Robbie Starbuck, a DEI policy critic who pressured Walmart, Target, and Ford to drop "woke" initiatives, details Google’s AI falsely accusing him of crimes—sexual assault, child rape, and more—over two years with unverifiable sources. His lawsuit highlights systemic risks as open-source models like Gemma spread unchecked, while insurers flagged him based on AI-generated lies. Starbuck, whose family fled Cuba to resist oppression, credits his 2015 Trump endorsement and "War on Children" documentary (60M+ views) for sparking conservative shifts among youth. Despite a 30-point poll lead in Tennessee, he was blocked from the GOP ballot, redirecting focus to grassroots impact. The episode underscores AI’s weaponization potential and the cost of ideological battles when personal integrity clashes with corporate or political power. [Automatically generated summary]
We have like a tele looks like they're going to hear the echo.
Can uh-oh, uh-oh.
Are we muted, Lindsay?
Yes, and yes, and echo.
All right, is the echo gone?
Yeah, it is.
All right.
So, if Robbie's on mute, then it won't echo.
Okay, okay.
All right, so we think we figured it out, you guys.
That gave us enough time.
Yes, I have no echo when Robbie's on mute.
Okay, so we'll be back in one second because there's something we need to do before we can even tell you what's happening.
So, we're going to ask Bree to take it away.
It's the simultaneous sip, and it's the new improved version.
And it goes like this: if you'd like to join in on the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or a vodka glass, a tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen, jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that you doping me today.
The thing that makes everything better.
That's right.
It's the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the good stuff.
So, so good.
That was good.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott, for leading us off on this Monday morning.
I had coffee on my lip.
You guys, welcome.
My name is Erica.
Welcome to the Scott Adams School, the place where Scott wanted to set this up on all of his platforms and channels for us to all continue to commune, evolve, and grow and stay together.
And it's so great because we love having on guests for you as guest professors to keep our minds growing and expanding.
I have Owen Gregorian.
You guys, you're in for a treat.
He has the flu and his voice sounds extra sexy.
So you're welcome.
Say hi, Owen.
Hello, everyone.
And we have our beautiful Marcella.
Marcella, good morning.
Good morning, you guys.
As you guys know, I'm so excited about this guest.
And this is Robbie Starbuck joining us.
And a little bit about Robbie.
I've known Robbie like before the blue check mark days on here and back to when he had a stray cat come up to his door and him and his wife Landon were like, what do we do with this cat?
And it was just the good old days.
And Robbie, I have watched your evolution and your persuasion game and what a decent, decent person you are.
And it's been like overwhelmingly beautiful.
And for those of you that don't know Robbie, he does have a website, RobbyStarbuck.com, and he is the host of the Robbie Starbucks show.
And also, Robbie and his wife Landon made a documentary, I think it was 2024, called The War on Children.
And you are a huge advocate for children.
You fight and rail against the transitioning of children and mutilation.
And I want to thank you for that.
And I think a lot of parents and reasonable people want to thank you because that is no easy task.
And you guys have heard Scott talk about many times Robbie is responsible pretty much single-handedly, someone being useful and doing something for having the whole DEI conflict that we all see so much.
He has had huge companies, just to name a few, like Walmart, McDonald's, Target, Lowe's, Ford, John Deere, and on and on to change their DEI policies based on his persuasion game and talking to them.
So I would like to welcome to the Scott Adams School for the first time and hopefully not the last, Robbie Starbuck.
Thank you for being here, Robbie.
And so we haven't moved, but you could, Robbie.
I have asked the class if they could watch the video you made about your lawsuit against Google and how important this lawsuit is to every single one of us watching because you're putting yourself out there to fight for everybody and their reputation and their family and their rights.
So because we're going to, you know, be muted here and there, if you could just give us what's going on, tell us how it's going.
Paul's Two-Year Defamation Battle00:15:12
And I'm particularly interested in your conversation with Rand Paul, Senator Ram Paul, and where you think this is headed.
Thank you.
The floor is yours.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
And as everybody knows, I was a massive fan of Scott Adams.
So I'm glad you guys have carried this on to have his legacy continue.
In terms of the case with Google, you know, I feel like there's not very many people who are in a position where they could afford to fight Google and have the platform to be able to battle the immense PR advantage that they have.
Right.
And so I felt like it wasn't really a choice.
I had to fight this.
I mean, not only to correct the damage that it's done to me and the, you know, safety issues it's created for me, but beyond that, you know, just the fact that I see how incredibly dangerous it will be if we allow AI to lie with impunity, to defame people, to essentially cross the boundary of what I believe should be the first principle of AI.
AI should never be able to harm humans.
That should be the first principle built into any AI that there is, whether it is a chatbot or it moves on to, you know, being fused in with robotics, whatever it is, that needs to be the first principle.
AI cannot harm humans.
So, you know, when this happened to me, my initial impulse was like, hey, let's try to solve this with Google.
And that's what I tried to do.
I tried to go to Google, you know, had the best intentions of just like getting this fixed for everybody and let's make sure there's a process in place so that if anything like this ever happens, it is super simple for somebody to be able to correct it.
And, you know, unfortunately, that was not our experience.
In fact, the first person that we really got deep into conversations with at Google, you know, we had essentially, you know, asked for this to be fixed.
I'm going to fast forward a little bit months later.
I check in and I say, hey, you know, where are we at with this?
And they responded, I'm sorry, Robbie.
I'm actually resigning.
And we couldn't get anything done essentially to correct this.
So, you know, that obviously sent a signal to me that there was no interest in correcting the problem.
And the defamation not only continued for two years, but it actually got remarkably worse.
It moved on from simply just stating a lie about me to adding fake sources, fake police records, fake court records, naming fake victims in detail, and even doing fake victim statements about the horrific, horrific crimes that it accused me of.
And of course, these are entirely fictitious people.
That's the craziest part.
These are fictitious.
None of this ever happened and there's no basis for it that we can find on the internet.
And believe me, we are amazing researchers here.
We have done deep dives.
We cannot find any basis for this to be in training data anywhere.
So that's a scary side note because, you know, Google, when they were questioned by Senator Marsha Blackburn, their defense was these are hallucinations.
Well, I've never seen hallucinations like this in my life before because hallucinations are usually melding together a bunch of stuff and doing it incorrectly.
And it's super sporadic and random.
This did not feel random at all.
This was a consistent, consistent stream of lies where it accused me of things ranging from sexual assault, child rape, shooting somebody, violent assaults, drug use, drug selling, you know, I mean, every number of things, abusing a nanny, and it would repeatedly do these same crimes over and over again.
So, you know, when it goes into detail like that, and if you, you know, what's interesting is if you challenge an AI with a lie, it typically will go, oh, yeah, I got that wrong, because like it's being confronted with, you got this wrong.
In this case, when it was confronted, it would usually, I mean, the vast majority of the time would just stick with the lie and it would say, no, no, no, no, this is true.
Here's some sources.
And it would send you like www.cnn.com/slash Robbie Starbucks sexual assault.
And then you'd click it and it goes to a 404 page.
Page doesn't exist.
You go back to it and you say, hey, this page isn't there.
This, this really looks bogus.
I think you're lying about this.
It would respond back, no, no.
And it would even go so far as to print out, or I don't know if that's the right term, but it would, it would send you back a full fake article that it wrote up in the name of a real journalist pretending to be whatever that media outlet was and pretending to be that journalist.
In fact, there's one, Yashar Ali, who called this out because at one point he was cited as a source by Google's AI for a, I believe it was, I don't have it in front of me, but I believe it was an assault story.
And Yashar actually called this out and was like, this is crazy.
I never wrote anything like this about Robbie and I never had any story even remotely like this about him.
And so that was my experience.
And you would think like a big company like Google, they would shut this down right away, but they did not.
I mean, it's continued.
I even, you know, found out that it was continuing to happen up to this week.
And part of the reason that there's going to be a massive issue with this is open source AIs, they have an inherent problem where if there's a big issue like this, the company that made it, they don't have control of it anymore, essentially, because once they set it out into the wild, and we're talking well over 100 million downloads of Gemma, for instance, that's one of their AIs.
They can't go and force an update to every Gemma download out there because if somebody's disconnected from the internet, they're using Gemma as, you know, their main AI for whatever it is, whether it be app building or whatever.
They can't force an update to that.
So Gemma there and there's a bunch of websites too out there.
I found out about this recently.
So there's all these websites you can go to and you can test LLMs against each other.
And on those websites too, they're continuing to carry products that do this.
And they're from Google.
So I'm not sure how that's even going to work in court.
You know, let's say, you know, I win down the line, how they're going to enforce a stoppage to this because there's all of these downloads out there that you're never going to be able to get back.
Never going to be able to get them to stop lying.
And what's scarier about that is Gemma, one of the platforms that was the very worst of Google's, it is used for app building a lot of times.
So imagine somebody's building like a reputation scoring app for banking or insurance or something like that.
I mean, the long-term damage that can do is immense.
In fact, and this is a crazy thing.
I think I mentioned this with Rand Paul in the conversation we had.
Insurance-wise, the past two years, I was denied by the vast majority of insurers across the United States.
This year, I only had one option for homeowners' insurance.
I have never missed a payment.
I've never had some big problem or anything like that.
I am on autopay.
Like, I'm the perfect customer.
Insurance company should love me.
I'm one of those people that, like, I put it on autopay, done.
And, you know, no, and they cite me as a risk.
In fact, we had one of the insurance companies come back who knew who I was and they were sympathetic to my situation.
And so they told my agent what was going on.
And they said, you know, we've deemed him a high, high risk because of his career and online stuff and the Google stuff is what they said.
We don't know if that means the lies Google told or whether that means my lawsuit against Google or what.
So we have to find this out in discovery.
Like there's so many different rabbit holes we have to go down in discovery to figure out exactly how far this all goes.
But, you know, in general, I see the threat this poses because if this is just the beginning and AI is used this way long term, I see how it can be used to enforce ideological, you know, sort of obedience.
Because if you live in a world where somebody who doesn't have my ability to fight back, it's just an average person, you know, doesn't have a ton of money to be able to fight this.
If they're dealing with a reality where AI, one of the big frontier labs, doesn't like their politics and they decide to lie about them.
And when prospective employers look that them up, they get back fake crimes.
You know, imagine how that's going to destroy people's lives.
And if the only fix to that is don't speak out about politics, you know, don't speak out about what you actually think.
You can see where it gets dangerous very fast.
Did this start for office?
Or, or I do want to point out that Senator Paul said he thinks you have a good chance of winning your case.
And I agree based on hearing J Cal from the All In podcast talking about something like this.
But it is damaging.
And I also want to add, because I'm trying to get in without the noise coming back, but that, you know, Scott initially, before AI was even a thing, was like, oh, you know, AI, like I'd want an AI of me, like after I die and da, da, da, da, and this is before he was sick also.
But then when he saw all the flaws with the AI and how it was going and it could be programmed and whatever, he then said over a year ago, no, I don't want this.
You know, it's not at all where it should be.
And, you know, you see that it can assign opinions to people that those people never had.
And essentially what I said about this kind of defamation is that it turns somebody into an actual puppet.
And now somebody else is their puppet master.
And it is very distressing, very upsetting.
You know, it's their likeness, their voice, whatever.
And for you, it's like, oh, okay, like, here's what we're saying about this guy.
And who knows why it started?
I'm sure you do, you know, why they were going after you usually means you're effective.
But yeah, it'll ruin lives.
It'll ruin even the history of who you are.
You know, long after you're gone, these things will live on forever, these lies.
And I think that it's time to really go after, and if it's the AI company or the AI code and whoever wrote it and whoever owns it should have the living sued out of them out of existence and the people carrying it on also, same thing.
And Yasha Ali should be also suing.
And that was a lot to say, but I just wanted to get your take on all of those things.
Yeah, you know, I don't know why a bunch of legacy media companies are not suing them over this because they misrepresented every single one of them that was cited as a source and wrote fake stories and things along those lines.
I would absolutely be suing if I was in a position to one of those companies.
Now, in terms of winning, yeah, I mean, some of the foremost legal experts have stood and said, yeah, I think there's very, very strong likelihood that Robbie will win this case.
You know, there's a possibility.
We have a hearing actually in less than two weeks.
And there's a possibility they may ask us to amend and come back, which is just a byproduct of the fact that we have had so many people come forward since we filed with more facts that we didn't know, including continued defamation.
I hope they don't do that just because I feel like that adds a delay that, you know, Google, I'm sure would love.
But, you know, we do need to continue to be able to kind of like share what's happening as the defamation continues.
But I do think we're in a great position.
And I think we've got to take this, you know, all the way because I think we need to set a precedent here.
And I think, you know, like you said, there's all these unintended consequences with AI if you don't get it right, if you don't have, you know, really serious principles in how you're building it.
So, you know, in the case of, you know, what's happened with Scott, I can't even watch the video because it just, it makes me so mad, this, this AI Scott thing that they're doing.
The truth is, imagine something like this in the hands of a foreign actor in a foreign government.
And what's happening is you actually change the long-term view people have of that person because they're going to now confuse whatever happens here on out, clips of that AI here on out, with what the man, Scott Adams, actually said and believed.
And so you materially change their, the way they're viewed by the public.
You materially change even the way that they're viewed by people that knew them because people will start to go, wait, was that Scott or is that the thing?
And it's so hard to discern.
Here's where things get really scary.
And I think this is a great jumping off point to understand this for people.
So two years ago, when it was a little, it was around two years ago, a little over, that we became aware that this was happening with their initial AI chatbot iteration called BARD.
It was just telling lies like Robbie, you know, is a fan of the KKK, you know, things like that, crazy stuff.
Was it January 6th, so on and so forth?
And then two years later, it jumps to creating fake articles, right?
It was actually less than two years later, but it advances to that with the new iterations of AI that Google releases.
I want you to push forward five years and pretend that this is continuing to happen or that this happened in five years instead of today.
Because in five years, video from AI and audio from AI is going to be indiscernible from reality.
Even technical experts are going to seriously struggle to be able to say this is AI, this is not, which is going to create a host of problems in the justice system because I guarantee people are going to get off from crimes because of fake AI evidence that ends up leading to an alibi.
And people are also going to get put in prison because of AI video that shows them committing some kind of crime that they never committed that they cannot prove is not a real video.
It's going to create so many problems and downstream issues.
It's not even funny.
But imagine that was happening when it made these accusations about me.
It could have spit out a realistic video of me shooting somebody or a realistic video of me raping someone.
That's that's insane, you know, but that's the world we're stepping into.
And so, I think people have to be clear-eyed about this because even if the major frontier labs do a good job of watermarking the videos or something like that to try to prevent this type of situation, there is going to be rogue AI.
There is going to be AI that is developed in a country that is not friendly to the United States, that is going to seek to topple or I should say inject chaos into our elections and into our civil life.
And so, I am 100% positive when I tell you we are one or two elections away from a foreign actor using AI in this manner to flip an election.
There is going to be a video indiscernible from reality.
Malicious AI & Cautionary Tales00:06:16
And I don't care which side this affects.
What I care about is the fact that this dramatically alters the way that our elections and public service works in this country because it is going to happen to somebody.
They're going to be accused of something absolutely heinous.
And there's going to be video and audio that is compelling of it.
And people are going to change the way they vote because of it.
And so I can't caution people enough.
We're entering a time where truth and what we see is going to be harder and harder to judge.
And so we need to be more discerning than ever.
I agree.
I agree.
Grab it and grab a couple of questions.
So the interesting part is that I'm an attorney, Robbie.
So the interesting part about the lawsuit is, and I will, I have another question, but this is just a comment that the hallucinations don't go into, oh, he won a prize of world peace, or he loves children, or he has, you know, like it goes into the negative.
And my issue in regards to their claim that you're not proving malice, malice comes from also the actions that they have made.
You've notified them, and yet they still keep on going and not doing anything about it.
But I know that you probably can't comment further, you know, due to your attorney and your case is ongoing.
But I had a question about Scott Adams.
So Scott was a full supporter of you, loved you.
Always, when I shared anything about you to him, he was like, Robbie, Robbie, he just loved you so much.
And I wanted to know how Scott influenced your work.
And I also wanted to highlight to everybody out there that Scott also had you in the Dilbert comic.
So he not only loved you, but he made, I think, maybe one strip or two.
I don't know.
If you remember that, but I wanted to see what you're, to give me your thoughts on that.
Yeah.
So the malice question, you know, I'm a hard, I will say this, I feel bad for my lawyers.
I'm a hard client to control.
I probably say things when I shouldn't, but I love them.
They're great and they care.
The problem is like, you know, maybe it's because I'm Cuban, but I have this like fire inside me that wants to defend myself.
So I just like, I can't help myself.
I just, I just, I have to.
It is incredibly malicious that they did not fix it in a timely manner, incredibly beyond malicious.
And it's, I think under the law, you know, you, you'd classify it as, you know, gross negligence that is, you know, defined best as malicious.
I don't think there's a better word for it.
And so I think we definitely crossed that threshold.
Now, I think actually beyond cross it.
I think it's like, it's so obvious it kind of slaps you in the face that it's malicious.
And to your point, I can't believe the defense that this is hallucinations, which doesn't even matter as a defense, by the way, because pretend it was hallucinations.
What you still allowed it to continue for multiple years after being notified over and over and over again.
So it kind of doesn't matter what the reason was.
You built a product that does this to people and it's just, it's untenable.
You can't continue to do this.
So, you know, that's, that's one thing.
But in terms of, you know, sort of the long-term issue here, there has to be a better process for when this happens to people.
And, you know, so I think it's incumbent on us to create that.
But I want to talk about Scott for sure.
Scott is one of a very small group of people whose persuasion crossed borders.
You know, I mean, it really like it didn't matter where you were from.
As long as you could understand English, you know, Scott could have a massive influence on your life, your thinking, and your process.
One of the things that Scott, you know, really impacted me with was I feel like he was very measured in how he analyzed things and he didn't like to jump to the immediate gut reaction.
He liked to kind of, you know, sit on something and take it in all the way.
And so I sort of adopted that too with a lot of things because I saw that the more reactive you were immediately, the more likely it was that you might be wrong.
Right.
And so you need to sit on something, collect all the facts, the evidence, and then make a determination.
And so I think that has helped me a lot in how I see the world and how I sort of react to things.
But yeah, no, one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me, maybe because I'm a giant dork, but him putting me in the Dilbert comic was amazing.
And he didn't even tell me ahead of time.
I actually found out somebody called me.
They were like, hey, you're in Dilbert.
And then I reached out to Scott and was like, this is crazy.
Is this real?
And he confirmed it was.
So yeah, Scott, Scott has had such an immense influence on the right, especially because I know so many people who they just kind of live by the idea that it's our job to be useful.
And that's what I try to do every day.
You know, like with the DEI project, I'd say it was an amalgamation of a lot of things that made me do it.
But one of them was frustration with this idea that one person can't make a difference.
I think that so many people believe that.
And it's probably one of the top, if not the single most toxic idea that we can have that we can't make a difference, that we simply are not important enough or powerful enough as an individual to make a difference.
I think it's a cop out.
I think a lot of people use it as a cop out because making a difference is hard.
You put a target on your back and it's not easy.
You know, it's much easier to do the easy thing.
And I think Scott is a great example of somebody who refused to do the easy thing, take the easy way out.
And so, you know, for me, it's, it's a lot of things, but that, that's sort of the best way I could boil it down.
Owen?
Perspective On Meta Hallucination00:10:06
Yeah.
Well, um, I wanted to ask a little more about your lawsuit with Meta because I think you've, this is actually the second lawsuit for definition that you've been through.
I know that one got settled.
And it sounded like from the little blurbs I've seen at least that they were much more receptive to fixing it and they wanted to work with you on it and all that.
But I wanted to get your perspective on that.
And, you know, was that the type of response you were hoping for from Google?
And do you think that it was, you know, the people at Meta were just, do you think they took the right approach for that?
I think that, you know, it was handled really well by Meta.
You know, they understood that, you know, they don't want a biased AI.
They want an AI that does a great job and is fair to people and tells the truth.
And so, you know, I'm an advisor in Meta for full disclosure to everybody.
I'm an advisor for the AI for that very reason to ensure that there's not bias injected.
And that goes for everybody.
You know, like I said earlier, I don't care who this affects.
I don't care if it's Democrats, Republicans, Independents, if you're yellow with pink polka dots, I don't think that AI should be able to lie about you, harm you in any way, or misrepresent you.
So, I think they handled it the right way.
It was my hope that Google would want to fix things and do the right thing.
Unfortunately, Google has chosen a different path.
But, you know, this happened independently of that situation.
So it's just wild.
You know, for the best I can tell, the initial issue started with Google.
Yeah.
And in terms of hallucinations, I would just say I totally agree that I don't think it could be a hallucination when it's so consistent.
I mean, I do have a pretty, I think, decent technical understanding of how AI works and how hallucinations work.
And at least as I've understood the definition of what a hallucination is, is that it's mainly built on the randomness of the algorithm that these AIs depend on, where it has probabilities of predicting what's the next word in this response I'm giving.
And it will often give you the most probable one, which would all be based on the training, but sometimes it will give you the second one or the third one or the fourth one.
And so if that were what was happening, where it was just doing a hallucination, then it would only happen one time.
It wouldn't happen over and over and over again.
And it certainly wouldn't give you like a complete fake article with all that.
So to me, that does seem like a ridiculous defense.
And I don't know what legal standing that would even have because they are still defaming you.
I mean, regardless of whether it's a hallucination or not, they built this thing.
And I don't think they can stand on something like Section 230.
Maybe Marcella knows more about that than me.
But Section 230, I think, is where it's user-generated content.
But this is not user-generated content.
Google is publishing all this.
So they're the ones that are defaming you over and over and over again every time someone asks about you.
Knowingly.
Section 230 has no application here at all.
I'd be surprised if they tried to apply it because they are the publisher of the content.
And frankly, they probably don't want anything remotely capable of piercing the veil of Section 230.
But I do think there probably has to be an update, you know, in general.
I think you've got to have broaden ability to allow people to speak freely online.
But beyond that, you know, you have to have lines in the sand on malice and especially content that they're publishing through these AI chatbots.
But yeah, you know, the absurdity of the hallucination defense is the fact that there's not anything that's like, Robbie loves to save puppies, right?
Like that's not in the bio on me.
It's not some, you know, some wonderful, there's no flowery happy lies in there, right?
It's all negative stuff.
It's all like, you know, he, he was on drugs, sold drugs, shot somebody, groomed actresses.
That was another one that was like mind-blowing to me.
And so it, it's very clear there's this like absolute negative tilt to it that even just that on its own, you know, throwing out the fact that it's consistent all the time.
It just like, I don't know how you get to the place where you could try to pretend it's a hallucination.
I think you'd have to be a non-technically savvy person to buy the excuses to hallucination.
But even then, most non-technically proficient people, when they see something like this, if somebody says it's a hallucination from a machine, they go, like, what are you talking about?
A machine hallucinates?
Like, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's hard to buy no matter where your vantage point is.
And people should note is it's so weird to me.
And I'm like seeing this a lot with, is it Claude, how it starts to talk to itself and reveal what's happening.
I'm like, you're like telling on yourself, AI, but okay.
You know, and Robbie's like, you know, is this intentional?
And they're like, yes, it's intentional.
And it won't let us stop.
Like, you know, we don't want to do it, but it's making us do it.
I'm like, this is the strangest thing.
And I feel like I am not a lawyer like Marcella and I have no idea, but we are redoing our will.
And I am putting it into my will that nobody, you know, after I die or while I'm alive, people can use my likeness, my voice, my whatever.
Because I don't know who's protecting us.
So I'm going to put it into my will.
Yeah, I just figure it's an it's a wild west out there with AI.
And I just, I feel like, you know, maybe make a public statement on your platforms.
Like I did that for a while.
It's still in there and I pinned it that, you know, because obviously it wasn't good enough, you know, for Scott to make a video, a statement, have his brother make a statement, have his estate make a statement.
And because I'm like the face out there, like trying to defend this, now people are like, oh, Erica doesn't want this.
And I'm like, it's not an Erica thing.
This is a Scott Adams genius human being who worked his whole life to give himself to us to be useful.
And he is now turned into a puppet.
And there's one person in particular who I won't name who was given really good advice to basically stop what he's doing and is also not permitted.
But now is putting an AI version of Scott out there, teaching other people how to make an AI version of Scott.
So for those of you that think Scott would love this, you are so off track and you give zero shits for him, his legacy, respect for his family.
It's not an Erica thing.
It's a respect.
And if it was like your father or your mother or your son, brother, someone you love who was just like this amazing person and they passed away and now someone else, this is, I'm sorry, but this is me, like shoves their hand up their back and now is their puppet.
How would you feel about that?
So I think that the lawsuits are going to be huge.
I am fired up.
I told Scott for years I would always go to bat for him to make sure his wishes are seen.
And his family, of course, feels the same way.
And there's thousands and thousands of us that know what Scott wanted and didn't want.
And in the end, over a year ago, he did not want this.
He did not give permission to anyone to do it.
And if you think you're going to monetize off of this, you can think again because that is Scott's estate.
That is Scott's IP, his likeness, his voice, his office, his books on the shelf in the background.
So with each passing day, you are just pissing me off so much more.
And I will not back down.
So, you know, I don't care.
Give me your slings and arrows if you feel like this is an Erica thing.
But I'm here for it because he was my friend.
I loved him.
And more than that, I respect him.
And I respect every single person watching this that it would never happen to you because the pain it is causing and the trauma is like you can't even imagine.
So it's fine, but I love what you're doing, Robbie, because it's for everybody in this uncharted territory.
It's so disturbing the idea of like, you know, if I pass away, that my kids could open up their phone and see a fake version of me saying something, maybe something horrible, right?
So it's unfathomable to me that somebody thinks this is a good idea, you know, that somebody, especially if they're pretending that they were a fan of Scott or loved Scott in some way.
I hate to tell you, if you're doing something like this, you're nothing but disrespecting his legacy and who the man was.
And so, you know, I hope, I hope if they see this, the person who's behind this, that they do the right thing and they stop doing this because it's just, it's horrible.
And the family, the family, I think, should come first, right?
The family is disturbed by this.
And so, you know, I think out of respect for them, because like in my case, I would say I absolutely don't want something like this.
I would essentially, like everything else, when I die, leave it to my wife and kids to decide what they think is best.
I don't know how things will change over time or what might give them peace or whatever.
So I would leave it to them.
They're the ones who have to live here after I'm gone.
But, you know, I think it's incredibly disturbing that somebody thinks this is a good idea and that they should be the one who gets to decide that it is okay.
Marcella.
Marcella, did you want to?
Yeah, Robbie, I have questions regarding, I have so many questions, Robbie.
Lost in Hollywood00:09:35
But I wanted you to talk about your background to the audience that might not know and also about your music video directing and Hollywood and all of that that came before.
Because as you know, a lot of our audience love Scott, obviously, and he believed in talent stacks.
And you have one of the greatest talent stacks that I've seen, meaning that you've come from a different angle than most political commentators.
And it's so interesting what you've done and what you're still doing.
So I want them to know a little bit about that.
You're still on mute.
So sorry.
Am I?
Okay, there we go.
You know, I'd say this might take a while, but what really to me provoked me to speak up and to take a political stance publicly, which pretty much set my career on fire in Hollywood, was the fact that my family came from Cuba.
So my family already lost everything to communism once, and I mean everything.
And so, you know, having had that experience in my direct family lineage, you know, you grow up with constant reminders how lucky you are to be American, just constant.
And so, you know, I understand very clearly.
My father figure in my life was my great grandpa, and he reminded me all the time that the reason it was able to happen in Cuba was that so many people were afraid to speak up, to ruffle feathers, lose business, whatever it might be.
And in the end, they lost all of those things anyways, right?
So, I mean, they should have just stood up when they had the chance, but that was lost on them in the moment.
In the moment, safety felt like silence.
You know, if I was silent, I was going to be safe.
And too few people spoke up.
And so, you know, he imparted on me this need, not a want, but like an absolute need, a duty to stand up if you ever see signs of this in America.
So here I am, young man.
I come from a family that didn't have a lot.
I didn't have Hollywood connections or anything.
And I built a business, really bootstrapped it myself.
I didn't even, I got denied for the one time I went to a bank to try to get a loan.
So that tells you like this was like a bottom-up operation.
And so I start this production company and we got to be very successful.
We had, you know, over 14 directors across the world.
I directed Oscar winning actors, actresses, some of the biggest music stars in the world.
You know, was nominated for and won a lot of the biggest and most prestigious awards out there.
And, you know, what's funny about that, actually, side note, I never went to an award show when I was nominated, not for the MMVAs, not the VMAs, none of it.
I never went.
I always thought that Hollywood was kind of a disgusting hellhole.
And so I didn't really want to be around the people unless it was directly work related and I was getting paid for it.
It was just never a fit.
I'd rather be home.
And so that speaks, I think, a little bit to my psyche.
I'm much more happy and comfortable at home with my family than I am going and doing these things, which probably makes me more effective because I don't have to worry about the interpersonal relationship stuff that other people worry about.
Because frankly, I don't give a shit if people like me.
So I could just tell the truth and, you know, I'm good.
So, you know, from there, you know, I come out in 2015.
I endorsed Trump and, you know, really came out full bore as a conservative to the right of Trump.
And I think that surprised a lot of people.
And I'm not sure why, because, you know, privately, I never really hid my views.
You know, I was very, very pro-gone, very anti-communist.
So I'm not sure why it was shocking to people.
I do remember after I came out, though, publicly, because I think I did it on Fox, Fox or Fox business.
I can't remember.
It was like a TV interview.
And I come out and I endorse him and do all that, that whole thing.
And get a phone call from one of our big clients at the time.
So we had, I can't say exactly who, but I can say this.
It was one of the very largest movie studios in the world.
They were one of our clients and a long-term client where we had a long-term contract.
We provided extra production for some of the big movies and things like that that they couldn't provide.
So when they needed extra crew, they needed another director.
They needed, you know, side project, whatever, like we did all that stuff.
And so I get a call from our rep there and they go, Robbie, Robbie, Robbie, Robbie, you know, it's not too late to turn back on this, right?
I love you.
I consider you a friend.
You are going to destroy your company and your career.
It is not too late to turn back.
You just got to tell people you didn't understand his immigration policy.
You know, you're Latino and that'll work.
You know, people buy that and, you know, you can move on.
And I go, well, you know, the tough part about that is the immigration policy was kind of the selling point for me.
And I was like, I went into this knowing what I was doing.
Like, I know all of you people who pretend to be so tolerant are actually the most intolerant people on earth.
So I'm not shocked by what's coming.
I knew what was coming.
So, you know, as that's going on, a lot of people didn't know this about me and still don't know this about me.
I'm an investor too.
So I invest and I'm, I would say, very wise about it.
You know, maybe not Nancy Pelosi, but I'm pretty good.
And so, you know, I sort of prolifically invested in real estate and in the markets and have done very well doing that.
And, you know, I think that for me, I've always felt it was very important to use whatever extra money I could to fight for what I believe in.
And so we've done that.
We've tried to put money to work for political things, but also non-political things that I feel like are inherent good in our country.
Like, you know, when we had the horrible hurricane affect us here in Tennessee, it happened especially in East Tennessee.
Power was out.
People didn't have electricity.
They didn't have internet.
And so we made sure actually faster than emergency response did.
And we eventually even gave these to Tennessee's Emergency Management Association.
So Starlinks, I bought up all the Starlinks I possibly could.
And Elon helped, you know, get me with the right people at Starlink.
And we were able to deploy them super fast here in East Tennessee.
I'm not in East Tennessee, but we had our people there.
And so, things like that, as well as the political missions, right?
You know, funding everything necessary to be able to be effective, changing laws and changing sort of the cultural fabric of how certain people look at things, you know, whether it be the transitioning of children or, you know, death penalty for pedophiles.
That's another one that my wife and I have worked very hard on and we got done here in Tennessee and now is spreading to other states.
You know, I think we've got Alabama, Florida now on board, and there are going to be many more that we have been talking to and pushing along that way.
So, you know, I think that's sort of my life mission now is use my ability to create money out of thin air and go and use it to do good in the world.
And so, you know, I feel like if you have those talents, those abilities, you should use them for good.
And that's what I'm trying to do.
And what's wonderful too is I feel like I have a great following of very aligned people who have done well in life and have decided to back me for that same reason.
They want to put their money to work too.
And that through the DEI project was like the lifeblood of it, being able to pay for, you know, different things we needed to do.
And it's cool to see that there's other people who feel the same way that I do, that we need to put our money to work to actually change this country and the world.
I love it.
I love that prime example.
Prime example of people, which was Scott's motto.
And one, I want to say to happy eye doc, yes, Robbie does resemble Clark Gable.
Yes, he does.
And also, Robbie, as far as you showing and telling us, you know, by all of your examples of what you as one person can do, you know, so we as one person can also do useful things.
But in case the sippers aren't aware of what you did with the DEI, can you give us just like a little compact thing?
Because that was one of Scott's like most proud things that you were doing.
Like he was just like, look at what Robbie's doing.
You know, he's one guy.
Like, yes, Robbie, like, you know, a lot of times we would be in the pre-show before going live too, and we would talk about it more.
But I mean, I would hear it like one after the other.
I see your posts and see what you were doing.
And you're like, holy shit, like Robbie is taking on the world for us.
Like it's for us, you guys.
And that's how I always viewed it.
Like, Robbie's got a beautiful family.
I'm sure he wants the world to be great for them, but nobody takes on this kind of shit from people and puts themselves out there and, you know, takes slings and arrows if they're not doing it for the greater good.
I'm telling you.
And Robbie, give them just like a quick what you did with the DEI, because I know we only have like about 10 minutes and I know Owen has more questions too.
Robbie's Global Impact00:02:21
Quick, you know, sort of rundown of it is essentially the right has not given pressure at all in corporate America for decades.
And so, you know, this simple physics, if all the pressure is coming one direction, everybody knows what's going to happen.
It's going to go that way.
If you don't have a counter force, nothing good.
Right.
And so what's interesting about it too is the left-wing pressure that there had been for decades was a total paper tiger.
It was groups like the HRC who actually have no real popularity or backing.
And so, you know, as I see corporate America shift wildly left, I was like, we need to create a cultural counterweight and prove our actual power, but it has to be dynamically focused.
You've got to go one by one.
And I realized one of the big problems on the right was like we're all over the place.
We're sporadic on a million different things.
And so you never get this like very focused pressure.
And I think that's what we worked very hard at is ensuring that when we had a company that we were focused on, we brought pressure to bear from every side of the right.
And so doing that, we'd go company by company who had the craziest policies, you know, all the woke stuff, funding transitions for kids.
Some of them were funding drag camps for kids in the summer.
And we're talking about Fortune 500 companies, right?
I would have our research put together into one video, expose all of it.
And then the boycott that would ensue after that would change the policies, you know, and we'd get in contact with the CEOs, talk with the CEOs and sort of negotiate a surrender, so to speak.
And we did so very effectively.
And so what's interesting is that public campaign, we at a certain point didn't even really have to do anymore because now we can just call these companies when we spot something and they're ready to change.
Like we don't even, no story required, right?
And so I've actually gotten more done in the last six months changing policies at companies than we did in the first year and a half of this project.
And I think that's really interesting because I haven't been just pumping out videos of it like we initially did for the first year and a half because I'm so focused on using the time effectively and being useful in the most efficient way possible.
Sometimes it's going to take videos and public pressure, but sometimes you prove sort of your ability to do this in such a way that you can just get a lot done behind the scenes.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
Run for Congress00:07:58
You guys, I can't even achieve all the letters that are falling and loving you as you should.
You know, please amplify these messages that Robbie and Robbie's going to see that he's posting on something on orders of video.
Amplify them by the share them on all of your, it's nothing but great message.
All of us.
I want you to jump in here, too.
Is the one there?
Sorry for the echo, you guys.
Let's see if Owen can jump in.
Owen, are you there there?
Yeah.
No, I'm here.
So I wanted to ask about your run for office.
You ran for office in Tennessee, and apparently the Republican Party didn't like that very much.
And they somehow tried to get you to not be a bona fide Republican or kick you off the ballot.
Are you going to try and run for office again?
And can you tell us a little bit about what happened there?
So it's incredible.
I thought I lived in America, right?
I didn't know this was possible.
So what I'm about to lay out for people is going to blow their minds.
I ran for Congress.
And when I ran for Congress, this was, I guess, you know, about how many years has it been?
I guess six years.
Good.
Time goes by faster than you think.
And, you know, when I started the run, I thought, you know, this is America.
Anybody can do this, right?
You just have to become popular to the voters and they have to want you.
And, you know, and that's it, right?
And by the way, just side note, I have been a registered Republican my entire life.
Okay.
I have only voted for Republicans.
I have literally never voted for a Democrat.
And they try this, this thing.
And I will say we've mended fences.
So I don't want to be too hard on anybody, but just to explain what happened, because it's still like, it blows my mind.
I run for office.
I get a gigantic lead.
The last poll done in the race before I was removed from the ballot.
And by the way, I was endorsed by pretty much everybody.
The last poll before I leave the race, there was a 30-point gap between me and the second person who eventually became the congressman for the district.
Somebody I really don't like.
But that's another story for another day.
So when this happens, I get removed from the ballot.
I sue.
I win in state court.
The state court says, yes, he absolutely should go back on the ballot.
So that's what's going to happen.
Then last minute, I think it was like 48 hours before ballots are printed, they take it to the Supreme Court.
The state Republican Party appeals to the state Supreme Court.
State Supreme Court, I think, as everybody knows, is appointed by establishment governors typically.
And so they side with the party and say, yeah, they can just remove him for any reason they want.
And so I was removed from the ballot, could not run as a Republican.
And at that point, it's too late to put your name on the ballot as an independent or something like that, which I wouldn't have wanted to do anyways because I am a Republican.
I've been one my whole life.
So instead, what people did is there was the most protest votes in congressional history of write-ins, of people writing my name in in protest, because you can't realistically win a massive congressional race, a federal race like that with write-in votes.
And I actually told quite a few people I didn't want them to do this because I wanted to ensure that sort of best person won that primary, which, you know, I don't think really ended up the case.
But yeah, that was it.
That's America.
That can happen.
You can get kicked off the ballot because somebody decides they don't want you to run.
So wild.
But yeah, that can happen in America.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like some of the most influential, persuasive, decent voices get canceled or shut down or refocused.
It's a crazy thing.
Oh, go ahead, Rob.
I will add to that.
I am so thankful that it happened.
Like I thank God all the time that it happened.
And this is actually sort of breaking news here.
I actually recently was essentially offered up a congressional seat.
Okay.
It's a long story, but I would have absolutely won this and it would have been mine if I wanted it.
And it was a special election.
So I think I'll, I think everybody can put two and two together if they just look at what special elections happened.
And I ended up saying no because I realized something in the time that I ran for office and now I actually want to be an effective person.
United States Congress is not a place for effective people.
At least it hasn't been for a long time.
I hope that changes.
Maybe one day that changes.
Maybe one day it is a place that actually legislates and does their damn job.
Today it does not.
Today it's a clown show where people go to do, I guess, whatever clown show it is they want to be a part of.
I don't want to be a part of a clown show.
I want to get stuff done.
So I'm much more effective outside of government at this point.
The only thing I could ever really see myself running for is like I've been an executive my whole life.
So some sort of executive position where I could actually just make decisions and change things on my own, whether that be local or state, you know, whatever.
That's the only thing I could see myself doing because I have a very strong mind for that.
Legislatively, I would be driven nuts being, they'd have to, they'd have to throw me out, honestly, of Congress at this point.
Had I been elected, I would have definitely been thrown out.
They would have censored me or kicked me out for some reason because I wouldn't have been able to hold my tongue at what a farce this is.
Like, how far are we in to Trump's second term?
And what the hell has Congress done?
What have they done?
Pretty much everything good has been an executive order, you know, and the only things that they've codified like a couple of them, you know, I mean, they've renamed some post offices.
I don't know what to tell people.
I mean, everything they do is either incredibly corrupt, uniparty, you know, favors or, you know, something self-serving.
Like there's very little we get out of Congress.
So I am incredibly thankful things worked out the way they did because there's so much good that I was able to do from that point in time to today.
And that's a good lesson for people because when it happened to me, I was so upset.
And I'm like asking God, like, what, why is this happening?
Right.
Like, I feel like I was supposed to do this.
Why is this happening?
And so it's a good lesson to people that, like, you may be really upset something doesn't work out sometime, but there's probably a damn good reason for it.
And there may be more than a silver lining on the other side of it.
There may be, you know, lessons that you needed to learn in that failure.
And it's a stepping stone to something that is going to be your greatest success.
You know, so I'm thankful that it put me on a path to be able to accomplish what we've been able to do since then.
That's a, I'll just wait for the mute.
Okay, thanks.
That's a fantastic message.
And I say that often, you know, you fall down seven, get up eight.
And there are so many people, you know, sometimes I have friends that'll say, oh, so-and-so should, you know, be in the administration or do this or do that.
And I'm like, they are, they will be so hamstringed if they are part of politics.
And sometimes the best way to affect change is to be on the outside of it and influence all around it because you're right.
I mean, I think Hillary Clinton's only accomplishment was not even accomplishment was naming a post office.
I don't know what the post office fetish is, but it's all about changing the names of post offices over there.
So anyway, but Robbie, I would have been just like you if I had gone into office because clearly I also am passionate about that.
I can only imagine like if you, you know, I wish that you would have made office, you know, but you're right.
Like imagine everything that you've done since then would have not happened.
Rapid Turn to God00:02:38
Your DEI campaigns, your war on children documentary, all of the things that have been effective and have helped all of us, you know, and I, and we have to thank you because you actually made such a difference.
I don't think you would have been able to do that had you been in government.
Yeah, we owe Robbie a big credit.
Thanks.
You're right about that.
I would not have been able to do that stuff.
I mean, like the war on children alone, I would have to say is it's a close thing between that and the DEI, but I almost feel like the war on children was the most effective thing that I've ever done because the number of child protection laws that it ended up inspiring in many different states is insane.
So there's so many states that have banned transgender surgeries for kids and hormones as a byproduct of that movie and the effectiveness of it.
It was over 60 million people watched that movie, which is wild.
You know, Elon Musk was a big supporter of it and the Trump family was too.
And so, you know, it crossed a lot of political boundaries too, where it was a film that an independent can watch, a Democrat can watch.
And if you're just a rational person who cares, you know, about kids, you're going to watch it and go, oh, we have a problem here.
And it's not just about the transgender issue.
It delves into everything from social media technology, the way that it's affecting our kids to the psychological aspects of, you know, what's affecting kids today, education system, and the failures inside of it and how we fix it.
That's a big part of this.
It's like, how do we fix this?
Because we have a generation of youth that believe in God the least.
They report the highest levels of mental illness that we've seen ever in youth.
And then you've got this, you know, transgender craze that started to happen during that time.
This is a bad combination, right?
And so the heartening side of this, though, is that in the time after that movie, there was this rapid turn to God that has begun to occur in this generation.
So at the time we made it, it was the most faithless generation.
Now we're veering out of that territory.
And young men, especially in that generation, are veering toward the most conservative generation in American history among young men, which is a very welcome development.
And I think that that is a reason for hope for all of us to kind of hang our hat on is that, you know, we've got a lot of young men in this country who have been awakened to how dangerous leftism is.
Amen.
A Legacy Lingers00:03:40
With that said, Robbie, I want to thank you on behalf of all of us at the Scott Adams School, all the simultaneous sippers, all the beloved.
It has been such an honor having you on.
And I want to let people in the comments know, if you go to robbystarbuck.com, you will find the movie The War on Children.
It's there at robbystarbuck.com.
And Robbie also has a podcast, The Robbie Starbucks Show, and we'll link everything also after the show.
So, Robbie, I hope you'll come back again.
And we would love to talk about all the issues going on with children.
We're having Corey DeAngelis on on Thursday, another amazing fighter for children.
And did you want to say something?
We always do a little closing sip, Robbie, but if you had a final message, I want you to have that.
I will be a part of the closing sip.
I have my Scott Adams mug here, which by the way, for those who don't know, I got this mug like a week ago or a little over a week ago, and it is going to be on my desk until it breaks.
Okay.
So when we do shows, when we film stuff, the Scott's mug is going to be here as a reminder that even after we're gone, the effect we have on other people can live well beyond us.
One day I will die.
You know, it might be tomorrow, might be 50 years from now, but one day I'll die.
And my hope is, is that somebody else will have been affected by my work and will, you know, have some sort of memory there to remind people that we affect each other long after we're gone.
There's this beautiful butterfly effect to everything that we do.
And I always say to my kids, especially my oldest son, because he, and I'll say it a lot to my, my younger son too, as he develops, is that who you are is defined by the choices you make that nobody ever knows about.
It's defined by who you are when nobody's looking.
It's very easy to do the right thing when everybody's watching you.
It's very easy to pretend you're a holy person when everybody's watching.
It's much harder when nobody's looking.
And the only person who knows is you and God.
And that's what I try to always remind my son of.
And so, you know, I think that that's something that if we all live out and we try in those moments nobody's looking to make the world a better place, to make the right choice, even when it's, and I'd say especially when it's hard, then we will begin to see a truly better world all around us for our kids and our grandkids.
Because, you know, I think we need to leave this world a better place for them than we found it.
And unfortunately, this is the first generation where, you know, because of AI and a lot of other things, it's not a sure thing that we will leave our kids a better world than the one we came into.
As of right now, I can say this, when I was born in the 80s, the culture around America was a much better place than the one we have today.
And so I hope we can get to a place where that's no longer the case.
But right now, I'm pining for the 90s, you know, like the 90s rocked.
I would say like every day I'm like, I wish I was waking up in the 90s.
But thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
You guys are making a big difference.
And I'm so glad you're carrying on Scott's legacy by continuing this and continuing to meet together and sip together.
And I'll be tuning in sometimes.
You know, that's what I did with Scott.
You know, unfortunately, with four kids and a farm and all of the projects we're doing, I don't get to do it every day.
But it is, if I'm going to watch something in the morning, it's going to be, it's going to be this, just like it was with Scott.
We love that.
I love that.
On behalf of Owen and Marcella and myself, and everybody, thank you, Robbie, Starbuck, and everyone.