July 11, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| One issue, for example, where I depart pretty strongly from the traditional Republican line is I think a lot of folks in the Republican Party, they see what's going on with Google, Apple, Facebook, with big tech writ large, and they say, well, we don't like what they're doing. | ||
| We don't like the fact that they censor conservatives, but they're private companies, and so we can't actually do anything with them. | ||
| And my response to that is, well, first of all, they're not actually private companies. | ||
| They benefit from a ton of special government privileges. | ||
| But also, they're just too powerful. | ||
| Like, however they got there, they're way too powerful and they're way too big at this point. | ||
| So I'm willing to go, you know, with Ken Buck and with Josh Hawley and with others and say, look, we've got to actually rein in the power of these companies, because if they control what you're allowed to say in America, we don't have a First Amendment anymore. | ||
| If we don't have a First Amendment, we don't have a real country. | ||
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[Music] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the author of "Hillbilly Elegy," | ||
| a memoir of a family and culture in crisis, founder of the venture capital firm Narya, | ||
| and current Senate candidate from the great state of Ohio. | ||
| J.D. | ||
| Vance, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| You know, I've wanted to chat with you for a while because I find that on Twitter, I find some people who make some sense, who actually are saying some things that actually seem like a sensible way forward for this country, for this earth, the whole thing. | ||
| You're on that short list. | ||
| For people that don't know who we are, can you give a little bit of the backstory? | ||
| That's sort of what the book is about and then the movie, but can you just give me a little brief bio just to kick us off? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So I was raised by my working-class grandparents in Middletown, Ohio, which is in southwestern Ohio. | ||
| It's a steel town. | ||
| And the basic story is, because of a host of complicated reasons, but one of which is that my mother struggled with opioid addiction, you know, my grandparents had to take care of me. | ||
| And we grew up in a pretty rough-and-tumble environment, didn't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of support. | ||
| But things sort of worked out for me. | ||
| As I like to say, America worked for me. | ||
| And I think it really did for a number of reasons, but two reasons at the top of the list are my grandma was always very loving and supportive. | ||
| She was, as you know, Dave, because you've read the book, but she was not a traditional grandmother in a lot of ways. | ||
| She loved to say the F word. | ||
| She had 19 handguns when she died. | ||
| But she was also a woman of incredibly deep faith. | ||
| And then I also was well served by the U.S. | ||
| Marine Corps. | ||
| And I listed in April of 2003, which is right as the Iraq war was ramping up. | ||
| Marine Corps is this incredible experience for me, gave me a lot of important lessons, | ||
| a lot of lifelong friendships. | ||
| And then from there, went to college, went to law school, sort of started working in | ||
| Silicon Valley in the technology industry, got connected with Peter Thiel out there. | ||
| And then while I was working with Peter, actually published this book, Hillbilly Elegy, which | ||
| happened to coincide, how could I have possibly known, with this remarkable political environment | ||
| that we lived in in 2016, where Donald Trump on the right was coming out of nowhere and | ||
| taking over the Republican Party. | ||
| You know, Bernie Sanders was coming out of the left and almost taking over the Democrat Party. | ||
| And so I sort of found myself all of a sudden a national commentator, and I'm glad that you like my Twitter. | ||
| You know, a lot of your colleagues in the media don't. | ||
| I'm not sure they're my colleagues, but they are in the media, whatever that is. | ||
| But you bring up an interesting point there because, yeah, that sort of put you on the map around 2016, the Trump thing's happening. | ||
| And in many ways, your story and the book and then the movie sort of is the story of the people that kind of supported Trump, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| So you think of the story of my family. | ||
| So my grandfather was like a working class blue dog Democrat. | ||
| He was a classic steel union Democrat, socially moderate, very patriotic, loved his country, but sort of always saw Democrats as the party of the working man and the working women. | ||
| By the time, you know, Trump came around in 2016, most of those non-college educated, you know, classic white working class white voters, That was sort of the buzzword in 2016. | ||
| They had shifted so hard to Trump. | ||
| And so I think a lot of the reason that the book did very well is people were picking it up, trying to understand, like, who are all of these voters who even, you know, some, a lot of white work class voters actually supported Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012, but had this really hard shift right and supported Donald Trump. | ||
| And so I think a lot of folks were trying to understand what was going on and the book obviously benefited from that. | ||
| Were you surprised that there was a jump from those values, being in the middle of the country, steel workers, industries changing, all that, and then to an actual political movement from a guy who was a real estate developer in New York? | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| I definitely found the reaction to the book as sort of this political insight into a lot of voters a little bit weird because the book doesn't mention Clinton. | ||
| It doesn't mention Trump. | ||
| It's not really a political book in the classic sense. | ||
| But I understand why people were trying to understand, like, why do these folks in the middle of the country feel left behind, so condescended to? | ||
| And of course, they feel left behind, they feel condescended to, because in many cases they actually are, or they have been left behind, they have been looked down upon by a lot of folks in power. | ||
| So I appreciate that people were, at least for a brief period, trying to understand that demographic of the country. | ||
| So obviously the book benefited from that, and I think hopefully it did provide some insights from that group of people, or to that group of people. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned the blue dog Democrat. | ||
| I'm not sure how much you know about my story, but I was a lefty, I was a progressive, the whole thing. | ||
| But I would say if the blue dog Democrats still existed, but they're basically like the unicorn at this point, there would be maybe some room for me to say I could kind of be on that side. | ||
| Probably not at this point. | ||
| But do you think that person exists anymore? | ||
| And if they do exist, are they basically just a modern conservative? | ||
| I mean, is that sort of what you are at this point? | ||
| Yeah, I think that the people like that certainly exist. | ||
| I think Donald Trump fits into that where, to your point, even though he was a real estate developer, I think he's at his heart, right? | ||
| He's a guy from Queens who works with a lot of working class people, construction workers, salespeople and so forth. | ||
| And so he's always identified with those folks at a deep emotional level, and they've identified | ||
| with him. | ||
| You know, Donald Trump is up there. | ||
| I certainly think my, you know, my attitude towards politics is like a working class or | ||
| a blue-collar conservatism. | ||
| There are other people out there. | ||
| I think Jim Banks is a really interesting guy, representative from Indiana. | ||
| I think Tucker Carlson, talk about another guy who's sort of, you know, an East Coast | ||
| wasp in the classic sense, but I think identifies with blue-collar folks in a very deep way | ||
| and obviously focuses a lot on them in his show. | ||
| So I think there are actually a lot of us out there who think the purpose of the Republican | ||
| Party should be to better serve its voters. | ||
| But I think they're all on the right at this point. | ||
| I mean, there were maybe a couple of blue-dog Democrats even five, 10 years ago. | ||
| They all got primaried. | ||
| They all got effectively kicked out of the party, and they're just clearly not welcome | ||
| there anymore. | ||
| So if they exist at all, they're sort of on our side of the aisle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know a few of these people, and I think it's kind of a worthy fight if you want to still say you're a Democrat and try to do something as the house is burning down, but it just doesn't seem like it could work to me. | ||
| Are you surprised how radical the left has gone, that there is no room for these people? | ||
| I mean, I guess as someone running for Senate now, you're kind of excited. | ||
| It's like, yeah, come over here. | ||
| We're all right. | ||
| I'm definitely surprised and a little startled by how crazy the left has gone over the last 10 years. | ||
| I mean, in part, this is a consequence of demographics, right? | ||
| The left is basically the party of upper middle class and upper class elites, and then some working class minorities who are sort of still along for the ride on the Democratic Party. | ||
| But really, those folks don't have a ton of influence in the party, right? | ||
| So it's partially just sort of who is leading the left. | ||
| I think it's like, you know, professionally educated people who went to Ivy League schools who tend to have pretty radical views about politics because of it. | ||
| I think a little of it is definitely economic. | ||
| I think the left is not comfortable with the fact that a lot of people are dissatisfied with the way The economy has worked the way the manufacturing economy has worked. | ||
| And instead of saying, you know, maybe this is a serious problem that we've like lost our entire manufacturing and industrial base to China. | ||
| I think their response is to complain that the people who care about our industrial base in the first place, they're obviously racist or xenophobic or idiots. | ||
| So I think part of what's going on is it's just like the composition of the left has really radically changed. | ||
| But then part of what's going on is the left, completely unable to solve America's real problems, has sort of resorted to criticizing most Americans as backwards or racist in some way. | ||
| And so, yeah, it's really startling. | ||
| It's really depressing. | ||
| But, you know, it is where we is. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| And I think, unfortunately, we just have to fight these people. | ||
| Where do you think Trump now fits into this thing? | ||
| Because you were not on board the Trump train in 2016, right? | ||
| You did vote for him in 2020. | ||
| Where do you think he sort of is now, like the worth of Trump at this point? | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| I was a late adopter to Trump. | ||
| And I remember Peter Thiel giving me crap for it back in 2016. | ||
| And of course, I eventually said, you know, you're right, you're right. | ||
| The guy was saying a lot of smart things. | ||
| I did support him in 2020. | ||
| I mean, I think at a fundamental level, Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party, right? | ||
| So to the extent that you have this blue collar patriotic movement within the country, it's on the right. | ||
| Most of those voters are still very loyal to Donald Trump. | ||
| And so I think he continues to have a very important voice, either as a kingmaker in the party. | ||
| Certainly, I think if he ran in 2024, there's a very good chance he'd get elected president again. | ||
| So I tend to think that Trump is not going to disappear as a force from American public life. | ||
| And I think, you know, unfortunately, Most Republicans, or at least most Republican leaders, I think most Republican voters are very good about this. | ||
| Most Republican leaders, I think, don't fully appreciate what Trump represented. | ||
| And so there isn't an obvious, like, answer to Trump if he just disappeared tomorrow. | ||
| I do fear a little bit that if Trump just went the way of the dodo, you know, decided, well, I'm going to focus on making money or I'm going to go play golf all day and not really worry about politics anymore. | ||
| Like, I don't know that there's an obvious person to replace him, right? | ||
| There are some really good people like DeSantis, like Ghosh Mali, but outside of a few really bright politicians, I think most people don't want to fully embrace what Trump represented for the Republican Party, which is a tragedy, because I think it's ultimately, you know, quibble with some things on the margins, but I think it's the right direction for the party to go. | ||
| Right, so you're saying guys like DeSantis and Hawley are better than Romney and Liz Cheney? | ||
| Is that the controversial statement you're making? | ||
| Yeah, the radical claim that I would make is that Josh Hawley is much better than Liz Cheney and Ron DeSantis is better than Mitt Romney. | ||
| But again, unfortunately, I actually think though the most elected Republicans are not | ||
| as far out there as Liz Cheney, they really don't like what Trump represents. | ||
| They sort of want the party to be what it was during the Bush era, 2000, 2004. | ||
| And because of that, there's still a lot of resistance. | ||
| I mean, even one of the big takeaways from the Trump administration is that when the | ||
| entire party is institutionally set against the will of the president himself, there can | ||
| be a lot of real bureaucratic fights. | ||
| And I think so much of what happened during the Trump administration is, you know, the | ||
| Trump folks wanted to do something on trade. | ||
| They were somewhat successful. | ||
| They were also fought by members of their own party. | ||
| And so you don't just need one politician, you sort of need the entire institution to | ||
| reform itself. | ||
| Right, so where do you fit into that? | ||
| Like, in terms of your beliefs at this point, are they all traditionally conservative? | ||
| I mean, I get what you're saying. | ||
| You could maybe be thought of as one of those, you know, 15-year-ago Blue Dog Democrat types. | ||
| But like, what would, say, your broad sort of idea set look like? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are some traditionally conservative ideas that I'm very comfortable with. | ||
| So I'm very pro-life. | ||
| I've always been pro-life. | ||
| I've always cared a lot about that issue because I think, you know, when abortion becomes widespread in society, what it effectively does is send a message to families. | ||
| That their babies are inconveniences instead of real blessings for us to support. | ||
| So on some issues, I'm very traditionally conservative. | ||
| But one issue, for example, where I depart pretty strongly from the traditional Republican line is I think a lot of folks in the Republican Party, they see what's going on with Google, Apple, Facebook, with big tech writ large, and they say, well, we don't like what they're doing. | ||
| We don't like the fact that they censor conservatives, but they're private companies, and so we can't actually do anything with them. | ||
| And my response to that is, well, first of all, they're not actually private companies. | ||
| They benefit from a ton of special government privileges. | ||
| But also, they're just too powerful. | ||
| Like, however they got there, they're way too powerful and they're way too big at this point. | ||
| So I'm willing to go, you know, with Ken Buck and with Josh Hawley and with others and say, look, we've got to actually rein in the power of these companies. | ||
| Because if they control what you're allowed to say in America, we don't have a First Amendment anymore. | ||
| If we don't have a First Amendment, we don't have a real country. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because I've discussed this with Tucker on his show many times, and years, like two or three years ago, I was still like, no regulation, don't touch anything, the libertarian side of me. | ||
| And I actually have come more towards what you just laid out there, which is what Josh Hawley's been laying out. | ||
| But what do you think that actually looks like? | ||
| Because if the founders could have never imagined something more powerful than the government, which is what we've got, I mean, do you wanna send government bureaucrats to look at the Google algorithm as if they could do it, or is it breaking these companies up? | ||
| I mean, I know you like the competition side and we'll talk about rumble in just a little bit, but like, what does it actually look like that you would want done to big tech? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, so yeah, you know, bracketing the things you can still do in the private sector, which I think is important. | ||
| I think that there are, there are ranges of options from less radical to more radical, right? | ||
| So I think a slightly less radical option is you just make in the same way that like you can't censor somebody because | ||
| they're Black or because they're white you well, you know, you used | ||
| to not be able to do that the last couple of years You can't for example turn off an electric utility can't | ||
| turn off somebody's power because they don't you know Like the sex or the gender or the race of the people who | ||
| need the power I think one thing you could do is just add political viewpoint to that protected class. | ||
| Say, if you're a conservative and you're censored on Facebook, you basically have a right to file a lawsuit in the same way that if you're censored because you're black, you have a right to file a lawsuit. | ||
| That's sort of option one. | ||
| I think a little bit more radical is the antitrust option, effectively breaking up these companies, making it impossible For them to sort of control the discourse because you have more competition among the platforms that are out there. | ||
| You know, I'm basically supportive of that, though I think that you have to do it the right way or effectively these sort of companies just reform as natural monopolies. | ||
| The thing that I'm really intrigued by is like, does the business model of Silicon Valley actually make sense, right? | ||
| So, you know, I have my iPhone right here. | ||
| If you think about like what an iPhone is, it really is a thing that gets you to stare at it as much as possible. | ||
| So that it can take your data and then sell it back to you in the form of targeted advertising. | ||
| There's a pretty good argument that the Silicon Valley business model, which distracts a lot of attention and effectively is built upon the theft of data, should be completely outlawed, right? | ||
| Make it illegal to sort of, you know, collect people's data without a whole host of additional protections. | ||
| I think that would blow up the model of Silicon Valley. | ||
| I think maybe that's too radical. | ||
| But if I'm actually laying my cards- Hey, as a guy that just started a tech company that's doing subscription and doesn't sell data, keep it going, keep it going. | ||
| But I have to say that honestly, I would be supportive of that. | ||
| If you basically said you can no longer effectively steal people's data, I think that would be really good for our country. | ||
| And I actually think it would be good for the tech sector because like the tech sector, Whether it's in digital technology or pharmaceuticals or, you know, energy and transportation, like, it's become a little bit, like, these devices, I think, have become a little parasitic on capital, on high-quality talent. | ||
| And there's this weird way where our entire economy, like, Silicon Valley has worked pretty well. | ||
| If you look at the S&P 500, Silicon Valley has great returns in their companies. | ||
| But, like, the entire rest of the country and the entire rest of the economy has been relatively stagnant. | ||
| That's a big problem. | ||
| That's not just a censorship problem. | ||
| That's a broader economic problem. | ||
| But I think we have to be worried about that problem, too. | ||
| So I'm pretty radical on this. | ||
| In other words, go after their special privileges, break them up, maybe even illegalize the entire business model, because I care about having a real economy and a real country again. | ||
| At some level though, do you think it's just kind of too late? | ||
| Like we had Trump for four years, we had all the hearings, we all saw Zuckerberg and Jack from Twitter and the rest of them trot out there and basically make up a lot of nonsense half the time under oath. | ||
| And we didn't do anything then, so why would the Biden administration, that obviously is no fan of some of the ideas you're putting out there, why would they be the ones to do this? | ||
| Well, I don't think they're going to be the ones to do this. | ||
| I mean, I definitely think it's going to be a combination of leverage from Republican senators, and hopefully I'm one in the not too distant future. | ||
| It's also going to require a new Republican administration. | ||
| I think, again, all this stuff is going to happen on the right because the left is way too in the pocket of the big tech industry. | ||
| All that said, you know, I try to take a very long view on this. | ||
| You may know this guy, Nigel Farage. | ||
| He's sort of the leader of the UK. | ||
| I've gotten drunk with him. | ||
| OK, well, yeah, he's a good guy to have a beer with. | ||
| You know, one of the things that I've taken just from getting to know Nigel a little bit is like the Brexit thing took 25 years of institution building, of convincing voters, of convincing media, a ton of institutional biases against the Brexit movement. | ||
| Electorally, there were some weird issues. | ||
| Of course, the media hated Nigel Farage and thought he was a terrible person. | ||
| So, I tend to think about this in a longer-term way, that the goal here isn't to fix this tomorrow. | ||
| Yes, I wish that more could have happened over the last four years in actually addressing the tech problem, but I think if we take that attitude, it can become self-defeating. | ||
| And what we have to do in this moment is actually gear ourselves up for a fight, and a long-term fight. | ||
| And if we do that, I actually think the people are with us. | ||
| I think that we're on the right side of this issue, and we'll eventually win. | ||
| It just may take some work and a lot of time. | ||
| Yeah, do you think we just need a sort of separation from all of the institutions that the left has built that we're now watching crumble? | ||
| I mean, do we need to just build new institutions, new technological answers and solutions, just really like a complete parallel economy? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think we probably do. | ||
| We need to build parallel businesses, of course, because the businesses have gone fully in the tank for the left. | ||
| The biggest multinational corporations are now effectively enterprises of the left. | ||
| I also think we have to build alternative educational institutions. | ||
| One of the things the left has been incredibly effective at Is monopolizing education in this country, right? | ||
| They basically created a system whereby if you don't get a four-year college degree, it's very hard to even apply for most middle class jobs, right? | ||
| Even if they don't really require a college degree, they'll put it right on the application like, you know, four-year degree required. | ||
| And so what this has done is forced a lot of people who just want to have a middle class life into the university system. | ||
| They've acquired a lot of debt. | ||
| They've, of course, acquired a lot of indoctrination along the way. | ||
| The left is in some ways, like, in this evil Machiavellian sense, sort of genius, because they've made the most left-leaning institutions the gatekeeper of a good life in this society. | ||
| Conservatives have got to find an alternative to this, because if we keep on forcing all of our kids to go to four-year colleges, we shouldn't be surprised that we keep on losing the culture war. | ||
| Yeah, I always describe it as the doctor in the original alien movie. | ||
| He kind of admires the pure evil, the complete remorseless evil of the alien. | ||
| He knows it's evil, but he's kinda like, hey, you gotta give the devil his due. | ||
| So all that being said, you also have a VC firm and you're actually getting in the fight right now by getting involved with Rumble. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, that's right, yeah. | ||
| So we launched our VC firm in Cincinnati You know, I've been in VC in the industry for a few years. | ||
| I always wanted to do something in my hometown. | ||
| So we launched it as a Cincinnati-based firm in 2019. | ||
| Myself, a partner, and a couple of our employees who are great. | ||
| On the one hand, we're just a classic VC firm, right? | ||
| We try to invest in really good companies and help them grow. | ||
| One of the companies I'm most proud of that we invested in is a company called App Harvest. | ||
| which is an agriculture technology company in Eastern Kentucky, | ||
| now has a close to $2 billion market cap. | ||
| When we invested, it was really just in its formative stages. | ||
| So a lot of good stuff happening. | ||
| But yeah, one of the companies I'm most proud that we got involved with was Rumble. | ||
| And I know you know a lot about Rumble, but the thinking there was actually – | ||
| we were sort of looking at a lot of the alternative tech platforms in the wake of January the 6th. | ||
| It's like, OK, this is pretty scary. | ||
| The president of the United States just got booted off of social media. | ||
| Maybe these companies are too powerful. | ||
| You know, let's look at Gab. | ||
| Let's look at Parler. | ||
| Let's look at a lot of the companies that are out there that are actually providing something like free speech to people who want to live in the digital world. | ||
| And, you know, liked a lot of the companies that we looked at. | ||
| Couldn't quite get comfortable that they were actually robust enough technology to withstand you know, what eventually, you know, the deplatforming | ||
| incident that came against Parler that effectively shut the site down for a couple of months. | ||
| But just kept on looking, and we finally met Chris, who's the CEO and the founder of | ||
| Rumble, who I know you know well, and started like talking to Chris and thinking, okay, so, | ||
| you know, first of all, their user metric numbers are incredible. | ||
| They're growing at a really remarkable clip. | ||
| They've never had an infusion of capital. | ||
| So they've sort of done all of this growth organically. | ||
| But also, Chris had built the platform not to be like a conservative website or a liberal website. | ||
| But just to be a true alternative website, right? | ||
| The technology was robust. | ||
| We felt like, well, if AWS tries to de-platform this company, they're not going to be able to be successful because of the way that Chris had built the underlying technology. | ||
| And so just eventually got really excited about what they were doing, made a big investment there, brought Peter Thiel along into the deal. | ||
| He also made a big investment in the company. | ||
| And now it's just it's growing at a really amazing clip and we think that this could be a true, independent, apolitical alternative to big tech. | ||
| Right, so I don't want to say too much at the moment, but I am having dinner in Miami with Chris on Friday, so I'll leave that part there. | ||
| But in essence, is the goal that you guys sort of want to replace AWS? | ||
| That you guys would basically say, hey, we've got all of the infrastructure. | ||
| Chris is an engineer, he's been building this thing for 10 years. | ||
| Like, we've got the infrastructure so that you won't just be blown up like Parler. | ||
| Because you're right, that was the moment Where it was like everyone realized this thing just, the severity of the situation just went through the roof. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| More even than trumping the platform, Parler being effectively kicked off the internet was really radicalizing, you know, to me and to a lot of other people as well. | ||
| You know, certainly one of the options, I'll put it this way, one of the options I think for Rumble is to become a long-term, apolitical, true free speech AWS, right? | ||
| The sort of online web platform that's not going to deplatform you because you say things that the mob doesn't like. | ||
| But one of the things I've learned working in the technology sector is you always try to have a good plan and you execute against it. | ||
| But there are a lot of forks in the road and I think rumble. | ||
| You know, it has 10 different pathways to the moon. | ||
| Like, this is not a company that just has one real option to go after. | ||
| And what I think, actually, what, you know, there's always challenges with companies. | ||
| And one of the challenges with Rumble that I think about is they have such a big market opportunity, they have so much they could do, that I think focusing and picking the right strategic pathway is almost going to be the biggest challenge. | ||
| Because the company, again, they're just doing really well and they've got a lot of real upside. | ||
| Right, and not to do too much of a commercial here, but you guys had the Trump rally a couple of days ago, live streamed on Rumble, over 500,000 people. | ||
| I think Biden's speech yesterday or the day before, 18,000 people on YouTube. | ||
| So something good's going on over there. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| 500,000 people, and being able to handle that amount of traffic as a new company is not easy. | ||
| So we were really pleased with it. | ||
| Yeah, so as this ecosystem kind of comes together, are there other pieces that you think we need to be thinking about that maybe we're not thinking about? | ||
| Well, the thing that we're not thinking about, I think, is just how... You know, payment processors, etc. | ||
| Exactly, is how truly unstable the entire online ecosystem is, right? | ||
| You mentioned payment processors. | ||
| There's sort of, you know, the domain registration services. | ||
| That's a big question. | ||
| There are sort of, you know, CDN services. | ||
| That's a big question mark that I have. | ||
| You know, if you get really far down the line and the tech companies feel extraordinarily powerful, do you get to a point where if you type in a website on a mobile browser, the browser won't actually resolve. Like that's sort of a | ||
| hallmark of a free and open internet is that if you type in a website, you go to that website, | ||
| do the browsers themselves start becoming agents of censorship? So what's crazy about the | ||
| internet, I mean, is that there are probably, you know, 40 or 50 really critical layers that | ||
| make it work from sort of payments processing, front end services, all the way down to the | ||
| back end stuff that 99% of people don't see or care about. | ||
| But at each level, there are only a few companies that actually control things, right? | ||
| And so it's not inconceivable that you have an internet where people can't have access to it if they're not sufficiently left-wing. | ||
| That's sort of a big concern that I have. | ||
| And I think that there are a lot of good folks, you know, a lot of good firms that are working on ensuring there are alternatives that are truly committed to free speech. | ||
| So I'm, you know, I'm somewhat optimistic that some of these alternatives are coming online, but I do in some ways see this as like a race against the future, because the left, as you know, is not becoming less crazy, it's actually becoming more crazy. | ||
| And, you know, once they control the information, they really control the way all of us think, and that's pretty much it. | ||
| Yeah, is that part of the problem right there, that there's just sort of an asymmetry of who likes to use power? | ||
| I've been talking about that a lot on the show, just that we don't really want to use power. | ||
| Even in this conversation, it's like, ah, you know, competition, government. | ||
| It's like, we're sort of okay with competing ideas being out there, where when they have the power, we know what they do. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| You know, people always ask me the difference between left and right. | ||
| Is it small government, big government, social conservative, progressive, what have you? | ||
| And I always say, look, the big difference between the left and right is the left loves to use power and the right is terrified of using power. | ||
| And, you know, my friend Richard Hanania, who's a really interesting thinker on this, he says the left loves to use power because they actually care about politics more. | ||
| Like, you know, you look at polling and the right just doesn't care as much about politics as the left does. | ||
| I think unfortunately we're in an environment where we have to get over it, because if we're not willing to use power to push back against the left, I think that power is going to come for us, it's going to come for our livelihoods, it's going to come for our families, it's going to come eventually, and already started, coming for our very ability to speak and to think for ourselves. | ||
| And so I agree, the left has a basic instinctive advantage because they love to use power, but we're just going to have to get over it, or we're going to find ourselves without, you know, really a real republic anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you see any sort of version of any of this ecosystem where there has to be some regulations around speech? | ||
| This is where the gatekeeping conversation always comes in. | ||
| You know, are you going to let Antifa coordinate on there on one side versus neo-Nazis on another side or something like that? | ||
| You know, obviously there's some regulation in every sphere. | ||
| And I tend to think that, you know, look, we've had a First Amendment in our country for 245 years and it's worked pretty well. | ||
| And the basic outline of the First Amendment is that you're allowed to speak your mind. | ||
| You're allowed to say the things that you want to say. | ||
| So long as you effectively don't incite violence against other people, right? | ||
| There are very narrow limits on what you're allowed to say, but there are some limits and I think that's fine. | ||
| And I think that should be the hallmark to how we think about the regulation of speech is, you know, we should be open to hearing a debate. | ||
| so long as it doesn't run afoul of the basic principles of the First Amendment. | ||
| Now, importantly, like this doesn't, you know, I think a lot of folks on the left like to retreat and say, | ||
| "Well, you know, are you not allowed to sort of regulate a school curriculum?" | ||
| For example, if you don't want to teach four-year-olds or eight-year-olds that they should hate America | ||
| and that America is a fundamentally... | ||
| white supremacist country, is that like a violation of the First Amendment? | ||
| I think no, no, of course it isn't, right? | ||
| We've long understood that, you know, the way we treat kids is different from the way | ||
| we treat adults, and the purpose of our schools is to form people, form young minds for future | ||
| leadership and future citizenship. | ||
| So I think the First Amendment doesn't apply everywhere, right? | ||
| It applies to a 19-year-old much differently than it applies to a 3-year-old, but I think that should be our guiding principle. | ||
| Yeah, that's actually exactly where I wanted to go next. | ||
| All this critical race theory stuff and that it's being pushed back against in certain states. | ||
| What's going on in Ohio with this? | ||
| Is that one of the states that they're making any headway with getting some of this stuff out of the schools? | ||
| Yeah, it really does feel like we're making a lot of headway in Ohio as a matter of fact. | ||
| I mean, we're, you know, starting to see even, you know, I live in Southwestern Ohio, biggest city here is Cincinnati. | ||
| And I'm starting to see stuff in some of the suburban Cincinnati school districts where parents are starting to push back against this stuff. | ||
| You see them starting to mobilize to take over some local school boards. | ||
| You have stay-at-home moms who never really cared about politics, who are thinking about running for local school board. | ||
| And you also have some curriculum stuff happening. | ||
| Some of the state organizations are really pushing back against some of the curriculum that's coming, unfortunately, from our universities and from some of our state leaders saying, look, you shouldn't be teaching kids to hate themselves or hate their own country. | ||
| One of the most heartbreaking stories I've heard in the last few weeks was from a dad who pulled his fifth grader out of school in a suburban Cincinnati school district. | ||
| And, you know, we often talk about this stuff in two abstract terms, right? | ||
| Like critical race theory is itself an abstract term. | ||
| But this guy pulled his daughter out of school because she was coming home really sad every day, being taught that she was effectively a bad person for having white skin. | ||
| And you think about the struggles we've had in this country and what we've been fighting for, and I think progressing towards, it's like, Aren't we supposed to think about people based not on their skin color? | ||
| Aren't we supposed to be teaching our kids to look deeper than skin color and how they judge and evaluate people? | ||
| And this just feels like a really radical step backwards in the wrong direction. | ||
| And it's actually making our kids unhappy. | ||
| That's what really bothers me about this. | ||
| Yeah, so you're old school. | ||
| You think that that MLK guy was pretty decent, huh? | ||
| You know, I think the idea that we judge people by the content of their character is a pretty good principle to live by, and it's unfortunate that the left seems unwilling to even follow it these days. | ||
| Yeah, so what other policies or platforms that you're running on that are unique to Ohio right now? | ||
| You know, the big thing we're focused on is the tech issue, the immigration issue. | ||
| You know, people think, I think, people understand the immigration question as fundamentally about law and order. | ||
| And it is that, right? | ||
| You don't have a real country unless you have a southern border with enforced limits. | ||
| But in Ohio, one of the things the southern border means to us is the addiction epidemic gets much, much worse when you don't control what's going on at the southern border. | ||
| So, for example, A few weeks ago, the Biden administration reported that you've seen fentanyl seizures go up four times over the same period last year, when I think Trump, to his credit, had a lot of control over the southern border. | ||
| That's what kills people in our communities, right? | ||
| So eventually that fentanyl is going to start making it to southwestern Ohio communities. | ||
| It's going to mean more dead bodies from the addiction epidemic. | ||
| And people just, you know, I always hate When the immigration issue is framed as about xenophobia or racism. | ||
| Like, you've got a grandma who's taking care of a grandbaby because her own daughter died of a heroin overdose. | ||
| She doesn't care about the southern border because she doesn't like brown people. | ||
| She cares about the southern border because she doesn't want her grandson to die of the same poison that killed her daughter. | ||
| Like, this is just common sense. | ||
| So, the border is a big thing for us. | ||
| Obviously, the big tech issue is a big thing for us. | ||
| And the thing we haven't talked about is, you know, I'm a big believer that unless you have an industrial base, a manufacturing base, you don't have a real country, right? | ||
| If you can't make pharmaceuticals, if you can't make surgical masks for your doctors, if you can't make like basic computer hardware that's necessary to operate your defense industry, Then you're fundamentally at the mercy of another country. | ||
| Like, we're getting to the point where six years from now, we could find ourselves in a situation where we have the same missiles as China does, but China's missiles work because they have computer chips in them, and our missiles don't because the Chinese control the computer chip industry in the entire world. | ||
| Like, this is really crazy, and this is unfortunately something that leadership in both parties has been complicit in. | ||
| So we're gonna talk a lot about manufacturing and the manufacturing economy in our campaign too. | ||
| Where do you think that stuff really comes from? | ||
| Like, is it just that sort of because of the success of America for 200, almost 50 years and capitalism and the extraordinary wealth and everything else, that we just sort of got sold off piece by piece and it's like, it was sort of nobody's fault and everybody's fault at the exact same time. | ||
| Like there's just sort of nobody left to fix everything. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's exactly right. | ||
| I think two big things happened. | ||
| One, we felt that we could trade our manufacturing economy for a lot of cheap consumer goods, right? | ||
| To put it as dismissively as possible, we thought, well, you know, maybe we'll lose millions of manufacturing jobs, but we'll gain a lot of cheap plastic garbage from China. | ||
| I think that was a trade that we should not have made in hindsight. | ||
| But I think to your point, more importantly, we forgot, I think, one of the core historical lessons of the American nation-state, which is that it was built by an American capitalist system, right? | ||
| Our government, you know, was not overbearing, but it made sure that core American industries could prosper and flourish in this country. | ||
| And importantly, the Japanese and the Chinese learned from the American model in building their own industrial economy. | ||
| It's really a model that's worked the world over. | ||
| And we sort of just forgot and ignored it. | ||
| We sort of decided that, you know, we didn't really need to have certain industries, you know, the law of competitive advantage. | ||
| It was fine if Chinese made this thing and the Americans made this thing and that can, you know, the Canadians made that thing. | ||
| But it turns out that like maybe the Canadians are a little bit more reliable than the Chinese for like complex cultural and national security reasons. | ||
| And certainly maybe Minnesota is much more reliable than Canada or the Chinese. | ||
| For some of these core needs. | ||
| And so I think we just stopped seeing the economy as a thing that was, you know, sensitive to, you know, to human control. | ||
| We thought that it would just work by itself. | ||
| But of course, all of our regulations, all of our tax policy, all of our laws were affecting that market in ways we were just kind of ignoring. | ||
| Do you think it's also that we kind of took our eye off the ball with four years of screaming that Trump was a Russian plant while China was actually doing a lot of the stuff that was gonna get us here? | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely right. | ||
| I mean, we definitely learned over the last four years that, you know, the media especially can be easily distracted. | ||
| It's like, you know, look a squirrel, right? | ||
| Look, Russia, look, Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And we have all these really serious problems. | ||
| Look, racism, right? | ||
| I mean, you couldn't even talk about the origins of the Chinese, you know, coronavirus For a long time until it became almost idiotic not to because that was considered racist to ask the origin. | ||
| So I think, unfortunately, we have a leadership class in this country. | ||
| You see it in the businesses, you see it in the media, you certainly see it in the government that is just completely unwilling to talk about real problems and uses these distractions so that we, you know, basically don't notice the fact that they're all failing us. | ||
| So what do we do about the mainstream media? | ||
| Do we let it die at this point? | ||
| Almost every day on the show, I have to do some nonsensical story about what CNN butchered or what Washington Post lied about. | ||
| And then I always pose the question to my audience. | ||
| I'm like, should I just start ignoring this stuff because we know their numbers are bottoming out? | ||
| Or do we have to keep calling attention to it because they still are brainwashing X amount of people? | ||
| I think it's a little bit of both. | ||
| I think that we have to try to extract ourselves from reliance on the mainstream media as much as possible. | ||
| But I also think, you know, it is important to recognize, like, your show probably has way more viewers than any CNN show on any given day, right? | ||
| I've got one guy in this room with me. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And my dog's under the table. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| So we are actually benefiting in some ways from the rise of alternative media sources. | ||
| I mean, I think actually where, you know, where I worry about this is sort of the fusion of government and media and big business, right? | ||
| Like the Washington Post, you should understand, is effectively the mouthpiece of Jeff Bezos. | ||
| You know, a lot of our biggest newspapers and magazines are effectively controlled by business and in some ways influenced by governmental interests. | ||
| That sort of unholy alliance is what I really worry about. | ||
| It's like, OK, so Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. | ||
| He just effectively lobbied the U.S. | ||
| Congress to cancel a grant given to one of his business competitors. | ||
| This just happened in the last couple of days for a space company, Blue Origin, | ||
| where now they've canceled the contract. | ||
| They may reaward the contract to him. | ||
| And you sort of start to wonder, isn't this a really icky system | ||
| where you have media cooperating with government, cooperating with business to control the flow of | ||
| information and control which decisions get made? | ||
| I actually think you can probably break the circuit in interesting ways. | ||
| And we should try to do that because yes, the media is weaker, but it's still incredibly powerful. | ||
| Yeah, so is that just through competition then? | ||
| I mean, is the breaking of the circuit that we're gonna build all this stuff and then people, they'll have an off-ramp? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a little bit through competition. | ||
| I mean, I've heard proposals that suggest that like part of the reason the media is a little bit less crazy in Europe, for example, is that they have more of a historical First Amendment, whereas in America, you have this weird trumped up First Amendment where the media can effectively lie about people without any real consequences. | ||
| And so maybe we need to sort of go back to an era where there's a little bit more consequence if the media just tells an outright lie about somebody. | ||
| Like, you know, if I'm a private citizen, I tell a lie about you, that causes you to lose your business. | ||
| You can sue me for defamation. | ||
| It's basically impossible to sue the media for defamation these days. | ||
| So there maybe are policy changes to be made there too. | ||
| You know, I'm not, you know, I wouldn't sort of fully go down that road just yet because I do think the alternative media is actually rising in a way that gives me some optimism. | ||
| Yeah, you know, to your point a couple of weeks ago, someone in the New York Times once again basically called me a white supremacist, and I spoke to a lawyer just for a second. | ||
| You know, I've been through this, just like you, I've been through this a million times, and she's a great First Amendment lawyer, and she was basically like, look, you could dump a ton of money into this, but these laws are so tight that most likely they have more money than you, and this isn't gonna go anywhere, and it's just gonna be a headache, and you know what? | ||
| Somehow we just, we all survived being called white supremacists somehow. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| I've had similar conversations. | ||
| I've been called a white supremacist by the Washington Post, and it is really crazy how It's impossible for people to face any consequences for this stuff, right? | ||
| It's kind of this crazy wild, wild west where there's just no real law. | ||
| I mean, you remember the Covington Catholic kid who was effectively slandered by every mainstream journalist all over the world. | ||
| That kid, fortunately, as I understand, has gotten some settlement. | ||
| But even that kid, my understanding is like it was not totally clear that this 17-year-old boy would have any recourse Even though the entire mainstream press came against him, that's pretty depressing stuff. | ||
| Yeah, not only the mainstream press, but half of the Democrats in Congress were saying how this is proof that America is a white supremacist nation, and it turns out that it was all nonsense. | ||
| Exactly, including our now sitting vice president. | ||
| Speaking of our sitting vice president, let's talk about the president for a second. | ||
| I've been saying for a while that the scandal is the non-scandal around this guy. | ||
| Something is not right with him. | ||
| It seems very obvious. | ||
| Everyone online is talking about it, yet no one in corporate press is talking about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like, I don't know, what do you think? | |
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if you've ever known somebody with dementia, One of the things you always notice is that they'll have this quick moment where they forget where they are, they almost get like a sense of terror across their face, and then they recover. | ||
| This is sort of, you know, earlier onset dementia. | ||
| This is not when people are really advanced. | ||
| And there are some times like Biden reacts in a way where I almost think he has that look, | ||
| that sort of look where he forgot where he was a second, remembered it very quickly, | ||
| but you watch the guy on the world stage, you watch him in some of these meetings, | ||
| and it's just very clear that he's lost something, he's missed a step. | ||
| I don't know if that's like, you know, he's just older and he's aged less gracefully | ||
| than other people, or if he actually has a serious problem. | ||
| But I find it bizarre that people never talk about this. | ||
| I mean, you probably remember a couple of years ago, like it was a serious mainstream story to ask whether Donald Trump had like dementia or Alzheimer's. | ||
| Because he like, you know, mangled a sentence in a speech or something like that. | ||
| Or he got like, you know, he said the same thing a few times in some remarks. | ||
| He drank water like this, remember? | ||
| And it's like the guy has Alzheimer's and it's like, you know, if you've ever met Trump, like he does not come across as a guy who doesn't know where he is. | ||
| And Biden is just so much worse on this. | ||
| And yet the press is totally uninterested in it. | ||
| I find it pretty bizarre. | ||
| The other side of this that is weird is that it makes you wonder like who actually has control, right? | ||
| Is that the White House chief of staff? | ||
| Is it the vice president? | ||
| Is it some other staffer? | ||
| But like, who's making the decisions there? | ||
| Like, I'd love to actually see just a good documentary or piece of reporting about what's actually, or who is actually in control in the White House. | ||
| That's exactly what I asked Trump about two weeks ago. | ||
| Who do you think is in charge? | ||
| He actually didn't have a great answer, but all the time now we see Biden get out there, he fumbles through something, and then he says, oh, I'm going to get in trouble. | ||
| It's like, with who? | ||
| With, like, he's telling, to quote Joe Biden, come on man, like with who are you gonna get in trouble? | ||
| But we just, we just don't know. | ||
| So you think Kamala's taking over at some point? | ||
| You know, I always assumed, you know, I've become more conspiracy minded just because it seems like our elites really are sometimes malicious. | ||
| And my assumption is that, you know, Kamala will eventually take over. | ||
| Maybe it's in 2024 as the candidate. | ||
| Maybe it's even earlier than that. | ||
| I mean, if Joe Biden resigns in the next two years, There is nothing that you will be able to do to convince me this was not a massive conspiracy to install a very unpopular person. | ||
| But, like, you know, I'll save the speculation until later. | ||
| My sense is that, like, the corporate wing of the Democrat Party recognizes, like, Kamala's their gal, but also even the voters of the Democrat Party don't like her. | ||
| And so there's some sort of weird bargain going on where she's eventually going to assume the mantle without real Democratic control over the process. | ||
| And, you know, of course the country's going to be that worse off for it, but hopefully, you know, on our side we can stop that from happening. | ||
| Right, so to get us back where we started to finish this thing up, so for the average Democrat that gets all, everything you've heard, you've said here, that they get it, but they're just afraid, afraid of being called a Republican, afraid of being called a conservative, afraid of being called a Trump supporter, you know, all the stuff that it sounds like you got over at some point, I got over at some point, but I get that those are legit fears. | ||
| What's your best pitch sort of as a candidate, but also as kind of like a thought leader in this thing to be like, yeah, we're not all bad over here. | ||
| You know, my best pitch is first of all, the people who are complaining about the country, voting for Republicans, voting for Trump, they actually do care about the future. | ||
| They just want their kids to live in a good country. | ||
| And that's what animates them. | ||
| But I think a lot of people on the left are never gonna really hear that or appreciate that or understand that. | ||
| But I think that the pitch that I make to our own side is that we have to be courageous and we have to speak up, right? | ||
| Obviously, there are exceptions. | ||
| There are people who are going to get fired if they say the wrong thing at work. | ||
| That's actually, unfortunately, a complaint that I hear pretty frequently when I'm out on the campaign trail. | ||
| But we just have to actually speak up about this stuff, right? | ||
| Like, I was called a white supremacist in the pages of The Washington Post. | ||
| I almost lost a couple of business contacts. | ||
| It was a very bad two days for me, but then the dust cleared. | ||
| I didn't apologize. | ||
| I didn't back down and things were fine. | ||
| And I think so often what we need to do and what we need in this moment is courage and friendship. | ||
| We need our friends to be courageous as well. | ||
| They need, you know, we need to know they're supporting us, but we just need to like actually stand up to the mob because I think every time somebody stands up to the mob and the mob backs down, our side becomes a little bit more powerful. | ||
| That is a closing statement. | ||
| J.D. | ||
| Vance, it was good finally talking to you. | ||
| I'm sure our paths will cross again. | ||
| Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
| And for folks who are interested in helping the campaign, jdvance.com, please go to our website. | ||
| Would love to have your support. | ||
| Now I know you're a real politician. | ||
| We'll link to it down below, too. | ||
| All right, thanks, man. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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