part. It's all very well-established. But I think when you're dealing with something that has second - and third-order downstream effects, you can't shake it too violently. and and when it comes to the economy you talk to anybody who does macroeconomics like they they're alchemists they have a little bit of science a little bit of magic and they're trying to like read the tea leaves but they actually don't understand these systems it's like weather systems right you can understand some pieces of them it's quite possible we could break things in the economy and the thing that was going to break was if he didn't relent i was talking to all these startups who are in e-commerce specifically yeah no i heard a lot from e-commerce My brother-in-law is in e-commerce, yes.

1:02:02And they were like, we're going to have to do layoffs. We're going to not put our Christmas summer orders in. We are going to not do this new product line, and we're not investing in this new thing. It takes a decade, five years, minimum two or three years to set up these supply chains and get a business cranking. So I was talking to Cutts Clothing, and I had him on the pod here at This Week in Startups, and he was like, ah, I'm going to have – everybody in my group chat is laying people off. And I think they didn't fully realize exactly how this would go to mainstream. Like when Besson was saying, this is a MAG-7 problem, not a mainstream problem.

1:02:40Yes. First stroke of the pen, it's a MAG-7 problem. It's a market problem. And then week six, it would have been massive layoffs. And the Trump layoffs would have made him so hated that his operating system is to be loved. So winning the deal, going and getting all these wins in the Middle East, which is kind of a superpower, I think. And then, oh, the stock market comes roaring back. I knew he would reverse his entire position if it didn't go well. Right. So look, I don't think either one of us can speak to exactly what was in his mind at that moment. Like, was his plan to throw out the bomb, have it be crazy for three days, and then have what happened happen?

1:03:20That seems right to me. But I'll grant you, maybe it was he was going to throw out the bomb, had no idea what was going to happen. I would say either way, since we can't speak to what's in his brain, what we can speak to is what has happened. And what has happened, I think you would agree has been pretty good, right? I mean, we're going to, assuming we get the landings that we think we're going to get. It's possible he will, yeah, have more fair trade deals over time. Yeah. I think the way I would put this is when I was first coming around to Trump. So this is now got to be six or seven years ago.

1:03:52Do you know Eric Weinstein? Yeah, of course. So I had Eric on the show and he really, I was trying to get him to come along too. So sort of what I've been doing with Bill Maher for years, I've tried to bring these people along, right? And Eric just couldn't get there. He kept, he's a bull in a China shop. He's a bull in a China shop. And I said, Eric, well, the thing is, what you seem to want is a panther in a China shop. You want a panther to walk in and be real sly and knock one thing off with its tail and then just close the door softly on the way out. But that's not the phrase. And there's a reason it's not the phrase.

1:04:22It doesn't really exist. Would we all like in like our heart of hearts or in like if everything was as highly functional as we'd like it to be, would we like him perhaps to be more – now he's changed where I do think he's more statesmanlike. But could we have gone without some of that stuff? Sure. Could we have gone without some of that stuff? Sure. But that's just not exactly how the world works. So we finally got one guy that was willing to do all of the things that none of us were willing to do. And to me, the results of that have been a net positive. So that's why when you asked me last night and you asked me here, like, what's my criticism of him?

1:05:00I don't really have much. You just look at the output. At the end, I really do just look at the output. Like, could he have not tweeted this or that or some of those things? Like, maybe. But he was also now we see how calcified the mainstream media was, how he was working against big tech. I mean, in retrospect, the fact that the old regime of Twitter took him out and what they did to Parler. And when you think of just all of these things. I would have given him a 30-day pause after January 6th just because the chances of him – January 6th could have been hundreds of Americans killed if those police officers had done what most police officers would have done, which is when you're getting beaten, you know, take the guns out and start shooting people.

1:05:42They showed incredible restraint. That could have been a much different outcome for America. Dave Rubin, I appreciate the hour. It has been a pleasure. Now I have to figure out how to get you for the next hour. We have a two, I'm going to talk to Lonsdale now. I got to think. And then I'll see you over in the studio. How can I get Jason? No, I mean, you, you and I are probably the closest to center of everybody in our circles. We're probably are the two people who are criticized most by our constituents of like, oh wow, they, they won't like fully take one side or they're thoughtful about this stuff.

1:06:15Like I do, I'm kind of disappointed in some of my friends that just are, have that Trump dedication syndrome. Who had that great joke? I would never be part of a club that would have me. Whose joke is that? That would be Marx Brothers. Is that Marx Brothers? Oh, that's Groucho Marx. Groucho Marx. There you go. Yeah, I don't remember. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time on this week of startups. Bye-bye.