Digital Warfare: The Hidden Dangers of TikTok Data Collection | Dave Rubin DSH #954

That's partly why I evolved politically because I was talking to all these scary right-wingers and all the people that I was told were evil, and they happen to be the nicest people that I'm meeting.

And then, unfortunately, what happens usually on the other side is the more you talk to the people on the right, the more that the left hates you.

And actually, it's not a two-way street there.

When you're on the right and you start talking to people on the left, people are usually like, Oh, that's interesting.

They're not that bright, or they don't really understand what they're talking about.

All right, guys, Dave Rubin here from Miami.

Hasn't been to Vegas in a while.

I have not been to Vegas since 2016.

Damn.

I have only been to Vegas once in my life for one night.

It was the Democrat National Convention, Bernie versus Hillary.

I was going to cover it.

I was working for Aura TV.

They had no budget, so I had to pay to take my team out.

And because I didn't have much money, I was making maybe 50, 60 grand a year.

We stayed at Circus Circus.

Wow, $20 a night.

I still have the disease I caught that night.

The bed bugs.

Yeah.

It was that place.

I mean, the whole place smelled like a, like a disinfectant factory.

Yeah.

Something is not right over there.

We're leveling up this time.

We're over at the fountain blue.

There we go.

Yeah.

No wonder you haven't been back since.

So that was your experience.

It freaked me out.

It freaked me out.

But I love, the funny thing is, I actually, I'm not a gambler, but I love casinos.

I love the energy of it.

I love the overstimulation.

I love the scent.

I love the just, there's something about a casino.

Everyone is just who they are when you're in a casino.

You know what I mean?

You see people in tuxedos and you see like the biggest trash of all time and everything in between.

And they're all interacting.

And I just, I love that.

It's a little bit about the like the gestalt of life or something.

I'm sure you've been a lot happier since the election's finally over.

Oh my God.

This is, I mean, we're, we're about to have the renaissance of America.

How old are you?

27.

You do not remember, my friend, the 80s, and they're about to be back.

And it was the best decade in American history.

Certainly, you know.

from

any modern times at least.

Like there is going to be such a burst of culture and comedy and humor and movies and music, like all of the stuff that has been just so rotted and calcified and sucked for so long now.

It's all coming back.

And the economy is going to boom and the world is going to get reordered politically.

There's a lot of goodness coming.

Not to say they don't have two months to really fuck up a lot of shit.

Well, they're trying to put Kamala in.

They're telling him to resign.

They're trying to put her in.

They're trying to start

World War III.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we're going to have to deal with till then, but I'm so bullish on the future of America right now.

And had it gone the other way, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They might actually really start that war.

It's looking really concerning, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's sick.

Like these people want to hold on to power in a way that they're literally

now knowing they're losing power, they're shooting.

We are now basically giving Ukraine rockets to shoot further into Russia than ever before.

At some point, if you're Russia, you might say we're not going to take this anymore.

That's not making the case for Russia or arguing for Russia or anything else, but it's just, they're a sovereign nation too.

You need to sovereign nation.

They're a sovereign nation.

If somebody was paying for Cuba to shoot rockets into Miami, I might be for destroying that place.

Yeah, they're going to make it hard on Trump to negotiate because the more they attack him, I mean, the harder the negotiations are going to be.

Well, it feels right.

I mean, that's the thing.

It feels like they're throwing in the kitchen sink now.

It's like, oh, Trump's going to come in and fix this real quick.

Let's see how dirty we can make it, you know,

before he gets in there.

It's like they're sore losers, right?

Yeah.

Not like it.

They are sore losers.

And then they blame the J6 incident that we're sore losers, too.

The fact that they even, that that is even a thing anymore, that anyone buys any of that.

I'm so over all of that.

And that's why I'm so like pleased, not just because of the election, but just the upheaval now with mainstream media and that no one's buying this nonsense anymore.

And that even today, Elon's like, maybe I'll buy MSNBC.

Did you see that?

And it's like, we don't need a cable channel really because the internet has clearly eclipsed all that.

But just the wholesale change that has occurred.

We've known it.

We've all known it for a while.

You're online, you're doing a show.

Like you get what's going on out there.

But we needed the culture to have like a real sort of mindset shift where it was like, oh, oh, the online thing doesn't mean we're all perfect at all of this or there's all kinds of fault lines there too, but that the mainstream corporate press is dead and it needs to be buried and we need to keep burying it.

You know, there's an inclination like, oh, they kind of, they're losing numbers and everything else.

Like now just stop talking about them, stop paying attention.

But like, it's like Freddy Krueger.

You got to bury his bones a couple of times.

Alternative media, I think, decided the outcome of this election.

Oh, I completely agree.

I mean, that's, I think this was the election over reality.

It wasn't really people think it was Trump versus the Dems or Biden, Kamala, whatever it was, but it was reality.

And I think they finally learned that enough of us had woken up to the bullshit.

We had woken up to the bullshit around very fine people on both sides and all of the COVID stuff and the Russia hoax.

And just enough of us were like, you know what?

Enough of this, enough of this BS.

And the amount of people that I know in my personal life, I'm not even talking about my audience, in my own personal life who had absolute Trump derangement syndrome for the last eight years.

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Who are now the biggest Trump supporters?

It's crazy.

I know at least a dozen people in my own personal life.

Wow.

And that tells you, you take a guy like Bobby Kennedy should not be voting for a Republican.

Tulsi should not announce that she's a Republican and be on stage with Trump.

Elon should not be a Republican.

I should not be a Republican if things were set in some kind of sane way.

But here we are.

And again, I think this is now the greatest political movement that I've ever seen in my lifetime.

This is, it's not, because it's not a conservative movement.

It's an America movement.

and we're going to fix the health system the economy is going to start chugging we got some good stuff i'm excited what was that final straw maybe i've just hopped up on that crazy air they pump in the uh in the hotels yeah oh you could be you know they pump that air and start feeling a little crazy i think i think i might have a little gives you that itch to get on the tables absolutely what was that final straw for you to switch because you were a little sooner than some of the people you named yeah um you know there were a couple things along the way the the one that most people sort of know as my famous moment was i was on with larry elder when I was still a lefty.

I had just left the Young Turks Network.

Larry Elder, who happens to be black, he's a conservative, he's libertarian, really.

And we started talking about systemic racism and he, I was interviewing him, but he just flipped the interview on me, just completely twisted it on me, started asking me all these questions.

I did not have proper answers.

And I don't know how many people get to say this.

Maybe you'll get to say it one day.

But in my career, I think my best and worst moment was at the exact same time because it was my worst moment because I came to a gunfight not ready for the debate.

I was not prepared and he was.

So that was why it was my worst moment.

And it was my best moment because when that show ended, we weren't live streaming.

It was going to be aired the next day.

And I was at Aura TV at the time.

So we had a bunch of producers and stuff.

I go into the control room after and all the producers were like, don't worry, Dave, we'll cut that part out.

Don't worry about it.

Don't worry about it.

And you know, sometimes in life, you just say something.

You don't even think about it.

You just say something.

And it's the right thing.

And there's a reason it's right because it's true.

I was just like, no, we got to leave that in.

If I'm an interviewer, I can't cut probably the most important part of the interview.

Then what am I doing this for?

And we left it in.

And the next day, you know, a million, it gets cut a zillion ways across YouTube.

And, you know, it's black, conservative, destroys white, libtard, and all that.

And it gets, you know, millions of views in many different iterations and across all platforms.

And for a day, I was like, man, this really sucks.

And then I started looking at the comments and there were all these people like, hey, you know, Ruben was listening.

And he said that they'd continue the conversation and everything else.

And then you flash forward five years and I'm on stage with Larry Elder when he's campaigning to be governor during the Gavin Newsom recall because we became, and he's a dear friend of mine now.

And it's like, that's what a proper evolution is about.

If you go, if you go towards the truth, good things will happen.

Full circle moment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

60 Minutes did not, or they did cut stuff out.

You did not.

I just wouldn't do it.

I wouldn't do it.

You know, I've done thousands of interviews at this point.

We've, we've edited only one for content ever, and it was because somebody whose name need not be mentioned, but who's a fairly big star, everyone watching this knows the person was so drunk and stoned that I actually felt it could like completely wreck their career in a really terrible way.

So we added that one.

And then beyond that, we've edited, you know, if somebody has like a coughing fit or like, you know, has to get up to go to the bathroom.

But otherwise, we just let it we let it be and let the chips fall where they may.

100%.

I'm the same way.

I've only edited if they asked, if they asked to cut something out.

But other than that.

Have you had people ask because they want to cut out, like they said something wrong or they realize they stepped in some shit?

Yeah, more like the PR thing, like they announced something too early or like whatever.

So that type of thing, I wouldn't have an ethical problem with that.

If it was like literally like, oh, I shouldn't, we're launching a product and I, you know, something like that, I wouldn't have a problem.

If it was content,

if it was specific content, I, I think I would have some sort of ethical dilemma or at least a discussion with them about it.

I don't do as many live as I used to.

I used to do a ton of my interviews live stream.

Now we do my daily show live stream and we do the interviews usually pre-taped.

How come?

More because of scheduling than anything else.

You know what I mean?

Like you just start doing this and just like you, you just finished up some stuff.

And then, you know, it just gets more complex to be doing it that way.

So for me, it's like we know we're doing my live show every day, 11 a.m.

Eastern.

That's what we're doing.

And then the interviews, we just kind of set them as the days going by.

And also, I'm busier now than I was back then.

So with hits or travel.

So it's just, it's purely like a mapping thing.

Yeah.

When it comes to picking guests, do you have a line that you draw with certain people that you'll have on?

I try to make it as wide as possible, but as you probably know, like it starts, the bigger you get, it starts becoming a little bit more complex because especially if you do anything roughly political or cultural,

generally speaking, people on the right or whatever we just described as this new Trump thing, they're willing to talk to anybody and have those conversations all the time and laugh about it and then break bread with you after.

And that's partly why I evolved politically because I was talking to all these scary right-wingers years ago.

And I was like, wait a minute.

Larry Elder's a nice guy.

And Shapiro is kind of cool.

Having dinner with Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck and all the people that I was told were evil and and they happen to be the nicest people that I'm meeting.

And then unfortunately, what happens usually on the other side is the more you talk to the people on the right, the more that the left hates you.

And actually, it's not a two-way street there.

When you're on the right and you start talking to people on the left, people are usually like, oh, that's interesting.

They're not that bright or they don't really understand what they're talking about.

It's sort of what Bill Maher is going through right now, where he can very easily talk to all of these people on the right on his show, even on his podcast.

He's just getting stoned with largely conservatives, and he doesn't really disagree with them anymore.

But it's getting harder for him to find lefties that make sense because the progressives have gone so yeah.

Yeah, it seems like he has shifted, Bill Maher.

He says he's in the exact same spot.

I would argue, and I've made this argument to him on air and off, that he should shift because you get it, Bill.

You're right on free speech.

You're right on identity politics.

You're right on all the stuff what the Democrats have done across the board.

Just vote the, so then don't vote with them.

Like, come on, man, last step, last step.

He may never get to the last step, but the fact that he's willing to hold the position, I think, is honorable, which is why I play a lot of clips on my show of him.

I credit him a lot, and I give him a lot of shit.

It's like a total 50-50 parody on it.

Yeah.

No, that's a good point what you said earlier, though, because I've had Pac-Man on.

I've had Harry Sisson on.

I don't know if they'd have me on their show, to be honest.

You know, I just did this thing with Pac-Man on Piers Morgan.

You know, you get 18 boxes and everyone's yelling at each other.

And it's just like, there's just nothing there.

There's nothing there.

And the fact that Sisson, who it's not even worth finishing the sentence, but it's like you're basically getting like a 15-year-old.

Like, this is what the left has been left with.

There's so few people to make coherent, good arguments on the left that when Piers Morgan, who has a huge show, is trying to get people on the left, he's left with getting this kid because there really are very, very few people on the left willing to make good arguments.

Very few.

I can only think of a handful, maybe Destiny,

Pac-Man, and I really don't know after that.

Yeah, I don't even know that those guys are making particularly good arguments, but I'll at least grant you that they're willing to go on those things and talk to people.

Do you do debates often?

not as much as I used to.

I used to do a lot more.

You know, I was kind of early in on the internet when that was like happening all the time.

And then, and I have like the scars of that and the successes of it and everything else.

I'm much more interested in building things right now.

I'm much more interested in people that are just like doing cool things and building businesses and doing things that are less political.

I built a tech company in the middle of this.

I'm interested, you know, everyone's kind of interested in like the food and health and fitness stuff right now.

So, I'm more interested in like, let's do all the things to fix America rather than debating whether socialism is good.

I'm past it, man.

I'm past it.

I feel that.

What's your tech company about?

So we started locals.com about five years ago,

basically to fight big tech, Patreon.

Do you remember Patreon?

Or do you use Patreon by chance?

No, I remember it.

No, no, no.

Okay.

Patreon was basically the subscription model for all the creators, and they were kicking people off and just banning them overnight without any recourse.

And I was touring with Jordan Peterson at the time, and we were looking at that like, well, this isn't right.

And I was making about 80% of my company's rev on Patreon.

I was like, well, I can't survive like this because I might say something that they're going to kick me off tomorrow.

I can't run a business like that.

So spoke to my brother-in-law, who's a tech guy.

We started locals.com, which was basically to build subscription models for creators where you own everything.

You own the data.

You control your community.

live chat, video, blah, blah, blah.

We built it.

We eventually merged with Rumble.

Rumble went public.

And I think we did a really nice,

let's say it's a nice little feather in my cap of fighting for free speech, fighting for the the things that I talk about all the time.

I put it into action instead of just talking about it.

Well done.

Not bad.

I remember Patreon was everywhere and they kind of like fell off, right?

Deservingly so.

So locals has taken a lot of the market from them.

And then, you know, there's some others as well.

Nice.

But we just did, we just did, I saw a problem and I was like, somebody's got to solve it.

And then like Homer Simpson, I was like, well, I'm somebody.

And then it is.

And that's how Rumble started, too.

They saw a problem with YouTube.

You know, censoring videos.

And I'm sure you dealt with that as someone that was on YouTube.

Oh, we used to get demonetized.

We We had a bigger problem with demonetized than deleted, which I always thought was interesting because sometimes they would delete channels or they delete Alex Jones or someone that might be, say, more controversial than me.

But what they would do with me all the time was they would just demonetize us, which you might think, okay, well, that's not censorship because your videos get there.

But there were two things that they were really doing.

One is once you're demonetized on YouTube, then you're not fed into the algorithm as much.

So it's like a secret way of censoring you.

That's one part.

But the other part is, you know, at some point, you got to make money.

And if you start realizing, boy, I'm doing all these great videos on all these awesome topics, but I can't make a dime, you might start.

changing topics.

So they were, that was their like creepier way of censoring people, I think.

I do have to give YouTube credit, though, even though obviously I'm a Rumble guy and locals and everything else, but my show's crushing it on YouTube right now.

And I will give YouTube credit.

They seem to have moved past that.

And you may have seen the article a couple days before the election where they did, New York Times did this big piece about all the crazy right-wingers on YouTube and then they asked YouTube for a statement at the end and YouTube said we're not deleting the videos and we're not demonetizing them so but that also shows you that the culture has shifted YouTube is less afraid of the cancel machine now so they're kind of doing what's right because capitalism is a beautiful thing well they have to play that balance with their sponsors like right now twitch is hurting have you seen this uh i i'm not on twitch i should be on twitch i i used to i don't want to brag but i used to be assistant manager at electronics because you know it is game stop uh a long time ago i was a pretty good gamer but i know that there's been some wacky stuff going on over Twitch recently.

Yeah, I've heard revenue is down 60% on streamers this month.

Wow.

The sponsors are just not wanting to fund Twitch.

Because people are saying mean things and doing all that.

I haven't looked into it fully, but there was this one streamer talking about the Israel-Palestine war.

He said the wrong thing, and a bunch of sponsors didn't like that, and they banned the guy, and now it's kind of...

You know, it's one of the reasons that no matter what you do or putting aside what your political opinions are on Middle East or anything else, if you're running a business and you're a creator, you have to diversify.

You should have a subscription model and you should have ads and you you should have pre-roll, and you should do merch, and do as much as you can so that if three of your five things are not taken out, which would be an awful lot, you still exist to some extent, and then build new things.

That really is the answer.

Yeah, because a lot of creators put all their eggs in one platform, and then they get banned or demonetized.

Then, what's next?

I mean, you're just at the mercy of people who can just shut you off like that.

You know, you mentioned the January 6th thing.

I mean, Parlor had 23 million unique viewers, unique users, which was a ton at that point.

There was as much crazy January 6th incitement happening on Facebook as there was on Parlor.

The reason Parlor got taken down was big tech saw it as the threat.

They were like, oh shit, there's a new guy on the block and they seem to like Trump.

So, you know, January 6th happens and then they were on Amazon AWS and that's how they blew them up.

I don't know if they click a button or it's a swipe or whatever it is, but they just blew up their servers and that was it.

So you have to do some things to protect yourself.

Absolutely.

Took them down from the app store, took down their site and everything, right?

Yeah.

I mean, AWS, virtually everything on the internet is run by AWS.

Rumble does have a cloud service now, which is B2B.

And there are some others, obviously, Rackstream or a couple others.

But you got to do whatever you can to protect yourself when you're doing this.

Absolutely.

Do you want Alex Jones to regain control of Infowars?

Yeah, it's his.

It's his.

I mean, I'm not even fully aware of exactly what the insanity of the lawsuit is fully about.

I mean, I know it has to do with the Sandy Hook incident and all that, but like the Onion was going to buy it.

And then at last second, didn't it?

No, it's his property.

He created it.

Whether you like the guy, whether you don't like the guy, I was very happy that I defended him from the beginning.

Probably should have done it even louder, but everybody was afraid we were all going to get taken out.

But I did pretty early on defend him, and I'm glad he's back on.

And again,

there are plenty of people, Pac-Man and some of these other guys.

Like, I don't agree with them.

Some of them say shitty stuff about me.

All right.

Say your shitty stuff.

Be online.

It is what it is.

Yeah.

Well, some people just do it for views, I feel like.

Oh.

You know?

Yeah.

Let's be honest.

Well, you know, the weird thing about the game as it relates to that is like, if you could go on my channel and I talk about CNN hosts all the time and I talk about mainstream hosts all the time, but I never talk, virtually never talk about like the lefty versions of me or my God, this guy on YouTube said this.

Like to me, that's such child stuff.

Like let them have their corner of the internet.

It's not great.

Most people mature out of it actually.

Or, you know, you had Pac-Man on and it's like, I think if you sit down with most of these people, their ideas are pretty thin and people wake up pretty quickly.

So I'm not interested in like just doing that, but I know that for a lot of these guys, if they talk about me, it makes them money.

It's just, it's just as simple as that.

It's not much more complex, though.

Yeah, you're one of those names.

I don't think they think I'm as evil as they would purport to, as the channel might imply, you know.

You're one of those names.

You're like Logan Paul, where if someone makes a bad video about you, 100k views guaranteed.

It's just, which is so funny because I'm, it, to me, I'm not controversial.

I guess I'm controversial in that we live in a strange world.

But if someone was to take the totality of my opinions and the way I live my life and my career, you might say this guy would have been, I would have been fairly mainstream, kind of whatever, milquetoast if this was 1986.

Pretty crazy.

I don't think they're that controversial.

I don't think I am, but you know, whatever.

Let them, let them have their corner of the internet.

All real internet, though, right?

Yeah.

What do you think of all these people leaving X?

It's not going to work.

I mean, the Blue Sky thing is not going to work.

They've tried other versions of this.

Even on the right, they tried versions of this during the old regime.

You know, they had Parlor and they had, what was the other one?

That

Jason Miller created.

What was that called?

The Jason Miller Twitter alternative

not parlor was it

what the hell was it well then Trump had truth social but then there was the the one oh getter getter the other one you know there have been versions of this that they've tried on the right and it never really worked truth social has parts of it working because Trump is there right he's back on Twitter now too the left the problem is they can't really create things because at least as the left stands now, they don't really believe in free speech.

So I'm seeing the same screenshots that I'm sure you're seeing, these people getting banned and kicked off for this and that.

And it's all going to be the worst sorts of people fighting.

And the truth is, as I just said, the culture has so shifted.

X is where the action is right now.

If you want to be in the game, X is the place.

And the irony is all Elon did was make it even.

He didn't make it more right.

His politics, maybe you might think, are now more right because of the Trump thing.

But all he did was say, hey, we're going to not shadow ban as much.

We're going to make the playing field more equal.

You know how many times a day I could open up my Twitter feed and see people posting Nazi memes at me and horrible things that they say about me and everything else?

So you either block them or you mute them or you ignore them or don't open the freaking mentions.

But I would much rather be in a place where the action is and be a part of that than just go to my own little nothing and argue with, you know.

not the brightest people in the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't even argue on Twitter.

It's not worth it.

Yeah, no, it's not.

It used to be fun to do that sort of thing.

And every now and again, I'll get into one, but it's pretty rare.

More often than not, I'm about to do it.

And then I'm like, ah, what's like literally, what is the point?

What is the point?

But years ago, you know, and all these social media things, they all kind of like, they have these waves where at one time, you know, at one time, Twitter, when Twitter first started and hashtags were big, they used to have these hashtag games.

And it would be like hashtag political sitcom.

And you had to combine like a word from an old school sitcom with like a current day politician or just like some silly little game.

And that's what Twitter was.

And then it more, now it's become hyper-political, obviously, and right in the middle of of the culture wars.

But I would just rather be where the action is, where people are fighting it out and duking it out and where free speech is respected than anywhere else.

Yeah, Twitter's hot right now.

They're unbeatable.

What's your stance on TikTok?

I have mixed one on this.

I'd love to hear your opinion.

So

my show is on TikTok, but I said to my social media guy, he wanted to do it.

I did not want to do it.

because of what's going on with China and everything else.

And I was like, I'm not putting it on my phone and I'm certainly not asking an employee of mine to put it on his phone.

He said he wanted to do it.

We're doing quite well on there and I'm just kind of letting it be on that.

But I don't even have it.

I've literally never even scrolled once on TikTok, so I can't totally speak to everything that's going on there.

Yeah, I think a lot of apps just spy on you, not just TikTok.

You know what I mean?

Oh, no, everything does.

I mean, literally, I bought a freaking outdoor swivel chair that I bought just by going on my computer to a website.

And then my Instagram feed was blown up on my phone, which I don't even think is somehow connected to my computer.

I don't connect them.

Are you logged on Instagram on your computer?

No, no.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I don't even know what the hell happened, but then I suddenly started getting all these ads for outdoor swivel chairs.

So it's like, I know there's some way with some email or some logged in, some like there's some connection, but the point, the point is that none of us really know what all these touch points are.

And we're just deep in that thing.

And we just are.

We just are.

We are.

But I saw Charlie Kirk on Patrick Bett David's show talk about TikTok and how he got hundreds of millions of views there.

And it really impacted like people's perception.

Oh, I think that that's absolutely true.

You know, the other thing is it's a little hard to tell how much of the traffic is real.

It's hard to tell how much of the traffic is real in general, but much less when it's coming out of China and if they want to push things a certain way and everything else.

So it's like you just got to decide how far down that rabbit hole of thought you want to go and how much you want to invest in all of those things.

And if you're Charlie, it's, of course, it's great.

I like Charlie a lot.

It's great to be getting those views if they're legit, but also if that means you're opening up your phone to spyware and you're Charlie, well, you may not want all those conversations public.

So, you know.

Yeah, I mean, they were spying on Tucker, right?

Signal.

I mean, all of these things.

At this point, I think you have to basically assume

that whatever you're doing or sharing to some extent, maybe not your name is associated with anything, but it's the data more than anything else.

I'm not super concerned about them spying on specific people.

You know, there was the Tucker thing, so it's not that it doesn't exist.

And Tulsi was on a watch list.

And Tulsi was on a watch list.

And I've had strange things happen.

So I'm not saying that none of that exists, but it's more to me the bigger, the meta issue is that they're gathering data on everybody.

And then

they know us more than we know ourselves.

We can all say we have certain behaviors and we like this or that, except they know what we're actually clicking.

They know what we're actually looking at.

And if you sat down in a focus group, you might say something very different and think you're telling the truth rather than what your actual behavior is on these things.

And speaking of data, you saw what happened with 23andMe.

Well, it's happened.

Did it happen again just in the last couple of days or more?

No, just

in general.

How the whole board resigned and everything?

There's a whole slew of problems there because like what kind of data did they just get?

And they've now connected people over generations.

And like who knows what the right freaking bad actor could do with all of that as it relates to bank accounts and medical records and just

BlackRock's involved.

Yeah, there's a lot of weird people.

I don't have much faith in them.

You don't have much faith in BlackRock?

That's a little,

you know, Starmer, the new,

well, he's not so new, but a couple months in UK Prime Minister.

He's big.

He just tweeted like how much he loves BlackRock.

Oh, really?

He was getting owned on Twitter.

Really?

Yeah.

For not supporting BlackRock?

No, for supporting Black Rock.

He was like, we need to integrate BlackRock more into it or whatever.

People are waking up.

And people were not happy with it.

Well, some of these companies are so powerful.

It's like one of the side effects of capitalism, but like the pharma companies are just, they have so much control now.

I would say it's a...

It's an unintended consequence or something like that of capitalism.

I would always err on the side of more freedom.

So to me, it's like if these companies are doing nefarious things, if they're doing, you know, if they're buying too much land or if the pharma companies are obviously doing terrible things related to COVID.

I would want just whatever you can do to free the market, to lower taxes and lower regulations so that more competition can get in there to deal with it, rather than having the government come in and try to deal with it because the government's not really good at anything.

Interesting.

So you don't want the government to intervene on the pharma stuff?

No, well, I would like the government agencies to be reformed, which we are going to do.

So he's going in not, so RFK for sure is going to go in, and he's not going in to make the government bigger for more control over the industries.

He's going to try to hack away at the ridiculous protections they have and things like that.

So in some sense, he's using the government to deregulate and

detangle us from the pharma companies.

There are basic things that the government should do.

Like, for example, I actually am firmly for this, even though I don't like governmental solutions to most things.

During COVID, you'd be watching Meet the Press, and they'd be talking about the efficacy of mRNA vaccines and how great they are.

And then it would literally be like, and now a word from our sponsor.

Here's Pfizer.

And it's like, whoa, wait, what?

You mean the thing you were just talking about for a half hour is also paying for it?

So like that type of thing, there's ways I think that the government could make that sort of thing illegal.

Yeah.

Maybe some other stuff with prescription drugs, which, you know, it's illegal to promote on commercials in most of Europe, but it's not here.

Right.

So, but all of that comes down to do we have a competent government?

We really haven't for quite some time.

We might be on the horizon.

Absolutely.

So you're a fan of the Doge movement?

Oh, yeah.

They're going to go in and blow this thing apart.

And I can't imagine two better people to do it.

I mean, Elon's literally trying to get life to go interstellar.

And then also he's buying Twitter to free our speech.

And he's going to crush 300 government agencies and save $2 trillion.

And then a whole bunch of us are going to be like, boy, I can speak freely.

We're going to go to Mars.

And, oh, the lefties who all think that the Earth is going to end in 12 years, it's like, dude, stop fighting with the guy who's trying to get us to other planets.

I don't think the Earth is going to end in 12 years.

I know it's not going to.

But if you guys even believe it, you might not be arguing with the guy who's trying to send us to Mars.

And he's number one in Diablo.

Just hit number one yesterday.

Someone just told me that an hour ago.

So he's literally, what does that mean?

He's the number one.

He beat the game in the quickest time ever recorded.

He's in an hour and 52 minutes.

That is absolutely insane.

How does he balance all this?

I have no idea.

You know, I've met him a couple of times and the guy.

He's everywhere at once.

Like the thing about him that I couldn't get over more than anything else was like he was so hyper-present when we met a few times.

He's just there.

He's just there.

But then he's also like looking at a meme and laughing and talking business and talking about space and talking about homeless people over there when we were in San Francisco, like a thousand things at once.

I don't know.

Did he lodge Neuralink in there?

He might have the Neuralink in there, right?

No, it could be like the beginning of Green Goblin, you know?

Would you ever get a Neuralink?

You know, I'm a big sci-fi guy.

My whole worldview has probably been shaped by dystopian movies, whether it's Minority Reporter, Total Recall, or Scanner Darkly, or I could go Matrix, the laundry list of things.

I love the idea of the future and the horizon that we're going into and all of that stuff.

I'm going to be, let's say, a little hesitant to directly connect myself.

You know, we're basically there already.

And, you know, there are now transhumans that are putting things in their bodies and all that stuff.

Oh, yeah.

There are people that are putting chips in their bodies so that you literally can walk up to your garage door and it'll open.

The lights will turn on and you're like, oh, yeah, this stuff exists.

Wow.

For sure.

Yeah.

I know dogs get chips.

So yeah.

Yeah.

No, there are humans that are doing it.

There's a guy, you should talk to him.

His name is Zoltan Istvan.

Okay.

There's a name for a transhumanist.

And yeah, he's put some chips in.

And we'll just have, you know, we're going to have more and more of that.

I mean, you saw the video, I'm sure, with the Neuralink and Paraplegic playing chess.

I mean, there's just unbelievable things on the channel.

Well, I did see Bill Gates wants to microchip a lot of people, right?

Oh, he's going to microchip the hell out of us and buy all the farmland.

He is an evil.

I mean, you know, it's so interesting because Elon is portrayed as evil and he's good.

And Bill Gates is portrayed as good and he's evil.

It's like, man, everything is upset.

I know.

I remember as a kid really looking up to him, to be honest.

I saw him in the Guinness Book of World Records books, like for Microsoft, being the richest man.

And I was like, I want to be him one day.

All he did was create create an operating system that brought viruses to us.

And now he's trying to supposedly stop viruses.

It really makes you wonder.

I mean, think about that.

Why did Apple and Mac take off after, you know, IBM and then PCs in general, once it became ubiquitous?

They were running the show for the 80s when personal computers became powerful into the 90s, into the 2000s.

MacBook took off because it was basically the virusless solution.

They had streamlined some other things and it looked pretty and Steve Jobs knew how to package it.

But every time you opened up Windows,

this is before you, right?

Like, do you have to do it?

No, I caught you tailing up.

You had a little bit of a, but you'd open up Windows, you'd go to freaking paint, and a thousand viruses would show up.

And then they'd sell you the antivirus software, and then that would get connected with viruses.

So, and this is the guy who's trying to stop the viruses now.

Something's rotten in Stinktown.

That's such a good point because I've had an iPhone for a while and a MacBook, no viruses at all.

Nothing.

Nothing.

It's like impossible.

I've never had and PC, yeah, you're right.

Those pop-ups were never ending.

Never ending.

Even with with the Norton antivirus, I would still get viruses.

Yeah.

And then you'd get a virus on Norton antivirus.

And then you'd have to get Simotech antivirus.

And who is the guy, the guy McAfee?

Yeah.

They killed him off, right?

He knew a lot.

He went to the jungle, and that was that.

Got to be careful with these conspiracies, right?

Yeah, you can go off the deep end pretty easily with those.

Can we talk basketball for a little bit?

I don't want to

jump on your face.

I know you're in Miami.

So are you a Heat fan?

I'm in Miami.

So I grew up in New York and then lived in L.A.

for eight years, and now I'm in Miami.

When I was in New York,

I was in Long Island where, you know, technically you'd think I'd be a Knicks fan, but MSG channel, you had to pay extra on cable.

So we didn't have that.

But we would get the Meadowlands channel for free, the New Jersey Nets at the time, New Jersey Nets.

So I grew up sort of as a Nets fan, but my favorite player of all time was Clyde the Glyde, Drexler, up in Portland.

So I was a huge Blazers fan, even though I lived in New York.

And then, of course, he ended up winning the championship with Elijah and the Rockets.

And

for my birthday a couple of years ago, one of my agents, I look at my phone and he sent me Clyde the Glyde's contact.

And now we text every now and again.

No way.

It's like, that's as good as it gets, Phil.

Full circle moment.

And my friend Phoenix here can attest, I've got a pretty sweet finger roll.

48, I can't do all the things I used to do, but I still can finger roll.

Who wins one-on-one, me or you?

You're 6'6 ⁇ .

I haven't seen you play.

I can still, I have a torn ACL on my left knee, but I do PRP.

You know about that?

No, I don't.

No PRP.

they take your blood and they spin it in a centrifuge and then they inject your own plasma back into the steels so it can't it can't replace something that's not there but it can like really strengthen everything around it so i play with three braces like a wrap damn i play with the wrap the sleeve and then i have like the metal thing you know because acl you can't go like this basically

but i'm in good shape i can i can really shoot still and i can run and i can play and i got good stamina but i'm not 6'6 so i'd have to you know what's your game like uh i'm a power forward layups little mid-range Okay.

I was more of a two-guard.

Oh, yeah.

It'd be an interesting matchup.

All right.

I get out to Miami.

I got a couple of great games.

I play three times a week for three hours.

I got a good crew of guys that are basically a couple guys in their young 20s, but mostly mid-30s into early 60s.

Whoa.

And I got to tell you, playing with guys in their 60s, it's fun because these guys, they can't do what they used to do, obviously, right?

But they're on the court for the love of the game.

Lovely.

So the joy on the court is just off the charts.

And then you also see when you you can't, you know, it's like watching a player age out.

Like Jordan in his later years was probably the best jump shooter in the league, even though he was known as a slasher before that.

So when you see people that can't do things over the years, you know, they lose the physical ability over the years, but then you can just start doing different things.

You can start doing little trick shots a little bit differently.

Or you see these guys, they've been playing together for 40 years and they're running like a triangle offense.

And, you know, all the young kids are just trying to run through everybody or freaking do the James Harden.

I'm going to dribble, dribble, dribble, chuck a 50-footer.

So So it's an absolute joy playing with people in various age.

And I'm still young enough to be able to, I can't really guard the 22-year-old who's super fast, but like I'm good enough that I can be on a court with any of these guys and get hold of it.

I love that.

That's cool.

We'll get you out to Miami.

Yeah, we'll play, for sure.

We'll film that.

Who's your team now?

Is it still the Nets?

You know, I don't watch professional sports anymore.

Wow.

I basically got burned out during the BLM thing.

I could not, I was already, you know, because my life is so political and what I do is so political, that already even before BLM, Sports Center was doing politics every night or it was like, who did this player murder or who beat that woman?

And it was just every night.

And I grew up, I wanted to be a Sports Center anchor.

I grew up in the heyday of Sports Center.

When I was in college, it was with Keith Olbermann, who's now a leftist.

fucking maniac

and uh and Craig Kilbourne.

Do you remember Craig Kilbourne?

Craig Kilbourne, he ended up having the late show after Letterman.

Okay.

That guy was funny as hell.

He was the one that really, to me, made Sports Center funny.

When it really started becoming almost like a comedy show instead of just straight, dry sports, he was the guy.

You should check some old clips of him.

And that's really what I wanted to do more than anything else.

But then as time went on, it just started becoming a political show.

I was just like, I'm sick of hearing about racism when I'm trying to watch basketball highlights.

So that kind of just turned me off.

I watch old games.

I literally, if you go to my YouTube search history and you'd see what I'm doing during cardio, I watch 80s and 90s NBA.

Those are classics.

Even though they're blurry, those are classics.

And And they weren't blurry back then.

People think, people your age think that they were blurry.

You understand that they were not blurry for us.

Wait, so how is it?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Mandela effect.

I don't know.

I was playing one of my guys, my social media guy, Brock.

He busted out on PlayStation 5.

He busted out NBA 2K, whatever the newest one is, right?

So I wanted to play with my old school Blazers 91 team.

So we go back.

And then now, you know that they like skin it so it looks like you're watching it on TV in that age.

You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

So they make it blurry when you're playing.

And I'm like, it was not blurry.

We watched things that looked like, you know, it wasn't, we didn't have HD plasma giant screens, but it was not blurry.

I think your brain back then couldn't comprehend what today looks like.

You know what I mean?

Well, that might be true that it's gotten so much better, but it was not blurry.

The way they've somehow blurred everything, it just was not that way.

I promise.

I feel that, though.

That

BLM stuff was nuts.

All the players were wearing it.

I was like.

I just couldn't take it.

I was just like, you know what?

I'm not interested in giving these guys my money.

I'm not interested in watching anymore.

I love the, you know, I'm such a fan that like I've watched the 92 finals where, you know, that was Jordan, the famous shrug.

And he beats, he beats Clyde, which was sad for me.

But I've watched, I could give you basically every shot of that six-game series.

I've watched it so many times.

And I just love it.

You know, it's just like something.

I don't know.

It connects me to a certain time in my life or something.

And basketball was very different than it is now.

I also just...

Professional basketball, I just think has become so bizarrely one-on-one and all the dribbling and like.

Deep three-pointers.

They take 63s a game now.

Well, Steph, who revolutionized the game in some sense he did a little damage there too because then everybody was wait how many did you say the uh the celtics on opening night took 61 three-pointers god out of how many shots probably that's probably more than probably almost way more than half yeah it was almost all their shots

like that's just not

and this is you get older and then you start like in my day everything was better but like you'll see it too like one day you'll be there because they'll add a four-pointer and they'll be like we had three pointers and we're no when i played because i played growing up as a center you didn't have to have a jump shot as a center growing up you just had to make layups and get rebounds Yeah.

That's it.

I remember when I was growing up playing and my uncle, who was a pretty good player, he went to Duke.

He didn't make the team, but was always practicing with the Duke guys.

And we used to play all the time.

And he grew up in a time before the three-point line.

So I grew up in shooting threes, and he could never understand it.

He just, he couldn't, like, it couldn't work in his brain.

Why would you ever shoot a three?

Why are you shooting out there?

It just doesn't matter.

Learn how to shoot a jumper.

And then, of course, the mid-range jumper did get decimated.

I mean, who shoots a mid-range jumper?

It's gone now.

Maybe like Kyrie Irving.

There's not many players these days.

Yeah, it's just, but you know, things, it doesn't mean it's always changing for the worse.

So I don't watch enough to know.

And I know there's some super skilled guys.

And my guys, you know, I see what's his name on the Spurs?

Oh, Wemby.

Like, I'm watching some of these highlights or Giannis.

Like, obviously, there are guys doing awesome, awesome things.

I just don't have the interest in that way.

Yeah.

I'll say this about Braun because I like him as a player, but off the court is so hard to like him, man.

Like, oh, my gosh.

The book that he's never read.

Dude, when he made that post back in Kamala, kamala i was like this might be the final straw for me to be honest i'll tell you something funny about a couple weeks ago i was with my sister-in-law and she wanted she was looking at a house maybe to buy in miami and we're in parked in front of the house and it was a narrow street and there's a blue lamborghini behind us honking honking honking we didn't realize it was there honking honking honking and then we kind of move out of the way and it rolls up and it's lebron james and he gives us the evil eye no way he gave me the evil eye I got the stink eye from LeBron James.

What a story.

Yeah, dude.

I wanted him to pass Jordan, but but just off the court, man.

Wait, for points?

Just in terms of GOAT status.

I don't know that anyone can ever pass Jordan.

Well, I think it's six for six in finals.

I just don't know how you beat that.

Everything else.

And if you think about what Jordan did, takes out Magic in 91,

takes out Clyde in 92, takes out Barkley in 93, who won MVP that year.

Then he has the two, well, he has the off year in 94, and then he does lose to the Magic in 95.

Then he takes out Kemp and Payton in 96, and then takes out Stockton and Malone those last two years.

It's like he took out everybody, and he took out Ewing, who had pretty great Knicks teams in the Eastern Conference finals.

He took out Reggie.

He assassinated everybody.

So to me, even if LeBron's numbers, which will probably overall be better, right?

He's already got more points.

Oh, he has more points.

He's the number one scorer all time right now.

He just became that last year, I believe.

Wow, I didn't even know that.

So,

you know, look, stats are stats.

So you can't argue with stats, but I think if you pure, how many, what's LeBron's finals record?

It's like, what, like three and six?

Does he have three or four?

I think he has four, so four and six.

That's pretty damn impressive, whatever it is.

But the fact that Jordan was six for six, to me, that is the thing.

And he just assassinated the guys.

I mean, that shrug game, that game one of the 92 finals, again, I'm a Clyde fan, so I literally was crying.

I was 16 years old, and I just watched, I was watching him shred my favorite player.

And he could not be stopped.

Yeah, and he retired at his peak.

Imagine if he he kept playing.

Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of conspiracies around why that happened and the gambling thing and his dad.

And there was a lot of stuff there.

But he, well, first off, not only could he have continued those two years, but even when he came back to the Wizards, had he gone to a good team, that was his one mistake, I think, in his playing days, is that he could have gone to like the Sacramento Kings or something.

You know, they were awesome at the time.

That was when they were playing the Lakers and Craig and Shaq and everything.

They had Bibby.

And had he gone there and been like, I'll be a sixth man, or he could have been a starter there, too.

They had a solid team, but like, had he just been like, I'll just be on a great team, but I don't have to take 30 shots a game, he could have played at least another five years, and he probably would have won a couple other championships.

Instead, he's like, I'm going to go to a shitty Wizards team that had nobody, Jawan Howard, maybe.

I don't even remember who was there.

And I'll score 40 a couple times.

But

so I think that was his one mistake.

That is a big mistake.

People wish he never came back at all because of those years, right?

The Wizard years.

There was a whole documentary about that.

I mean, yeah, I remember watching it.

And it was kind of like, it was just sort of like, what's the point?

Because he was so associated with winning.

It was just win, win, win, crush everybody.

And now it was like, all you were tuning in for was, could Jordan score 45 again?

And he did do it every now and again.

But then he had games where he didn't.

And you were just like, oh, you lost by 20 and you scored 16.

What was the point?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's hard.

But look.

We should only be so lucky that we will be the pinnacle of success and then want to keep going with it.

Absolutely.

You said you were a big gamer earlier.

Back in the day, I was.

I was, you know, I grew up on Nintendo, 8-bit Nintendo NES.

And then my prime years were Sega Genesis and then PS1.

And that was my college years, just stoned every night playing.

You were a stoner?

Oh, my God, college.

I smoked more weed from 1994 to 1998 than probably freaking

Snoop Dogg.

That's who I was going for.

I was going to say Martha Stewart, but probably Snoop Dogg.

And then when I got out of college, I was doing stand-up and I needed a day gig.

And I was assistant manager at

Electronics Boutique, which is GameStop now in

Broadway Mall, Hicksville, Long Island.

Moved a lot of red Pokemon in 98.

Wow, humble.

Nobody moved more Pokemon than that.

Yeah.

Like the Game Boy game or

it was Game Boy Color, I think, it was when Game Boy.

The one with the battery, right?

Yeah, the one with the battery.

And they came out with a red one.

I think it was a gold one and a red one.

And, you know, the thing is, once you go into the business of something you love,

it turns it on you pretty quickly.

So it ruined the feel of Game Boy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now I play, you know, my guys that work for me here, a lot of them are younger.

You have the game that I'm into, right?

I just don't have time.

I have two two-year-olds.

I'm busy at work, so I don't have time.

But if I have a few minutes, the game that I'm digging now on PS5, they rebooted Contra.

You remember the old school Contra?

Contra, not Impact.

Oh, Contra was an awesome, just 2D scroller.

I'm not really good at 3D.

I like going one way.

I'll go that way.

Left and right, up and down.

Left, right, up, down.

That's my thing.

And Contra was a sick game that for any of your fans fans that remember it, there was an amazing cheat code.

It was the cheat code of all time.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right.

BA selection.

That's where it's from now.

That was the 30.

Yeah, that's the meme.

It was to get 30 guys on Contra.

And then they added that to a couple other games by Konami, I think Life Force and a few others.

But they updated it now, and they have a new, it's a PS5 version of it where they basically just kind of re-skin the game.

So the music's updated, the skin is updated, it's, you know, some new bosses and stuff.

And it's just enough.

I can play it for 10 minutes, put it down.

But I tried playing 2K with my guys, and they're just mauling.

Oh, I get wrecked in 2K.

I can't shoot.

I can't shoot.

I can't do it.

That game's hard, man.

There's a learning curve on that one.

I like games where you could just get in there and dominate.

You remember NBA Jam?

Yeah.

I was a little too young, but I saw it.

I have the arcade version of that in my house.

That's your game?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, just three buttons of the joystick, right?

Three buttons, joystick, and I can still beat my 20-year-old social media guy.

So that's good.

Nice.

That's basically my main marker in life.

Nice and stuff.

And I still beat my young employees at video games.

You're competitive.

I love it.

2-2.

What do you play?

What do you play?

I play Fortnite and chess.

I was a big FPS first-person shooter gamer growing up.

So I was really good at those games.

So I got really good hand-eye coordination.

What was the first first-person shooter?

Was that, well, like a Doom, I guess, was probably like the precursor to that one.

I played Combat Arms.

A lot of people played Call of Duty.

Golden Eyes before you, right?

Golden Eyes Bell.

I think most people think that was like the

standard of excellence that then probably spent time.

Yeah, and then Call of Duty just took off.

And Grant that Auto.

I just, I remember one time I tried.

So my buddy and I,

who I grew up with, his kid, I guess, had PS2 or PS3.

We hadn't played video games in years.

You know, we're like mid-30s now.

We're like, all right, we're going to get a Star Wars game.

We love Star Wars before they wrecked Star Wars.

And we got one of the battlefronts or something, you know, where you're in the whole world and you're running 3D.

And we open up the game, and it's the two of us, and we could not get out of the room.

Whatever room we were in to literally start the game we and we were laughing hysterically like it was one of the it was what 10 minutes of just first it was frustration yeah then it was like kind of anger and it ended in 10 minutes of buckled on the floor hysterical laughing that we spent so much of our childhood playing with these games these buttons masters of everything this guy beat super mario brothers in nine minutes and we could not get out of the room

Games are hard these days.

And I remember back then, if you got stuck somewhere, you couldn't just look it up on how to beat it.

You didn't know it.

You had to figure it it out.

Not only that, but you also couldn't save back then.

Right.

So no matter how far you would get in a game, if you just kept dying at that same boss, you had to redo it again and again and again.

Actually, one of my, someone could find this maybe.

Probably my best video game moment is that Adventure of Link, which was Zelda 2.

So there was the original Legend of Zelda, and then there was Adventure of Link, which most people say is the hardest of all of the Zelda games, including all the new ones, Lennui and everything else.

Somehow, oh, you're from Jersey.

I was in Jersey with my grandma, lived in Jersey, and there was a store called Caldor.

And it was like just a, it wasn't a video game store, it was just like a department store kind of thing.

And me and my brother went into Caldor, and my grandma took us there, and there was a box that we saw in the back of the video game area.

And it looked like it, it sounds like I'm making this up, but it's completely true.

We saw it's like gold, like it had the golden box.

And we were like, could that be?

Because Adventure of Link was not supposed to come out for a couple more weeks.

Somehow it was at this caldor.

We got it.

It was not supposed to come out for a couple of weeks.

And we beat it before it came out.

And I sent a picture to Nintendo Power Magazine of me and my brother beating it.

And we were in, I think, the second episode, the second issue of Nintendo Power Magazine.

Wow.

And I think I might have been the first commercial user to beat.

that game ever because we got it before it was out.

That's a flex right there.

You should put that in your Twitter bio.

That should be in my Twitter bio.

What am I doing with my life?

Yeah, I never played that game, but a lot of people played Zelda.

Well, I know everybody loved Breath of the Wild or Call of the Breath or Bad Breath.

That was the Wii one.

Oh, the Wii one.

Oh, God.

The Wii one.

What'd you think of the Wii?

I thought it was ahead of its time.

You mean the original Wii with the

sticks and the sensor?

You know, my nephews and nieces have it, and it's just fun.

I liked it because it was like, I can't really get into the deep games anymore.

Like,

I'm not doing Call of Duty, but like, I can strap on that thing and play tennis and do that kind of thing.

Tennis is fun.

Yeah, it's funny because my nephew now is about seven and he's he's really into video games, suddenly.

And he had this, my sister, I guess, got him some like knockoff kind of portable thing that has all the old games on it.

You know, one of these things that has like a thousand games on it.

I've seen that.

You know, they've got like Nintendo and Gen.

Yeah, I get TikTok.

Yeah, it's that thing.

But I was watching him play on it and it's like, you know, they're not all configured right because the buttons were different on all the systems.

And I was like, the screen's not right.

So a fan had bought me a Wii, not a Wii, Switch

a couple years ago.

And I just, as I said, I just don't have time, but we've got the PS5 in my studio.

So I said to my nephew this like a month ago, I was like, Elon, would you, would you hold on to this thing for me?

I'm just, I can't hold it right now.

Could you hang on?

This, the joy that I saw in this kid's face.

Like you've never seen happiness like that ever.

And now he's been to my house a few times since.

And he's like, Uncle David, Uncle David, can I, can I hold on to it?

And I'm like, yeah, you got to hold on to it for a little bit.

And it'll just be like our running thing forever.

I love it.

The one mistake that I made was I was still logged in with my credit card and I did buy about 20 games on that till I realized, but what are you going to do?

Oh man, that was me with iPhone games, clashing plans and stuff with my mom's.

Yeah, I'm glad the narrative on video games has changed because I have a lot of good memories from video games and there was a lot of shame too.

But now it's shame like, oh, you're spending too much time on this.

You're not getting outside.

Yeah, exactly.

But now it's more accepted because you can make a living off of it.

You could stream it, you know.

Yeah.

The interesting thing for me is growing up in those games, which, as I said, you couldn't really save them.

You could just, you would just play, like, I'd play, you know, an NBA game a couple times with my friends, and then we'd still go outside.

Like you, there was one game, you're not going to remember this game, there was a game on Sega Genesis called Herzog Zui.

It was a split-screen strategy game.

So, you know, you had to build bases and increase your spear of power so you make more money, so you can buy more weapons, blah, blah.

We would play that literally all night long.

Like sometimes, you know, we'd start at nine and wake up at, you know, 9 a.m.

and just all night long doing that.

But beyond that,

you would play for like an hour and then we would would just jump on our bikes and go outside.

So something has shifted with the addictive nature, I think, of the games

and everything else that that, you know, again, as a father of two-year-olds, like I'm going to have to be very aware of that sort of thing.

Like the things that you grew up with, the tech that was in place and the trickery that was in place to just keep you there all the time instead of playing ball or whatever else.

Like it's, it's, it's real.

Well, these games probably have done so many studies on the brain and how to like keep you trapped there, like the social media platforms.

Oh, I mean, the pleasure centers and just like the endless clicking and then we have endless scrolling with this thing like we just have no idea what all of this has done plus the online component of like you're voice chatting now with people yeah so that's got to be a whole other like I had none of that so that's got to be a whole other element I had never even seen that till a different nephew of mine during COVID and I went into the basement when I was at my brother's house and he I oh they were playing Fortnite and and he's got the headset on and I they're all screaming and going crazy and like you really realize wow in my day these kids at least would have been in the same room and now they're not even that was also a covid thing but like at least in the same room you're gonna break it up every now and again you're gonna go upstairs to get your prime and talkies or whatever where now it's just like it's so ice it's it feels social to some extent but it's really isolating actually that's true yeah i've gone through my phase where i played a lot but yeah you got to touch how much do you play now only weekends um and a few hours a day yeah i got it under control but yeah with the podcast i'm so busy so yeah trust me this is better yeah this is better you're building something and creating something.

And then one day you will have some time and you'll have some kids and you'll love introducing them to it.

But like at some point, it's like, how old are you?

27.

I'm 27.

Getting married next year.

Oh, awesome.

Want kids around 30?

Yeah.

Oh, so you want kids around 30?

So you're on your way.

You're on your way.

Well, I would.

Not if you asked, but you're on your way.

I want to give you your flowers.

You set the way for guys like me to come up in the space.

You've been at this for a while.

It's weird to become the veteran.

You're the veteran.

It is funny.

Something happened in the last couple of years where now people say that to me or they bring me on shows and they're like, he needs no introduction.

I'm like, what?

Like, what?

Like, there's something.

But I guess, you know, Bill Maher said to me once, because I asked him about the longevity of his career, because the guy's been, you know, he started stand-up in the late 70s and he's as popular now as he's ever been.

And he said to me that one of the things that he's most proud of is just that he's still here.

Because there are a lot of guys that do a lot of different things that are amazingly talented.

You know, there's sports versions of it.

You know, a basketball player, J.R.

Ryder, should have been the next Michael Jordan and just became nothing.

Or Harold Miner.

There's a million of those guys.

Who would be a current one of them?

Give me a current guy that probably should be awesome.

I guess Derek Rose, if you didn't get injury.

Yeah, Derek Rose, but that was more injury related.

But even that, that's part of it.

Like there are people that are supposed to do awesome things that never get to.

And then you find that in whether it's doing stand-up or this or video games or whatever, there are guys that just, that are good, that have long careers.

Sometimes there are guys that are awesome that have long careers.

And there's like every version of it.

So when Bill said that to me, and now people say what you said to me, which I really do appreciate, it's like, I've been around, and I think I'm at the top of my game right now.

So it's like, let's see how long we can run this thing.

I love it.

Well, Dave, where can people keep up with you, man?

You want to meet me in the universe where we're in the contra?

The port-a-potty.

Is that a video game?

That will be a video game one day.

Port-a-potty.

You're going to strap on the fucking

Quest.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Have you seen that?

They box in the cars, the telephone boost, the Port-a-Potties.

I got a and then we just got it just to test it.

And I did beat Saber a little bit, which was actually kind of fun.

And then I was just like, I gotta be in the real world.

I'm on this thing enough.

I gotta be in the real world.

But I thoroughly enjoyed this.

And

we gotta get you to Miami.

And we'll have a three-point contest because it sounds like you're more than though.

You're a mid-no, that's why I'm offering.

I'm not stupid.

We're not gonna have a post-up contest.

All right.

Well, it's been fun, man.

We'll link yourself below.

All right, awesome.

Thanks.

Thanks, guys.

Peace.