The Key Pillars Of Wealth-Building That School Doesn't Teach Us: Do You Know Them? | Dave Rubin

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
I do have worries about job displacement. The big issue I have right now is AI makes it really easy to envision why I need less humans working for my company. Humans are expensive and they're problematic.
They come with a lot of expenses, health care, retirement funds, stuff like that. There is a real incentive, and it's kind of a perverse incentive, but there's a real incentive for industry to replace humans when technology went can. I keep in mind Keynes, who was a famous economist. He had a concept called technological displacement, where he said, if technology can do a job better than a human, you should replace the human. It just makes economic sense. He said, what you got to be careful about is the pace at which you displace human labor. If you displace human labor so fast that you can't repurpose it to another constructive use, you end up creating a societal crisis.

**Dave Rubin** (0:47)
Why is it that the people who are for free markets and everything can't seem to market free markets?

**Adam Taggart** (0:52)
There has been an increase in the wealth divide for reasons we can get into or not. And people are looking at that and saying, hey, that's not very fair. Objectively, most of the policies that our government has pursued over the past couple decades have rewarded people who own assets. And that's a minority of the country. So the people who don't have financial assets, the regular people out there, all they get is the increase in their costs. They don't get the benefit of the rising asset prices. So the rich kind of move further and further away from the less rich.
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. About five weeks ago, I had the privilege to be interviewed by Dave Rubin on his hugely popular podcast, The Rubin Report. Connecting with Dave has been a big goal of mine for years. I'm a huge fan of his work and he's got a massive audience that I think can benefit from the themes that we talk about here on Thoughtful Money. So appearing on his show was a real honor for me.
We talked about the fundamentals of wealth building and what keeps most of the general public from learning them. I thought the discussion came out quite well and I hope you think so too by the end of this video. Enjoy.

**Dave Rubin** (2:09)
I'm Dave Rubin and yes, it is August and I am still off the grid, but that does not stop us from bringing you fresh content and joining me today is the host of the Thoughtful Money podcast, Adam Taggart. Adam, how are you?

**Adam Taggart** (2:24)
I'm great, Dave. Total honor to be here. I'm a huge fan.

**Dave Rubin** (2:29)
I appreciate that. As I said to you in the moments before we started recording, anyone with a nice well-lit moss wall, pretty much good to go in my book. I appreciate the moss.

**Adam Taggart** (2:40)
Hey, no worries. You got to differentiate yourself in this industry.
Before we start, Dave, some may say this is buttering up the host and maybe it's part of it. But I'm a huge fan of your work and what you do here. I'm a huge fan of your team. Connor, Phoenix, Christy, Joseph, by the way, you should kick that bucket of fish heads closer to Joseph. Let's load another copy.

**Dave Rubin** (3:03)
He does get it. I keep it right out of reach, so he really has to, late night, really just has that extra effort to get the fish heads.

**Adam Taggart** (3:13)
Well, he's been working hard. He deserves at least a whole head at this point.
But also, I think you do a great show, but just as a guy in the business, I'm really impressed by the business that you've built here, not just with The Rubin Report and I think your videos are up to like 600,000 views a video right now. I mean, you're absolutely crushing it. But also, what you've done with locals, what you've done with the Creator Network, Copal, I mean, you're really building a business or an empire of business off of all this, and I think you're doing it in a really fantastic way.

**Dave Rubin** (3:46)
Oh, wow. Well, I truly, truly appreciate that.
Interestingly, that was sort of, although I wasn't going to say all those nice things about myself, that was kind of how I was going to start this interview because I did not learn much about finances in high school, and most people seem to not learn much about finances. They don't learn much about debt. They don't really understand credit cards. We don't really learn what the markets are. I'm sure you get a version of this question all the time. So all of the things that I built, I was kind of learning about them all the way, and that still goes to today where I'm learning things about all of this. So when I'm off the grid for August, I like doing shows that are a little more evergreen, and we did some on lifestyle and health. But I thought finance would be perfect, and that's why we wanted to talk to you. So first off, are you surprised that still in 2026, there is such a lack of knowledge around all of these things, so that a guy like me has to be learning on the fly as I'm building things just because I think they're kind of interesting, and then I have to surround myself with good people who can fill in all the blanks on the stuff that I don't know.