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Feb. 13, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:41:35

In Studio Live Stream with Dave Rubin! Viva Frei Live!

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	All right, I'm looking to the left and I see my face.
	So that means we're live in studio at Locals.
	And this is live with Dave Rubin.
	And when I told my wife we were doing another interview and it was going to be live in person, she said, well, who's interviewing who?
	And then I immediately panicked and didn't realize who's going to be interviewing who.
	And it means that I'm going to be interviewing Dave.
	We did a live one a while back with Barnes.
	How long ago?
	It's been a long time.
	I mean, time doesn't make any sense anymore, right?
	Like, what was yesterday seems like four years ago.
	Four years ago seems like 20 years ago.
	I don't know.
	When did I first have you guys on?
	It's got to be like three years ago.
	And then you've been on my show many, many times over the years.
	You were on Friday.
	I remember that.
	The panels are fantastic.
	I've been on that a number of times.
	We did the live.
	It was like you, me, and Barnes.
	I read your first book.
	You've since come out with a second book.
	And it was all that to say, when my wife said that, I realized...
	This is going to be more interesting in person, and I had to do my homework.
	This is tremendous pressure for you, because some people say I'm the Larry King of a new generation, and now I'm on the other side of the microphone.
	In a studio that I built, in essence, I built this company, and then we brought these crazy-haired people like you and said, do whatever you want with our technology, and you've made quite a success of yourself.
	People don't appreciate that you built this.
	People got scared when it merged with Rumble.
	And then I think their concerns have been quelled.
	And then they got concerned when I went exclusive with Rumble.
	They're going to say Viva's going to be toned down or controlled, reined in.
	You know, the internet has created this really bizarre set of selective pressures where people say what they want, for the most part.
	Then you get a little pushback.
	They change what they say.
	You get a little blowback the other way.
	You go back to the other thing.
	People think if you don't do exactly what they want out of you the second they want it, that you're a sellout or a shill or some other thing.
	Controlled opposition.
	Controlled opposition.
	The big one, though, I did hear a lot.
	We got a lot of pushback.
	So we merged Locals with Rumble, which...
	To be totally transparent with you, I have no need to be this transparent, but I said it on my show and I'll gladly say it here.
	I did the deal completely for stock.
	And the reason that I did it was because I believe in the thing.
	We had an all-cash offer.
	I could have walked with a lot of cash, but I believed in what the Rumble, and still believe in what the Rumble guys are doing.
	And now I consult and guide on stuff that you guys are working on too, you and Barnes, in terms of free speech and policies.
	How can we be more transparent than big tech and all that stuff?
	But it is kind of funny how the internet operates.
	It's like if you make any little move that they don't expect, they come and get you.
	But that's why you just have to do what you think is right.
	I mean, as a human, but I think as whatever the hell it is we are in front of microphones and cameras, you just have to do what you think is right.
	Let the chips fall where they may.
	And then if you make some mistakes along the way, hopefully you can clean it up and go forward.
	Everyone makes mistakes.
	I think I recently made a mistake where I accidentally interrupted.
	Yeah, I thought I had one point retweeted that tweet from the doctor who said it was that tweet that said, you know, even if it turns out the jab is poison, I'm glad I would do it again because I was motivated.
	And it turns out the tweet was was inaccurate.
	But, you know, even in my mistake, I said, look, this tweet, I thought this tweet was parody.
	And then when I tweeted, I said, well, I got blocked now.
	So now I sort of think it's real and I do think it's real.
	And I guess that's confirmation because I got blocked.
	And then the.
	Isn't it funny though?
	You're not a journalist.
	Do you consider yourself a journalist in any way whatsoever?
	I don't, but when I say I'm not a journalist, I think I'm like...
	Happy Gilmore saying I'm not a golfer anymore.
	I don't consider myself to be a journalist.
	But I'm on the golf course, basically.
	Well, yes, but I think I don't do what journalists would do is disclose confidential information that I get, you know, a la James O 'Keefe, or like a journalist, go secretly get stuff and then go public.
	I consider myself an analyst, but I don't know what the difference is anymore.
	It seems that being a journalist just means telling the world what's going on in unfiltered terms.
	So I don't know.
	Conflicted identity.
	Well, I ask you that because, I mean, most of the people who consider themselves journalists are not journalists by any standard that any of us knew the word journalist to mean.
	The idea that you were this impartial lens so that, you know, there's truth and then hopefully they can give it to you in a lens that will make sense for you in your daily life.
	And that's what a journalist is supposed to do.
	They're supposed to be on the ground finding out information.
	Virtually, blah, blah, blah.
	But it's like...
	The barbarians are at the gate.
	And what I fear Trump is doing right now is DeSantis is our best warrior.
	He really is.
	He's done everything so right here.
	You moved here from Canada, large part because of him.
	I moved here from Cali, large part because of him.
	I'm sure we both know dozens of other people that have done the same thing, and the amount of emails I get from people that are even in the process of doing it now.
	And what I fear Trump is doing is basically the barbarians are at the gate.
	We have our best warrior.
	We've been preparing him.
	He's been going through the machine.
	He's doing it right.
	He's doing everything we've asked.
	And what Trump is doing is kind of chiseling at his Achilles heel.
	Just being like, ah, if I can't be the guy everybody loves, then nobody will be.
	Which was sort of what Cobra Commander used to do at the end of every G.I. Joe, remember?
	Or Megatron used to do it at the end of Transformers.
	Let me refresh my memory.
	If I can't have it, nobody can!
	That's how every Transformers or G.I. Joe ended.
	You know, they'd be about to win, then the Joes would come in, or the Autobots would come in.
	And then they would destroy the thing, whatever it is, the weather machine or whatever.
	And I think there's some level of that going on with Trump.
	It's like, he sort of is like, if I can't, if I'm not the guy, then I'll gladly burn the whole thing down.
	And I just don't like those, the sanctimonious ones.
	Come on, come on.
	I could understand a bit of the...
	The nickname, because he did it to everybody.
	Sure, but it doesn't work.
	It doesn't work for everybody.
	I don't know what would make Ron DeSantis sanctimonious in any event.
	He's actually been the reverse.
	I mean, Trump, if you want to, again, and I like Trump, and I like his kids, and I've interviewed him, and I consider myself friends with Junior and with Ivanka and Eric a little bit less, but I mean, I know them.
	But, like, Trump is sanctimonious.
	You know, DeSantis, what has DeSantis done that is sanctimonious?
	If we want to get the Google definition of sanctimonious, I couldn't come up with anything, let alone the accusation of, the suggestion of grooming.
	And from what I understood, is the best evidence of that, that there's a picture of him drinking a beer with kids that he...
	Well, they all look roughly the same age, and it's unclear whether it's a beer.
	And none of it makes any sense.
	It's from some random account.
	He's not a...
	Like, it's just stupid.
	And even the fact that...
	That I even showed that picture on my show today and that you even mentioned it here.
	I actually felt kind of gross after because I was like, why am I giving this any air?
	I looked at it.
	I said, first of all, if the worst thing is back in the day, how long ago?
	This will be 20 years ago.
	The idea of a professor maybe having a beer with students while the students are, doesn't seem bad by today's standards, but let alone by the standards of the time.
	Sure.
	And unless there's some better accusation like have been leveled against Justin Trudeau about potentially inappropriate relationships with students and potential NDAs, which none of it has been substantiated, but those rumors have lingered for a long time, I didn't even But also, look, Trump has been photographed with Epstein.
	You know, Trump grabbed him by the pussy.
	That's what I'm saying.
	These tactics won't work.
	If you want to beat DeSantis, let's say Trump is really, I am the best guy for the job.
	I know how to drain the swamp like nobody else.
	I'm willing to do what must be done.
	Let's say that's his true feelings about this.
	And it might well be.
	Then figure out another way to beat him.
	But if your plan is, I'm going to destroy the guy who is protecting the republic, which basically DeSantis is doing by showing Florida still standing as an America that you probably envied as a child in Canada and that I, the America that I grew up in, that barely exists anymore.
	If your goal is, I'm going to take this guy out in the most grotesque fashion possible, I just don't know how I could support you.
	Yes, will I support you over Biden at the end?
	Yes.
	But like, If you have to do it that way, we have a much bigger set of problems, I would say.
	Well, actually, this is a good segue into this, and we're going to get into the Twitter stuff because that's where I spent most of my homework researching the infighting.
	I spent the better part of coming down here listening to two podcasts.
	It was a two-part miniseries on Cointelpro, which is so stupid.
	I've seen the name for so long, I thought it had to do with a laundromat.
	I was reading Cointel.
	And I'm reading how they were, you know, the FBI intelligence agencies were causing infighting among activist organizations, spying on them, doing all sorts of stuff to sabotage from the inside.
	And now we're living through, on the one hand, the Trump-DeSantis, although DeSantis really hasn't been punching back, which I think has played much better than Trump just flailing away like a, I won't use inflammatory rhetoric, but I don't think Trump has come off looking better as a result of this.
	People are defending him.
	Who support him, which is not the good thing.
	But you've got Trump going after DeSantis.
	And then within the conservative world, one scandal or one drama after another.
	Maybe it's more meaningful for me because I live on the interwebs.
	My wife says nobody knows half of the stuff you're talking about.
	No, it's important stuff.
	Daily Wire scandal.
	Then you had, what was the second one?
	Well, you're talking about Daily Wire Crowder.
	Daily Wire Crowder infighting.
	Then you got Project Veritas.
	Then you got Project Veritas.
	Then you got the Eliza Blue, which is causing a rift between Tim Pool, who's either seriously or not seriously contemplating retiring.
	You got infighting among traditional conservative entities.
	You've been around this for longer than I have.
	Have you ever seen anything like this on this scale?
	And do you think?
	COINTEL Pro 2.0.
	It's weird because it does feel like it's all happening right as, let's say, the center, right, or whatever you want to call all of us are roughly part of, right as we're starting to gain momentum.
	Cancel culture seems to have eaten itself.
	No one's really buying the social justice stuff anymore.
	They're not funny.
	They're not interesting.
	They're not creative.
	There does seem to be a shift in things, and then suddenly all of these things happen.
	I would generally, I would do a Carl Sagan on this.
	Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
	So like, you know, was somehow, did government agents somehow convince Crowder to record phone calls to release against the Daily Wire?
	Like, probably a bit much.
	I'm not there yet either.
	But the general, well, the one that I would say is sort of the most conspiratorial, and I don't have enough information on this, and I'm totally speaking out of school.
	I'm just talking about timing.
	The Project Veritas one seems very crazy to me because they dropped this Absolutely staggering, unbelievable...
	You know, their guerrilla-style video of the Pfizer executive basically saying, yeah, we're doing gain-of-function, and in essence, we're trying to invent new diseases, which is what we've all sort of, you know, all us crazy crackpots on the internet have been saying for a while.
	And then two weeks later, there's this lawsuit, and now it looks like he's been already removed, if I'm not mistaken, or it's happening right now, James O 'Keefe, obviously.
	That one seems really weird, but then it's like, so were people inside Veritas waiting to take out James O 'Keefe?
	The one interesting thing, beyond the obvious time part of this, I'm always interested in how the media covers or does not cover something.
	So the media completely ignored the story that Veritas broke, right?
	Totally.
	There was one article in the Daily Mail, deleted within a few hours of publication, where they just went through the expose, archived in time.
	So that to me is incredible.
	So CNN ignores it, MSNBC ignores it, The Times ignores it, blah, blah, blah.
	But then, when it's time to go after James O 'Keefe, Everybody covers that.
	And that is one of the things that I find amazing.
	It's sort of like when Elon Musk bought Twitter and then a week later, Elon Musk isn't doing anything about Twitter's child porn problem.
	And then it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
	First off, he is.
	He actually is doing more than anyone's done.
	But were you guys talking about Twitter's child porn problem before Elon bought it?
	You did not care about it before.
	Now you're just trying to figure out a way to take him out.
	It's like you just have to figure out how to learn those games.
	Learn the games that they play and understand when they ignore something.
	This story right now about East Palestine in Ohio, this explosion, has this been on CNN or New York Times?
	I don't judge the blue-haired crowd.
	You don't?
	Well, not in that way, but there's a lot of people in the blue-haired crowd, young generation, whatever they're called, Gen Z. The people who you would typically expect to be on libs of TikTok or be found out on libs of TikTok.
	Putting out videos on TikTok, ironically enough, about how the media is not talking about it.
	I saw this one blue-haired girl.
	I put it out this morning.
	But there's a bunch now.
	And it's an amazing thing what the media ignores.
	The media outright ignored the Project Veritas expose.
	Then a number of who I believe could be, they're not paid by anybody, but people saying it's a fake story, the guy's a total schnook, he made it all up, he was lying to impress a date.
	And then Pfizer press release comes out.
	And nobody talks about it.
	Right.
	Well, they admitted it in the press release.
	Still nobody talks about it.
	And they still haven't talked about it.
	But Project Veritas and James O 'Keefe, bad man, hard employer to work for.
	We need a phrase for this, right?
	I mean, this would sort of be memory holing.
	It's something like that, right?
	Because, you know, when I did, I know you want to talk about it a bit, but when I went to Twitter and I talked to Elon and then I released that thread.
	It was pretty wild stuff.
	Like the fact that he was admitting, or not admitting, he was allowing me to tell people what the truth was, which is that they are finding stuff deep within the code attached to specific accounts in terms of how they shadow ban.
	You would think that the media would be interested in that.
	The same media who for four years under Donald Trump told us that Russian bots operating on Twitter and Facebook had tricked us related to the election, right?
	So they were allowed to question the election.
	Then we got...
	Biden, now you can't do it anymore.
	But you would think if they were impartial, if they were journalists, they might go, boy, you know, for four years we were talking about this Russian bot thing on Twitter and Facebook.
	Now this guy, Dave Rubin, and I know he's a right-wing maniac.
	We don't really like him.
	We don't like Elon Musk, even though we loved him a few months ago.
	But now he's a right-wing maniac, too.
	We don't love him.
	But the idea that he's releasing information, that there is problems with the code related to who gets information on what, that might be worth covering.
	But instead...
	Literally nothing.
	And that, again, is what they do with everything.
	Well, I say there's literally nothing because it incriminates them.
	They were pushing the Russia...
	It is a hoax.
	It is a hoax.
	People don't appreciate this.
	There are still too many people who believe there was some legitimacy to it.
	You couldn't make a lie that big up without a portion of it being true.
	The only portion of it being true is that people were working with foreign entities.
	It just happened to be the DNC and the media.
	They ignore it.
	And I found this out in other respects.
	They ignore it.
	But they're going to ignore this because it incriminates them.
	And then it goes sort of full circle.
	How do you deal with the media that ignores stories that incriminate them without being a little edgy and in your face?
	If you found the solution to that...
	No, well, I think that gets us to where we started, which is that's why now I'm sort of more directly combative or it's more about mocking.
	Or even literally an hour ago, I got my assistant forwarded me an email from NewsGuard.
	Do you know what NewsGuard is?
	Oh, yes, yes.
	They determine the legitimacy of NewsGuard.
	Yes, they determine what's true.
	So NewsGuard, get this.
	Oh, you were on the show!
	This one's related to you!
	So on Friday, on my show, this is wild.
	This just tells you everything you need to know about all of this.
	On Friday on my show, I had you, I had Marissa Streit, who is the CEO of PragerU, and I had David Sachs, who is former CEO of PayPal, big VC tech guy helping Elon restructure Twitter right now.
	If you remember, Marissa mentioned that she's been getting guff from Newsmax over PragerU, and they've been going after them and a whole bunch more, and are they funded by the government and everything else?
	I've never mentioned Newsmax on my show ever before this.
	This morning, my assistant gets an email from Newsmax.
	Newsmax or Newsgard?
	I'm sorry, from Newsgard.
	Newsgard, thank you for clarifying.
	From Newsgard, not Newsmax.
	They've been perfectly fine to me.
	They're not liked by Newsgard, but they were like number one misinformation on Newsgard's website.
	Anyway.
	I had never mentioned NewsGuard on my show before.
	It's mentioned on Friday.
	Monday morning, today, my assistant gets an email from someone at NewsGuard.
	They are now looking into the veracity of factual information related to podcasts, and they're going to be doing a special on the Rubin Report, and they want us to comment on the record.
	And if I have my phone on me, if you'd...
	Allow me.
	The question is going to be this.
	Are you going to comment on the record, knowing that whatever you say is going to be spun against you?
	So I said to my assistant, I said, don't respond yet.
	Let me think.
	And then I Googled the kid who reached out.
	It's a kid.
	He looks like he's 22. His name's Zach Fishman.
	So I tweeted out.
	I said, hi, Zach Fishman.
	My assistant passed along your email, so wanted to go on the record for you and NewsGuard as requested.
	And then in quotes, who on the government instructs your policies?
	And where do you get your funding?
	Your mafia tactics won't work on me.
	Print that.
	It's on the record.
	Poop emoji, clown emoji.
	Did he write back?
	He hasn't responded yet.
	My internet's off right now.
	But he specifically, in the email, said that any communication we have is on the record.
	So he has a duty now.
	To print that, right?
	Now, we know he won't, obviously.
	But that's how you beat these guys.
	Enough of this nonsense.
	It has now been printed.
	And it will be for NewsGuard to now.
	Maybe I'll get a request for a comment from NewsGuard.
	They could be looking into you.
	I mean, you were on the show, man.
	You were on the show.
	I've been looked at from the Canadian media, W5, when they were looking into Rumble.
	And I did not know that they were going to use me as a piece in their propaganda war against Rumble.
	I learned afterwards, no matter how much you say.
	They'll find something to try to...
	What channel?
	That was CBC?
	That was CTVW5.
	That was wild because, as you may remember, a week or so before that hit piece came out that you were quoted in, but I'm sure I have no doubt that they fiddled around with things that you said.
	You actually, if I remember correctly, you thought it wasn't absolutely horrible, but it was tilted, right?
	The piece itself.
	Because they did this whole piece on Rumble.
	I found the most ridiculous thing was the suggestion that A, there are more violent comments.
	In the comment section on Rumble then on YouTube.
	Which is insane.
	Mathematically insane.
	It's a stupid affirmation.
	And then they cherry picked one and asked me, do I not feel responsible for the violent...
	I didn't even see the comment.
	Do I not feel responsible for any violent comments in the comment section?
	That would be like me blaming AOC for all the horrible things that people say about me on Twitter.
	Which is probably maybe true.
	I would have an easier time blaming AOC.
	When Maxine Water comes out and says you've got to get in their faces and harass them, that...
	I can see that.
	Someone says, yeah, I'm going to get in their face and harass them.
	Not knowing how comment sections work is just, it's pretending to be stupid for the sake of misleading other people.
	But yeah, that was the only thing that I thought they took unfairly out of context.
	To tell you a little bit about, I don't want to get too lost in this because it's Inside Baseball, but a few weeks before the hit piece came out, I happened to go...
	To the Rumble offices, which were being built.
	It was a building under construction, so there was no security.
	The doors, I don't even think, were on the hinges yet.
	I mean, it was that level of construction.
	And I went with the CEO of Locals and Rumble.
	We walk in and there's construction guys there and whatever.
	There's no security or anything.
	And then out of nowhere, this girl pops out of a corner with a document, several pages.
	I'm from CTV, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And answer all these questions and on the record, blah, blah, blah.
	And it was like, man, this is what you guys do.
	There was no evidence that we were going there that day.
	Nobody even knew.
	I had just got to Florida, I think.
	Nobody knew.
	They were stalking the building, waiting for either me, I'm the public side of it, but Chris, who's the CEO of Rumble, or Asaf, who's the CEO of Locals, waiting to pounce.
	And then it was a list of the most ridiculous questions.
	And we need answers on all of this.
	It's been two days.
	And it was like...
	I think I basically said to her, you have to leave this building.
	You were not invited.
	Canadian media might not appreciate trespass laws and other dynamics of living in Florida.
	Yeah, but I knew about that.
	It was stalking you, stalking Chris, stalking Rumble, and then when it comes to other more meaningful issues like whether or not Pfizer is actually engaging in some form of...
	No, couldn't care less.
	Couldn't care less.
	But we may not get into this.
	We're going to segue into it directly right now.
	You went to San Francisco.
	Yes.
	I like the way you said that.
	San Francisco.
	It's almost hard to say because it's so horrible.
	I saw the images of it.
	Now, I think the last time I was even on the West Coast, it was years ago, but if I'd been to San Francisco, it was 20 years ago for a day.
	First, getting into what's going on in San Francisco as a city, as a failed city.
	Is it beyond?
	Let me rephrase.
	Is it even a question now as to whether or not it is a failed city and is it beyond salvaging?
	It is unimaginably horrible.
	I am not being facetious or cheeky or anything else.
	First off, so you haven't been there in 20 years.
	I was last in San Francisco.
	It was the week that lockdowns happened.
	I know that because we were trying to raise money for locals and I had to go to Silicon Valley the week that the market was crashing.
	The worst possible time to raise funds, but we got there and actually we were able to pull some stuff together.
	It kind of worked out.
	But even in the subsequent two and a half years, it has taken a downturn that is unimaginable.
	The videos that I posted that I'm sure most of your viewers have seen on Twitter or elsewhere.
	It was like a zombie apocalypse.
	It genuinely felt like The Walking Dead.
	There are gangs, not even gangs, because that feels directed.
	There are just droves of sort of mindless, what look like zombie people.
	I mean, drool and blood and goo and dirty clothes and like ass hanging.
	Needles.
	Oh, needles everywhere.
	Everywhere.
	And I'm telling you, it was everywhere in the city.
	I saw a lot of pushback on Twitter.
	People say, oh, you're just looking in this two-block radius.
	No.
	The thing is, when I was meeting with Elon, which is why I was there, they kept pushing the meeting back.
	So literally, both times I met with him turned out to be after midnight.
	So I had plenty of time during the day, especially on the second day.
	So I was just like, all right, I'm just going to wander around.
	I haven't been to San Francisco in a while.
	It was kind of pleasant out.
	I walked and walked and walked and walked.
	The equivalent of miles, which is not easy to do in San Francisco.
	It's very hilly.
	It was everywhere.
	I had to go get...
	My sunglasses broke, so I was going with Sunglass Hut to get...
	I'm crapping for my sunglasses.
	They're not here.
	So Sunglass Hut, I think it's on Market...
	No, not Market Street.
	Union Square, something like that.
	Union Station.
	It's a nicer part of the city.
	It was everywhere.
	And what's also interesting about it is if you get a block suddenly, literally, I mean, one block where there's not just...
	30 homeless people doing drugs.
	There's either a dead, literally, like a seemingly dead person on the floor, or there's garbage everywhere, or this was the other thing that I noticed.
	Everyone there looks terrified.
	Everyone.
	And you mean not the homeless population.
	Not the drug people.
	The civilian.
	Let me not use anything that can be misconstrued.
	You're still so nice.
	The non-homeless population.
	The employed population.
	The employed, seemingly functional population.
	Every single person.
	I mean terrified.
	People will not look at you.
	Everyone is just kind of like, all right, I'm about to lose my wallet.
	Every restaurant looks dirty.
	So I needed to go somewhere for dinner because, again, these meetings kept getting pushed.
	So I'm looking at some restaurants and everything looked disgusting.
	Oh, and also everyone's wearing masks too, which was another, which in this case I could understand because you just don't want like the stench of whatever.
	To the extent you can still smell through the mask.
	It's an illustration that maybe they're not as effective as blocking the micro particles.
	But I was like, all right, I got to go to dinner.
	Where can I go?
	I can't find anything decent.
	So I was like, I'm going to find literally the fanciest steak joint because that's got to be on a decent street.
	It has to be.
	So have you ever been to Mastro's Steak Joint?
	Like there's one in Malibu I used to go to.
	This is like a Primo.
	Top of the line steak place.
	I'm sure it's thought of as like, you know, like A-list.
	I walk over there, disgusting.
	Oh, the video that I took where you see the mobs and people, that was about three blocks away.
	So I'm walking through that thing.
	And then I go and they have an awning outside, Mastro's, and there's four guys cooking what I assume was meth or crack or whatever you might cook.
	And I was like, okay, not going there.
	And that was it.
	I'm so neurotic that I would be nervous about inhaling some fumes and then maybe having some sort of fentanyl over it.
	Oh, that's funny.
	I'm not even saying it as a joke.
	I wasn't nervous about inhaling the drugs, but I didn't want to inhale the stench.
	There is a stench of quasi-death poop.
	You didn't go in, so you didn't get to ask the owner, like, how do you survive and who comes in here?
	And do they have armed guards letting them in?
	And how are they not allowed?
	Asking them to move, and what everyone feels about the failed city.
	Well, you know, one of the interesting things is that you do see some cops there, but they're doing nothing.
	They're doing nothing.
	Like, think about it.
	If you have all these homeless people doing drugs right there, they're breaking the law.
	You are not allowed to cook and or smoke crack or fentanyl or whatever on the street.
	And the cops see it, and they do absolutely nothing.
	The Twitter offices are about a block away from, I think it's the San Francisco Opera House.
	It might be called something else, but the opera building, whatever it is.
	As I walked by it, I was thinking, man, I'm going to guess that 20 years ago, or even maybe 10 years ago, there used to be people that would show up in tuxedos and women in gowns, and they would go see the opera, or they'd go see the Philharmonic, or something of that nature.
	There is zero chance that that...
	I cannot imagine someone saying, we're going to go have a nice evening.
	You're going to put on your tux and I'm going to wear a gown or you're going to put on your fancy watch and blah, blah, blah.
	So it is an absolute city in disastrous dissent and that cannot be disconnected from the fact that Gavin Newsom was mayor there.
	He was mayor there.
	He had a...
	You had a 10-year plan to remove homelessness.
	That was the video.
	You've seen the video?
	A clip out of Robocop.
	Yeah.
	A 10-year plan.
	Yeah.
	And it was 15 years ago, by the way.
	It's madness.
	So Newsom was the governor.
	Newsom was the mayor of San Francisco.
	And now he's the governor of California.
	Democrat privilege.
	It's the only privilege that exists in America.
	If you're a Democrat, you can ruin everything.
	And you will work your way up.
	No accountability.
	Now I understand also that they have some lax laws on shoplifting.
	Oh yeah.
	The criminality that you see has been decriminalized of sorts.
	So I guess in a way you get to reduce crime by eliminating the crimes.
	Isn't it brilliant?
	Only a Democrat could come up with something like that.
	And you get to create equality by destroying the city and making everyone equally impoverished.
	$950.
	You know that?
	You are allowed to steal $950.
	They have this in L.A. too.
	$950 worth of stuff and they will not prosecute you.
	That means quite literally, Biba, you can walk into Best Buy.
	I asked my man Connor.
	He's my video game guy.
	I said, what's a PlayStation 5 going for these days?
	About $400 or $500.
	They ain't cheap.
	But that means you could walk into Best Buy, steal a PlayStation 5. Games are going for about $70 a pop.
	So let's say you get about five games.
	Now you're about $850.
	You could maybe push that to six games and then you're right at that 950 level and you can walk out and you will not be prosecuted.
	And then what it says to the decent citizens of society who don't want to jump turnstiles, who actually are willing to pay for Madden 95. Madden 23 or whatever.
	That's the one Tecmo Bowl from Nintendo Entertainment System.
	Remember LT on the original Tecmo Bowl on the Giants?
	Oh, he was unstoppable.
	Lawrence Taylor.
	Come on, man.
	Yeah, of course I remember.
	No, I don't remember that level of detail, but yeah.
	But what you're saying to the civilized people of a society is not only are we not going to prosecute crimes, but in essence we will punish you for believing in the system.
	We will punish you for your good behavior because things will go up in price because other people are stealing them.
	And you're just a schmuck.
	You're just a schmuck.
	Why are you buying that freaking card for the metro when you know you could just hop that thing?
	And then you just encourage more and more people to do it.
	And that's why all of these Democrat-run cities are just, as I always say, they are just on their descent to hell.
	They have been there before, but I don't see a way that San Francisco, L.A. maybe, but probably not.
	L.A. just seems about five years behind San Francisco.
	But I would say San Francisco and New York right now seem like they are on complete, complete free fall.
	They need Giuliani again, but Giuliani's a right-wing racist maniac.
	First of all, something tells me that if a tax-paying employed citizen even tried to do the shoplifting, there would be much less reluctance to pursue or prosecute or give them a ticket or whatever, knowing that they would pay it.
	Right, that's funny too.
	That's another level of it.
	You pick on the people who you think there's something useful to pick on them for.
	Handing out a ticket to a homeless person for shoplifting, they're not going to pay it and what do you do?
	Arrest them.
	They might even want to be arrested so they can get off the street for a temporary time.
	In Canada, when the winter gets cold...
	Being threatened with arrest is not the worst thing on earth.
	Especially now that men can go to women's prisons so you can get laid a lot.
	You know what I mean?
	I'm a woman.
	You call me Allison.
	Next thing you know, you're banging 80 chicks in jail.
	We're going to get into this.
	This will be a separate discussion in a second.
	Okay, so you're in San Francisco.
	It's a hellhole with no caveats.
	Beautiful view of the ocean.
	Wait, let me just give one other picture for you.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	But think about it.
	When I'm at Twitter, I'm upstairs with the world's richest man.
	And all of what I just described to you is right downstairs.
	So, I mean, I'm talking 50 yards.
	Like, think of the juxtaposition of that.
	No joke.
	How does Elon does not walk in through the front door?
	So those who can't be exposed to the waste that is the governance left over from Newsom, they go in through, they drive in, go underground, elevators.
	I mean, I have a little...
	Insider info on that, but that's not for me to share.
	But he's not walking through the front door.
	And employees themselves, the ones who go do the TikTok videos about how they have free coffee and meals, are they walking into the front door?
	Yeah, I think so, yeah.
	Or they might park inside the building and then go up in an elevator.
	At least to avoid it?
	Yeah.
	So you're there upstairs with the world's richest man.
	Yeah.
	Outside, squalor, social decay.
	First of all, what does Elon have to say about it?
	He's still there and he's still...
	Does he have faith in it or is it just too hard to up and leave?
	So on the first night, basically what happened was at about 5 p.m. Eastern, I got a call on a Tuesday saying, Elon would like to meet you in San Francisco tonight.
	So I was like, I got to figure this shit out.
	I called everybody I know that would maybe have access to a plane.
	Like, get me on a flight now, you know?
	Nobody could come through.
	I ended up sitting literally last row, middle seat, broken chair.
	American Airlines.
	You didn't fly Spirit.
	C-32E.
	No, it was a nightmare.
	But whatever.
	It was fine.
	But anyway, I got there a little bit after midnight.
	So when I got there, this tells you everything you need to know about the guy.
	I get there.
	Now, first off...
	There's probably about a hundred, you know, he's in a conference room at first, but with a window so I can see him.
	And there's about a hundred people and everyone's holding laptops.
	It's funny, one thing I learned about programmers, they hold laptops in really bizarre ways.
	Their bodies are contorted and they're like trying to really just do all this weird stuff and they look at things upside down.
	Anyway, but there's all these people there and they're doing their thing.
	And then finally I see someone kind of points at me and then Elon comes out.
	He says, hi.
	We chat just small talk for maybe two minutes, and now it's got to be close to 1 a.m.
	He had the Tesla quarterly earnings meeting the next morning.
	He had to testify in a trial.
	And it's already past midnight.
	The guy's been working all day long.
	And this is what he said to me.
	This is almost verbatim what he said.
	He said, I really want to help you out, and I understand there's some real problems.
	The guy's told me that, you know, your account has been hit in some weird ways that we want to look into.
	He goes, is there anything that I can do for you tonight?
	Because if there is, I'll stay.
	Otherwise, I'm actually pretty tired, and we'll do it tomorrow.
	And I thought, how insane is that?
	I guess I'm known to some degree, but, like, I'm just some guy that, like, somehow ended up in that office.
	and here's the world's richest man who owns...
	He's trying to get us to Mars.
	The guy's trying to do a lot of stuff.
	So I don't mean to make this about the money.
	But he's literally like, if you want me to stay and in essence work for you tonight, I will.
	And I was like, no, no, it's okay.
	You can go home and we'll pick it up tomorrow.
	So first, I think that's just like a good little insight.
	The employees who are there now are the ones who checked the yes box on ready-to-work hardcore for the company.
	And you don't see very...
	Not the ones that I saw, but he fired, I think it was half the work staff, basically.
	So they had about 7,500 people.
	It's down to a little over 3,000.
	About 3,500.
	So there are still clearly people there that are...
	Agents or not working on, you know, for him or work for the government or whatever.
	So he has to figure that out.
	But to your direct question about what did he say about the San Francisco situation, you know, I was very aware the next day when we had about a two-hour meeting.
	I was very aware of like, I have limited, I didn't know how long I had with him.
	I was like, I want to focus on this thing.
	We had started to talk about the kind of why I left the left stuff in politics because I think his journey is very similar to mine.
	And that's where he got very, he was like really into that.
	Like I think it was, he was glad to take a little break from tech and all that.
	We only talked about the San Francisco thing for like a minute or two.
	And basically he was just like, something like, it's unbelievably horrible.
	It's like, I didn't get any indication whether he really wants to take the company out of there or not.
	But we do know that he's already moved Tesla to Texas.
	There's every reason to get them the hell out of there.
	I think the thing is.
	He fired so many people.
	The product is shaky at best, right?
	He kept describing it as a Jenga.
	You know, it's like this thing could fall over at any moment, and he's got the bad actors in there.
	I don't think he's ready to be like, to the 3,000 people, a certain person.
	I believe to Texas, they might not be too.
	They may not be, right.
	And it's like anyone maybe pulls that last Jenga piece out, and then he has a much bigger problem on his hands, which is a $44 billion investment in a product that literally he can't turn on.
	There was the one question.
	We want to come back to him now being on the outs with the left despite being elected.
	A lifetime of being elected.
	My impression now, having lived through something similar, is that nobody leaves, they get pushed out, or they stay somewhat where they are, and it moves even more radically to the left.
	About Elon, and I don't want this to all be about Elon, does he look happy or does he not look happy?
	Yes, he looks happy.
	He was laughing constantly.
	Right when we walked into the meeting, he was in the middle of showing someone a funny little video about what it's like to try to raise funds in Silicon Valley, cracking up, really laughing a ton.
	He's wearing a t-shirt that looked like an old ratty t-shirt that I wouldn't be seeing in.
	He's just doing everything he freaking could possibly do.
	That really was my takeaway.
	Physically healthy?
	Or is the stress of what he's moving through?
	He definitely, he's burning it at both ends.
	I think twice during, I noticed, during the two-hour meeting, he kind of closed his eyes and he was like, my brain's on overload, my brain's on overload.
	He's trying to take in so many things.
	So I don't know how long you can last doing that.
	I think he really would like to find someone else to run the company once it's been righted a little bit more.
	I just don't know.
	When or how that could happen.
	And who would want to take that job?
	That's the third question.
	Did you get an impression as to whether or not he knew the extent of outright intelligence infiltration?
	No.
	I won't load it.
	I think it's outright infiltration.
	I think it has been infiltrated.
	Whether or not it's a state actor, it's a non-starter.
	I think it's a branch of the intelligence.
	The debate was the bots.
	Did he give any impression as to whether or not he knew about FBI involvement and the interplay between intelligence and the company?
	We didn't talk about it specifically in that way, but I asked a similar question on Friday when we had Sachs on.
	So David Sachs, who was one of the creators of PayPal with Elon 25 years ago with Peter Thiel, he's not being paid and he doesn't own any of Twitter.
	He's just advising.
	So he literally is there.
	He came to our meeting.
	He asked me if he was like, do you want me to come?
	And I was like, yeah, because I happen to like him a lot.
	And I was like, it might help that, you know, it's someone else here.
	Knows Elon when I sit down so it feels a little more, I don't know, family-ish or friendly-ish or something.
	He basically, his answer when I asked him that on Friday, in essence, he said nobody knew what they are finding out.
	So it was like we all thought the bot thing was a problem, that there was fake traffic being driven by who we didn't know.
	But the fact that now nine FBI agents were employed at...
	Twitter, we now know that.
	The general counsel for the FBI, this guy Jim Baker, is the general...
	Is he still, or I guess he's been fired since?
	No, he got fired.
	He got fired.
	But he was the general counsel at Twitter.
	It's like, you cannot make this up.
	Like, it's too...
	That's one of the things.
	The conspiracies are so obvious that we can't see them, because they're like...
	You know, it's like the vision is like this.
	If it were a movie, and you say, okay, now you're the part where you discover the FBI, the former FBI counsel is the CEO or whatever the...
	No one would believe it.
	Who wrote this shit?
	It's like John Cusack getting onto the jury and running away.
	How does an ex-gunright activist get onto the jury?
	It's mind-blowing.
	It's so mind-blowing that even I'm sitting there looking at it and saying the bot thing had to have been a disguise.
	He knew what he was buying so he's going to blow the lid off this and become public enemy number one.
	There are others who say...
	It's so obvious he could not have known, therefore he has to be some form of controlled opposition working with the government because nobody could ignore it and then nobody would do this.
	Can I address that one real quick?
	Oh, please.
	Because that one to me, look, if that is true, if that is true that Elon Musk, who seemingly put it all on the line and from what I could tell was busting his ass and repeatedly talking about free speech, if he is somehow a double agent or controlled opposition or whatever, then the game is so...
	The game is so complex and so out of what any of us could bother wasting a breath talking about that it would be pointless for any of us to do anything other than buy a chicken coop and move to the middle of nowhere.
	And that's it.
	And by the way, that's a pretty great thing.
	And I do want to get a chicken coop.
	I had one in L.A. It became very complex.
	We had a very sick dog.
	We had to get rid of the chickens.
	Had to make a choice.
	Dog or chicken?
	We went dog.
	But no.
	So I do not believe that's the case.
	I believe that he is...
	Mission aligned with us in that he believes in free speech, he believes in the beauty of America, and he wants there to be honest, open debate.
	I think he is frankly shocked at what you just described there is that most of us kind of didn't move and that in a sane world, even for me, I think I'd probably be somewhat on the left in a functioning, sane world.
	We just don't live in that world.
	If we could get everything back to...
	I don't know, 1995?
	And if we felt things were a little more functional?
	Like, I'm not inherently against government if it's slim and trim and controlled and doing what its very specific duties are.
	But that has nothing to do with the way government is now.
	And I think a guy like him, who's benefited a lot from that too, by the way, because of subsidies and tax breaks and all that stuff.
	That is one of the arguments as to why he might be not compromised, but too dependent on...
	Pissing them off, but not too much, because then they'll cut, you know, the government funding to Starlink, not Starlink, but rather SpaceX.
	Well, I don't think the government's funding those things, but he does get some tax breaks on those things.
	And yes, he's gotten, you know, there's been other things related to Tesla.
	But like, I just don't think that, I did not get the impression that was it at all.
	And also it just, the way he's consistently gone after it and gone after it and gone after it and going deeper and deeper.
	Viva, if for no other reason than I have this two-hour meeting with him, we didn't really, there was no setup to the meeting of, like, exactly why we're doing it.
	And then I said to him at the end, do you mind if I repeat any of this?
	And he goes, as long as it's true.
	It's like, he told me there was a bunch of shit that if he really was protecting only what his asset is or something, you wouldn't want everybody knowing that Twitter is as unstable as it is.
	Like, he might have said, actually, don't repeat that thing.
	Can I see it first?
	Can I vet it first?
	As long as it's true.
	And he didn't have to pause when he said it.
	That was the thing.
	Can I just kind of repeat some of this stuff?
	As long as it's true.
	That's because you're in bed with the government as well, Dave.
	And he knows it's going to be limited.
	Clever.
	We're all part of this thing.
	At some point, there is no end to the suspicion.
	But at some point also, there is no end to the corruption.
	So you don't know.
	But Elon's political...
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Evolution.
	Let's call it that.
	It's similar, I presume, to yours as well.
	How ignorant I am to these things of identity politics.
	The first time we did the interview, I didn't know that you were gay.
	No idea.
	Well, I'm only gay after 10pm.
	I had no idea in the sense that, first of all, it's never relevant to me.
	Maybe I didn't know you well enough back in the day.
	Well, it's not that relevant to me.
	The only reason why it might be relevant is that typically you would not be the poster child for being called a right-wing extremist.
	And I know some of the politics are definitely not right-wing, but what happens?
	You're an older person.
	How old are you?
	46. I'm an older person.
	You're looking good.
	We can compare greys here.
	No, I got more greys than you, but we're of the same vintage.
	Wait, how old are you?
	43. Yeah, I got more grey hair, but I blame these are Trudeau greys.
	Those are Trudeau, yeah.
	I don't think that I've changed much.
	If anything, I think I've gone maybe more left in the traditional sense where when I was younger, I say, yeah, death penalty, fully supported.
	And now I no longer say that.
	Oh, that's funny because I've now flipped on that because I used to be completely against it because I didn't want the state to have that kind of power.
	And there's a liberal argument to make there.
	That could be an old liberal argument that you just don't want the state to be able to punish dissent in that way.
	I'm more amenable to it now.
	So that's interesting.
	Well, I'm amenable in the ideal circumstances versus supporting it as a government policy.
	Because I say, like, you can't undo a wrongful execution.
	And now I don't trust the government to do anything.
	Totally get it.
	But so how did your political evolution come out of this?
	Like, when did you realize they've gone batshit crazy and I'm still pretty sane?
	So, you know, I've told versions of this many times, so I'll try to do like a somewhat abbreviated one.
	But I grew up in a New York liberal household.
	And when you say that, people think, oh, they must have all been crazy, like leftist lunatics.
	But that's not the way it was.
	I was a child of the 80s.
	My family...
	We would, every holiday, whatever it was, we'd be, you know, I'd have 50 people at two different, you know, kids' table, adult table.
	I'm the oldest of my generation also, so I was always angling to the adult table.
	Like, I didn't want to be with all the young kids, and I was always trying to get there because they were arguing about abortion and foreign policy.
	My family was always arguing.
	Nobody was involved in politics directly, but everybody was always arguing about stuff.
	And then dessert would be served, and then it was done.
	So people would be yelling throughout the meal, for sure, screaming at each other.
	And then, but then, literally, cake?
	Okay, we're good.
	We'll do it again tomorrow.
	And that's how my family was.
	And that's what I thought of as liberalism.
	And also, you're not a New Yorker, but we had great liberal politicians at the time.
	There was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was one of our senators.
	And he carried the Constitution with him.
	But he was a liberal.
	He believed in a decent government that could do some for the people.
	Ed Koch was the mayor of New York City before the progressive David Dinkins came in and destroyed it.
	And then once he destroyed it, Giuliani came in and had to fix it.
	JFK was a liberal.
	JFK wanted to lower taxes, wanted to get us out of wars.
	Disband the FBI.
	Disband the FBI.
	Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
	I mean, that's the reverse of Bernie.
	But he was a liberal.
	So that's the liberalism I came from.
	Then I moved to L.A. in 2013, started working with the Young Turks.
	And what I liked about that, and they described themselves as progressives.
	And what it seemed to me was they were liberals, but like they were...
	Like, they were liberals who had just done a line of cocaine.
	Like, they were just, like, raged all the time.
	And everybody's a racist and a bigot.
	And there's something very empowering about that.
	And also, if you can silence your opposition with all those tactics, everyone's a racist and a bigot and a homophobic.
	It becomes very, it feeds you in a very weird way because you're now on a moral crusade too because you're literally trying to save the world.
	There's a few things that woke me out of that.
	The famous one is when I sat down with Larry Elder and he really beat me over the head about systemic racism.
	But there were a bunch of things that had happened before that.
	The famous Sam Harris, Ben Affleck debate on real time with Bill Maher.
	That really was the one that...
	That fully in my mind, and people can find it, I did a video in my little apartment about it the next day, so this is back in like 2014, where I was still a lefty, a liberal, and I'm trying to explain what just happened there, and I show it completely unedited, and then I just jump in at different times because everybody was editing it to figure out their own, you know, to fit their own ideology and all that.
	But I would say the bumper sticker on that is there was one day where I was on the panel with the Young Turks and Cenk and all these people and everyone's just screaming and everybody's a racist and a big and homo.
	And I remember thinking, literally, literally looking at them thinking, it's not like you guys are that bright.
	I really remember thinking that.
	Like, these aren't the brightest people.
	These weren't people that I had great...
	You know, I would go out to dinner with them or invite them into my home.
	Some of them were invited to my wedding.
	We actually never had philosophical discussions about politics.
	It was like complaining about people or complaining about work.
	Cenk was a horrible boss.
	There was a lot of that kind of stuff.
	But it was very little of what I now do with all of my new right-wing friends, where we actually don't talk about politics at all.
	We usually talk about philosophy or...
	Something like that.
	And I remember thinking, you guys just aren't that bright, so is it possible that you guys are so right and somehow everyone else is so wrong?
	And once that math equation did not work in my head, the rest kind of fell apart very quickly.
	And then I think Elon is going through a version of that himself.
	As you went through it.
	For me, it's only a matter of, I don't know if at the time, what...
	What we call typical progressives were pushing for were as radically perceived at the time.
	And so, you know, bringing it back to why...
	Well, they went from equality to equity.
	And that was the jump.
	It needed...
	It basically needed to end at gay marriage.
	The cause needed to end once...
	Basically, I mean, maybe we can find the most marginal examples of this that aren't true.
	But once gay marriage was done, there were no laws that stopped black people from doing anything in the United States.
	There's no laws that stopped gay people from doing anything, or Asian people, or Jews, or blah, blah, blah.
	Once we did that, the machine of that thing needed to kind of take its foot off the pedal.
	But instead, it put its...
	And that's why now we're dealing with...
	We're going to chop your nuts off if you're a 13-year-old boy who's a little effeminate.
	Because as Chris Rock said in one of his HBO specials, the cops need a certain amount of crime.
	And that's what these guys need.
	They need a certain amount of racism to keep the grift going.
	We did it.
	We did what the promise of America was supposed to do.
	It doesn't mean that we eliminated racism as an intellectual concept.
	There's always going to be a racist.
	Ilhan Omar is a racist.
	AOC is a racist.
	She didn't know about Jews and monies as a trope.
	I believe that as far as I can throw.
	But the point is, there's always going to be these bigoted people.
	Of course there is.
	And the best thing that you can do is hopefully explain to them.
	Why they shouldn't be, or live a life that would challenge their preconceived notions.
	But that's what these guys seem to be.
	Let me steel-man the argument.
	Because what they're going to say is, this is the gay privileges.
	Once you've got what you wanted, then you don't care about the trans population.
	You don't care about the trans kids.
	I'm trying to figure out a way where I understand, or can conceptualize, where the slippery slope has to stop.
	But the argument is going to be, good, gays and lesbians got their rights.
	Now there's trans.
	Right, so what right does a trans person, I know you're doing a steel man, so what right would a trans person not have an American to do?
	I think, incidentally, there's another argument which I'll probably get in big trouble for saying is the response to this, the steel man response, which is, someone's going to say, well, discrimination based on gender identity is not specifically outlawed.
	So you can, in theory, refuse to hire someone based on their gender identity.
	Well, I'm not so sure that that's true, actually.
	Are you telling me that that's true for sure?
	No, I don't think it was true before.
	Well, first of all, we have the Equality Act of, I think, 1973 or 1974 that dealt with most of this stuff.
	And then over the years, there have been laws passed related to sexuality specifically.
	If there potentially is some law that still can somehow trick somebody into like discriminating against a transversion, I suppose you could talk about that.
	Now, first of all, I would talk about it at a state level.
	Secondly, I think people to some extent, and here's where, this is where they'll really, Media Matters will love this one.
	People are allowed to discriminate to some extent.
	We all discriminate on a daily basis.
	Hopefully you're not doing it based in a bigoted way, meaning in a way like, oh, there's a black person.
	I'm simply not going to hire that black person.
	But we're all making judgment calls all day long with every interaction that we have, period.
	As far as I know, there are no laws that stop a trans person from living however they wish to live.
	Now, if we're taking this down to the child level, where we're now talking about gender affirming care.
	Beautiful and a horrible euphemism.
	Gender-affirming care, which in...
	Up is down, left is right.
	You are not affirming someone's gender if you are going to try to chop their body parts off.
	So if you want to talk about that related to kids, well then, there's a discussion to have there, obviously.
	Once someone is 18, whatever they wish to do with their body or whatever else, they can do it.
	You want to dress however you want, whatever.
	I will treat you with respect if you treat me with respect.
	But I will tell you this, a couple months ago, right when we moved to Florida, we were doing some work at the house.
	I have not told this story publicly, so you're getting a good one here.
	You're getting a good one here.
	So we had just moved to the house, and we're doing a lot of work, and someone showed up at the house.
	We had an appointment for a certain type of worker.
	I don't even want to be more specific than that, to show up to the house.
	David, my husband, yells.
	From the other room, take the dog and get out of the house.
	And I'm like, what?
	What is going on here?
	Take the dog and get out of the house.
	I grab the dog.
	I start taking a walk.
	Then I'm texting him.
	I'm going, what the hell's going on here?
	A man with 5 o 'clock shadow, like a 6 '3 man, hairy legs, in a dress, showed up to our house to give us an estimate on something.
	5 o 'clock shadow, 6 foot, dress that doesn't fit, walks in.
	David said he was clearly on drugs, like eyes were bloodshot and out of whack.
	Sounded like a man, slurring words, but basically sounded like a man.
	For a half hour, he had to go along with this nonsense until he got the guy out of the house.
	And he felt like the guy was sort of sexually harassing him and like all this weird stuff.
	Anyway, I mention this because this person got a job.
	They should not have had that job.
	Imagine if David had been a little...
	26-year-old girl, housewife, and then this man in a dress comes into the house who clearly is on drugs, blah, blah, blah.
	I'm not applying this, obviously, to all trans people.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	But the point is, if I had called the company and said, you know, I was having somebody give me an estimate on blah, blah, blah, and you sent a man in a dress who was on...
	Like, I then would have been the bad guy, or they would have come after me, or the story with Dave Rubin stops...
	And that's how we've just allowed everything to get so backwards.
	The reason he wanted me out of the house was he was afraid that the guy was going to recognize me and think of me as a transphobe and then that would have, you know, we don't like to have people know where we live and all kinds of stuff.
	So it's just like a litany of endless nonsense related to all of this stuff.
	But if you can point out to me, or anyone watching this, and there's commenters that can gladly throw in, if anyone watching this can point to me to a law that exists in the United States that is discriminating...
	I would not want a law that stops Muslim people from doing this or gay people from doing that, blah, blah, blah.
	There are plenty of mosques that won't perform gay marriages.
	I don't know.
	Should we be upset with Ilhan Omar on that one?
	I'm pretty sure her mosque won't perform a gay marriage.
	Not one mosque in the United States will.
	But I wouldn't want to force a religious institution to do that.
	So that's why there's so many inequalities here.
	But the liberal position would be That everyone is treated equally.
	And that, under the law, how people behave on the margins of that is a different issue.
	Well, my sort of perspective of this is that once upon a time, and I think it's still recognized as a diagnosable mental condition, it's gender dysphoria, which used to have treatments, where it went from being protected from discrimination based on a mental...
	Diagnosable mental condition, for public accommodations, etc.
	That's one thing.
	And I don't think there's any risk of that.
	I think it's already baked into the law.
	Then the question became on what we call intuitive persona, like individual relationships where you can no longer exercise any discretion based on certain things, and it doesn't seem that there's any limit to it.
	Where you have the biological males of Dylan Mulvaney and Jeffrey Marsh taking to the social medias to speak on girlhood, to go to the White House and lecture on girlhood.
	She's the worst stereotype.
	He, Dylan Mulvaney, is the worst stereotype of what a woman would be.
	Possibly.
	I think it's a troll.
	I still think it has to be a troll.
	There was a most recent one that he put out where he's...
	There was, what was it?
	Normalize the bulge, which is to say, I have a penis, but refer to me as a she.
	Then there was, what makes me look so good?
	I'm not there to steal your husband.
	Did you see this one?
	Yeah, I saw it.
	But still insist, call me a she despite the fact that I recognize that I have a penis, and that I'm going to the White House to talk on girlhood issues.
	I'm just saying, the question is...
	And then to watch mind-muddled Joe Biden be like, it's a moral responsibility to treat you with a...
	Do you feel that this is a concerted effort?
	We've heard, what's his name, Solzheim, the Russian propaganda?
	Solzhenitsyn.
	Do you believe that this is an actual concerted effort?
	Yes, to some extent.
	I mean, this is where, again, you start going into conspiracy theory territory.
	But one of the things that Solzhenitsyn said, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, and obviously Jordan talks about him all the time, is that the one way you stop the thing that we're all worried about is you stop participating in your lot.
	And we're all participating in a lie all the time.
	I think that's another reason I've become a little more direct in my language with some of this stuff.
	You're a fundamentally good person.
	It's very obvious to me.
	So when you slightly use the wrong pronoun there, it's like you're going out of your way to behave towards a person who would never grant you any grace or any dignity, no matter what.
	But you're still trying to do it.
	And I think that that's part of the problem.
	We all have to stop participating in the lie.
	It is not Good for a third grade teacher to talk to anyone's child about sex.
	I have these two boys at home.
	They are so freaking perfect and incredible and amazing.
	And it is my job to now hopefully give them enough tools to go out into the world and know and to react to it in some way that is truthful and decent and something.
	And I'm going to do the best I can with that.
	Will I fail?
	I'm sure.
	But I'm going to do the best I can.
	If I found out that it's six years from now, or seven years from now, and that my son Justin is in third grade and the teacher has secretly for months been calling him Justine and telling them he's a girl, I'm surprised people haven't been killed because of this.
	I really mean that.
	I really mean that.
	At some point, something horrible is going to happen.
	Well, something horrible is happening already because they're chopping off the genitals of kids.
	But at some point, some parent out there...
	I'm not excusing violence in any way whatsoever.
	Again, because I'm giving the caveats because I'm a good person.
	But they are doing something so twisted and it's all because we participate.
	Think how much time have you as a content creator spent talking about trans issues?
	It's so disproportionate to the.0001% of people that it's bananas.
	And by the way, me too.
	But we're all responding to the lie all the time.
	And how you extricate yourself from that, I don't know the exact answer.
	Talking about potential violence.
	I mean, it is the suggestion that just by raising awareness of it, you increase the risk of someone snapping and going ballistic.
	And it's the accusation against libs of TikTok by exposing what they're saying.
	Literally just amplifying that.
	Most people want to be amplified online.
	But it goes back.
	I don't know if it's Zelensky's Rules for Radicals or if it's Goebbels-level propaganda.
	Claim to be the victim while victimizing.
	And now they're saying, by bringing attention to what we are actively saying, and we're proud of it, and we think we're right for saying it, you're exposing us to violence.
	When I don't necessarily think that they are, I think the best thing that can happen would be the public discourse.
	But shielding this outrageous philosophy practice from critique under the pretext of being victims, it's a great way to make people even angrier.
	Because now you say, like, I can't even expose the fact that you're doing this to my kids and to other people.
	But that is why you should be very freaking proud that you live in Florida.
	We are dealing with all this stuff head-on because DeSantis chose to.
	And it is being eliminated from all of our institutions here.
	This does not take place here.
	Now, that's not to say there isn't some weird teacher probably in Orlando, that Disney country, and it is one of the few remaining pockets of blue, which there's pretty much none of them left.
	But they are getting rid of all of this everywhere.
	And that's another reason why when you say, okay, well, San Francisco, will it ever turn around?
	New York, will it ever turn around?
	No, because you're also breeding through public education a next generation of dependent, asexual, confused, broken people with broken brains.
	Think how many adults got their brain broken over the last three years of COVID and Trump derangements.
	There are a lot of people that I thought were pretty...
	Freaking on the ball about most stuff.
	Here, I'll be gratuitous.
	Sam Harris.
	This is a guy whose brain was broken by Trump and COVID.
	I don't know why you have me in this zone now.
	Now I'm just doing it.
	I've really gone out of my way not to talk about him because it's disappointing at a friend level what happened there.
	But putting that aside, there are plenty of bright adults, thoughtful, interesting.
	Well-educated adults whose brains were broken.
	And now you have seven-year-olds who are growing up with activist teachers, with parents that are confused about everything, and all of the rules we all believe in have been thrown out.
	And then we wonder why everyone's depressed and anxious about it.
	I'm not here in Florida.
	I tell you, everything's freaking great here.
	And again, that's why I can make the argument why DeSantis should not run for president, because we're doing it right here.
	And then I was telling my wife, if DeSantis leaves, okay, he appoints, I guess, a replacement or who knows what happens.
	But yeah, any state is one election away from turning into California in a generation, in a matter of five years.
	In this case, I think it's a little bit different because the machinery here now is really, really strong.
	I think there are, I don't even want to mention a couple names because I don't want to start infighting on that, but I think there's a couple.
	Good people who could follow him properly.
	I think he might be a once-in-a-generation candidate, which is then the best argument for why he has to run.
	I think there could be a replication of a Reagan situation here.
	You know, there's something about Casey DeSantis, the first lady, who's very Nancy Reagan-esque.
	I don't know if you saw the picture of her on Inauguration Day, but she had these gloves that kind of went up her arm.
	It was very...
	It was very JFK.
	It's just, the pieces are there.
	Jackie Onassis, I'm talking about.
	But we shall see.
	I want to highlight one absurdity, is that they have laws that, what do they call them?
	They call them transition...
	What's the word?
	Laws that prohibit transition therapy.
	As in, you can't talk someone out of thinking they're trans.
	Right, you have to encourage it, basically.
	You have to encourage an actual transition, so they have these anti-transition laws.
	It was Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan saying how the idea of psychiatrists or people who are helping with mental issues to affirm and not that their role should be to affirm is exactly backwards.
	You know, Jordan said something great when we were on tour.
	So this is 2018.
	So the trans stuff was bubbling up, obviously, but not as hot as it is now.
	One of the things that he said that I thought was the most thoughtful and that maybe really helps people frame it in a certain way.
	Let's say one of your kids now is 16, 17 years old and comes to you and says, Dad, you know, I'm physically a boy, but I really feel like I'm a girl.
	You go through all that and you really do everything that you can as a parent to talk about it in an honest way.
	And then you take them to a therapist and you're working on it and whatever's going on there.
	One of the things that Jordan said that I thought really was brilliant was the therapist has a duty to explain to that child, okay, so you're 16 now and you feel you're in the wrong body.
	If we change all of your body parts...
	That does not mean you will be happier on the other side of this thing.
	First off, in terms of the drugs you're going to have to be on, the surgeries, they live sometimes with a certain amount of pain because chopping genitals off ain't easy, inverting them, like a whole bunch of crazy stuff.
	You may not come out physically looking like you may not be passable and really look like a girl or whatever it might be.
	Like the idea that if you could just do all these physical changes, you will heal the thing on the inside is crazy.
	So it might be better, might.
	Be better, and this would be what an honest therapist would say, would be, okay, we acknowledge that your mental identity does not match up with your physical body, but there might be a better way to live within your physical body, beyond expenses and all of these things.
	And I think that's like a very calming way of discussing it, that that probably, well, in essence, they're not really allowed to say anymore because right now they have to, by law in many states, just run with this freaking thing.
	And you don't even have to get a second doctor.
	It used to be back in the day you had to have at least two doctors sign on, several psychologists to get these surgeries.
	Now it's just freaking drug them, chop it off, let's roll.
	It's nuts.
	I interviewed a British guy, Richie, who went through the surgery.
	And Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy.
	So on both ends of the sex side of it.
	Richie was an adult when it happened, who was suffering from a number of mental issues by his own admission, feels that he might have been exploited, or at least taken advantage of, but not explained the full consequences of this, where they say, yeah, here's what a female vagina looks like.
	He gave this anecdote where in the pre-op, they were showing pictures of female vaginas, not post-op neo-vaginas, as they call them.
	Old school the JJ.
	Old school, you know, made by God, if you believe in God, but not made by nature.
	And as if to say, all vaginas look differently, yours might look a little different.
	And Richie's, you know, his, a moment that I can only imagine is the most horrific moment, which is when he comes out of sedatives, because he had lost so much blood, he was basically unconscious for a week.
	Comes out, and he says they put the mirror between his legs, and...
	He said he was horrified.
	He said it looked like someone went at his groin with an axe.
	And they don't tell you about any of this.
	They don't tell you about the lifelong complications.
	They don't tell you about the immediate complications.
	These doctors who are sort of like the administrative tribunals in Canada, they exist for the purposes of propping up their own existence.
	They say, go run through it.
	It's horrific.
	And to target children who are...
	Confused in general.
	Viva, the other part of this is that it's wildly anti-gay for the same people that think that they are pro-gay.
	So when I was a kid, I liked mostly what were thought of as boy things.
	I like G.I. Joe, I like Transformers, I like Star Wars, I like playing basketball, all of those things.
	Okay, so I happen to be a gay adult and married to someone and okay, fine, you can like that or not like it.
	I actually don't even care that much as long as I'm treated equally under the law.
	I don't care if anyone likes me and I certainly don't want extra credit for it.
	But there are many effeminate.
	Gay boys that play with Barbies and play with other things that now would be encouraged, oh, you like pink?
	You're a girl, and go through this process.
	By the way, this is happening in Iran right now.
	Iran has a very high percentage of trans girls because they are gay guys, but Iranian authorities don't want to deal with the idea of a gay man.
	They would rather have them.
	Lopping off their genitals and living as women.
	So you would think that the LGBT community, which I have nothing to do with, that you would think that in the idea that everyone can sort of be ace, you know, we can all be in and out of sexuality, and it's just a...
	They're oddly the most ideological when it comes to this stuff, because apparently if you like pink, we better chop your dick off.
	That is my...
	Which is why, you know, I don't understand why there's not a fracturing of the LG.
	From the BTQ.
	Well, because it's not even a thing in the first place.
	Like, what is it?
	But for the most vocal of the progressives who are the most screaming on the far end of the plus side.
	Yeah.
	No, because believe it or not, I know you know this, but believe it or not, because most gay people are sort of like straight people and they just want to go about living their lives.
	So if I was to look at like a couple gay people that I could mention off the top of my head, because they're known, that I'm friendly with, like Douglas Murray.
	Great conservative British author.
	It's like, all right, that's a part of his life, but he's a brilliant intellect.
	You know, Peter Thiel.
	You know, I could give you, like, I don't want to sit here and name and gaze, but you get the point.
	Like, these people, they're not part of, I have nothing to do with the trans community.
	I have nothing to do with the lesbian community.
	I assure you, I know far less about lesbians than you probably do.
	You've probably studied lesbians in a way that I haven't.
	I see where you're going with this now.
	Okay, point well taken.
	Now I'm in trouble.
	No, some people might say it's because the gays and lesbians have gotten their rights, and so they don't need to be part of the community to make sure that the plus...
	Again, if you show me where they are not equal under the law, we can have a discussion about that, but nobody can really come up with that thing.
	And also, wait, wait, sorry, I just have to add one thing here.
	You know, this whole thing like, oh, but when the Stonewall riots, it was the...
	First off, all they wanted, in the Stonewall riots, what these people wanted, they wanted to be able to go to a bar, basically, that wasn't underground in a speakeasy where you had to use a secret code.
	They wanted to live a life that had value and that was equal.
	The gay rights movement went from a movement of equality, which is just, equality is just, to a movement of we are now going to derange and alter society in unrecognizable ways.
	That is very different than equality.
	Ultimate way of summarizing.
	It is the gay rights.
	Gays and lesbians said, leave me alone.
	Let me do what I want to do.
	And today it's, you must do this and you must call me this.
	You must bow down in front of me, which is what they used to do in some of those clubs downstairs.
	And targeting the children.
	Connor liked that one.
	Okay, the last time we spoke, you were on your first book.
	Now you've written your second book.
	Yes.
	Don't Burn This Country.
	Yes.
	What's it like?
	You wrote it during COVID.
	So I guess there was, you know, in a way...
	It was a little easier.
	Well, I say there wasn't that much to do except for what, you know, the people on the interwebs.
	That's when we were doing what we were doing.
	Yeah.
	What process goes into writing a second book?
	Do you not say I've said everything I have to say in my first book?
	Well, it was kind of funny because Don't Burn This Book really was...
	It was the culmination of everything I had been living through between leaving the left and dealing with the...
	Hate mobs and cancel culture and whatever.
	And it was a little kind of autobiographical.
	And, you know, so it was sort of it's not easy to write because a book is not easy to write.
	But like my pen was just kind of moving.
	And I wrote most of it actually first by pen.
	And then and then I write it later.
	I type it out later.
	So it wasn't it wasn't that hard for me to write.
	And I also didn't know what I was doing.
	You know, it's sort of like when you don't know what you're doing, you can kind of do it right.
	Sort of.
	So I'm very, very proud to don't bring this book because I think it's like got the right tone of humor and politics and all that stuff.
	Don't Burn This Country was more research-based.
	So I had a researcher working with me while we were doing it, meaning we were going for a little more like nuts and bolts and facts.
	And it's a little, it's structured a little more hardcore.
	It wasn't quite as fun for me to do.
	But the question was, was why write it or what?
	No, no.
	Just like the process.
	I mean, it's a lot of just freaking sitting.
	For me, I mean, everyone has their own process.
	For me, it was like, I was like, all right, I'm writing today.
	So if it was even on a Saturday, like I would go into my office at like 8 in the morning.
	I'd just be going.
	And sometimes I'd completely lose track of time.
	And it could be 5 o 'clock and I basically hadn't eaten or drank.
	Sometimes David would literally put a slide.
	He'd open the door.
	It became like a running joke like I was in prison.
	And he'd slide a plate of food under, you know, just like so I'd eat something.
	And then there are days where you just don't have anything and you just can't put it together.
	And like, why the hell am I doing this?
	But you just go and go and go and go.
	And I think I have probably two more in me, would be my guess.
	Do you read comments on the internet?
	Do you read replies on Twitter?
	On Locals, for sure.
	Locals has become...
	I mean, it's exactly why I created Locals.
	I wanted to create a place that would allow for somewhat like-minded people to engage in conversation in a more thoughtful way.
	And I think, in essence...
	Why we created Locals and why now it has become successful is that clearly is what a lot of people want.
	And it's worthy of throwing in a few dollars to do that, right?
	It's worthy.
	The people that are watching this on Locals right now that are commenting, that are your fans.
	You basically, whether you know every at handle or not, obviously you don't know every single one, but every single day I go into locals, I respond to comments, I look at what people are saying.
	It helps me frame what I'm thinking every now and again.
	I'll see a comment.
	I'll be like, you know, that is something I should be discussing on the show today.
	Or people give me ideas, things.
	Versus Twitter where it's just like this endless...
	You know, just like war zone, scorched earth, lunacy.
	I'll glance at YouTube comments for literally one minute a day.
	Now I have a guy that works for me that I've told, go in there just to get a, you know, a cross section of what's going on.
	And sometimes it's just for technical reasons.
	Like, you know, I'll see here.
	Somebody will say, Dave, you know, your audio sync was a little weird today.
	I need to know about that sort of thing, you know.
	But I try not to pay too much attention to that.
	The thing is, when you've done this thing long enough, and it's weird that I'm, like, a veteran of this, because I don't feel old, really, but, like, I've been doing this for a while, and I think a lot of people did model what I was doing and create other versions of it, which I think is great, actually.
	I think there's plenty of room for everybody.
	I love when, you know, when I find someone like you, literally, like, I'm like, who is this guy?
	He's saying something true.
	It seems nice and kind of funny, like, got crazy hair.
	Like, let's get in on this.
	And then I just think there's more room for everyone.
	I really believe that.
	We've created something really, really nice here, and I try not to get lost in the battlefield anymore.
	You mentioned, actually, locals as an entity, there's no risk that this becomes too much of a burden for Rumble as a bigger entity, and they say...
	No, these things are freaking like this.
	I mean, when we sat down, I kid you not, when Chris, who's the CEO of Rumble, and Asaf, who's the CEO of Locals, and I sat down, it was in Florida, like...
	Now it's about two years ago to initially discuss.
	I thought we were having dinner to discuss how could we just like have some very light partnership.
	Like, I don't know, you push some traffic our way.
	We'll figure out how to funnel some of the subscription money back to you.
	Something like that.
	We really had no idea.
	To tell you how good Chris from Rumble is, and now you've gotten to know Chris obviously yourself.
	He would then, by the time the water was poured.
	I mean, I remember it.
	They were pouring the water.
	So we had just sat down.
	He's like, guys, look, I want to acquire you.
	How are we going to do this?
	And, you know, that's an incredible thing to hear as a startup.
	It's like, oh, we're teaming with someone bigger than us.
	We knew that Teal had funded them, so it was like a well-funded operation, ideologically aligned.
	You want to make sure all those pieces.
	But then we had basically a year and a half of slogging out negotiations to make sure this was right, and I didn't want to merge.
	In essence, we merged, but they're the bigger company, so that's why it feels like it's an acquisition in that sense.
	I didn't want to just hand the keys to this thing to some company that was going to do whatever they wanted.
	I'm telling you, we had an all-cash offer on the table.
	Millions and millions of dollars cash I would have had to walk from this thing, and we didn't take it.
	And I want to give a little credit to my partner, Asaf, who's sitting out there right now.
	This is the office and studio that we built.
	I was more inclined to take it.
	Because I was working so hard and doing my show, and suddenly I was spending 75% of my day on Locals to build a tech company, which was not my intention, that I was kind of like, you know what?
	We built something good.
	Maybe we should just move on.
	And he was like, no, no, no, no.
	There's a much better opportunity here.
	And clearly it turned out to be the right thing.
	And now circling all the way back to the beginning with what happened with Project Veritas, the concern of people out there is that we're one mutiny away from Rumble being turned into YouTube.
	I can tell you this without giving you everything under the hood.
	First off, Chris himself, this is a good dude.
	This is a really good dude.
	I know him fairly well.
	I've had dinner with his wife and child.
	Like, good dude.
	Saf is a great dude.
	He happens to be my brother-in-law also, so he married my sister.
	He's been in my family for a long time.
	These people are fighting for the right ideas.
	The board now, who I've gotten to know a whole bunch of them, like, all anyone does is talk about free speech, talk about building the parallel rails.
	I have never...
	I'll tell you something about Chris.
	I was thinking about this the other day.
	I've never even heard Chris talk about the money.
	The guy's worth a shit ton of money right now.
	This company went public like an unimaginable amount.
	I've never heard him say that.
	I've never heard him talk about the size house he wants to build.
	A lot of people do.
	I don't begrudge anyone anything that they want.
	But I think that this is as ideologically aligned and set up properly.
	The infrastructure is set up properly.
	I think I'm right.
	I think I'm right about this.
	All right.
	And now this might be...
	Come on, Viva.
	Challenge me, for God's sake.
	I guess now, one question.
	It's this paper straw.
	Well, you're lucky it's still getting the fluid out of there.
	What do you see for the future?
	I occasionally wake up and have dark thoughts as to where things are going because it doesn't seem that there's a bottoming out of the madness.
	You've been in this for longer.
	You're sort of more deeper into it and more exposure than I do.
	Doing what I do.
	Optimist or pessimist as to where this goes in the short term versus, you know, setting aside the World War III, maybe we'll talk a little bit about Joe, but sure.
	Socially, you know, from a social perspective, is it going to get worse in your mind, or do you see it getting better already?
	Well, I always describe myself, I think someone wrote in a piece once, that they thought I was a world-weary optimist, and I really like that phrase.
	I'm an optimist at heart because I don't think I can do this and talk about what I believe and fight for what I think is right if I wasn't an optimist in some degree.
	You have to believe you can change things for the better, or at least sustain something decent.
	To do this, otherwise we'd be complete lunatics.
	But at the same time, I'm not a wild-eyed optimist, meaning like, oh yes, everything's going to get better just because I wish it so, and that's going to be how it is.
	I'm world-weary.
	The world is a freaking whacked-out place, and I come from, on both sides of my family, my mom's side and my dad's side, Holocaust survivors.
	The world can be horrific, unimaginably brutal, as Jordan would say.
	So I'm not just blind in the optimism.
	But I believe we can do something good.
	And I'll tell you, Michael Malice was sitting in that very chair a couple weeks ago.
	And, you know, the point that he's often made is that, you know, they're not sending the best of the best.
	You know, if we're up against Joe Biden, who has dementia, and AOC, who's an idiot, and Ilhan Omar, and Adam Schitt, like, these are, it's a clown show of ridiculous people.
	Now, yes, could the WEF be controlling things above that, and they've stuck you with Trudeau?
	Okay, fine.
	So we have to deal with all this stuff within the limited...
	Scope that we can talk about it.
	Something like that.
	I'm bullish on, I would say, humans' ability to fight for freedom and come out on top.
	That is what the human story is.
	I would say I'm very, very bullish on what's going on here in Florida, and I think we have the blueprint for how we can fix America.
	I am not bullish on the country as a whole.
	So I really do think if it isn't DeSantis, if Biden gets in again or the Democrats get in again, the grand experiment might be over.
	That is the black-pilled version.
	Like, I don't think we can sustain this thing much longer.
	The economic policies, the woke policies, all of it feels like it'll kind of be over at a national level.
	And then we'll have little states within, you know, we'll have, it'll be federalism as it was intended.
	I mean, Florida will flourish.
	But, you know, the feds will always move on Florida then and they'll move on Texas and they'll move on Montana.
	The blue states will always want what the red states have.
	It won't be the other way.
	And people will still want to come here.
	And I've said to DeSantis as a joke, you know, we should charge an entry tax now that I'm here.
	It's like people should have to pay to get in on this.
	1,200 people a day move here.
	So when people are always like, oh, well, we should have this like great debate between California and Florida.
	It's like we've had the debate.
	People leave.
	Cali every day.
	Nobody's leaving Florida.
	Was it you who said it?
	The U-Hauls going cross-country were going to California, Florida and not Florida back?
	We basically had to pay double for our U-Hauls because we use another company.
	But in essence, because they're all going west and then they stop in Texas.
	A lot of them stop in Texas and then might go to Florida, but nothing's going the other way anymore.
	It's not to say there's other people going to the other states, but the bulk of things, New York, Cali, Florida's there, Texas is in the middle.
	And they're all going one way, and normally in a normal business, okay, now you've got to load up the truck on the way back to send it home, and now they're sending empty trucks home.
	So in that regard, I'm optimistic because I see what's happening here, and I think that Florida, and I would say Miami specifically because it's the most metropolitan city here, is 30 years in the future.
	This is what America is supposed to be, what's going on here.
	We're diverse because nobody cares about diversity, meaning...
	Nobody cares.
	All right, there's Cubans there, and there's Venezuelans there, and there's a Mexican guy there, and nobody cares.
	It's completely irrelevant.
	We're rebuilding the tech sector here.
	Suarez has been absolutely incredible, the mayor, related to that.
	I think Florida is fighting all the right fights in terms of everything that DeSantis has done, and we have no income tax.
	The weather is great.
	Look, we had a Category 5, as DeSantis called it, a biblical storm.
	This was a once-in-a-hundred-year storm that sat.
	This thing, I don't know if you realize, like, actually how big this thing was.
	Well, I actually did not appreciate how darn lucky we got.
	We're, like, mid-Panhandle?
	Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	You're not mid-Panhandle.
	You're East Coast here.
	Yeah, East Coast, but, like, we're halfway through, sort of, like, it's the glades behind us, and then it's nothing.
	We're, like, 12 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Coast.
	Right, but this hit the Gulf.
	So it missed us on the left.
	Right, so in essence...
	And I had no idea how...
	Like, I was like, oh, it's a hurricane.
	Part of the Florida hurricane season.
	I had no idea how biblical it was.
	Oh, this thing was unbelievably massive.
	And it basically sat on Southwest Florida.
	So Sanibel Island and Fort Myers, blah, blah.
	Anyway, I've been there.
	My folks had a place on the island.
	It's in various states of disrepair.
	I've been to the island since.
	I mean, it's demolished, but they're rebuilding incredibly quickly.
	The bridge, there's the Sanibel Causeway.
	It's about a three-mile bridge.
	It was demolished, like as if bombs went off, on election night.
	I was at the DeSantis.
	I was broadcasting from the DeSantis campaign.
	And a guy came up to me and he said, Dave, you might be interested in this story.
	He said, I'm a contractor in Fort Myers.
	And two or three days after the hurricane, DeSantis came down and he got a whole bunch of us electricians, contractors, cement guys.
	He got everybody together.
	And he said, what do you guys need from me?
	And basically all everyone said was cut all the red tape.
	Let us get to work immediately.
	They rebuilt the bridge in two weeks.
	He said it would have taken two years.
	If the federal government was involved.
	That tells you everything you need to know.
	We're doing it.
	We're rebuilding roads here, left and right.
	There's houses going up as fast as they can possibly go up.
	Florida does have one problem, which is that we have a housing price problem, but not where Cali has a housing price problem because it's propped up by BlackRock and all of these companies buying all of these houses.
	We have a problem here because so many people are moving in.
	You can only build things with a certain speed.
	That will be dealt with too.
	And there's plenty of land to build.
	There still is.
	As packed as this state is, there's tons of land.
	South of Miami, Homestead area, a little bit more towards the Panhandle on the other side.
	There's a lot of land.
	So we're doing everything right.
	So I'm very bullish on that model.
	But if DeSantis doesn't become president, not to say it can't be anybody else.
	If a Republican can get in and figure out a way to really dismantle a bunch of this stuff, then I would be bullish on America again.
	And I think that would be great.
	And by the way, That's why I would support DeSantis going.
	You know what I mean?
	To me, it would be the dream of we send out our best guy and he does the thing.
	That's the American dream.
	Not because everything's wrapped up in politics, but because the dream of you can fix bad things.
	You can fight for things that are right.
	That would be a beautiful thing, but it's a dream.
	And dreams don't always come true.
	Well, the one thing I find hilarious is we moved down from Canada.
	People in Canada have a stereotype of Florida in general.
	Florida man.
	I mean, anybody who doesn't know the gag, you go to put Florida man in the Google search engine and you'll find some hilarious stuff.
	He's wrestling an alligator with a cigar in his mouth and a little dog out of its mouth.
	Dying in weird ways and doing silly things.
	People poop all over Florida and it seems that there's a fixation that I think is actually more rooted in jealousy than it is in disdain.
	And there's a part of me that feels sympathetic to the people who...
	Would love to move here but can't and therefore have to demonize it and say I'm happy in commie California or commie Canada.
	Thus far, it's been incredible.
	The weather is nice, but I prefer seasons.
	The geography is nice, but I prefer mountains.
	The fresh water is nice, but I like swimming.
	Right, so this is hilarious.
	This is what you get.
	But none of that.
	I know you're saying it sort of as a joke.
	But none of that.
	You would trade gladly those things that you don't have for the freedom that you now have.
	A thousand percent.
	First off, it's also 75 and absolutely gorgeous today.
	So yes, you don't have hills.
	We don't have hills here.
	It's a very flat place.
	No fresh water you can swim in without risking alligators.
	I went kayaking on one of the ponds.
	Go swim in the Gulf.
	You'll be fine.
	You'll be fine.
	But it is...
	I would trade it all for freedom.
	Of course.
	Now, I've got three kids, and we spent the last three years in Canada masking up vaccine passports, living a life which I think is absolutely psychologically destructive for a child.
	And we get here, and my anecdote memory was when we were driving down, we're on our way, and we were at a hotel, and they didn't want to get into the elevator because someone else was in there.
	Not because they were scared, but because where we're from, you don't do that anymore.
	And it's a beautiful thing to be here.
	And people demonizing it, I think it's more rooted in jealousy than it is in anything real.
	Well, look, have you paid attention to the last couple days with this DeSantis ban, this AP African American Studies course?
	So, I mean, I know what people are saying about it, and people are idiots, and they're saying that he's banning African Studies when it was some gender ideology aspect of the studies.
	And I mean, I know it, like, I know it just reflexively, but then I see the people in Canada messaging me, my wife, like, hey, this is what's going on in your state, and they don't understand a damn thing.
	But that's why the mainstream media is actually dangerous at this point.
	Corporate media is dangerous.
	I got a text over the weekend from a friend of mine who lives in L.A. He's basically red-pilled, hasn't left yet.
	He's planning his exit, but he's still friends with a lot of Hollywood liberal types.
	He said, I'm in a debate right now.
	He said, I'm sitting at Starbucks.
	I'm in a debate right now about DeSantis banning this AP African-American studies thing.
	He's like, I don't know much about it, but it can't be true, is it?
	And I sent him a couple of articles.
	I sent him some of my tweets on it and concise videos on it.
	But I was like, man, this is why the mainstream media is so evil.
	They are convincing people that somehow...
	We played some clips on The View.
	I mean, they have said some crazy...
	That he just wants to ban talk about slavery and civil rights.
	An AP class.
	An AP class.
	That means you're getting college credit as a high school student for this.
	They don't want genderqueer theory.
	Was Harriet Tubman eating pussy?
	That's what they don't want in there.
	How does genderqueer...
	This is why I say like...
	Harriet Tubman eating pussy.
	Now you've heard me say it twice today.
	Well, there's going to be another highlight.
	The idea of the trans movement being fundamentally homophobic, misogynistic.
	They cloak their objection to this law in anti-racism when it's fundamentally exploitive of Black History Month.
	Of course.
	Let's sneak it in here and then we're going to use black history and black Americans to say...
	DeSantis is a racist because he wants to don't say black.
	I mean, it's like when the first stories came out and they're saying he wants to ban studying of African-American history or black history, I was like, okay, I was here for the don't say gay bill, so I know you're lying.
	Right, so it's like, you know, all right, give me a minute.
	Yeah, give me a minute.
	But it's so exploitive from the party that says we're not the racists, but we're going to dishonestly exploit Black History Month to further our ideological agenda.
	How do you get...
	The sane people to understand that the people who say that they're not the racists are the racists.
	No, but now do you see, I know you know this, but do you see why they need censorship?
	Why is it that they need to make sure that we're shadow banned and algorithmically depressed and everything else?
	It's because we're shining a light on this nonsense.
	This is what DeSantis has done so well.
	And the more he shines the light, now they do new things.
	You see the new trick with DeSantis?
	It was in, I think, Atlantic like a week ago.
	They were like, Trump was a unique threat because he fought the media.
	DeSantis is even scarier because he ignores us.
	And it's like, man, he's doing what you MFers deserve.
	This is what you deserve.
	But they have kept a certain amount of people completely bamboozled.
	And confused and brainwashed.
	And it is our job to outpace them.
	And that's sort of like how fast can we red pill and how fast can they blue pill?
	And also they have every advantage over us.
	But I don't know.
	I have nothing better to do than save the world.
	Like, let's go.
	Let's go.
	You now are recently a father.
	Yes.
	There's a story.
	There's a whole backstory behind this.
	Yeah.
	And I know you've shared some of it.
	I don't want to pry.
	What was this?
	Explain how.
	A male couple ends up with, they're not twins, but they're like, there's nothing beyond Irish twins because these are...
	Babies.
	These are tighter than Irish twins.
	So how did this all happen?
	Well, first off, I'm not a scientist.
	I'm not a biologist.
	I don't know what a woman is, but I know who carried the babies.
	No, no.
	I mean, without getting too lost in all, like, the stuff, like, we find an egg donor, right?
	You see, there's ways that you can go about in finding an egg donor.
	And our basic criteria for an egg donor was we wanted a girl that was, that basically, like, I didn't want, like, a six-foot-four Swedish blonde woman.
	We wanted a woman that looked like maybe the type of woman that I would have married if I had been straight or something, so that the kids would...
	Look somewhat roughly like us.
	We got two eggs, one with my sperm, one with David's sperm, and it's very technical.
	The doctor goes in.
	I mean, they can see the whole thing and they do it.
	And then we had two surrogates, and these are the most wonderful.
	It's all by choice.
	No one is forced to do anything or anything like that.
	These women, both of them, happened to be Christian and believed that it was their duty, that they have this incredible...
	Power in the world that they can help people that want to have families have these families.
	And basically what happened, the reason that the kids are so close, they're two months to the day apart.
	And the reason for that is we had one surrogate who had a couple miscarriages and then they wouldn't allow her to be used anymore.
	As a side note, there was during COVID, which is when we were doing this, our doctor said that he saw more miscarriages during COVID than he had ever seen basically in his 30-year career combined.
	That tells you a little something about stress.
	And this was pre-vax.
	Pre-vax.
	So that's not necessarily part of it.
	In any event, when the first surrogate got pregnant, basically, I'm 46. We were just like, all right, if we really want to, we don't know if the next one is going to take, how long it takes.
	And then, so we went for it.
	And then, of course, that one took immediately.
	So that's why they're so close.
	So in life, they will really be twins, in essence.
	They are biologically related through the mother's egg.
	And so far, so good.
	They're happy and healthy.
	Do you know who the biological father is?
	We know who is who.
	We have not told anyone, including our parents or anyone else.
	And in an interesting twist, most people are guessing wrong, which is kind of fun for us.
	And I think, I guess, it'll just kind of present itself one day.
	Fantastic.
	And how do you find this?
	I mean, there can't be much more of a life-altering, in the best way.
	Yeah.
	Depending on...
	Well, it's the best way.
	In most ways...
	Well, to most people, it would be the best way.
	Some people say, I would never do it again.
	It compromised my career.
	But how do you make it work and how are you finding the experience now?
	I mean, look, I, especially in these last five years, as I always say, David, we have lived a very charmed existence.
	Like, my career took off.
	We have means to do things.
	We went on cool vacations.
	Like, we eat good food.
	I have the things that I want.
	I have a full-court basketball court.
	I did the things.
	I can say that without guilt because, first off, I think if you work for something and attain it, it's actually quite beautiful.
	But I did all the work to get...
	I don't mean that purely at the stuff level.
	I mean at the life level.
	I wake up and I do what I'm supposed to be doing, what I want to be doing.
	Every morning when I wake up and I'm ready to do the show...
	If I take three days off, if one of my guys is on vacation and we...
	Just take off a random day.
	I miss doing the show, genuinely.
	I took a week off when Luke was born.
	Justin was born in August, so I was already off.
	But when Luke was born, I was like, I miss doing the show.
	I'm always like, man, I want to talk about that.
	So we've had something really, really great.
	Then you add kids to it, and suddenly you're sleeping less.
	And I can't just lounge in the pool with a tequila drink at 2 p.m. on a Saturday anymore.
	That's long gone.
	So I think in some ways...
	There's like a certain like, this isn't quite the right word, but there's like, I have a little bit of like morning for my old life, but I know how good it was to get me here.
	And then, you know, when I'm sitting with those kids in the morning, so my day, because my day is so packed, I try to do like a good hour in the morning and then, you know, around five o 'clock, I'm kind of wrapping up there awake till about eight.
	So then I have that time.
	But when you're with them and you're not on Twitter and they're smiling at you and you just can see the world in a new way in their eyes and you have the, I don't have to tell you this as a father, that it renews the spirit of like, I was fighting for a world that would be the best world I could live in, I suppose, but now I have to fight for a world that will be the best world they live in.
	And I think that may be another reason to get to what we talked about earlier about how you shift in your tactics when you're fighting.
	I think maybe I've become a little more direct because of that, too.
	Like, when I was seeing that whole nonsense around don't say gay, and it's like, first off, I know the governor and the first lady.
	The idea that they're homophobes is ridiculous.
	They sent us onesies for the kids immediately.
	When I saw the first lady last time, all she wanted to do was see pictures of the kids.
	Like, these are good people.
	But then you see the disconnect between the media and all that.
	And then it's like, man.
	I have these kids, and I would not want someone else telling these kids anything that I had no knowledge of or anything else.
	So it makes you want to fight for these things a little bit harder, I suppose.
	And something else, this will be for my own self-help, edification.
	Yes.
	Stress, anxiety, and fear.
	Oh, I thought you were going to ask me what hair product I use, because I mean, my God, it's everywhere, man.
	It's all over the place.
	I can see myself in your thing.
	It's incredible.
	The colors are changing and there's like a little gray and there's a little orange.
	Having looked at you for the last hour, it starts shifting like it's alive.
	It's like, whatchamacallit in Spider-Man, Venom.
	It's like the symbiote.
	It's like on you.
	No hair tips, but stress, anxiety, fear.
	I remember in the first book, you talked about the anxiety, you talked about the stress.
	The fear of impending doom.
	Especially the world in which we're living.
	Not that I'm crazy, but I might be a little crazy.
	You go to bed at night and you say, if they're going to trigger a nuke over in Europe and there's going to be a tsunami, what's it going to be like?
	How do you deal with it?
	And does it get better?
	Does it get worse?
	Or is it strictly a question of learning how to cope with it?
	Well, I think there's two parts to that.
	So one is just like the impending fear of doom at a societal level.
	That things are so nuts and humans have such technological power, whether with nukes or EMPs or what the Internet has done to us.
	And we're on like the precipice of all being like slaves to robots and like all of that kind of crazy stuff.
	I've been able to mostly do that.
	I think partly the reason that I didn't go crazy, I say this, and people think I'm joking when I say this, but over the last couple of years where so many people went nuts, I love sci-fi movies.
	So much of my childhood, whether it's Total Recall or AI or I Am Legend or iRobot or The Matrix or any Philip K. Dick story, I love so much of that dystopian stuff and V for Vendetta and just the list goes on and on that I was sort of not prepared for this because you never prepared for that day where they locked you in your house and you can't believe what's going on.
	Understanding what power is and just like this weird disconnect between reality and what we're thinking.
	Like a lot of the stuff that I've always loved and even the freaking, believe it or not, Viva, the Star Wars prequels laid out a great story about the accumulation of power and how you can use both sides against each other to actually, you can pull the strings to make that happen and blah, blah, blah.
	I'll show you a great Twitter thread I have on that that'll blow your mind related to COVID and the prequels.
	I was somewhat prepared for some of that stuff.
	So I think you have to kind of move off the big ones, right?
	Like, could the nuke be dropped while we're sitting here?
	Yes.
	But you know what?
	We sat here.
	We enjoyed ourselves.
	It is what it is.
	On the personal side of, like, you're in it now, right?
	Like, you're in the thing.
	Would the machine love to destroy you?
	Would the machine love to take me out?
	And all that stuff.
	I told you about the news guard thing.
	Like, they're always planning hit pieces, but none of it does anything anymore.
	And yes, is there always another way that they can do something?
	And do they do horrible things and all of that?
	I can't sit here and say the answer is no, but I just think that if you're just and decent and you just keep going, how about this?
	I'll even slightly alter what I was going to say.
	You have no freaking choice, my friend.
	You cannot stop yourself now.
	And so you better get on board.
	Meaning you can't stop yourself from saying what you think.
	You can't stop yourself from being part of this thing.
	There is nothing you can do.
	Until the day that you don't do it anymore.
	But you are not anywhere close to that day.
	Now that day might come when you're 72. And maybe that day comes when I'm 54. But I'm nowhere close to it yet.
	You cannot stop yourself.
	Are there times where I'm like, man, I shouldn't be screaming about the FBI that much?
	They're not good.
	They might say bad things about me.
	Like, I am.
	But then, like, what...
	Otherwise, what are we?
	What are we doing here if not to fight for something that's better?
	It's an interesting way of putting it.
	Like, you can't stop, I think, once you get on the path and not in a bad way.
	Yeah, like, once you realize you can't not say what you're thinking when it's the most obvious logical thing, you can't stop.
	And then...
	You're on a trajectory that you can't get off of anyhow because...
	Actually, it's better.
	Don't say what you think.
	Don't fight for what's right.
	You should just protect your own and see what happens.
	Frog pot.
	Tend to your garden.
	Well, the frog pot.
	But I remember back in the day watching Christina Blasey Ford and the machine go after Kavanaugh.
	And I'm sitting there saying, okay, well, I want to be objective.
	Let me look at this from both sides.
	And, you know, Christina Blasey Ford, she could be a victim.
	I think she's a victim of something.
	Might be a few things.
	But then you realize just how insidious it all is.
	Okay, now do you even speak up when the FBI can six ways from Sunday to go get after you?
	As Chuck Schumer threatened us all.
	And like drudge up something that probably didn't happen in any version of reality at all.
	30 years old to destroy you as you go through.
	At some point you just want to give up and stop talking because you feel that it's all the way pointless.
	I know, but the thing is you can't.
	You just can't.
	I can't exactly explain why, but humans have been through worse than whatever we're going through right now.
	This is a unique challenge because of the tech side of this, where it's fueled by things that are artificial and weird and un-understandable.
	Where, you know, back in the day, you know, did you watch Downton Abbey by any chance?
	I think I may have seen one episode.
	Downton Abbey basically took place in England right around when the Titanic, the first episode is when the Titanic sinks.
	One of the things that the family is most worried about, so this is early 1900s for the most part, into World War II basically I think is where it sort of started ending.
	But one of the things the family is most worried about, they hate the media because the media is always lying about them.
	So maybe the media has always been like this.
	And maybe we didn't know it.
	And maybe we all thought Walter Cronkite was so great, but actually he wasn't so great.
	I don't know.
	I suspect he probably was pretty good relative to what we have now.
	But the point is, you just, there's no way around it.
	The truth is the truth.
	And if you're attracted to the truth, if you value the truth, you cannot do anything against it.
	And as Jerry said to George, good luck with all of that.
	And now I think before I forget.
	Are we able to go to Locals exclusive now so we can get some of the questions from Locals?
	And I've got a few more questions, which I think I actually haven't asked.
	Just for the good stuff.
	How long have we been going for, Dave?
	I have no idea.
	An hour and 52 minutes?
	Sweet Jesus.
	Sweet Jesus Louise is right.
	I got a sick kid at home.
	I got to get out of here.
	All right, let's go.
	15 minutes.
	Here we go.
	Not even.
	No, no, 15. Or are we already on Locals?
	Look how nice that studio looks.
	Look at that.
	40 seconds, then we're going to go to Locals, everybody who's watching on Rumble.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com is the locals community.
	I don't know why.
	I have to figure out the way I'm sitting, posturing.
	Got a cramp in my left hip.
	Oh, you got the left hip cramp?
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com for some exclusive stuff.
	See you there.
	Everyone who's already there, I'm going to go to this thing.
	Tap again because I don't seem to see the...
	Oh, wow.
	Look at this.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's nice.
	Isn't that nice?
	I mean, we built this thing.
	Originally, it was in a separate box.
	Now we're Instagram level right over the screen there.
	You're awesome, Dave.
	Love you, Serena Reppens.
	Fuck talking about the issue.

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