June 26, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| So I just go back to, release the damn videotapes, tell me what did Pelosi know, when did she know it, let's find out who, you know, who are these guys like Epps, there's several of them, who broke the windows, that's where you need to start. | ||
| But like, going after people who are just out there pissed off about the election, I mean, you know, let's not forget, we're still, you still have people who have not accepted the election from 2016 because they believe that Trump and Putin and Russia all stole this, why? | ||
| Because these liars, Like Pelosi and others told the American people that the media went along with it and they brainwashed people all over this country. | ||
| So anyway, that's all I have for January 6th. | ||
| I yearn. | ||
| I yearn for those good old days. | ||
| Those good old days of 2017 when Hillary was allowed to tweet that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president and it would not get taken down from Twitter. | ||
| When Stacey Abrams would say she won the gubernatorial race in Georgia and it would not get taken down. | ||
| You used to be able to question these things. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a former U.S. | ||
| Congressman from California's 22nd District and now the CEO of Truth Social. | ||
| Devin Nunes, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, it's my honor. | ||
| Great to be with you. | ||
| I am glad to have you on. | ||
| We met for about 10 seconds in passing at Mar-a-Lago a couple weeks ago during the 2000 Mule's debut, and you're sort of right in the thick of the political and the social media firestorm. | ||
| So let's start actually... Well, you know what? | ||
| Let's start somewhere else because of that background that you got behind you. | ||
| I sense you're in Florida, but you're a former Cali guy. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Yeah, you know, we looked around, much like you, in terms of where to locate the – put the headquarters. | ||
| And, you know, it quickly got narrowed down to Florida and Texas, Tennessee. | ||
| And then, you know, this was a good spot, relatively close to Mar-a-Lago, just on the other side of the state, easy to get to. | ||
| And then, of course, it's a free state. | ||
| It's a fun place to be. | ||
| We have a lot of people who wanted to be here in terms of our tech folks. | ||
| So it just kind of made perfect sense to be here, which is odd because you would think a startup tech company for the last 40 years Would have been in Silicon Valley in California, but that wasn't even on our list. | ||
| It didn't even make the list of even a potential place. | ||
| Was there literally not even a moment where you guys were like, oh, just in terms of the manpower or to get the right programmers or whatever else, that you were like, oh, we have to do this in Silicon Valley or the ship had already fully sailed? | ||
| Yeah, it didn't even pop up. | ||
| You know, for one, you know, I know my background for the last five years and you're doing a lot of the, you know, involved with the Russia hoax and the impeachment hoaxes and all of that. | ||
| You know, it's not even, you know, sadly, you know, if you're going to, if you're more center right, there's a lot of places in this country that are not safe to be. | ||
| And I can tell you the Bay Area is one of those. | ||
| So as a Cali guy and someone that represented California's 22nd district, as I said, is this sort of bittersweet for you that you have to relocate and do truth down in Florida, the free state of Florida? | ||
| I mean, you know, I left California about six months ago. | ||
| I have not looked back. | ||
| Oh, by the way, I don't know if you know this, but every time I gratuitously mention California on the show, I put money into this jar. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know who gets the money though. | ||
| Well, originally I was going to help transport someone from California, a sane person from California, to Florida, but we've decided I'm actually going to export a Democrat from Florida and send them to California. | ||
| Oh, that's okay. | ||
| That's a good idea. | ||
| I was going to tell you, there's plenty of homeless people that you can pick up and move from California to here. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But was that bittersweet for you in a way? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, my family's still out in California. | ||
| You know, my family's been there in some cases for almost a hundred years. | ||
| My family came from the Azore Islands in Portugal. | ||
| You know, ag family and pretty much everybody is right around that area. | ||
| I was born there and I represented there. | ||
| And I don't take pride in it. | ||
| I mean, I love the state, but it's just untenable to operate a business there. | ||
| I mean, especially one that's owned by President Trump, right? | ||
| I mean, it wouldn't even be possible. | ||
| So, you know, where I am in the middle of the state, we like, you know, we like to say that we're kind of that last place that's left that's in a little bit of sanity because we're I know all the people in LA and San Francisco call it drive-through country, but it also happens to be the breadbasket of the solar system. | ||
| Everything grows there, from almonds to grapes. | ||
| To raisins, to, you know, every damn thing you can eat. | ||
| They all grow there and it's a beautiful place. | ||
| But, you know, as you know, you know, we can't even get, I fought my whole career to try to get water into the, into the region. | ||
| Um, and because the, you know, kind of the green, uh, global warming gods that they, that they pay homage to there in California. | ||
| I mean, we're, we're actually cutting the damn state off of water. | ||
| So, you know, look at some point, you know, I'm doing this job to open the internet back up and give the American people their, their voice back. | ||
| And I'm proud to do it. | ||
| And we can probably get into a lot about how I kind of stumbled into this. | ||
| But look, it bothers me what's going on in California. | ||
| And look, I want to see it fixed. | ||
| But for the time being, I just don't know how you do it. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why I went to... I think the way you do it is you have to win the hearts and minds. | ||
| And right now, people are just getting so dumbed down. | ||
| They're getting so destroyed. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's just tough because they're cut off of information flow. | ||
| OK, so obviously we'll spend most of what we're talking about here on the tech side and how we can save free speech and all those things. | ||
| But as long as we're talking about California and I always put money in the jar, let's continue a little bit. | ||
| Gavin Newsom just won the primary. | ||
| He's obviously going to win reelection. | ||
| Is there anything to point to that is hopeful in California or do you think that it just needs to hit that rock bottom, whatever it might be, if it's not there already before things turn around? | ||
| Well, I keep thinking it's going to get hit rock bottom, and I've been thinking that for the better part of a decade. | ||
| But I think what's happening instead is that we're losing so many people like yourself. | ||
| So people are essentially voting with their feet. | ||
| They're leaving. | ||
| So it's making it harder and harder. | ||
| So, you know, we've got major... You want to talk about 2,000 mules? | ||
| I mean, 2,000 mules is legal in California. | ||
| And so, you know, how they've really destroyed it is they essentially, now it's mandatory voting, mandatory registration. | ||
| So if you go to the DMV for anything, you get registered to vote. | ||
| And in fact, I think it's totally chaotic. | ||
| We don't know who the hell's registered there. | ||
| Some people get multiple ballots. | ||
| And they made legal, What was done in the last election in other states, which is thank God right now still illegal, but they made it legal to essentially go harvest ballots in California. | ||
| So I think a combination of of basically the whole state awash in ballots. | ||
| The Democratic Party awash with money so that they can afford to pay as many people as they need to go pick up ballots. | ||
| It's made it very hard. | ||
| You can only kind of go to those places that are almost like the Alamo. | ||
| You have to actually have money if you get targeted like I have been, you know, several times for the last few election cycles. | ||
| You know, we had to actually, you know, go raise money from all over the nation so we could fight back. | ||
| And I think that's going to be the one place you say, is there any hope? | ||
| Look, there's 52 congressional districts there. | ||
| They gerrymandered the hell out of it with this commission this last time. | ||
| But I actually think that it is possible that we could pick up two or three or four congressional seats in California. | ||
| And look, that has not been possible for the last 10 years. | ||
| So that's probably the only bright side right now. | ||
| I mean, obviously, you had the crazy DA that got beat in San Francisco. | ||
| There may be a recall from the one in Los Angeles. | ||
| But look, I'll just tell you, I was in Sarasota for a couple weeks. | ||
| And kind of the first time that we got headquarters going, And then went back to California, had not been back for a couple weeks, and I was greeted at the little donut shop that I go to to get a cup of coffee by a homeless guy, like, standing in front there, like, with his bike, like, essentially not letting you in until you give him money. | ||
| I mean, that's, you know, the owner of the business can't do anything. | ||
| I mean, it's just, you know this because you just left there, but I just don't know. | ||
| I think people get a little bit of, it's almost like Stockholm syndrome. | ||
| And people have just become accustomed to it. | ||
| What started probably, I remember five or six years ago, there was a church in my home city, Tulare, Visalia area, 65,000 people in Tulare. | ||
| The, you know, there was a church that said, oh, well, you know, we're a church, you know, we're going to, we're going to help people. | ||
| Good thing, you know, they want to help people. | ||
| Well, there was a couple of homeless people living there. | ||
| Well, pretty soon it went from 2 to 10 to 24 to when the church said, well, we can't have this in our church parking lot. | ||
| Well, now there's just homeless scattered out through the whole city. | ||
| I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds just in, just in my home city. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that doesn't include the district that I represented. | ||
| There was homeless everywhere there. | ||
| And of course, you know what it is in L.A., but I think that's just, you know, spending all this time in California. | ||
| And Washington, D.C., the last decade or so, when you come to a state like Florida, you realize like, whoa, wait a second, I just had a flashback to what it was like to grow up in California in the 80s and 90s. | ||
| I mean, that's what it feels like here. | ||
| It's safe, it's clean, and it's totally different. | ||
| So I think it's going to have to hit rock bottom. | ||
| I think more people are going to have to have to leave until people pull their heads out of their ass and actually start to vote right. | ||
| And part of that is the free flow of information, which is why I left Congress to start True Social with former President Trump. | ||
| I know this is not going to surprise you at all, but I have three employees in this room with me right now who all moved with me from California to the free state of Florida. | ||
| One of them got a California ballot to vote in this past election to his new address in Florida. | ||
| I mean, that tells you everything you need to know about what's going on over there. | ||
| Yeah, and I've heard that time and time again. | ||
| I don't even know, I mean, this is how sophisticated they are. | ||
| They learn people move out and they're still sending them ballots, right? | ||
| I mean, and I guarantee you, I'm sure if you're a Democrat and you moved out or an Independent, I guarantee you, you get the ballot. | ||
| I'm not so sure if you're a Republican, you get the ballot. | ||
| He is a Republican, so. | ||
| He got it? | ||
| Okay, wow, that's good. | ||
| The tech guy must have been taking, he probably didn't show up to work because of COVID or something. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Made a mistake, didn't take him off the roll. | ||
| All right, so before we dive into the tech stuff and sort of what shifted you in your career and all that, you know, I have spent literally zero cumulative minutes talking about January 6th on my program. | ||
| To me, it is a complete distraction. | ||
| It is impeachment number three. | ||
| It is going to end with nothing going anywhere. | ||
| It's going to make a set of sort of very confused people about the principles of America even more confused. | ||
| But because you've been in this with Trump for a while, because you've been trying to fight disinformation, because you were involved, you know, around the impeachment trial and all those things, is there anything you'd like to just say about it broadly or specifically? | ||
| Because I just feel that I have no need to entertain this. | ||
| That's really just how I feel about it. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think you're right to not entertain it. | ||
| I think kind of my quick thoughts are this. | ||
| The institution of And Congress and all the institutions in Washington are collapsing. | ||
| All right? | ||
| So kind of what we just talked about with California, it's happening in our nation's capital also. | ||
| And what I say is we've just entered a dark chapter of American history right now that | ||
| started in that 2015-16 timeframe with that first piece being that people within the FBI | ||
| and DOJ thought it was perfectly okay to get involved in politics and frame a presidential | ||
| candidate and ultimately the entire Republican Party. | ||
| So it started with, oh, it's a dirty trick, get the FBI to participate in it, get the | ||
| Get informants to participate. | ||
| Walk all this stuff into the FBI and the DOJ and different locations like what came out in the recent Sussman trial. | ||
| Fully engage the fake news media with it. | ||
| But at the time, they just justified it in their own mind of, well, it's just Donald Trump, so nobody cares about that. | ||
| Let's just write crap about him and crap about him and crap about him. | ||
| And first it started as, well, let's just call him that he has ties to Russian oligarchs. | ||
| And then suddenly they moved that because there were no ties to Russian oligarchs and say, well, what the hell, let's just say he has ties to Putin because they knew that Hillary Clinton's emails, they were afraid that, by the way, they never actually came out, the emails that the Congress had an actual investigation going on to because she destroyed a server, an illegal server, you know, taking you back to that time, right? | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, from there, it just got worse, right? | ||
| And, you know, I was the one who essentially came out, like, essentially on day one, or, you know, probably day, you know, second or third week, and I said, Russia stuff, what the hell are you guys talking about? | ||
| Like, I was just, like, six months prior to this, you, Obama, and your whole crew wouldn't do a damn thing about Putin as he invaded Crimea, he was involved in Libya, he was involved in Syria, and we won't get into foreign policy discussion here today. | ||
| But I knew it was, you know, pure, utter, I think I can say bullshit on your show. | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| So I knew it was total bullshit because, you know, I knew, because as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I knew what they weren't doing. | ||
| So you can't come, you know, come out right after the election. | ||
| We were told, hey, nothing unusual. | ||
| Yeah, Putin's a thug. | ||
| He's a bad guy. | ||
| He messes around. | ||
| I mean, it's not unusual for him to mess around in elections. | ||
| But, you know, all they really found at the end of the day that Putin did was, you know, he bought a few Facebook ads, which, by the way, weren't even in the states that mattered, right? | ||
| So that was the extent of actual hard evidence that we had on the Intelligence Committee. | ||
| We didn't have anything else. | ||
| And that was the position of the officials in the FBI And the other intelligence agencies that we worked with, until they decided to turn on the operation. | ||
| So they ran a dirty trick all through the campaign, and then they just doubled down with the full power of the FBI and DOJ, and you know the rest, and I had to take the brunt of that. | ||
| We exposed it all. | ||
| Then it led to Mueller, the Mueller investigation. | ||
| Total corruption, right? | ||
| They couldn't find anything on Russia, but they found plenty of process crimes that they went after people on. | ||
| I had to sit out there every single day. | ||
| You know how hard it is when you've got 95% of the media that is listening to Democrats in Congress and people within the former intel people, current intel people, you know, retired four-star generals, you know, who would constantly come out and say, well, I can't tell you what I know, but it's really bad, right? | ||
| And I had to sit there and say, no, you guys are lying, right? | ||
| And you're totally full of it. | ||
| So, you know, I had to sit there and withstand that so that Mueller hoax, and then it goes into impeachment. | ||
| You know, the whole Ukraine impeachment was a whole nother debacle. | ||
| And then look, there was a riot that occurred at the Capitol. | ||
| And so what do we need to talk about there? | ||
| It's the same thing that I said after day one, which was, look, there was intel that we knew about. | ||
| Now you're starting to see some of that come out. | ||
| Pelosi knew about it. | ||
| The Democrats knew about it. | ||
| That's why the Trump administration was willing to have National Guard ready for the Capitol. | ||
| That's not unusual. | ||
| It happens when you have big protests, especially when, or when you're getting ready to have an inauguration. | ||
| It was the first time that I'd never seen, I mean, they put up the fences for anything, right? | ||
| I was there for two decades. | ||
| I mean, oh my God, there's going to be a protest of Supreme Court. | ||
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unidentified
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Boom. | |
| They do like a double fence. | ||
| If anybody's, if you've been to Washington DC, the Supreme Court's essentially right across from the Capitol. | ||
| They'll put like double fences up, get plenty of security. | ||
| That's just for a Supreme Court protest for a few hundred people. | ||
| So the fact that they had the intelligence, they had approval for the National Guard, there was no fencing put up, and now the way that they're going about all this when you got this guy You know, so it really appears like Russia hoax 3.0. | ||
| It's just like a another version of it You've got this guy Ray Epps who clearly was inciting people. | ||
| The guy is not even being arrested He's not even being interviewed. | ||
| I mean nobody just seems to know anything about him the dudes that living out in Arizona I mean, you know, just that's just one example of what appears like there was some type of federal involvement And when I say the riot, it should not be hard. | ||
| There's some 14,000 hours of videotape that I have called for for the last, you know, when I was in Congress and now not, and even today, like, release it. | ||
| They won't even show the Republicans the videotape, right? | ||
| So they're selectively showing tape. | ||
| I mean, there's cameras all over the Capitol, Dave, just so you know. | ||
| I mean, there's plenty of video because of however, you know, we never even got the exact number of how many people went into the Capitol. | ||
| But what I've said from day one is release the videotape and the people that I want busted and prosecuted are the ones who were fully masked up. | ||
| They somehow had exactly the location to go to and they had exactly the tools they needed to break windows. | ||
| And to this day, I'm not sure I could be wrong. | ||
| I mean, it changes every day, but I'm not sure they have located those what appear to be Maybe two to three dozen people at different doors that broke those windows. | ||
| I mean, those people should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. | ||
| We don't even know who the hell they are. | ||
| I sense that what you're saying subtly is that they might be feds, right? | ||
| I don't know who the hell they are. We don't know. I mean, I mean, I know that Epps guy, | ||
| I mean, that's clearly fishy, right? I mean, he's living out in Arizona somewhere. And I mean, | ||
| hell, the night before he's on videotape with, with people, you know, Trump supporters that | ||
| were out there for the rally, which by the way, the idea that Trump, President Trump or anyone | ||
| else would hold a rally on our nation's mall in Washington, DC, that's only out of the norm when | ||
| Trump does it, right? | ||
| I mean, there are rallies there. | ||
| I was just there, I mean, this past weekend, they had the Pride rally and they had some gun rally. | ||
| I think last time I was in, I was in Washington, D.C., they had a Uh, they had like a police officers, uh, uh, for fallen police officers rally. | ||
| So the idea that it's like unusual somehow that the, the, the people can have rallies. | ||
| Um, I mean, that's at the cornerstone of our, of our democratic Republic here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you go back just, you know, four or five, six months before you had BLM riots who destroyed the Capitol, shut it down on my damn near got attacked, you know, coming out of the, when Trump gave his nomination speech in Washington, DC, just months before. | ||
| So, you know, the idea that suddenly now, oh, you can't have a rally, that's nonsense, okay? | ||
| So I just go back to what crimes were broken? | ||
| Well, clearly the people who broke the windows. | ||
| The rest of the people, I mean, a lot of the people had no clue that they couldn't go into the Capitol. | ||
| The Capitol is normally open for the public, except during COVID when Pelosi has closed it down. | ||
| So I just go back to release the damn videotapes, tell me what did Pelosi know, when did she know it, let's find out who are these guys like Epps, there's several of them, who broke the windows, that's where you need to start. | ||
| But going after people who were just out there pissed off about the election, I mean, Let's not forget, you still have people who have not accepted the election for 2016 because they believe that Trump and Putin and Russia all stole this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because these liars Like Pelosi and others told the American people that the media went along with it and they brainwashed people all over this country. | ||
| So anyway, that's all I have for January 6th. | ||
| I yearn. | ||
| I yearn for those good old days. | ||
| Those good old days of 2017 when Hillary was allowed to tweet that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president and it would not get taken down from Twitter. | ||
| When Stacey Abrams would say she won the gubernatorial race in Georgia. | ||
| And it would not get taken down. | ||
| You used to be able to question these things. | ||
| But that's actually a perfect segue to what I really want to talk to you about, which is big tech censorship. | ||
| So you are running True Social. | ||
| It's obviously President Trump's platform. | ||
| I think some people know that the infrastructure is run by the Rumble cloud. | ||
| For total transparency I am part owner of rumble because of the deal that we did with locals and I think we're we're building some awesome stuff So at some level we are kind of in business together Although this is the first time that we've ever spoke except for that that quick. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| We had a couple weeks ago So what was it? | ||
| Was it a very natural transition for you to say? | ||
| Okay here I am in the swamp It's corrupt as hell. | ||
| Everyone's lying about everything. | ||
| Maybe I can help clean things up on the private side Which would be the the social media side? | ||
| Yeah, it's a pretty interesting story, actually. | ||
| So I wrote this little pamphlet book called Countdown to Socialism in July of 2020. | ||
| And so remember, this is before the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop, and of course, millions of Americans getting booted off or censored on the tech tyrant platforms. | ||
| Well, I had actually already quit Twitter because I realized that I was being shadow banned and it was totally useless for me to even be on the platform. | ||
| So I was the first member of Congress to go to Parler. | ||
| So Parler was the company that ultimately got Bezos cut off their servers and essentially killed the company. | ||
| But I quickly realized that I had at Parler. | ||
| I mean, finally, so think about it. | ||
| I was on Twitter from essentially the very beginning. | ||
| I had, I don't know, a million followers or something, maybe a little over a million followers. | ||
| Well, when Parler got shut down, Dave, I had 4.2 million followers on Parler. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And Parler, I mean, that was like in a year, in one year's time. | ||
| You know, I knew the censorship that was going on, okay? | ||
| I had also been capped on Instagram. | ||
| I've been, like, at 100,000 people. | ||
| I liked Instagram, actually. | ||
| I like to use it. | ||
| I think it's interesting. | ||
| People all over the globe are on it, and we'll get more to Instagram later, because I think it's important in terms of the business aspect of what we have to do. | ||
| But Instagram, I've been capped at, like, 100,000 followers for, like, three years now, right? | ||
| I mean, I don't grow, and I used to use it. | ||
| So anyway, 2020, I write this pamphlet, warn everybody about that this is happening. | ||
| At the same time, I noticed when, oh, Dan Bongino, who you know, who was also there that night. | ||
| So I had my little podcast that I was doing, essentially, and the reason I created a podcast different than you, it wasn't to make money or anything. | ||
| It was actually, I had to get away, find a way that my constituents and people all over the country could hear directly from me without being censored. | ||
| So I used my national email list and database and everything that I had through my campaign site, and I was able to network, created this little podcast, And Bongino calls me, he's like, man, you're really doing well on this podcast. | ||
| It's crazy because like I even get in like the top, probably never beat you, but like I would be in the top 20 sometimes, you know, when I first started it. | ||
| And anyway, he tells me, hey man, you got to go to YouTube. | ||
| I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| Shit, I didn't know anything about, you know, YouTube. | ||
| So I heard, I knew about it. | ||
| I had like a little account there, but I never really thought about doing video. | ||
| So I did, so we started doing a simulcast, right? | ||
| So I'd put it on the audio side, and then I'd also put it up on YouTube. | ||
| And what happened was incredible. | ||
| My audio just kept going up, up, up, up, up. | ||
| My video like shot up immediately. | ||
| And then, like, if it could have had negative views, it would have had negative views. | ||
| Like, it flatlined, okay? | ||
| And I said, this is impossible. | ||
| This can't be possible. | ||
| So, I told my team, I said, let's just find, let's find a freaking video player because clearly people, there's no way I'm sending this out to a million people and people aren't at least, like, I have enough family members that would at least feel sorry for me and at least click on it to give me a view, you know? | ||
| And of course it didn't make sense either because the audio listens were going up, right? | ||
| It's in the heart of the election time. | ||
| I mean, it's all about Russia hoax, Ukraine hoax, impeachment hoaxes. | ||
| I mean, all that stuff is hot. | ||
| People want to hear about it. | ||
| And I was, you know, I had really good guests on the show. | ||
| And so I just said, and we came across this rumble player and it's a great story because, so I had 9,000 followers on YouTube. | ||
| I thought, Oh, it must be okay. | ||
| I don't know how many people are on YouTube. | ||
| It sounds okay to me. | ||
| I didn't know any better. | ||
| So I call up Rumble, and Chris, first Chris from Rumble, the owner, the CEO of Rumble, he said, at first he thought he was under investigation from the Congress, and then he quickly went into, because I just asked him this question, I was like, look man, I just want you, I just want a place, I can park my video, and if I put in Devin Nunes Podcast, right? | ||
| That was the name of it, not very creative, but that was it. | ||
| And I said, will it come up? | ||
| And Chris was like, well yeah, of course, like why are you, this seems kind of dumb, I said, well, go try it right now on YouTube. | ||
| And that was like a moment for Chris. | ||
| It was like, oh my God, you couldn't find it. | ||
| He couldn't find the podcast. | ||
| He didn't believe it existed. | ||
| And then I had to send him the link so he could eventually find that, yeah, there was a channel and there was a link. | ||
| So, long story short, I get up on Rumble and so, like I said, 9,000 followers on YouTube. | ||
| In three weeks, so no one knows of Rumble in the United States of America. | ||
| No one. | ||
| This is like pre-Bongino, pre-anybody who had went to Rumble. | ||
| I had 35,000 followers in three weeks, and in three months I had almost 400,000, and now, you know, I'm sitting here today at a million, and I don't really, you know, now I'm just kind of posting news clips on it, but that shows you right there. | ||
| I mean, those are real numbers, right? | ||
| I gave you the Parler numbers, I gave you the Rumble numbers, And in the book that I wrote, I essentially warned the people about that there was a funnel effect that was taking place. | ||
| It wasn't so much that 95% of the news media is fake and slanted, because I can handle the 95-5, because I think we have a lot of good places between the podcasters like yourself and all the different news companies, the investigative reporters that we have. | ||
| We can hold our own 95-5. | ||
| But the difference between 10 years ago and today, and I learned this through the Russia hoax and how people's perceptions were and what people were learning, is I realized that 60% of America was just kind of tuned out, never even knew anything about the Russia hoax. | ||
| And what I call it is the funnel effect. | ||
| So it's when you take that 95% You feed it through a funnel, which, you know, ultimately becomes these phones right here, right, that are going through, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. | ||
| And then the left is deciding what people are able to see, especially those people that are most important, like conservatives, you know, people that always vote. | ||
| I mean, they're going to know the difference, but it's those people who really only they only vote in general elections. | ||
| They don't pay attention a whole hell of a lot. | ||
| But, you know, they'd want to do their civic duty. | ||
| And, I mean, we sat there for, you know, year after year pounding away. | ||
| It was clear the only people that had anything to do with Putin and Russia or Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and Adam Schiff, the Democrats on the committee. | ||
| I mean, it was plain day, direct evidence that this wasn't complicated, right? | ||
| But yet nobody knew it. | ||
| And you still had, even by election 2020, you still had over half of Americans thought that the Republicans and Trump had something to do with Russia. | ||
| It was just a big problem and I knew that until that funnel, that funnel that the left controls, which is why they're so ticked off about Elon Musk buying Twitter, until you get rid of that funnel, we're going to continue to have this problem like the problems we discussed in California and the problems we see in Washington, D.C. | ||
| That's kind of the short story of it all. | ||
| It's so interesting because the problems that you were trying to solve for yourself are exactly what led you to this new career, and that's exactly why I started Locals. | ||
| I was having the same exact problems as you. | ||
| You'll love this one. | ||
| I remember, this is a couple years ago now, when I was about to hit a million subscribers on YouTube. | ||
| And at the time, you may remember, you could go on Social Blade where they did a live track of subscribers. | ||
| So you could literally just watch a graph and the numbers would grow. | ||
| And every time I got within about 20,000 of a million, I would lose 50,000. | ||
| And then it would slowly grow again, and then I'd lose 40,000. | ||
| And it took me months when it should have been way before. | ||
| And then what did Social Blade do? | ||
| Well, YouTube deactivated their API so they could no longer track in real time because it was becoming too obvious. | ||
| So one of the things that I say all the time about social media It's not the stuff that we know that they're doing I'm worried about. | ||
| It's the stuff that we do not know that I'm most worried about. | ||
| So, okay, so all of that added up. | ||
| How is truth going to solve some of the problems? | ||
| We could go into all of the shadow banning. | ||
| You don't see subscriber videos. | ||
| You know, the bans, the censorship. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| We can do all that. | ||
| My audience gets it. | ||
| How is truth gonna solve some of this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, so look, I mean, one of the things that we're doing is we're riding on top of, we call it riding on Rumble, the Rumble rails, right? | ||
| So the same thing that Locals is using, you know, Rumble is getting into that marketplace. | ||
| It's critically important because, you know, we have to have data centers that these big giant tech companies can't kill and cut off, right? | ||
| So that's why, you know, we've partnered with Rumble. | ||
| And then what we're doing, like the product that we're building out right now is one that we envision Is taking kind of the best of all of these social media companies that are out there in terms of, you know, Twitter is kind of just a simple message board. | ||
| Then you have a lot better technology at Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. | ||
| So we're trying to take the best of all of that and put it into one platform. | ||
| And people who have seen True Social, which we're only just a few months old right now, And right now we just have a simple chronological feed. | ||
| No, we don't use any algorithms, but you will see already that we are trying to do a really good job with video. | ||
| And no surprise, we're using Rumble for our video infrastructure. | ||
| So we're trying to tie all of this together so that we have a product that takes the best of all these social media companies. | ||
| Because, and I said that we would come back to this, and here we are, the eyeballs in this country are on Instagram. | ||
| And at TikTok, right? | ||
| You essentially have kind of an older demographic that are on Facebook that are probably over the age of 50. | ||
| From 50 down to 25, Instagram just dominates the market. | ||
| And then under 25, which just is really scary, scary as hell, Chinese-owned TikTok and all these young people on TikTok. | ||
| So for us to compete with Twitter, Like that's, you know, look, you know, we're not going to ban people. | ||
| That's kind of an easy market for us. | ||
| Like people that want to be on Twitter, get news, that sort of thing, because your Twitter sucks so bad. | ||
| And a lot of, a lot of our people are never going to go back, go back to Twitter. | ||
| So that's an, that's kind of an easy market, but to really grow this company, we've got to get into the mainstream of, of people that are, don't want to just do politics and news all the time, but want to communicate and actually social network. | ||
| Knowing that we're not going to shove some algorithm in their face. | ||
| I think that's our comparative advantage. | ||
| We're going to do a lot of things really well, but you're not going to be canceled. | ||
| We're not going to steal your data. | ||
| We're not going to shove some algorithm into your phone on the stuff that we think you need to see. | ||
| And that's our comparative advantage. | ||
| And it's really just about filling out the feature set. | ||
| So, you know, we're in the Apple App Store. | ||
| We've been there for a couple months now. | ||
| We just got truesocial.com. | ||
| Now anybody can sign up from any device. | ||
| including you can sign up on Android, but you just have to kind of bookmark it and go back. | ||
| And then we're hopeful to get into the Google Play Store here soon. | ||
| So then it's simple for people that like to have apps. | ||
| And then it's really about the features that we're gonna be rolling out. | ||
| So the features, people love features, there'll be more features for sure, | ||
| but how worried are you about just some of the way the internet works now? | ||
| So for example, Truth is in the App Store, you know, Twitter booted Trump, and then, you know, there was this This concern that if Elon, if he ends up getting Twitter and he puts Trump back on, if Trump was to go back on, even though Trump has said he won't go back on and he's all in on truth, that the App Store could then boot Twitter. | ||
| That this is multi-layered at many different levels. | ||
| Yeah, so the only, you cut right to it, right? | ||
| The only two plans, and the reason that we went to Apple first, I've had a long, my whole career I dealt with Apple. | ||
| They're less woke than others. | ||
| They do have Republicans that work there. | ||
| I've dealt with them for a long time. | ||
| President Trump felt like we could work with them, and that's why we chose Apple first, because we had to, you know, if you're not on the Apple App Store and you're not in the Google Play Store, it's just tough to ultimately compete against Instagram and TikTok, right? | ||
| So now the good thing is that we're trying to be a family-friendly place to be, right? | ||
| So we're not, we're not looking to have any illegal activity. | ||
| We're not, you know, we don't want, like, porn on there. | ||
| And, you know, some vulgarity is okay, but you can't get crazy about it. | ||
| So we really want to be family friendly. | ||
| And that right now is, you know, so far, we've had a great working relationship with Apple. | ||
| Google, we waited Kind of for that to be last, because now we're up on the | ||
| web, you know, truesocial.com, anybody can get on to it, even if Apple was to get rid of us, you | ||
| could still have your account. | ||
| And Google is just more problematic. | ||
| We already talked about some of those issues, but we're working with them. | ||
| At this time, I can't say anything that they're trying to keep us off the Google Play Store. | ||
| But look, once again, we have a little bit of an advantage that we're not looking for violence and illegal activity on the platform. | ||
| We really want to keep that to a minimum. | ||
| I think that's going to make it really tough for them to kick us off their stores. | ||
| Plus, they already know. | ||
| Look, they're not stupid here, Dave. | ||
| Uh, Republicans are likely going to smash the left in the elections. | ||
| Um, you see big tech running ads constantly all over the place saying how great they are. | ||
| So I think they are a little bit worried about what Republicans could, could ultimately do. | ||
| So look, I think here at True Social, we're a family friendly place. | ||
| We're just not going to censor people for politics. | ||
| You can talk about any damn thing you want on the platform politically, but we don't want a lot of the garbage that I think they would try to use to wedge to get us kicked off these platforms. | ||
| And that's to our advantage. | ||
| So when when Elon, you know, now it's about two months ago, first started grumbling about maybe buying Twitter, how were you feeling about it? | ||
| And how did you feel when President Trump? | ||
| Well, I don't remember which order it was. | ||
| Did President Trump first say he wasn't going to do it and then sort of went after Elon a little bit? | ||
| Or was it the other way around? | ||
| And what do you make of him getting in the mix? | ||
| Yeah, I don't make much of the, I think, you know, I mean, I've only met Elon Musk a couple times, but he seems like he's obviously a brilliant guy, very, very sharp, but very funny guy, right? | ||
| It's why he has, you know, a big following on social media, because he's a creative dude. | ||
| But if you remember, and the fake news has basically ignored this, surprise, surprise, but the mission of our company, True Social, is very simple. | ||
| Like, we're here to open the internet back up, And give people their voices back. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's a very simple, very simple business plan and mission. | ||
| And so, you know, I like to say that, that President Trump didn't need a new business and I sure as hell didn't need a new job. | ||
| It's just that what the hell do you expect us to do when you kick all these people off of social media, including the former President of the United States, who had no voice at all, plus millions of his followers had no voice at all, not to mention all the censoring that we already discussed. | ||
| So the fake news has ignored this, but When it came out originally that Elon Musk was looking at buying Twitter, we're like, hey, go for it. | ||
| That's our mission. | ||
| If you can bust up one of those big tech companies, great. | ||
| Have at it. | ||
| And so we've always been supportive of it. | ||
| But at the same time, what I said from the very beginning, I said, look, the place needs a lot of work because there's a hell of a lot of bots there. | ||
| And we already knew that. | ||
| I knew that from my experience on having a Parler account, a Rumble account, having a big Twitter account. | ||
| And then also just in our beta test period of True Social, how is it possible that people who had been on Twitter forever, and Instagram in many cases, most people were getting more engagement on our platform during beta testing than they were getting on these big tech platforms. | ||
| Now, you can say some of that shadowbanning, some of that censoring, but I think it's also that Twitter, and you notice I've spent a lot of time talking about Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, there's a reason. | ||
| Twitter is just a global PR wire. | ||
| It's where when Barack Obama wants to make a statement like he did last week, you know, he hadn't been on Twitter forever. | ||
| And I know he made some statement, I think, about the shooting in Texas. | ||
| I mean, it's a place for celebrities and political hacks and reporters to go put stuff out. | ||
| It's not where people go to social networks. | ||
| So from my perspective, we're all for opening this thing back up. | ||
| It's a global platform, meaning Twitter. | ||
| I don't know if Elon's going to do it, but I think what he's realized now is what we knew going back is that it's full of bots. | ||
| And bot is kind of a big term, but it's basically a combination of bots, spam accounts, fake accounts. | ||
| You know, corporate accounts, every corporation in the world has has an account. | ||
| But the fact is, they're just not active and they don't engage. | ||
| So, so that's kind of, you know, so we're also, you know, we're very supportive of and I think what you saw just to kind of finish up with that, is that I think Elon made some funny remark about President Trump, and President Trump went back and made a funny remark about him. | ||
| And, and now President Trump's, you know, basically You know, it's kind of funny, like people, why would I get so many calls, even from, like, well, I don't really talk to fake news, but from even people who are not fake news, and they'll say, like, well, if he runs for president again, isn't he going to have to go back on Twitter? | ||
| I'm like, no, like, why? | ||
| There's nobody there. | ||
| Like, you could make a different argument about some of these bigger platforms. | ||
| I don't, he would never go to TikTok before the, because of the Chai comms, but you know, I mean, look, Instagram and Facebook still have a lot of people. | ||
| Right, so what do you think he would do? | ||
| I mean, I guess that's the question. | ||
| Look, I think the goal here is, is that, you know, from our perspective, is to, you know, we've got some real, we just, just in the last 10 days or so, we rolled out some really important features on our platform. | ||
| We've got some additional features that we'll hopefully roll out here in the next two to three weeks. | ||
| And then, you know, I'd like to get our platform to a point where, You know, where it does really take the best of all those platforms. | ||
| And then look, we're going to be in direct competition to them. | ||
| And remember, we're only open right now. | ||
| You got to remember, we're only open in the in the United States. | ||
| That's the only place we're open right now. | ||
| So imagine once we imagine, you know, think about when we when we open this up globally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How concerned are you that, you know, maybe Apple will be okay and, and, you know, Google will let you in, but just the other, the other trickery, I mean, I know they can't pull a parlor on you, obviously, because truth is using the rumble infrastructure. | ||
| So it's, it's in essence, it's truth's infrastructure, but just some of the other trickery and shenanigans that they can do. | ||
| Well, you know what, we've, we've really built this thing from the ground up piece by piece, right. | ||
| And that's what I kept saying, you know, when I took over, when I took over the company, The fake news didn't like this, but I said, you know, they | ||
| said, oh, when are you going to launch? | ||
| And I said, well, it for sure won't be, you know, it'll be, you know, after the first quarter. | ||
| And, and of course, they never reported on this, even though I said it 500 times. | ||
| And I'll say it for the 500 first time is I said, look, we're going to be, | ||
| we're not anybody's on anybody's timeline, but our own. | ||
| Like, we're going to launch when we're ready to launch, right? | ||
| So that's why we had to make sure the Rumble Cloud was ready. | ||
| When we switched over to the Rumble Cloud, that's when we essentially went out of beta and opened up for anybody on Apple. | ||
| Now we have our web-based application, so anybody can get it from any device. | ||
| But we're building this block by block, Dave, and we're doing it in such a way that nobody's going to be able to shut us down. | ||
| I think what you might be alluding to that we do have to, you know, be sensitive to are DDoS attacks, right? | ||
| Attacks to try to take us down. | ||
| And, you know, I know Rumble's had some of that. | ||
| We've had some of that. | ||
| We know that's going to be a, you know, problem, you know, into the future. | ||
| But look, we have We have a good team of people and Rumble's been around a while and they're very, very helpful, plus the team that we've built here at True Social. | ||
| I think, you know, outside of kind of those attacks, there's nobody that's going to be able to shut us down. | ||
| Well, I love the fact that you were in government, you saw a problem, you're in the private sector trying to solve that problem, and that this idea that I had about four years ago is now part of the solution to that problem. | ||
| So I appreciate you taking the time, Devin. | ||
| Oh man, yes, it's great. | ||
| And I've been flirting with locals, I've been on there. | ||
| It's an interesting platform. | ||
| It really is a place for You know, for those independent content creators where they're not going to have to be beholden to, you know, to kind of the big monopolies or the big companies. | ||
| So, you know, congratulations. | ||
| We build it for you. | ||
| Whatever you do with it is on you. | ||
| It's as simple as that. | ||
| It's as simple as that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's going to continue to grow, and I think it's going to be a great home for creators. | ||
| And, you know, we're going to look to where we can work with you guys, continue to work with Rumble. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, I sense you'll be in Sarasota a lot more often, and since I'm here in Miami, I guess we're going to have to meet what would be right in the middle, something like Doral or something like that. | ||
| as we've been building out our platform. | ||
| And we're very thankful for that support for you and your team that have offered that. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, I sense you'll be in Sarasota a lot more often. | ||
| And since I'm here in Miami, I guess we're gonna have to meet | ||
| what would be right in the middle, something like Doral or something like that. | ||
| We'll find something. | ||
| Alligator Alley, right? | ||
| Oh, exactly. | ||
| We'll meet in the middle of the alligator alley. | ||
| They got the panthers and the gators there. | ||
| Devin Nunes, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks a lot, Dave. | ||
| 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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