00:01:10.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:16.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:32.000You 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.
00:02:44.000And then at some point, if you don't do anything about it, you're just talking.
00:02:47.000And then I would say you get ultimately diminishing returns on that.
00:02:51.000So all of us were screaming about big tech and were upset about shadow banning and deboosting and algorithmic tricks and all of this stuff.
00:02:59.000And I thought, all right, well, I've talked to a lot of people.
00:03:02.000No one seems to be willing to do anything.
00:03:15.000I 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.
00:03:23.000And 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.
00:03:33.000And the company really grew really fast.
00:03:35.000I 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.
00:03:45.000And then the Rumble guys came along and you know a bit about Chris Ober at Rumble and the other people over there.
00:03:50.000And I thought, well, you know, you can fight alone, meaning I could build a great product and I can try to fight Google myself.
00:03:57.000And, you know, that David guy did beat Goliath.
00:04:01.000But sometimes it's good to have a team too.
00:04:03.000You know, you can think about it as team sports.
00:04:04.000You can think Lord of the Rings or whatever.
00:04:06.000Like it's good to have some other people around you in the battle.
00:04:10.000And 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.
00:05:14.000But 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.
00:05:22.000You went on tour with Jordan and you decided, hey, I'm an entrepreneur.
00:05:30.000And 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.
00:05:42.000Yeah, I'm glad you asked because, you know, it sounds like a little bit like insider baseball stuff.
00:05:47.000But 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.
00:05:56.000And 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.
00:06:03.000So 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.
00:06:18.000And 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.
00:06:28.000He was one of the guys on YouTube that described himself as a classical liberal.
00:06:32.000He was fighting for individual rights and liberty, most things that we now associate with libertarians and conservatives.
00:06:37.000But he was an interesting guy to talk to.
00:06:39.000Anyway, he was on Patreon and Patreon for your audience that doesn't know, they're basically just a crowdfunding subscription site.
00:06:45.000So if you produce pretty much anything online, they will enable you to have your audience subscribe monthly to what you do.
00:07:04.000Jordan Peterson was on Patreon as well, some other big people.
00:07:07.000And 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.
00:07:20.000He went on someone else's show that had nothing to do with Patreon.
00:07:24.000And 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.
00:07:33.000Patreon decided without any warning, without any recourse to delete his channel.
00:07:38.000Now, he was running his own business in that way.
00:07:42.000So they just said to him, hey, we're not even going to give you a chance to explain yourself.
00:07:46.000But really what it was, it wasn't just that.
00:07:48.000It 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.
00:08:04.000So once that happened, that's where Jordan Peterson and I, and as you said, we were on tour together at the time.
00:08:09.000We had been discussing, you know, could we maybe build something?
00:08:16.000Announced we were both leaving Patreon.
00:08:18.000Then Sam Harris left Patreon, a bunch of other people did, and that really was the beginning of Locals.
00:08:22.000I said, all right, let me, let me build some of this stuff for myself.
00:08:25.000And 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.
00:08:32.000And 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.
00:08:40.000Why don't we build these two products together?
00:08:42.000And and then build something much bigger.
00:08:45.000And it's Locals.com and it's officially now merged with Rumble, which is now a spec, publicly traded, and it's exciting.
00:08:51.000I mean look, i'm all for breaking up Google.
00:08:56.000I wouldn't have said that four years ago.
00:08:58.000I did come on your show and we kind of danced around it, right.
00:09:00.000We were kind of still believers in the market, and we still are, but it was.
00:09:05.000I think I was a little naive, to be honest, about how strong these companies were.
00:09:09.000Go ahead, comment on it yeah well, real quick.
00:09:11.000I 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.
00:09:17.000Look, there's a reason that I never fully described myself as a libertarian.
00:09:21.000I 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.
00:09:29.000I think there's a widening of conservatism that we can.
00:09:31.000We can discuss if you want, but without getting lost in the definitions.
00:09:34.000I never believed that that government should absolutely do nothing.
00:09:40.000I love Michael Malice, I love some of the anarchist guys, like intellectually, I like it.
00:09:44.000But 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?
00:10:01.000So, 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.
00:10:10.000I'm with you that we have to figure out the pressure points but, at the same time, build that parallel economy.
00:10:17.000I 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.
00:10:36.000And 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.
00:11:11.000You have I see Seb Gorka, Dinesh D'Souza, Dan Bongino, you have Tulsi Gabbard.
00:11:19.000Talk 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.
00:11:31.000Yeah, 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.
00:11:44.000I'm pretty sure he used to call me racist all the time.
00:11:46.000But the point is that we are willing to have a plurality of opinion on Rumble.
00:11:50.000We're not really interested in putting our finger on the scales and saying, oh, this opinion should be heard more than that opinion.
00:11:57.000No, 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.
00:12:09.000Well, if you do that on Rumble, you have a much bigger problem or locals for that matter.
00:12:12.000You have a much bigger problem than Dave Rubin, right?
00:12:15.000Like you have a much bigger problem than us.
00:12:17.000The government is going to get involved.
00:12:19.000But we are otherwise an open platform.
00:12:23.000And ironically, that's really all that people want.
00:12:26.000You 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.
00:12:36.000We 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.
00:12:49.000So because we just believe, hey, this is America.
00:12:54.000If you'd like to use our product, use it.
00:12:56.000If you break the laws, you got a bigger problem than us.
00:12:58.000It's like, this is a very obvious thing that I think is welcoming to everybody.
00:13:03.000And, 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.
00:13:11.000And it's become so ubiquitous and so powerful.
00:13:13.000And we're all walking around with these devices in our pockets and everything else.
00:13:16.000The other part of this is that they will crumble under the weight of wokeness.
00:13:22.000You 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.
00:13:32.000When 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.
00:13:39.000I did not care what your skin color was.
00:13:41.000I know in the modern day, that's known as racist or something like that.
00:13:44.000But we wanted to hire the best possible people.
00:13:52.000I know really nuts, really, really out there stuff.
00:13:54.000But 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.
00:14:20.000But they will hire people based not on skill.
00:14:23.000They will hire people based on these things.
00:14:25.000And then slowly you will degrade the product.
00:14:27.000If you build a company or you have a governmental organization or a nonprofit or whatever it might be, right?
00:14:32.000If 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.
00:15:42.000Because this idea of like free speech absolutism, you do get a fair amount of anti-social personalities.
00:15:48.000I just kind of love to see awful things, right?
00:15:50.000So how do you balance that when you create a website?
00:15:53.000Because 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.
00:16:02.000Again, 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.
00:16:16.000They feel soft and lotiony in the stores, but you get them home and they don't absorb.
00:16:20.000Well, Mike Lindell and MyPillow found out around 2006 that towels change forever.
00:16:25.000They started importing them and adding softeners and other things that cotton that made them feel good, but didn't work.
00:16:31.000He found the best towel company right here in America.
00:16:33.000They have proprietary technology to create towels that feel soft but actually work.
00:16:37.000And they're all made with USA cotton and they come with a MyPillow 60-day money-back guarantee.
00:16:43.000It's a six-piece set, two baths, two hand towels, two washcloths made with USA cotton, soft yet absorbent, regularly $100 $9.99, now just $39.99.
00:17:14.000How do you strike the balance between free speech, the pursuit of heterodox ideas, and some of the ugliness that can come with the internet?
00:17:31.000But I think the best thing we can do is try to live up to the ideals that the founding fathers laid out.
00:17:37.000I 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.
00:17:49.000Now, 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.
00:18:01.000And I'm happy to discuss any of that if you'd like to.
00:18:04.000But 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.
00:18:12.000And as I said earlier, if you break the law, you have a bigger problem than us.
00:18:15.000Now, 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.
00:18:24.000So basically, we build you a community.
00:18:26.000People have to pay a couple bucks to get in.
00:18:29.000And then you decide who can be in your community and who can't be in your community.
00:18:33.000So, in other words, if somebody comes and joins the Rubin Report community, first off, they have to pay a few dollars.
00:18:37.000And you're not going to believe it, Charlie.
00:18:39.000If 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.
00:18:59.000So literally for five cents, I kid you not, I think you could eliminate most of that.
00:19:02.000So 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.
00:19:08.000Now, 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.
00:19:20.000Charlie is in charge of Charlie's community and Charlie could say, hey, this guy really doesn't like me.
00:19:25.000He says mean things about me in my community, but you know what?
00:19:27.000He's paying me money and I believe in capitalism and I'm going to profit off it.
00:20:23.000And 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.
00:20:31.000I mean people that have anonymous accounts that post like Holocaust jokes.
00:20:51.000Look, look, the internet, Charlie, the internet, you've often talked about this related to devices and young people.
00:20:57.000We have been handed this tool in the last 20 years that none of us understood what we were being handed.
00:21:03.000And I would also argue that the people who designed it in many cases didn't understand.
00:21:06.000You 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.
00:21:15.000Remember, 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.
00:21:20.000Well, then this guy invented something called Infinite Scroll, which we now all know.
00:21:24.000This 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.
00:21:34.000And it will go on endlessly, endlessly.
00:21:36.000And 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.
00:21:43.000The guy who invented Endless Scroll has come to regret it.
00:21:46.000He'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.
00:21:53.000That's what happens with the Pandora's box.
00:21:55.000You open it, you don't know what's going to come out, right?
00:21:57.000So the best we can do is, I think, figure out ways in our own lives to behave with this technology.
00:22:03.000So 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.
00:22:12.000What I would want to do is hand as much power over to the creators.
00:22:15.000And then actually, and this is going to sound very conservative, Charlie, but perhaps I really have evolved.
00:22:20.000I would want to teach people the proper lessons of life so that everyone isn't adding to the madness all the time.
00:22:29.000So that's not to say you're going to stop all of the underbelly internet 4chan people.
00:22:34.000And I swear to you, I've never even been on 4chan once.
00:22:37.000I'm not even sure what it is, but I know it's something and it ain't good.
00:22:45.000But perhaps we could build a culture around our technology, around our behavior, around whatever our own personal religious or moral beliefs are.
00:23:03.000And 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.
00:23:13.000And 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?
00:23:21.000It's trying to create a point out of that.
00:23:23.000That's never been, the indictment has never been around that, right?
00:23:26.000The indictment is like you have people saying normal stuff that just get totally obliterated by these technologies.
00:23:34.000Well, you're making an interesting distinction there because I think you're right.
00:23:36.000There'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.
00:23:46.000And it's like, I understand that at some level.
00:23:49.000But that's not really what we're talking about here.
00:23:51.000What you're really talking about and what most, it's not even conservatives.
00:23:55.000What 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.
00:24:04.000Except what we realize is they've allowed a free flow one way and a depression on the scale in the other way.
00:24:10.000So 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.
00:24:22.000You 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.
00:24:45.000And 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.
00:24:51.000And 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.
00:24:58.000Then you can leverage enough outrage, let's say, to get them to reverse it.
00:25:03.000But 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.
00:26:04.000But 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.
00:26:16.000So, 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.
00:26:28.000She 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.
00:26:38.000Then Bill Maher goes on this tirade about how, oh, I don't live in Florida, but Florida is so much better.
00:26:42.000But 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.
00:26:49.000And I saw all of these Republicans, including many people who I really like, by the way.
00:26:53.000I mean, Ted Cruz tweeted out the video.
00:26:58.000Clay Travis, guys that I really like, were all applauding it.
00:27:01.000And 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.
00:27:12.000Well, 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.
00:27:24.000These 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.
00:27:37.000And the Democrats destroyed everything in the last two years, which is why Florida is free and New York City is a dystopian nightmare.
00:28:20.000There's a huge alliance that is happening.
00:28:23.000Charlie, 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.
00:28:30.000There is a new alliance that can save this country.
00:28:32.000I think it starts in this state that we both live in right now.
00:28:35.000But we need some of these people to fully get there.
00:28:38.000Otherwise, we should just stop giving them credit.
00:28:42.000And 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.
00:28:51.000And you kind of, as you call yourself a conservative, but you know, and you are a conservative.
00:28:56.000I've always thought you were conservative.
00:31:03.000It was supposed to be in front of 500 kids.
00:31:05.000But 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.
00:31:17.000They are yelling at me, throwing things at me, screaming noisemakers.
00:31:46.000Well, 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.
00:32:02.000By definition, you should have a wide-tent political movement.
00:32:06.000Now, I understand that there are traditional religious conservatives.
00:32:10.000There's more libertarian-leaning conservatives.
00:32:13.000There's sort of the Trump wing and the anti-Trump people.
00:32:17.000There'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.
00:32:24.000But then also, let's say we defeat the woke.
00:32:26.000And I really do think that could be on the horizon.
00:32:28.000I think the midterms are going to start to prove it.
00:32:30.000But 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.
00:33:07.000Well, Rudy Giuliani happens to be pro-choice with, you know, he wants some just few week limit on abortion.
00:33:14.000There'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.
00:33:24.000Well, obviously you want someone like Rudy on your side.
00:33:26.000I would put myself in something like that.
00:33:28.000So I would say I might be a little bit more on the libertarian side of the conservative movement.
00:33:34.000And then maybe on the further to the right of that, you would have maybe more traditional religious conservatives.
00:33:39.000But 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.
00:33:48.000And 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?
00:33:58.000That 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.
00:34:16.000We have to understand that traditions are valuable, that family is valuable, all of those things.
00:34:20.000That I would say is a little bit more on the personal side and not fully a governmental thing.
00:34:24.000But this is where we're going to have some push and pull.
00:34:29.000And 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.
00:34:36.000And 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.
00:35:23.000Like the very basic fruits of the Enlightenment, basic things that the founding fathers talked about, separation of powers, consent to the governed, independent judiciary.
00:35:31.000These are things that are fundamental to Western civilization.
00:35:34.000And Western civilization is a good thing.
00:35:36.000And that's worthy of protection and preservation.
00:35:39.000Charlie, I know we're tight on time, but now I live in Florida, so we can break bread above ground.
00:35:42.000You used to have to come to my underground barber in LA.