The Charlie Kirk Show - Winning the Fight for Free Speech Online with Dave Rubin

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk show, Dave Rubin from locals, locals.com.

00:00:03.000 You guys should all check out locals.com.

00:00:06.000 I think it's terrific.

00:00:07.000 Locals is an amazing website.

00:00:08.000 You guys should check it out where you guys can support content creators, including our show at locals.com.

00:00:13.000 Dave and I have known each other for years.

00:00:15.000 We throw some jokes back and forth from each other.

00:00:17.000 Don't take the jokes very seriously, everybody.

00:00:20.000 Okay.

00:00:20.000 We're already getting some emails.

00:00:21.000 Charlie, how dare you?

00:00:22.000 Okay, just calm down.

00:00:23.000 All right.

00:00:24.000 Dave and I have known each other for years.

00:00:25.000 He's not offended.

00:00:27.000 He's a good person.

00:00:28.000 He's courageous.

00:00:28.000 He's smart.

00:00:29.000 And he's an entrepreneur.

00:00:30.000 It's great.

00:00:30.000 It's a light-hearted episode, but also very serious about the subject matter at hand, freedom of speech.

00:00:35.000 If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:38.000 If you want to get involved with TurningPointUSA, you can do so.

00:00:40.000 tpusa.com.

00:00:42.000 That's tpusa.com, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War.

00:00:47.000 tpusa.com.

00:00:49.000 That's tpusa.com.

00:00:52.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:53.000 Dave Rubin is here from locals.com.

00:00:55.000 Here we go.

00:00:55.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:57.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:59.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:03.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:06.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:07.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:08.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:01:10.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:16.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:25.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:29.000 Brought to you by my friends, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage, 888, 888, 1172 or AndrewNTodd.com.

00:01:39.000 With us right now is a friend of mine and the founder of Locals, which has now merged with Rumble.

00:01:46.000 Congratulations to all behind it, including the founder.

00:01:49.000 And he's one of the smartest and one of the most courageous fighters for free speech on the planet.

00:01:55.000 Dave Rubin.

00:01:55.000 Dave, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:58.000 Smartest and courageous, Charlie.

00:02:00.000 Our guys sent you the paperwork, I see.

00:02:03.000 I appreciate it.

00:02:03.000 I read it first, friend.

00:02:04.000 It's good to see you.

00:02:05.000 Now, I omitted handsome because that would be weird.

00:02:08.000 It would be weird for me.

00:02:10.000 I like your hat.

00:02:11.000 I like your hat.

00:02:11.000 It wouldn't be weird for you, but that's a separate issue.

00:02:15.000 So we can talk about that if you want.

00:02:17.000 Not really.

00:02:18.000 So, Dave, first, congratulations.

00:02:20.000 Locals is amazing.

00:02:22.000 We're starting to use it more and more.

00:02:23.000 You're part of kind of this parallel economy.

00:02:26.000 Talk about it.

00:02:26.000 You're an entrepreneur.

00:02:27.000 It got acquired or merged with Rumble.

00:02:29.000 So walk us through that.

00:02:32.000 Yeah.

00:02:32.000 You know, the truth is that for guys like us and all of the people that are now online and in mainstream media who talk about the problems of the world for a living, there is a value in talking.

00:02:44.000 And then at some point, if you don't do anything about it, you're just talking.

00:02:47.000 And then I would say you get ultimately diminishing returns on that.

00:02:51.000 So all of us were screaming about big tech and were upset about shadow banning and deboosting and algorithmic tricks and all of this stuff.

00:02:59.000 And I thought, all right, well, I've talked to a lot of people.

00:03:02.000 No one seems to be willing to do anything.

00:03:03.000 I guess I'll build something.

00:03:04.000 And that really, about three and a half years ago, was the genesis of locals.

00:03:09.000 I thought, well, what do I need as a creator?

00:03:11.000 I want to own my video, own my audio.

00:03:13.000 I want to own the user data.

00:03:15.000 I want to be able to communicate directly with my own audience without having to go through YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, et cetera, et cetera.

00:03:23.000 And we started building a really great product that also allowed my audience to subscribe to my stuff in essence so that I could actually make some money by producing hopefully worthwhile content.

00:03:33.000 And the company really grew really fast.

00:03:35.000 I was able to get a great team of investors to help us bring on more programmers and just the right architects to build a really nice and I would say elegant product.

00:03:45.000 And then the Rumble guys came along and you know a bit about Chris Ober at Rumble and the other people over there.

00:03:50.000 And I thought, well, you know, you can fight alone, meaning I could build a great product and I can try to fight Google myself.

00:03:57.000 And, you know, that David guy did beat Goliath.

00:03:59.000 So maybe Dave can beat Google.

00:04:01.000 But sometimes it's good to have a team too.

00:04:03.000 You know, you can think about it as team sports.

00:04:04.000 You can think Lord of the Rings or whatever.

00:04:06.000 Like it's good to have some other people around you in the battle.

00:04:10.000 And we just saw a great opportunity to merge what we're doing, which is subscription-based solutions with what Rumble's doing, which is sort of underbelly of the internet, replace Amazon AWS, but also the front-facing video YouTube side of things, so to speak.

00:04:24.000 And we've merged.

00:04:26.000 And this is just the beginning.

00:04:27.000 I mean, the parallel economy, that's the phrase you use, which I've been using for quite some time.

00:04:32.000 I'm not here to have the government come in and fix all of our problems.

00:04:35.000 I don't think the government does anything well.

00:04:37.000 What I would prefer to do is build better products.

00:04:40.000 And that's exactly what our plan is.

00:04:41.000 And that's why I'm thrilled you're on there.

00:04:43.000 And that's why the numbers are blowing up.

00:04:44.000 I mean, the proof's in the pudding.

00:04:46.000 People want off-ramps from the big tech craziness.

00:04:49.000 Well, I want to just compliment you again because so many people talk a good game with this stuff.

00:04:55.000 And I kind of walked through this with you for quite a while, right?

00:04:59.000 That you were criticizing Google.

00:05:02.000 You were talking with them, trying to say, hey, can you back down YouTube?

00:05:07.000 Can we make this work?

00:05:08.000 Because you had an amazingly big YouTube phone and you're still doing things on YouTube, obviously.

00:05:12.000 You've had all the above approach.

00:05:14.000 But it was really the Patreon thing that it seemed to motivate you more than anything else, especially kind of the Jordan Peterson delisting from Patreon.

00:05:22.000 You went on tour with Jordan and you decided, hey, I'm an entrepreneur.

00:05:27.000 I own my own stuff.

00:05:29.000 Let's do this thing.

00:05:30.000 And talk about the Patreon thing because that really was where they thought they could choke point the ability for creators to make money and not live within a corporate box.

00:05:42.000 Yeah, I'm glad you asked because, you know, it sounds like a little bit like insider baseball stuff.

00:05:46.000 How did these things come together?

00:05:47.000 But it is important because, you know, the way information moves so fast these days, we all kind of forget the seminal moments that happened before that led any of us to this.

00:05:56.000 And I mean, by any of us, I mean that led any of us to being addicted to these devices, to having given all our data away and everything else.

00:06:03.000 So basically, back in it was December of 2018, there was a guy who I'm guessing maybe you've talked to before who goes by the name Sargon of Akkad on YouTube.

00:06:15.000 His real name is Carl Benjamin.

00:06:17.000 He's in the UK.

00:06:18.000 And he was one of the first guys about five or six years ago when I was going through my own political awakening, realizing how sort of corrupt and backwards the progressives are and how they had abandoned liberalism.

00:06:28.000 He was one of the guys on YouTube that described himself as a classical liberal.

00:06:32.000 He was fighting for individual rights and liberty, most things that we now associate with libertarians and conservatives.

00:06:37.000 But he was an interesting guy to talk to.

00:06:39.000 Anyway, he was on Patreon and Patreon for your audience that doesn't know, they're basically just a crowdfunding subscription site.

00:06:45.000 So if you produce pretty much anything online, they will enable you to have your audience subscribe monthly to what you do.

00:06:52.000 You set your price limits, et cetera.

00:06:54.000 Anyway, I went on Patreon.

00:06:56.000 That's where I was funding my show.

00:06:57.000 It was about 80% of my rev. I built a really successful company around that and hired a bunch of employees and everything else.

00:07:03.000 I was on Patreon.

00:07:04.000 Jordan Peterson was on Patreon as well, some other big people.

00:07:07.000 And Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, he was on there and he went on someone else's show, not his Patreon channel, not his YouTube that was funded by Patreon.

00:07:20.000 He went on someone else's show that had nothing to do with Patreon.

00:07:23.000 And he said the N-word.

00:07:24.000 And he said the N-word, not to be racially offensive or pejorative, but he said it because he was mocking the people who use that language.

00:07:33.000 Patreon decided without any warning, without any recourse to delete his channel.

00:07:38.000 Now, he was running his own business in that way.

00:07:42.000 So they just said to him, hey, we're not even going to give you a chance to explain yourself.

00:07:46.000 But really what it was, it wasn't just that.

00:07:48.000 It was the fact that it had nothing to do with Patreon that really was the bell in my mind, like the warning, the canary in the coal mine, where it was like, wait a minute, they can boot you off services for things that you've done that have nothing to do with the services themselves.

00:08:04.000 So once that happened, that's where Jordan Peterson and I, and as you said, we were on tour together at the time.

00:08:09.000 We had been discussing, you know, could we maybe build something?

00:08:11.000 Is there a way to do something?

00:08:13.000 That's when I said, okay, we got to go.

00:08:14.000 And Jordan and I Subsequently.

00:08:16.000 Announced we were both leaving Patreon.

00:08:18.000 Then Sam Harris left Patreon, a bunch of other people did, and that really was the beginning of Locals.

00:08:22.000 I said, all right, let me, let me build some of this stuff for myself.

00:08:25.000 And then what we realized is that you know, if you build something that works for you, well most likely it's going to work for some other people too.

00:08:32.000 And and that's really where Rumble came into the equation, because they were like, oh, these guys have built a nice subscription side of things, we've got the video player side of things.

00:08:40.000 Why don't we build these two products together?

00:08:42.000 And and then build something much bigger.

00:08:45.000 And it's Locals.com and it's officially now merged with Rumble, which is now a spec, publicly traded, and it's exciting.

00:08:51.000 I mean look, i'm all for breaking up Google.

00:08:53.000 I've said it for a while.

00:08:55.000 I came on your show, Dave.

00:08:56.000 I wouldn't have said that four years ago.

00:08:58.000 I did come on your show and we kind of danced around it, right.

00:09:00.000 We were kind of still believers in the market, and we still are, but it was.

00:09:05.000 I think I was a little naive, to be honest, about how strong these companies were.

00:09:09.000 Go ahead, comment on it yeah well, real quick.

00:09:11.000 I mean, I remember that conversation well and you and I have also discussed it privately and on stage together many times at colleges and things.

00:09:17.000 Look, there's a reason that I never fully described myself as a libertarian.

00:09:21.000 I think there's a reason that you don't describe yourself fully as a libertarian, that you describe yourself as a conservative and I I, at this point, consider myself a conservative.

00:09:29.000 I think there's a widening of conservatism that we can.

00:09:31.000 We can discuss if you want, but without getting lost in the definitions.

00:09:34.000 I never believed that that government should absolutely do nothing.

00:09:39.000 I like some of that stuff.

00:09:40.000 I love Michael Malice, I love some of the anarchist guys, like intellectually, I like it.

00:09:44.000 But if the government is not to do anything in a case like this, where we are addicted to these machines that are infringing on our ability to communicate with each other, that are causing all sorts of strife culturally politically, everything if the government's supposed to do nothing related to any of that, well then, what's the purpose of the government?

00:10:01.000 So, unless you fully want to go down that road which, by the way, as I said, I like some of those ideas, but but it would be an adventure to go down that road so, unless you really want to go down that.

00:10:10.000 I'm with you that we have to figure out the pressure points but, at the same time, build that parallel economy.

00:10:16.000 That's exactly right.

00:10:17.000 I remember I came we did two episodes people to watch them on Rubin Report, and the first one was in january of 2018 and the next one was in the summer of 2019 and they're about a year and a half apart and it was amazing how, in the january of 2018 one, we were kind of diagnosing the problem.

00:10:36.000 And then i'll never forget Dave, you said you said and i've stolen it totally highway robbery, and I give you credit like two percent of the time.

00:10:43.000 Where i'll take it, i'll take it.

00:10:44.000 Yeah, where you said the founding fathers did not like centralized power, it's like that's really smart and it's true.

00:10:51.000 It's that's why they hated big government.

00:10:53.000 It's just they'd also hate big google as well.

00:10:55.000 It's local.

00:10:56.000 They could never imagine something above government the way that.

00:10:59.000 That's exactly, That's exactly right.

00:11:00.000 I'm going to the website right now.

00:11:02.000 And Dave, we're doing our first live stream on locals soon.

00:11:05.000 You have top-tier talent here and across the spectrum too, political spectrum.

00:11:09.000 You have Russell Brand.

00:11:11.000 You have I see Seb Gorka, Dinesh D'Souza, Dan Bongino, you have Tulsi Gabbard.

00:11:19.000 Talk a little bit about that, Dave, and how all of a sudden you're seeing top-tier talent from across the political spectrum all of a sudden gravitate around one of the most beautiful fruits of the Enlightenment free speech.

00:11:31.000 Yeah, well, I'll also toss in one other name, which is Glenn Greenwald, who's a lefty, obviously very critical of the woke left, but certainly a lefty and really has been against state power forever.

00:11:42.000 He doesn't even really like me.

00:11:43.000 I don't think.

00:11:44.000 I'm pretty sure he used to call me racist all the time.

00:11:46.000 But the point is that we are willing to have a plurality of opinion on Rumble.

00:11:50.000 We're not really interested in putting our finger on the scales and saying, oh, this opinion should be heard more than that opinion.

00:11:57.000 No, look, at the end of the day, if you break the laws of the United States, so if you make a threat or you plan a terrorist attack or you try to sell drugs, et cetera, et cetera, the things that we all know are illegal.

00:12:09.000 Well, if you do that on Rumble, you have a much bigger problem or locals for that matter.

00:12:12.000 You have a much bigger problem than Dave Rubin, right?

00:12:15.000 Like you have a much bigger problem than us.

00:12:17.000 The government is going to get involved.

00:12:19.000 But we are otherwise an open platform.

00:12:21.000 We want as many voices on there.

00:12:23.000 And ironically, that's really all that people want.

00:12:26.000 You know, it sounds like a very special and rare thing now because we know how Facebook obviously favors certain things over other things, how YouTube obviously favors certain things.

00:12:36.000 We know that conservatives are always the ones who are shadow banned on Twitter or suspended or deleted, often for saying things that are just months too early to be said related to vaccines or masks or whatever else.

00:12:49.000 So because we just believe, hey, this is America.

00:12:52.000 We've built a product.

00:12:54.000 If you'd like to use our product, use it.

00:12:56.000 If you break the laws, you got a bigger problem than us.

00:12:58.000 It's like, this is a very obvious thing that I think is welcoming to everybody.

00:13:03.000 And, you know, the other piece of this that I think is interesting, when people talk about, oh, there's this behemoth related to big tech and we can never defeat this behemoth.

00:13:11.000 And it's become so ubiquitous and so powerful.

00:13:13.000 And we're all walking around with these devices in our pockets and everything else.

00:13:16.000 The other part of this is that they will crumble under the weight of wokeness.

00:13:22.000 You know, wokeness where you hire people based on skin color and gender and sexual orientation, you will no longer hire the best programmers because Charlie, you're not going to believe this.

00:13:32.000 When I hire for my production company or when I was running locals, when we were hiring, we didn't ask what someone's sexuality was.

00:13:39.000 I did not care what your skin color was. 0.99

00:13:41.000 I know in the modern day, that's known as racist or something like that.

00:13:44.000 But we wanted to hire the best possible people.

00:13:48.000 That's it.

00:13:50.000 We're going to continue.

00:13:51.000 Yeah, can you believe it?

00:13:52.000 I know really nuts, really, really out there stuff.

00:13:54.000 But at the end of the day, that's what we're going to keep doing with Rumble and locals and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all of these companies that bring in diversity, inclusion departments, diversity, equity, and inclusion or diversity, inclusion, equity. 0.97

00:14:08.000 Yeah, die.

00:14:09.000 I know. 1.00

00:14:09.000 It's just so perfect. 1.00

00:14:10.000 You can't make it up. 0.99

00:14:12.000 That's the next step, by the way, is die. 1.00

00:14:15.000 Just die if you're not one of these things. 1.00

00:14:17.000 They're really leading with it. 0.99

00:14:18.000 It's a little too obvious.

00:14:20.000 But they will hire people based not on skill.

00:14:23.000 They will hire people based on these things.

00:14:25.000 And then slowly you will degrade the product.

00:14:27.000 If you build a company or you have a governmental organization or a nonprofit or whatever it might be, right?

00:14:32.000 If you have anything with a mission statement, the second you take your eye off what the mission statement is, the second you say, oh, there's some other thing that is more important than selling the best mousetrap or building the most efficient system to help people or whatever it is that you do, you will degrade the product.

00:14:48.000 So they will slowly degrade.

00:14:49.000 And by the way, it'll slowly degrade and then very rapidly degrade.

00:14:53.000 And we'll just build something better.

00:14:54.000 And that's what I love about this.

00:14:56.000 And it's just, there's all these kind of chirpers that criticize companies.

00:15:01.000 It's hard to build things.

00:15:03.000 You know, we've built something at turning point.

00:15:04.000 It's hard.

00:15:05.000 And building something is the long-term solution.

00:15:09.000 Because if you think about, okay, you break up these companies, well, then what?

00:15:09.000 It really is.

00:15:12.000 Then they'll just, it's like a virus.

00:15:14.000 It'll turn into something else.

00:15:15.000 You'll have the Google variant.

00:15:17.000 Then you'll have the, I don't know, the beta variant or whatever they do.

00:15:20.000 The meta variant.

00:15:21.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:21.000 Meta, meta.

00:15:22.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:23.000 Meta.

00:15:23.000 I was going to beta.

00:15:24.000 It was a little bit of a play on words.

00:15:26.000 But that's what's so exciting about it.

00:15:28.000 We're starting to really stream here.

00:15:30.000 It's locals.com.

00:15:31.000 We're going to use it a lot more.

00:15:32.000 But what I want to explore with you a couple of things.

00:15:34.000 Where do you draw the line?

00:15:35.000 Because I don't like going to 8chan or 4chan.

00:15:38.000 I think I did that when I was like 18.

00:15:39.000 And I still have to go to counseling for that.

00:15:41.000 It was terrible.

00:15:42.000 Because this idea of like free speech absolutism, you do get a fair amount of anti-social personalities.

00:15:48.000 I just kind of love to see awful things, right?

00:15:50.000 So how do you balance that when you create a website?

00:15:53.000 Because that's kind of some of the tension and the debate happening amongst some people like Tim Poole and others, where they're saying you must allow everything at all times.

00:16:02.000 Again, having, you know, went to 4chan as a young age, I don't think that's a good idea, but I do want to get your take on it because that's something as a CEO and as a content creator, I'm sure you have to strike a balance for towels are mostly garbage.

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00:17:11.000 Do it right now.

00:17:14.000 How do you strike the balance between free speech, the pursuit of heterodox ideas, and some of the ugliness that can come with the internet?

00:17:24.000 Look, speech is ugly.

00:17:25.000 The human condition is ugly.

00:17:26.000 People say mean things.

00:17:28.000 People can be offended.

00:17:29.000 People can be the offenders.

00:17:31.000 But I think the best thing we can do is try to live up to the ideals that the founding fathers laid out.

00:17:37.000 I mean, the First Amendment, the idea that the government cannot compel your speech and cannot stop you from speaking, is pretty freaking close to the way this thing should operate.

00:17:48.000 It's pretty close.

00:17:49.000 Now, we can get into the minutia of what that means when a company is either a privately held company or when a company goes public and has other responsibilities, fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and all those things.

00:18:01.000 And I'm happy to discuss any of that if you'd like to.

00:18:04.000 But the general idea behind what we've done with locals Locals in Rumble is that you are welcome to come here and say what you want.

00:18:12.000 And as I said earlier, if you break the law, you have a bigger problem than us.

00:18:15.000 Now, one of the things that I think we did really, really well on the local side was that we handed the power around speech to the creators.

00:18:24.000 So basically, we build you a community.

00:18:26.000 People have to pay a couple bucks to get in.

00:18:29.000 And then you decide who can be in your community and who can't be in your community.

00:18:33.000 So, in other words, if somebody comes and joins the Rubin Report community, first off, they have to pay a few dollars.

00:18:37.000 And you're not going to believe it, Charlie.

00:18:39.000 If you charge people a nickel, literally a nickel, you will already eliminate probably 99% of the bad actors because people don't want to pay just to be a pain in the butt online because everyone is awful and has burner accounts and all these anonymous accounts and tries to attack people because they're anonymous.

00:18:57.000 There's no skin in the game.

00:18:59.000 So literally for five cents, I kid you not, I think you could eliminate most of that.

00:19:02.000 So what we said was, hey, for a couple of bucks, you can join the Rubin Report community and that will clean most of it up.

00:19:08.000 Now, if you want to spend a couple bucks and join the Rubin Report community or the Charlie Kirk community or any other community, if you want to do that because you hate Dave Rubin or you hate Charlie Kirk, well, now we got a choice here.

00:19:20.000 Charlie is in charge of Charlie's community and Charlie could say, hey, this guy really doesn't like me.

00:19:25.000 He says mean things about me in my community, but you know what?

00:19:27.000 He's paying me money and I believe in capitalism and I'm going to profit off it.

00:19:31.000 That's number one.

00:19:32.000 And allow him to say what he wants.

00:19:34.000 Or you could say, hey, you know what?

00:19:35.000 I don't want this guy's money.

00:19:37.000 I'm going to boot him out of my community, but he could still be in anyone else's community.

00:19:41.000 And that really is how we all deal with free speech.

00:19:44.000 So if you think about it this way, I always tell people, locals, we build digital homes for creators.

00:19:49.000 So if anyone is outside of my house on a public street and they're screaming, I hate Dave Rubin.

00:19:55.000 He's a mean guy and he's friends with mean people like Charlie Kirk.

00:19:58.000 Well, they can do that on a public street, but I don't invite them into my house to do that.

00:20:04.000 So I think that was one of the very clever ways that we worked some of this stuff around speech.

00:20:10.000 But I'm happy to get into some of the more arbitrary or underbelly of the internet.

00:20:15.000 Yeah, we don't need to dwell on it.

00:20:16.000 I just find it interesting because, you know, I hate censorship.

00:20:20.000 I've been victim of it.

00:20:22.000 So have you.

00:20:23.000 And at the same time, I do love being able to block people on certain accounts because there's just when I mean the ugliest, you know what I mean, Dave.

00:20:31.000 I mean people that have anonymous accounts that post like Holocaust jokes. 0.98

00:20:35.000 Like you're a terrible person.

00:20:36.000 You know what I mean? 0.73

00:20:37.000 Well, the question is: all right, so what do we do about that?

00:20:37.000 Yeah.

00:20:40.000 So for the people that just want to post, you know, really horrific memes about slavery or about the holidays.

00:20:45.000 Yeah, precisely.

00:20:46.000 And they're just doing it because they're antisocial.

00:20:49.000 It's really, and they're whatever.

00:20:51.000 Look, look, the internet, Charlie, the internet, you've often talked about this related to devices and young people.

00:20:57.000 We have been handed this tool in the last 20 years that none of us understood what we were being handed.

00:21:03.000 And I would also argue that the people who designed it in many cases didn't understand.

00:21:06.000 You know, the guy who invented Infinite Scroll, you know, remember early days of the internet, even say 10 years ago or so, you'd get to the end of a web page.

00:21:15.000 Remember, you'd go to CNN.com and there would be a certain amount of stories and you could drag it for a little bit, but then it would stop.

00:21:20.000 Well, then this guy invented something called Infinite Scroll, which we now all know.

00:21:24.000 This is an endless scrolling feed, which will deliver you either dopamine on some level if it's positive, but it can deliver you fear and anger and everything else.

00:21:34.000 And it will go on endlessly, endlessly.

00:21:36.000 And then when you throw in all the crazy things that you can see online that can either make you happy or sad or whatever else it might be.

00:21:43.000 The guy who invented Endless Scroll has come to regret it.

00:21:46.000 He's come to regret it because we've unleashed something that we didn't know was, we didn't know what was in that Pandora's box.

00:21:53.000 That's what happens with the Pandora's box.

00:21:55.000 You open it, you don't know what's going to come out, right?

00:21:57.000 So the best we can do is, I think, figure out ways in our own lives to behave with this technology.

00:22:03.000 So it would not be my preference to be sitting there or have a team dedicated to sit there and watch for all of the mean things that people could say.

00:22:12.000 What I would want to do is hand as much power over to the creators.

00:22:15.000 And then actually, and this is going to sound very conservative, Charlie, but perhaps I really have evolved.

00:22:20.000 I would want to teach people the proper lessons of life so that everyone isn't adding to the madness all the time.

00:22:29.000 So that's not to say you're going to stop all of the underbelly internet 4chan people.

00:22:34.000 And I swear to you, I've never even been on 4chan once.

00:22:37.000 I'm not even sure what it is, but I know it's something and it ain't good.

00:22:40.000 It's bad.

00:22:40.000 I don't think you can stop just what human nature is.

00:22:44.000 I just don't think you can stop that.

00:22:45.000 But perhaps we could build a culture around our technology, around our behavior, around whatever our own personal religious or moral beliefs are.

00:22:53.000 That will be a little bit better.

00:22:55.000 I mean, I think that's where, again, most things come back to the individual.

00:22:58.000 It's not the perfect answer, but I think it's close.

00:23:01.000 No, for sure.

00:23:02.000 And I recognize that.

00:23:03.000 And definitely anchoring yourselves towards the idea of like, we don't like, we might not like what you say, but you can say it is totally the appropriate response.

00:23:13.000 And you're going to have, and you know this, you see some of it, trolls that are going to try to push the boundaries and then be like, oh, why are you censoring me?

00:23:19.000 It's like, you know what I mean?

00:23:21.000 It's trying to create a point out of that.

00:23:23.000 That's never been, the indictment has never been around that, right?

00:23:26.000 The indictment is like you have people saying normal stuff that just get totally obliterated by these technologies.

00:23:34.000 Well, you're making an interesting distinction there because I think you're right.

00:23:36.000 There's a certain feeling amongst some set that's very loud online that, no, everything has to be up there and it's equal and we should have no judgments on anything and everything else.

00:23:46.000 And it's like, I understand that at some level.

00:23:48.000 I really do.

00:23:49.000 But that's not really what we're talking about here.

00:23:51.000 What you're really talking about and what most, it's not even conservatives.

00:23:55.000 What most freedom-loving people are talking about is that we thought that these technologies, that these devices and these apps were going to allow a free flow of information.

00:24:04.000 Except what we realize is they've allowed a free flow one way and a depression on the scale in the other way.

00:24:10.000 Totally.

00:24:10.000 So if you were to say, say, eight months ago, that perhaps COVID was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, that might have got you banned or at least shadow banned on Twitter, where now you're allowed to say it.

00:24:22.000 You may remember, Charlie, in July, the last day of July, right before I went off the grid for the month, I tweeted out something to the effect of saying that vaccine mandates were coming and the vaccines are not working as promised.

00:24:33.000 And I got suspended by Twitter.

00:24:35.000 And what happened?

00:24:36.000 Well, two months later, vaccine mandates were coming.

00:24:38.000 And it's very obvious that the vaccines are not working as promised.

00:24:43.000 But Twitter suspended me for that.

00:24:45.000 And had I not had a locals account where I could get the message out to my audience to start spreading word that I had been banned.

00:24:51.000 And then I messaged you and I messaged some other people that were friendlies to say, hey, we should draw attention to Dave being suspended here.

00:24:58.000 Then you can leverage enough outrage, let's say, to get them to reverse it.

00:25:03.000 But the simple truth is, obviously, guys like you and I are in a very unique situation here where we have those audiences, but they could take out all sorts of people at any given day and none of us would have a clue.

00:25:13.000 That's exactly right.

00:25:14.000 So I want to talk about Barry Weiss and Bill Maher.

00:25:17.000 So I've been a lockdown critic since the beginning.

00:25:19.000 You have been a lockdown critic since the beginning.

00:25:21.000 I've never liked the vaccine.

00:25:23.000 I can't quite recollect.

00:25:25.000 I think you've been pretty good on autonomy, obviously, medical freedom, the whole thing.

00:25:29.000 But now what you want.

00:25:31.000 You want to get injected?

00:25:32.000 Go ahead.

00:25:32.000 Yeah.

00:25:33.000 That's very San Francisco of you.

00:25:36.000 I'll never forget.

00:25:37.000 Dave and I spoke at Berkeley with Candace Owens.

00:25:39.000 We went to Martin Steakhouse.

00:25:41.000 I tell this story often.

00:25:42.000 That was the harbinger of urban crime.

00:25:44.000 Because that was still at a time, Dave, when we thought that San Francisco was actually a civilized place.

00:25:48.000 It was right on the edge.

00:25:49.000 That's a different story for a different time.

00:25:50.000 We come out, Dave's stuff is gone and the SUVs are broken into.

00:25:54.000 But Barry Weiss and Bill Maher, why are they getting all this credit all of a sudden?

00:25:58.000 No, this is, I did about 20 unhinged minutes on my show.

00:26:01.000 Charlie, you know me.

00:26:02.000 It's pretty rare that I'm unhinged.

00:26:04.000 But this is really something that I think that if we're going to figure out what a new alliance of freedom-loving people really is all about, and if we're going to get through all of the crap of the last two years, we got to figure this issue out.

00:26:16.000 So, in essence, what happened was Barry Weiss, former New York Times author who considers herself a good, decent liberal, but she's non-woke and left the New York Times because it was woke, which is very similar to Bill Maher's position on this stuff.

00:26:28.000 She basically went on Bill Maher and did a two-minute rant about how she's against lockdowns, the Democrats are causing children to be depressed, the school stuff, the masks don't work, all of this.

00:26:38.000 Then Bill Maher goes on this tirade about how, oh, I don't live in Florida, but Florida is so much better.

00:26:42.000 But he has to preface it with, I don't live in Florida and I don't want to live in Florida, because that would give too much credit to, you know, scary Ron DeSantis.

00:26:49.000 And I saw all of these Republicans, including many people who I really like, by the way.

00:26:53.000 I mean, Ted Cruz tweeted out the video.

00:26:54.000 I like Ted a lot.

00:26:55.000 I like Senator Cruz.

00:26:56.000 I consider him a friend.

00:26:57.000 He's a good guy.

00:26:58.000 Clay Travis, guys that I really like, were all applauding it.

00:27:01.000 And I thought there's something really wrong here because if these non-woke liberals, let's say the 10 of them that are left in America, that consider themselves- And they're all on locals.

00:27:10.000 Yeah.

00:27:12.000 No.

00:27:12.000 Well, look, if these 10 people who basically get it, they're against critical race theory, you know, they're against wokeism, they're against mandates now that it's sort of safer to be against mandates, whatever it is.

00:27:24.000 These 10 people that are against that neo-racist stuff, it's like, well, okay, then at some point, and I think we're pretty much there, you have to admit that guys like us and conservatives and right-leaning people got most of this stuff right.

00:27:37.000 And the Democrats destroyed everything in the last two years, which is why Florida is free and New York City is a dystopian nightmare.

00:27:43.000 And it's why I fled Los Angeles.

00:27:45.000 Like at some point, you can't just say, oh, I get the issues kind of right, but I'm always late on it.

00:27:50.000 So I'm too late.

00:27:51.000 I'm two years after the conservatives.

00:27:53.000 But then it's like Barry and Bill Maher.

00:27:56.000 And I posed this question on my show today.

00:27:58.000 Are you happy that Glenn Young won Virginia?

00:28:01.000 You should be.

00:28:01.000 And why didn't you say anything about it?

00:28:03.000 Did you want Gavin Newsom to be recalled in California?

00:28:05.000 I don't know that either one of them took a position on it.

00:28:08.000 Do you regret voting for Joe Biden?

00:28:09.000 Do you think that Donald Trump and all his supporters are racist?

00:28:12.000 It's like you got to get to the end.

00:28:14.000 You can't just go down a road and then get to the end of the road and be like, ooh, now I'm scared.

00:28:18.000 It's like, get there already.

00:28:19.000 Time is running short.

00:28:20.000 There's a huge alliance that is happening.

00:28:23.000 Charlie, you and I have been a part of it for a long time for whatever our political disagreements might have been a few years ago that obviously are shrinking at this point.

00:28:30.000 There is a new alliance that can save this country.

00:28:32.000 I think it starts in this state that we both live in right now.

00:28:35.000 But we need some of these people to fully get there.

00:28:38.000 Otherwise, we should just stop giving them credit.

00:28:40.000 I think that's so smart.

00:28:42.000 And I also think there's this, there's this desire amongst conservatives to try to always kind of win the approval of the Marrs and the Barry Weiss's.

00:28:51.000 And you kind of, as you call yourself a conservative, but you know, and you are a conservative.

00:28:56.000 I've always thought you were conservative.

00:28:57.000 I was on that train before.

00:28:58.000 You said it to me.

00:28:59.000 I remember in that car ride, you said it to me.

00:29:01.000 I was like, Dave, you're a right-winger.

00:29:02.000 That was after we were in stores, Connecticut.

00:29:05.000 But I think it's really smart, Dave, and it's important.

00:29:07.000 We're like, hold on, not so fast, Barry Weiss and Bill Maher.

00:29:09.000 You've been like wrong about everything the last couple of years.

00:29:12.000 And why don't you recognize the people that actually saw it right?

00:29:14.000 Because maybe their ideas are rooted in things that are true.

00:29:19.000 I recently received a question from a listener.

00:29:21.000 She wanted to know if it was possible to avoid digestion problems by eating only healthy organic food.

00:29:26.000 It was a nice thought, but unfortunately, it's just not possible.

00:29:28.000 You see, your natural ability to digest food declines with age.

00:29:32.000 This is because your body produces fewer enzymes, proteins responsible for digesting food.

00:29:36.000 Fewer enzymes mean more difficulty digesting food.

00:29:39.000 Even organic foods won't provide enough enzymes to properly digest them.

00:29:42.000 This is especially true if you cook your food because cooking kills enzymes.

00:29:46.000 This is why you have digestion problems even after a healthy meal.

00:29:49.000 Your body just can't produce enough enzymes to get the job done.

00:29:52.000 That's why you need to supplement with a high-quality enzyme supplement that could be a huge help.

00:29:56.000 I personally recommend Mess Zymes by Buy Optimizers.

00:29:59.000 It is the best-in-class supplement loaded with full spectrum enzymes for digesting protein, starches, sugars, fibers, and fats.

00:30:05.000 Taking mass Zymes daily helps top off your enzyme levels and replace the enzymes your body is no longer producing.

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00:30:20.000 For an exclusive offer, my listeners can go to masszymes.com slash Kirk, M-A-S-S-Z-Y-M-E-S.com slash Kirk.

00:30:28.000 Again, that's masszymes.com slash Kirk.

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00:30:37.000 Dave and I have spoken campuses all across the country, Berkeley, University of Connecticut.

00:30:42.000 We also did LSU together.

00:30:44.000 Remember that, Dave?

00:30:45.000 That was fun.

00:30:46.000 Almost everybody.

00:30:47.000 Wait, Charlie, I got one that you didn't show up to.

00:30:49.000 You remember the New Hampshire one that you, me, and Candace were supposed to do?

00:30:54.000 In all fairness.

00:30:56.000 You didn't show up.

00:30:56.000 You had Kanye showed up.

00:30:58.000 It was a big thing with Candace and the whole thing.

00:31:00.000 So I end up at a venue.

00:31:03.000 It was supposed to be in front of 500 kids. 0.90

00:31:05.000 But because there were so many threats against scary Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk and Dave Rubin, they moved it to a hockey rink for 5,000 people where I gave a speech for 500 kids.

00:31:17.000 They are yelling at me, throwing things at me, screaming noisemakers.

00:31:22.000 It was bananas.

00:31:22.000 It's on YouTube.

00:31:23.000 But here's why I don't feel bad.

00:31:25.000 You got millions of views off that content.

00:31:27.000 I did get a lot of views.

00:31:28.000 It's everywhere.

00:31:28.000 I mean, just you made your money back with that one.

00:31:31.000 So, Dave, talk about the conservative movement, which in some ways people describe it as an anti-woke movement.

00:31:38.000 Where is it at?

00:31:39.000 You call yourself a conservative.

00:31:41.000 You identify as one.

00:31:42.000 I think you've been a right-winger for quite some time.

00:31:44.000 Where are we at?

00:31:46.000 Well, look, I would say that any movement that is going to be real in a true democracy, in a pluralistic society where you, by definition, you are supposed to live in a nation with people who think different things or perhaps have different lifestyles, whatever it might be.

00:32:02.000 By definition, you should have a wide-tent political movement.

00:32:06.000 Now, I understand that there are traditional religious conservatives.

00:32:10.000 There's more libertarian-leaning conservatives.

00:32:13.000 There's sort of the Trump wing and the anti-Trump people.

00:32:16.000 There's neocons.

00:32:17.000 There's all of these people that are trying to fit together with something that on one hand has to do what you just said, which is defeat the woke.

00:32:24.000 But then also, let's say we defeat the woke.

00:32:26.000 And I really do think that could be on the horizon.

00:32:28.000 I think the midterms are going to start to prove it.

00:32:30.000 But I also think the model, especially here in Florida through Ron DeSantis, the model of how to govern properly by not being a king and actually handing the power back to the people and letting them make choices.

00:32:39.000 I think that's attractive.

00:32:41.000 So it's starting to come together.

00:32:43.000 But what I think the challenge will be, and I think this is where you and I, guys like you and I, can help mold it.

00:32:49.000 It's like, all right, so there might be, say, more, let's say, libertarian or socially leaning conservatives.

00:32:54.000 Well, someone like Rudy Giuliani, I think, is a good example of this.

00:32:57.000 You know, Rudy Giuliani, anyone in their right mind thinks he's a conservative.

00:33:00.000 Obviously, he worked for Trump and he was a Republican mayor of New York City, et cetera, et cetera.

00:33:06.000 He's obviously a conservative.

00:33:07.000 Well, Rudy Giuliani happens to be pro-choice with, you know, he wants some just few week limit on abortion.

00:33:14.000 There's an awful lot of people that fit on that, meaning that they are conservative when it comes to most of the other issues related to government, and they don't fit into the perfect Republican box when it comes to that.

00:33:24.000 Well, obviously you want someone like Rudy on your side.

00:33:26.000 I would put myself in something like that.

00:33:28.000 So I would say I might be a little bit more on the libertarian side of the conservative movement.

00:33:34.000 And then maybe on the further to the right of that, you would have maybe more traditional religious conservatives.

00:33:39.000 But I think the things that we fundamentally have to agree on is that the founding of the United States is good, that our documents based on individual rights and limited government are beautiful.

00:33:48.000 And then the cultural stuff that maybe we disagree on a little bit, which by the way, I'm completely okay with, that we may disagree on it, but we have to also fundamentally realize that family is good, right?

00:33:58.000 That handing down generations of knowledge and of history of our forefathers who lived, Charlie, in way worse conditions than us, who only through fighting for freedom made it so easy so that guys like us could talk about ideas instead of having to deal with them on the battlefield.

00:34:16.000 We have to understand that traditions are valuable, that family is valuable, all of those things.

00:34:20.000 That I would say is a little bit more on the personal side and not fully a governmental thing.

00:34:24.000 But this is where we're going to have some push and pull.

00:34:27.000 But I love that stuff.

00:34:29.000 And I hope that my, say, new conservative friends are willing to continue to have that conversation, which, by the way, they've been completely willing to.

00:34:35.000 Of course.

00:34:36.000 Yeah.

00:34:36.000 And I mean, this is why people like Peter Pogosian, who's an atheist, who would probably be more on, I think, further left than you on certain issues, maybe not.

00:34:46.000 Sure.

00:34:46.000 Is willing to be like, let's build a coalition against the woke, right?

00:34:50.000 And that's where you're kind of seeing that sort of energy coalesce because it is an existential domestic threat.

00:34:57.000 It really is.

00:34:58.000 I mean, you know it.

00:34:59.000 I know it.

00:34:59.000 These people are willing to use political power to try to crush dissidents.

00:35:03.000 And it's something that is a serious, a serious threat to the American way of life.

00:35:08.000 Dave Rubin from locals.com.

00:35:09.000 I wish we had more time.

00:35:10.000 Also, buy his book, Don't Burn This Book.

00:35:13.000 It's a great book.

00:35:14.000 Don't burn it if you get it.

00:35:15.000 Don't be anti-liberal in that sense.

00:35:18.000 But Dave, I want to have you back on.

00:35:19.000 I want to explore a lot of these topics more deeply with you.

00:35:22.000 But you're exactly right.

00:35:23.000 Like the very basic fruits of the Enlightenment, basic things that the founding fathers talked about, separation of powers, consent to the governed, independent judiciary.

00:35:31.000 These are things that are fundamental to Western civilization.

00:35:34.000 And Western civilization is a good thing.

00:35:36.000 And that's worthy of protection and preservation.

00:35:39.000 Charlie, I know we're tight on time, but now I live in Florida, so we can break bread above ground.

00:35:42.000 You used to have to come to my underground barber in LA.

00:35:44.000 Now we can do it in public.

00:35:46.000 It's wild.

00:35:46.000 And pay 0% income tax.

00:35:48.000 Dave, God bless you, man.

00:35:50.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:35:51.000 Good to see you, brother.

00:35:54.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:55.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:58.000 If you want to support our show, you can do so at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:36:02.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:03.000 God bless.

00:36:06.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - January 25, 2022

Winning the Fight for Free Speech Online with Dave Rubin

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