Tim Pool's Problem with Socialism

And when you look at people that are anti-capitalist, they're really into socialism, one of the things you find is a lot of rich kids. It's weird, right? It's fucking real weird. It's because they don't understand real struggle, because they've grown up without it and they have these ideals, like they feel guilty because they've grown up without struggle and they want to help the world and they think capitalism is evil and I never saw my dad. So we need to get all these rich people and they need to give that money to all these poor people and we need to balance out income. You know what else they notice? The people around them were all white. People that are into socialism? The people that are into socialism tend to be upper class, upper middle class, white. Obviously, we're generalizing in a big way here. Right, right, right. A lot of them. But there's some studies, some research that came out and it finds the overwhelming majority of socialists in the United States. They came from upper middle class to upper class families that tended to be white. Yeah, and those are the ones that focus so hard on these social justice warrior issues. You take a person who's been surrounded by rich white people. Yes. It probably got a reason to not like them, but then they assume all white people are the same and you end up seeing this racialization of politics. Also they find themselves in a position of affluence that they didn't earn. They want to burn it all to the ground. And they assume, I think there's some truth in that. There's people who have money they didn't earn and there are leeches on the system. They make money from money. They've never done anything in their lives. Sure. They're arrogant. Sure. There's a lot of people like that. Right, but when you then take that generalization and apply it to anyone who has money or everyone and you take it to a dark place. Exactly. When I first started entering the public space in terms of news and politics, I was at Occupy Wall Street. And before I had any notoriety, I was being heralded. They called me a good example of what's wrong with the system. Here's Tim Pool, a high school dropout, mixed race guy. And here he is just sleeping in a dirt park using his phone to tell the real stories of the world. After I got featured in Time Magazine, what did they say? Tim Pool is white and he was born with a silver spoon, which is not true. It's absolutely not true. But the socialists types, the activists couldn't accept that I had jumped the class system, I guess. Their view of the world is rigid, that the rich people keep the poor down. There's no chance of upward mobility and that's not the case. You absolutely can become successful from humble means. One of my favorite AOC quotes was her talking about, it's literally impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when she used to be a waitress and now she's a congresswoman. It's not impossible, but it's not even. That's what we need to address. It's not even. The reality is some people have a far easier path and some people have a far more difficult path. But you have to deal with the hand you're given if life is a game. I'm not saying it's a game, it is life. But it's similar to a game in that you're dealt a set of cards, you're dealt a set of circumstances. And yes, some people just get four aces from birth. Your dad's a multi-billionaire and your whole family's always been rich and you never have to worry about a goddamn thing for the rest of your life. But guess what? Those people turn out to be fucking miserable and crazy. There's some benefit in being born with a shitty hand of cards. Absolutely. There really is a motivational benefit for sure. Gumption. Yes. You know, there's a TED talk. There's one thing, one trait, one personality trait that guarantees success of all, of all. It's not intelligence. It's not class, not race, not gender. You know what it is? What? Perseverance. That's it. I believe that. There's a TED talk on it. It's interesting and it's true. Now I think there's always going to be certain limits based on your ability. Like I'm never going to play in the NBA, not tall enough, nowhere near as fast or can jump high enough. Actually that's not true. I can jump pretty high skateboard. But you take people who don't have top tier intelligence, not the strongest, but if they work hard enough, they can find their apex. They can find that point where they are successful and they can make it. Right. It's not true for everybody. Some people are below that threshold. No matter how hard they try, they're going to need help. Well, I think that the problem is with any sort of generalization. You know, perseverance is the most important thing. Yes, sure. But you also have to be intelligent. You can't be doing the same thing over and over again. No, I'm not going to quit. No, you have to be able to figure out what you're doing wrong as well as have perseverance. Perseverance is a necessary part of the equation, but there's many pieces to that. But define success in that regard. Right. If success is. Well, it depends on the field that you're choosing. Right. If you're not smart enough to be an astrophysicist, you shouldn't be an astrophysicist. Right. If you're not tall enough to play in the NBA, you probably can't play in the NBA. Do you think that's not necessarily true, though? Muggsy Bowes, that dude was amazing. He was amazing. He was 5'7". Was he? Yeah. He did 360, don't? He was amazing. Was he 5'5"? 5'3". 5'3". Oh, Spud Web, that's right. Wow. Even shorter than I thought. Yeah. Yeah, you can do it. Yeah. That's amazing. It's very rare. Right. We talk about two guys. Right. Two guys are going to like that. Yeah. I think the average person has the potential and the capabilities of being successful, wealthy, if they want famous. I think one of the challenges we have in our culture is how we're raising kids and what the values we're giving them. Well, it's also what are you trying to do? Like, what do you look? There's a thing. There's a bunch of different things that you could just you just don't have. Like, some people can't sing. They don't have any fucking talent. They just don't have it. Their voice sounds like shit. But guess who else's voice sound like shit? Bob Dylan. Terrible voice. Yeah. How does it feel? I mean, come on, man. People love it because there's like authenticity and passion and there's something to it. Right. But he found out a way to make it work. He wouldn't win American Idol. Fuck no. Imagine. One of the greatest musicians ever lived. Imagine him going like someone saying, what do you want to do, man? I want to be a singer songwriter. OK, just without any music, not any instruments. Sing me a song. Probably, probably. Well, you know, there's there there are a lot of people, especially in the Internet day and age, that you would not expect to have made it who made it. Yes. Well, you know, there's a lot. Yeah. I mean, and then there's rules today that I don't think really hold true. You know, people say, oh, you know, you have to be good looking. You have to be thin. Well, Adele's not thin. She is now. She's thin now. People are mad at her for being thin. Yeah. But she just was talented. Just had a powerful voice. Or that woman, Susan, what was her name that was on America's Got Talent? I don't know. No, it wasn't America's Got Talent. An X Factor. X Factor. The Susan Boyle. That fucking wizard over here. Susan Boyle, she looked like someone's Grammy. Right. But she belted out this song that made Simon Cowell almost cry. Wow. Because she was just fucking talented. Just really good. You can find a thing. But you know, if you're Susan Boyle and you want to be a comedian, maybe her jokes are fucking terrible. Maybe she would show up and open mic night at Sunday night at the comedy store over and over again and keep bombing. And then, you know, she never would have made it. Yeah, I can't learn. Some people just did. I think I think if you can if you can learn, right, if you can, you know, one of the problems those people refuse to accept when they're wrong, they write to be self critical. Yeah, they're not they don't have an analytical perspective in terms of their own issues. They can't analyze themselves and see the flaws and be objective and introspective. Some people just don't have that because they've been protecting themselves. They have these sort of personality traits that protect themselves from self deprecation, from understanding where they're flawed. When I was a teenager, I remember reading that Michael Jordan would watch tapes of himself playing to figure out what he did wrong. I don't know if that's true, but to me, that was like, if you want to be the best like him, you need to actively look for what you're screwing up and call out immediately. Well, that's imperative for sparring. When you're sparring, like we used to film a lot of back when I was competing, we'd film sparring sessions and fights, particular fights. But sparring sessions, it was critical because you could see how you were telegraphing something and then you got countered. You could see how and sometimes you don't think you're doing it, but then you realize like, oh, my God, I'm dropping my hand every time I do this. And then you get caught crazy. Yeah, that's with everything. That's like poker. Yeah. Yeah. Giving your tells away. And it's nuts. But I think most things you'd be better off seeing like with comedy, it's massive. It's gigantic. Being able to visually see yourself is like primary. That's number one. A little bit, a little bit less good is listening to yourself. And at a certain point in time in your career, you can get away with just listening in terms of like, but there's a big difference between people who monitor their stuff and go over it and analyze it versus people who don't. And it's just, it's, it's accelerated learning. It's like taking advantage of all the tools that you're given. And you can apply that to anything that you're trying to do good in life. If you have the time and the energy, like if you're doing a job and during this job, you know, you just show up at work and you try to do your best. Then you go home and you fuck off and you do your stuff. You'll get better at whatever you do. Exactly. But if you go and do your job and then afterwards analyze what you did, pay attention to it, write things down, make a diary perhaps, or review your work. And really you'll get better faster. It's a matter of how much time as long as you don't burn out. I don't take days off ever. Yeah, that's weird. I took a day off yesterday, had some bad sushi. Here's a lesson everybody. If, uh, if I don't want to be mean to the sushi people, they're really nice to me, but you know, maybe, maybe lay off sushi if they've been closed for a month because of pandemic and well, you're driving from the other side of the country text me. I'll tell you the places. There's only, I go to like four places out here for sushi and everywhere else. I'm like, Ooh, I don't know. Well, so here's what I wanted to say, right? Uh, I don't, I don't take a day off and a lot of people say I'm crazy and I've actually in my Monday through Friday is now double shifts every day. Then Saturday and Sunday are single shifts in terms of production. So I do Monday through Friday, three hours and 40 minutes about Saturday and Sunday is about an hour and 40 minutes. And, and what would I do if I wasn't working? I'd be playing video games, but listen to the numbers you just said. Yeah. Three hours and 40 Monday through Friday. Yeah. And then an hour and a half per weekend day. Yeah. That's still not a full day's work. And still not a full week's work. So an hour and a half of recording is like 10 hours of research. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, so you're working more than that. It's like eight hours. So, uh, I'm doing constant research in between fact checking and then I recall like once I get everything in line and I think I'm confident on what I'm, what, you know, what I have, and of course I'm, I'm not perfect. Then I record for about 20 minutes. Then I get back to researching reading and I, you know, so it's, it's. Here's another benefit though. You work for yourself. Absolutely. You don't have some dickhead over your shoulder telling you what to do. I chose this though. Right. So, so there's a couple of things. What, when you brought up, you'll get good at whatever you do, whatever it is. You do. I tell my friends every second you spend doing something as an investment to be into being better than better at that. So if you want to come home from work and play video games all day, you'll be really good at video games, man. Um, maybe you start a stream, your Twitch channel, maybe you, maybe you can make, you know, some money being a good personality, but you got to earn it. Or maybe there's something you want to do that instead of playing video games, you do that instead. For me, when I'm not working, I'm just sitting around like, why am I not working? What, like, what am I doing? You know, I'm it's, I ended up taking, uh, yesterday off. I didn't work today because we're doing the show. And so I'm sitting, you know, sitting around watching TV shows. Like this is awful. I can't stand it. I gotta read the news, man. I gotta, I gotta be in, I gotta be into it. Well, you're driven. You're done, but also you're enjoying it. That's the difference between someone who's working in a fucking coal mine or someone who's working in a field all day picking strawberries. Yeah. I hate the job. You know, I hear you, but you know, you know, many people have hit me up that you probably get something similar. Like, how do I do what you do? You know, when I was working for vice and I was traveling around the world, 10, 20 emails every week from young people saying, I really want to do what you do. And you know what I, you know what they would say to me when I would tell them how to do it, they would say, I will never do that. I would tell them, here's what you do. Do you have any money saved up? No. Okay. Where do you work? You don't work. Get a job, Starbucks, McDonald's, whatever you can get. Maybe you can do better than that. Save your money. Once you've saved enough, find a story you want, fly there, cover it. You know what they would say? No. I had one, there's one person that said to me, I want to travel around the world and do what you do. How do I do it? I said, do you have money saved up? Yes. Excellent. There's a story right now going on in Turkey. All right. You got to be secure. You got to be safe, but it's in both fairly. Okay. Fly there right now, film it. And you know, I'll see if I can make any connections on what you find. You know what they said? Well, the money I saved is from my apartment in Brooklyn. And I'm like, right, what's more important to you having your nice Williamsburg apartment or being a journalist traveling around the world? Well, I like my apartment. I'm like, okay, listen, when I worked for Vice, I was sleeping on a couch. Every dime they paid me, I put in the bank. I didn't touch it. I got a job working for a Disney, an ABC news joint venture company. After that, they paid me a bunch of money. I put 70% in the bank. I didn't touch it. When I left, I went to a bunch of these New York digital companies. You know, I'll spare them their names for any embarrassment. Many of them who have become rather worthless. They still exist and they're big. And I decided after seeing what they had to offer, the bias, the deception, the clickbait driven nature of it, I'm gonna do it myself. And because I saved my money, I was up of the way. I was able to do so. So then I had an apartment. Then I could pay for my plane ticket, you know, to, to Sweden, to France, to Germany, to do these stories and started building up a base within about seven or eight months I had gone from red to black. So now all of a sudden I was no longer losing money. I was making money and I'm like, there it is. Couple of years on, ridiculously, ridiculously, ridiculously successful. For myself, I guess I could, you know, it's relative, but I've got some, several employees launching new companies. Well, one of the companies shattered a fundraising record of a million bucks in a single day. So that's, that's, look, the path for me isn't the path for everybody, but sacrifice, you know. Well, you're basically saying exactly what they're saying in Ted Talk, perseverance, and you, you embrace the grind. But it's also, what do you really prioritize? Yeah. For me. What are you trying to do? I don't care about having an apartment. I want to, I want to, I want to see what was going on on the ground in Istanbul. So, you know, it's also like who, who is the type of person that would chase down the stories? The type of person that's really going to chase down the stories is a person that is driven to chase down stories. What you're getting is questions from idiots. You're getting questions from people that are like, how do I do it? And then when you offer the answer, I'm not going to do that. Right. Those are the people that are never going to make it. Like there's a conversation I had with Ari Shafir where he and Robert Kelly, apparently they, they thought about sponsoring a comic who's up and coming, taking care of their financial needs and, you know, for like a year and try to see how far they could get in their career if they didn't have to deal with money. And I said, that's the problem is the type of person who's going to make it is going to make it not just in spite of the fact that they don't have any money, but because of the fact they don't have any money. Yeah. Those day jobs, those sucky jobs that you need to have when you're struggling, those these they fucking motivate you. They're important. If somebody just comes along and gives you all the money you need for food, you're going to have acid and some hungry guy on the other side of town is going to take all the gigs that you would get. They're going to write better jokes. They're going to be more motivated to go to open mics. They're going to pound the pavement harder. Well, I got a story for you. I'll try to get the details right. It's my buddy's company. So forgive me if I'm, if I'm getting the details wrong. But he had a social media management company. He started himself. He knew everything about social media, Instagram and all that. And he started building up a client base where I'm going to run your social media for you, worked like a charm, start making ton of money, get new contracts, these companies know what they were doing. He got to a point where I had to hire people. He ended up hiring a couple college grads and he put up the ad saying, you know, college degree required. They couldn't figure anything out. They kept calling them, having problems, couldn't manage anything. So he fires them re hires again, more college grads. Same problem. Eventually has to fire them. Then he hires because he's running out of money. He hires to high school. I think they were high school dropouts and he was like, they wanted substantially less money. And at this point, I just couldn't find good people. They worked swimmingly. It was amazing. No phone calls, no problems. These were people who had worked hard, saved up money in their small bumpkin hometown, moved to Los Angeles to make it big. They knew what they wanted. They knew what they had to do. And they said, I will find a way to do it. He said the other people are hiring were just like drones. They just wanted a job. They didn't know or care what they were doing. They didn't bother. So they didn't want to learn. But these people who are driven viewed this as just another problem to be solved on my path to success. Yeah, that's, that's the mindset and that's the difference. The mindset of success is the mindset of I will figure it out. So I think the problem is how we're raising people in this country. We're raising them to, in certain areas, to expect things to be given to you. You get a participation trophy no matter what you do. You're congratulations. You're the one. This is the problem with socialism and this is the problem with universal basic income, what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Expecting something from the government, particularly without any financial feasibility, there's no, there's no real logic to where that money comes from. Like show me your work. Is right. Right. What is money? You know, so, so one of the arguments I keep seeing from a lot of people who have more, I don't even want to call them socialists. I think they're just regular urban dwelling, like liberal left type people. There's one viral post on, uh, on Rhett, on Reddit that said, you've got these conservatives or you've got these people out protesting so they can enrich their landlords and the, these billionaires when they should be demanding that rent be waived, that mortgages, you know, in evictions be canceled and that the government take care of their needs and provide them with stimulus or something like that. And, um, and I look at that, like you're, you're very clearly living in a city, but what they don't understand is they say things like, you know, landlord isn't a job. Like I argue that there's a lot of very successful landlords who make a ton of money and do very little, but that's a fucking job. Right. It's so stupid to say it's not a job. It's not just that it's the money you pay in rent can't just be wiped out because there's groundskeepers, there's maintenance, there's administrative assistance, there's taxes that be filed. Rent doesn't just go into their pocket so they can buy a boat, but they, they, they view it this way and they think that money is, is what you want. That when they say these people who want the government to be reopened, you know, are simply trying to enrich the wealthy. It's like, I think maybe they make things and they want to keep making things. They want, they want their economy, not the government, the economy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mixing that up. But there's there, there, there are a lot of people that don't seem to understand. I think it's because when you live in a city, everything's already there for you. When I lived in New York, the Williamsburg bridge, boom, there it is. I didn't see it built. I didn't pay a dime for it and I can just use it. I can cross over. It's just there. And I've never had to, you know, you never had to fight for it. So you just say, why can't I just have it? You see, you walk in any store and there's food. Hey, there's food. Easy. What they don't see is the supply chain, where the food is made, the work that goes into it. So they assume that money guarantees access to it, which it doesn't. If the economy is shut down, the money can't buy you things. The value of that money starts going down. If the farms can't sell any of this to anybody and start dumping and I think it's called fallowing fields, no longer farming, then there's nothing to buy. So if products aren't being made and services aren't being rendered because the economy is closed, what is your money going to get you at a certain point when the economy is shut down for too long and we're seeing all of these businesses close, family businesses. I heard a story, terrible tragedy. Somebody killed themselves because their family business of 70 years was shut down. That product is gone. So eventually there's no food to buy. And only then will people realize that the government stimulus money has no inherent value. It's the work we do for each other. That's the argument being left out when you when you get a biased view on social media or when these people don't quite understand, you know.