Dave Rubin on Speaking Your Truth in a Divided World (Archived Episode)

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, 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 a party. Which is already, 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? 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 28th. The day that the book comes out in New York City, that has been indefinitely postponed. And, you know, we'll see over the next couple of months as things slowly get back to normal when we can start doing that. And, you know, at this point, after being trapped in the house for so long, although this is my home, my studio is 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 going to have like a little feeling of the roar in twenties where people are going to want to be out and about again and will want to 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 you know do you want to delay the delay the book and we just don't know if

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 you know, 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 know, you edit for a couple of months, but really I stopped touching the book probably right around Thanksgiving of 2019. You know, 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 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 you know 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 closing certain states and things like that. But fortunately, there is online. We've got an e-book. We've got the voiceover version. And we'll see what happens. But I just think you've got to move. You can't just wait till everything's perfect, because perfect never comes.

Yeah, that is a very fair statement. I don't know. So 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 to 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 out 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, man, I'm already putting so much time and energy into those ideas, those thoughts, trying to get them out of 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, you know, 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.

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, you know, 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, you know, some of the publishing houses, you know, 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, I just, you kind of just figure out a way. It's a little bit of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, like life finds a way, you know?

And you find a way to do it. And I basically for the, so for me, it was about a six month, six month process of writing. Um, 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 eight a.m.

and often write until about two 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 know, you got to eat. And then I would be like, wow, you know, 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, 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. You've worked on this thing for months. If you're the woman pregnant, you've eaten right. I gave this thing everything I had, then 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 obviously the editing part and all that is extremely, it's very technical and you move things around and then you have to 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, like I feel like it's more

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. You know, like little things that I thought maybe were 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.

Yeah, when it comes to writing the book for me, 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 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. If you're not thinking in the right way, you're going to miss all these opportunities, there's 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

Like, all the 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.

getting an EIN number, a tax ID for the company. 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 life. 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 got to 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.

As somebody with a couple of businesses now, so I've had to get a couple EINs, and then 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 got to 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. So, you know, 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 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's 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 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.

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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 a district, the definition, but that was all happening. With you so far.

I 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 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

You're walking people through exactly what you think. One, I'd love to know, 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 haranging you, 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?

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 8th or 9th 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 all the whole thing, like everybody else and friends. And we would be arguing about everything. I mean, arguing about farm 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. 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 that's part of it. And then as far as like being, you know, in the eye of the storm or glutton for punishment with all this, I mean, look, if you're going to do anything good in this world, it is going to come with a certain cost. You know, if you 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, deplatform 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, you know, 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 going to have people push against you. You know, 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, you know, 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 know, 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 noise makers and, you know, they chant and they would pick times because they would set it up in their phone 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.

uh, 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, 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, you know, 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, that their opponent is human. Um, so all of those things, they're not really fun in the midst of it. You know, like it's not,

I don't think I'm combative by nature. I mean, you see the way I do interviews. I'm not here to really fight with people. I am interested 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 out. 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 going to 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. 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.

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 that seemed pretty open, you guys talked about everything, what was it that made you afraid to be open about that? 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, 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 metaphor in the book. You know, I think partly that looking back there were probably a couple things. You know, first off,

Gay, you know, it's a little hard for people now in 2020 to remember what it was like in 2000, in 1990, 1980, 1980, whatever. The stigma that was attached to being gay, 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 from 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. 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.

um, 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, I oddly became resentful of him because I was out at, 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? Um, 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 it's a weird thing. It's funny, because 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 than 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 and

you know i describe in the book that when i was really closeted your ability to 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 to 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, you know, when you're not really being part of yourself about exactly? Well, just that I was gay. I thought there was something wrong with me. You saw that like that.

Yeah, I saw it as bad or I just saw it as like something. 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. 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. But 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. 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 pro-create in a traditional sense, we're actually in the process of having kids be a surrogate and an egg and the whole shebang. And as we were, yeah, yeah, as we were walking into the sperm bank, it's kind of funny. It was like the day before, like the full on shutdown of Los Angeles because of coronavirus,

So people are like 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 as we're walking into deposit sperm. But I think 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 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, you know, one of the saddest things there is you see all of these guys who are, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, possibly even over, 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 out, 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

you know, 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 1230 a.m. in the Times Square subway station on September 11th, 2001.

And then I woke up, I woke up a few hours later and America was under attack. But I was already, you know, 25 years old. He was out much younger. And then, 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 in 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 lived 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 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.

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 alive 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.

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One thing I wanted to follow up do 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 who's sperm to use? So this is actually happening right now. We just had a call like an hour ago with the woman who's help 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 with this, we're going to take two eggs from the donor, his sperm, my sperm, and have twins. So biologically each one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool, man. How did you guys, I mean, OK, so just pretty straight down the middle, fair one in 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. 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 two. I would really be okay with a boy and a girl. I don't think I want two girls.

But I think a boy in 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 going to mix with the magic of the universe or mess with the magic of the universe. Why not mess with the magic of the universe or why not two girls? Why not the magic of the universe? Um, you know, once, once the egg hits the sperm, even though I do talk about my feelings about abortion and I think, you know, 12 weeks is the cutoff.

You know, I do believe that you have at that point the genesis of life and then we could talk about, you know, five days in is a blast, this is really life and where are you at in four weeks and the rest of it. 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 in one, I hope that it's either two boys or a girl and a boy and, you know, we'll go from there.

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. No, no, no, it's done after they, they don't know the sex until they fertilize. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 deal 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 going to sperm thrown in there. You're good. And it's like, there's so many things to think about. What's the most surprising? Well, I guess more, 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, like 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 tell her a lot about.

We have not met face-to-face yet. We're about to do a Skype meeting. 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.

I'm so curious. What were some of the things that were really important to you? Like if I was going to do this, I would be a psychopath about their diet and like their exercise, like that would family mental health issues. Like you want to talk about like, 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 it would be mental health diet exercise. What were some key factors for you?

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 have 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, you know, 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, looks very happy. She looks fit. You know, she does some exercise. It seems like she basically eats right. We're not going to force her, you know, 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, it's why it's taken us a little longer there. It's like, 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. You know, there's a whole right now if you could or would you wait until coronavirus sort of settles out? 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

and 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 gonna last three more months, six months, nine months? It's like if we're, it goes to what I said earlier, like, I think you just move forward and move forward and move forward.

I think I got a little bit of that from from Peter Thiel just like keep going just keep going and 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. 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 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 predisposition. You're going to have more of a predisposition. Let's put it that way. So yeah, we're paying attention to all of that stuff. And 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.

So what do you would a decent parent look like? Like, what are some core, like, um, so for instance, yeah, I know that people would, if I had kids, I'd really be in trouble because I might, I was spanked growing up. I didn't have any beef with it. Uh, I think a lot of kids run right today. And so, uh, thankfully I never have to like deal with the societal backlash against that. But like, what are some talents of, uh, tenants of parenting that you,

subscribe to or maybe that you worry about or you haven't decided on like what are some key things that you guys are debating now. 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 we have a new dog now and like he he's a year old we got him the day that the

that LA was closing all everything because of the shutdown. I saw that the shelters were closing. And I was like, I just got to 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 going to wait for a while, probably for the fall, because I had the book tour and we were going to 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, I'm just going to 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 mentioned this because

Uh, 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. Uh, you know, oh, you're standing on the, uh, 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 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

Yeah, when I think about how we were raising, 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 think much about it. It was just, hey, I'm gonna hop on my bike and ride. There was like this dirt track that made my friends used to ride our bikes too.

And when I think about how far away that really was, um, and that, you know, that was like nine 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 dinner time, whatever, my mom would whistle and you could hear the whistle really far away. You could probably hear my mom's whistle like a good half mile away and just, you know, 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, I assume you were pointing to the book? Yeah. Yeah. Where do you fall in that stuff? Um, well, it's funny. So I'm 43. How old do you? 44.

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 childhood, I grew up in Long Island, but 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, you know, 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 30 feet 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, and 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, you know, this goes to this sort of helicopter parent thing and that we're on top of them all the time. And now, you know, 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, you know. And, you know, 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. Um, 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 get soft. Well, I mean, just tax wise and just the general state of where this state is going.

Um, with our, with our real far lefty governor who ruined, you know, Newsome, Gavin Newsome, 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, it's absolutely disgusting. Uh, 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, you 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, that 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

you know give them that long leash and then you know one day you come home and you fell out of a tree and you know you got a spike in your shoulder well maybe you won't do it again but but all of this you know it's a it's a more intellectual exercise for guys like us until we're actually doing it right yeah but this is you want to talk about an intellectual exercise that I think it's 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 what I want to know. So you've got, hey, this universe of beliefs, but the rubber meets a road when you have fucking kids. And I want to know, like, what are the big ideas you have that you distilled down when 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, 800%.

And I am super worried that 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.

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 it 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 wanted 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 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... Oh, that's the Mars thing? Yeah, no. 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 spoil the remarks. 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 the same... That is the thing. A hundred percent insane. But nobody was watching this. They were like, hey, there's a bow and arrow, go play. There's a motorcycle, go play it. 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.

man when i think about and 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 eight 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 have to 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 with this child. And so, you know, I'm gonna, 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, Molly coddling 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.

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I mean, it's one for the ages, right? It's one for how we even behave in our own lives. 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, you know, 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 sort of 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.

You want to give them freedom. And then if you give them freedom, they might hurt themselves. Again, 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, it's three years later, and they haven't moved off the couch because they're a pothead, or much worse than that.

There really is no perfect way here. And then there's, you know, 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.

So what are some of the beliefs, like you have very clear beliefs, you laid them out in the book, a 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 hold fire, no inciting violence. What are some core values that you want to instill in your kids?

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 happened. 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, 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

lose 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, 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 or gender, your skin color, even your nationality, as long as you're 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 of 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 they had in their mind what was too many Asians now that in my book that's known as racism but they've decided we have too many Asians here so we're going to make it harder for Asians to get in and we're going to 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 in mind weren't given anything and i write about what what it 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 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 time. They go, oh, well, this group had a rough goal 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 four 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.

When you get into this stuff, it's really interesting. As somebody who obviously has embraced capitalism in the extreme, I'm a huge believer in capitalism, and at the same time, I don't like to see people struggle. Again, this is one of the reasons I didn't have kids.

I do not like people putting roadblocks or barriers in front of somebody who wants to bust their ass and build something.

where in fact all 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 I was like wait what this is a negative thing like the the notion of yeah

Working hard and trying to figure something out now. I'm not denying look it's what I call minimum requirements So there's something they're not smart enough to they're never gonna 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 and

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 environment. Yeah, so I agree with the premise. You sound to me very much like sort of an iron-randy and 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.

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, inherit all this money that go bust because it, 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 has proven time and again over, over now decades that capitalist societies, not, 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.

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 is going to 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, let's say you're, I mean, 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, that's market price for it, which by the way, after Corona, I think we'll significantly go down because I think people are gonna 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 mostly 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 uh... you know i'm laying out classically liberal principles in the book and 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 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're probably doing 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 it's the nobody's going to do what has to be done. Well, what has to be done? I ought 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, and 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 peace in place. Yeah, when I think about the issue and I agree with you, it's messy. And I honestly, man, here is 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 isn't possible 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 choose the sex. It is a fucking terrifying, slippery slope. 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 a prepared, make no mistake. I was ready to capitalize on opportunities that came away, 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 in 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 hardworking. 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 is fucking haunting me, and I've quoted this so many times as 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 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 we become 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. If I can 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 concepts 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 seeds planted in my head.

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 going to 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. Yes, interesting. So when you're 100% right and you quoted in your book something that was very startling, which are the stats around people who grew 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, man, world's most normal childhood don't have any trauma over 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,

Why is enough to recognize I don't think I should be making policy anytime soon, but my hypothesis goes like this. So I'm my last company had 3000 employees about 1000 of them group hard as hell in the inner cities of South Central Los Angeles Compton like crazy crazy.

And the kind of story, I used to think I grew up poor, my friend I did not grow up poor. I now know what real poverty looks like. And I'm talking people, I held 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 to see 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 AK-47 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 fun and 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 they're 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, EVPS 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. So I want to know like, 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'm ever 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 would 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 an 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 men, this is anecdotal at scale, this was a lot of people. And I was just like, man, so my life's mission is because my wife and I could have retired, bought an island, and literally never thought about working her 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 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's sort of,

I, 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 your 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, damn. Yeah, well, well, first of all, there's a lot there, but you're, first of all, you're living your words, right? Like, you're actually, 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 hire it, as you said, a third of your workforce, a thousand people that came from these areas, and I 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. Here's the real thing I'm grappling with right now.

Some of them, yes. And there were amazing transformations through it. And it was, 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 it for almost a year. She was amazing, amazing, bright, hardworking, 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. Well, I would say this, that shouldn't haunt you in that you can't solve everyone's problems, right? Like you can...

Well, that's a pretty lofty goal. It is as moronic, though, as you're saying. And I know that. So I really do find myself sketched 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 like people are really struggling. What do you do?

But with that in mind though so okay so you've built businesses you've got money as you said you can 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 you're still busting your ass. Well what's the 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 that woman.

Isn't that 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, you know, 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. I definitely think the government can do it better. I have a quick question for you. How do you think we should be handling the crisis now with the number of people filing for unemployment?

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, you know, we gave 25

million dollars to the uh... kennedy art center and then they fired half of the the musicians that are there something like that like we know that the cut the you know the politicians they put all this pork for their own pet projects in and all that nonsense that being said in in this case where we're 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 plate 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 you know people like right now what i think there's like 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

You know, 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.

by the groceries make sure that they can get their medicine things like that and then you know help the business i think there's a little bit of both i think unfortunately what's happened here is you know god damn 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. It's just to get their little pet project in there. And this, again, would be where I would say you scaled 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 you make under... I love your ideas, by the way. But that's from a position of ignorance. How do you think, like, that only works if we radically scale government back, basically, right? 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 going to legalize it and they're going to be more potheads and it's a gateway drug and all these horrible things are going to happen and blah, blah, blah. And guess what? None of that happened. Actually, now we 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. 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 know, 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, oh, 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,

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 enough, he can't do too much damage too, that the wheels will stay on regardless of the extreme guys on both sides. But 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 on the right. You have a book in your nice stand. Is it on Liberty? Forget. 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.

Well, we're around here, but if not, if it's not in here, it's in my night band. Yeah. You said that there were a few key ideas that were really simple, but very profound that you'd like to come back to. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, so much of what I lay out at Don't Burn this book is are the base.

ideas of on liberty by john Stewart mill i mean the core of it is what we want a lot of it's really the 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 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've 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 Stuart Mill, who wrote on Liberty, what was it maybe?

a hundred years before the final fifty years before the founding of the united states may be something like that seventy nine hundred uh... that he had the right idea

that the only 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. So hard ride, I guess. But one thing that I really wanted to talk to you. Had the book here somewhere, literally in the room this morning. I don't know where it went.

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 don'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 I just kept popping up on 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 twelve rules for life and as somebody who is man oh my god it's so good so i i was changed by joseph camels the power of myth i mean book in 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 so when I got married I went through a ritualistic scarification to remind myself I was different after my marriage and before it's been profoundly impactful So I read maps of meaning and I'm like holy hell 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?

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 of months. He's getting better. He will be back. You know, he was able to write the front blurb on my book and the back blurb and he's working on his book. You know, Benzo's 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 I'll say, how's Jordan? 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 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, you know, pet a cat if you see one on the street, which is really just stop and smell the roses. And, you know, I think it's rule number six is it's either six or nine, you know, 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 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 I 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. 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 when you give these big talks at these theaters, 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 double in 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&A He's shook all the hands taking all the pictures We walk out the side and we see these two guys in in the distance and they're kind of hugging 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 and

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 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 somewhere in uh... scandinavia i think maybe in sweden and that the guy that's running the jet bridge runs on to the plane and uh... it's a young black guy and he says to jordan he says i and i only mentioned that he's black by the way because if you listen to the press they were saying all which all angry white men that listen to jordan peters and i i couldn't care what

what, you know, 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, blah, blah, blah. 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, we're in, this one was in Stockholm for sure.

I go to h&m which is their number one export besides iKEA from Sweden and i just wanted to get a baseball cap because it was 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 2,000 people cheer in for him. I had him stand up in his new suit. So I saw a real tangible change. And there's so little of that in life. And it comes with flings. It comes with arrows. 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.

Man, that'll be great to see that notion of everything coming down to you and taking responsibility for your life. 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,

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 it changed my life forever. The gift that I had 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 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. That's rad. 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, 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. It puts you in a position you're not solution oriented. Well, just to go off that real quick, you know, it's first off, that's very consistent with everything else you're saying, which is nice. It shows that you have like a holistic view of the world that this isn't just like some

tape together Frankenstein monster that like sort of makes sense, right? Like 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 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 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, 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, and I'm 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 going to have a part of everything. We're everyone's going to have health care. We're all going to be nice. Everyone's going to 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.

Yes, man, fuck. A big issue that we could do a whole other, I mean, really, that's large of what this entire thing has been about. But, man, Dunburn's 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 has 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 probably figure it out. My branding guy is pretty good. It's RubenReport.com and Twitter, RubenReport and Instagram, RubenReport and all that, and it's don't burn this book.com or they can get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

and the rest of it. And I just wanna say, I thoroughly enjoyed this. 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. Like we did when we were kids. Remember you used to go out to ill with other people? It was a long time ago, but we were trying.

Awesome. I look forward to that. That'd be great. Right on, man. It was a pleasure, really. 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 takes care of itself. But these days, no mics push away. All right, brother. Thank you so much, man.

Everybody, thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes, go to Stitcher, rate and review us. That helps us build this community. And that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys, rating and reviewing really helps with that. All right guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

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