All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 27, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:52:36
Live with PublicSq CEO Michael Seifert; Then with Robert Gouveia! Viva Frei-Day!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We got you!
We got you.
And more to come.
Clown.
Thug.
Crook.
Criminal.
This isn't a fake video, people.
This guy sounds like Michael Rappaport without the swearing.
So I just want everybody to appreciate, that's not a doctored video.
That is straight up, you can see it in, you can't see the banner, but I'll refresh.
That is straight up from Jamal Bowman's official Twitter account.
I thought it was a joke.
I'm like, no, this can't be real.
This cannot be a congressman acting like a fool.
I mean, there's the ultimate irony behind this because when the video of Jamal Bowman, no, sorry, when he got arrested or charged with pulling the fire extinguisher, fire alarm, I was like, oh, maybe I can find something that shows what a hypocrite Jamal Bowman is.
I found it.
This is his official account.
He's laughing at the Trump mugshot.
Fool.
Criminal.
We got you.
Justice.
We got you.
And more to come.
More to come.
Clown.
Thug.
Thug.
Crook.
Crook.
Criminal.
All right.
So the ultimate irony, people, is not much time later, Jamal Bowman, the man who couldn't tell what the fire alarm was and thought it was an emergency exit, apparently, the video of his lie.
Comes out.
He comes in there.
This is the video of Jamal Bowman pulling the fire alarm.
Takes the two signs down.
I don't know why he did that.
And pulls the alarm.
You remember his official explanation?
I wanted to personally clear up some confusion surrounding today's events.
Today, as I was rushing to make a vote, I came to a door that is usually open for votes, but today would not open.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I activated the fire.
Liar!
Remember what he called Trump a crook, criminal, thug?
Liar!
And now I want to see your mugshot because rules are rules, Jamal.
You made them.
I mistakenly think he would open the door.
I regret this and sincerely apologize.
Oh, yeah.
But I want to be very clear.
This was not in any way me trying to deliver.
Liar.
This is him.
Here, look at this.
Comes up in a rush.
I thought this door would open.
Oh, the sign, by the way, says...
I'll show you what the sign says because I couldn't read it.
Someone found...
There you go.
Pull the alarm and run.
What did the alarm say?
What did the sign say?
Sorry, hold on one second.
Here you go.
Someone, I hope this is right.
Hold for three, push until alarm sounds.
Three seconds, doors will unlock in 30 seconds.
Doesn't seem like a very safe emergency exit.
Liar!
And now he's been charged with a very minor charge.
So maybe he is still laughing all the way to the bank because apparently, you know, rules for thee but not for me or whatever the hell it is.
No one's above the law, but some people are certainly more under the law than others.
Oh, yes, sir.
Public square, people.
That's right.
This is going to be amazing.
I ran into Michael at Tim Pool's event in Miami.
And it's...
It is what the world needs right now by way of business.
And straight up, this is not a sponsored ad.
There's no financial anything here.
I met Michael.
He has created a business which is fascinating but responding to a need that we all need right now.
A parallel economy.
And I got some questions because I got some questions as to how this all works.
But he started Public Square, which he'll explain it.
He'll explain it.
And then I invited him on.
He said, sure, let's do it.
And then we bumped around some scheduling time.
Boom shakalaka, here we are.
But before we actually go live, let me make sure we're live on the Rumbles.
We are.
There we go.
That's my ugly face right there.
And let me see if we're live on the Locals.
VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com live here.
And I'll wait for an answer.
We are.
And if anybody wants to go watch on VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com, we're going to have the after party there.
That's the link.
And if anybody wants to go watch on Rumble.
I think I forgot one thing today, which was link to Rumble.
And there's a typo in there because it's me.
All right.
How do I go pin that comment before we leave here?
Pin the comment.
Okay.
Done.
Done and done.
And Michael's in the backdrop.
We're getting this on.
Everybody share the link.
We're live.
And Michael, bringing you in in three, two...
One second too early.
Michael, sir, how goes the battle?
It's going.
It's going indeed.
It's good to be here.
Well, it's good to have you.
I love the organic way that, you know, you meet people who are good people, who do good things, and then things just happen.
30,000 foot overview.
I will not spend too much time on your childhood.
I got a lot out of you during the Tim event, but I might ask you some questions.
Who are you?
What are you doing?
And how is life?
I am Michael Seifert.
I and my team have built the largest marketplace in the world of non-woke businesses that aren't going to lecture you about gender ideology when you're just trying to buy a cup of coffee.
And I'm doing really well.
I'm loving change in the country through the power of commerce.
We're shifting the power structures of society back toward we the people at publicsq.com.
And it can happen by helping consumers vote with their wallet.
If you're tired of what Target and Bud Light and these other entities are doing, you actually have options where you can shift your dollars elsewhere.
It's not just enough to boycott.
We can actually move our money positively in a direction that we feel good about.
And so I'm filled with hope.
The world's kind of collapsing and Rome is falling, but...
We're having fun.
Joyful resilience at the end of the day.
Someone cynically said, you know, when World War III goes off, at least, you know, the ratings on TV are going to be good.
I won't pry too much into childhood and upbringing, but may I ask, like, where are you from, siblings, what your parents do, and just to understand how you got to where you are now.
I'm from Southern California.
That's where I've lived the longest over the course of my life, but actually recently just moved to the sunny state of Florida.
So I'm like you.
Fled.
Communism, the People's Republic of California.
And we consider ourselves political refugees, so we made the move to Florida.
It was actually funny.
The other evening, my wife and I were sitting in a restaurant with our sweet little girl, and we were having a great dinner.
Our waitress was really kind.
She said, hey, have you ever been here?
We said, no.
We actually just moved.
She said, where'd you move from?
We said, California.
She goes, oh, no.
And I said, I promise we're the good kind.
And we're not going to vote for the same sort of policies that decimated that once beautiful state.
So we are proud Florida residents now.
We love the free state of Florida.
And my parents are actually, both of them, from farming families in central Illinois.
And they decided to go on a little bit of an adventure when they got married.
And so they moved around the country with us as my dad had new promotional opportunities with his job.
And so I saw a lot of the country.
I've learned a lot of stories along the way.
I've always been intrigued by politics and business.
And so now the fact that what I do actually blends those two worlds, it's quite rewarding.
So we have a wonderful family, a wonderful purpose-filled profession, and I get to meet lots of cool Americans.
So it's an exciting life.
So you were born in Illinois or were you born and raised in California?
I was actually born in Kentucky.
And you'll like this, a portion of my upbringing was in Toronto, Canada.
So while I've lived in California the longest...
I'm from a lot of different places.
And so I lived just south of Toronto for a few years of my childhood and made the move back to the United States for high school.
And yeah, it's been a wild ride.
But I feel like Florida's home for a while.
So it's pretty refreshing to feel like we're settling roots.
Other than, I don't want to poo-poo the architecture or the lack.
I mean, it's sort of like all very similar structured buildings, strip malls and all that stuff.
If you can get past that and the flatness and the hotness, it's a beautiful place.
People are...
I mean, as far as I can tell, genuinely and sincerely happy here.
And it's tough not to be happy when it's sunny every day of the week and you're not being taxed out the wazoo.
California is sunny every day pretty much, but you're taxed up the wazoo.
Born in Kentucky, how many years did you spend in Kentucky?
Four.
Okay, so you don't really remember Kentucky.
Don't remember.
Then you go up to Toronto?
St. Louis for a year and then Toronto.
We were in Toronto for almost five and then made the move back.
Then was in St. Louis, Florida, California, Alabama for a little while, and then California for basically my entire 20s.
Well, let me ask you this.
This is a lot of travel for a kid.
How many siblings do you have?
One.
Younger sister.
She actually works at Public Square as well.
That's amazing.
It's the good kind of nepotism, I promise.
This is a meritocracy around here.
She earns her keep and she does a fantastic job as a product designer.
So we're grateful to have my younger sister, Katie, on board.
Well, traveling around that much as a kid has got to be difficult for developing roots, making friends.
There's the flip side is you make a lot of friends in a lot of places and you've got a lot of great connections, but you don't appreciate that as a child.
Do you harbor any resentment to your parents for the...
Not tumultuous, but the, what's the word?
Not transitory either, but the traveling you did as a kid, which you probably did not like as a kid?
Yeah, it was difficult being a nomad.
We never really felt settled.
And yet, at the same time, I was grateful.
Right around the time I was about 13 or 14, I started feeling an immense sense of gratitude for the diversity of relationships I formed.
I had friends all over the country and truly over the continent.
And doing all that travel also helped shape a lot of my social abilities.
I think that one thing that's really hurting the next generation is the lack of ability to connect with each other.
We're glued to our phones.
We're glued to our screens.
And if you've never really been forced to get outside your comfort zone as it relates to social interaction, you're really handicapped in that regard.
And I know that now.
Our team is filled with incredible staff members, many of whom are Gen Zers, but they're the anomaly compared to many of their peers.
Many of their peers in this day and age can't even lock eye contact.
It's actually very sad to watch.
And so part of the travel and the moving...
And the transitory nature of our family actually helped instill in me a great sense of the ability to communicate, the ability to create relationships very quickly, the ability to move past small talk quickly, to jump into deep conversation, and also the ability to transition well.
I think one thing that people have a hard time too with is maintaining relationships long distance, and we were able to do that growing up.
So I'm grateful, all in all.
Very much a net positive.
How old are you, if I may ask?
28. So 28. Okay, fine.
So you're growing up with this highly movable life, but it's in the digital age, so it really does change everything.
It's like you didn't have to rely on writing letters and pen pals to maintain friendships.
It could be as direct as the internet.
Okay, what did you study in university?
Political science.
All right.
And any business after that or just political science straight into this?
So I took a unique approach coming out of high school.
I graduated high school.
And my father was actually very much into finance and so taught me a lot about personal finance as well as corporate finance, taught me a lot about the way that the economy works.
Understood a lot of how economic structures shape society and then vice versa, how society and policy shapes economic structures.
I loved it growing up.
I grew up reading people like John Locke and Thomas Paine and learning a lot about social structures and the public square and what makes a community thrive, learning the difference between a republic and a democracy and that we truly are a constitutional republic and why that's so important to preserve.
I just loved soaking all this up as a kid.
And so when I graduated, I actually wanted to get to work right away.
I went to University of Alabama, did a year in person, and just didn't really feel like the in-person college experience was for me.
I wanted to go work.
I wanted to get my hands dirty and actually jump in and put some of the practical skills I had learned to work.
So I left school in person.
I went to online schooling through Liberty University, and I actually graduated my entire bachelor's degree with a major and a minor.
Online.
I never actually stepped foot on the Liberty campus.
I did it all online before online school was cool.
And I was really grateful to graduate while I got to work full time.
So I worked in nonprofits.
I worked also in private equity.
And I got to do that working with small business owners and different entrepreneurs all while I was doing school at night.
And that really set me up well for what I'm doing today.
So I'm grateful for the degree.
But more than anything, I'm grateful for the practical application.
Many other countries do this, by the way.
They encourage their high school students to start flexing their muscles within a specific profession or school of thought earlier than later.
And that way, when you actually graduate and you head into your professional career, you're not just looking at 18 as the transition to more schooling.
You're actually looking at 18 as sort of the age where you transition into providing value to society.
And that's what I wanted to do.
So now we're here and, you know, it's worked.
I've loved to go and work and build and try to provide Let me ask the crass question, because there's a big debate about the cost of university in America.
You do an online university education at Liberty.
What did it cost?
Per semester cost, with no scholarships or anything because it was an online school that was pretty simple.
I think my semester cost all in was like $6,500.
So my yearly tuition was less than $13,000, $14,000.
It was a very cost-effective way to do schooling.
It was actually affordable.
And I took a lot of classes.
I kind of expedited the journey and the path there.
So I tried to cram a lot in in a short amount of time.
I highly recommend it.
It was an amazing world-class curriculum, too.
Your teachers will call you every week.
Liberty University is a Christian school as well.
And so if you're a person of faith, they'll call and they'll pray for you.
They'll send you newsletters and updates and reach out if you need help.
It was an incredibly personable experience.
And this was before COVID, obviously.
And so I loved, loved, loved the way that I did college.
I couldn't recommend it enough.
I have friends that went and spent $250,000 on a four-year degree, and I just can't resonate with that.
Well, first of all, you read the classics, John Locke and all of the other historically big brains.
As far as current thinkers go, current political influences, who did you...
I mean, you're still growing up, but who did you listen to in your teens, early 20s in terms of modern voices to shape your politics?
Yeah, there's actually a book I want to recommend to everyone.
There's an author named Paul Johnson.
He wrote a book called Modern Times.
I read this book in, this was probably about seven or eight years ago, and it was incredibly transformative.
My understanding of the last 100 years and how we got where we are today.
It's a little bit of a bigger book.
It takes a longer time.
I would encourage folks to sit down for six months and just kind of enjoy it.
Don't feel the need to rush through it.
It's about 850 pages.
But Paul Johnson was a great thinker that informed a lot of how I view the bridge between politics and economics.
I've also loved some of the modern thinkers in sort of the...
I don't know that I'd necessarily call it populist movement, but...
Somewhat populist.
Bringing power structures back to the people, that's sort of the anthem of populism.
And there's some great thinkers that we all know and love, like Tucker Carlson, that's actually informed a lot of that thinking.
In fact, I reflect on a great debate between, it was very cordial, but it was a debate between Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro probably about four or five years ago when they were talking about the new technological revolution and how AI was going to either disrupt or complement the economy.
And Tucker and Ben had two varying theories on how we should see this new age of automation.
And Tucker's goal was really to preserve local communities and to prioritize small businesses and to make sure that major sources of employment, especially for like non-college educated males are preserved.
So we talked about truck driving things and that really resonated with my family who comes from trucking and farming.
And so that was really I've loved people over the years.
Honestly, like you guys, what you're doing with Viva Barnes is really exciting.
I like the law and how that incorporates to all of this as well.
Love it.
It's not a university, people.
That's a joke.
No, it's really cool.
I've had a lot of neat influences.
There's some business people as well.
There's a gentleman named Dario DeLuca who does a lot in sort of the private equity thinking, trying to build communities.
So I actually got to mentor underneath him for a little while.
Dario actually was famous in Southern California as a private equity mogul who basically transformed a city.
There was a city that was riddled with poverty and homelessness and a lot of corruption and crime.
And he thought that real estate and Business entrepreneurship would actually revitalize the city.
That was the simple thesis and it worked and I got to watch that kind of happen and how we did it.
Really cool stuff.
I could go on and on about the people that inspire me, but those are just a few.
Okay, but we're going to do that and other stuff when we go to Rumble because we're going to, we're going to, what's the word?
Give the benefit to the alternative market of ideas and sharing.
So link to Rumble, people.
I'm going to end this on YouTube right now.
As we do remove, end on YouTube, remove.
Okay, fine.
3, 2, 1, come on over to Rumble or go to locals, vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
Ending.
Okay, now, so when do you get the idea?
Bongino has been talking about, you know, parallel economies for a while, but I'm not sure that he was the first person to say it.
When was the first time you heard of or thought of the concept of parallel economies, given what we had seen, say, the mainstream economy do to dissident thinkers?
Well, there were some early thinkers writing about this in the 80s.
They didn't necessarily call it the parallel economy.
That term, I didn't see coin until about 2011, 2012.
But what I will say is that back in the 80s, you'd see people start to speak of the concept when they talk about the diverse kind of economic landscape that was emerging, especially categorized between.
The United States was largely founded upon this concept of shareholder capitalism, where the goal of a company really should only be providing value to their consumers and their shareholders.
As long as you're maximizing value to the people that own the company and the people that the company serves, then you're doing your job well as a business.
But in the 80s, something interesting started happening where things shifted more towards stakeholder capitalism.
I.e.
the belief that you should factor in other stakeholders into the business consideration rather than just your consumers and your shareholders.
So you should talk about the climate.
You should talk about marginalized communities.
You should talk about all the ways in which you're serving.
The different stakeholders in your community, whether that be the nonprofits that are around you or whatever it might be.
So stakeholder capitalism started to emerge, and then out of stakeholder capitalism came ideologies like ESG and DEI.
So as ESG, environmental social governance, these score systems that are given toward companies that include financial favors if they are to act in a progressive manner, and DEI, which is really a way of structuring your business goals and interests and employment, these philosophies emerged out of this.
that a business should care for the external stakeholders rather than just your customers in response to ESG and DEI The concept of the parallel economy began to emerge.
You saw this especially when you had companies like Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A in the early days come under fire because they refused to adopt some of the ESG and DEI principles.
So if you remember the famous court case from the 1990s with Hobby Lobby, the abortion pill debacle in the 2000s with Hobby Lobby, their healthcare plans where basically the healthcare plans were wanting them to adopt the funding of abortifacients.
And they said no and got into a legal battle.
Chick-fil-A then coming under fire for their religious views in 2007 and 2008.
And then all of that led to this moment I remember in 2014 very vividly where it was National Protest Chick-fil-A Day.
So there was a group of activists that were very frustrated about Chick-fil-A's Christian conservative views.
Chick-fil-A has actually let go of a lot of those views since, which I actually think is a mark against them.
I think they should have held fast to their principles.
But back then, about a decade ago, they were holding really strong, and they said, hey, these are our beliefs.
Take it or leave it.
We're confident in our ability to reach all consumers, but if you don't like what we're doing and why we do it, that's all right.
You're free to do so.
So there was a national protest Chick-fil-A day that emerged.
I remember driving by a Chick-fil-A on a Tuesday afternoon.
I think it was 2014.
Could have been 2013.
But I drove by, and there was a two-hour line out the door of this Chick-fil-A.
And I was absolutely flabbergasted.
I couldn't understand.
It was like 11 a.m.
Why would people sit outside with lawn chairs outside of a Chick-fil-A?
What on earth is happening?
So I pull over, and I...
Google, back in the early days of the smartphones, what is happening at Chick-fil-A?
And it turns out it was National Protest Chick-fil-A Day, but these people outside the store, these were not protesters.
These were supporters.
There was a line out the door, two hours long, of people wrapping around the parking lot that were taking time out of their jobs to go and sit, set up shop, and support Chick-fil-A.
To get a chicken sandwich, to show solidarity with Chick-fil-A's beliefs.
And I remember being so intrigued in that moment, thinking, what on earth is happening here?
This is a different psychological drive in the marketplace than anything I've ever witnessed.
That was the power of the parallel economy.
We saw this a few years later when you witness companies like Goya Foods.
If you remember during the 2020 election, the CEO of Goya said, hey, I'm voting for Trump.
He was asked in an interview, who are you voting for?
He said, I'm supporting Trump, so sue me.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out and said, hey, this is the largest Latin American food provider in the United States.
As a Latina woman, I think we should initiate a boycott.
So she did this big call to action to boycott Goya.
Well, funny enough, it ended up being the best month of sales Goya had ever had, to the point where the CEO of Goya gave AOC employee of the month and hung her picture on the wall.
It was brilliant.
Was that 2020 or 2016?
I think it was 2020.
It could have been 2016, but I think it was 2020 because I don't think AOC was in...
She was in office when this happened, if I remember correctly.
Jeez.
Okay, that makes sense.
I thought I would have remembered that incident.
I remember the boycott and the bounce back to some extent, which is going to lead into some future questions that I didn't hear.
I thought I would have remembered the employee of the month.
That's classic.
And so you're seeing the pushback to the...
Well, I'm not calling it censorship, but to the boycotts.
And that's the genesis of the idea?
Yeah, you know, Chick-fil-A held strong, and Goya held strong, Hobby Lobby held strong, and in return, their sales skyrocketed.
And that is the power of the parallel economy.
So when these businesses come under fire for standing strong in their values, they have more traditional and more conservative values, they value meritocracy, excellence, they're not going the way of the DEI and ESG crowd.
When that happens, their sales surge.
They have lots of new customers.
They actually don't lose as many customers as some people might think.
And they're put on a whole new path to success than beforehand.
So that's that concept of parallel economy.
ESG and DEI have driven stakeholder capitalism.
And in return, there's been a rebuke of that through the power of the parallel economy.
And those companies are thriving and succeeding.
So Public Square, for example, is a rebuke.
A direct alternative to the targets and the Amazons of the world.
That's what we're building here, the Etsy's of the world.
We're building a marketplace that actually prioritizes the values that have made this country so special in the first place, prioritizes meritocracy, love for country, constitution, the values that it protects, and our growth has been tremendous as a result.
The parallel economy will have people that are genuine and the parallel economy will have people that are grifters or just trying to make a quick buck off of it.
The only companies that will really succeed in this arena are the ones that are genuine.
They have to actually understand this TAM.
Actually, before you get there, I just want to bring up this one particular story.
I don't know if this would fall under how the mighty have fallen, but I was trying to remember.
This actually happened.
This was the CEO of Chick-fil-A shining...
I'll just read the headline so no one's going to accuse me of editorializing.
People are slamming Chick-fil-A's CEO for shining a black man's shoes on stage in a bizarre display of repentance and shame.
And there you have it.
Dan Carthy said he bought about 1,500 shoe shiners for different Chick-fil-A employees.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
Question here.
I presume you've done some studies that you know the buying power of the various demographics, because you have these online mobs who say, we're boycotting this and that, and a lot of people reflexively or responsibly say, good, you were never the consumers in the first place, and you don't have buying power, not in a judgmental way, but your boycott is purely illusory or symbolic with no financial impact, except in the way that it causes other people to, other corporations to respond in kind.
Do you have any hard stats on the buying power of, let's just say, conservatives versus liberals or Democrats versus Republicans, boycotters versus actual consumers?
Absolutely.
It's a great question, too.
And you brought up the Chick-fil-A story.
I think that stories like that that continue to come out, showing Chick-fil-A's sort of fall from their original intent, I think if there was another boycott Chick-fil-A day today, you wouldn't see the same surge like you would have seen 10 years ago, because people don't feel in our movement that Chick-fil-A has really stood strong.
I think you would see a massive surge to the Goyas of the world that continue to stand strong to this day.
You'd see a surge to Hobby Lobby that continue to stand strong to this day.
You'd see a surge to the gun companies that continue staying strong to this day.
You'd see a surge to the 75,000 businesses we have on Public Square that have all, in just the last two years, taken a stand and say, hey, we love these values and we're not afraid to stand for what actually built this great economic system.
In terms of the buying power of this parallel economy, you can categorize it in two ways.
Number one, if you look at 2020 election data and you look at folks that voted for Trump, so we're not just a political movement.
We have cultural stars on our side.
We have professional athletes on our side.
We've had exposure into lots of different avenues to get the public square name out there.
But even if you just said we are purely a political marketplace, here's the opportunity.
In 2020, $7 trillion of GDP was represented by Trump voters in the United States.
$7 trillion.
$7 trillion is the third largest economy in the world by GDP, only behind the United States more broadly and behind China.
What is the, more broadly, the $7 trillion of what is the United States GDP entirely?
Well, now we're 30. We're over 30. But at the time, we were about 24, I believe.
So it was about a third of the GDP.
And that's just Trump voters.
So we're just talking 18 and older people that voted for Trump.
I believe we were right around...
Yeah, we were probably a little bit closer to 21 or 22. Yeah, right around there on GDP.
And so $7 trillion, it's a massive, massive dent.
That's larger than India, larger than Germany.
And so you look at the economic opportunity of that buying power that's being completely ignored, and you'll start to realize that not only is this a very liberating movement to create a parallel economy full of the Goyas of the world and the Hobby Lobbies and all the different companies that are standing strong, it's also a lucrative one.
So if you take that further, look at the boycotts this year.
So Bud Light decided to go woke, and they...
Absolutely slapped their audience in the face.
And they meant to do it.
They said that they had an actual mandate to reform their audience.
That's what the VP of Marketing said, right?
So look at what happened.
You saw a boycott, a 26% decline in sales immediately.
And between Bud Light, Target, and Disney, you saw...
So Anheuser-Busch, InBev, Disney...
And Target, a $50 billion decrease in market cap in less than 60 days.
In fact, if you look at Target, which followed the month after Bud Light, you saw their stock get downgraded twice by JP Morgan.
Something that's interesting here, by the way, is that JP Morgan has been one of the biggest entities that's cheering on ESG.
But when ESG actually leads to the decrease of your business, they're more than happy to downgrade your stock and penalize you.
So they were the one that fed you and gave you incentive to get a higher ESG score.
Then when you do that thing and it hurts your business, as it inevitably will, then JPMorgan punishes you.
It's a very sinister system.
Target then experienced the first earnings miss they've had in six years.
Do you remember the last time they had an earnings miss?
Six years ago, what was happening?
It was the bathroom debacle.
The bathroom?
Oh, the trans bathroom.
The transgender bathroom.
That's exactly right.
So they clearly didn't learn their lesson.
That money, and here's my point, that money, that $50 billion of decreased market cap, it's got to go somewhere.
It doesn't just totally evaporate.
These are consumer businesses.
So the money's gotta shift.
Where is it shifting?
Well, on the beer side, it shifted to Modelo.
Modelo's now the number one selling beer in the United States.
It also shifted to our marketplace.
The day after Bud Light did what it did, we had an 800% increase in searches for beer on our platform.
That's amazing.
Yeah, it was incredible.
It was incredible.
Target, same deal.
When Target did what it did, consumers flocked to our app and we were a top 10 app on the entire app store for over 10 days.
And so we've really seen a surge toward the parallel economy as we recognize how corrupted and broken the existing institutions and the incumbents in corporate America are.
I don't even know if we should get into the Bud Light UFC sponsorship for the time being, because people are going to criticize it.
But if UFC got a good deal out of a desperate company, rake it in.
I don't think people are going to stop watching the UFC and move to Pride, for example, out of boycott.
Okay, so the market has been analyzed.
Actually, I want to get into the going public business in a second, but hold on.
What was the question?
Oh, I guess...
The question.
Certification.
You say that these are not grifter corporations pretending to be like-minded because there's a market there.
The company that I couldn't remember, the certification I couldn't remember when we met at Tim Pool, B Corp.
Where you get this B Corp certification and it's like, it shows you're a good company, you do all this crap.
And I saw what goes into certifying B Corp and it's the same, not rubber stamp, but pay for the label type thing as...
Dolphin-free tuna, which is something you license out.
There's no overview.
There's no verification.
It's just you get a label, and you could kill as many dolphins as you want, but so long as you got the label, it looks good.
What is the application certification verification process to make sure that the companies that are part of Public Square are legit and not phonies?
That's a great question.
So a few points here.
First is, many of these businesses self-select.
So if you're a business that's kind of on the progressive authoritarian left, you're not going to want to join our marketplace.
We don't often see businesses trying to pull the wool over our eyes and join and associate themselves with this marketplace that often gets labeled as super conservative or alt-right or whatever it might be.
So they're not going to self-select that.
We find that that's rare.
But that said...
In case that were to happen, we have a very strict vetting process.
So when a business signs up, they immediately see five core values that guide our experience.
You can find these values at publicsq.com.
So if you go to publicsq.com, scroll down the page, you'll see our values.
A lot of people, by the way, ask public SQ.
What's that stand for?
It's obviously public square.
SQ is how you write it short form if you're writing an address, obviously.
We're actually, though, next week, this is exciting, brand launch, we're launching to publicsquare.com.
So next week, we're actually having Public Square fully written out, doing a little brand revamp, bought the rights to that, which is really exciting.
And that'll be a fun next step for our company.
So if you go to Public SQ...
Yeah, I wanted to scroll down, okay.
Yep, so if you scroll down, you'll see on our next little section, there's our values.
So those five values, these big blue boxes that you see here.
These are our five core values that businesses agree to when they're signing up.
And they, in signing up, not only agree to align to these values, but they also agree to not spend time, money, or resource antagonistically against these values.
I want to stop here to explain something real quick.
A lot of people sometimes ask, well, are you just kind of the right-leaning version of ESG?
There's a really important distinction, besides all the fact that, you know, they're communists.
The simple distinction is that ESG requires you to do a lot.
You have to limit your emissions to X. You have to work to reduce this thing.
You have to hire these amounts of genders.
You have to give to this thing.
You have to support these political, whatever it might be.
It's all these things you have to do.
And you literally take actions in order to increase your score.
You have to show your initiatives.
Our marketplace is very opposite.
You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to put a flag on your place.
You don't have to donate to a politician.
You don't have to support this nonprofit.
You don't have to do any of that.
It's what you're agreeing not to do.
We don't want you to lecture these customers about their political views.
We don't want you to bar service because of somebody's vaccine status.
We don't want you to hang paraphernalia on your walls that shows progressive political alignment.
It's these things that we're asking you to do so that customers feel like they can come in here and have a political pressure-free environment that won't cancel them, that won't censor them, and won't lecture them about gender when they're trying to buy a cup of coffee.
We use that line often, but it does happen.
It's what businesses were supposed to do, which is serve the clients irrespective of politics, because business was not to be mingled with politics.
Once upon a time, they would say, "It's not a question of not having beliefs, but don't espouse beliefs in the business that alienates some of your customer base." We've strayed a long way from that, where now certain things have become litmus tests for...
Service too.
DEI statements of inclusivity that they sort of compel lawyers to make.
Now they took it down in Ontario.
But so it's, yeah, it's not a compulsion to do something.
It's a compulsion just to not do something and let people be people and be consumers without being lectured.
It's magnificent.
Well, and there's a good example of this.
You know, if you look at one of the hot topics amongst our community, it's abortion.
Pro-life versus pro-abortion.
I don't use pro-choice because the baby doesn't have a choice with the pro-abortion crowd.
That's a misnomer.
They say that it's a choice, but it's not a choice.
If you look at pro-life versus pro-abortion, you start to see companies getting wrapped up in this debate on the pro-abortion side by actually utilizing customer funds to support abortion clinics.
Well, if you're one of our millions of consumers that don't like that, then...
Every time you're going to Starbucks, unfortunately, you're empowering what you don't like.
And so on our marketplace, we ask businesses, "Hey!" Please don't donate to any of these sort of progressive causes.
Then they'll ask, well, do I have to donate to right-leaning causes?
We say, no, you don't need to donate to right-leaning causes.
Just please don't donate to those causes.
And that's the real distinction here.
And that way consumers can know with blessed assurance when they're coming to our platform that they're not accidentally funding a political campaign when they're just trying to buy a cup of coffee or a new pair of pants or whatever it might be.
So the reason we vet in alignment with these values is to secure that sort of safety and security and confidence in the transaction experience.
Once they agree to those values, it's then passed off to an actual research team.
So we have a team of about 10 research analysts that are on our business integration team that are cranking every single day.
They're utilizing an algorithm called the PSQ score that we've developed that basically scrapes anything a business has ever said publicly online.
So on their social media or on their website.
And it creates, in a millisecond, a composite score that sort of acts as a base level for the vetting process and flags any areas of concern for our research team to then go dive into.
They're scanning, making sure the businesses...
By the way, we're not just vetting for values.
We're vetting for quality, too.
We want to make sure these businesses are legitimate, that they're providing quality service, that their links work the way they're supposed to, that there's inventory, like they say there is, etc.
Once that happens, they're passed through, given the green light, and they're live on the platform.
We can pull all that off generally.
In about 24 hours.
That's unbelievable.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
It used to take a week.
And so we've refined the systems quite a bit.
It's working.
Can someone on the team just like go scrub the internet for my social media posts and tell me what my score is?
We'll give you a PSQ score.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, that's amazing.
And has it ever happened that someone not ratted someone up, but someone says like, hey, I just saw this guy attend.
I saw the CEO at an event or making a tweet.
Like, is there a community sort of surveillance?
Yeah, there is.
We definitely have a, how was your experience?
Let us know.
A call to action after these transactions.
What we often find is that most of the concerning issues or actions are caught on the front end.
So it's very rare that we have a business approved and then we find something out about them.
It's very often that we have a business come on, try to get approved, and we find out that something's wrong.
So for example, we had a business that was trying to join, and it wasn't even a nefarious business.
They would say they agreed with our values, but it's a brothel in Reno.
And we're like, hey, we're a family-friendly platform.
We're not going to promote a brothel from Reno.
Sorry.
There's places you can go promote your thing, but that's not going to be on our platform.
So they would say, hey, we agree with your values.
But they didn't actually fit the sort of family-friendly nature of our platform.
We have miners on the platform.
We're not going to do that, right?
And so another industry that's tough is like cannabis.
So not necessarily CBD.
CBD is easy.
We have lots of those companies on the platform, but literal dispensaries, regardless of your feelings on the issue, there are massively varying regulations around the country as to how all that works.
And so for us, we've just sort of stayed away from that one.
But the vetting team catches a lot of that on the front end.
The issues that we do find when a business has been approved, this is rare, but this has happened, a change of ownership.
So if a business sells, for example, and the new owner...
Now that we've been around as a platform for about 18 months, we're starting to see these sorts of issues arise.
The way that we mitigate that is by reaching out to these businesses fairly often.
We actually want to have regular communication with these businesses.
We email them a few times a week about different things.
We ask them to participate in different surveys and things like that.
This helps us have a regular sense of community and communication with the business community.
That's worked very, very well.
We've also had the heartwarming.
We sent...
Cuban food, amazing, amazing dishes.
And they got exposed for being on Public Square by a local Antifa chapter.
So what did we do?
A ton of consumers to their business.
Same deal with an ice cream store that we had on the platform as well.
They came under fire in a local Facebook group.
Not to worry.
We brought them 500 new customers in a day when we did a big campaign to celebrate their business.
It's really incredible to see the power of the parallel economy, and you can't cancel all 75,000 of these businesses.
You can't cancel all over 1.6 million of our consumer members.
You can try, but it won't work.
We have too big of an army at this point.
There's strength in numbers, and it's incredibly refreshing for our consumers.
Well, now that you mention that, and then I hadn't thought of this, but set aside boycotting.
How about vandalism?
How about destruction of businesses?
Has that occurred yet?
We had one instance after the Bud Light debacle where a brewery on our platform faced vandalism and graffiti from opponents to our platform and to the stance that they were taking.
These people basically came out and said, hey, we're not a huge fan of what Bud Light did.
And we have alternatives.
So if you want to come here, come here.
And I'll protect the privacy of that brewery at the moment.
But it was a great establishment with a fantastic reputation in their local community.
And these are a few bad actors that were trying to antagonize them.
So we reached out, offered to pay for the cleanup process, and they were back on their feet that evening for the next night of business.
And so it's the win.
That's how we do it moving forward.
We've actually paid for a business's legal fees as well.
There was another restaurant in Chicago, actually, That...
We had a fine that they received from the city coming out of COVID because they denied the restrictions.
They kept going and offering service to anybody.
They wouldn't ask for masks, wouldn't ask for vaccines, and they never closed.
And they faced a $1,000 fine from their city for doing so.
And so we actually reached out.
We paid for their legal bills, and we paid for the fine to fight it.
And we try to do this stuff often so that the business community that's on the platform knows that while those situations are rare, they do happen, and we want to keep them protected as they move forward.
We always get rewarded for it too.
Anybody who thinks that they might lose a few customers if they join Public Square, if they stand out in support of the parallel company, it's totally false.
We've never had that happen.
In fact, out of the 75,000 businesses, the only stories we hear are the very opposite, where their sales increased a thousand percent because everyone's like, I can trust these people.
Thank you.
Finally, sanity.
I'm going over there.
Now, I don't want anybody coming away with any unreasonable expectations.
What is the Public Square's formal policy on assuming legal fees and things like that?
Do you do it on a one-off basis?
I presume it's in your terms of service that you have no obligation to do it, so everybody shouldn't just be running to you when they have a problem?
That's exactly right.
What I will say, it's only ever happened once that we've had a business face the need for legal fees because of their stance in support of the parallel economy.
That said, we're here for our business community.
So we don't have a publicly stated policy necessarily, but we try to get creative.
For some people, it's not even legal fees they need.
It's a special drive to their business.
So it's, hey, let's do a big giveaway campaign and let's push people to this storefront because X happened and they came under attack for something.
That's happened with ammo companies on our platform where, you know, They come under regulatory fire, and so they just need a good surge of new customers.
We polled our business community earlier this summer, and we asked them, what's your greatest need?
So not only is it to connect with values on consumers, all these things, and you want to feel like you're a part of a marketplace that has a real sense of purpose behind it, that's helping you grow your business by prioritizing the basics of meritocracy and value for your customers.
Past that, what's your greatest need?
And they said...
Conversion.
That's it.
In an economic trying time, we just want more hot leads, more customers, and more ability to convert them into paying customers.
And so the fact that we can provide those simple things as an economic platform is obviously helpful.
In the rare cases where they need legal fees or something else, too, we just always encourage them to reach out.
We'd love to talk about what we can do.
Okay, fantastic.
Now, the question is, practically speaking, the app, we can't pull it up now because I haven't thought of a logistical way of doing that.
How does it work?
People will download the app?
And they will put in their area code to see what they're looking for geographically near them.
Do they go by product?
How does it work, practically speaking, for users?
That's a great question.
So if you head to publicsq.com, you can experience the platform on the web.
You can log in or create an account there.
It's totally free to join.
We're never going to ask you for money.
Obviously, when you pay for the business products that you're getting, you'll obviously have to use currency.
But to join...
There's no sort of special membership fee or premium option.
You just log in, you create an account, and you're off to the races.
What's really exciting about this platform, by the way, if you also see here, just underneath the Shop Now button, you can see the Apple icon as well as the Google Play.
Our app is live on the App Store as well as Google Play.
So if you're looking to download this app on your mobile device, you just search Public Square on either of those platforms, and you'll see us pop up.
We should be first.
You'll see America's Marketplace, and you can download the app and be off to the races there as well.
Once you create an account, We drop you into the experience and it's very simple from there.
You have the ability to shop.
So the shop tab is filled with businesses that are in online retail or online service.
So they'll serve you anywhere in the country.
You can buy...
Yesterday I bought my toilet paper from a business on Public Square.
My wife bought some household cleaning products and I got new biking shoes.
All from...
The Public Square platform.
So you can actually buy ammo and paper towels in the same shopping experience, which is pretty neat.
You then also see a local tab where you can actually shop for things around you.
So you can find different businesses in your local area that have joined Public Square.
There are these little square pins that mirror our logo that you'll see around your community.
Check out those businesses.
Go show them your support in your local area.
And actually, we just yesterday soft launched our shopping cart feature.
On Wednesday, November 1, we're doing this rollout more prominent.
This is cool.
Up until this date, we've been a directory.
We show you the businesses, we show you the services, we show you the products, but then you actually conduct the purchases on their site.
So we link you through, and then you conduct the purchase on their checkout site.
November 1...
We actually launch fully, and there's actually a few products that are already doing it on the platform, our one shopping cart checkout feature, where you can add multiple vendors to the shopping experience and check out from our app and never actually have to leave.
So we're entering e-commerce so that we can truly compete against the Amazons and the Etsys of the world.
This is the first step to doing that.
It's incredibly exciting.
So on Wednesday, we'll actually have the ability to purchase over half a million products from the Public Square platform directly in e-commerce.
So whether you're looking to shop and buy a new pair of pants online, Or you're looking to go to a store locally and check it out or get a new plumber?
Whatever you're looking to do, you can find it on Public Square.
I'll leave you with this one more story here on this topic.
My wife and I just moved to South Florida, as we mentioned, and we're definitely in the more natural health movement.
My wife and I have chosen a more holistic way of living in terms of how we handle our daughter's health as well.
And, you know, we respect everybody's decisions, but as it relates to the medical world and vaccines and all of that, but at the end of the day, for us and our family, we've chosen to go more preventative medicine and healthy lifestyle living and things like that.
We reached out.
To a business that we found on Public Square, a licensed MD that now runs her own pediatric practice that specializes in natural health.
And it's vaccine pressure-free.
We'll never ask you to do anything like that.
It's a wonderful, freedom-loving establishment.
We called, said, hey, would you mind serving us?
And said, would be happy to.
Came to the house, did a house call, and we now have our pediatrician.
So whatever you're looking for, there's a high likelihood that you're going to be able to find it on the platform.
And we've wanted to make the one-stop shopping experience as seamless as possible.
Now that you mention that story, I realize I've been in Florida for a year and three months now, and we don't have a doctor for my wife and I, but the kids have a doctor.
I might have to go look for one this afternoon.
Oh, now, you went public, was it in June of this year?
July 20th.
July 20th.
Yep.
Was that a traditional IPO or one of the SPAC methods of getting on?
We went the de-SPAC route.
That's exactly right.
So we did a SPAC with a great acquisition corp called Columbia.
They were looking for a parallel economy company to take public.
And we were not necessarily looking to go public in the short term.
We were open to it because I really wanted to be a company that's by the people, for the people, and owned by we the people.
I like the idea of our consumers and businesses actually being shareholders in the company they're building.
Public has quite a lot of perks to it in terms of access to capital, the ability to have an equity currency that you can utilize for things like acquisitions.
What a lot of people don't realize is that we actually have a few companies underneath the Public Square umbrella and brand.
We obviously have the app and the marketplace, which is what we've talked about today.
But we also own a diaper company.
We started a diaper company called Every Life.
It's the fastest growing pro-life, pro-family diaper company.
It's actually the fastest growing diaper company in modern history, and it's the only pro-life, pro-family diaper company on the baby care space today.
You'll also see...
That we owned a B2B software service called PSQ Link.
You can find that at psqlink.com.
So we have a few different companies.
Part of the perk of being public is you have an equity currency you can utilize for acquisitions.
Now, the problem with being public, obviously, is that you can be subject to, if you're not careful, shareholder activism.
And so the risk you run is that you'll have an economic mob.
Try to take over your business, buy enough of your company to elect certain board members and hijack your entire mission.
So what we did is we actually created a special class of shares that would be exclusively mine so that I retain majority voting control in perpetuity as we move forward as a company so that the mission can't be hijacked.
So if George Soros of the world wanted to come around or Alex Soros, who's making most of the decisions now, wanted to come around and purchase 90% of the company.
That doesn't actually equate to any majority voting rights.
So there's no correlation between the voting control and the economic control of the company.
You can't do anything with it.
And so that's one of the many steps we've taken to preserve control in the company so that the mission is kept pure.
That was really important.
And it was a non-negotiable for us as a management team, as well as all of our investors heading into this transaction.
And that is basically to say, so long as you're involved in it, there will be no hostile takeover.
There'll be no indirect method of circumventing the purpose.
Then the only question is concern for you upping and leaving at some point, something happening to you where your shares go to somebody else that compromises the mission of the company, but nothing in life is guaranteed except death and taxes.
Okay, and this is amazing.
So you're launching the shop.
Oh, sorry.
Two questions that are coming out of the Rumble Rant side.
Let me bring this up here.
Sorry.
Love it.
Here we got, for Michael, do you have a presence in Canada at all?
And then the second one is, I use Public Square, but I wish more restaurants and pubs would sign up.
Start with the first one.
Presence in Canada?
We don't yet have a presence in Canada, but I use yet with all seriousness.
We absolutely have the plans to venture into Canada.
Now, there's one important note.
As we look at going international, which will happen in the future, I'm not going to give any specific dates, but it is something we're actively working to.
It's not going to be the global marketplace.
It's never going to be public square.
Everybody sees the same thing no matter what country you're in.
We actually, just like we have America's marketplace, want there to be a public square Canada's marketplace.
We like the concept of economic nationalism.
We believe that a country should primarily take care of its own first.
And so we want to make sure that as our marketplace grows and expands internationally...
We have this special affinity and appreciation for localism and nationalism.
So we're looking forward to building Canada's marketplace.
If you actually go to international.publicsq.com, so international.publicsq.com, and you join our international waiting list, that would be incredibly helpful.
We've already had tens of thousands of folks around the world join our waiting list, and that helps us know.
You just have to put in your email, let us know what country you're from.
That will help us know kind of the interest level of different companies.
Tell me if I got it right here.
International.publicsq.com.
And then we've got, we're not outside of the United States.
Sign up below.
Okay.
And then you got your sign up.
Okay.
Excellent.
That's exactly right.
And the second question, restaurants and pubs.
That's absolutely right.
We don't have as many restaurants and pubs on the platform.
A lot of that's because many of the restaurant owners, cafe owners, they're not as often a part of some of the larger business clubs, Facebook groups, things like that.
There's restaurant associations that we're actively marketing to.
That's a big thing.
So we've had an intense amount of growth in restaurants and pubs and bars and cafes over the course of the last few months.
In fact, it's been one of our fastest growing industries.
That's because we just recently started to market to these restaurant associations and different groups where they take place.
They're not as often involved with chambers of commerce and things like that as much as service-based industries are or some of the more financial sector businesses.
So they're a little harder to get to.
Oftentimes, too, restaurants don't have the most easy online access.
They really only have a presence through their Google listing or their Yelp listing or whatever it might be.
And so they don't quite have the same SEO play often that some of the more online service businesses do.
A lot of those reasons are ones that restaurants just have been sort of the lagging business industry to join.
What we find though is that restaurants love joining.
It's actually a great industry to see kind of an immediate attraction on Public Square with because you want to find a new date night spot.
You want to find a new restaurant you can take your family.
You want to get away from the chains and you want to find somewhere local that loves the message of Public Square.
That's a great industry that's easily accessible.
Not everyone needs a realtor, right?
You don't need a realtor every week.
You don't need a lawyer, hopefully, that much.
And so, no offense, obviously.
Even if I need one, even if one needs one, oftentimes you don't go to one and then, you know, it's like not going to a doctor when you...
There was a question in our locals community, but I think you answered it.
It's from RyanPD911.
It says, do you ever plan on creating a shopping platform to replace Etsy as a small business owner?
That is what I want from Public Square.
And I think you answered that question.
We absolutely do.
And actually, just to elaborate on the question a little further, the step one of our commerce journey is basically taking whatever you've done for your storefront, whether that's Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Squarespace, however you built your website.
We basically link that.
Into our backend, very seamless, so you don't have to go create a whole other storefront.
All your products link over, all your inventory links over.
We use two APIs to do that.
Makes it very easy to get going and have your products sold on PublicSquare.
What we're actually working on, though, is you being able to replace the Shopify's, the Etsy's, the Wix, Squarespace, etc., by actually building your identity management business portal through PublicSquare.
And that's down the line, something we're really excited about and that we've already begun working toward.
Now, I have to watch out the questions that I ask the CEO of a publicly traded company because I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
I don't know anything.
I'm cautious, so you're good.
The question I had is more the broader exposure of things.
We know of online advertising.
So the platform now is more for marketing for the businesses.
But not so much necessarily the online advertising space.
So when it comes to like, what's the word when you have mass campaigns to boycott?
That's not a risk for the individual users.
It's not even so much a risk for the platform as a whole.
It would almost seem to fit into its reason for existence.
What are your main exposures as a business?
Other than short-selling manipulation on the open market?
What are your main exposures?
Definitely short selling.
That's of course a risk to any publicly traded company, but especially one that has a sort of ideological position or mission associated with it that half of the country loves and the other half might not love.
So that's certainly present in the business.
Now the reality is the best way to break through that pressure...
Is simply continuing to execute because the more buyers you have into the stock, the more that you break through any sort of glass ceilings that are there.
And so, you know, if you have more buying pressure than selling pressure, it makes the world of a short seller a nightmare.
And that's obviously the goal.
I don't think too much about the stock.
Actually, I'll tell you this.
I can share this publicly.
Our largest investor reached out the day before we went public and he said, hey, just remember, I'm not looking at the stock for multiple years and neither should you.
Go build your business.
Execute and the stock will follow.
Stock's a lagging indicator, especially when there's market volatility.
And so our big thing to kind of push out the noise is go build a business that provides a lot of value to customers that they see a real need for and make a lot of money while you're doing it.
Make sure you're maximizing your business processes and the market will follow.
So short selling is definitely one.
Other risks include things like, honestly, just the heavy regulatory environment.
You know this well.
If they can't cause your business to fail, they'll cause you to get distracted.
And so the desire for a lot of our adversaries is to just try to distract us with stuff.
Try to distract with vain threats.
Try to distract with animosity.
Try to distract with pressure.
That's really the goal of these.
By the way, it happens in politics, too.
They don't actually think Trump's guilty of any of the 91 things.
They don't think he is.
They know he's not.
They know that this is all political hocus pocus.
They do it because they want him distracted.
They do it and they line up these trial dates with Super Tuesday and things like this because they want him distracted and not able to focus on the mission.
Little do they know, it actually helps him.
The more that they attack him, the more that he garners support.
Similar is the case in our world.
Rumble's experienced this as well.
When Rumble experiences a lot of regulatory pressure.
Rumble thrives.
People really see a draw toward the platform because they recognize we're in a fight here and we need to support those that are standing strong for our community and the values that we hold dear.
And then finally, there's one more that I'd mention, which is just we really are prioritizing the expedient ownership of our own infrastructure on everything we do.
So anytime we have a new vendor sign-on, for example, that's helping us with SMS messaging or whatever the thing is, whatever tool they're helping us with, We actually ask them the values question.
Hey, if we face political pressure, if we get a bad reputation because of our views, are you going to cancel us?
And we've had people say yes.
And so we say, all right, we're gone.
We've had other people say, no, we won't.
We say, okay, well, we need that in legal writing.
We need it in our contract.
We try to really stress vendor alignment with any tools or partners that we utilize in this space as we're building our business toward the ultimate goal of eventually owning it all ourselves, which is really what we're building toward.
Fantastic.
And I think I know that you have something coming up.
You have an event coming up that you're sponsoring.
Am I not wrong about that in Miami?
You are not wrong.
It's actually in Orlando.
But you are right.
We are partnering with Rumble and the Florida GOP to actually host the Florida Freedom Summit.
It is an incredible event where every single major presidential candidate on the Republican side is going to be speaking and making their case as to why they believe they're the right candidate for the 2024 election for the Republican nomination.
So Trump will be there.
DeSantis will be there.
Vivek will be there.
Nikki Haley will be there.
The whole crew.
And we're going to hear what they have to say specifically about the business community.
We're really proud to be sponsoring this with Rumble and partnering with this.
Chris and I are on our panel together, which will be fantastic.
I'm speaking.
Omid Malik, the CEO of Columbia Acquisition Corp that took us public, is speaking as well before DeSantis.
And we're going to make sure that the interests of the business community are represented.
We're also hosting our first ever public square town hall.
We actually have Congressman Jim Banks from Indiana, who's actually running for Senate there, as well as Donald Trump Jr. joining us Monday, November 6th in Indiana, where we're packing out the largest bar.
In the state of Indiana, it just so happens they're on Public Square.
We're packing out that bar with Public Square business owners who are going to get to ask Jim Banks questions.
How are you going to represent the interests of the business community on Public Square?
And thankfully, Jim is a big proponent of our values and the stance we're taking.
And so that should be a fun event as well.
We're going to do a lot of those moving forward into the future to make sure the values of the businesses on Public Square are represented in the actual political Public Square.
Fantastic.
And I'll just read two more here.
We got P Moyer says, I just joined Public Square.
Looking forward to using it, Michael.
And Finboy Slick says, another thing that people can do to help, disable your ad blocker on freedom-friendly platform sites, not just to help the sites, but also the businesses that advertise on them.
I was looking to make sure I put in the right links.
I put in all the links.
Where can people find you, Michael?
Well, you can find the platform, which is really what's most important, at publicsq.com.
So if you go to publicsq.com, you'll also see links to the App Store and to Google Play.
You'll also see links to our diaper brand if you're looking for diapers.
You'll see links to our PSQ link, our business service, in case you're looking for a sales tool that can help you compete against Salesforce and some of the product offerings they're offering there.
So publicsq.com, that's definitely the go-to.
I'm on Twitter or X now as well.
At Real Michael Seif.
So S-E-I-F.
The first four letters of my last name.
At Real Michael Seif on X. And that's where I spend most of my time.
I'm on Instagram and we as Public Square on Instagram and all these other platforms as well.
But I'm a big proponent of the newly reformed X. And that's where we do most of our important communications.
Absolutely phenomenal, Michael.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Hopefully we'll meet up in Orlando.
But thank you for coming on, everybody.
Michael, go.
Enjoy the day.
We'll talk soon.
It's good to see you.
Thanks so much.
You have an amazing community.
And so it was a pleasure to be able to talk to everyone.
Appreciate it.
Amazing.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Have a good one.
See you soon.
You too.
Oh, my goodness.
That's amazing.
I signed up, by the way.
I just wanted to make sure that when I opened it up in my browser that nobody, you know, incidentally saw my password or...
Email address because I once accidentally showed my email address during a stream.
Not that I really care because it's not a mystery email address, but my goodness, did I notice some spam.
And holy cows, I don't know if Google picked up on the wording of my email address because it wasn't even real people.
It was just immediate spam.
All right, now, for the rest of the show, we've got Robert Gouveia talking about Trump and his sham of a...
Prosecution.
Robert Gouveia, watching The Watchers, for those of you who don't know who he is, everybody knows who he is, has been covering it, giving some of the most excitable?
Not excitable.
Exciting.
Watchable summaries of the shams that are going on right now.
He's been covering the plea deals as well, and I've been watching him, and I've been saying publicly, I appreciate his optimism, but I don't share it, so we're going to discuss that today.
Gouveia's in the backdrop.
Robert, are you good to go?
Alright, thumbs up.
Boom shakalaka.
Sir, you're looking good.
How's it going?
Good to see you, Viva.
Thanks for having me on tonight.
Look at that skin fade that you've got.
I remember back in the day when I used to get those.
Turn your head to the side for a second.
Here you go.
That is a good skin fade.
Shout out to Sergio.
Yeah, that's my boy Sergio around the corner.
Well, we've got to see if Sergio is on Public Square.
It's...
That is...
It's amazing.
The app is amazing and Michael is...
Extremely well-spoken and extremely principled.
I like it.
Between Public Square and Rumble, there's an alternate market, economy, platforms.
But Chris from Rumble is fighting a much bigger, different machine on multiple fronts.
Robert, so what's going on?
Well, we're glad for that, man.
I appreciate the work that Public Square is doing.
I appreciate the work that Rumble is doing.
I think that we're going into a whole new season here.
We're talking about the Trump prosecutions, and I think we're going to see more of that.
I think that right now we're just kind of warming up, and we're seeing some of the, I think, intensity increase with these gag orders.
I think they're going to try to limit Trump and try to penalize him.
So I think it's a pretty precarious position, and I'm glad that we have alternatives this cycle because we didn't have a lot of that last time, and I think we kind of got flat-footed as a result.
We'll start with the less, we'll start with the, I say not less controversial, we'll start with the stupider ones because the New York, dude, Robert, I've been asking everybody, nobody's given a different answer.
Leticia James taking to Twitter every day to put out her, it's Orwellian, not like two minutes of hate, her Orwellian two minute summaries of the trial that she's currently conducting, talking about evidence, witness testimony, putting it up on Twitter for a trial that for some reason is not being broadcast.
First question, this is a state case.
This could have been brought televised, right?
In my opinion, yeah, it should have been.
I mean, they are allowing cameras kind of in the courtroom to allow people to dabble.
You know, they get a shot of Trump in there, they get a shot of the judge in there, and then they throw the cameras out.
But unlike federal court, right?
Federal court, there's a pretty strict prohibition.
I don't know exactly what New York's rules are, but it's not the federal rules.
And we've gotten a lot of state cameras, you know, state court cameras in many other trials.
Personally, I feel like they come out and they say that they want the cameras in the courtroom, but I'm not so sure that that's accurate.
I really think that they want to keep what's happening in the courtroom hidden, because when we go through the trial tweet threads, it's like a circus in there.
I would imagine that they would not want America to see a lot of that.
I just created a new term.
It's called the...
Instead of the transcript, it's the tweet script.
Love it.
Actually, coined.
Hashtag everyone give me credit for that.
It's a trademark.
Yeah.
Because what's amazing is you're going through it.
It's not a transcript.
It's somebody summarizing what's going on.
And it's a gong show.
I mean, it started off as a gong show with the judge...
You know, taking off his glasses to smile for the camera.
So the latest news out of New York.
Angeron, I've been sharing those videos.
I'll keep sharing them until people understand that they exist.
This judge who eight years ago talked about the tools that he has to bypass jury verdicts, whether or not he's following the law or making the law.
He's got tools.
He can do whatever he wants.
He issued the gag order, the verbal gag order.
Was there ever a written...
Did he ever put that gag order verbiage on paper?
He did, yeah.
And he just did this newest one as well.
They're pretty short orders, and they are in writing.
So he made verbal orders in the courtroom, and then he followed them up with written writings.
And they just basically summarized what he said in court.
But the more recent one was the summary of the, and I know we're talking about the first one, but he kind of walks through and rehashes what happened on the record and then just doubles down on his sanction.
Are they under appeal?
Do you know if those orders are under appeal?
So, not yet.
My understanding is that Christopher Keyes, so yesterday, Christopher Keyes, Trump's defense lawyer, said that he was going to appeal this latest gag order, and the latest gag order was the $10,000 sanction.
And so, just for a quick recap, as brief as I can be, but this was about the judge's clerk.
So, Trump was making some statements during the breaks.
He would go into the courtroom, they'd have trial, he'd come out and he'd talk to the press.
Well, I think it was on Wednesday, he came out and he made a statement.
And I didn't see the video of it, but it sounds like when he was turning a corner or something, he made a statement to the AP, and they reported that Trump made a comment about somebody sitting alongside the judge, like sitting alongside the judge.
We don't know who that was.
It could have been Michael Cohen because Michael Cohen was on the stand, and that was Trump's former lawyer who was the key witness on that day, which I think was Wednesday.
But the other person who was sitting on the other side of the judge was the judge's clerk, and the judge has already issued an order.
Saying Trump can't comment on the clerk, which I think is unconstitutional because why can't he comment on the clerk?
But that was the order originally.
Trump said he was talking about Cohen.
They brought Trump up to the stand.
I mean, it was a big deal that we can, you know, unpack.
But long story short, Trump's defense was objecting, objecting, objecting.
They came back in on Thursday and they objected again after they got their written order.
And they said, Judge, your order's wrong.
And they did promise to appeal it.
Whether they do or not, you know, it's...
Yet to be seen.
But Christopher Keese in the defense said that they did want to appeal it.
And they made the same point that it's Trump's constitutional right under the First Amendment to be able to criticize that law clerk.
And if she's in the judge's ear this entire trial, right, if the judge doesn't really know what is going on and he's constantly hearing from her to tell him what to do, that's part of the process.
And in my opinion, Trump should be able to comment on that process because that's the only safety valve that we have against corrupt prosecutions.
You've got to be able to talk about them.
Oh my goodness.
He was fined $5,000 for the first violation, $10,000 for the second.
The defense was that he made a comment about someone biased sitting next to the judge.
This was when Michael Cohen was testifying.
And his defense was, I'm talking about Michael Cohen, not your precious law clerk.
And Engeron hears it and says, no, I don't believe you.
Slap you with a $10,000 fine?
Yeah, that's it.
And these are all, you know, these are all very, Trump is kind of tap dancing around a minefield here.
And this is by design.
And there's something.
I think very, very nefarious happening here where the courts will parlay and piggyback off of each other.
So what happened, so even backing up before this most recent $10,000 fine, you know, Trump made a comment.
So they're kind of entrapping him in a way.
And then once one court gets him, then the other court will piggyback off of that.
So zooming out even a little bit further, the original sanction.
So, you know, Trump comes out and he makes a lot of statements.
And I've said that I think Trump should be making these statements because he should be flexing his free speech as much as possible.
It's the First Amendment.
He has a right to talk about the process.
That's why we put it first, so that we can criticize the illegitimate prosecutions or whatever the corruption is in government.
That's our redress of grievances.
That's why we speak.
So I've been saying Trump should be very, very aggressive with this language because we're now going to see...
These two immovable forces of American law come against each other.
You're going to see the free speech, you know, bucket coming against these due process rock that you'll find in the justice system.
And it's, you know, how do we differentiate between these two things?
So Trump is coming out talking about everybody, right?
Deranged thug Jack Smith and the whole litany of people as he is allowed to.
And the judge issued an order saying that at that moment he could no longer make comments about the clerk.
Like, specifically the clerk.
So Trump stopped talking about the clerk.
Now, the first order, right?
So Trump didn't violate that again the first time.
But the problem with that is that the bad statement that Trump made was on a truth.
And what they did is they pulled the truth off of the truth.
The bad statement, the naughty, the naughty that Trump did was on a truth.
Yeah, the bad speech, you know, the wag your finger speech.
So they took that truth and they put it on Trump's website.
And then when Trump was ordered to remove the truth down, They didn't also simultaneously pull the website down.
So it stayed up there on the website, and then somebody notified the judge about it.
And so Trump got the first sanction, not really for an intentional violation, right?
It was an aftermath of the first violation.
And so that was sanction one.
That was $5,000.
Trump, you should have had your staff or somebody pull that down.
So that set the pretext.
And that is what was used or referenced by Judge Chutkin.
And I know that's a whole different courtroom and a whole different topic, but that's January 6th.
That's the federal case.
So then Chutkin was relying on that original kind of mistake to say, see, Trump is violating gag orders and we need a gag order.
And then just recently, and I know I'm, you know, going deep here, but just recently, then New York referenced the January 6th judge said they issued an order, which is why we need an order.
So it's like the people who started this whole process are creating an environment that causes other judges to rely on them.
And then they rely on the other judges and everybody's just kind of gagging Trump.
And then, you know, it's going to escalate.
And from here, right, if Trump steps on it again or they set him up again, maybe they hold him in contempt or they...
Take away his cell phone privileges?
Or they default him on verdict.
I mean, what you're describing for those who didn't follow the Alex Jones trials in Connecticut and Texas, it's exactly what they did to Alex Jones in the Sandy Hook defamation case.
You get some wonky rulings coming out of Connecticut that the Texas judge piggybacks off of to issue increasingly He's not even allowed to assert his own innocence anymore, but not just the default verdict, where the plaintiff didn't even have to prove their case.
It was just granted.
And this is exactly where they're going with Trump.
They're going to Alex Jones, Donald Trump.
Yes, and it started off with the indictments.
The stupid indictment out of New York was not the end of it.
It was the beginning of it.
Then you got it in D.C., you get it in Florida, you get it in Georgia.
Okay.
I don't know where we go after this.
Okay, carry on, please.
Well, so in New York, you know, this gag order, I think that they will appeal it.
It's been a very interesting trial.
I mean, we had Michael Cohen, who was on the stand, and it's very much kind of the same game that they're playing with the courts.
One court will issue an order, then they'll all spiral off of this.
And we're seeing this all over the place.
I am nervous about it because we're going to see the same pattern, I think, appear with the 14th Amendment removal stuff to try to keep Trump off the ballot.
Absolutely.
Once one judge somewhere crosses the threshold, crosses the Rubicon there, and we're seeing that in Colorado, they're all going to start falling like dominoes.
And it's very concerning to me.
So, same thing we saw with the gag orders all piggybacking off one another.
They did kind of the same thing with Michael Cohen.
Alina Abba, who I'm a big fan of, Trump's defense attorney, she was there cross-examining Michael Cohen.
And Michael Cohen, we know him.
You've seen him.
He was a convicted perjurer, right?
He's lied multiple times.
He's been on CNN.
Jake Tapper's called him out.
He's literally a convicted perjurer.
And so he was brought out in Tish's case.
And Alina Abba came out, and she just obliterated him, man.
It was, like, beautiful.
I shared your, what's the word, recounting of the tweet thread from the tweet script from, what's his name again?
It was either Dan Alexander or Adam Klasfeld, one of the two.
Those are the two guys I think it was Dan Alexander.
Well, I mean, we could summarize this very quickly.
Cohen is a demonstrable proven liar who said before Congress that Trump never asked him to inflate the value of his assets.
And then comes out here and says, Trump asked him to, and he says, well, you're lying somewhere.
Did you lie there when you told them he didn't?
Or are you lying now when you're saying that he did?
And it ends there.
But Judge Engeron, you know, after they made their, what was the motion for?
Directed verdict.
Directed verdict.
Engron says, no, I've got enough evidence to fill the courtroom, or we've got evidence to fill the courtroom, not displaying any bias or having prejudged the case, but it is predictable because you could get Cohen out of there entirely.
They're going to rely on whoever other witnesses, Letitia James, has been quoting every day saying, Trump asked them to do X, Y, and Z. Okay, so Cohen is an actual...
Sorry, go for it.
But the thing with that, though, is that Cohen even admitted that he was the starting point of the whole case.
And he actually looked at Tish James and he said, thank you.
No, he said, you're welcome.
You're welcome.
So he said, because at one point, you mentioned this going through the tweets.
Cohen goes on CNN, says, you know, Trump's worth $10 billion, which was whatever.
I don't know how much.
And that allegedly initiated the investigation.
Cohen is on the stand and says, you're welcome to Leticia James, who's in the back of the courtroom.
Are people laughing because it's over the top or because they're all part of the same clique here going after Trump?
I think it's probably all of it.
I mean, the way that I'm interpreting this courtroom is they're all kind of smirking and stuff.
Cohen made another comment saying, ask Tish about something.
And Tish is in the back of the courtroom like, objection!
She's not even a part of it.
He's not saying Tish, though.
He's saying, ask Madame James, right?
I don't know what he said.
Ask the Attorney General or whatever.
But her Twitter handle, the reason I call her Tish, for everybody knows, is because one of her Twitter handles is at Tish.
James.
So we like to call her Tish.
But she's in the background, you know, making these comments like she's sitting behind the bar.
She's not even with her team of attorneys up front there.
And they're all just kind of laughing.
I mean, they're reporting, you know, giggles in the courtroom and stuff.
And I'm just like, this is not how this is supposed to go.
And she has a convicted perjurer on the stand.
He's acknowledging that they're all here because of him.
And the judge just keeps letting this thing go on.
He doesn't even care about Cohen being a liar.
He says, I've already.
You know, judge this case.
And I'll just also highlight this.
When you're talking about the 14th Amendment, you just need one wonky judge to grant the order for Trump.
That small domino was set in motion already with Cui Griffin.
Yeah.
Trying to see if I can get him.
This was the New Mexico County Commissioner.
Oh, and Cowboys for Trump founder removed from elected office for a role in U.S. Capitol riot because some crazy, I don't know, clerk or whatever said...
Insurrection removal from office.
That's the first domino.
The next bigger one is going to be any wonky judge who issues such an order, you know, at the lower levels of the court.
Well, we're getting there in Colorado.
I mean, there was just a ruling.
I have not read it or covered it yet, but I think that that judge relied on that Cui Griffin one to say that the 14th Amendment was self-executing, right?
So this is how it goes.
They start small, and then it's like a snowball that just rolls down the mountain.
Anything more?
The New York trial is an absolute joke.
It is unconscionable and unprofessional, being an understatement, for Leticia James to be doing what she's doing on social media.
Do you agree with that?
I absolutely agree.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
I think it's amazing that other prosecutors and other defense attorneys are not calling out a lot of this stuff.
It's not normal.
A prosecutor should be speaking through their filings.
Say what you will about...
Merrick Garland, our U.S. Department of Justice, but that's what he says, right?
He comes out and he says, we speak through our filings.
We don't comment on this stuff in public because that's kind of the standard that you get from the government.
The government already has all the power, all the money, all the cops, all the resources, and then to use kind of that bully pulpit, that, you know, her position as well to go after a defendant.
Like, this is Donald Trump, so they feel like they're justified in doing it, but he's a civilian defendant.
You know, he's just a regular guy.
Currently, that has no political power, and it's unethical for a prosecutor to do that, but she does it, and it's cowardly because she won't even get up in front of the bar and make her claim, make her opening arguments or do any direct exams or cross-examinations in the court of law.
She just sits behind the bar, which is where the law school students sit, and everybody else is doing the actual work until she hops up on Twitter.
Unbelievable.
Do you know what the next step is in the New York trial?
So they're back in trial today.
Yeah, we're just burning through witnesses.
Cohen was done yesterday.
They had a witness that they called that turned out to be a bad witness for them.
And they had to designate her hostile.
And then she basically said, no, Trump never told me to do anything.
And so she's back on the stand today.
And we'll see who's next after that.
But I don't know if Trump will be there or not.
We're kind of following along to see when he shows up.
All right.
Excellent.
Now let's get to the juicy one, Robert.
Yes.
You've been covering the plea deals in the Georgia case.
So thus far, it went down in the order.
Sidney Powell, Cheesebro.
Yep.
Jenna Ellis.
There was one more in there.
Scott Hall was the first one.
So Scott Hall came before Sidney Powell.
Oh, really?
Okay.
And what did he get by way of plea deal?
Same thing.
So he got deferred adjudication, just like all of them.
So they're all going to have all their charges dismissed.
And actually...
He was kind of the first one through, so I think he really kind of set the tone for all of this, and they all kind of followed his plea deal pattern, which was excellent.
So it's zero and four for Fannie right now.
On all four of those...
Deferred...
You said deferred verdict?
Deferred adjudication.
Deferred adjudication.
Okay, explain what that means.
So it's...
It's a technical thing in the law that is extremely common, but it's known as a number of different things.
It's also called diversion, meaning you actually don't get convicted of any crime.
So probably the easiest way that I can explain this is just by relating this to traffic school or driving school.
And I don't know if you've ever gotten a speeding ticket, Viva.
I know I have.
But when I got a speeding ticket a long time ago, I had to take what's called defensive driving school.
I actually elected to do this.
So I got a ticket.
It was something I disagreed with, but I reviewed the ticket, reviewed the charges, and I decided, you know what I'm going to do?
I don't want the points on this license.
I don't want this to go on my insurance driving record.
I want the whole thing to go away, right?
So what I did is I went online and there's a defensive driving school option there.
And what you do is you say, I elect to take defensive driving school for this ticket.
And when you fill out the form, generally what you're doing is admitting that you did it.
You're sort of admitting to some fault to it.
But what they do is they don't actually enter that admission.
Okay, so think of that almost like a plea of guilt.
You're saying, yeah, I did it, but they're going to say, we're going to give you 60 days or 90 days or whatever, and you can go and complete this class online or go take this school, right?
And you follow me thus far?
Yeah.
All of this is pretty simple, right?
And so once you complete that, then the court takes your admission and they just delete it.
The whole case gets dismissed.
Nothing goes on your record.
It's like it never happened.
Now, what's happening in these Georgia cases is exactly the same thing, except just in a criminal process.
When you go through a criminal case, at the very start of a criminal case, you have to enter a plea of something.
We've all seen this.
At the very start of criminal cases, how do you plead?
Guilty or not guilty?
99.99% of people at the very start of a case Enter a plea of not guilty.
Well, at some point when the case moves forward, you're going to have pretrial conferences and settlement conferences and negotiations and motions filing.
And we saw this all in Georgia.
So now we're talking Georgia now.
We saw Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.
We saw tons of litigation about discovery and Brady material and all sorts of stuff.
Well, we're getting very close to a trial date.
And so when you get close to a trial date, a decision needs to be made.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to keep your plea of not guilty?
And go to trial and then let the trier of fact, let the jury decide whether you're guilty or not.
Or you can change your plea into a plea of guilt, right?
Generally speaking.
Now, there's also some other options.
Those are the general rules.
There's also some other options.
The government can dismiss your case, right?
They can say, hey, you know, motion to dismiss.
You could argue that your case should be dismissed.
The judge could dismiss it.
But generally, it's trial or a change of plea.
Now, in most cases.
Now, many states have created a third option.
Which is called deferred adjudication or called diversion or first offender programs to give people an other option so that they don't have to get convicted if they are a first offender, so that they don't have to go to trial if they are a first offender.
It's what we saw with Jussie Smully.
I think it was called pretrial diversion in his case.
So did he get pretrial?
I'm not familiar with what he got.
He got pretrial diversion back in the day, which pissed everybody off because allegedly he had had a...
DUI.
He had some other run in with the law beforehand and people were irritated because apparently it was not intended to be offered for felonies, but only misdemeanors.
That's from memory.
But I remember looking into that.
That was like one of the first vlog series that allowed me to delve into law.
And I had to call up an American lawyer and said, yeah, it's called pretrial diversion and they can do it if it's a first time offense and it's a nonviolent crime and a bunch of criteria.
And he, you know, he basically has no criminal record afterwards.
Yeah, was that his, because he had a trial, didn't he?
Didn't he actually go to trial?
I think they, then they had a special counsel that came in and took away the, whatever, undid the diversion because they said, what did they say about it?
That it was the result of corruption from Fox?
I have to go refresh my memory on that, but I do remember pretrial diversion was offered to Justice Millett, which is how he got off scot-free in the first place, but then they took it back.
So, okay, understood on the program then.
The question is, so who was the first one that got this?
I forgot the name now.
So it was Scott Hall.
So what we all watched, what we saw, was that third option.
It was not a guilty plea proceeding and entry of judgment.
Okay, so there's a difference between that.
There's a difference between going through a guilty plea proceeding and having a guilty judgment.
What we saw were the proceedings.
We saw Sidney Powell go through.
We saw her plead guilty.
We saw Jenna Ellis plead guilty, Kenneth Chesterborough, and Scott Hall.
But that process, everything that they did and just recorded, all of that is just going to be bundled up, packaged up, and just put on a shelf.
And it's just going to be sitting there while they complete probation because they're in this deferred adjudication situation.
It's basically the case is on hold.
And provided that they comply with the terms, The case will ultimately be literally dismissed.
And if you read the order, it will say that they are exonerated of all charges.
OK, so they will not have any criminal conviction.
They will not have any criminal judgment against them.
And by the way, the cases are already sealed.
OK, so you already can't go find them.
If you go try to find Chesa bro or Jenna Ellis, they're gone already.
Like they're already sealed.
The only reason I was able to get that Sidney Powell deferred adjudication order, which I shared on X. was because they entered that as part of the big RICO case, and they didn't separate her cases out.
And so you're not going to find those same documents for the other two cases because they've already been sealed.
But if you read the order, their convictions, they don't have any judgment at this moment.
People think that they've already pled guilty.
The judge took it and held it in abeyance, just held it aside, and then put them in first offender status.
And so their cases have all moved over or are in the process of being moved over to the dead docket.
And we'll come back.
And these so-called insurrectionists, okay, these people that Big Fanny held press conferences about and screamed at all of us that was going to wreck America, they're all going to have total exonerations from this, all four of them, literally.
And they'll be able to say that, that they were exonerated, because that's what the court order says.
So let me ask you this, though.
In the meantime, that's to say they've pleaded guilty.
But it has not been registered on a docket and never will.
It'll be, I don't know if expunged is the right word, but they have technically pleaded guilty.
They went through a guilty plea proceeding.
So they went through the motions.
Okay, I know this is nuanced.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, so the risk is nuanced versus, I won't say spin in a bad way, but the way that you want to describe it so that it doesn't feel like the L that...
It will be portrayed as.
This is legally accurate, so I'll show you the order.
If you want to pull the order up, you can read it.
You'll send it to me in the...
How do we do this?
Yeah, I'll send it to you.
I'll read you the order.
This is accurate, okay?
And the reason why it has to be this way is because if we did it any other way, if we said that there was a judgment of guilt against these people, they would not be in diversion status, okay?
They would not be able to actually...
They would be guilty.
They would be convicted.
We want to give people the benefit of not being a convicted person.
So they're in this holding pattern.
They are not adjudicated guilty.
They have not entered a judgment of guilt.
They did go through a guilty plea proceeding.
And so if you scroll down on that document...
So first of all, actually scroll back up.
Let's just scroll back up.
Yeah, hold on a second.
This commercial, I see this ad all the time.
What's it for?
Okay, forget it.
Scroll back.
I'm sorry.
Got distracted, Rob.
No, you're funny.
No, that's funny.
That's funny.
I was like, what is that?
What is that?
It's funny.
Gluten-free.
Okay, out of here.
So if you look at the document, okay, so see there where it says disposition in that third, fourth column?
One, two, three, yes.
Disposition, right there.
And it says first offender disposition, okay?
It doesn't say guilty.
It doesn't say acquitted.
It doesn't say anything.
So the disposition of this case is that they're in first offender status, right?
Legally.
Like, that's the disposition.
And by the way, these cases are sealed.
So, like, if you do a background check or anything like that, it's not going to show a conviction.
I'm not even sure you're going to find it because the court has already sealed it because they give this benefit.
Like, I know this sounds crazy how good this plea deal is.
No, it doesn't.
The issue is not how good the plea deal is for the defendants.
The only question is...
How it's going to play against the remaining one, and Trump in particular.
So you say, and I know that what you're saying is accurate.
The only question is going to be, if and when they go to trial in Georgia, or until such time as they do, and perhaps even forever, they get to say that the four defendants pleaded guilty, and they can, in Jenna Ellis' case, also invoke the written statement that she read and submitted to the court.
No?
Yeah, so if you, so real quick on that one document, which is one more time.
There's one other sentence I just wanted to show you.
So if you scroll back down.
Is it this?
I'm going to bring, I'm going to make it a little bigger.
Okay, scrolling down.
If you scroll all the way down, you'll see the specific language from the judge.
And right there.
So he says, keep going down, keep going down.
And okay, so those are the terms of what they have to do.
Okay, so this is Sidney Powell.
She's got to pay restitution.
She's got to write an apology letter.
She shall testify truthfully, okay, at all hearings.
That was stupid.
Don't they always have to testify truthfully?
Like, that's to say not only would she be found guilty of perjury, but then her deal here would be torn up and she would, I don't know what they would do to punish her.
Yeah, if she lied on the stand, that would be perjury.
They'd charge her with another crime.
She doesn't have to testify against anybody.
And then one more line down if you go...
I've seen a lot of people saying she has to testify against Trump.
That's not true.
She just has to testify truthfully.
And she only has to testify truthfully about this.
And if you go down to the next page, the final...
Okay, right there.
It says, the defendant consenting hereto, it is the judgment of this court.
Okay, this is where it's weird.
It's the judgment of this court.
That no judgment of guilt will be imposed at this time.
So the judgment is no judgment of guilt.
But that further proceedings are deferred.
So when they say that she is adjudicated guilty or that you pled guilty, no, she did not.
The court has adjudicated that there is no judgment of guilt at this time, but we could come back later and adjudicate them guilty later.
Let me go back to the testifying.
Defendant shall testify truthfully at all hearing or trials involving the co-defendants in this matter.
Some people, Robert, you'll say like, okay, everyone has the obligation to testify truthfully.
Anyhow, some people are going to say that is wink wink nudge nudge code for you damn well better tell us what we want or we're going to try to find a way to say that your truthful testimony that did not give us what we want was somehow untruthful the way they, you know, Look,
I don't know how these people are going to testify.
They could go one way or the other.
It's anybody's guess.
I doubt that they're...
As open as maybe some people are implying.
What I think is more likely the case is these people got smoking deals.
Their testimony will be about those charges.
Each one of those charges are very small.
For example, Jenna Ellis was aiding and abetting Giuliani.
What are they going to ask her?
Or Sidney Powell, if we want to stay on her.
Sidney Powell was convicted of six misdemeanors.
For hiring, like, the actual crime, okay, that she pled guilty to, which they can ask her about, was hiring external third-party experts to go in and do some investigation.
Like, literally, those are the six charges.
It was solicitation to go find somebody, execute the contract, have them do the work, and pay them, right, and that whole process.
So she'll say, you know, Sidney Powell, you know, isn't it true that you...
Hired a third party to go investigate an election?
She'll say, yeah, I did.
Why?
Because I thought the election was stolen.
Okay?
Did Trump tell you to do that?
Maybe he did.
Maybe he did tell us to go investigate something.
He's allowed to do all of that, right?
That is not in and of itself criminal.
Now, is Sidney Powell going to come out and say, Trump told me to hire this company, even though he knew that we lost the election, and he was this orchestrator mastermind, right?
In other words, All of this conduct that these people pled guilty to is mostly legal conduct, right?
They're just taking plea deals to stuff that is a slap on the wrist and is really, really not that consequential to Fannie's case, which is my point.
If she had a strong case, she would have gotten convictions on these or would have gotten more out of them than what we see here because these are all going to go away.
There's no jail time.
It's like a slap on the wrist.
It's like traffic school.
That's how minimal it is.
So here's where I disagree, I guess, to some extent.
A, they're going to take Sidney Powell's apology letter.
What will be the rules of admissibility on her apology letter, which we haven't seen yet?
We haven't seen it, but so what if it's in there?
So she could say, I made a mistake of law.
I made a mistake of fact.
I thought what I did was totally legal.
Turns out it's not.
Yeah, but I don't think she's going to be allowed to draft a letter like that.
I think it's going to be, I knew what I was doing was wrong.
I'm so sorry for the stress I put on you and for the harassment that you got.
And they're going to take that in the Trump trial.
So the two opposing views are, prosecution wasn't ready to proceed to trial.
They didn't want to disclose their plan of action to the bigger defendants.
Cut this deal because they're not ready, they don't want to do it, and it doesn't matter if it's sweetheart for them, they get a little political goodwill out of it, or they get a little political fodder out of it, and they'll move on to the bigger fish without having showed their cards.
The flip side is to that, some might say that the Georgia jury system is so corrupt in the first place, they would have guaranteed been convicted, but that would have displayed too much of their cards to the bigger fish, and so they say, look...
We'll get the political fodder out of this.
We've got Jenna Ellis submitting a written document saying that she was relying on the lies of people who were older than her, but they were lies nonetheless, and she was, you know, shouldn't have done it.
Sidney Powell writing an apology letter.
We'll see what it says.
And they don't have to disclose how weak or strong their evidence is for the bigger fish.
So I know you're sort of, you're more on the first side of that, on the option A, if I'm reading you right.
Yeah, I think that people who are...
Celebrating Big Fanny's progress here, I think, are mistaken.
I don't think that that's accurate.
I think that she is not doing a good job here.
And I think it's because she overcharged this case.
She came out swinging.
This is her case to break.
Nobody told her to charge Sidney Powell with seven felonies and then whittle this thing down to six years of probation, which will probably be terminated in three, which will result in no convictions.
So if they...
If they really had a strong case, and this was really an insurrection that was as undermining of American democracy as they all claim, they should have convictions across the board.
They should already have Sidney Powell, dead to rights, and Chester Brough, and Jenna Ellis, who are some of the biggest people out there, and then they turn around to Trump and they say, you're done, dude, you're done.
This case is dead to rights.
So what they're saying now is, in my opinion, cope.
And as evidence of this, there was one...
This plea deal that we watched specifically with Kenneth Chesabro, and this is what really kind of caught my eye on this.
First of all, these plea deals that the government offered, Fannie offered, were written like on scratch paper, okay, which means they just crafted this thing last minute.
It was almost a joke for a case of this severity.
It's like they just wrote them by hand.
So they were all pressed for time.
And when we went through Kenneth Chesabro, who's one of the lawyers on this case, he was a defendant who pleaded.
Guilty in a proceeding to a deferred judgment, is how we'll say that.
He, in his plea deal, his attorney, they ask this question, are you satisfied with the representation you received here?
Okay, Chesterbro is like, oh my gosh, yes, I'm thrilled.
And later on in that plea proceeding, the judge asked Chesterbro if he could stick around for a day or two to clean up some probation stuff, like check in with some people.
And his lawyer said, That Chesterbro had been planning to stay there for three to six months.
It was a very short little snippet.
He said, Mike, is your client planning to stay here for a little bit?
He said, well, actually, my client was going to be here for three to six months.
And what does that mean to me?
Is that the original offer from Fannie's office was an open-ended plea deal for three to six months of jail.
And when they showed up here the day before trial, as jury selection was going to start, Chesterbro, Fannie's office flipped out.
They buckled.
They gave him a plea deal to a deferred adjudication, which means no jail time, no convictions.
And they actually modified, I think, some of the other terms, like they modified it to one felony or maybe no felonies.
I can't remember.
There's so many of them.
But a smoking deal, right?
And so he went showing up thinking he's going to prison or going to jail for three to six months to getting zero and to getting all of his charges dismissed because he was bluffing.
His team was saying, we're ready.
We'll go to trial.
Let's go.
My client's not going to jail.
He didn't do anything wrong.
And so then Fannie came out, gave him a deal because she folded, not the defense.
All right.
Very fascinating.
I like this.
I still think it gives them all the political fodder they need.
That's true.
Some statements in there that they never even wanted these people in the first place.
It's not that Fannie's doing a good job.
Is this one Fannie?
This is Fannie Willis.
It's that I think she got what she wanted from the little fish, and she never had any interest in them in the first place.
And I think long-term, their careers, I think, are severely compromised, if I'm not being too harsh.
Well, we'll see.
I'm a little empathetic to these defendants.
I'm a former practicing criminal defense lawyer.
I've helped a lot of people take deferred adjudication agreements and things like that.
This is about as good of a deal as they could have ever gotten.
This is about as close to a dismissal, literally.
I mean, it will ultimately be dismissed and exonerated as they could possibly get.
So, you know, if they're sitting there and this deal lands on their desk, to me as a defense attorney, it signals massive weaknesses in their case.
And it also, you know, just think about this too, Viva.
It also sets a pattern, okay?
They're being incongruent here.
So if they're going to charge Sidney and Chesa bro and all these people with monster felonies and then give all of them deferred charges, dismissal charges, how can they then turn around and they and then say Trump doesn't, you know, deserves 40 years or 20 years or 10 years or whatever it is.
Right.
It like one of the things just doesn't belong there.
And they'll say that he's the mastermind.
Sure.
And maybe that makes him a little bit more culpable, culpable, culpable.
But it's inconsistent with what a prosecutor should be doing, which is applying the law equally.
You're not supposed to be going and just targeting people to leverage them and use them against your political opponents.
Yeah, but that's what the prosecution should be doing.
What she will do is say they admitted to partaking in this criminal scheme and we're going after the one that really matters and that's going to be Trump.
They've got something of the admissions.
Jenna Ellis did not have to submit that statement or make any statement.
Is that correct?
I don't think so.
So I don't know what the agreements were behind closed doors or what her attorney said she would do to the prosecutor or whatever.
But when we were listening to that, the judge was a little taken aback.
He's like, I don't normally hear from people here.
And we did not hear the same type of statements from Powell or Chesabro.
Except we will see what Powell's apology letter looks like.
Does Chesabro have to also issue a letter of apology?
So, yeah, I think they all had the same terms.
I'm not sure if Chesterbro had the apology term, but I think he did.
But I don't know that we will see the letters because the cases have already been sealed.
I mean, it's insane what they've done.
And I think that's some more evidence of, you know, the fact that they don't want us to see these things.
Every one of these is going to say exonerated, exonerated at some point.
Well, I'll make one prediction.
Even if the letter of apology is going to be sealed, it's going to be leaked.
Guaranteed.
I think you're probably right about that.
Get this thing out of here.
Oh, God!
Sorry.
Nothing happened.
He's all right.
Walk it off.
No, that wasn't the dog.
That was a tin can on the dog.
Walk it off.
He'll be all right.
Everyone, seriously, the dog did not fall.
It was something on the desk.
Someone's going to clip that and say, Dave drops a dog.
Robert, what have you got coming up in the coming days?
Or the coming weeks.
What are you working on?
So we're still covering all of the Trump stuff pretty in-depth.
So we've also covered the January 6th case.
And the January 6th case is getting hot right now as well.
So recently we covered Trump dropped, we called it the motherlode of documents.
He had a series of, I think, four different dismissal filings.
One to dismiss, this is the January 6th case for the so-called insurrection out of Washington, D.C. with Judge Chutkin.
And he submitted a motion to dismiss for constitutional violations saying that You know, the president is constitutionally authorized to go do all these things.
He has submitted another one for statutory violations, basically saying that the Jack Smith indictment doesn't match the U.S. code.
You know, the code says certain elements are illegal, and Trump's conduct, as alleged, does not match those elements.
And so he filed a motion to dismiss on that one.
We went through a deferred adjudication.
I'm sorry, that was what we just talked about.
We went through a...
Selective, vindictive prosecution, that's the one that we covered, saying that Trump is being targeted by Jack Smith and the Biden administration, and we've never seen anything like this historically before.
And then today, I think what we're going to see is that Trump submitted a very short motion, and this is going to be a lot of fun, but he said that he intends to submit and to use classified material at his trial on the January 6th trial, meaning he has evidence.
Is what this motion is alleging.
It shows that there was foreign interference and other intelligence failures that made him think the way that he thought.
So the crime is that Trump allegedly said that the election was rigged when he knew that it was not.
And so Trump says, I'm going to introduce classified documents to show you why I did think that it was in fact rigged, because this is what I saw.
And now the idea that offering that classified material...
Into the court for all of us to see, it's going to blow up the intelligence community, right?
They're going to be very unhappy about that.
And the court's going to be very unhappy about that.
And so Trump is saying, all right, I'm going to use one of my tools, which is just the trial presentation, my right to a trial, to bring out all of this evidence for everybody to see.
And we'll see what that does.
I'm very excited about that.
So it'll be a fun one to cover.
Fantastic.
And Rob, everybody knows where to find you.
Your schedule is live daily.
Tell us what your schedule is, because you're doing a lot.
You do the Locals exclusive stuff.
Yeah.
And you got the mind maps, which are amazing.
But tell everybody what your schedule is and where they can find you.
Yeah, so we go live every weekday, 6 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube, Rumble, X, and Locals.
And we do our live stream there.
And then we also do members-only stuff in the mornings at about, well, morning my time.
So about noon Eastern time, about 9 a.m. Pacific, is when we do our members-only streams.
We like to...
Get our bearings straight on the day.
See what the president's doing.
See what the congressional committees are doing.
See what the court dockets look like.
And then we just kind of unpack all of the madness out there, as I know you know exists.
I put the links up there, but it's watchingthewatchers.locals.com on Twitter.
I want to make sure I'm spelling it right.
It is Rob Gouveia.
G-O-U-V-E-I-A Esquire.
E-S-Q.
Not the full thing.
We both follow each other.
Rob?
I am satisfied with your explanation, but I'm still sticking to my assessment.
I think they got what they need out of this.
I understand the legality out of it.
And these are sweetheart deals for the defendants, which they cannot be faulted on an individual basis.
They'd have to be crazy not to have taken them.
The only question is coming from someone who proclaimed to have the crack into now saying, yeah, I admit I lied.
My bad.
It's bad.
But we'll see where it goes.
We'll see.
All right, Rob.
So you're live tonight.
Everybody, you know where to go, Rob.
Thank you very much.
And I'll DM you afterwards.
I'm going to go finish up with some...
Thank you, my friend.
Thanks for having me.
Bye, everybody.
Have a great day.
Have a good one.
I like Rob and I like Michael.
In fact, I like everyone in our circle of intellectuals, business people, social media platforms.
Now, I realized I said I was going to go live with Hunley, who is currently live.
Let me see where Hunley is.
I'm going to give everybody that link, but what I'm going to do before I do that...
I'm going to give everybody the link there.
Close that down.
Come back here.
Come back here.
Give this out here.
Boom shakalaka.
I don't know why I'm sharing the Rumble link.
I did not share the Rumble link.
I don't know.
I'm going to be with Hanley in a few minutes.
And gang, what I'm going to do before then is, first of all, thank all of you for being here.
Second of all, there are Rumble rants that I did not get yet, which I will get before we go to the locals-only portion of this.
And I'll read this.
This is Andrich Birchens.
Andrich Birchens says, This pair is better news than CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC combined abso-frickin-lutely.
In fact, I was trying to think of a funny way.
I can't think of a joke funny enough right now, but thank you very much.
Finboy Slick says, You didn't think I'd let you get away with complimenting a man's skin fade without mentioning your secret desire for a mullet, did you?
Finboy, I might do it one day.
We'll see what happens.
Then we got Vienticus Prime says vote for me.
And I think I got this one.
I didn't get this.
KCampbell48 says Viva.
When will Rumble incentivize content creators to come to Rumble?
I've seen so many content creators lose thousands of dollars from YouTube just from being demonetized.
I don't know what you mean by incentivize them.
They're working on a number of things to make Rumble even more lucrative in terms of ad dollars or the equivalent of AdSense for creators.
Their CPM is good, obviously can be better, and they're working on things, so it's going to be getting better.
The objective, obviously, is to use Rumble for the freedom aspect and the independence aspect while using YouTube for still reaching the biggest playground to drive more people over to your Rumble content so you can be free and independent.
It's a thin line to walk sometimes.
And then I got that from Finboy Slick.
So what we're doing now, I'm going to go over to Locals.
We're going to do the Locals exclusive portion and get to some tips there.
Oh, I can bring out the screen.
Hold on.
We're done with that.
Bring that out.
Bring that, Uri.
Yeah.
And then this is Locals.
So come on over to Locals.
Let me see what's going on in the chat here, actually.
There's something, anything here, there, Irish.
It's been a while.
What's up, Viva and Viva family?
Irish Marine, 57, sir, how goes the battle?
Thanks, Viva.
You pinpointed my advice.
Bam Lau.
Viva needs to read the actual agreements.
He doesn't even know what the charges were.
That's wrong, Southie.
In fact, I know what the charges were.
I know what the replacement charges were.
And I understand Gouveia's argument in law.
It doesn't change the fact that, in fact...
They're going to bring up a written statement from Jenna Ellis talking about how she relied on misinformation from older lawyers who ought to have known better, and that's going to be used against Trump, period.
I think there was no...
Fannie had no interest in seeing Sidney Powell go to jail for this.
I think they got what they needed.
I understand the legalities of how, technically speaking, after they've fulfilled all of their conditions, they will have no criminal record whatsoever.
It's gone and clean and done and done.
I read everything.
I know what they pleaded to.
And although their guilty plea has not been registered, I understand everything Robert Covea just said.
You're going to have an apology letter from Sidney Powell.
It will either be known, disclosed, leaked, or not.
And either way, you've got her acknowledging certain things as matters of fact, which is to be distinguished from matters of law.
So, that's my long-winded answer of explaining my position, but it's not for lack of reading.
Trust me on that.
The gag order is to prevent the citizens from knowing what is going on in the trial, says Marley33.
Absolutely no question about that.
And let's go back to the bottom here.
Andres Birchin says, I see Salty is about to be on the quartering.
Viva knows his stuff, says Raised by Wolves.
Well, I know my stuff, but I also know when I don't know my stuff.
Robert's explanation, I understand it.
He's right.
He's not wrong.
Only question is, practically speaking, how does this play out?
And that written statement, oh boy.
And then also, you know, Viva, you wouldn't look so good with a mullet, says Bam Lau.
Okay, good.
So now what we're going to do, come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
You don't even have to be a supporter.
You can just be a member.
We're running our sixth or seventh...
Local supporter conversation, where I'm going to select somebody who wants to do an interview from the community of supporters, and we're going to do that.
Viva and Rob need a weekly show.
You know, the way things work, there's so many people.
You pick whatever's in the news.
I want to get Julie Kelly back on, obviously.
Everybody's covering their own expertise stuff here.
Not their own expertise, but their own niche content.
The way it's working now, it's beautiful for everybody.
So, what we're going to do, I'm going to end this on Rumble.
Come on over to vivabarnslaw.locals.com.
I'm going to go there for 15, 20. Then I'm going to go head over to Eric Hundley.
And then I'm going to get an energy drink.
So all of you who have been watching in Rumble, if you're not coming over to vivabarnslaw.locals.com, enjoy the day.
There is plenty to watch and learn out there.
So go.
And those who are going there, I'll see you there.
And then I will see Hundley in a few minutes if he's watching.
So ending on Rumble.
Peace out, peeps.
Enjoy the day.
And now we're going over to Rumble.
To Locals!
Sorry, let me just scream.
Oh, there was a comment in the tips that's talking about the mic.
I'll get there in a second.
Okay.
Bill Brown, $1 tip says, sign says long-haired freaky people need not apply.
Do I look tired today?
I'm getting concerned.
Let me see my face.
▲
Export Selection