Jan. 13, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
32:04
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| That's also why it's so wonderful that sites like Locals are springing up and are going to provide an alternative. | ||
| Nature abhors a vacuum. | ||
| Markets abhor a vacuum. | ||
| I love if these Twitter guys and YouTube are going to play the game the way they want to. | ||
| there's about 47% of Americans who want to hear dissident voices and who will be really tuning in. | ||
| Joining me today is the former CEO of Overstock.com, a man dubbed the Renaissance Man of | ||
| e-commerce by Fortune magazine, a cryptocurrency enthusiast, and more. | ||
| Patrick Byrne, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| It is such an honor to be on your show, David. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I've been watching you for four years and just become such an admirer. | ||
| I feel I've made the big time. | ||
| This is it, man. | ||
| I mean, look, I went through your bio today and I said, okay, there's some impressive stuff here, but this is it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, it reads better. | ||
| As they say in theater, it all reads better than it played. | ||
| In my bio. | ||
| But no, this is it. | ||
| Making it here is, I think that you have become such a intellectual center of gravity for the freedom movement that I really am excited to be on your show. | ||
| Nice, thanks. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that, and we happened to bump into each other just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It was the second time. | ||
| You didn't even remember the first time because it was backstage at some Yale event or something. | ||
| But we saw each other, we chatted for a little bit, and this is long overdue. | ||
| But you are making a Rubin Report first here, because just as I sat down a moment ago, I opened up my Twitter to say, well, what's Patrick up to? | ||
| Just so I can ask him something timely off the bat. | ||
| And boy, oh boy, you are doing something timely. | ||
| You have been banned from Twitter literally in the last like 10 minutes. | ||
| I saw your profile. | ||
| I saw you're following me. | ||
| I saw the tweets. | ||
| I refreshed just to see if you had put anything new up. | ||
| You're gone. | ||
| You're gone. | ||
| So congratulations. | ||
|
unidentified
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All the best people are, Dave, don't you think? | |
| What did you do? | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| Well, I've been sort of teasing Jack. | ||
| There's a tweet someone should go back a few days ago and find. | ||
| I put up something like, Jack, is it verboten to list a 19th century philosopher? | ||
| A quote from a 19th century philosopher. | ||
| I've been doing things like that. | ||
| I don't think I've been violating any terms of services, but just kind of ridiculing them. | ||
| John Stuart Mill wrote this beautiful statement about Free speech. | ||
| And it was basically he who knows only half of, he only knows his own side of an argument, only knows half of the argument. | ||
| And it's not enough to have teachers tell you what the other side is and then give you how they would answer it. | ||
| You have to be able to read the original material, so there has to be free speech. | ||
| That's the only way we're going to have a fecund discourse and advance as a society. | ||
| So I put that up. | ||
| I'd like to think that that's probably the... It'd be kind of funny if posting 19th century philosophy is violating the terms. | ||
| If John Stuart Mill can get you kicked off Twitter, I'm pretty sure I would be off of Twitter. | ||
| So I have a feeling it might have been something else, but in any event, you're off the Twitter, life goes on. | ||
| Real quick, I wanna focus really for this time on the censorship stuff, on what you think some of the solutions are, on tech, all of that. | ||
| But for the people that just have no idea who you are, you actually have a pretty fascinating bio and you've done some really cool stuff. | ||
| Can you give me like a minute or two just like Patrick Byrne 101, and then we'll dive into everything that's happening right now. | ||
| Patrick Byrne 101 is, I had a dual career in business and academia. | ||
| Part of that's because I got out of college, I had cancer, three times, and I spent a lot of my 20s in the hospital. | ||
| And for want of something better to do and convalescing, I did a PhD in philosophy. | ||
| I was something called a Marshall Fellow, and did that at Cambridge, finished the PhD at Stanford. | ||
| So, but meanwhile, I was also doing all kinds of other things on the side and those other things just sort of built until by the time I was in my late 20s. | ||
| They were taking they were business ventures startups and investments as such and they kind of took over my life. | ||
| For about 20, 25 years. | ||
| I'm happily, I left a year ago because I knew that I was going to be, that I had been involved in a lot of stuff that was going to be seeing the light of day and running a publicly traded company as CEO. | ||
| I thought it would probably, I didn't know how it was going to come out, but I knew it was going to come out and I thought it would probably destroy the company if I stayed. | ||
| So I punched out a year ago and then started going public with some of the things I know. | ||
| Right, and some of those things that you have been tweeting about are kind of election-related stuff that, to be quite frank with you, if I was to bring up right now, my channel could be deleted like that. | ||
| That's just the sad truth of it, but that's probably the segue that'll get us to all the censorship stuff. | ||
| As a guy that, you know, you're an innovator, you brought Overstock to IPO, you're a crypto guy, you're involved in intelligence and all of these things, What do you make of this very bizarre moment that we're in, in terms of the information war, not even the specific political, you know, Trump-Scott, the 10 days left war? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's all part, it's the fourth stage of a, It's the fourth stage of a psyop. | ||
| And the first stage was the COVID, the second stage was Antifa, the demoralization, disorientation, then the election, whatever happened there, we won't comment on it. | ||
| But the last stage is normalization. | ||
| So they have to control the media and normalize. | ||
| everyone's belief in this election. | ||
| And if you doubt it, everyone's gonna treat you like you're crazy to doubt this election. | ||
| So this is really the fourth and final stage of a PSYOP, where I think they take over the United States, frankly. | ||
| So that's why this is so crucial for them. | ||
| That's also why it's so wonderful that, you know, sites like Locals are springing up | ||
| and are gonna provide an alternative. | ||
| Nature abhors a vacuum, markets abhor a vacuum. | ||
| I love if these Twitter guys are gonna, and YouTube are gonna play the game the way they want to. | ||
| There's about 47% of Americans who wanna hear dissident voices. | ||
| So what do you, as someone that, I think you're pretty much like me. | ||
| You're either an old school liberal or a libertarian, somewhere in that spot. | ||
| What do you make of what the government either should have done or could have done or would have done in all of the time that it had to break these companies up or regulate them or the rest of it? | ||
| I never felt there was a good answer. | ||
| You know me, I like competition. | ||
| That's why I started Locals. | ||
| But do you think Trump dropped the ball in terms of There was a time where maybe some of this could have been dealt with? | ||
| Yes, but I think that they have, the goons have gone to steps that I doubt even Trump anticipated, that they were gonna do things like shut off Twitter for 70,000 people, turn off sites, pardon me, I now have COVID as I told you. | ||
| I'm surviving. | ||
| You've had it for a couple of days. | ||
| You're alive. | ||
| You're smiling. | ||
| I'm alive. | ||
| I think I'm on day four. | ||
| It feels like a mild flu so far. | ||
| I'd say what they have done is so extreme that it's really left a bad taste in the mouth of anyone but the most crazy Marxist lefties. | ||
| They can't imagine an America. | ||
| Somebody's taking care of me that actually voted for Biden. | ||
| And even she has told me how horrified she is about what's going on. | ||
| It's clearly they are showing their hand and showing America what the America is that you have to look forward to in about a week if this all goes through as planned. | ||
| Okay, so if Trump couldn't have foreseen some of this stuff, do you think he just dropped the ball? | ||
| Like, what would you have done on the regulation stuff, knowing that these companies were getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and yet having the competition beliefs and the limited government beliefs? | ||
| Well, first of all, the emergency broadcast system should probably have been extended to social media and not just be in legacy media. | ||
| Uh, the rules of that. | ||
| If the government needs to communicate, they need to communicate. | ||
| What if there's a nuclear blast or something, uh, or a threat? | ||
| In addition, I think that what they really have to do is get rid of this section 230. | ||
| You know, the whole principle upon which it was all based. | ||
| And I remember 21 years ago when they made the argument, they said, you can't Yahoo says you can't sue us for stuff that appears on the message board. | ||
| We're just like a tree in the town town park and people go and nail whatever they want on the tree. | ||
| We're value-free and on that basis they got treated not like a publisher who could be sued for libel, but they got treated like just a A neutral platform. | ||
| Well, our concept of a publisher has to really expand. | ||
| You become a publisher by using algorithms that suppress certain voices and elevate others. | ||
| That makes you a publisher. | ||
| Maybe you're not the guy doing the typing, but you have effectively become a publisher. | ||
| So those exemptions they have from the laws on libel that govern, say, newspapers, should not be there. | ||
| They shouldn't be there, and there should be guys like Nick Sandman suing all these social media companies if they allow and promote messages that such and such is a racist or such and such is a fascist and such, then you should be able to sue just like you can if the Washington Post says it or CNN says it. | ||
| And of course, we all know that CNN coughed up some couple hundred million dollars or something, so they say to Nick. | ||
| So they ought to do that. | ||
| That same liability should attach to Twitter, YouTube, everybody else in the game. | ||
| So do you see the, what happened with the servers to Parler, so moving away from Twitter for a second and just the suppression of whether they're de-boosting you or shadow banning you or whether YouTube is suppressing videos, to actually in effect blow up the servers of Parler, you know, they removed this, they didn't physically blow them up, but you know, they said you can't use our servers anymore, that's what Amazon said. | ||
| Do you view that as just like a massive escalation or is it just like the obvious next step? | ||
| No, I do think it's a massive escalation that should get them sued. | ||
| That should really get them sued for some great big check. | ||
| Because you can't tinker with it. | ||
| What if AT&T, go back to the 70s, suppose AT&T had started saying, When you talk on your telephone long distance, if you are promoting a Democrat, we're going to turn you off. | ||
| Only Republicans will we let you talk about on our AT&T phone lines. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I'd say that it would have been ridiculous. | ||
| It would have been ridiculous. | ||
| Doesn't matter that it's a private company. | ||
| And so I think it's insidious. | ||
| I think it's extraordinary. | ||
| But it tells you the kind of country we are about to become in the absence of Intervention of one kind or another you know you've got Nancy Pelosi saying that they're going to round up | ||
| Children of Trump supporters and crazy stuff like that. | ||
| If they don't take a vaccine, they're gonna take your kids from you. | ||
| We're really turning into a fascist state. | ||
| And I'm sure you, as an educated man, David, understand that fascism is a phenomenon of the left. | ||
| You were that whole, that history. | ||
| Yeah, well, this seems to be the confusion because everyone seems to apply it to the right and to Nazism. | ||
| But share with me, please. | ||
| For my less educated viewers. | ||
| Well, 110 years ago, there was a hardcore socialist in Italy. | ||
| He ran the socialist paper, Avanti. | ||
| He was considered so hardcore, he was almost distasteful to some of the others. | ||
| He was a certain type of Socialist called a syndicalist. | ||
| And, you know, after Marx, there's different strands of socialism and some strands of the Leninist Stalin strand. | ||
| But there was another strand that was like Prudhorn and George Sorrell, who believed in worker participation and worker democracies and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And they ended up evolving this theory of how to organize society, syndicalism. | ||
| Which is basically everyone belongs to a union of different kinds, and then the unions all meet in the halls, the great hall of the government, and with a firm hand of the government Controlling and pushing, they reach their deals and then you as a minion just live within the deal that your guild makes. | ||
| That's socialism. | ||
| The guy fought in World War I, unlike most socialists, and he came back after World War I and he had a twist. | ||
| He had a new frosting, which was that, yes, it is we socialists who understand the world correctly, but only we who have been bloodied in battle really have a place speaking for the future of the nation. | ||
| And this guy's name was, as you probably guessed, Benito Mussolini. | ||
| Benito Mussolini was a hardcore socialist, and even when he added nationalism, he didn't change his view of how you organize society. | ||
| So you really want to think of there being two kinds of socialists. | ||
| There's the international socialists, like the Trotskys, and then there's the national socialists, like the Mussolini, and then later his pal Adolf. | ||
| But they're phenomenons of the left. | ||
| They're not free market guys or anything like that. | ||
| Even, yeah, that was all recreated after World War II, that we were taught to think of them as right wing. | ||
| They grew out of the left. | ||
| Are you shocked that more people don't know that? | ||
| I mean, I remember when I was on The Young Turks, when I was a lefty, like five years ago, or no, it was more than that now, seven years ago or something like that. | ||
| It feels like 10 lifetimes ago. | ||
| I remember saying something like that on air once about, well, wait a minute, weren't these guys really on the left if you really know what leftism is? | ||
| And everyone kind of screaming at me, but is everything that we're seeing now just a failure of our education system that nobody knows anything? | ||
| We don't, not only do we not know history, we're actively erasing history. | ||
| It is indeed. | ||
| I don't know if you're aware of my friendship with Milton Friedman. | ||
| Do you know that story? | ||
| No, I don't, but I'd love to know it because of course I have nothing but admiration for Milton Friedman. | ||
| Milton thought that the way to save the nation was with school choice, and he used to say that our current government school system, or our socialist school system, is going to teach socialist values, and a free market system would teach freedom. | ||
| He saw that's how we save the country in the long term. | ||
| Just before he died, about a month before he died, he called me and his foundation was supposed to dissolve at his death. | ||
| And probably, well, not probably, the single greatest honor of my life was he called me and said, Rose and I want to change our will and you're going to carry on in my name for 10 years as the head of the Friedman Foundation, which I did. | ||
| And then stepped down and he said, carry on for 10 years and you step down and change the name to something else. | ||
| And so I did that for 10 years. | ||
| I think it's the way, I think that so many of the problems we face, these government schools, he wouldn't call them public schools, government schools, have really become little indoctrination camps. | ||
| It's shocking to me how, how this, the nonsense history, just fake history that students get taught. | ||
| I've, you know, working as the CEO of a company, I've of course interact with, interacted with all kinds of You know, age ranges, and it's just amazing how people in their 20s are so indoctrinated, and they don't know bupkis! | ||
| They don't know bupkis about history! | ||
| I've got some very close friends who are, I would call, say politely, I would call them kind of militant black Muslims. | ||
| But we're good friends and we spend a lot of time debating and stuff. | ||
| But I'm kind of surprised, at least they know a lot, but I'm generally surprised when I deal even with black activists, how little actual history of slavery, of black America do they know? | ||
| They've memorized a bunch of ideological talking points and spirit and they can't, | ||
| they don't think critically about anything they've memorized as a general rule. | ||
| Which is why, you know, I think what's really going on, I'm old, I'm a lot older than you, Ruben. | ||
| I don't think you're that much older than me. | ||
| I got a lot of miles on me. | ||
| As Indiana Jones says, it's not the years, it's the miles. | ||
| I used to wonder, in the 1980s, I lived in an academic environment where people were arguing for socialism, and they were still of the mentality, socialism because science and economics. | ||
| Well, by the end of the 1980s, as that all collapsed, they were kind of silent for the 90s. | ||
| Then they became socialism because of ethics. | ||
| And so there were all these ethics programs set up at universities. | ||
| And from what I saw of them, they basically, their basic point was, if you're going to be ethical, you got to be a socialist. | ||
| And then by about 2010, it became socialism because you're racist. | ||
| Then by about 2015, it became socialism because shut up. | ||
| more in the last couple of years to become socialism because black lives matter. | ||
| It's all intellectual goo. | ||
| So, and I wondered where they were gonna go when they ran out of, I mean, I was in academia | ||
| when I saw socialism collapse as a worldwide movement. | ||
| And I thought these, you know, there's always the control freaks among us. | ||
| They're gonna come back someday with some new way to pitch it. | ||
| And I've seen in 20 years, like I say, there's three or four different stages. | ||
| So this to me is just, you know, they can't even have the arguments anymore. | ||
| They cannot even conduct themselves in a normal reasoned discourse | ||
| that you used to take for granted anyone out of college could do. | ||
| And since they can't do that anymore, they don't really want to have the arguments. | ||
| They don't want to have any debate. | ||
| They just want to say socialism because... | ||
| Have you been able to figure out how many sort of, how many of them actually believe it versus how many of them just go along with it? | ||
| So it's like, I don't think probably that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in their heart of hearts are true socialists. | ||
| They might be bigger government people than we are, but I don't think they're really socialists in that sense. | ||
| I sense AOC is probably really a socialist. | ||
| Ilhan Omar is probably really a socialist. | ||
| But what do you make of the way that they've just sort of completely been able to eat the last remaining liberals, whatever you wanna call them at this point? | ||
| Well, I think of you and myself as the liberals. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I know, I'm trying, I'm trying. | ||
| It's time we reclaim our word. | ||
| There are other words that have been pejoratives, and then the people claim them. | ||
| It's time we do that. | ||
| Liberalism is what we are. | ||
| They stole our word about 90 years ago. | ||
| Up until about 90 years ago, you could sell socialism in America as socialism. | ||
| After about 1930, because we were becoming enemies with the USSR, you couldn't call yourself a socialist. | ||
| So they started calling themselves liberals. | ||
| But they stole our word. | ||
| It's time we claim it back. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| So what do I think? | ||
| Well, I don't know if Nancy Pelosi really she understands power and she wants more power and more money. | ||
| And that's all she understands. | ||
| And that's, of course, going to lead her down to endorse increasingly lefty projects. | ||
| There's there's a book. | ||
| God, I haven't read it in 20 years, something like. | ||
| the structure of revolutions, the structure, it was about how, about, revolutions tend to have a | ||
| certain pattern and one of the patterns is they tend to keep lurching toward the most extreme | ||
| members of the revolution. The Jacobins defeat the, whatever the guys were called, the Third | ||
| Estate or I forget what they were called, the Bolsheviks defend the men, defeat the Bencheviks. | ||
| It's always... | ||
| The US was the exception, our revolution. | ||
| But when something like this gets going, there's this internal dynamic where everybody on the side of the revolution or their revolution has kind of an incentive to be more More extreme than the other. | ||
| And that's why the thing just spills and gets more aggressive. | ||
| Are you shocked then that our system... I mean, I think a lot of people are watching this going, okay, I kind of get it and I kind of feel it, but maybe this guy's a little bit over the top. | ||
| But are you shocked that our system... | ||
| That so many conservatives really believe in, libertarians believe in, the ideas of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and freedom and federalism and all of these things, that they were supposed to have systems that could stand up to this. | ||
| And we're watching the systems just collapse. | ||
| I'm actually right, when I saw you got banned from Twitter, the next thing that I saw was that the Democrats are now trying to push a thing to ban the Electoral College. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like already, already. | |
| You know what is sad is when you actually talk, when I talk to my activist friends, and if you even ask them, Well, what is the argument for the Electoral College? | ||
| Or what is the argument for free speech? | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| They have no idea. | ||
| They're like a little kid going into a garden, seeing stuff, oh, I'm going to pull that up and look at it. | ||
| They have no idea how anything actually works. | ||
| And so they want to junk everything and throw it out, and they have no idea why the Electoral College was a good idea. | ||
| So I think that they're The thing to know about them is when you actually engage in discussion, they can't even have intelligent discussions, as far as I can tell, about the background of these rules, the background of property rights, the background of free speech. | ||
| What is it that made one little clump on earth suddenly explode 500, 600 years ago and do so well? | ||
| Well, it's because we figured out certain philosophical principles. | ||
| Religious freedom and, in general, freedom for your own conscience. | ||
| All kinds of things worked, and they're just ready to jump them. | ||
| And they can't even tell you—they don't know anything. | ||
| I'm so disappointed, actually. | ||
| When I talk to activists, it's shocking to me. | ||
| Even on the subject of black America and slavery, they know nothing about the history of slavery. | ||
| They just have some talking points. | ||
| No, they don't do Sears work. | ||
| It's so interesting because I just covered this. | ||
| I'm sure you saw this Biden speech where he's talking about COVID relief and he says, well, we're gonna help black and Hispanic and Pacific Islander and blah, blah, blah first. | ||
| And it's like, that's actually against the constitution. | ||
| That's against the, forget that MLK guy, it's against the constitution that we don't curry favor based on the color of your skin. | ||
| And yet it's so brazenly being pushed on us by the guy they told us was the moderate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you go along with it, if you have a society like that, then you need a government agency that's the department of who's been naughty and nice, who's the one who gets the bad treatment, who's the one who gets the good treatment. | ||
| Once you have a government agency of who's been naughty and nice, or whatever they call it, making decisions like that, then you have this, you know, that's just, it's a terrible solution. | ||
| Anyone, any child will know what's going to happen over a decade if that, In a government where the government is trying to fine-tune things like that. | ||
| And it just creates this pandering citizenry who think their job is to supplicate to the government who's going to be the one and, you know, I'm going to make an argument about why I've not been naughty and I'm nice and he's been the one who's been naughty. | ||
| And it just tears society apart in that way. | ||
| It's terribly unhealthy. | ||
| And there's no evidence whatsoever it does anything but create disasters. | ||
| You know, I lived in communist China. | ||
| But what do you really feel, Patrick? | ||
| when they first opened up. | ||
| And I saw a lot of this stuff unfolding there. | ||
| And it's, yeah, it's their lack of education makes them not understand what the necessary consequence is | ||
| of having government get in the business and deciding who's been naughty and nice | ||
| and giving special favors to. | ||
| It just turns the whole society into this corrupt throne-sniffing supplicant | ||
| to the powers that be in government. | ||
| But what do you really feel, Patrick? | ||
| What do you really feel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
(Patrick laughs) | |
| Is throne sniffing gonna get by ya? | ||
| I don't think you can say Throne Sniffing. | ||
| No, please. | ||
| The whole mainstream media is gonna be Throne Sniffing for the next four years, so yeah. | ||
| But wait, so bringing this back to the big tech part, because you were running over stock, you're well-known in the crypto world and all that, when people look at these guys like Zuckerberg or like Jack Dorsey at Twitter or the rest of them, And I think a lot of people think that they're sort of these inherently evil characters, where I'm a little more sympathetic to the human condition of their managing these virtually unmanageable things. | ||
| I think they do have a lot of the bad ideas that you're talking about. | ||
| I think they've shown themselves to only censor one side, the whole thing. | ||
| Do you have any sympathy as a guy that's run big businesses that with the type of stuff that they have to manage these days and the pressures from government, Or do the millions make up for it, that they're getting paid? | ||
| The hundreds of millions? | ||
| The millions make up for it. | ||
| No, I don't have any sympathy. | ||
| The way to handle it is just keep everything simple, keep the truth the truth, and keep the rules simple. | ||
| Simple rules for a complex world. | ||
| If you start getting in the business of censoring by content, by viewpoint, You know, then you in Facebook are gonna need your department of who's been naughty and nice. | ||
| It's a terrible road to go down. | ||
| I actually, I gotta tell you, all I know about Zuckerberg is his Chinese, I hate to be a Mandarin snob, but his Chinese stinks. | ||
| In about six weeks of studying Chinese, this guy's been married to a Chinese woman for 10 years, his Chinese sounds to me like, Probably minded after about six weeks of study at Dartmouth College. | ||
| And that tells me a lot. | ||
| This guy studied it for years, got a Chinese wife. | ||
| His Chinese is so grating, it tells me, you know, he just came up with a good idea. | ||
| Well, he must be real smart in other ways. | ||
| Not everyone is. | ||
| Although it could be he just stole the ideas. | ||
| I did see the movie. | ||
| I did see the movie. | ||
| How is your Mandarin now? | ||
| Do you want to send some sort of message to our new Chinese overlords that maybe the YouTube censors won't... Well, I guess they'd be happy about it. | ||
| [SPEAKING CHINESE] | ||
| I am a great admirer of the Chinese. | ||
| You can have that to-- | ||
| yeah, you can turn that into a native speaker. | ||
| They can translate. | ||
| So yeah, it's a shame. | ||
| I love China. | ||
| This is probably a dangerous thing to admit. | ||
| I'm an old China ham. | ||
| I grew up loving China. | ||
| I saw it as my, if I had a historical role in the world, it was going to be to somehow build I think the best thing that could happen for the world is some sort of merger of the U.S. | ||
| and Chinese principles that actually could create a healthy, perpetual peace for the world. | ||
| We have a lot to learn from the Chinese. | ||
| They do some things very well. | ||
| Their family, their traditions, their focus on education and building human capital, all kinds of things I saw in China and I thought, boy, this is what we need to see more of here. | ||
| But what I love about our system is freedom. | ||
| And there needs to be some sort of merger of those interests. | ||
| And they might not be really the ultimate guys behind this. | ||
| They may be involved. | ||
| It may be somebody else. | ||
| The truth will come out, I think, sooner rather than later. | ||
| But if they have been involved in this, all I can say is it's a real disappointment to me because I spent my whole life thinking of them as my friends. | ||
| I kind of love them almost as much as I do America, frankly. | ||
| So I have to say, in full transparency, when we met just a couple weeks ago, you said to me, hey, Dave, you know, I really like what you're doing. | ||
| And I think you said something about Locals.com. | ||
| And I said, oh, well, maybe we should talk. | ||
| We literally got on the phone like a day later. | ||
| I had you meet my business partner about two days later. | ||
| You immediately invested. | ||
| So you do own a piece of Locals.com, which is thrilling for us. | ||
| And I think you're going to help us navigate these really freaking These nasty waters, basically, these really rough waters that we're about to go through. | ||
| Is there something, I'll do it publicly, is there something we should be thinking about as this company's growing right now in the midst of all of this that maybe I'm not thinking about yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I keep the faith. | |
| I do not think we're going to lose this. | ||
| I actually think that we're going to win. | ||
| Keep the faith. | ||
| I would say that they say in venture capital, bet the jockey and not the horse. | ||
| When I met you, I knew I wanted to bet on you as the jockey. | ||
| At least as much about that as your fundamental underlying idea. | ||
| However, what you spoke to me about with locals sounded so precisely Matching my view of the world and what was needed, and a way to be off the main platforms in a way they could not come after, which I think when we spoke about it, we thought it might be some distant abstract. | ||
| We didn't realize it three weeks later. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't realize three weeks, you know? | ||
| But at least a month. | ||
| At least a month. | ||
| What's next for you? | ||
| Well, I'm gonna see how this plays out over the next week, and then, And then I'm gonna take it easy. | ||
| I sort of just had a tough year and a half, and since I left the company, and we're gonna see how this plays out. | ||
| Then I'm gonna take it easy, probably go lay somewhere warm in the sun is what I need to do. | ||
| I probably should be doing it right now. | ||
| But go lay in the sun in some tropical location is what I'd really love to do. | ||
| That sounds like a plan. | ||
| Well, Patrick, I'm thrilled that we finally did this. | ||
| I'm thrilled that we're partnered up on Locals and We shall see. | ||
| We shall see what happens. | ||
| I normally don't end a show like that, but I feel like that's the best I got right now. | ||
| Like, we shall see, right? | ||
| May you live, as the Chinese say, may you live in uninteresting times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, we got the interesting times, which I know is a Chinese curse. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'll be watching, I'll be watching locals with great interest. | ||
| And I think, I think half of America is, is fed up with this censorship. | ||
| They're gonna gravitate very quickly to what you have to offer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| Well, I wish I could tell people to follow you on Twitter, but you are suspended. | ||
| Where can I send them, at least? | ||
| Is there any other place I can send them? | ||
| DeepCapture, deepcapture.com. | ||
| DeepCapture.com. | ||
| That's where I've been writing for about 15 years. | ||
| When I have something to tell the world, I put it up there. | ||
| Great, awesome. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| And feel better, drink some OJ. | ||
| We'll talk soon. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about tech instead of nonstop yelling, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're right over here. |
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