← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Dave Rubin on Speaking Your Truth in a Divided World (Archived Episode)
01:48:04
Loading summary
Transcript106 lines
- [00:00]
Grainger Announcer
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need, all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need, all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [01:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here with Dave Rubin. What is up, my man? Welcome to the show, Tom.
- [01:11]
Dave Rubin
It's good to be with you. I'm just hunkered down in the fort over here just trying to avoid the coronavirus, zombies and whatever other apocalyptic things are happening outside. Who knows? At the moment it's raining here in la, which is sort of apocalyptic. Which is already.
- [01:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, very apocalyptic, for sure. This is a super weird time, man. How do you think about what's going on, given that you have a book tour, which we can see over your shoulder. Don't burn this book. Launching a book right now. I have a lot of friends who are doing it. It seems like a rough way to have to launch the book. How are you thinking about that? Why didn't you push it off? What's the thinking?
- [01:49]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, I should say had a book tour and we will have one in the future. But the current book tour, which of course was supposed to launch on April 28, the day that the book comes out in New York City, that has been indefinitely postponed. And we'll see over the next couple months as things slowly get back to normal when we can start doing that. At this point, after being trapped in the house for so long, although this is my home, my studio's in my home, and I work from home and my crew comes to my home to work and all that, you know, everyone's getting a little stir crazy. And my hope is when we get on the other side of this thing that we're gonna have like a little feeling of the Roaring twenties where People are gonna want to be out and about again. And we'll wanna go to public events and comedy shows and speaking tours and restaurants and all that stuff. And, you know, it'll be good for the economy, but I think more than anything else, it'll be good for the human spirit. I did have a call a couple weeks ago with all the top brass at Penguin Random House, and they said, do you want to delay the book? And we just don't know what's going to happen with shipping, and we don't know if people will be at the stores and all of those things. And my feeling is this is the first book I've ever written. I finished the book last July, so July of 2019. And then you edit for a couple months. But really, I stopped touching the book probably right around Thanksgiving of 2019. We're in April now. So I've been sitting on this thing for a long time. The ideas that I talk about in the book, I think are mostly timeless ideas. But, you know, like anyone that does anything, when you do something, you create something. It's a piece of art, it's a book, it's a comedy skit, whatever it might be. You build something, you don't want to sit on it forever. You want to do it and kind of get it out there so that you can move on to do other things. And I'm very proud of the book. But I basically said to them, we got to get it out. Let's get it out. I think. I think actually, I didn't anticipate Corona. Nobody anticipated Corona. But I think the ideas that I talk about in the book are very related to what we're seeing right now with government stimulus packages and federal shutdowns and Borders and a series of the other things that I talk about. So my feeling is you just move forward. You keep moving forward. I do know that a lot of books were delayed and canceled. And, yeah, maybe it's going to hit us and hurt us a little bit in the bookstores if they're still closed in certain states and things like that. But fortunately, there is online. We've got an ebook. We got the voiceover version, and we'll see what happens. But I just think you gotta move. You can't just wait till everything's perfect because perfect never comes.
- [04:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that is a very fair statement. I don't know. So I. I technically have a book deal. I have continued to refuse the advance because the amount of time that it takes to sit down and write the book, the amount of time that it takes to go out and promote the book. I'm super conflicted, and that is the right word. I'm conflicted about it. I want to do it and I don't want to do it. It's kind of how I feel about kids. So my wife and I don't have kids. And what I've always said is I actually really want kids. Like, I really want kids. And I used the big brother for this kid for like eight and a half years. I know what it's like, the good and the bad. And the only thing that I want more than I want to have kids is to not have kids. And that's where I'm at with the book. It's like I put out so much video content that is exactly what I would write in the book. And so it's like, oh, man, I'm already putting so much time and energy into those ideas, those thoughts, trying to get them out into the world in a way that I can constantly adjust them and revamp them. And the thought of sitting down for, you know, God, on the short side, six months, I mean, if I'm just absolutely murdering it, or a year, which is probably more likely, given how slowly I write, to concretize the ideas and get them in a way that I can put out. So it's like the only thing I want more than to actually put those ideas out in the world in that way is to still have the time to do something else.
- [05:47]
Dave Rubin
Tom, I hear you. I mean, I definitely hear you. Right. Like, we exist very much in the same space. I'm putting out a ton of stuff, and it's not just the videos, but whatever I'm doing on social media and touring and speaking at colleges and all that stuff. And when this thing was presented to me, and it was presented to me, I didn't ask for it. One day we started getting a bunch of calls and some of the publishing houses wanted to make this happen. My feeling again, because I do believe in this, you just keep moving forward, was, oh, there's a great opportunity here and I'll just figure out how to make it work. And somehow, even though right now, in the last few years of my life I've been busier than I've ever been, you kind of just figure out a way. It's a little bit of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park. Like, life finds a way and you find a way to do it. And I basically. So for me, it was about a six month process of writing, but basically what I would do is I'd wake up, I'd let my dog out to pee, I'd make some coffee, and I'd go into the green room, which is because my studio is in my house. One of the bedrooms is the green room where the guests come in and can chill out before the show and get makeup and all that. And that became my office. And I basically closed the door at about 8am and often write until about 2 or so without eating nothing. I would just go, go, go, go, go. And every now and again my husband would open the door and just like slide in a plate of food as if I was in like maximum security. Because he'd realize, you gotta eat. And then I would be like, wow, I am hungry. And I didn't even realize it. But it's funny that you talk about it framed within having kids, because when I handed in the manuscript in July, it felt like what. I can only presume a little bit of what giving birth is like. Like, you worked on this thing for months. You know, if you're the woman pregnant, you've eaten, right? Like, I gave this thing everything I had. Then you give it. You sort of put it there. And then the weird thing is for a book that the next thing that you do with it is you start dissecting it. So it's an odd thing because it's like you birth this thing and then the first thing you have to do is operate on the birth, which is a really weird process. And you know, obviously the editing part and all that is extremely. It's very technical and you move things around and then you have to, you know, battle out some of the ideas. But I can tell you this, and I suspect it would be the same for you if you can figure out how to carve out that time. The rewards that I now feel for this thing, I feel like it's more timeless than, say, just doing interviews or video content on a daily basis. It's a way of crystallizing your ideas and challenging little things that I thought maybe left unsaid or I hadn't fully come around on one idea, or why do I really think this about taxes? Why do I really think that this should be the cutoff point on abortion? And how does that compare to a pure pro life position or a pure pro choice position? All of those things, if you like what you're doing, it's fun working through those things. So I really did enjoy the process, actually. Even though it's work, it's definitely work. And it's exhausting and you will Hit writer's block and all of that stuff. The process, I think if you can get through it and you have something to say, is definitely worth it.
- [09:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when it comes to writing the book, for me it is. It's really a trade off. So if I'm going to be spending that time on that, there's something else that I'm not spending my time. So I've become known. So ironically, when I started all of this, I thought I would be the business guy. And I thought that's where everybody was going to, you know, be interested in what I had to say. And as I was trying to explain to people how to build a business, I kept coming back to, dude, first you have to get your head right. Like, if you're not thinking in the right way, you're going to miss all these opportunities. There's like this foundational layer of stuff. And so I started going into that just as like a. Okay, once you have that in place, now I can talk to you about business principles. But the thing I struggle with my employees the most, the thing that I went through myself was all this mindset layer stuff. How to think, problem solving mode, focusing on the problems instead of the solutions. The ability to generate momentum, to not be emotionally devastated by criticism. Like all these things that fuck people up. Like, I've always told people, boredom kills more entrepreneurs than anything. Like all this stuff, financial difficulties, all that. The thing that eats entrepreneurs alive is your friends are out partying and you're at home working on like some really boring shit. Like I remember, dude, I don't get mad very easily. When we were so I had left Quest, we were launching Impact Theory and getting an ein number, a tax ID for the company was. I was about to fucking punch through a wall. I was like, this is the most deeply inefficient system I have ever encountered in my. And it is so enraging when you're small and you're trying to like, get something going, you're trying to get momentum going. And you've gotta fucking pay your employees, but you can't pay your employees until you have a tax id. Dude. I was literally. I wanted to tear my hair out
- [10:53]
Dave Rubin
as somebody with a couple businesses now. So I've had to get a couple eins and then, you know, you have to wait for the ein to get the bank account open. And then sometimes the thing gets lost in the mail. We had that happen once. And then you gotta wait on the phone with the irs, which I don't have to get into that. I Mean all of those things. And the funny thing is, of course, they're side issues for anyone that's really trying to accomplish something. Those are the things that you have to do to build the business behind what it is you really want to do. I actually think one of the things that I'm most proud of is that all of the issues that I talk about on the show related to freedom, related to liberty, related to getting rid of regulation and owning your life and individual rights and all of these things, and low taxes so that people can flourish. Those are the exact things that I've imported into my business here. We're in a really, really difficult, challenging economic time and at every other level beyond economic. But my business, I have three businesses now, but my business, meaning the Rubin report and the production company behind it, we're absolutely thriving right now, which is great, but it's not a coincidence. It's because I've always made sure to a take good care of my employees so that right now, when everybody's working from home, I know they're really working and that they have a vested interest in seeing us succeed. And if they've needed us to buy them equipment, my director works remotely. Now, we make sure we get everybody stuff. We don't cheap out on things. We pay 100% of all of their and their dependents. Health insurance. The way we've run everything here. Our company has no debt. We just hired somebody. I mean, in the midst of coronavirus, I just added a new associate producer. All of those things that I'm very proud of, they're not coincidences. They're from doing exactly what you said there. You got to get your head on straight first, know what you think and why you think it. And then that's a sort of beautiful thing because I didn't ever think of myself as a businessman in any way. The fact that I now run this company that funds and produces this, this was the goal. But I actually like all that other stuff now because then it's like, oh, these things aren't just ideas. Talking about low taxes and why that will help you thrive is not just an idea. It's actually when you put it into practice. And I go, wait, if my taxes are lower, I can actually hire more people, thus helping the economy, and I can pay for more of their insurance or whatever it is. It's a pretty beautiful thing. And it's funny because I will often see that people, let's say my ideological opponents, so like the real progressive types, they're always screaming about unions for example. And often you find, as is with my former employer, that's a big YouTube channel. They scream about unions for everybody else all day. And then it comes out in the news a couple weeks ago that their own employees are trying to unionize and they're fighting them tooth and nail against it. And it's like, yeah, but that's so consistent, I think, with what comes out of a certain version of the political machine these days. And what I wanted to do was say something that was true. And then as a byproduct of that, I was able to create something good, which is a pretty beautiful thing.
- [14:08]
Grainger Hospital Procurement Announcer
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [14:39]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's super interesting. I've always avoided politics, I think, partly because I don't find it very interesting, partly because the culture wars has become literally crazy. So as. As what I'll refer to as a culture wars, and you being what I would consider in the fucking middle of all of that, maybe you'll disagree with the definition, but that was all happening.
- [15:03]
Dave Rubin
I'm with you so far.
- [15:05]
Tom Bilyeu
I was. It was kicking off while I was building business, so I just had my head down. So for basically two decades, I just had my head down. I was working. That was it. I was trying to build businesses. I was so bad in the beginning at being an entrepreneur that it was just like constant panic mode for years and years and years. I didn't even have time to sort of look up and, you know, think about what I think at a higher level. Then as you're building businesses and it's real and your house is on the line and you start looking at, especially living in California, the insane tax rates, it starts to be a little bit more. You start having sort of background opinions. This is not an area I feel like I'm well thought out. But it's very interesting to read your book and to see all of your ideas laid bare, walking people through exactly what you think. One, I'd love to know, like, have you always been drawn to this? And how do you deal with this sort of what I'll call glutton for punishment mode? That you're in. I've seen videos of people haranguing, you know, interrupting your talks. You go to colleges still, which seems like madness. What is it that draws you to this and makes it worth sort of all the difficulty?
- [16:15]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, so I'll do the first part first, which is, have I always been interested in this? You know, it's funny, I didn't really realize that until I was writing this book because I was a political science major in college. And I remember in eighth or ninth grade, it was the 19, I believe, 1988 presidential election was Michael Dukakis versus George H.W. bush. It seems like many lifetimes ago. And we did a mock election in my class. And I had to. I was, like, the campaign manager for Dukakis. And Dukakis was the liberal and the Democrat, and he was the good guy, and Bush was the evil Republican, and they care about war and money, and he was the bad guy. That's, I think, where the real political thing started. But under that, I would say, and I write about this in the book, my family was always. It's not that anyone in my family was in politics, but we just always kind of talked about everything. So at holidays, we'd have big tables with aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandkids and nieces and nephews and the whole thing, like everybody else and friends. And we would be arguing about everything. I mean, arguing about foreign policy, arguing about abortion, arguing about taxes, immigration, everything that now we all talk about. And really, somehow in my family, dessert would be served and everyone would just kind of forget it. Like, it was just like nobody held a grudge over politics. We had family grudges that often could last a generation or two in terms of interpersonal relationships, that kind of stuff. But I never saw anyone storm out of a meal because of a political disagreement or even really yelling at each other. You know, it would get heated sometimes, but I never saw that. And I think that ability to do that dance, to be able to talk to people and understand that people think differently, and then you still break bread with them. They're still your family. I think that just got embedded into my DNA somehow. So I think that's part of it. And then as far as, like, being in the eye of the storm or glutton for punishment with all this, I mean, look, if you're gonna do anything good in this world, it is gonna come with a certain cost. You know, if you are going to try to say something true, try to say something that you believe it is going to come with people yelling at you, people trying to silence you, de platform you potentially physically try to stop you, they'll try to go for your job. I mean, there's a million examples of this over the course of time. You know, scientists hundreds of years ago talking about new scientific theories and having religious authorities go after them. Anyone, anyone anywhere that tries to innovate and do something good, you're gonna have people push against you. What Tesla was trying to do and basically destroyed by Edison. I mean, there's so many examples of this kind of thing. So all of that stuff, when you see these videos, there's the one that really went viral where I was at the University of New Hampshire, and I'm basically telling a bunch of kids that you should live free and let's appreciate America, let's agree to disagree. I mean, that was the message. And they're screaming at me. And they bring noisemakers, and, you know, they chant. And they would pick times because they would set it up in their phones so that every few minutes a bell would go off. So different kids knew when to stand up and interrupt and chant. And I would literally, there's a moment, people can find it on YouTube, where I would go, I was literally, I don't know, maybe eight feet away from these two people, and they're mindlessly chanting, and I'm standing in front of them, but they refuse to look at me. They won't look at you in the eye. I kept saying, guys, I'm right in front of you. If you have a question for me or a comment or a thought, feel free to tell me, I'm right here. And they wouldn't even look at me because they don't even want to think that their opponent is human. So all of those things, they're not really fun in the midst of it. I don't think I'm combative by nature. You see, the way I do interviews, I'm not here to really fight with people. I am interested in. In talking to people, but some of that just comes with the territory. And actually, I wouldn't have thought this maybe three years ago, but I now think this, that if it wasn't for a lot of those slings and arrows, I don't know that I could be where I am right now. Because now when the hit pieces come or the New York Times says something stupid about me or Vox or HuffPo or Buzzfeed or any of these things, it's like, now, first off, I have an army of people who defend me before I even have to defend Myself. But I also know that these people haven't taken me. They haven't taken me out. And if anything, they've helped me strengthen my resolve. And I think, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I think a lot of people need to hear that. And that's why so much of the book is about, you know, get your shit together, basically, so that you can face the mob one day. Because otherwise, whatever it is that you believe that isn't mainstream, that isn't just the automatic woke opinion of the day, you're never gonna say it. And do you want to be the type of person in your life that doesn't say what they think? Most people don't. I don't. We get cowed into fear with that. But I don't want to be that person. And that's why I was really trying to write this book.
- [21:19]
Tom Bilyeu
One thing that I found along those lines really interesting in your book, and I didn't know this part of your story at all, was that you didn't come out for a very long time as being gay and that it was causing you massive. Would you categorize it as anxiety or depression? Like, one, what would you categorize it as? And then two, how did you end up there if you had this family? It seemed pretty open. You guys talked about everything. What was it that made you afraid to be open about that?
- [21:47]
Dave Rubin
You know, it's an inside job. It really. It's an inside job meaning even if the world is totally open to you, whatever that means to you when you're in the closet. And by the way, you know, and I talk about this in the book, the Closet, we only think of the closet as you can be closeted about your sexuality. My point in the book is you can be closeted about many different things, and I think many people right now are politically closeted. People who have just very basic, decent political beliefs are afraid to say what they think. If you're afraid to say what you think to your family, to your friends, whatever it is, you are closeted in a way. So that's why I make that a metaphor in the book. I think partly looking back, there were probably a couple things. First off, gay. It's a little hard for people now in 2020 to remember what it was like in 2000, in 1990, 1980, 19, whatever the stigma that was attached to being gay. And. And nobody really wants to be the other. Nobody wants to. You know, it's like, in retrospect, now I see why there's so many reasons that maybe by being the other in this regard, by having this other thing about me, that it did help shape a certain tolerance for me. It did help shape my belief in the individual. It did help shape my belief that we can be different and still love each other, or at least not kill each other. So I don't regret it now, but I think I did. Part of it was that there were no gay role models in a way that, you know, there was RuPaul or there were, like, over the top, you know, every cliche, gay, ridiculous character that you can think of. And by the way, even now, there aren't many gay role models. You know, there's a couple gay people on tv, someone like Anderson Cooper, who. All the gay people in New York City knew he was gay but was closeted way later. And I, oddly, became resentful of him because I was out at a certain point and he was still closeted. And it was like, why am I doing the dirty work for Gloria Vanderbilt's son who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars and on CNN every night? But I would say I also didn't because I'm not flamboyant or something like that. And I like basketball, and I like video games, and I like Star wars and things that are not thought of as gay, whatever that means. I think that made me kind of feel like a freak, sort of, because, you know, like, it's a weird thing. It's like. It's funny because, like, when you think back on how you used to think, sometimes it's like, wow, it's crazy that I used to think that way. But I think it partly was that I was like. I knew who I wanted to sleep with or whatever, but that was different than every other part of me that anyone knew. And for a long time, I just had a hard time reconciling those things I thought gay meant you love Madonna and you like to do ecstasy and go to clubs and go to theater. And I don't like any of those things, although I did do ecstasy once at a Madonna concert, and I didn't really have a great time. So, you know, I think it's just an inside job. And at some point, you know, I describe in the book that when I was really closeted, your ability to even see what's real starts to change. Because if you're hiding yourself all the time, you need to be real so that you can exchange reality with other people. So, like, right now, when we're all trapped in our houses, I'm actually Quite worried for mental health going forward because it's cool that we can do this, right? And hopefully people listening or watching this can hear something that we're saying and can then mirror some truth off that they could go. I struggled with something similar or that has no meaning to me or this guy's nuts or whatever. But the more that we just are all distancing ourselves. That's why I don't like the phrase social distancing. Because, yes, we have to physically distance ourselves six feet right now. But the idea of social distancing, we're social creatures, and there's a reason for that. We need it so that we can keep going and keep learning and growing and all of those things. So at the end of the day, whatever it was, whatever it was that kept me there for a long time, it's funny, I don't have any regrets per se, because I think whatever I went through got me to where I am now, which is good. But I guess my one, it's not quite a regret, but I wish I had been a little bit easier on myself. Because when you're not doing anything or
- [25:55]
Tom Bilyeu
were you being hard on yourself about. Exactly.
- [25:59]
Dave Rubin
Well, just that I was gay. I thought there was something wrong with me.
- [26:02]
Tom Bilyeu
You saw that?
- [26:04]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, I saw it as bad, or I just saw it as like, there was like a defect in me. Meaning my friends were all very similar as me, and we'd play basketball and do all these things, and they all had girlfriends, and it was like there was something about me that was flawed.
- [26:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, there's something really interesting there. So I've heard people, gay people that have come out of the closet talk about that a lot. And maybe it's tied up in the very notion of identity that there is some sense of getting something echoed back to you from other people that helps you form your sense of identity. I really want to understand that. So you're thinking that something is broken or something is wrong? Is it simply like, we interpret different as being wrong when we're young? Or, like, what do you think that mechanism is? It is so common that so many people feel like that.
- [26:56]
Dave Rubin
Well, look, there's something inherently. I'm 100% pro gay, right? So I'm married to a man. We've been together for 10 years. We've been married for almost five. But, you know, the idea that, say, two gay people can't procreate in a traditional sense, we're actually in the process of having kids via a surrogate and an egg and the whole shebang and we posited sperm. And as we were. Yeah, yeah. As we were walking into the space, sperm banks. It's kind of funny. It was like the day before the full on shutdown of Los Angeles because of coronavirus. So people are scattered and it's very weird out. And we're walking into the sperm bank to deposit sperm and Dennis Rodman was standing outside and I was like, I will never forget this. It's like lockdown day one. And there's Dennis Rodman as we're walking in to deposit sperm. But I think that it brings up all sorts of issues about how you think about the world if you can't procreate. Or even more important than that, I would say until gay marriage. This is why I think gay marriage was so important. Regardless of how you feel about gay people, if you don't give people the opportunity to be in some sort of stable relationship that everybody else can be in, what do you leave them with? You leave them with an endless life of narcissism and chasing after sex and all of those things. And I used to live in West Hollywood, which is the gayest place on earth. I mean, they have rainbow crosswalks. This is the gayest place on planet Earth, basically. And one of the saddest things there is, you see all of these guys who are 50s, 60s, 70s, possibly even older, who come from a time when there was no way they could be in a functional relationship. And then you throw in the AIDS crisis and everything else, and then you see that basically they've had to live their lives just for their spray tan and to work out and get hair plugs and wear muscle shirts just because they have to just get that next quest. And that's a really. I feel terrible. I didn't like going to the gym there because I'd often just be focused on those guys, like how sad it was. And I think that concept related to the question you're asking. Until gay marriage came around, it was sort of like, well, what kind of future could I have? I never really thought about the future. In a weird way. I just sort of did whatever I wanted to do. And that's not really a way to live. And that's why even in the book, I lay out some other beliefs that I now have, including why I think the time tested stories, even of the Bible, that I don't consider myself a believer in a traditional sense. But I think that there are things outside of us that are true and that are time tested and churned throughout the ages that help us flourish as a society. I could have never seen that the other way if I didn't realize that I could have a future. So I think it, I don't know, I know it's a little bit of a messy answer because I don't know that there is a great answer to it. And I would also say that like straight people and everyone else, all gay people are different. So some people. So David, my husband, he's 12 years younger than me. So he grew up in a time where, when he was in high school, not only was he out already, where I wasn't out until, I mean, I tell it in the book, but I literally came out to the first person I ever came out to at 12:30am in the Times Square subway station on September 11, 2001. And then I woke up, I woke up a few hours later and America was under attack. But I was already 25 years old. He was out much younger. And he always says to me, he's like, well, I knew I was going to be married. I knew I was going to have kids and a family and the rest of it. And that's why equality is so important, because it's not that you're giving people something special. What you want to do and what you want out of a society is you want laws that treat everyone equally and then you don't force anyone to get married or you don't force anyone to be single. But if you don't give people that opportunity. And I think this is where the Republicans and conservatives really got screwed up for many years. They got so obsessed with gay and gay marriage and all these things. Well, if you didn't allow gay people to have functional lives, then actually you were gonna force them to become all the things that you thought that they were, you know, these sex drug crazed monsters or something like that. And I don't know, I think actually at some level I live with some of the shadows of that because I know what I was for some period of my life at least. And it's very, I think it's great that now, you know, a kid could be 15 and say, I like boys, I like girls, whatever, and generally people don't care. And maybe that kid when he's 21, will think something else or whatever. I think these are all basically good things. Yeah, I think they're basically good things.
- [31:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, what a difference 12 years makes. That's really interesting. It's cool to see that we're changing that fast. Heartbreaking, like you said, to know how many people had to live A lie. Because it really was dangerous. And, I mean, I'm sure there are places still in America where it actually is still dangerous. That's heartbreaking. One thing I wanted to follow up. Dude, that is so interesting. I've got to know. So you guys are going to have a child through a surrogate. How do you choose whose sperm to use?
- [32:08]
Dave Rubin
So this is actually happening right now. We just had a call like, an hour ago with the woman who's helped facilitating all of the stuff. So what we're trying to do right now, actually, we have the surrogate already. We're about to settle on the egg donor. So we haven't officially settled on the egg donor yet, but we both deposited sperm, and our goal is we're going to take two eggs from the donor, his sperm, my sperm, and have twins. So biologically, each. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [32:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. That's cool, man. How did you guys. I mean. Okay, so just pretty straight down the middle. Fair one and one. That is really fucking fascinating. Do you guys have, like. Does one hope for a boy, one hope for a girl? Will you guys sort that out? Because you actually can, right? You can choose these things.
- [32:55]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, you can do all sorts of stuff. I think they call it selective elimination. You can do all sorts of things with interesting phrases like that around them. You know, I actually. David definitely wants at least one boy, and I think his preference would be 2. I would really be okay with a boy and a girl. I don't think I want two girls, but I think a boy and a girl would be totally fine. Two boys would be fine. And if it ends up being two girls, it'll be two girls. I don't think we're gonna mix with the magic of the universe or mess with the magic of the universe too much. Why not mess with the magic of the universe? Or why not two girls?
- [33:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Why not mess with the magic of the universe?
- [33:40]
Dave Rubin
Once the egg hits the sperm, even though I do talk about my feelings about abortion, And I think 12 weeks is the cutoff, I do believe that you have, at that point, the genesis of life. And then we could talk about five days in. Is a blastocyst really life? And where are you at in four weeks? And the rest of. I would just be. We'd have to have a serious conversation about what we would do then. My hope, actually, is that when we do this and the sperm meets the egg and one and one. I hope that it's either two boys or a girl and a boy, and we'll go from there.
- [34:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So I think I May not understand how the selection process works. So it's done after they fertilize the egg. I thought it was done at the sperm level.
- [34:24]
Dave Rubin
No, no, no. It's done after they. They don't know the sex until they fertilize.
- [34:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it, got it.
- [34:29]
Dave Rubin
By the way, there's no silly questions related to this because I can tell you, after being in with these fertility doctors and the surrogacy people and the egg people and everything, it's like, this is a whole other world. There are so many issues related to science and government and absolutely everything you can think of. And we all think, we know, oh, you know, oh, it must be just so easy. Or just egg and a sperm. Throw it in there, you're good. And it's like there's so many things to think about.
- [34:53]
Tom Bilyeu
What's the most surprising?
- [34:59]
Dave Rubin
Well, I guess I don't know if this is surprising exactly, but the fact that science can somehow pull all this stuff off is actually pretty incredible. When you see it, like when we've been to the fertility clinic and you see, oh, and this is literally the machine that we use to fertilize the egg with the sperm. This is the device that science has come up with to do that, to make life like, that's pretty freaking incredible. But I would say also just the fact that there are women out there, like this young lady who we just chose to be the surrogate, who from everything I can tell about her, seems to be a really wonderful person and she's married with three kids and that she wants to help. She wants to help other people have children. That she's willing to do that it
- [35:49]
Tom Bilyeu
tells you a lot about.
- [35:51]
Dave Rubin
We have not met face to face yet. We're about to do a Skype meeting
- [35:54]
Tom Bilyeu
in the next couple days. You will meet her before you make.
- [35:57]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, so we've seen pictures of her. We've all agreed that we're going to do this. We have a profile. She has a profile. We go back and forth, ask questions.
- [36:08]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm sure. What were some of the things that were really important to you? If I was going to do this, I would be a psychopath about their diet and their exercise like that. With family mental health issues you want to talk about. I actually love that we're at a point where people can take some control over this, which I'm sure people absolutely hate about me, but I find this fucking fascinating. So for me, it would be mental health, diet, exercise, what were some key factors for you?
- [36:35]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. So in terms of mental health and Mental health history. My feeling is that's far more important on the egg side, meaning that you want to make sure that the woman providing the genetic material, that she doesn't either any major physical diseases or is a carrier of all sorts of stuff, or that she comes from a family that doesn't have a long history of mental health or cardiac problems or cancer or a litany of other issues. On the surrogacy side, it was more, is she. Well, first it was just, is she in a stable home? So this woman happens to have three children, three young children. We've seen plenty of pictures. Everybody looks very happy. She looks fit. She does some exercise. It seems like she basically eats right. We're not going to force her. You can do all sorts of things. Or if you want to throw in a ton more money, you can give them all the money in the world for all organic food the entire time and all that. You know, our basic feeling was if she's healthy and does exercise and has a family, you know, we don't want her eating fast food all the time. So we've talked a little bit about that. It doesn't sound like she does too much of it anyway. But also knowing that she had three kids that were all born basically at 40 weeks that are seemingly, or not seemingly that are healthy and everything else that was important on the egg side. So it's why it's taken us a little longer there. Well, also, coronavirus has actually really slowed this process because, you know, people aren't. People aren't donating as much right now. They're not getting as many surrogates. There's a whole. Would you process.
- [38:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Would you move forward right now if you could, or would you wait until coronavirus sort of settles out?
- [38:06]
Dave Rubin
Well, that's been an ongoing discussion. We're sort of allowing the doctors to decide the timeline here. So it is possible that I could find an egg literally when I end this call with you. And at this point, we have the surrogate, and as long as the doctor would be willing to do it, which some doctors are and some doctors aren't, and I'm not an expert in all of this, obviously, I think we would be willing to move in this, because if we weren't, then it's like, all right, well, what are we really saying here? Is this thing going to last three more months? Six months, nine months? It's like, if we're. It goes to what I said earlier, I think you just move forward and move forward and move forward. I think I got a Little bit of that from Peter Thiel. Just like keep going, just keep going. So we'll see how the egg thing, how that sort of shakes out. Because yes, you have to be more careful about the genetic stuff there. The family history we found. You look at these, it looks like dating websites. Basically you're just swiping past all these girls, you know, that's what it looks like really. It does. And they're telling you all these things about themselves. What we've really found is like I'm not that concerned about say an Ivy League education. I want somebody that's educated, hopefully went to college. But I'm actually, we haven't even put too much primacy on that. It's basically we want someone that looks healthy and fit, that is healthy and fit and that seems happy. That actually has sort of driven us more than oh, she went to Yale and is at Stanford business school and blah, blah, blah. I believe if we're good parents we can teach the right things and help on the education front and that the genetic beginnings of that. Yeah, that you could be more, could have more of a predisposition, let's put it that way. So yeah, we're paying attention to all of that stuff.
- [39:57]
Tom Bilyeu
And
- [39:59]
Dave Rubin
look, at the end of the day you just hope you're making the right choices and then you hope you're going to be a decent parent. I guess.
- [40:05]
Tom Bilyeu
So what do you would a decent parent look like? Like what are some core. Like so for instance, I know that people would, if I had kids, I'd really be in trouble because I my, I was spanked growing up. I didn't have any beef with it. I think a lot of kids run riot today and so thankfully I never have to like deal with the societal backlash against that. But like what are some tenants of parenting that you subscribe to or maybe that you worry about or you haven't decided on? What are some key things that you guys are debating now?
- [40:41]
Dave Rubin
You know, it's funny, we haven't talked about it too specifically other than we have come to realize that David will definitely be more of the authority figure and I'll kind of be more of the fun one. Like that just seems to be like the trend a little bit. Like even just with our. We have a new dog now and like he's a year old. We got him. The day that LA was closing all, everything because of the shutdown, I saw that the shelters were closing and I was like, I just gotta run there. And we had just lost our 16 year old dog to Cancer about a month ago. And she lived an incredibly wonderful life. It was truly magical. But we were gonna wait for a while, probably for the fall, because I had the book tour and we were gonna be traveling a lot and we wanted some time after Emma had left us, but then this thing happened with Corona and I was just like, ah, I'm just gonna run over to the shelter and just see. And we went to the local shelter and there was this beautiful, gorgeous dog there, one year old pit mix, who looked almost exactly like Emma, our previous dog. That was a total coincidence. And he was about to be put down that day. The order had already been signed. And not because he had any behavior problems or anything else, but these shelters are just completely overrun. And I was like, that's not happening. And we took him and for the second he got here, he's been great and all that. But I mention this because he's fairly untrained and he's young and sort of crazy and running around and eating socks and the rest of it. And David is much better at sort of being the disciplinarian, where I'm just like, ah, yeah, you could get on the couch, oh, you're standing on the dining table, that's fun, you know, and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I think basically though, to be a good parent, what would be a good parent? That you would allow that kid to hopefully make their own mistakes without going too overboard in the mistake department. You'd give them as much of a leash to experience life, but knowing that there is a leash, not just throw them out into the world and just, oh, see what the hell happens. And I think actually what that probably comes down to is if you're pretty much a whole person who has some sort of semi coherent, but hopefully mostly coherent worldview, then hopefully you can raise a child just by being that. Just by being something that is kind of sane and kind of stable and kind of real. I think you can model some of that behavior. But this would probably be best if we pick this up in about 16 years, we'll see if I'm even remotely close to write about that.
- [43:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when I think about how we were raised and I think we grew up roughly at the same time, so I was able to. So I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, so it wasn't like Los Angeles, where I'm at now, but my mom would let me ride my bike, I don't know, like four miles away, five miles away, and not even really like think much about it. It was Just, hey, I'm gonna, you know, hop on my bike and ride. There was, like, this dirt track that me and my friends used to ride our bikes to. And when I think about how far away that really was, and, you know, that was like 9 or 10 years old, and my mom let me do that. You would just listen. Obviously not when I went that far, but normally we'd just be sort of wandering around the neighborhood, and when it was dinnertime, whatever, my mom would whistle. You could hear the whistle really far away. You could probably hear my mom's whistle, like, a good half mile away. And you just come running home, and that was that. You live in la, so it's probably a little bit different. But, like, how do you think of that? Like, what kind of physical freedoms. How do you perceive the level of apparent danger for kids? What do you think about, like, the. I'm sure you've read the book the Coddling of the American Mind. Like, where do you fall in all this? Like, letting kids. You were pointing to the book. Yeah, yeah. Where do you fall in that stuff?
- [44:31]
Dave Rubin
Well, it's funny. So I'm 43. How old are you?
- [44:34]
Tom Bilyeu
44.
- [44:35]
Dave Rubin
44. Okay. So we're basically the same age. And yes, there's something sort of magical, I think, when you think back to our childhoods. I grew up in Long island, but very much the same thing was on my bike all day long. I don't know, we were crossing highways and doing crazy stuff, and somehow we always got home. We didn't have cell phones. I didn't have a tracker on my leg. I don't know what my mom thought we were doing. I used to climb trees. I always ask this to my mom now I'd be like. Or to my dad, I'll be like, you know, I used to climb that tree in front of the house. I'd be like 30ft up there like a monkey, and you guys would just let me do it. There were no pads on the ground. Like, I could have broke my neck any. Yeah. And a series of insane things that we used to do, but nobody thought anything of it. And actually, at least in my community, everybody turned out basically okay. You know, there weren't any major accidents or anything like that. That feels very special and very different to me than what it must be like now raising a child. And I think this goes to this sort of helicopter parent thing and that we're on top of them all the time. And now, because you'll give them a phone, which is a safety thing in a way, so they can communicate with you, but also opens up a truly sort of crazy Pandora's box of all sorts of trouble that it could get them in and a million other things. So the phone, I mean, technology, like fire, it's like it can be used for a lot of good. You can, you know, heat your house and cook your food, but it can also burn down that house and kill everybody. So I would hope. Well, first off, I don't know, by the time we really have the kids at an age where they're running around, I don't know that we'll be here in the People's Republic of California. I may have moved to the soft. Well, I mean, just tax wise and just the general state of where this state is going with our real far lefty governor who ruined, you know, Newsom, Gavin Newsom, basically ruined San Francisco. I don't know the last time you were up there, but the amount of homelessness and drugs there, it's absolutely disgusting. You may know that they literally have an app to tell you what streets have human poop on them so that you can download the app, get to SFO and avoid the human poop. So there's a lot of trends that I see here in Los Angeles that I really don't like. What I do like about la, I love the freaking weather. It's beautiful. Every day happens to be raining today. And when it does rain, it's actually nice because you're like, oh, we do need that. But the weather is great and I have a nice group of friends. And because for me, because politics and media are really media and I should say entertainment are really becoming one thing. Doing what I do is really great here in Los Angeles. I don't know that we'll always be here though. But as far as what I would let them get away with again, I would try to give them that long leash. And then one day you come home and you fell out of a tree and you got a spike in your shoulder. Well, maybe you won't do it again. But all of this, it's a more intellectual exercise for guys like us until we're actually doing it right.
- [47:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, but you want to talk about an intellectual exercise that I think is really revelatory about who a human being is. It's one of the things, like always when I'm interviewing somebody and they've got really strong beliefs, I'm always like, what do you teach your kids? Right? Like, that's the. I want to know. So you've got, hey, this universe of beliefs. But the rubber meets road when you have fucking kids. And I want to know, like, what are the big ideas you have that you distill down? You're trying to teach your kids. So, for instance, this is not the reason I didn't have kids, but it was a factor, man. Like when I think about my natural personality. So in my relationship, I would be the disciplinarian a hundred percent. And I am super worried that I. I know the amount of hardship you have to have to be able to. Especially as a guy, to be able to toughen the fuck up, which is exactly what I had to do. I was so soft as a kid. My dad did not push me at all to deal with physical pain. Did not tell me, hey, stop fucking crying about it. Like, the pain can serve you. You need to get tougher. Never gave me that message, I'm sure out of love and affection. But in the end, like, I still had to learn those lessons. I just had to learn them really fucking late in life after was causing all kinds of problems for me that I was so emotionally weak. And so when I think about. I need to. Because my kids would, you know, very lucky position. But my kids would grow up wealthy. I did not grow up wealthy. So now my kids would be really in trouble of just me trying to, like, make my own life what I want it to be. Like their life would be nice, right? Far nicer than the way that I had it. So now they're growing up soft. And I'm fucking afraid. I'm legitimately afraid. Did you watch oh, God. The First Man? It's a show on Apple TV about what if. Great show, by the way. I think it's called the first man and it's.
- [49:12]
Dave Rubin
Oh, that's the mars thing.
- [49:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's what would have happened to America had Russia beat us to the moon. It is fucking awesome. But I don't want to. Spoiler alerts. I'm sure I'll dance around it a little bit, but there's a moment in there where a kid has very. The kind of trauma that would impact your whole family. And I thought, fuck, that could have so easily been me. The way that my parents, like, dude, I used to go to my friend's house, ride motorcycles without helmets. We used to shoot bow and arrows straight up into the air. That's insane. But just to see that is insane. 100% insane. But nobody was watching us. They were like, hey, there's a bow and arrow.
- [49:52]
Dave Rubin
Go play.
- [49:53]
Tom Bilyeu
There's a motorcycle. Go play. Like it is. What's the phrase, I don't believe in God, but it is but for the grace of God that I made it out of my childhood. And man, when I think about, it's good though, but what you end up having is. So my grandparents, my grandfather was one of like eight or nine kids, but I think only five made it to adulthood. So I think three of his siblings died, you know, before the age of 8 or whatever. Not that people thought of kids as disposable, dude, but it was. You just knew that there was going to be some amount of death involved. And as you whittle down the number of kids halves where you're only having one kid or two kids, I know I would have that sense of like, this is precious, man. And I'm so fucking afraid of something happening to this child. And so, you know, I'm going to, you know, do the sort of corralling and protective mechanism. I don't know, I just worried about what that would. That that would actually end up creating a problem. And I just sort of weighed like, what would be worse, Mollycoddling them a little bit to make sure that they get to adulthood or the, the trauma of losing a child. That's what freaked me out.
- [51:03]
Netgear Orbi WiFi Announcer
All right, let's talk about WI fi. Is your home WI fi struggling to keep up? Can it handle streaming, gaming, video conferencing and homeschooling? What about all of these things happening at once? Sounds like it is time for a WI Fi upgrade, my friends. You can bring your WI fi up to speed with Orbi Wi Fi 6 from Netgear. Wi Fi 6 is a whole new kind of WI fi. It is the latest tech that gives you the fastest speeds possible, even as you connect more and more devices throughout your home. That means you'll be able to stream without buffering, eliminate lag while gaming and connect more devices to your WI fi than ever before. It's like upgrading your WI fi to first class. If you're ready for an amazing WI fi experience, you can get it today from Netgear and never worry about WI fi again. Check out Orbee Wi Fi 6@netgear.com BestWiFi that's netgear.com BestWiFi and check out Orbi WiFi 6. Take care guys, and be legendary.
- [52:07]
Dave Rubin
I mean, this is. It's one for the ages, right? It's one for how we even behave in our own lives. Like you can. We've all done crazy shit that we shouldn't have done, right? We've all done drugs we shouldn't have done or this behavior, that behavior, whatever it is, we've all done those things. And whether you came from a family that was the helicopter parents right on top of you. It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons maybe around season eight or nine or so when the Simpsons was still in those core years. When you find out, they show you a flashback to Flanders growing up, and now here he is, the most stiff, dorky, religious, conforming thought guy on the planet. And they show you his parents. And why did he become that way? Because his parents were ultra hippies who gave him no rules. So what did little Ned Flanders crave? He craved rules, and then he became really religious and really obsessed with rules and turning to the church for everything and all that. It's a little bit of a caricature of the whole idea, but it's the right bones for what we're talking about here. It's like you want to give them freedom, and then if you give them freedom, they might hurt themselves. Yet at the same time, by giving them that freedom, hopefully you've shown them that in the future, if they act responsibly with freedom, that all sorts of good things can happen. On the other hand, you can hold them in and protect them from the world. But what might happen? Well, now you send them off to college. You've done a crazy job protecting them from everything, and now they get to college, they have one puff of a joint, and because they've been hidden from everything, next thing you know, it's three years later, and they haven't moved off the couch because they're a pothead or much worse than that. So there really is no perfect way here. And this is it. This is what life is. It's how you want to do your life. And then hopefully, if you did something kind of right, that you can then model that for the people behind you. But they have to make their own mistakes, too.
- [54:00]
Tom Bilyeu
So what are some of the beliefs? Like you have very clear beliefs. You laid them out in the book. High emphasis on freedom. Freedom of speech, I think you said in the book, is an absolute barring the things you said that the Supreme Court has already ruled on. Don't yell fire. No one citing violence. What are some core values that you want to instill in your kids?
- [54:22]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, real quick on the don't yell fire one. You know, it's an interesting thing that I had to Google a bunch of times because it's a slight misnomer that you can't yell fire in a theater. You actually can Yell fire in a theater in a jokey way or in a certain context. You can't yell fire in a theater to incite panic because then that becomes a criminal problem. That's like a very minor sort of in the weeds thing. But it is an interesting one because you hear people say it all the time. And I used to say it all the time, but it's really with the intent to do harm in that case. So I lay that out in that I'm for free speech with that caveat. And then in the United States, we have the most slight cases that are almost never used in case of libel or slander, which I do believe should not be protected speech. But they're very rarely used because the bar to prove them is so high that it never happens. So I. All of them, I mean, that's the thing. All of the beliefs that I've put into practice that I've talked about on the show over the last couple years, I've sort of put into this book because I didn't want to write something that was purely what I'm against. Most people know what I'm against already. I don't like socialism. I don't like collectivism. I don't like top down power. I want people to be free, right? You know how to live your life the best way you can. It doesn't mean you're doing it all the time. It doesn't mean I'm doing it all the time. None of us are right. We're not. Jesus. We have moments often. Sometimes you might have moments where months go by and you're like, whoa, I've been on a really good run. I fought some of my demons and I started behaving better or doing all the things I needed to do to really get in the groove with life. And then life kind of moves, moves smoothly. And then you have other times where you just fuck up a zillion things or you lie or you cheat or whatever it might be, and then life sets you off in a different path. But I wanted to give people something that wasn't just, oh, I'm against these bad ideas, but what am I really for? And what it all really boils down to is I am for the individual. I believe that in any sort of free society, but for our context in an American society, what we have done better than any other country in the history of the world is give more people more freedom than anywhere else. Everyone in every corner of the world has come to the United States. And in almost every case, without exception, has made it better for themselves and for their children. It is very rare, almost impossibly rare, that people immigrated into the United States and then left because they couldn't make it here. And they were like, ah, we're going back to the other place. Nobody, nobody, whether your ancestry is Irish or Italian or Jewish or Chinese or Mexican or whatever it is, everyone comes here and basically makes it better. And that is because we have this incredible belief in individual rights that everyone, regardless of your sexuality, your gender, your skin color, even your nationality, as long as you are an American citizen, should be treated the same. And by the way, whenever I say that, people say, well, black people used to be slaves and women couldn't vote. That is true. It is an imperfect system created by imperfect people. But over time, we have expanded those rights to more and more people. So we freed the slaves, we allowed black people to vote. We allowed women to vote. Now gay people can get married. And if you were to show me any group of people in the United States in 2020 that do not have equal rights by the nature of some immutable characteristic, I would absolutely fight for that. What I don't want to fight for is that because you're a perceived marginalized, depressed group or something like that, or the history of your people, not you. Has had a rougher history or this or that or the other thing, that you're going to get special rights now. Because every time we say, oh, well, you don't have to be as qualified to get into this college, or you don't have to be as qualified to get this job or whatever, now that kind of sounds right. Oh, we're trying to make up for some historical thing, except what you're doing actually is punishing someone else who doesn't deserve to get punished. And a great example of this is that Harvard over the years has made it much harder for Asian students to get in because they had in their mind what was too many Asians. Now, that in my book, that's known as racism. But they decided we have too many Asians here. So we're gonna make it harder for Asians to get in, and we're gonna make it easier for these other groups. Now, why should we be punishing a young Asian kid who busts his ass, whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents came here, were not given anything, just like your ancestors weren't given anything and mine weren't given anything. And I write about what life was like for my grandparents and great grandparents who came from Eastern Europe with nothing and busted their butts so that my parents could be a little better off than they were, and now I'm better off than my parents. That's the American dream. That's what most of us have some part of. But the idea that we would say, oh, no, no, no, you Asians, because you work too hard and you care about education and you care about school and blah, blah, blah, you guys are getting it. You're getting it off too easy. We didn't give you anything, but you guys are just doing it too good. We're going to now punish you. That's deeply dangerous. So I think what happens is a lot of people just sort of have lazy thinking. They only think about it at the first end. They go, oh, well, this group had a rough go of it. We best help them. Even if it wasn't that specific person, it was generations before. We best help that person. And that kind of sounds right until you go, well, all right. Are you for punishing someone else? And then they go, oh, I guess not. And then it's like, yeah, well, then the argument falls apart pretty quickly.
- [59:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when you get into this stuff, it's really interesting. So as somebody who obviously has embraced capitalism in the extreme, I'm a huge believer in capitalism, and at the same time, like, I don't like to see people struggle. So I've. And again, this is one of the reasons I didn't have kids. So it's. It. I do not like people putting roadblocks or barriers in front of somebody who wants to bust their ass and build something and that shit. You want to talk something, talk about something that I do have a very strong opinion about. It's the opportunity to build something for yourself. The opportunity to be rewarded for adding value, for working your ass off, all of that. And so that's one thing that I. It. It seems to me as somebody who's not deep in this world, admittedly, but when I see things on the fringes where, in fact, I'll. What do you think about the. I had. It never once occurred to me that people were reacting poorly to the phrase, pick yourself up by your bootstraps or pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And then I started hearing people, you know, saying, oh, why don't they just pull themselves up by their bootstrap? And I was like, wait, what? This is a negative thing. Like the notion of working hard and trying to figure something out. Now, I'm not denying. Look, it's what I call minimum requirements. So there are some people that are not smart enough. Dude, they're never going to make it. And they are fucked. And they are fucked through no fault of their own genetic lottery. Absolutely brutal. Maybe they were drug and alcohol impacted. I mean, dude, the litany of things that can end up being stacked against you is so, so, so gnarly. But talk to me about your view on the notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, working hard, trying to get ahead, and then the need. Or maybe you don't feel like we need to worry about people getting left behind, but that's sort of where I struggle. It's like, I don't want people getting left behind, but fuck me, I do not want somebody taking everything that I'm trying to build to try to level equal opportunity. Yay, equal outcome. Gnarly in the extreme, in my opinion.
- [61:52]
Dave Rubin
So I agree with the premise. You sound to me very much like sort of an Ayn Randian capitalist. You believe that the government, from what I can understand, should basically get out of the way so that as long as we have equal rights, right, equal opportunity. And by the way, when people say equal opportunity, it doesn't mean we all start at exactly the same thing. It means that the playing field is level. But yes, some people are born into more money, some people are born smarter, some people are born with more athletic skill or better looks or a series of different things. So there's no such thing as just sort of this magical equality, right? So what can a society that has all sorts of people do? It can only, I think, create an even playing field so you've got a chance. So pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It was funny. AOC Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, she said, well, who's ever done that? As if it was a literal phrase. I mean, it was a phrase at one time, but you can't pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. You ever try to do that? I mean, the point is that if you work hard, if you work hard in America, you've got a chance. And nowhere in the world gives you a better chance of doing that. And by the way, there are also millionaires. There are children of millionaires who inherit all this money that go bust because you still have to work for it. You still have to invest properly, you still have to know what you're doing. You can't just squander it all away. So I believe. So your question though was, well, what do you do about the other people? Well, first off, it is proven time and again over now decades that capitalist societies, yes, they make a lot of really Rich people. But everyone rises with that, right? Everybody comes up with that. The poorest people in America are way richer than the poorest people in third world countries and in second world countries. And often their quality of life is even better than middle class people. In some of these places, they're not living in huts. You can be sort of in the bottom percentage in the United States and have some sort of shelter and often a TV and a washing machine and da, da, da, da, da. Maybe not the greatest life in the world, but you can get by. That's because capitalism moves everybody up. It doesn't mean that everybody's gonna be rich. But if the question really is, well, what do you do about those people? What my preference would be is rather than this giant social safety net that we know doesn't work, if it ever worked, then more and more people would always be getting out of it. But what happens is people get caught in it forever because once the government starts giving you something, they start giving you sustenance. So now you can get a certain amount of food or whatever your supplies you need are. Now they give you also subsidized rent and the rest of it. Well, so let's say you're. I mean, the great. I can give you a great example. My sister lives in New York City. She's paying market price for a two bedroom apartment. It's an obscene amount of money. Something like $5,000 for a. It's not even a two bedroom, it's a converted one that they manufactured a second bedroom out of. Right. Something like 5,000 bucks. That's market price for it. Which, by the way, after Corona, I think will significantly go down because I think people are going to be moving out of cities. But that's a different thing altogether. In her building they also have subsidized housing. So there's people in her building that have lived there for generations that are paying something like $600 a month for the exact same apartment. Now that sort of sounds nice, right? This sounds kind of nice. Oh, we're helping poor people get apartments. That's right. But what happens is, and this is a fact that we then find these people cannot leave, and then it becomes a generational thing. Because why would you, if you're being given a $600 apartment and the government's even giving you some money for that, why would you pick yourself up by the bootstraps, bust your ass and get a better job? Which then would mean you wouldn't get that help anymore and then you'd be kicked out of that apartment and have to move somewhere else. So I don't blame the people that get caught in this cycle. I blame the machine that is constantly putting people into this cycle. So if you want to help people, truly you unleash the market to do everything it can, which will create more jobs and all of that. Right? You're a businessman, you've created jobs. I'm a businessman, I've created jobs. And then the hope is that more and more people will work and then figure out ways to rise themselves. Now, of course you are totally right that there will always be people on the margins because of mental health, because of a litany of reasons, bad luck, bad choices, drug addiction, all of those things that will always need some extra help. My preference would be that if the government would most get out of that game, and I'm not saying completely, I do think there is some. This is where I would say, although I'm mostly a libertarian, I'm laying out classically liberal principles in the book. And a classically liberal principle would be that you want some guidelines on society where a libertarian would just sort of say completely get out of the way with everything. I would say we can do something to help the people who need it the most. But just throwing money at things is not the right answer. What I would prefer to do is you scale back as much of that administrative state, as much of that social net as possible. Even though I think it was well intentioned, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You scale as much of that back as possible and then you know who will step up. Good people will step up. I am sure you give some money to charity. I'm sure you do some things for causes that you care about. I actually believe people want to help more. But the more that we just say, ah, the government will do it. Don't worry about that, the government will do it. Well, then none of us think it's our, our responsibility. So we're all willing to just have more of our paycheck taken away so that the government can do something highly inefficient. I just don't think it's right. And I think that if you want to help people, and I'm guessing you probably do in your own way, that you'll keep doing it and then we can have something for the really extreme cases. And by the way, I will fully admit this is not a perfect system, but there is no perfect system. And part of the problem right now with what's happening with the progressives and the socialists is they just think that their system will be perfect, that they can build a perfect system. We'll have equality for everyone. We'll have racial harmony. We'll have perfect economic equality. All of these things. Guess what? No, it can't happen. And it can't happen because humans have to make the system. And we're imperfect, right? We are imperfect. So we can't create a perfect system. So I always say this is like. This is why Thanos killed half the universe in Avengers, right? He knew that there were finite resources in the universe, and he said, nobody's going to do what has to be done. Well, what has to be done? I got to wipe out half the universe so that we can have peace and harmony. So if you think that wiping out half the universe is the right way to do it, or enslaving half the universe is the right way to do it, then you do it. But there's no such thing as a perfect system. There's a messy system. Freedom is messy. And the best thing you can do is give it some basic guidelines to keep that core piece in place.
- [68:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, when I think about the issue, and I agree with you, it's messy. And I honestly, man, here is. Here's what I think is just the gospel truth. There's no way around it. There's no way around suffering. There's no way around seeing somebody stuck because they're. I mean, if they are literally, they don't have the mental faculties to execute at a high level, which unfortunately, like anything, IQ or whatever metric you're going to use, the real functional intelligence, which maybe is impossible to measure, but we can all agree is either present or not present, there are just some people who fall below that line. And I don't know, barring anything so horrifying, where we start dictating the genetic lottery, as you were saying, despite me saying in my own life I might be willing to share, choose the sex. It is a fucking terrifying slipper soap. Anyway, so when I think about what I would want to do. So I have achieved a lot in my life, partly through very good fortune, for sure. Fortune favors the prepared. Make no mistake. I was ready to capitalize on opportunities that came my way. But I'm not a fool. I don't think that my life is devoid of luck. There's been tremendous amounts of luck in my life. So when I think about actually going in and helping, it is not obvious what the answer is. So one of my favorite stories, and I'm so desperate to get this guy on the show Because I am almost certainly mischaracterizing exactly what he did. But as I interpreted it, there's a guy named Jeffrey Canada. Jeffrey Canada grew up in Harlem during the crack epidemic. He realizes, yo, this is a problem of education. I'm going to get a scholarship to Harvard. I'm going to get a degree in education, I'm going to go into the system and I'm going to fix it from the inside. And he does it, man. He's so bright and so hard working. Ends up getting, I think, a full ride to Harvard. Goes to Harvard, comes out and spends, I think, 10 years in education trying to fix it. And then he realizes you can't fix it from the inside. And this, this has fucking haunted me. And I've quoted this so many times. That's why I'm so desperate to have this conversation with him. He said, you have to give up on adults. And I was like, oh, my God, that was so horrifying. And he said, if you. He goes, look at the fucking data. And what the data is saying is the difference between a kid who grows up in the inner cities and a kid who grows up middle class is the number of positive words they hear by the age of five. And it so massively impacts their. The language centers of their brain that they either will be able to go on to thrive or they won't. And it's this thing that really holds them back. So he becomes a obsessed with getting to women who are pregnant or about to become pregnant. And I was like, that's so genius. That's like target, man, target. That's their game. Fucking find women who are pregnant or about to become pregnant, because you can influence their buying behaviors for the rest of their life. You can influence the child's buying behaviors. And the fact that he identified something so simple as I never would have thought that it's. You're impacting the language centers of their brain, which of course is going to influence the number of words they have, which is going to influence the. The concepts that they can grasp, which is going to influence their ability to articulate themselves. It's like really terrifying the number of ways that that echoes through somebody's mind. So that seed's planted in my head.
- [71:57]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, very quickly on that. I mean, actually, you're making what I think is a pretty conservative argument, which is that basically what you're calling for there is you want stable families ultimately, right? Because where is that stuff going to come from? Where you're going to care about those women, where they're going to be treated properly and be able to have the time to eat right when they're pregnant and all of those things. What you want are stable families so that over time. Because we all know this, we all know that there are a million studies about this. If you grow up in a two parent home, you are way more likely to make the right choices in life and be successful and stay out of jail and stay away from drugs and all those things. Not perfectly, of course. And are there single parents who are wonderful? Obviously. But if you look at the data over time, it's something we all know, but we're all sort of afraid to say it. Like if you come from a strong family, it will have given you some sort of bedrock at the bottom. It'll give you some sort of foundation like you were gonna build a house. And you want that foundation to be kind of solid. Right. Or extremely solid. And if you don't have that, it just opens up all sorts of other opportunities. And that could get us into a whole other conversation about why actually by giving so much money to poor people that you actually end up hurting the family, you incentivize women to have more kids. There's all sorts of studies on that kind of stuff, but that's a whole other thing.
- [73:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting. So when I. You're 100% right. You quoted in your book something that was very startling which are the stats around people who grow up without a father and how impactful that is. My parents did me a solid which was they three weeks after I left for college, I'm the youngest. Three weeks after I left for college, my dad moved out and I thought, whoa, like thank you. I never, I don't know that I could do that because he was unhappy for a very long time. But man, because of that I felt world's most normal childhood. Don't have any trauma for my parents getting divorced or anything like that. So very, very grateful for that. But when I look at the like what's really going to solve the problem? Right. So I don't. I am very worried that we don't actually know how to solve the problem. We know some things that don't work, but we're. It's sort of like. So here's. I have a hypothesis. I think I know what would work now. I'm wise enough to recognize. I don't think I should be making policy anymore anytime soon. But my hypothesis goes like this. So I'm. My last company had 3,000 employees. About a thousand of them grew up Hard as hell. In the inner cities of South Central Los Angeles, Compton, like fucking crazy. Crazy. And the kind of story I used to think. I grew up poor, my friend. I did not grow poor. I now know what real poverty looks like. And I'm talking people. I helped my stepfather while he bled to death from a gunshot wound to the head. My best friend, I watched him try to hold his intestines in as he bled to death because he was shot point blank range with a shotgun in the stomach. My sister was shot to death in the heart with an AK47 in my front yard. On and on and on. And I was just like, jesus Christ. Literally, I'm looking out my window, I can see the fucking neighborhood, right? So in my nice beautiful neighborhood, I can see it's so fucking close. And they never drive to go out. So I'm interviewing all these people. And we're growing so fast, dude, I'm having to interview people two and three at a time. We grew by 57,000% in our first three years alone in manufacturing. So just like, ah, the number of humans you have to hire and the rate at which you have to hire them is pure insanity. So at the early stages, everybody that was brought into the company was interviewed by me, literally bar none. Janitor, EVP of sales, didn't matter. Everyone in between, it was me. And so I'm having to come up with a way to interview people very, very rapidly and sort of cut to the heart of who they are. So I started asking this magic genie question. And the magic genie question goes like this. You're going to be granted one wish and one wish only. Can't ask for more wishes. Can't cure cancer. Bring somebody back from the dead. It has to be something you want, because I want to know like, what? What do you really want? And dude, I must have asked that question 250 times without fail. Every single person gave me the same answer. And they all said, $1 million. And I remember thinking, what the actual fuck it is a magic genie and you're going to ask for a million dollars? You could ask for a trillion dollars. You could ask for a money printing machine that makes money that will be accepted everywhere through all time. And I was just like, why are they not asking for an impossibly large amount of money? And then I realized for them a million dollars was impossibly large amount of money. And I was like, holy fuck. We have a mindset problem. We have a frame of reference problem, to be very specific. And the way that they looked at the world was so capped, they had put a glass ceiling on themselves. Their parents had told them, the world doesn't want somebody like you to succeed. Like, they actually tell their kids words like that. And I heard that over and over and over and over. And while anecdotal, man, this is anecdotal at scale. This was a lot of people. And I was just like, man. So my life's mission has become. My wife and I could have retired, bought an island and literally never thought about working or money again. And now we're working harder than we've ever worked. Because my theory is if you can give people the right mindset, they'll go down. It's what I call the only belief that matters. If you believe that through hard work and deliberate practice you can gain new skills and those skills have actual utility in the world. Right? It's not about checking something off a list to say, I read this book, it's about learning architecture so you can build a bridge that doesn't collapse when cars go across it. And that's transformative. It is the ability to change the world around you. I mean, it cannot be overstated how powerful the acquisition of skills is. And so it's just like, okay, how do we get people to realize, Put time and energy into learning something that matters. And you can change your life, you and change the lives of those around you. And the more I went into that world, the more I hear people believing that they can't move classes. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It is the belief that you can't move classes that is fucking you up far more than whatever injustices there are in the world. And that's the shit that scares me. Like, as somebody who sort of politics freaks me out, there's too many things to learn about with my, maybe my limited intellect. I'm actually perfectly fine to accept that, but personal responsibility is my fucking obsession. Because that I know, like you can take and run with it. And so just wrap that up. I will say, but I don't know, even as hard as I'm going to influence societal change, how many people get eaten by the world? It's just like, God damn.
- [78:52]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, well, first off, there's a lot there. But first off, you're living your words, right? You're not just saying this stuff like, oh, this is what I believe and I just believe it and it's self evident that it's true. You actually put it into practice and hired, as you said, a 30 year workforce, 1,000 people that came from these areas. And I would venture to say that most of them probably have a much better life for having the opportunity to work at one of your companies and then hopefully move their way up and maybe get out of that neighborhood if that's what they wanted, or the rest of it. So that is the essence of the American spirit.
- [79:27]
Tom Bilyeu
But here's the real thing I'm grappling with right now. Some of them, yes. And there were amazing transformations, dude. And it was tear inducing material. I mean, people who were like, you didn't just change my life, you changed the life of my entire family tree. Like, this is going to echo. Incredible. But I am haunted by the number of people for whom it was just money. So to give you an idea, we had one employee. We had her for almost a year. She was amazing. Amazing, bright, hard working, fucking. You couldn't push her around. This woman knew, like, just clarity of purpose, not to be intimidated by anybody. She was amazing. She got her first income tax return. She never had an income tax return before. And she quit because she'd never had that much money before. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, this is an intelligent woman, a driven woman, but the frame of reference is so crazy that. Or not crazy, so unhelpful that it sent her off in this weird direction.
- [80:33]
Dave Rubin
Well, I would say this, that that shouldn't haunt you in that you can't solve everyone's problems, right? Like, you can. Well, that's a pretty lofty. That's a pretty lofty goal.
- [80:46]
Tom Bilyeu
And hopefully as moronic though, as you're saying. And I know that I just so. I really do find myself skitched out in this weird space of like, hey, don't fucking tell me what to do with my money. I'll do whatever the fuck I want. And fuck. Like, people are really struggling.
- [81:01]
Dave Rubin
What do you do?
- [81:03]
Tom Bilyeu
So, yeah, but.
- [81:05]
Dave Rubin
But with that in mind, though, okay, you've built businesses, you've got money. As you said, you can retire and go to an island and that would be a pretty great life. Probably right? But you don't want to do that yet. And you're still busting your ass. Well, what's the real way to then make the most of that? It sounds to me like the real way to make the most of that is you keep reinvesting in your companies. You keep coming up with new ideas so more and more people can partake in it. Now does that mean that woman, the idea of that woman isn't going to keep coming through the system and then suddenly just breaking down in the middle of it because she realizes she has no idea to pay taxes. Or maybe along the way you learn the lesson that, oh, I'm bringing in all these people who aren't that educated who need all sorts of life skills. So one of the benefits that I'm going to give them, which will end up being a write off for you, is I'm going to give them a tax course that I'll pay for that. Hopefully they won't have to deal with that. And that again, it's you using your money to expand knowledge to other people, which in turn it actually feeds you because it's the ideas that you care about. And I think you and anyone that is involved in business that actually wants to help people, I think that's how you do it. You don't turn to the government and say, you guys can just do it better because there's just simply no evidence of it. There is no evidence.
- [82:24]
Tom Bilyeu
There's no way that the government can do it better. I have a question, quick question for you. How do you think we should be handling the crisis now with the number of people filing for unemployment?
- [82:35]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. So there's a lot to say about this. So first, as a general rule, I don't love government bailouts. I don't love them. The government usually creates all the problems. We have big banks that are too big to fail. And then what did we do? We bailed them out and we made them even bigger. Right. More small banks went away. And then what we said was too big to fail. So you'd think maybe you'd want to make it less big. We actually made it bigger. So government is always putting a band aid on another government problem because they find another emergency to create something bigger. And even in this stimulus package, we gave $25 million to the Kennedy Art center and then they fired half of the musicians that are there or something like that. We know that the politicians, they put all this pork for their own pet program projects in and all that nonsense. That being said in this case, where we are dealing with a truly worldwide, unprecedented event that has shut down the global economy that not only. Look, first, we've had pandemics before, right? We've had the Spanish flu before, we've had the Black Plague. I mean, there's been things, but this one has spread the world. And also because we're so interconnected now, even if coronavirus hadn't made it to the shores of the United States, if it had spread across Europe, spread across Asia and everything else, we'd still Be feeling some economic impacts of it. So what I would say would be a basically good idea is you have to prop up businesses. And this is where so many people get things wrong. They think if you help business, that means you hate the regular guy. Well, no, businesses are the things that employ the regular people. So if you help businesses. Right. So it's just a flaw in logic because they think, because so many people are taught that business is evil, that big business is bad, and it's like, no, that is actually the engine that keeps this whole thing going. So I would say you want to help business. Now, that doesn't mean you just give endless cash to all giant corporations that don't need money. But certainly if you can help out mom and pop stores, if you can help out people, like right now, I think there's a couple things you could do. So if you can't pay your mortgage right now, I wouldn't want someone kicked out of an apartment. But it's not just as easy. So people will say, all right, freeze mortgages. It's not quite that easy because then the landlords who own many properties, if they're not now getting their income, well, now they're going to go out of business. So everyone that just throws these easy answers. Oh, give people money. Oh, freeze mortgages. All these things, they all sound right. And then you think about them for about. Usually takes about four seconds. And you realize that they're much more complex than that. So I would say we want to do a series of things right now to basically help people. So first off, I don't know that you can freeze mortgages, but if you are about to be kicked out of your apartment or whatever it is, the government could say that for three months we're suspending evictions. And then as we figure out what's going on here, how long this is all going to last, there'll be a kickback to the building owners and the lenders and things like that. I would prefer not to just give a ton of money to the banks and let them kind of figure out what to do with it. We know that this didn't work last time. We gave all this money to the banks, and then they created all sorts of other regulations that created all sorts of other problems. So what it really comes down to is, do you want to just. In a time like this, when all these people are unemployed and having all sorts of problems is the best thing that the government can do. Some people, the pure libertarian approach, you do nothing. You let the market sort of Crash and crumble. And then through that, human ingenuity will reconstitute itself, and smart business people will do all sorts of interesting things. But you let it hit the pain point, right, like, you let it crumble so that it can rebuild. I think intellectually that's a really interesting exercise. I don't know, to keep the wheels on a society, if you could ever do that. So the real argument then becomes. If you put that aside, the real argument is, well, do you prop up businesses or people? Do you want to just put cash into people's hands so that they can absolutely make sure that they can pay the bills, buy the groceries, make sure that they can get their medicine, things like that, and then help the businesses? I think there's a little bit of both. I think, unfortunately, what's happened here is you know goddamn well that literally not one congressman or senator who signed that stimulus bill read that thing. Nobody read that thing. It was like this. If not like this or this, that thing was massive. Nobody read it. They all stick in these ridiculous things like diversity and inclusion memos and all of this nonsense that has nothing to do with coronavirus just to get their little pet project in there. And this, again, would be where I would say you scale back the power of the government. What I would prefer to do than any of it let people keep more of their money. No matter how many millions of dollars you have, I want you to have more of it, because I believe you know what to do with it. And I would say that exact same thing for poor people. And I would say, you know, I lay out what I think is a fair tax system in the book. And basically, if I think. If you make under.
- [87:29]
Tom Bilyeu
But that's from a position of ignorance. How do you think like, that only works if we radically scale government back, Basically, Right?
- [87:39]
Dave Rubin
Yeah. Radically scale it back. What is government really good at? Not only what is it good at? When the founders framed the Constitution, what they wanted were this conglomerate of states to govern themselves, and then the federal government would basically make sure that the states weren't warring. The federal government would take care of the borders of the entire entity, and very little beyond that. That really was it. Meaning if you lived in New York, most of the decisions that would impact your life were made by the legislature in New York, the governor of New York, and that went for the same of all the states. Even right now, when America is at its best, it's at its best because the states are doing their thing. So legalizing marijuana is a great example of this. Colorado was one of the first states to do it. And everyone that didn't want it to be legalized said they're gonna legalize it and there are gonna be more potheads and it's a gateway drug and all these horrible things are gonna happen and blah, blah, blah. And guess what? None of that happened, actually. Now it got legalized. There's new businesses selling it. They're raising tax revenue that you can use for other projects and all that. That was Colorado taking an experiment, and now you can export that experiment to other states. And if you don't like what's happening in Colorado, well, then you can move to Alabama, where it's illegal. And so I would prefer that the states be able to do as much as they possibly can. So when we talk about pulling back government, it's just that the federal government was never supposed to have this much power. And the irony right now is you've got a certain percentage of people in the United States who have been screaming for now four years roughly, that Donald Trump is Hitler and his supporters are Nazis. And yet at the same time, right now, we're in a crisis. And what they want is more from the federal government. So they're saying, if only the federal government could do more right now. Really? So you want the guy you've been calling Hitler for the last four years to do more? That doesn't really make sense. What I would prefer is you give all of these guys less power. And the exchange there is that when it's your guy in power, if you've scaled back some of his power, he can't do absolutely everything you want him to do. But the beauty is that when it's the guy that you hate, right? So in my case, when it's Bernie Sanders who has all the reverse ideas that I have, if we've scaled back the power up, he can't do too much damage too, that the wheels will stay on regardless of the extreme guys on both sides. But the only you can't. That's what unfortunately, the progressives of today who have way too much influence, they think if they could just get their guys in that everything would be perfect and that would be a dystopia for me. So I want to scale back the power so they don't have a chance to do it. And by the way, the same thing would go for the authoritarians that might rise.
- [90:19]
Tom Bilyeu
On the right, you have a book in your nightstand. Is it On Liberty? I forget.
- [90:24]
Dave Rubin
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. It was here the other day. It's probably in this room somewhere. I brought it out for something. I don't see it right this second. It's around here, but if it's not in here, it's in my nightstand. Yeah.
- [90:36]
Tom Bilyeu
You said that there were a few key ideas that were really simple but very profound that you'd like to come back to.
- [90:42]
Dave Rubin
Oh, yeah. I mean, well, so much of what I lay out at don't burn this book are the base ideas of On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. I mean, the core of it is what we. Well, a lot of it's really the theme of everything we've talked about here. But beyond everything else, the individual is the only thing that matters. That that is the only way, by strengthening the individual. All right? That that is how you will allow people to flourish, to make sure that the government doesn't have too much power over your life until you hit those marginal issues where the government has to do something. So as I'm saying right now, coronavirus is one of those type of issues where. Look, would I love to leave this all up to the states and let every state decide how they want to deal with social distancing or how they want to deal with the bailout or whatever? Yes, in a perfect world, I would like to do that. But you know what? Viruses don't care about borders. So if this governor of New Jersey, let's say, was doing everything wrong with coronavirus, and the governor of New York was doing everything right, we got a problem because there's a border there and the virus doesn't care about the border. So I fully acknowledge that not everything can be done at the super local level. But in effect, John Seward Mill, who wrote On Liberty, what was it maybe 100 years before the founding. No, 50 years before the founding of the United States, Maybe something like that, 1700s, that he had the right ideas, that the way that you can allow people to be free, the way that you can allow the human experience to flourish in the greatest way possible, is to not create a system that will crush it. Don't take away people's rewards just because you have some other desire to do with them. Let people have what they earn. Find the little moments where we need some sort of collective, in the right sense of government to do the little things, but the big things are better. What could happen in your life right now that you would really want the government involved? There could be a couple things, right? Like if your house was broken into, you might want the police, but as a guy that's doing pretty decent, you also might have Some security. You also might have a gun in your house. I mean, there's all sorts of things. Go to the post office. I mean, if you think that the post office, which is run by the government, is so brilliantly run, and then they'll say, oh, well, we want you to take their. We want them to take care of health care, too. And it's like in the post office, you ever ask someone at the post office for a pen? They think that's like asking for gold, because they don't even have pens at the post office. So I think we just have to be careful with what we ask for. So Liberty. The book is called On Liberty. You can literally read it in an hour. And Liberty is the key of all of this.
- [93:21]
Tom Bilyeu
So hard, right? I guess. But one thing that I really wanted
- [93:24]
Dave Rubin
to discuss had the book here somewhere, literally in the room this morning. I don't know where it went.
- [93:30]
Tom Bilyeu
One thing that really resonated with me is Jordan Peterson. And I know that you spent a lot of time with him. He's somebody that I didn't know anything about in the early days. I was hearing headlines. He sounded like a psychopath. And I was like, yo, I don't know, man. And then he just kept popping up in my YouTube feed. And so one day I was like, you know what? Fuck it. Like, what is. Why do people hate this guy so much? Let me just hear him talk crazy for a minute. And so I clicked into one of his videos, and I was like, wait a second. This actually, like, this is amazing. This is absolutely fantastic. And from there, I ended up reading his book Maps of Meaning, which I actually read before. I read 12 rules for life. And as somebody that dense, man, oh, my God, it's so good. So I was changed by Joseph Campbell's the Power of Myth. I mean, fucking change, dude. That book hit me. It influenced so much of my life in terms of rituals, in terms of. As somebody who struggled to go from being a boy to being a man. Like, his ideas around, hey, the lack of meaningful rituals is a real problem. Like, we need these demarcation points. And. And so when I got married, I went through a ritualistic scarification to remind myself I was different after my marriage than before. It's been profoundly impactful. So I read Maps of Meaning, and
- [94:46]
Dave Rubin
I'm like, holy hell.
- [94:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, this guy is. He's picked up. I think he's even better than Joseph Campbell. He's picked up where Joseph Campbell left off and is really, like, shown how usable and powerful this has been in his life. I have two questions. Or in people's lives. I have two questions for you. One, do you have any updates? Like, what the fuck? Where is he? What happened? Like, is he gonna be okay? And then two, I'd love to know. I know you spent a lot of time touring with him. Like, what were some key things that you've taken from him?
- [95:17]
Dave Rubin
Yeah, so the first one, I can't say anything that isn't really public. I can say that I did see him within the last couple months. He's getting better. He will be back. You know, he was able to write the front blurb on my. On my book in the back blurb. And he's working on his book. You know, benzos are a fucking hell of a drug. And, you know, there was this meme that somehow he was this, like, addict for all this time and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it's not only so patently dishonest, but he was totally. When we were on tour, he would talk about taking a small amount of benzos to help him deal with anxiety. Then in the midst of the tour, he found out that his wife had what they thought was terminal cancer. Thank God she's okay now. But I was actually with him out to lunch when he got the call that she was sick or that they thought it was going to be terminal. I saw this guy live through a year and a half, almost two years of an unimaginable life. The rise to fame, the scrutiny, the love, the hate, the travel, every piece of it. And I never saw him once break one of those 12 rules. So the first part of the question, he will be back soon enough. My guess is we'll be hearing from him probably a little bit in the summer, and then probably back to somewhat like, normal speed, probably in the fall. Don't totally quote me on that, but trust me, I know the amount of people that are pulling for him because I get messages and people literally come up to me on the street and I think they want to ask me something about me. And they'll say, how's Jordan? And that's completely fine with me because he affected me as much as he affected any of these other people. Which gets me to your second question. Being on tour with this guy, it was incredible because I saw somebody doing exactly what I think we've tried to do here for this last hour or whatever it is, and what I sense you're trying to do with your life, which is you take your ideas, you put them into practice, and then through that, have Been able to help other people. That's pretty cool. And I think really that's what Jordan did. He really, he created, created these 12 rules. From stand up straight with your shoulders back, which is present yourself properly to the world. From that sort of simple rule to pet a cat if you see one on the street, which is really just stop and smell the roses. And I think it's rule number six. It's either six or nine. About know that somebody that you're talking to might know more than you. I mean these sort of basic things that I don't think any, I don't think any in and of themselves that any of the 12 are totally revelatory. And I don't think he would think they are, but he gave them together as a package that I think for whatever reason, the reason that it worked for you, the reason that it worked for me, the reason why it worked for so many people, was that something has happened in the last 20 years. Partly as we're watching our old institutions crumble, partly as we're watching the media just feed us awful nonsense, partly the rise of YouTube and a million other voices. Is a lot of people kind of lost their way within that. It's partly, probably because of what we talked about before, about helicopter parents or distant parents or all of these things, right? Like that whole mix, that whole stew. And what I saw was a clinical psychologist from Toronto who is this mild mannered, sounds like Kermit the frog guy. Travel the world and help people. I mean, help people in the most fundamental ways. I'll tell you two quick things. So one of them, we were in Dublin and you know, when you give these big talks at these theaters, you know, there's a huge entrance out front and then there's usually an artist entrance on the side so that you don't have to walk in or out through all the fans and everything. So, you know, we did a ton of travel. I think we got to Dublin that day, I think from the uk. You know, there's jet lag, there's just like the endless amount of emails, reading articles about himself that are lies, doing the press, all that stuff, but he never phoned it in. He gave a different talk every night, which is staggeringly incredible. I don't know that anyone can do that besides him. Anyway, it's late night, it's probably like midnight after a very, very long day. He's given a talk, he's done the Q and A, he's shook all the hands, taken all the pictures, we walk out the side and we see these two guys in the distance, and they're kind of hugging and they kind of run right at us. And one of them was about 60. The other one was about 25, maybe 30. And it turned out that they were a father and son who had not seen each other for like five or six years before that, they had had a falling out. And by coincidence, because of reading 12 Rules for Life, they had started getting their lives in order. And they were at the same show together and saw each other and reconnected that night. So there they are, crying. Now Jordan starts crying. I teared up a bit. Little bit. It's like, think how profoundly powerful that is. Not because this guy was selling them something, right? Like, it was like selling snake oil. Not because he was trying to make a profit off these guys, but he said, get your shit in order. Get your life in order, and you might be able to get the world in order, Right? Clean your room before you clean the world. And that's what these guys did. And they reconnected that night. Incredible. Another one real quick was a night that we were. We were somewhere in Scandinavia, I think maybe in Sweden. And the guy that's running the jet bridge runs onto the plane, and it's a young black guy. And he says to Jordan, he says, and I only mention that he's black, by the way, because if you listen to the press, they were saying, oh, it's all angry white men that listen to Jordan Peterson. I couldn't care what race this guy is. He runs onto the plane and he says, I could get fired for this. But I just have to tell you, I've read 12 rules for life. You fixed my life. I got this job. I'm doing great. But Jordan gets up, shake his hand. The guy was glowing, like, beyond, beyond glowing. And I could give you a million stories like that. So I saw something real. I saw real, true change. I'll give you one other real quick. This one was in Stockholm for sure. I go to H and M, which is their number one export besides IKEA from Sweden. And I just wanted to get a baseball cap because it was really windy out. And I walk in, I grab the cap, and then I'm online, and there's a young guy in front of me and the cashier, and they're speaking in English. The young guy has a suit. He tells the cashier. He's like, I'm going to see Jordan Peterson tonight. This is my first suit that I've ever bought. The cashier says, I'm going to See Jordan Peterson tonight. And then I tap on the guy and I said, me, too. And they knew who I was. And we talked for a little bit, and I thought, how absolutely incredible this is. This young kid, I don't know, he's probably 19 years old, is buying a suit so that he can dress up, so that he can stand up straight with his shoulders back and attend an event of a guy who helped him turn his life around. And I gave him a shout out at the show that night and had, you know, 2,000 people cheering for him. I had him stand up in his new suit. So I saw real, tangible change. And there's so little of that in life. And it comes with slings, it comes with arrows. You know, it comes with arrows that are sometimes being shot up, that are going to come right down on you because you start talking to media without knowing that they're trying to get you and the rest of it. But it was a magical year and a half, and I have no doubt that he'll eventually be back and better than ever.
- [102:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, that'll be great to see that notion of everything coming down to you and taking responsibility for your life. And, man, I will never understand pushback on that. I actually don't get it. I don't get how somebody could think that things will be worse if they look inward, take responsibility. I've told the story so many times, I'll give a truncated version, but the very first blog article I ever wrote, it was my first foray into stepping from sort of behind the company and not being the face or anything to being the face. And I wrote this blog article, and I wanted it to be, like, the greatest gift I could give. Like, the thing deepest inside me that I had learned that had changed my life forever. The gift that I'd been trying to give to all my employees, because I used to do this, is back at Quest, I used to do what I called Quest University, where I was like, look, I will teach you anything and everything that I know about entrepreneurship. Going back to the very first thing I was talking about, I always thought that was how I was going to reach people. And the mindset stuff just came because that's the primer, right? If you get that right, then you can build a business or be a linchpin in your life or be a better parent or whatever. Like it. It is all going to come down to the foundation of how you think, how you interpret the world. Like, just the way you look at things. And so I write this blog article and the title of it is, everything is your fault. And the punchline was, imagine getting hit by a drunk driver. Whose fault is that? And I'm like, it's your fault. I thought people are going to be like, yes, this is amazing. And people were pissed and they were like, you're, you're victim blaming and like, how can you do this? This is crazy. And I'm like, look, in a world where even the insurance company is going to tell you that it's the drunk driver's fault, I just want to remind you, you could have made a different choice and gotten a different outcome.
- [104:13]
Dave Rubin
That's rad.
- [104:14]
Tom Bilyeu
That's so empowering. And to like being empowered, even though that means you have to own your suffering, even though if things are not going well, you've got to turn around and say, yo, like there's, I could do something different and get a different outcome. So I can't just pass the buck. I can't make this somebody else's problem. And my thing is, even if it is, even if just fucking the data shows this isn't your problem. You didn't create this. This is happening to you. It doesn't help. It doesn't help.
- [104:45]
Dave Rubin
It doesn't help.
- [104:46]
Tom Bilyeu
It puts you in a position, you're not solution oriented.
- [104:50]
Dave Rubin
Well, just to go off that real quick, first off, that's very consistent with everything else you're saying, which is nice. It shows that you have a holistic view of the world, that this isn't just some taped together Frankenstein monster that sort of makes sense. This consistently makes sense. But to specifically answer your question about how you can't understand the mindset of the other people, it's really interesting because I think even the people that purport to believe that everything's, it's not your fault, it's the system and corruption and blah, blah, blah. I think if you took them at a really individual level, most people know and you can get them to realize they won't, you know, it'll take a couple of conversations that it's their life and that it is on them to fix it. I think intuitively we know that. We know that because it's the story story that has made us come this far. I mean, I say this in the book, this thing about what are all the stories that you care about? What did Luke Skywalker do when he realized what the Empire was doing? He blew up the Death Star. He didn't ask someone else to do it. I mean, every movie. What did Frodo do with the Ring? He didn't Say, ah, could somebody else get that thing to Mordor? He went on the quest himself. I mean, every story, every. Forget fictitious stories. What does LeBron James do in basketball? You know what I mean? He dragged a whole bunch of very average teams eventually to championships. He lost a lot of championships too. He lost more championships than he won. But everyone, it's on you to make the best of the world, not to just complain about everything. And I think most people do understand that. I think what I'm more scared about, not more scared per se, what I'm more generally fearful of is that there are bad actors who want to use that emotion, use that fear, use that feeling of uselessness to control people. And that's what societies do. So when we hear all these ideas about socialism and all that, that are the complete reverse of everything we've talked about here, it's not sold as something scary, which it is meaning that the government can do whatever it wants, basically at any time. And you're going to owe everything to the government. What is it sold as? It's sold as compassion. We're all gonna have a part of everything. Everyone's gonna have healthcare. We're all gonna be nice. Everyone's gonna go to college. Everyone. But that's not real. It's not real and it's actually removing the most human part of us, which is the part to fight for what's yours. That's what you must do as a human being. Or don't do it and see how it turns out.
- [107:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, man. Fuck. A big issue that we could do a whole nother. I mean, really. That's largely what this entire thing has been about. But, man, don't burn. This book was a really interesting read. It was really. You're not trying to hide. You lay out all your ideas for the world to see. I think it's pretty interesting. I respect the way that you are always willing to change and even just watching since you've started interviewing people watching you change and evolve as as much been really interesting and I think so early on in the book, talking about coming out of the closet, it's something that really rings true with how you live your life. I think that's dope, man. Where can people connect with you? Get the book. Find out more. You're not exactly an invisible person on the Internet, so I'm sure a lot of people know. But for the people who don't tell them where to find you, they can
- [108:10]
Dave Rubin
probably figure it out. My branding guy is pretty Good. It's rubinreport.com and Twitter Rubin Report and Instagram Rubin Report and all that. And it's don'tburnthisbook.com or they can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble and the rest of it. And I just wanna say I've thoroughly enjoyed this. Like, this is what real conversation is all about. This is how you push things forward. Because you show people that these aren't just everything we've talked about here. These aren't just things we're talking about. They're things we're trying to live. So once this coronavirus passes, let's break bread in real life. Like, real people love that.
- [108:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Absolutely.
- [108:43]
Dave Rubin
Like we did when we were kids. Remember you used to go out to deal with other people. It was a long time ago, but
- [108:48]
Tom Bilyeu
I remember those days. Awesome, man. I look forward to that. That'd be great.
- [108:52]
Dave Rubin
Right on, man. It was a pleasure. Really.
- [108:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Definitely. Guys, thank you so much. That's the end of the episode. Normally this is where I shake hands and push the mic away and it sort of take care of, takes care of itself. But these days, no mic to push away. All right, brother. Thank you so much, man.
- [109:06]
Netgear Orbi WiFi Announcer
Everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go, go to itunes, go to Stitcher rate and review us.
- [109:14]
Tom Bilyeu
That helps us build this community and that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we
- [109:20]
Netgear Orbi WiFi Announcer
can to help as many people as
- [109:21]
Tom Bilyeu
we can deliver as much value as possible.
- [109:24]
Netgear Orbi WiFi Announcer
And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that.
- [109:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Alright, guys, thank you again so much.
- [109:29]
Netgear Orbi WiFi Announcer
And until next time, my friends, be legendary.
- [109:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Take care.