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July 10, 2023 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:18:23
DEFEATING WOKE CAPITAL: PUBLICSQ GOING PUBLIC, Michael Seifert & Omeed Malik on the Patriot Economy | TRIGGERED Ep.49
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you you
you Guys, Don Junior has a great day.
here, and welcome to another exciting episode of Triggered.
Today's a special one.
It's unique in that the guys that I'm gonna have on the show are actually at the forefront of the patriot economy, that parallel economy taking on the radical leftist insanity.
I have Michael Seifert, who's been on the show, but a lot's happened with Public Square since he first made an appearance.
They're now going public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Allowing them access to the public markets and the capital markets to be able to grow and actually fund that movement.
We're not just at cancel culture and boycotts.
We're actually taking it to the next level.
So this is going to be a really exciting show.
We're going to see what Public Square is going to do.
We're going to see how you...
Now can partake in growing that patriot economy.
So it's going to be pretty special.
A lot's happened, you know, for me, as someone who was just, you know, an early investor
in this, a believer in this cause, some, you know, stroking even big checks, because I
believe so much in making sure that this exists to combat the sick, woke ideologies of today's
radical left and corporate woke America.
It's amazing.
We've seen what's going on.
We've seen the boycotts, but we've seen these companies double down and triple down, and
it ain't going away.
This feels like a perfect solution.
But before we get to that, I want to thank our incredible sponsors.
You've heard me talk about it, guys.
These guys are taking a risk as well, supporting a show like this, programming like this, where
we combat the insanity, where we speak the truth.
But you know, we're not exactly politically correct, even if we are actually correct.
That doesn't seem to matter much these days.
So go check out the folks at GoldCo, guys.
Gold, silver, precious metals, and diversification of your portfolio are so critical.
With everything that's going on right now, we see the decisions that are made.
We'll talk a lot with Michael Seifert and with my buddy Omid Malik about ESG and what that has done to the public markets, what that's done to woke corporate America, the bad decisions that are being made that could really affect your retirement portfolio, and they're forcing it on you.
Even if it's not a good financial decision.
Even if it's not the decision a reasonable fiduciary would make investing your retirement funds.
So check out how to diversify, expand your portfolio, and protect yourself from that insanity by looking at gold and silver.
The folks at Gold Co. can take you through that process each and every step of the way.
It's not just about blindly going and doing it.
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They're going to take you through it.
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That's D-O-N-J-R-Gold.com.
And just learn how to do that.
See if it makes sense.
But you see what's coming.
You see the interest rates skyrocketing.
You see the bank collapses.
You see what's going on inflation and gas prices and everything.
Like, when's it all going to implode?
Because it can't go much further, in my opinion.
I just want you to be protected.
So go to donjrgold.com to learn more.
And also, speaking of supporting businesses that support your values, go check out the folks...
at Patriot Mobile by going to patriotmobile.com slash triggered, where you can get free activation if you change your plan over.
Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider, and they give back a portion of all of their money to the causes that you and I believe in, whether it's supporting first responders, whether it's fighting the insanity going on at our school boards, where they're putting conservative people that actually align with the values of the parents whose students are in these schools.
They're criticized by the left for doing what's right and for following their beliefs.
Just an awesome company.
So if you're going to have a cell phone in your pocket, and you will no matter what, I mean, you might as well do it with someone who actually gives back to the causes that you believe in rather than the causes and the companies that hate your guts and...
We'll invest heavily in the things that are the antithesis of what you believe in.
So if you're going to have a cell phone, do it with Patriot Mobile.
Allow them to take your money and give back to what you believe in and support the companies that share your values.
Again, go to patriotmobile.com slash triggered for free activation.
It's quick, simple, easy.
You can do it in a second or you can keep supporting the company's Like, you know, the parent company of AT&T that wanted to cancel OAN and Newsmax and other conservative programming because they don't believe in it.
The choice is yours, folks.
I recommend you checking it out.
And with that, guys, I'm going to go to my friends Omid Malik and Michael Seifert, and we're going to talk about the patriot economy.
Alright guys, we're back and we have an exciting show for you today.
We have Michael Seifert, the CEO of Public Square.
Michael's been on, actually had an awesome show because what Michael's all about is the parallel economy.
We've seen that today. We've seen cancel culture from woke corporate.
We've seen the insanity that's going on and Michael literally has been fighting back and at the forefront of that movement for quite some time.
Starting out just literally out of his house In San Diego, but now we're taking it to a different level.
We're going public. Omid Malik is my buddy.
He's taking public square public on the New York Stock Exchange, allowing us to have access to the public capital markets to be able to grow and continue this movement.
Guys, we talk about, you know, cancel culture.
We see it every day.
That's not enough. Now we have the ability to actually take it further, to actually invest in the companies that share your values.
You hear it in my intros all the time.
You hear it with the sponsors of this show.
Now we're taking it to the next level.
So Omid, I want to welcome you aboard.
This is your first time. Michael, that was one of our biggest shows.
You know, we sort of threw it together at CPAC, recorded this thing, you know, had over a million views because people are excited about this concept.
Give them the recap for those who haven't seen what's going on.
And then, Omid, I want you to talk about sort of where we are because it gets complicated, but we can really simplify it so that you, too, can take part in, again, not just boycotting, but actually going further.
Actually supporting those companies that share your values.
Actually investing, even if it's two dollars, in the people that are in the forefront of this movement taking on the insanity of what's going on in woke corporate America.
Well, happy to be back. Good to have you, man.
Yeah, good to see you. A lot's happened since we...
A lot's happened. And a lot's happened in the years since we met.
Yeah? Well, and tell you what, not only has a lot happened at Public Square, but a lot has happened in society that has reaffirmed the need for Public Square.
Just last week, Ben& Jerry's, Adidas...
Target last month, Bud Light the month before that.
There are these constant reminders of why we need a parallel economy.
And people are tired of being lectured about these companies that they're just trying to buy household goods from, about indigenous land and woke politics and gender expression and all this nonsense.
People are ready for an alternative for all these different lifestyle brands so that they can actually know with a
blessed assurance That they're not funding companies that want to indoctrinate
their kids and stand against all the principles that made the United States special in the first
place so We have been able to provide a really proactive solution
that has been seen as Not only kind of a cool additive to consumers lives, but a
real necessity. It's been a necessity for us I'm tired of funding my opposition and now thankfully with
public square and the way that this is growing we built this incredible coalition
We have thousands of businesses that are offering alternatives. They're saying guys we love our country
We love our Constitution. We're never going to lecture you or your family about this woke nonsense, and they deserve our dollars.
You're never going to make sure that your kids wear, like, the trans, satanic clothing and make sure that we highlight that you're...
Tucking underwear and all this nonsense? Well, because that's, you know, that's true, but what's worse is you see the boycotts.
I think it's sort of incredible.
You see these companies, they see they're losing billions of dollars, but then...
They double down. Target last week was threatening to take down Mark Levin, my friend.
Take down his book.
They finally caved after some pressure because losing $10 billion in market cap the week before wasn't enough.
But it's not stopping.
Ben and Jerry's watches all of this, and they think that America should give all of its land back to...
Did you see? The tribe, I guess, that lived in the area where Ben and Jerry's has their corporate headquarters was like, okay, we want your corporate HQ. I want to see their action, because it's always talk.
It's virtue signaling, and we're sick of it, but it's...
And I've been guilty of this too, because I know some people in some of corporate America, I'm like, come on, they don't actually believe this stuff, so it's like maybe...
But no, they keep doubling down.
They keep buying in, so I don't think you can give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
I've made that mistake myself, being like, come on, it's not that bad, because I know some of these people.
But it is because they're controlled by those woke corporations.
So, I guess that's where I come in.
What are we going to do about it? We can continue to bitch and moan like we have for over a decade, or we could actually create some solutions, and that's what we're here to talk about today, is that we have probably the best solution for patriots in this country, and that's going public next week.
On the New York Stock Exchange, Public Square.
And that's how I factor into this conversation.
Talk about that whole process.
You could buy it, but it's not Public Square the ticket.
Right now, you can get into Columbia Acquisition Corporation.
I'll make it really simple.
They're going public through a SPAC. I'm the guy that runs that SPAC. The SPAC is a public company that's already on the New York Stock Exchange.
It's called Columbia Acquisition Corp.
It's CLBR. That's the ticker on the New York Stock Exchange.
I'm the chairman and CEO of that company.
I had to go and find a company I wanted to take public, and this was the company I wanted to do that with.
In the next week, he's going to become the surviving company and my company goes away.
Now, that takes him public and he gets all the cash that I have that's going to help him put his growth into overdrive.
That's the exciting thing about it.
So you guys understand, that's approximately, let's call it $200 million that Michael then, as CEO of Public Square, will have to be able to help grow this business.
Invest in, let's call it OEM products of other people that want to take on big corporate.
It gives them so much flexibility to, again...
Not just boycott and show you, here's an alternative to that product, but actually go and take them on.
I mean, that's a big deal, right?
That's the next step. Because, again, the boycotts have been great in terms of destroying market cap, but if they're doubling down, it's not enough.
We actually got to... Kid Rock can shoot, your friend can shoot the cans, and I think that's funny and we'll laugh at it, but then what's the positive thing?
That's only one aspect of it.
That day after they did that, he had an 800% increase in searches for beer.
So people want to find beer that is actually something that's not owned by a multinational conglomerate.
You know, I saw an interview actually with DeSantis a few weeks after that happened, and he said, oh, I'm never going to drink Bud Light again.
But then the guy said, what do you drink?
And he said, Guinness. And then it was found out that the company that owned Guinness did a transgender ad during the Super Bowl.
It never ends. Guinness was significantly worse.
But that's my point. It's not happening unless you go to these other companies that, by the way, over 55,000 businesses on his app, all of which are small and medium-sized businesses.
This isn't political. It is the largest repository of small and medium-sized businesses in America.
Those are the companies that were most harmed by the COVID lockdowns.
So this transcends politics.
And they are also the companies that are struggling the most under the current administration's economic policy.
So you don't only get a chance to support businesses that are the backbone of America, the middle class.
You also now, once the company is about to go public, you have the ability to support them by going and buying the stock now and owning a company that actually represents your values.
There really isn't any precedent for that until right now.
No, it's totally unique.
And like I said, Michael and I met A little over a year ago.
And it was like, I love the concept.
I'm an investor. Like, I'm a pretty significant investor, you know, in all of this.
So I've believed in the movement for so long.
But again, I think at the time we thought, hey, you know, we'll keep getting small businesses.
We'll give them a venue to get to other patriotic people who want to support that kind of business rather than, again, give your money to Woke Corporate, which is going to be then...
Spent and weaponized against everything that you believe in.
Or you can do this.
And the people who sign up on Public Square, whether you're a consumer or a small business looking to get to that market of people who believe, you're aligning those values.
Give us the quick recap of that, Michael, as well as some of the things that you've done that are just sort of the antithesis of what you see every day going on in world corporate.
What you've done for young parents.
Yeah. Who work at Public Square.
Just doing the opposite of what, again, big corporate.
We'll pay for you to go travel all over the world to get an abortion.
Just depravity.
Corporate-funded depravity at this point.
Well, and by the way, that corporate-funded depravity is this guise.
They're trying to say, we care about women's health care and we want to promote the health care of our women employees.
But in reality, that's not what they're doing.
What they're doing is... Protecting their bottom line.
They want to spend less on your maternity leave, so they'd rather you terminate your baby instead of promoting the empowerment and the growth of your family.
From the beginning, Public Square has always been seeking for solutions.
We want to be more about what we're for than what we're against, which is why, from the beginning, instead of just showing a blacklist of companies you should stay away from, we promote the largest repository the world's ever seen of businesses that you should go to, because if we can shift our dollars to these businesses, The, in turn, power structures of society will shift back toward the values that we share.
And I believe that ultimately these values we're describing, a love for country, love for freedom, a love for liberty, and the values that the Constitution protects, these are American values.
They're what made this country the best country the world's ever seen.
And we've created at PublicSQ.com a network of those.
And what's pretty cool is that...
Every week, we just try to be creative about what's a new solution we can provide.
And obviously, going public is a major solution because it allows folks to not only spend their money with companies that support them, but also invest their money with companies that support them in a world dominated by ESG and DEI. Recently, another one of those solutions that we thought of, you brought it up.
It was kind of a fun thing.
We were so frustrated watching after the overturn of Roe v.
Wade last year, which was a big win, thanks to your dad and the great administration.
You know, that win was really profound.
But then all these companies came out and they were like, we stand against this and we're going to fund our employees abortions because we care so much.
In reality, they don't.
But we said, you know what? We actually love our employees and their families.
We want their families to grow and expand.
And I would hope that they would feel like Public Square is a great place to work where they know that their employer has their back if they want to continue expanding their family.
And so we actually decided while the world was going to do $4,500 per abortion at Amazon, Lululemon, Uber, all these different places, Let's actually do $5,000 in a bonus after tax to any of our employees that have a baby or adopt.
So if you're on our staff and you or your spouse has a child, or if you decide to adopt, we'll actually give you $5,000 in a bonus.
No restrictions as to how you'd like to use it.
And I'm really proud to say that we've already had four employees take us up on it.
And in the last month, we've had another four pregnancies announced.
It's working. There's a lot of excitement.
And we're a small company, but growing fast.
So to have this policy in here at the beginning sends a message to our team.
We are pro-family. And we're not just saying that so that we can represent that to our businesses.
We mean it even at the very core of our company.
These sort of solutions are working.
And by the way, it's why our inbox is flooded with applications from people that are leaving Amazon and Target and Yelp.
And they're just saying, I'm so tired of talking nonstop about mental health days and woke politics and the need for BLM. I'm ready to support a company that's very simply pro-America, pro-family, constitution, bringing it back to the basics.
Okay, so talk about that, because again, when we started talking over a year ago, I love the idea, but when I made an introduction to Omid, I was like, you guys got to link up because we can scale this.
We can make it bigger. There's something that needs to be done here.
Omid, you came from an interesting background.
Obviously, corporate law, corporate finance, New York City.
Even, you know, different political views.
This is kind of like the odd couple.
It is, but it's worked incredibly.
But talk about that, because when I see, you know, and again, being part of it and being an investor and going through the deck, you know, some of the employees that you're bringing, these are people that function at a really high level in major corporate America.
Like, I'm shocked that a small company, you know, now you're going to have the access to the capital.
But I'm shocked that you could even attract Some of the talent that you've had.
Again, some of the companies that we've even named today, you know, people that were running stuff there that are like, I'm sick, I don't believe in any of this stuff, but I'm forced because they're trapped.
But they're like, you know what, I'm going to take a pay cut to go do this because we've got to fight back.
This is not just a financial transaction.
It's part of a broader cultural, political movement.
So I'll just give you a couple minutes as to how this thing came together, at least in my head, because it's very personal.
Moving from where we met in New York down to Florida, that was for my family for both political and cultural reasons.
It was clear to me that there were visions of political systems that are not working.
California versus Texas.
Florida versus New York.
The data is all there. Deficits versus surpluses.
No income tax versus taxes.
So I started thinking like, and then the cultural movements that we're all talking about that you're at the forefront of.
What's the next battlefield?
When I got here, I had this thesis that it was going to be around commerce, which is insane because the one thing America was, right, Michael Jordan said, is I don't talk about politics because Republicans buy sneakers too.
That was in the 90s.
It seems totally trite now that he said that.
That's how far we've come.
But I said if the other part of the country is getting divided, this is the next area.
And I didn't have to look too far.
You just look at what Canada did when they took away the bank accounts of all those truckers.
That we're trying to protest their rights against getting the shot.
So I knew that that type of stuff was coming here and we saw it with the censorship.
Effectively, what we saw was the government using private big tech monopolies to take away our constitutional rights.
Correct. That's effectively what was going on.
Yeah, it sounds dystopian, but it's actually happening.
You know it better than anybody. Trudeau talks about everyone should be able to peacefully protest until truckers peacefully protest.
And then it's like, we're going to throw you in jail.
We're going to track down your bank accounts.
We're going to fine you.
You know, that's not...
That's not off the table.
Stay at home because COVID will kill you unless you're protesting for social justice.
Then it can actually be good.
We saw that in New York.
Then you'll be immune to the virus if you do that.
So that's how you trust the science to those people.
So basically, with all of that as a backdrop, I'm raising money, investing in companies.
I started getting pitched by all these businesses that were being part of this new patriot economy that was starting up.
And I said there's something huge here.
And as I said on Tucker's show, that's over 100 million Americans that feel not only ignored but alienated.
Think about that. Why would you do that?
We all think it's stupid.
But listen, to our detriment, we haven't done anything about it until right now.
But that seems like a big part of the opportunity in terms of going public.
I know it from Trump Org.
I know it from other businesses.
Insurance companies, they don't even want to look at you.
Banks don't want to finance you.
It's like you're dealing with half the country, and you can make a pretty solid business with 100, 175 million Americans, and there's probably plenty of independents that are sick of what's going on.
Third largest economy in the world, by the way. Yeah, just there.
And right now, No one's even willing to talk to them.
No one's even willing to cater to them, which seems like a strong investment opportunity as well.
Which is why you've become the face for so many consumer-oriented brands that want to be able to scale and get to this cohort that has all the spending power that you've seen firsthand that no one has tapped into.
I mean, it's one thing to ignore them.
It's another thing to go and spit in their eye, right?
So that's kind of where we stand.
And to me, when we linked up, You know, we started that other fund, 1789 Capital, just to invest in these businesses.
So the first idea was maybe we just make an investment in it.
But I said, no way.
This is too big. You go back several millennia, the most foundational aspect of any economy is an exchange.
People finding buyers and sellers and combining them.
That's what he is, fundamentally, is an exchange.
Providing the transparency for Americans who are totally disaffected with the corporate culture they find themselves in to conduct commerce.
So it is more important than almost any other monoline product.
This is the foundation of the patriot economy.
Everything will then blossom from there.
Effectively, the way that Amazon has shown that it's now digital.
We all are forced to use a company that is actually underwriting and sponsoring our biggest enemy, the CCP. Why do we do this stuff?
So this is the first step in that broader, I think, revolution.
And I'm very pleased to help them do that.
And the opportunity for your viewers and everybody that watches this show is you don't just have to stand on the sidelines.
You can use his site now instead of Amazon or other places or Yelp.
And then now what we're presenting is an opportunity to actually be owners of it as well, which is to go and help support the mission.
And that's sealed the Arctic.
Yeah, and that allows for future growth.
That allows us to expand those platforms.
That allows us to improve and continually adjust.
Because, again, you're up against, let's call it, almost trillion-dollar companies, right?
That's a big deal. And they've gone out of their way to spit in the face of, you know, people who just believe basic things that, honestly, five years ago as an American, wouldn't have been controversial.
Like, you wouldn't even, like, you know, I feel, I always say on the show, like, I feel like I'm the star of the Truman Show.
Like, someone's got to be screwing with me.
I'm waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out of a cake and be like, yeah, you're being punked!
Because it's that ridiculous, and yet that's today's mainstream thought.
You know, Michael, talk a little bit about sort of the growth of the platform, the people, you know, the amount of companies coming on, not just, you know, again, not just the consumers that are signing up, because again, it goes both ways, right?
So if you're just... You know, if you want to find the store in your neighborhood or when you travel, you know, the non-woke coffee shop, you go to Public Square.
But if you're that coffee shop and you're looking to attract business, I mean, you have some great stories of saving businesses.
But talk a little bit about that growth and maybe give us a story about some of those businesses that were like, hey, man, I'm just a patriotic business struggling.
They got on the platform and all of a sudden other people found them because I think it's a big deal.
Well, that's actually the best and most rewarding part of all of this.
We're excited about going public.
We're excited about the growth.
We hit a million members faster than Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify did.
We've had incredible breakthroughs and milestones, but nothing has been more exciting and rewarding than the testimonies we hear from business owners.
I remember it was the first month we launched, and there was a business that reached out.
It was a hair salon. And she said, hey, just wanted to let you know, I've really struggled recently.
And in the first five days of being listed here...
I made enough business just from Public Square consumers for my entire month.
Thank you so much. That one story made it all worthwhile.
And I honestly said, I remember thinking, if that's all I ever hear, this entire journey and all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, completely worth it.
And that's just one tiny fraction of the iceberg.
We're hearing from incredible companies that are jumping into really hard industries like the healthcare space.
There's a company called America First Healthcare that joined the app and they said, hey, we had to double our staff size just because of a push notification that you guys sent out to your consumers.
And then we did another one, and they had to do it again.
So they're growing and expanding, and the right businesses are prospering.
There's a restaurant that was nearly done, and COVID wiped them out.
I mean, COVID was so hard on restaurants.
Especially, restaurant service industry really decimated that crew.
I mean, almost half of the restaurants in LA County Have struggled to even reopen ever again.
There's this massive turnover, and we don't want to see that happen.
We want to see the right types of businesses prospering into the future.
This restaurant reaches out and says, hey, due to Public Square consumers, I feel like we have the ground underneath our feet again.
And then there's the fun stories, too, of a beef jerky company that joined Carnivore Snacks, actually.
Joe Rogan calls them his favorite snack.
Carnivore Snacks came in.
We brought $40,000 of sales to them in their first month of joining us as an advertiser.
I mean, it's so cool to watch how this patriotic economy is not only a very liberating movement, it is also incredibly lucrative.
And actually, the point I'll end with is that, you know, over the last 60 days, Anheuser-Busch, Disney, and Target combined have lost over $50 billion in market cap.
52.5 when you add Ben& Jerry's.
Ben& Jerry's. Great point. But again...
But they keep doing it. It's one thing, the first, you make a stupid marketing mistake, you have a bad hat, but then you watch.
And it's like, you know what? I'm going to spit in your face, and I'm going to double down, and I'm going to say that it's still right.
That's what I don't get. I mean, you know...
How is Disney, with millions of shareholders all over the world, how do they go to their board meetings and say, we're doing the right thing?
It seems like there's not even a fiduciary responsibility anymore.
Their responsibility is to the woke, communist, leftist, socialist, whatever you want.
At this point, honestly, some of this stuff...
In my opinion, satanic, you know, evil mindset.
No, no, it's good. How do they explain that as a fiduciary?
Because you see the ESG thing.
You see Joe Biden using his first veto to veto the...
To opt out of ESG. To opt out of ESG. No, no.
We're going to force you to make what could arguably be a much worse financial decision for your...
For the people who you're supposed to be responsible for taking care of, they don't even care.
They're not even pretending. How do you keep doubling down?
You're scratching on some pretty big themes there, though, because if you go there, you're opening up really what's behind a lot of the craziness that's going on.
And a lot of it is you have to look at Who runs these public companies financially?
It's not the individuals there, because you're right, you know some of them.
They're not necessarily bad people, but who are pulling the strings?
And that's when you start getting into a lot of the stuff that Vivek talks about, which is this ESG. It's a cult, but it's also a very, very powerful one financially.
So if you have people that run trillions of dollars of assets, and if every public company is effectively owned by three entities, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, you do as they say.
But what's funny is that In many cases, a lot of the money that those folks have were from Republican states, which was crazy that it's only this awakening is happening now.
Some of these oil and gas companies, they take that to be anti-oil and gas?
I'm like, I don't understand. It's a very complicated structure that people need to understand.
It is a very, very small cabal of globalists and people who do not share America's interests.
But have a much different view of the world that are not only controlling us from a government perspective, with a global perspective, with who's there right now, but also these financial interests that also, as we've talked about in the past, operate as like Dutch East India companies.
They're transnational. They don't give a damn that they're domiciled in America.
They're globalists. Yeah, this is not a conspiracy theory.
This is just right there in front of you.
Oh, it's conspiratorial.
And by the way, like all the other conspiracy theories that have proven truth a couple months later, everyone will figure this out eventually.
But what I'm wondering is, is there ever a chance where the movement of the people who, you know, hey, maybe your 401k was invested in Disney because that was a blue chip stock and you're not handling it, you're not making those decisions every day.
I mean, that's why I think this is a great CLBR to invest in that is the option to take that on.
I mean, that's sort of what this is.
That's the most American thing you can do, to your point.
But when do those people sue and say, you're no longer...
You can, but what I'm saying is that a lot of the institutions are co-opted and corrupted.
I don't need to tell you guys that.
You know that, right? So a lot of the forms that you would use.
What I think we're proposing is actually as American as apple pie.
Some people think that if you're having a parallel economy, that's a bad thing.
Well, maybe they don't look at the fact that a lot of the actions that were taken to get us to the state came from that side, right?
What California was banning any...
You come from California. No state employee from California was allowed to travel to any red state and have that trip subsidized.
They started these actions.
We didn't. Now, the next step is, let's be clear.
COVID, one good thing that came out of it was we re-found federalism.
We should have competition among states to see who's better.
The next thing I think we need to do...
That's what Trump did. He's like, hey, I mean, that's our system.
We'll leave it to the states.
He left it to the states and see who wins.
And then if you look at the conservative states, whether it's Texas or Florida or South Dakota, they over-performed.
Businesses didn't go the same way.
People had freedoms. And you saw that leftist states did the opposite.
They were also much less reluctant to give back that assumed power back to the people because they don't actually believe in that.
Well, what was the craziest thing is it shows how significant that 2020 election was.
Because when Biden came in power and had the two chambers, the first thing they did was pass that bailout, which created inflation, but they pegged the money that they were giving to states to how high your unemployment rate was.
So if you did a crap job like Newsom or Cuomo, you got more money.
You are rewarding. Think about that. But that's like the most Democrat thing ever, right?
100%. We're going to pay you more money to stay at home than to actually go to work.
The last point I'll make on this topic is just, we just all talked about the best thing we can do is federalism, let the states play it out, and the people, as we're seeing where they're moving, you just moved to Florida from California, will vote with their feet and take their tax dollars.
The next step that we need to do is, we can't rely on the institutions that have been co-opted to save us from this anymore.
We need to be capitalists.
We need to start our own businesses.
Then and only then, when they see the trillions of dollars either being divested from those asset managers or the customers, where we're representing, start taking their dollars to other businesses, will they start normalizing the behavior.
Until that point, forget about it.
They're going to keep doing it every day.
Yeah. So, I mean, get into a little bit more details, you know, Michael.
What is, you know, being able to go public, you know, you got through the New York Stock Exchange, pretty much, I mean, record time.
And that's sort of amazing, given sort of what, you know, the SEC has done to conservative companies and all these things, the scrutiny, the this.
I mean, it's a very clean process.
You know, what's next? I mean, this is happening in basically, you know, less than two weeks.
Yeah. Yeah, the next few weeks are going to be pretty fantastic for us.
Our Redemption Day is the 17th.
And this is important because in a SPAC, the way this works is that there's a certain amount of money held in the trust, just under $200 million, right around $173 million.
And that money...
It essentially either can go on our balance sheet if you have low redemptions or it goes back to the investors that cash out if we have high redemptions.
We obviously want to see low redemptions because that's a good sign for the company that there are a lot of people that invested in CLBR that want to carry that equity over into PSQ Holdings.
Public Square. And so the goal here is that, hey, we'd love for folks to invest, to join us in CLBR, and then hold through the close of this transaction, the vote's the 19th, and the ticker changes on the 20th.
And then whoever's held on that 17th Redemption Day is money on our balance sheet that we can utilize to continue building the parallel economy, because as Don correctly noted, it's expensive to do this.
But we are fighting back with excellence.
We're putting our best foot forward.
We've hired the best talent on the planet.
And now that we can supercharge that with capital, we really believe the sky's the limit.
For us, the exciting part about going public is that we've always been accompanied by the people and for the people.
From the beginning, we didn't have any celebrities backing us.
We were just a bunch of normal people that cared enough to do something.
I had a list on a piece of paper of businesses that we knew we could support.
And that list became this incredible movement.
We used to knock on doors and ask businesses in the early days, do you agree with these values?
Would you love to join? And that's how this started.
Now, today, we have hundreds of businesses signing up from all over the place.
And what's incredible about this is that buy the people for the people is how we've grown.
Now we get to be owned by we the people.
We actually get to be an opportunity for investors to spend their money and invest their money with companies that don't hate them.
Because if you're a retail investor and you've ever put your money into anything, you can almost guarantee it's been robbed by ESG and DEI cults.
For us, though... And that's just what I'd view as just market inefficiency.
Taking your money, spending X percent of it on bad decisions to check a box, or to bring in the check box.
They check seven boxes, they're trans, this, that, and other non-profit, whatever it may be.
They're going to be the head of marketing.
Not because they're the best marketer, but because that gives them a higher ESG score, which...
Which is ridiculous. Some of those banks that went bankrupt, you remember a couple months ago, had the highest ESG score, like Silicon Valley Bank and all that stuff.
Yeah, highest ESG score. SGX had the second highest.
And it was the biggest fraud Ponzi scheme we've had in American history.
But this is what keeps happening.
Yep. But there, this goes back to the conversation we were having a little bit earlier, right?
Those are the new gatekeepers.
Those are the metrics that they abide by.
There was actually an example of a CEO recently who got paid a bonus.
Even though his stock was down 40%, he got the bonus because he hit ESG metrics.
Yeah, but if you think about that, guys, I mean, you know, and again, the problem is the average viewer here may not even know, like, again, because, like, if you're not playing in those things on a daily basis, you may not, you know, your 401k is with Joe Q, whoever is investing in it.
But, like, They're actually taking your money and putting it in these companies because this is the dominant form of these companies.
ESG matters more than shareholder value.
ESG matters more than revenue numbers.
None of that means anything, which is insane as just a capitalist.
So, I mean, actually investing in CLBR, you can do that now before it even goes public, the transactions.
I mean, that's done. It's happening on the dates that Michael mentioned.
But at least you know you're investing not only in this company, but in all of the companies that sign up that share these same values.
It's a cloud of arms. Do people want to support this?
I just see natural efficiency there.
That doesn't exist in corporate America.
Not because it shouldn't, but because there's no consequence for them to risk your retirement savings Bullshit, frankly.
Well, and you know what's interesting is that for us, it's going to be a massive actually selling point because it's our genuine feeling that ESG scores should be zero.
You shouldn't factor in the environment or social politics or diversity quotas in your hiring.
You shouldn't do this. In fact, the Supreme Court just ruled that affirmative action in universities is actually unconstitutional.
It's illegal. You shouldn't be able to do this. Because of course it is.
It should be the same in companies. The best was watching Joy Reid screaming, I only got into Harvard because of affirmative action.
Yeah, exactly.
That explains. She's like, I had no business getting into Harvard based on anything else.
I'm like, then maybe you shouldn't have been at Harvard.
And the fact that she doesn't understand that she's proving everyone's point in making this argument just shows how far we've fallen.
It also ruins the reputation of those schools now.
That's a funny thing, since you and I have gone to those schools, which we did, it's like, you think about our kids, like, it doesn't carry the same weight to many more like it used to.
Oh, me and I, we went to, you know, the elite universities.
But I look at them now, they're indoctrination camps.
It's almost, why would you do that?
I don't think, you know, you're not capable of having an argument, even if it's civil.
You're about 10 years younger than us, or 15 years almost.
You didn't go to one of those schools.
And look, he's about to be one of the youngest CEOs of a public company.
This is the future, actually.
Not that I learned anything, necessarily.
This is just in this generation. But that diploma got you in the door, and it was sort of a good old boys club.
That whole paradigm has changed. It's gone.
My kids were like, I want to go to that school.
I'm like, honestly, I don't think it's worth it.
By the way, I argue that for most of college, period.
Not even elite versus not elite.
I think right now, the amount of people, the amount you could learn without doing that.
I could learn everything I needed to learn in college in about four months that I learned in four years
at an elite university because of all the fluff.
But the pedigree doesn't matter anymore because of what they do every day, the acceptance.
All that.
What was this dad at Stanford?
They're like, well, you know, I think only like 10% of the incoming class was white.
And then, of course, everyone that was benefiting from affirmative action,
well, maybe it's because white people underperformed.
Maybe just one demographic, just by itself sort of magically underperforming.
Like, maybe not.
Maybe it's just like, if you could check a box and you could, you know, people,
the trans community saying, you know, I'd argue they're the most privileged group in society today.
You can't do anything.
You know, even the LGB community can't question the trans community.
It's insane. When people say that, it's funny because it's so easily disproven.
It's when you have people, especially from the white community, that feel like they now have to check the box of being one of these things in order to get to school.
I've heard this numerous times, whether people want to admit it or not.
They're just checking that box and saying, I'm non-binary or whatever they want to say.
They get into college, they're not mad at sex.
They're heterosexual again. By the way, Elizabeth Warren did this in the early days.
She checked the box of American Americans.
She was leading the charge.
Yeah, the absurdity of this.
You know, Pocahontas over there.
But, no, you saw the stat.
It was, prior to COVID, it was, I think it was basically straight white women.
50%, close to 50%.
I don't remember the exact stats, so don't fact check me.
But, like, it was something that close, you know, identified as bisexual.
Right? And then when COVID hit...
It's 20% of Gen Z. Yeah, no, when COVID, but no, but this was people that, oh, when COVID hit, Exactly 0% of that 50% actually were in a bisexual-homosexual relationship because they really weren't.
But there was actually a social pressure.
Like, you weren't cool if you weren't bisexual.
Now, you check the bisexual box.
You never actually act on it, probably because you're not.
And so it was really sort of telling.
Yeah. You ain't cool unless you're this.
And that's, again, part of the indoctrination.
They're doing this to our kids. There's the explicit reading materials in our school, the this, that, and the other.
I mean, there's no reason to teach this stuff to a three-year-old.
No, never. You know, you see with the parades.
Well, you know, it's not about kids.
Well, kids aren't allowed.
Well, then we're not putting on our parade.
Well, But I thought it wasn't about...
Wait a minute. Well, follow the money is what I like to say.
Follow the money for all this is what I encourage your viewers to do.
Follow the money behind the whole COVID scam and the whole Pfizer and Moderna joke that that was and what's happening.
That's a good short position of those two companies, quite frankly.
But go a little bit further into this contagion that's happening to our children right now,
which is very much, as you're saying, influenced by one TikTok, which is, we've talked about
this for years, a Trojan horse.
To CCP, like, just...
Trojan horse.
Look at what they show our kids to make them act this way versus their own.
And then finally...
Yeah, for those of you who don't know, the algorithm on TikTok basically rewards people
in America for acting like imbeciles, so that your children watch imbeciles and want to
emulate them.
In China, the algorithm rewards people who are doing, like, young kids who are doing,
like, physics projects so that everyone watches.
Oh, that guy's the TikTok star.
He's doing physics projects.
So, you know, they're literally trying.
And it shuts down after a few hours.
It doesn't let you stay on the app for more than a couple hours.
You can't become addicted.
You can't become this. But when you are watching, you're watching kids that are potentially rock stars in a good way, not imbeciles in a bad way.
And it's basically a big CCP psyop for the Chinese Communist Party to destroy our youth.
And by the way, it's been very effective.
You look at the suicide rates, you look at the stuff that they push as it relates to, again, the trans, non-binary nonsense.
You know, every kid grows up being confused.
They're emulating people they could never actually be like.
Not because they're actually good, but because they think that it's good because that's how they've been programmed.
I mean, they're destroying the next generation.
If you look at the pharmaceutical companies behind a lot of this, and so that's obviously what I was referring to on the COVID thing, if it wasn't explicit enough, but the fact that they're immune from any liability.
If you can create a product where there's no downstream liability, I mean, think about that for a moment.
There is no other. And then it's mandated at the same time.
You must take it regardless, and you cannot sue for any harm that comes from it.
There is no other industry that gets that.
So that's step one. But then you can even look at what's going on behind the trans craze.
There is a massive pharmaceutical movement behind that and money behind that.
Think about the fact that when they get them on puberty blockers, when they're as young as five or six years old, they have to take those drugs for their entire life.
And then you get the hospital systems involved.
And then the surgeries are another profit motive.
We've seen videos come out of certain hospitals where they're encouraged to push this stuff to generate revenue.
I mean, it is utterly sick.
And this is on children that couldn't buy a pack of cigarettes for 50 years.
They couldn't get a tin of dip.
And yet, we're going to put you on lifelong things.
You're going to make a permanent decision at 5 or 3.
It's insane. To bring it back to Public Square, because you're the antithesis of all that.
Is there another company on not just the New York Stock Exchange, but probably any of the exchanges that is even like this?
You know, very few. What I will say is that Our buddies at Rumble, which we're on right now, they went public via SPAC, just like we did, and they're on the NASDAQ, though, not New York Stocks.
Yeah, they're NASDAQ. That may be one of a few free speech.
So there's two out of hundreds.
There are two out of there. There aren't a ton.
And there are a few cool ETFs that are trying to push back against the woke capital.
But people need a company that they feel like they can follow the life cycle, can join them on the journey, especially with something like Public Tour, when you're an actual consumer or a business to own the platform that you are hosting on.
That's pretty cool.
And there's a question that a lot of people ask us, and it's a good one, which is, well, if you're going public, can't you be controlled by the Black Rocks?
That's actually a really good point. Because this was a concern of mine.
I'm like, wait a minute. If you're starting off and you're a small company, they see the threat.
It's cheaper for these multi...
Billion, almost trillion dollar corporations.
I'm just going to buy it all and control it, and then I take out my threat while pretending they're happy to take your money.
They'll let you play a little bit, but never actually become a threat.
What do you do to combat that?
Yeah, you know what? Actually, we learned a lot from Rumble.
Chris Pavlovsky had a special class of voting shares that ensured that he had a majority of control of the company, even if he didn't financially own a majority.
So even if Alex Soros came in and bought 90% of the company...
Chris would still be in control.
And so Alex can't call a shareholder vote.
He can't elect board members. He can't have any direction in where the company goes.
And we're actually employing a similar tactic at the close of this transaction.
So assuming the shareholders vote in favor on the 19th, ticker changes on the 20th, I will actually retain majority voting control as long as I own over 50% of my position in perpetuity.
So for the life cycle of this entire company.
I'm keeping my position.
This is the thing I pour my life into.
Michael believes this stuff.
When I invested with them and everything like that, this is not...
Where we are is incredible because I think other people see what's going on, but you were content doing this and starting this movement literally out of your kitchen because you were sick of what was going on in lockdowns.
You'd go to a coffee shop and you couldn't take down your mask to make an order without getting lectured.
It was like, enough of this.
You know, that's what's awesome.
It's real and it's organic.
And again, I mentioned earlier sort of the level of talent of people.
You know, your chief marketing officers coming out of, you know, big, big places.
The guy setting up the digital behind the scenes.
It's like, wait a minute, how does a small company, even before this transaction, how did you get that guy?
Well, that guy actually believes as much as Michael does.
And he took a pay cut to come do this because I think he understands what's going on at Woe Corporate and also the threat to that for the future.
Yep. And that one gentleman you're specifically referencing, he's got six kids.
So he's like, if I don't fight back now, what future am I leaving for my kids?
You seem like an underperformer, I feel like.
He does set them up.
Yeah, I'm like, wait a minute, I got five.
I thought I was doing pretty good.
They're going after that baby bonus on our staff.
Right, exactly. But, you know, he took a massive pay cut from a major corporate entity.
And he's a perfect example of someone who's putting his money where his mouth is and said that it's too important to spend my day working for companies.
You've got great friends at Red Balloon.
They're friends of ours as well.
Red Balloon's trying to fight this on the job front side, trying to connect employers.
Yeah, that's a job board. So, you know, if you're looking to...
Again, if you're a small business and you're looking to hire, go check out RedBalloon at redballoon.work because I think the most disastrous thing, and Omid, you've seen this happen a bunch, is a bad hire.
You don't even have to be overtly conservative.
You could just be a freedom-loving business.com.
You hire some woke leftists because you're not screening for the insanity,
and they're suing you over this.
You say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays, and you're going to jail, and this person owns your company.
Or just puts you in a lawsuit that you've got to...
The problem with BS is you still have to defend BS.
That hiring process and that HR back-of-house, because so much of that has been corrupted and gone woke,
that's sort of an alternative as well.
Red Balloon, we work with them for that, but if you're that small business, check that out because that's a part of this bigger picture.
Well, I was just going to say to close our point, too, this is why it's so important that we keep the mission of this pure, because we're building this entire economic ecosystem.
And so we've always said from the beginning, and I've said this with no hesitation, if I had to choose between compromising our mission, but it led to success, or failure, but we stay true to the mission...
I'm always choosing staying true to the mission.
Because what the world needs right now is genuine expressions from entrepreneurs that actually believe this stuff.
That actually want to go after...
Because, by the way, the ESG cultists, they don't even really believe what they're saying.
They're doing it like you said. It's ridiculous!
They're pulling the strings. No one with an IQ of above, let's call it, into the double digits, even barely, actually thinks that matters.
It's like when I watch the military guys.
Diversity is our strength in our military.
It's like, I don't know, like... How about strength is our strength if you're trying to win a war?
Maybe that's why we haven't exactly overperformed lately.
I don't think they actually believe it, but there's no consequence for them saying it.
There's actually rewards, right?
If you're on the left, you can lie to Congress.
You can do these kinds of things. What side would you guys have been on when certain horrible things were happening in history?
Everybody wants to say they were going to fight the Nazis if they were in Germany.
It's easy to say, oh, if that would have happened if slavery was happening, I would 100% have been able to.
Would you? Because when things are going one way, I've seen a lot of sheep.
I haven't seen a lot of people taking the other side of stuff.
It's usually people that are so confident and quick to say that they'd be an abolitionist that they'd actually just be part of the sheep.
And that's the people that let you know.
Well, I think COVID was the greatest sort of...
Exactly. That's the point.
What better example in modernity?
Oh, I really believe in freedom, but do you really?
Yeah, not at all. And show how easy it was for them.
And that should be a cautionary tale.
And that's why the private sector, again, is the last battlefield.
It's the area we are farthest behind.
It's the area where we have to make up the most ground in the fastest.
And it's the area, based on technology, that they're going to attack first.
This is the part that they're going to try to de-platform people.
They'll first take away your speech, and then they'll take away your liberty by de-platforming you off the financial system as well.
This is already happening in China.
People need to understand that.
Yeah, talk about the social credit score.
We talk about it generally.
This is another thing that's not...
It's aided by AI. It's getting worse.
It's getting worse. Yeah, there is a show called Black Mirror that came out almost seven or eight years ago, I think, on Netflix.
It's not as good anymore, but if you look at the ones from seven or eight years ago, it's almost like they knew what was going to happen.
They have one episode that it's pretty...
Pretty telling now. It was seven or eight years ago.
It was basically like the person would walk around and you could rate them based on the interaction.
So, like, if you were nice to me, you would get five stars.
But then that, if you were rude, I'd give you zero stars.
That would then affect how much money you can make.
That would affect whether or not you could go take a loan or get a car.
And it was meant to be kind of like satirical, but it was really like a warning.
Like, that's where we're headed.
And that was taking the way people act online, which is so scared of cancellation and doing all the virtue signaling to be accepted, which is now manifested into our real world.
And that's effectively the basis of a social credit score, which is you must behave exactly the way the regime wants you to.
Otherwise, we will inhibit your ability to make a living.
And that's ESG. That is ESG. That is where we're headed with that.
We're already there. China's ahead of us.
You know, I had an interesting conversation with Palmer Luckey, you know, sort of one of the few conservative, you know, believers in tech, you know, young, you know, teenage billionaire, founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook.
They threw him off his board because he was, you know, had a dissenting opinion.
But he was talking about AI with me, and this is five, six years ago, before everyone even, sort of, now it's everywhere, and you've got ChatGTP and all that insanity.
Of course, that's also biased and swayed and liberal and gone insane.
But he talked about it, and he goes, you know, China's so into this because At any other time in history, you could have a revolution because a guy like you and me and the three of us, we could get together as we did with this.
And plot a bit of a resistance at least.
But now, there's a video camera over there that sees you talking with this guy.
One false word and they're on you and they're able to crush Did you hear about Amazon shutting down a house because someone said the wrong thing?
No, he didn't even say the wrong thing.
The guy wasn't even home. He misinterpreted him in an Uber, right?
The driver thought he heard him say something, which was just nonsense.
And then the smart homes shut it down. And they just shut down the home.
You don't think that's going to happen to your test list?
I mean, of course, yeah. I like, you know, certainly Twitter 2.0 is better than 1.0.
You saw also last week, Elon Musk is signing on the pledge to believe in Communist China's socialist core values.
Yeah. Because, you know, he's got a huge multi-billion dollar company that's entirely dependent on the rare earth minerals, the batteries, all the components that go into that car.
If he doesn't sign off on that, so a guy that can be out there for free speech is still controlled by China.
And this is what they would like.
And honestly, guys, our left...
Is not that different.
If they could implement that right now, amass that level of power, shut down your beliefs, shut down your speech, shut down your freedom, shut down your Second Amendment, they would.
You know how I know this? Because they're saying it every day.
They have become, and again, as you know, I mean, we talked about this.
I used to be a Democrat when I was younger.
This party that, you know, has become the party that I don't even recognize has become the party of censorship and war.
And Kennedy says that all the time, who's also, you know, similarly situated like I am.
He's a pro-liberty, pro-American person.
That's what I care about, liberty and the country.
And if you feel that way, how can you be comfortable with how comfortable they are with censorship, which is the foundation, you know, being against censorship is the foundation of being an American.
And you see that the judge just on July 4th actually told the Biden administration to refrain from continuing their interactions with all these tech companies that they had clearly been doing and we knew about from the Twitter files that this is how we started the conversation.
I actually had Jeff Landry on Thursday.
He's a good friend.
He's a hunting buddy. He's the attorney general in Louisiana.
That started that case.
And it's always about, again, how are we fighting back?
You guys may want to just hear the inner workings of that show because it's really interesting.
And watching the Democrats, what do you mean the government can't basically call Facebook and tell them to shut this down?
They did it to Tucker. They did it to Tucker.
They artificially boosted Fauci's lies.
They covered up when you caught him in a lie.
They were doing all of these things to manipulate the science.
Because again, Fauci said X on TV, but he said the opposite of X to his colleagues in emails.
So, like, both...
The opposite can't be true at the same time.
And Fauci was saying, take down these people, get them out.
We have the emails from the FOIA request where he's saying to go attack the people in the Great Barrington Declaration, a lot of them who were my friends, these epidemiologists, these scientists that had great credentials that were trying to give a different perspective.
He's telling them to basically shut them down.
That is a violation as a federal...
Well, beyond the fact that he used, you know, hey, you want funding from, you know, NIH? That's...
Guess what? You better come in line.
It was like, but I don't agree. Doesn't matter.
You're not doing the funding. This is the science, but it's wrong.
Here's proof. No funding. In what world wasn't the leak from Wuhan lab?
One question. Of course it was, but if you said that, you were out of academia.
This is my new thing whenever I'm on a platform.
How is Fauci rich? Yeah.
Why does he have over, on the disclosure I've seen, over $10 million of cash?
How did he do that?
How do you get that rich if you're in government for 50 years, for half a century on the salary?
Even though he was the highest paid employee, it was still about $500,000.
Still the math doesn't work.
How did you get that cash?
Right? How do you get that cash?
How do you become that rich when you work in half a century?
That's my point. That is what's so insane to me, which means that the corruption is so much deeper than you imagine.
It's the same thing with COVID. It's the reason why we didn't do a proper investigation of it is because there are people in this country that are partly responsible for it.
So that is the issue we have.
It's that we have...
This cabal of people in the United States who are not loyal to America but are loyal to foreign powers like the CCP and are completely in bed with them.
So you never get honest investigations because a lot of people who could control those investigations are in cahoots with them.
And this is like the most, again, it's not like this is conspiratorial.
It's right in front of you.
It's obvious. You should be able to have a dialogue.
And maybe even if you're wrong about that opinion, at least maybe the conversation leads you to another result as opposed to this is the gospel, you must believe it, you must fall in line, and that's it.
Shut up and take your shot.
Don't ask any questions about it.
And all of the companies, I mean not all, but so many of the companies that are on Public Square right now, they experience that.
Yeah. And they said, you know, enough.
Or they were getting crushed in their local municipalities.
Like I said, you started in San Diego.
I mean, San Diego is maybe a little...
It's conservative for California.
But it's still California.
But, you know, there's a hunger out there for this.
And... And there's no market.
No one's even willing to step out of their box.
Even the woke companies, they love your money as a conservative, but they're not going to actually publicly support something like this.
So I think it's such an incredible opportunity.
I mean, you talked about, Michael, because people who would be interested in perhaps investing, I guess, You talked about, hey, you figured out how to maintain control, right?
You're right. The Soros-funded guy can't stroke a check for a couple hundred million dollars and now he controls your company and will pretend to let you play but never allow you to actually grow or maximize shareholder value or whatever it may be.
Are you ever worried about cancellation in any other way or does it actually just make you stronger at this point because you're actually fighting back and our people care about actually fighting back?
That's a great question. We certainly in the early days, and still today, but definitely when we were starting, wanted to make sure that we mitigated as much of the cancellation risk as possible.
So we vetted all the vendors we partnered with for all of our own kind of SaaS tooling.
We actually, in the early days, made sure that as we were...
Securing some of these foundational partnerships and contracts for different services that we needed to utilize for the growth of our own business that they actually said explicitly, we will not cancel you based upon negative reputation for your political views.
We also asked very difficult questions of some of these folks.
We, in the early days, were threatened to be canceled by our own bank.
They said, hey, we're a little concerned about this conservative thing.
I've dealt with that as well. You did, just recently.
Exactly. We don't want your business.
I'm like, We thought someone stole three quarters of a million dollars out of our bank account.
It was like, oh yeah, we forgot to tell you that we just don't want your money.
I'm like, what did we do?
We're not creating news.
We're literally just aggregating everything.
Purely because of your political views. That's it.
And for us, so we said, you know what?
We're going to bank with a bank that we found on our own app.
So that's who we bank with, Axos Bank.
So, you know, for us, we've tried to mitigate as much of the cancellation risk as possible.
And also on top of that, we do feel like any time that we've been hit, any time anybody's tried to attack us, you know, obviously we've never had a successful cyber attack or anything like that against us.
We've got an incredible team led by a great CISO. But when people attack us in the press or when they try to encourage our cancellation or when they try to encourage the cancellation of the business vendors on our platform, what's pretty incredible to witness is that we've built an army now.
We have such strength in numbers that...
We intimidate them more than they intimidate us.
We're actually proactively pushing back.
We had a business in Chicago where there was a group of left-wing activists that were saying, this business is on Public Square.
We should go there and we should protest in front of this business because they're anti-trans and all this stuff.
Well, we were organized a rally at the business where we would pay for the first 500 patrons' meals.
So when we had a mass drive of consumers to that business, there were like five protesters from the other side.
They stood down. The media will always, you know, they get down low and they get a camera angle.
So they did it to me with my dad one time.
We were in Scotland. We were building a golf course.
And, you know, I look at the picture in the media and it looked like there was this rally because they get down low and there's two people and a sign.
That's all it was. It was two people in a sign.
But they make it seem like these are the people and they're, you know, no one.
It was just totally artificially created.
And that's, I'm glad you mentioned Chicago's.
We did that when we were at CPAC. You know, we get to CPAC, we're like, hey, we had a sort of an interesting dinner.
You know. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nigel Farage, you know, all these conservatives were like, where can we go in D.C. where we're not...
So we got on Public Square.
We found an incredible restaurant there.
We went there and they were like, oh, we'd love to have you.
It was like last minute. Can we get a table for 20?
It was Kim's birthday. It was amazing.
And like... It was awesome.
And we had an incredible experience.
So it's not just about finding a business that shares your values in a red state.
It's actually, and perhaps even more so, about finding them in those blue states where those businesses still exist, where those people still exist, where those values Again, values that would at no other time in American history be even remotely controversial, just like being pro-America.
It's in those places.
If you're traveling for business and you end up in Chicago, go on the Public Square app, find that business.
Go there. Coffee shops could be catty-corner.
Don't give it to Starbucks who's funding the crap that you hate.
For two seconds. You're going to search anyway, wherever it is.
Like, find that business on Public Square and go there.
It's that simple. And that's how, I mean, again, that's the difference between, we touched on it earlier, just sort of being on the defense.
We're going to do the boycott.
Again, great, but this is taking it to the next level.
Now we're actually going on the offense.
Yeah. That's exactly right.
No, I mean, it is, and it feels good.
I mean, I just have to say, like, I've just been so impressed with the adoption, and I think he kind of referenced it, but I want to put a finer point on it.
And, you know, as someone who's in the financial community, you look at these businesses and you have to compare them.
That's one of the things we do is a comp analysis, basically.
And from a historical perspective, I just want to hone in again on the fact that he has over 1.1 million registered users already on this app.
That's the customers that sign up.
It's not just hit the website.
They give their demographic information, their email, their website.
And again, in historical context, they reached that metric under 11 months of being national.
That's faster than Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify.
Think about that. Put that in context.
And you compare. That's basically Facebook-level growth.
So what that means is if we think there's at least 100 million people out there, already, just in a few months, we've already gotten 1% of that.
I mean, it is game on once we're out there.
And what I'm so excited about is the symbolic importance Of all three of us, amongst our other friends, to be up there on the 20th ringing the bell of the New York Stock Exchange.
That's kind of like, you know, I was telling them it looks like the deplorables are storming the gates here.
I don't think they ever thought that you guys would be up there ringing the New York Stock Exchange bell, but it makes me very, very personally happy that I helped facilitate that.
Yeah, and listen, there's so much more.
I mean, for those investing, I mean, you know, Michael, the precautions you've taken, we talked about cancellation, just, you know, a protest.
But even, you know, not being dependent on, like, Amazon Web Services, you know, where they say, yeah, build your own, build your own, you're off.
Talk about some of the protections that people, again, if they're looking to invest, the steps you've taken there to make sure that you're on your own.
If big tech decides they don't like you anymore, it actually doesn't matter.
You're independent of that. Well, yeah, that's a great question.
We've had a lot of steps toward redundancy on the back end for our infrastructure, which has been incredibly important.
And we applaud the companies in this space that we are in conversations with, like Rumble, that are absolutely crushing it in the cloud architecture world.
And obviously with their SPAC and the capital that they were able to infuse into the growth of the company, they're able to make leaps and bounds toward that aim of becoming a totally uncancellable ecosystem.
And that's the same thing we're trying to do at Public Square.
We want to make sure that from the very foundational elements of our company, To the very top, we have security that is giving consumers and businesses alike a real sense of assurance that they're not going to get screwed because we get screwed.
Plus, on top of that, you know, the other thing is that the companies that have been canceled largely in the past have been very social-oriented for speech.
And we're a little different given that we're commerce.
You know, you don't really speak on the app.
You just shop on the app.
And that helps us to a degree because there's very little...
Parameters around issues with the First Amendment that the authoritarians hate in society.
It's harder to criticize shopping because it's the most foundational element that we all kind of do throughout a day.
You wouldn't survive unless you can shop for goods to some degree, right?
Which, by the way, why the social credit score is so dangerous is because they want to shut off your access to shopping if you don't agree with their political views.
So we want to make sure that for us as a company, when we exercise our rights in the marketplace, To source our own services, and then for our consumers to do that through our services, it's incredibly important.
By the way, one last point on this.
One of the neatest parts about this ecosystem we've created is the relationships that are taking place between our businesses.
So we have businesses that have said, I'm getting screwed by Salesforce.
Mark Benioff has called himself the most anti-conservative CEO in the country.
What are we supposed to do with that?
We need a solution. I think he owns Time Magazine, by the way.
Probably. No, I'm not kidding.
It's like Bezos owns the Washington Post.
It's not political, it's journalism.
No, it's a propaganda wing of Amazon.
And who owns the Atlantic? It's Jobs' widow, who's obviously a complete leftist.
People need to just, and I'm going to keep doing this throughout this interview as I have, just sprinkle things in here.
Because not enough people know who's really controlling a lot of what you digest.
Right. And you consume.
And we've got to make sure that the three of us are getting that information out there at every step of the way.
Because it'll start making things look clearer once you understand that.
And that's why it's important, guys. Like, share, this kind of content.
Again, I'll ask Omid, tell us if they're interested.
Because, again, you can invest.
And when I say invest, it doesn't have to be seven-figure checks.
That's not what we're talking about.
Talk about how to do that, what that process looks like.
Because, again, a lot of people may not even know, but they're like, hey, I like this idea.
And it's different.
It's different. So, it's in the context of the way markets work in the United States.
So, what I do most of the time is invest privately.
However, in order to invest privately, you have to be what's called an accredited investor.
And you guys know about that.
You have to have a certain amount of income and there's a threshold.
And so, when a company stays private, that means it can't really get to the people.
And so, that is kind of why When I talked to Michael about this, he said to me the most important thing is I want my relative that's a truck driver to be able to own my company.
And he can't do that right now.
That's actually how the conversation started when we first met.
That was one of the first things he said to me that appealed to him, is that we want to democratize capital markets.
We haven't done that.
The capital markets of America belong to each and every one of us.
Everybody watching this show, it's yours too, but we haven't done anything with them.
So part of doing this is to go out there and allow anybody.
So a lot of folks have gone out and donated, you know, $5, $10 to your dad and other important political figures, and that's great.
Now we're giving another opportunity, which is if you're concerned about commerce, you can do $5, $10 and go buy a stock and own a company that you care about and be a part of it.
And that's really different.
And it's, I think, really exciting because it's another element for people to be able to, as you guys said, play offense.
For them, if they have an Ameritrade account or something like that, any one of those accounts, you can go and CLBR. Yeah, that's what it is.
Buy a share. Hold it. You can do it, yeah.
And then you hold it through the, if you're inclined to support, you hold it through next week, and then you automatically own Public Square.
It's pretty cool. So that's how you go out and you support that.
And I just think that's part, that's really what this was always about, was how do we create another movement Within commerce this time.
That people can all participate in.
There was no other way to do this.
And I think it's only the beginning, quite frankly, because other people are going to see this successful transaction and what we're doing here and want to take part in it.
We can't only have two listed companies, Rumble and Public Square, that represent half the country.
But I'm happy to open that floodgate.
Yes, and you guys are doing that.
I was one of the earliest guys on Rumble as well.
I believe in this stuff.
I think I was the second verified user on Rumble.
And look at where that's come. It's such an important platform, what you guys are doing.
It's been great. Again, you can choose where you spend your money.
It's not just about the boycott, but actually, take the time.
Download the PublicSquare app.
You can go online and just go to PublicSquare.com.
C. Find those businesses.
Support those businesses.
You can invest in CLBR right now.
That'll flip over to PSQ in a little over a week.
It's going to be...
This is the forefront.
This is actually the, hey, what can we do?
This is it. It's not just stop supporting XYZ. Post a meme.
You can actually... Listen, that's big.
I like memes. Who likes memes more than me?
Who likes memes more than me?
But you can actually now be proactive.
And so we're taking it into the next evolution.
We're combating that cancel culture with not just cancellation, but actually an offensive movement.
And that's what I look at this as. You know, there's basically, I think, you know, three big buckets as people think about it.
One in this new economy that we're all talking about.
I call it EIG, which is Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth.
And other people call it the Patriot Economy.
It doesn't matter to me. It means the same thing.
It's basically three buckets. It's companies like Public Square that are going to replicate and give you great products that are patriotic and care about this country.
That's bucket one. Bucket two is we all know that globalization has gone too far.
We've got to bring things back onshore.
We've got to look at companies that are going to make sure national security is at the forefront.
And we don't have China cornering the lithium market like you mentioned.
And bucket three is they're amazing businesses.
That can't get any financing, whether they're in ammunition or coal, that are super, super great businesses, but they can't even get loans from banks because that's how much this is permeated through our economy.
Great businesses with great bottom lines can't get a couple million dollars from a bank to loan.
And so that's the state of the state.
People should know that because, as you pointed out, a lot of this stuff is in the background, but it's there.
That's why I think I like to say this to Michael.
ESG was a scam, but it became a multi-trillion dollar scam.
And it started around 2010 or 2011.
We right now are at the top of the first of this movement.
Maybe even spring training, as Michael likes to say.
So we are at the ground floor of something that is going to make ESG look like a joke.
And that's how exciting this is.
I think that's the incredible opportunity.
I think there's the incredible sort of investment opportunity because you are at the forefront of it.
Because it is so opposite of everything that's out there.
Because there is... Such a big market, half the country, maybe more, who's literally not only not been catered to, but has borderline been ostracized, left out in the nuts.
So, I think it's an incredible opportunity there, but it's also a chance to, again, you can give your money to Jeff Bezos or Schultz over at Starbucks, and they will take that money and donate millions and millions of dollars to Democrats that hate your guts, to woke causes that would put you in the gulags, or Or you can support a small business, even de facto this way, through the public markets and put their kid through soccer practice.
You know what I mean? You're supporting American small business, the American family.
It's just the antithesis of everything else that's out there.
And what I love about it, again, I'm a big investor myself, because no one else is even doing it.
I know. It's shocking, but that's how perverted that mindset has gotten, that people...
We can't cater to half the country.
As a businessman, wouldn't it be amazing to you that you could start a company that would have...
I want a monopoly on half the country that no one else wants to touch.
I can do fine with that.
By the way, one other thing I don't think we've talked about that you might want to mention is, like, obviously we're...
You know, some political involvement on this panel here, but this is not just a political app.
Can you talk a little bit about maybe the culture and the sports and how this is a transcendent movement?
There's like a whole set of people that are like kind of like Rogan viewers.
They're not, you know, Well, you did a great job of that this week.
I mean, today, you actually hosted a course, a thing that was going to happen at one of our golf courses.
Right, so I'll actually talk about all that stuff.
Yeah, that's actually a great point.
So Jordan Poyer, one of the best defensive players in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills, he came under fire because he was hosting a golf tournament, celebrity golf tournament.
All these incredible stars and athletes were going to be there.
And they were hosting the golf tournament for charity, by the way.
For a hospital. For a hospital in New York.
At the golf course in Doral, in Miami.
It's only one of the best golf courses anywhere in the world.
We'd be so honored and privileged to be able to play there, and especially when it supports a good cause.
Well, the left came under fire and said that you're a racist and you're all these awful things because you're
hosting this that trumped her out, which is absurd on its face, but
Unfortunately, it got so bad that the sponsors had to pull out and so Jordan was like guys
We got to cancel the tournament But when we heard about that, we got in touch with his
people We started talking to Jordan and said man, it really feels
like the show needs to go back on We cannot let them win
And he was so aligned to that.
And so we actually announced that we would be the title sponsor.
We would bring the tournament back with him.
And so today we hosted this incredible golf tournament at Trump Doral.
And it was amazing.
Celebrities from all different aspects of culture coming together to support this incredible cause and send a very loud and clear message, which is that do not let this tiny fraction of society, whom their bark is way more intense than their bite, Do not let them threaten you into silence.
That's what they want you to do. They want you to be silent.
They want to intimidate you into just sitting down and shutting up.
Proud of Jordan. Proud of all these people that are standing up and saying, no, no, no.
Enough is enough. And we're really proud to put our money behind heroes like that.
And to Amit's point, this has massive ramifications for culture, for sports, for entertainment.
We actually had a racing team, Rick Ware Racing, it was a NASCAR racing team back in the spring
in April.
They actually gave us a free car to wrap.
JJ Yelly, an incredible driver, gave us a free car to wrap because he said, I just want
to support drivers, or I just want to support companies on my car when I'm driving that
love this country and love liberty.
And so we've seen that happen in action sports as well.
We have incredible athletes that have joined us and that we're partnering with as influencers, country music stars that aren't even known for being expressly political.
Ray Lynn, who's an amazing up-and-coming country star, has been one of our fiercest advocates and incredible influencers.
So we're just witnessing how this thing really is far more of a principled movement than it is just a momentary political drive.
And I'll finish with this. We just celebrated July 4th last week, and our country celebrated its 248th birthday.
The average life cycle of a civilization, a nation-state, is about 250 years.
That's what many historians believe.
So we have a choice to make. We've got two years left, and then we're going to have a presentation in front of us.
Do we want to beat the averages and see another 250 years of prosperity for the United States?
Or are we going to let this woke nonsense destroy our incredible nation?
We're going to choose the former.
We want another 250 years.
The way you do that is by making sure that the houses of commerce, those who profit in this society, want a prosperous future for the United States, where each of us is actually able to express our mind in the public square.
So we're proud to be in a movement that is not just for a momentary political win.
It has lasting economic and cultural ramifications.
It's pretty exciting. I don't think you could have said it any better.
That's a good way to close.
So guys, if you're interested, go check out CLBR on the New York Stock Exchange.
Again, that'll flip over in about a week.
It's going to be awesome. I'm just excited to be part of movement.
Love what you guys are doing.
I love that I could make an introduction again.
It's more than just talking and posting memes.
It's actually taking that action.
I think everyone can do that. We love what you're doing.
You've been a leader in the movement for a while now, and it's great for us to all come together.
So we really appreciate what you do with this show and everything you're doing every day.
So thanks for the partnership.
Yeah, I really appreciate it. Awesome, guys.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Talk soon. Thanks. Guys, that was awesome.
I hope you all appreciate it.
Please, again, like, share, subscribe.
Let other people see this.
Even if it's not for you, I totally get that.
But if it is, and I think it should be, because I think this is what I ask, what I see in the comments.
Hey, how do we support?
How do we actually fight back?
Again, the boycotts have been great.
They've been effective. But if the companies are still doubling down...
We've got to do more. So go check out CLBR on the New York Stock Exchange.
You can buy $10 worth.
You don't have to spend.
This is not a big thing.
You can be a part of that.
And I think it's just an awesome opportunity.
I'm excited to be a part of it.
I'm an investor myself, in full disclosure, because I believe in it.
I've been pushing this for a long time because you've seen me post about it on social media.
Like, this is the forefront of that.
This is the... We're good to go.
With guys that actually give back to what you believe in rather than companies that hate your guts, go to patriotmobile.com slash triggered for free activation.
Quick, simple, easy, and you're going to have a cell phone in your pocket, so again, it might as well be with someone who shares your values.
Also, don't forget to check out the folks at GoldCo by going to donjrgold.com.
See if gold, precious metals are right for you.
They'll take you through the process each and every step of the way.
You can inform yourself.
You can make an educated decision whether you want to leave it in your 401k as is with some of the lunacy and ESG that we spoke about on the show, or if you want to diversify your portfolio.
Maybe hedge against some of the insanity we see going on.
Maybe hedge against inflation.
Rising and skyrocketing interest rates.
What I see, in my opinion, a huge foreclosure crisis coming on because I see what's going on in interest rates and everything else.
It's a great chance to do that.
So go check out the folks at GoldCo at DonJrGold.com.
Really appreciate you guys.
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