HOMOSEXUALITY, HOLLYWOOD AND INTOLERANCE

Robert Hansen

You're an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, have been anyway, a producer. I want you to tell us a little bit about how you got out to LA and then back again. I think that would be useful. And then we can dig into some of your earlier life stuff after that.

John Robinson

I could do it with a Ted Baxter that ages me, “It all started on a 5000-watt radio station in Fresno, California.”

Robert Hansen

I think this is actually quite important for the rest of the stuff we're going to be talking about. Normally, I would skip over people's backgrounds because I don't find them that interesting. But if it's relevant to the conversation, in this case, I think it's worth doing.

John Robinson

Oh, my mother has always been important to me. I lost my father when I was very young. He died of cancer, my natural father, when I was like eight years old. My mother was, I would say brilliant in so many ways. She was 31, very pretty. Three kids, one less than a year old. She had to go, and her husband died suddenly and had just started making money.

We had a big house and all this stuff but no real savings and stuff at that point. She went and created a career, but she did something interesting. She noticed what each of my brother and myself, even later my sister, just a year old, she would figure out what we liked and what we were interested in.

She saw that I had an interest in content and in storytelling, but she also saw that I had a knack for imitating people. They would make me imitate presidents, started with Jimmy Carter. She was always pushing me to do more of that, too. And as I got older, I found some business.

I started collecting hubcaps in Houston off the side of the road and in the ditches and the humidity fuses. We lived in a nice area. Back in that time, the cars had hubcaps not rims. And I ended up with three home in the garage.

Some of the men in the neighborhood would come. My mother was very pretty. They were trying to find their ways, but they became mentors and business people. Man, I found I like business and I like stories.

Robert Hansen

Just to round that out, so they came over to meet your mom and get their hubcaps back?

John Robinson

No. They came over to meet my mom. The hubcaps to them were inconsequential. Turned it around. The one that ultimately won was the smartest because they told me one of these are guys that were big business. One of them founded Sysco foods. These are some interesting guys.

They were just coming down and helping the young widow with her kids. We lived in a nice area, and it was an interesting time back in the ‘70s. And so one of them tells me after I have 300 hubcaps in the garage, “My wife loses those things all the time. You got to go up to a little gourmet grocery store, you got to sell those things.”

Well, I could do that. But my friends that helped me get them out of the ditch were terrified of selling. They would start teaching me business. And then I noticed a couple of things happen. There's a lot of stories with that. But I learned how to sell them. I wasn't in some van. We lived in a nice house right down the street. I was a little redheaded kid on my bike, they would follow me down.

I would sell them a hubcap. I was selling three, four, or five a day making 8, 10, 12 dollars a day in the ‘70s, $100 a day in the ‘70s. These men would start telling me, “What are you doing with your money?” “I'm going to buy a Z/28.” “Well, don't buy the car with that money.”

The storytelling, for me, was how I would approach the ladies in the car to tell them and convince them to come down. I would learn all of that, and my mother noticed how fun that was. And then these men started helping, and that was storytelling to them, too.

One of them figured out that my favorite hubcap was Cadillac spokes because they went across the whole line of Cadillacs in multiple years, so I could sell them a lot. This guy, who ultimately became my stepfather, was the smartest of all of them. He would show up every, I don't know, week or two with a Cadillac spoke for me. That was his way.

Later on, before he died of Alzheimer's, we had a conversation. I asked him about the Cadillac spokes. I said, “How did you find so many of them?” He goes, “You idiot, I knew I was in love with your mother. And that's who I was going to marry. I sent my assistant down to McGinnis Cadillac and bought 50 of them.” He’d pay 50 for a hubcap, I sold for 10 or whatever.

Anyway, I got to invest in their stocks when I was young. By the time I was out of college in 1985, that was worth something. Southwest Airlines, some of those had taken off Sysco foods. And so it gave me a little bit of an advantage. But I knew I liked business and I liked the storytelling.

I liked that, but I was trying to find a way. I didn't think I'd look like the leading man actor. I didn't want to go do all of that stuff. So I was finding a way to be involved in storytelling and content. My mom was very big in education. I started off with educational content.

I started off with everything from leadership and training and psychological profile content that had to do all up and down the line there that wasn't K12 education. But it was education, business education, all of that type of stuff. I worked for a mentor in a roll-up company. So I learned how to buy companies, I learned entrepreneurship, I learned venture capital.

To me, it was always about content. Content is a place to go and a reason to go there. To me, a natural correlation or a natural subset of that was the delivery of it, which is ever changing. Content is here, and it's a place to go and a reason to go there. But whether it was albums, then cassette tapes then DVDs, then mp3, you see the evolution of how content is played and distributed.

I started looking at how you might do such things, and we got into some technologies. But at the same time, as I was looking at that and I was looking at those technologies, I went to work for a mentor. I bought and sold companies for him. And then I said, “Your content that we've rolled up is great. But your delivery is not. I need to build us, before the internet, a satellite training network.”

He said, “You do it. I'm too old.” I went out on my own. He was my first investor. I ended up teaming with a couple of folks, and we built a little satellite network. Then we ran into the teachers’ unions and problems, so we instead started doing it for car dealers to train their service people without sending them to Dearborn, putting a dish on top and doing all that. And then package that up and sold it as auto dealer training network or whatever it was and got out of it because the internet was coming up.

I saw the internet as a golden opportunity. At the same time, I switched teams. I married a Baylor girl, and I say that getting a lot of people gay just because of the shoes. We can edit that later. But as I was looking at it, that was what led to also getting into entertainment content. Time Cable channels were just coming online, big cable. So there's now an insatiable appetite for content.

I had a business interest in it. But I didn't want to put myself out on the line personally as the creative. I didn't have the confidence in that. So I hid behind the business, which I was more comfortable with. But as we did that, we started doing knockoff films. It was region entertainment but knockoff.

Twister would come out, and we'd make Storm Chaser with see actors and then sell it to the cable and then make lifetime networking and then bad horror films. But other stuff started coming to me at that point. And I really had encouragement.

I wanted to also be able to tell stories. But I was conflicted because on one hand, we were starting to do venture capital and technology. And on the other hand, I was interested in content and more so in entertainment content. But the only thing worse than a Vegas credit line was to be investing in films if you're also running a VC fund.

That wasn't at the time seen as even remotely wise. I had learned on how you actually make money in the business and what a gross corridor is, most people don't understand that, and what distribution means and how you get it and all of that stuff.

As I was coming out, I looked at moving. I divorced. I said, “I need to go into mecca for gay.” I didn't want to go to San Francisco. I was more interested in the convergence of content and technology than they were at the time up there. And I found myself an investor in a company called the Load Medium at the time.

That took me out there, which was a happy medium between entertainment content. It was pre-caching content back over a 28.8 modem. You could play full-frame video, which streaming, as you know, was just choppy. You couldn't do it. And it gave me a way or an excuse to go out to California and to West Hollywood in search of gay mecca and to meet my creativity goals and find a way to succeed in content and technology out there.

Robert Hansen

One of the things you invested in was Usual Suspects, which happens to be one of my absolute top favorite movies. But in hindsight, it's got some big pockmarks on it reputationally, Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey. You were around some pretty interesting folks. How do you think about that in retrospect?

John Robinson

The senator, while insisting he was not intoxicated, could not explain his nudity. That was from my favorite, WKRP. Hollywood has generations and history of demons and people that think they're above the law and over entitled and this and the other.

I had made some money, and I was looking to find my place. And I got hooked up with the cool kids in the gay community in Hollywood. And in doing so, it's not something I'm particularly proud of.

Robert Hansen

I wouldn't suspect so.

John Robinson

I'm proud of some of the stuff I was able to do. But I wasn't proud of the fact that I went against my upbringing and what I knew. I just wanted to be one of the cool kids. So I got in there, I had a big target on my back. And I was probably talking bigger than I was. I was probably doing this or doing that.

I had a lot of them come at me, and I was putting money into a lot of ridiculous things and being taken advantage of. But also, I ended up with a great house. I was going to tear down the house. I didn't care what happened to it. It was on three acres on Mulholland. Great house, great yard. The house was modern but in needing of being scraped. So I didn't care what happened.

I'd have big parties, and Halloween parties are over the top. My birthday party, which coincides with the Golden Globes, accidentally became a big Golden Globes after-party because of my assistant sending birthday invitations out. Ian McKellen was up for one.

All of a sudden, all this stuff started happening. And all these people start showing up after the Golden Globes to a party at my house, which we had booze for 50 people. It's one of those things, and then it just became a tradition.

In that world I, I guess, became the gay mafia, if you want to look at what that is. Everyone shows up into Hollywood. We did things with the headshot photographers. I don't generally even say any of this stuff. It's not something I'm particularly proud of.

Robert Hansen

Only say what you are comfortable with.

John Robinson

We had a group of us that are some names that are relatively large. We would have a dinner. Just like the old days of Hollywood, the gay community was doing the same thing. So then they would be invited to parties, and we would be able to meet them.

Some of them thought they were going to be the next, there are rumors, Keanu Reeves or the Tom Cruises and all those rumors that fly. But they weren't. If they were there, the lawyers were looking. They weren't going to get anywhere. And so I didn't like it.

One day there was one of those parties. There was a guy who went on to win an Oscar who was a good actor but a great writer. We were at a big party at my house. And I just said, “No, you don't have to do that. If you want to ask me out on a date, you do it regular-like.”

It was at that point after two years of being in with that group, I’ll just avoid legal stuff, but some of the things that you would read about people like Singer and some of them, some of that stuff happened at my house. And I had to get rid of it.

I had a big knock-down-drag-out fight with him at one point that ended any of our relationship because of that stuff. I made a horrible joke. I said, “It says valet not car rental drop-off. Get the hell out of here.” And that caused me a lot of problems after that.

Robert Hansen

I can imagine. It puts you on the right side of the whole thing after it's all said and done though.

John Robinson

Yeah. But I just don't ever talk about it. I don't want to get sued because I didn't play that game. Luckily, I had two years. And some of it was fun. But there were things that caught my attention.

Robert Hansen

That shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. I've never met either of them. So I don't have any specific examples on my side. But I've known people who've been at conferences where Kevin Spacey was a guest speaker, for instance.

He was very open about what he wanted and with whom and very predatorial. I'm four degrees of separation from that person. It was very clear to me from where I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas, and this happened in Germany, what was going on.

John Robinson

Kevin didn't work with Bryan Singer again until Superman.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, that one Superman. Not his finest works.

John Robinson

Legendary’s first movie and almost, I think, chased Thomas Tull out of the business. But he didn't work with them. And the reason was, he was what you said. Kevin, although he wasn't out, made it very clear. But he was also mean and vengeful in certain ways.

I didn't even know any of this was going on back during the filming of that movie. But he ended up doing something and maybe trying to take Brian's boyfriend or did just little things like that, which he apparently did again on the Superman set and caused all kinds of friction. But yeah, he was that.

I got an awakening. I just said, “I don't like that, whether it's straight or gay or this or that. If that's what the business is, I don’t know what to do.”

Robert Hansen

How prevalent do you think it was, out of curiosity? If you were to name the top 100 actors and actresses, how many of them have had to do bad things to get to where they are, do you think? Just based on your gut feel. Or direct knowledge, if you have it.

John Robinson

There's always the bad movies that they make. But those are generally as a result of development deals that get them locked up. So when the studio gets enough money in it, then they just have to make the piece of junk. But no, bad things aren’t done like that.

Harvey was a dominant player, and now that's all public. So there is a number of those people like that. And there are a lot of horror stories about that. I know horrible things that a few have had to do.

Robert Hansen

Like A-list celebrities, people would actually know their names?

John Robinson

Yes, definitely. I know several occasions of people that are good friends and things that would come out that certain directors and certain people would do because there's this over entitlement, there's this sense of, “What are you going to do about it?”

Robert Hansen

You still want the job done. You want to be famous.

John Robinson

They’re willing to throw it all down, get on a bus. Everyone told them they were the prettiest girl or prettiest guy in high school, “Go out, you need to be an actor.” They go out, and then they find out what it's about. Then they have a choice to make because these things happen. And these things are done.

I'm sad to say, even in this environment where we are now, there are still little pockets of the world over there that just doesn't understand you can't do that. Now, more so, I'm not a fan of lawyers all the time.

I think when you get into the fact that certain people if they can't get bonded and if they have those types of problems, more and more, there's other checks and balances to it. Then also people, cell phones, it's just too easy to entrap people.

Robert Hansen

And the #MeToo movement, I'm sure.

John Robinson

Well, all of that stuff that came from it. But the thing that gets these people is when all of a sudden they get blackmailed by someone who comes in and says, “You did this to me to get the role. I'm going to put it back on you. If I don't get it, this is going out. How much is your divorce going to cost?”

To me, that’s-

Robert Hansen

It’s pretty gross.

John Robinson

Yeah. But you’ve got that supply and demand. When you've got those fewer people making the decisions over something that can make the difference between you living an extraordinary life and an ordinary one and you've been working five years as a waiter and you've done all of this stuff where you're like, “I either got to go home with my tail between my legs or somehow just go out there ready, willing, and able to do it.” And then they throw themselves at the fox.

Robert Hansen

That's a feedback loop. Now, it feels like that's how you do it in this industry. “That's how I got my role, by sleeping my way to the top.”

John Robinson

Yeah, but people didn't talk about it. If you want to see a metaphor in a way for the gay mafia, go watch, oddly enough and coincidentally, it’s Kevin Spacey in Swimming with Sharks, which was the assistants basically taking over.

That was basically how the gay mafia, the Geffens and Dillers of the world rose up to prominence. It was because they controlled access. They were the assistants, and then they worked their ways up. Then they banded together and made things happen. But those types of things aren't what that industry is about. To me, it's the part of the industry that disgusts me.

It was fool's gold. It was fun to play for a little bit. But in reality, what I like is good business and good stories you can be involved in. It's like cutting the grass, it's immediate gratification. But then it gets to live on in a library.

Hopefully, if you're starting to tell stories that matter and if you realize now in my life how powerful the medium is as an ability to shape and help in pop culture, I think it's more important than ever that the stories be authentic. And that's where we are right now.

How do we change some of the direction of some of the stories that are being required to be bought in Hollywood, that are doing damage to society? How do we do that? I think the new Top Gun is a prime example.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, that was great movie.

John Robinson

It doesn't check any of the woke boxes.

Robert Hansen

It also is a very cheesy, silly, fun, campy type movie that we all grew up with. It fits the bill of exactly what you wanted to see when you were 12 or whatever.

John Robinson

But the12-year-olds and all of us right now are mad enough that we want that stuff. We want messages of liberty, but we also want redemption. We want people to rise above their conflicts and conquer. We'll be like Seabiscuit in the past, where the rich guy is not always bad. There’s flaw.

There's this and there's that, but people are able to be seen as whole people and come out.

Robert Hansen

With their flaws and their good parts.

John Robinson

When you see that sometimes the very thing that's a flaw later becomes the very thing that's a strength. Like in Seabiscuit. I just love that story because if you think about it, there are salesmen and everything. But everyone hates the car salesman.

Here's a guy at the beginning of automobiles who went from horses to cars. He's selling cars, and he becomes very good at it. But he's selling cars as a vehicle to the future and as your dreams. You just see that in him. Then he gets very successful, and then his young son dies from the very thing that he's selling out on the ranch.

Then he has to go and find solace. His wife leaves him, everything happens. He goes and he starts finding solace, oddly enough, in a horse. And he brings together a broken man and a broken rider. He puts this group together. Everyone's fixing each other.

There's this point in it when that horse is successful. He's trying to sell the track owner in California on having a stakes race that is 10 times the amount of purse that has ever been done. And this guy is not buying it. It’s at Santa Anita, the track. He’s not buying it.

He sells them on the infield filling and the access for people that have never been into a race and that are going to grow up coming all that blah blah blah. He does all that from the sale of merchandise, everything. He makes the whole case.

It was 100,000 back then. It was a lot. As he's walking out, the track owner says, “Do you sell cars that way?” Jeff Bridges’ character. He turns around and looks at me, he goes, “Thousands of them.” And it's at that point that you realize that you don't hate this car salesman. But you love the very way it's that talent that brought him to the point to be able to bring this thing together. I'd love stories like that.

Robert Hansen

You actually have owned a production studio or building some stuff out. I don't know how much you're willing to talk about that. But you're actually building studio space.

John Robinson

We were in California and starting to figure out what we wanted. I've said this in a press before, but Rick Perry had delivered a really good pitch. I was actually building studios and doing some stuff in China at the time. And that's another story how that even happened.

Thanks to Al Ruddy and Dr. Robert Mandel putting the Grumpy Old Men together, Nobel economist, Oscar-winning producer. They both wanted to talk and then everything. Robert Mandel’s in China all of a sudden. I'm doing stuff in China. Well, I did it. And I didn't like it.

Rick Perry says, “Why are you doing that there? Come back home to Texas.” But his pitch was funny, “It's the creativity of LA, technology of San Francisco. Nice people, no state income tax. And your mom was here.” So it was a great elevator pitch.

Robert Hansen

Does he sell thousands of cars, too?

John Robinson

Yeah, he sold thousands of boats. And he sold a lot of people on moving here, sold a lot of jobs. But he created a great environment. The state did everything they said. I came here, and I started exploring in East Austin. I wanted to test it, I wanted to see what was going on.

I felt like I had been involved with the studio in LA at Hollywood Center, an old 11 sound stage. It had been Howard Hughes's. It had been Coppola’s. It was just in the middle of old Hollywood. So I understood the manufacturing facilities of a film.

Coming to Texas, I started looking at it. I said, “If you want to be in the manufacturing business, you got to have manufacturing facilities.” And Texas was a great location shoot. But there are no real purpose-built studios here.

Everyone looks at the incentives and all that. I think there's some interesting stuff to talk about on some changes that might happen. Hollywood may be a surprise. It may not be as blue as you think. There's a whole other discussion on that we can talk about.

History wise, I said we've got to have manufacturing facilities. I just didn't know if that was just too crazy or not. And so we found a little studio that had some sound stages. And I was interested in Austin moving east, everyone was going north and west. No one had gone east. And you have a river. I'm like, “Why isn't anyone doing this?”

We started looking at that and found a studio and did a deal. I had a partner. We went and took over a studio there and started testing the market. Hired a fantastic girl as president and went to see, All right, let's just see what we can do.”

Now, the sound stages were only four of them. Three really weren't big enough to do big films or really even TV shows. But you could do independent commercials and a lot of stuff, so the risk was relatively low. But we went into that to see what we could do.

Then in two and a half year period of time, we had 144 productions. Bastrop started becoming a county. We had some politicians that helped, and it became the film capital. And then we're in the middle of some stuff. I had a partner that didn't share the same goals as to how big this need to be and this and the other.

Right about that time, COVID comes on. I had proven that there's a market for it, but I couldn't do that business the way it was with that little production facility. We need more. If this is going to be done, you can't crawl, walk, run. You got to jump all in.

We need at least 17 massive stages. You got two 30,000 foot stages per show. If you're going to be doing plus, plus, plus, we got to change some of the stuff, the way the incentives work. There's a lot of stuff that has to be done. But you've got to build it. Somebody's going to be stupid enough to build it.

Robert Hansen

You're the stupid man for the job.

John Robinson

Well, I also looked at it from Georgia's perspective. Most people in Hollywood don't know that the Pinewood or whatever it is now, one of the biggest studios out there is owned by the Chick-fil-A people. I just find that funny that they don't understand who actually owns it, the very people they pick it against.

I looked at what's going on in the marketplace here. I want to be an engine to help change the perception of some of the old school, conservative politicians. So I had a multitiered plan to use that studio to start testing things to make some progress. And then I wanted to build out more on it because it was on a couple 100 acres.

Turns out that's not near enough, and the land wasn't going to be right for that. It was a floodplain, you couldn't do a lot of stuff. I looked at it and said, “This got to be done differently.” COVID came, and that gave me an opportunity to just have that one stop.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at liberty, I'm looking at the messaging, I'm looking at stuff that's going on with some partnership and stuff with New Republic Pictures in LA producing films, Rocketman, the first film for New Republic Pictures.

Brian Oliver's a great man, great producer. There's some goal shared, and it's a place to get back to telling some interesting stories like 1917 and things that can come out. I said, “This is an opportunity. Well, we got to do this right. And it's got to be bigger.”

Then came the opportunity to look at how we're going to capitalize that. And at the same time, we're trying to fight with the politicians here. People say, “You don't know what it's like to be a minority.” I say, “Really? I'm gay, ginger, Republican, Christian, likes guns. Maybe there's one other of us, I don't know.” But I looked at it.

We're looking at our messaging and the things for this country and content and things that are a part of it. I said, “We're going to do this.” I got up on a soapbox, and I got slapped around with it. But I'm saying this isn't fake. This isn't fake news, even. This is very real.

Now people are starting to see it. You have shifts going on in politics. Constituencies that were always Democrat are now shifting because there's things going on, as the parties divide further. But my point is liberty.

I don't care what label you're putting on it. I just want liberty in our country and what we're doing and good. I want those stories to have a place to come out and how are we going to get back to that where we're not all slamming America and all the business people aren't bad and the socialist solution isn't always the winner.

All those things just kind of great at me. I started looking at it and said, "How are we going to do some of that?" And I would talk and put things together, but I didn't get a lot of help. And suddenly some other things started happening. Some people that were more libertarian thinking started moving to town.

Some of them, they started finding me. I remember saying we've got four gates that are being closed to so many voices and those gates are big tech, big education, media and film and science and health. If you're not totally woke or totally this or totally identity politics oriented, and if everything you are about, you can't get through Stanford anymore. You can't work in these tech companies.

You're just beat up. It's not about being far right or far left, it's about being just people. And I said, we've got to get back to that. And some people that were interested in that started showing up here. And I guess I'm crazy or lucky enough that I choose to move to a place many years before people that also believe that way, start moving there. And they're big people.

It started becoming a thing where we put this concept together. And that's where we are right now. We're buying up a whole lot more land. We're in the middle of that right now. And on that is not only going to be a massive studio, but also corporate headquarters, innovation, a hub where people can come.

The government's being, the State government, very helpful in creating the environment for our municipal utility districts. We're in essence able to make a new city. And it's 12 minutes from the airport. And to have those things start to happen with thinkers like Elon Musk and companies moving out that direction and the boring company for hyperloops.

All this stuff starting to come together. And it's an environment of objectivity where people can go where a new university, first elite university in 100 years, it's just focused on being what universities are supposed to. All sides can come together.

Robert Hansen

Let's talk about that at the end, because I think what I really want to talk about before we get there is your background. So, you, as you have alluded to a number of times are a gay man. But you were a gay man growing up in Texas?

John Robertson

Yes.

Robert Hansen

Which I think, especially in the timeframe that you were growing up, that's not exactly a safe proposition or at least doesn't on the surface appear like that would be a particularly safe thing. There was an epidemic going on. The attitudes towards homosexuality was definitely different back then than it is today. Definitely different.

What was sort of your experience going through that? And you ended up coming out the other side with, I would say that almost the same politics as when you started, which is I think a lot of people would be confused by, because they look at LGBTQIA plus

John Robertson

Plus. Put a plus there and it will cover everything.

Robert Hansen

And then, I'll cover everything. I think they look at that group, that cohort and say, "Well, that's almost always or exclusively going to be Democrat." And if you're not as in the case of like Peter Teal, when he went in and spoke at the RNC convention people would say he's homosexual but not gay.

They kind of disavowed him as being even part of the culture. So, I think you, as you said, you're in this very weird minority here. I'd be kind of curious to memory that a little bit.

John Robertson

Well, I found was they, you said they.

Robert Hansen

They, the general population.

John Robertson

What I found was it's like fight club. There's 25% to 32% under Trump of us that vote Republican, but we can't say anything when we're running around out there because you get canceled and shouted down and all that.

So, we just wink at each other when we know. And there's some really interesting creative powerful people, Mark Cherry, people that have been known now, but others that aren't out. And you would think in this great bastion of open-mindedness that is supposed to be Hollywood and especially West Hollywood. I fell for it.

I left Dallas at the time, found an excuse, an investment in load. But my real passion was getting out there to have my gay freshman year to experience Gay Mecca.

Robert Hansen

A room springer.

John Robertson

To be like, "Okay, here I go." And what I found was the opposite, that the gay community was locked in a little bubble and they weren't open. They weren't forced to intermingle.

They would sit in West Hollywood right adjacent to Beverly Hills and they would have the look and they were getting bitter, but they would have this look, and they would look when a straight couple or people walked into a restaurant on the other side of the line.

The man would just get the look up and down and then there we go, "Ugh, the breeders." And there was no effort or interest in intermingling. And that irritated me because more than half of my friends and the true friends that I found in Hollywood from the John O'Hurleys and Brian Cranston's and people that became creative, great friends from all sides, politically.

I liked having dinner parties, but the gay community would say, "I'm not going if the breeders are going to be there." And so, I look back at my background and I started questioning what I thought...

Robert Hansen

Why do you think that is, by the way? Why do you think that group of people don't want to hang around anyone who doesn't meet their particular ideology or background?

John Robertson

Because sadly too many of them are just told that's just ingrained in them that everyone hates them. I guess, everyone's guilty of this, but any group that would be considered a minority or an identity politics group tends to overly think about their...

Once I started admitting to being gay, everything became centered around the hub of look through the goggles of being gay. When in fact, most people, that's not the case. So, I played on a gay softball team. It was a pickup Sunday. Some people were very good others were not

Robert Hansen

They were there for other reasons.

John Robertson

No, but it was an interesting time. But noticing in that world, one of the guys that they were a big charity, they ran charity and they made the films for the human rights campaign.

I had become a board member and become involved heavily in the human rights, which is a gay lobby. And back at the time, we had President Bush, we had a short time, we had a control Republican Senate house and president.

They were of course pushing gay marriage and they were raising $29 million for their annual budget and then another $28 or $29 to build a building in DuPont Circle for the gay. I'd say, if you're doing your job, we don't need that. In a few years.

So, when this started happening, I started questioning how they were going about it. Why were they raising all this money? What were they doing? And I would say it openly. And so, one day I questioned them. I said, well, "How much of your $29 million budget has gone towards getting, say, Republican candidates or office holders who are under 50 years old and lobbying them?

So, as you can bring it across the line, we already owned the left, don't we?" And the answer was, "Well, $156." I mean, they didn't have the answer. I had the answer. $156 out of $29 million. So, I knew something's wrong here. They're even not even trying.

And so, they by and large took us down a direction of forcing us to think that this is our only way is to completely follow the, the democratic side. And so, I was giving a talk one time and I was asked the same question and I said, "I didn't have a problem being gay until I moved to West Hollywood."

There's two things that are important to me there. I asked one question to the audience at this thing. I said, "Why is it easier for me to be gay in my Republican world than Republican in my gay world? Why?" They didn't have an answer for it.

Robert Hansen

Do you?

John Robertson

I said, "Here's the problem. What I said a little bit ago, tying it back."

Robert Hansen

Yeah. But do you have an answer?

John Robertson

I do. Because they think that everything's about them. So, when someone from Bakersfield in California, or from Texas in general looks at them, they think it's because they're gay. In fact, they don't know gay people.

They hadn't, especially back then, the only thing they saw gay was on the gay pride parades on the news twice a year or once a year. And guess what? I don't want those guys teaching my kids either. But you know what? It's not the same thing.

Gay pride parades are like Mardi Gras for gay people. The people taking their tops off and throwing beads and Mardi Gras, they go back to be school teacher. That's just what Mardi Gras become.

Robert Hansen

It didn't used to be that way though. When the marches very first started...

John Robertson

I'm not talking about...

Robert Hansen

I know. But they had some real grievances.

John Robertson

Of course they did. And that's what they live. They live in that, but they haven't accepted their own acceptance. They still want a place blame. And so, what they don't give, they don't give people a chance. They target them and, and trust them.

So, for instance, some of our best friends when we move to Texas are older farmers and people that come from all complete different backgrounds.

And there's a couple of stories there, but this one talk I was giving where I asked that and then I was asked, well, "How was it coming out in Texas?" And I said, "Well, actually, with your parents." And with that, "I said, actually, my dad outed me, and my stepfather."

He called me one day and he said, "John, there's a guy I do a lot of work with, with the World Bank. He's going to be in town. He's gay. I think you should take him out and show him around." I had just divorced.

Robert Hansen

He knew.

John Robertson

Well I said, "You and mom know I'm gay. Are you setting me up on a date?" And he goes, "John, the only thing in my life, there's really been only two things in my life that have confused me. And one was the day you got married."

But he said something interesting. He says, "Your mother and I would just hope that you would stop messing around with all that and find somebody good and get on with it and have a life because that's what we want for you.

So sooner you figure that out, the party can end and you can get on with life." So, my partner and I have been 18 years, that's like dog years. It's like 70 years,

Robert Hansen

In gay years. That's a long time.

John Robertson

People say, "Why is that why you got two males?" And they're always like, "What's next? What's next?" But that type of stuff that it just made me realize I can be myself. I can be into a relationship. I can be monogamous, I can be all of those things. Why do I have to call myself a Democrat if I'm for low taxes and get out of the way and I don't want this and I'm not a socialist and I'm for Liberty. Why do I have to be that way?

People in the gay community that are vocal and the rest of us that maybe have... For gay marriage, which was a conflict, I went around it and I start helping support Dustin or Lance Black as I knew him, Dustin Lance Black and some others that came up with marriage equality.

Which was, we got a Conservative and Liberal, the Bush V. Gore lawyers and we got a thing in a case and went brought sides and brought it and then took it and went through the court 22 months, Supreme Court, boom, boom.

Now, a gay marriage from that standpoint we also had to fight the other battles of getting people to realize that they weren't looking at you because you're gay. They're looking at you because you're different. And they're just trying to figure out if you're a good person or not. And once you are in Texas, they'll defend you forever.

My husband told me that, “When he says Jim Swarner are these people, you're right. They don't care at all. It's so different." He thought when he was coming to Texas, he was going to be dragged around by chains behind a truck. And I said, "Well, not unless you pay extra for that."

Robert Hansen

He's from Canada. He got it. It's all fine. So, you talk about Governor Perry, you talk about people and they say homophobic thing sometimes because they get in the press for it, but they're just struggling to find their way. Doesn't mean they're bad, doesn't mean they don't evolve and change, which they have.

Robert Hansen

A lot actually.

John Robertson

Yeah. And these people, one time we were invited to a party at the governor's mansion and a dinner party and Rick was there. He was governor. Jason didn't want to go because he was scared. He didn't want to embarrass me.

Robert Hansen

Jason your husband?

John Robertson

Yeah. He didn't want to embarrass me. Like, "Well, I don't want it to come up or after explained." There's going to be 12 older people there, famous football coach Gene Stalling, some other people. And I said, "Nonsense. We're going, this is who we are."

So, when we walked up on the porch, governor brings us in, he's talking to Jason, we go into the parlor and he says, "Jason, you come sit next to me." And he starts talking about Jason and telling Jason's story of how discipline and gymnast and who he is and what kind of person he is.

Robert Hansen

He's an amazing person.

John Robertson

He made him the rock star in the room. And then, we went to dinner, he sat next to him. So, Jason and I were going into the bathroom and the governor's mansion, they have these napkins and they're with logo. I always take some. And the house manager's like, "I'll slip you however many you want." I just feel better if I take them.

Robert Hansen

If I have stolen them.

John Robertson

And so, in there, and Jason goes, "Well, I know what he's doing." I said, "Well then tell him." He goes out and he's talking to Governor Perry and they're about to sit back down at the dinner table and he goes, "Hey, I know what you're doing." And Rick just goes, "Well, how am I doing?" And he goes, "Well, very good. I thank you for that." He goes, "Well then, sit down let's enjoy."

That type of a thing is something that the press will never tell you is going on, or people don't understand these people. My biggest win is not as a big group, it's if we're playing golf or we're doing something that's the hetero-environment. And mine is the little wins that I like.

I like it when people don't know I'm gay and then all of a sudden they find out. And once they do, you notice them when they don't know you're around, like in the back of the locker room when all of a sudden they start defending you and telling someone not to do that if they're gay bashing.

Those little wins with centers of influence that start saying, "No, that's not who they are."

Robert Hansen

Yeah. The trajectory is definitely, and on both sides I think is going to a lot more understanding. I mean, we have gone from, from it being almost unheard of and very shameful to Grindr. And pride parades on TV and all kinds of things.

I mean, it's so swung so far in the direction of acceptance in every piece of media effectively. And anywhere that you sort of look around physically on the street, you'll see entire parts of towns dedicated to a gay district. That's just would not have been possible 30, 40 years ago.

And so, I think even the people on the very furthest most conservative Christian are still going to stay there for a while, but eventually even they are going to realize that's a battle not worth fighting.

John Robertson

You're not ever going to win a battle totally on people's beliefs. There are some religions that believe, a lot of things that people aren't going to believe.

I won't even start there, but it's not to organized religion, it's not that. Even in general, some of the people, once they start knowing and understanding who you are as a person, you're not a stereotype. You're now someone they know.

Robert Hansen

I would say you definitely don't fit the stereotype.

John Robertson

Well, the stereotype is a minor part of the community. Most of us hide in plain sight. That's the whole theme of X-Men, I guess until we don't. But for us it was a battle of accepting and accepting ourselves and realizing it's okay, we are enough. We can be what we need to be.

Now that we got gay marriage, we're into business, we're into this, we want this. Why do we have to always be put into this?

Robert Hansen

Some of the most powerful people in the world are gay?

John Robertson

Why is it that I, if I were just a white male, have the ability to be a Liberal or a Conservative, a Democrat or Republican, a Libertarian, whatever I want. But if you say, I'm a white gay male, now I have to be a Liberal Democrat, or I'm called all kinds of names. Or insert black male or whatever, the same thing starts to hold true.

I just reject the fact that we don't have the freedom to be and pursue what we want. We're past the point where we're at stonewall and we have to be this way. The politics have changed, the people have changed. Get on with it.

Robert Hansen

Let talk a little bit about that. So, there's these like code words, like Friends of Dorothy or Mrs. King, which is the King, the Mrs. would be the queen. There were secret handshakes which I did not realize until much, much later on.

And then, someone told me, I'm like, "Oh, actually that's happened to me a couple times." The I'm gay sort of handshake, bandanas, earring on one ear. I mean, there's all these little signals that people had to sort of subvert the thought police at the time who were quite conservatives.

I think there's a strong echo in the same way I think people feel there's echo of racism through slavery. This is the echo of this conservative right against the gays. Misplaced or not in both counts, that echo is what we're feeling when I think people are saying, "Well, if you're Conservative, you're not gay. You're homosexual, but not gay."

John Robertson

But that's just blatantly false because the problem with that is, it's the religious right that they point at. And they make that to see if you're submitting to all of that of the religious right. But what they forget is the religious left is just as big or bigger. It's called the Catholic church.

So, you can't just put it on the left or the right because once you get into the middle of it, you see the religious left and almost the entire black community is all against it. So, those are just marketed things that people stand behind to say, these are the reasons we can't be that.

When more of the advances that are made actually get made under either Republican leadership or with Republican support because you can't do it just on one side alone. It's when you are able to sell your story and sell your idea and make that stuff work.

There's a new angle with religion, strange bedfellows that the religions and the people that care are very concerned about population right now, because you think it's increasing and here it's not. And when you get into abortion, you get into all these things, there's a weird circular thing that if you just stand back for it for a minute and you say, "Well, wait a minute, here's a whole group of people that now are normalizing and want children."

There's a whole group of people that want spirituality, but have rejected the church because they feel like the church has rejected them, organized religion. There's some interesting counterintuitive things that come together that make religions that are antiabortion and want adoption.

And then, when you have the studies, my mother brought a study to my attention years ago. It said, "The children of gay couples are turning out to be better educated." And I said, "You know why that is Mom?" And she said, "No." I said, "Well, because after they get through playing, the grandparents end up raising them." She goes, "Oh okay." "I'm just kidding. That's not true."

But the reality is I don't reject or want to put labels on it. And I'm interested in telling stories that show weird contradictions. I mean, I'm very interested. And there's so many scripts, but guess where they're sitting?

Robert Hansen

In some vault in Hollywood.

John Robertson

Because they can't get green lit. They can't get bought. They can't get distribution because the people are holding them back there from it. I mean, why? Because there's big blocks of people that don't want those messages out.

Robert Hansen

A mutual acquaintance of ours growing up gay in Texas, his mother was not at all interested in him being gay. Did quite a bit of work to put him through conversion camp, conversion therapy, pray the gay away. And I remember asking him about it.

And I feel like it was mostly kind of a nothing burger in his mind, but he made the off-color comment. And he is like, "Well, what do you think he happens when you put a whole bunch of gay kids together?" I don't have a whole lot of faith in that design in multiple ways.

John Robertson

I was wishing I knew about it back then.

Robert Hansen

You would've a lot of more fun?

John Robertson

No, I'd just said, "I think I need to be sent." My parents wouldn't have done it. But I would have said...

Robert Hansen

Can we go check it out, at least?

John Robertson

"I keep thinking these thoughts and I need to be there in that environment because the pickings would be easy." No, we made some John O'Hurley, actor, a friend of mine made. He always plays of being the Mr. Magoo, the fumbling.

We came up with a piece of content, a story to humorously try to tell stories like that. He and his wife and this scene we were to this put together, he's kind of the good looking idiot who's surfed by in business and everything on his looks, but is not quite aware, Peterman.

He's just basically his J. Peterman character, except they're at the thing and he gets mixed up. And instead of them bragging about the kid that they say they have, but they really don't.

So, they have to explain why the kid's not there. He says at the dinner party that they sent their kid to Exodus, which he meant he thought Exeter. Well, Exeters is a gay conversion. Now, "How old is your son?" "He's eight." "Interesting." And this whole, I love Lucy coast, how you could start to poke fun. But that's the vast minority it today.

Robert Hansen

So, I think where I was going with this whole thing is, there seems to have been some shift along the way where pride used to be sort of like, "Don't kill me, don't beat me up. I'm okay. I'm at the Stonewall age." When there's a lot of very, very brave men and women who were involved in that, who really, they were up against some really tough odds. Of course.

And I think there's something really to that and that type of pride I have zero issues with. I think that's very admirable that they were able to accomplish it as a matter of fact. But something changed where now we have drag shows at, kids' birthday parties and there's been a shift here where this is being pushed down to children.

John Robertson

There is a gay agenda and it's a powerful one. And there are many dollars put politically towards people to push that stuff. I've been in the middle of it.

Robert Hansen

I think any sort of overt sexual activity in front of children, doesn't matter which side you're the fence you're on, is probably not wise for their psyche. Save it for them when they actually understand and have sexual feelings of their own.

John Robertson

I couldn't agree more because to me pushing that agenda off the backs of children is just not fair to anyone.

Robert Hansen

But it's not just that, it's the Mardi Gras of the version of gay pride. I think it's important that you don't lose visibility into any group of the population. Doesn't matter what they are. I don't care what orientation or age group or whatever we're talking about, sex or whatever. But I also think that there's something weirder going on here, seems like it's permeated in a way that is outsized from what it actually is.

John Robertson

I think it's been that way for a while, Robert. I mean, the problem to me with that thinking is it's an indoctrination school and they're just trying to indoctrinate deeper and deeper.

Again, If you don't adhere to these norms... This is kind of a weird disconnect, but a lot of gay people become great at communication or great at things because when they're in my age bracket and you went through the AIDS time, you had to hide in plain sight and go back to...

Robert Hansen

Scarf, earrings.

John Robertson

Well, no. You can go to a party or a bar or whatever in the straight community, you find a girl, well, if you're in the gay community, unless you're in the rest of society, you couldn't go and intermingle mm-hmm.

So, you had to find codes and cues. Now, all of those things with this earring or scarf, that stuff got hypothecated by style. You couldn't count on that. But the one thing you could count on, I'll lose my gay card, but was the eye contact. And back before Grindr and Internets and Jason and I met on MySpace. That's how long we've been together.

You could walk past someone and I could do it in the straightest environment, and it's just the eye contact. I would walk past, you walk past someone and you make eye contact and then you keep it, for three, a bit three or four. And the straight guy is going to look down in a way. The gay guy will keep the contact.

Robert Hansen

Especially when you don't know them.

John Robertson

Right. That's what I'm saying. You're passing someone in a place. I used to do it at the golf tournament at Lake Tahoe, used to drive one of O'Hurley's friends that was always trying to hit on women. And there was this target rich environment, hardly any gays and I could find it like that.

Robert Hansen

And he'd be like, "How do you do that?" "I'm not going to tell you."

John Robertson

But when you would see that happen, you had to find a way as a protective mechanism to do it. And that's why gays have always wanted to fight for the feeling of normalcy. They want the word marriage because we want normalcy. Everyone, and the kids want to fit in.

That's been something forever and that's probably never going to change. And so, that's why they are pushing so many gays that get into power, pushing to move that down the line. I knew I was gay in third grade and I didn't ever admit it.

Robert Hansen

That's an interesting way to phrase it. Normalcy. So, I mean, if I look at someone wearing chaps and all leather and they're straight, I'm not going to say that's normal. I'm like, "What are you doing? Why are you walking around like that?" "Oh, I'm just going to go get beat up."

John Robertson

Well, because I work at a ranch. I mean, it's legitimate for a lot of them actually.

Robert Hansen

I mean, it's clearly not normal in the sense that you're not just going to see an average heterosexual person dressed or acting like that. So, it's something else. It's more than that.

John Robertson

You do more now because you have people that are finding that they're getting attention. I find this more now, recently than ever before, people look and act and pretend to be gay that absolutely aren't. And maybe they're just thinking that this is an easier way for them.

Oddly enough, its counter, but I look at it as just pendulum goes back too far. Like the gay mafia got into power in Hollywood.

Well, as they start to control more politics, what they're just trying to do is this normalcy, this fight for it to make it realize that, had I known I was gay in third grade, how would my life be different if I acted on it? That's a good question. I know how it would've been in college. I'd be dead.

Robert Hansen

HIV was very serious and very prevalent.

John Robertson

I rejected being gay. There was best looking guy in high school, knew I was gay. He was this, that. He was always with me and I couldn't shake him. And he went to school at a different school. And I was visiting one time and he had the best looking girlfriend and all that stuff, and he didn't tell anyone, but he knew I was gay back then.

I would've done whatever he said, had I admitted it. He took me to a party. First time I'd kissed a guy, all that stuff. I wanted it so bad in hindsight, but I didn't do it. I said, "I'm not, you're wrong." By our 10-year high school reunion, he was dead with AIDS because I would've done what he wanted and he was beautiful and doing everyone and I would've probably, who knows?

So, you can't say that just forcing that on people when they're not capable of really knowing what it means to them yet or how to. I was late in processing it and I'm glad I was. I wouldn't have Jason, I wouldn't have him, my life would be different. It wouldn't be what it is.

But you can't legislate that down to that level because there is something else going on, in my opinion. And it is off the backs of gays, but it's not about gays. It's just about political power for people.

Robert Hansen

Interesting. So, one of the things I've been hearing a lot more is Liberals are no longer liberal. I don't know, how does that resonate with you?

John Robertson

Well, I started to talk about earlier about "strange bedfellows in Hollywood" starting to change. Look at Joe Rogan moving here. Comedy, different types of content is now changing because it starts hitting. All the comedians used to be way Liberal, way left, but then New York and LA during COVID, the mass mandates, they couldn't work. They couldn't work at all.

And they started looking at things and saying, "Well, I don't believe in this. Why are these people able to control me?" And then Joe Rogan makes the move and comes to Texas and comes to Austin. It just started making sense to me when I say, and then I hear Tony, a lot of these comedians that were formerly Liberal.

But one of the jokes that brings it home to me is one of them said, "I knew there was a problem when I'm not allowed to work and earn a living because some government is saying stuff that is now proven to be not true."

He goes, "But you'd see it all over New York, you'd see people riding bikes with a mask and no helmet." He goes, "Am I that guy? Do I think that way? Am I drinking that much of their Kool-Aid that I think I have to ride my bike with a mask and no helmet when that bus is going to do more damage to me than these air particles."

A lot of them have started using a similar joke. But you started seeing people and you see parents in California schools just... I have personal friends whose very big liberals and the women in Malibu and all of that. And I showed up for Jason's birthday at Malibu with some dear friends.

The first thing she did when she came out and greeted me, she goes, "I now agree with you. I've become this. And we had to take our kids completely out of school. We had to start our own school with a group of other parents because of all this ridiculous stuff."

And she goes, "They just do whatever they want and they guilt you into it.", When it starts hitting people at a granular level that affects their lives, people start looking at liberty as a solution again.

Robert Hansen

Well, let’s hope we don't get too far down the line because there's a pretty obvious end to that if you go the logical conclusion of what happens when states control what people do. So, it's good that people reacting negatively now as opposed to waiting.

John Robertson

I'm this right now. But if the parties were to change, with the woke environment, I think there's consequences to it that were unintended. They started the woke in order to control an environment.

But what's happened is people are rebelling and now they're being canceled that were normally considered themselves proud Democrats to the left, and now all of a sudden they thought they were safe.

And they're like, "Well, that wasn't what I signed up for." But you see people starting to say things like, "Well, wait a minute, why don't I get a choice in this?" And my saying that's overriding is Liberty finds a way. It's not always pretty, but Liberty finds a way, and that's what I'm hoping is happening right now.

Robert Hansen

So Grand Torino the movie, Clint Eastwood. He got a lot of flak for that for being racist.

John Robertson

Excellent point. Yes, go ahead.

Robert Hansen

For those who haven't seen it, he plays this old crotchety racist guy and this boy that maybe threw a ball over his... I forget how they ended up becoming friends, but he just basically wants to shoot this kid away the entire movie.

John Robertson

He's being recruited by the Han Gangs in this neighborhood that's converted from Ford production, manufacturing people to, it's been taken over by Han as people move in and the gangs recruiting this other good kid to steal his grand Torino.

Robert Hansen

There you go. That's how he ends meeting him.

John Robertson

His family forces him to go do good deeds for the old man.

Robert Hansen

The entire movie. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone who wants to watch it, but it actually is a very good kind of end of that movie. He basically almost the exact opposite of racist when it's all said and done. It's an arc, it's a story, first of all.

All things you watch on TV are their stories, unless they're documentaries and even then sometimes, but there's this arc of this character who goes from extremely racist to the opposite to being one of the most heartfelt conversions of a soul you could possibly ever witness in a single hour and a half long movie or however long it was.

John Robertson

Did he really change?

Robert Hansen

Well, that's sort of the whole point of the movie. Sort of yes, sort of no. But the arc, you're watching this person who doesn't want to change. He's stodgy. He's in his ways, and then all of a sudden there's reasons and he starts putting up with a little bit more, and it kind of wears on him.

And he is like, "Oh, okay, fine." It starts letting him be around a little bit more. I think of all the movies I've seen that got so much flack, that one seems like amiss. Like how did that one of all of the movies, people decide that he's racist for having done this movie about racism?

John Robertson

Because it didn't fit their narrative. And that's the problem with what's going on. You take that type of a movie, which is a beautiful movie, beautifully shot movie, beautifully acted, beautifully directed.

Robert Hansen

Well written.

John Robertson

And completely on point because it was tackling a very complicated subject. It's a change. It's times changing. And a man who didn't really change.

Robert Hansen

Trying not to.

John Robertson

He didn't really ever change. He just had to adjust how he adopts. Now, the part where he changed that you're saying where he evolved was... This is what I'm talking about the internet, and they just were different. He wasn't racist.

They could have been black. He was racist against his son. He didn't have a good relationship with his son because he saw him as a car salesman. But what have you, he was that guy. But those people were different. But what he was, was interested in their character.

It wasn't that he didn't become racist anymore. It wasn't about race to him, it was just he got comfortable with who they were as people. And then, he would protect them with what? Like I said earlier, his life. Which he did, so to speak. Sorry for that.

And the point was, he even dumbed it down so much that he taught you how to be racist the way groups of people do to each other in the same group or in relative. He's teaching the kid, when he walks into the barbershop and he walks into his longtime friend, the Irish guy, and says, "Hey, are you dumb meek bastard? How are you doing?"

And then, tells the kid, the kid comes in there and then the guy for fun said, "You don't have the right to say that." He's teaching him the difference between picking and being fun and using the races as both differentiating and uniting at once.

That was a complicated thing for [granddad] to do, but that's my granddad, that's his ring. That's what I grew up with. And I somehow understood that. So, I never looked negatively at those people because they might appear to be a racist because they're calling something. Because they were racist in a way. Everyone is in a way.

But they were, like you said, in reality their heart was really believing in people. Good people. They just wanted to know who you were and then they'd defend you. Wouldn't matter who it was. Happy to have hair.

Robert Hansen

For those not looking at the screen here, Mr. Robertson has red hair, red beard. You are a ginger as the colloquial.

John Robertson

Happy to have hair.

Robert Hansen

Some of us aren't so lucky. As I've heard you say a number of times through the last group that's allowed to be made fun of. I know you say it, half-jokingly. But it's the other half that's not joking. This feels like this is the interesting reverse racism that's going on. A lot of people claim it doesn't exist or can't exist. Which actually I think is even a more interesting topic in some ways.

But I think it is a bit weird that we allow certain things to be done. Or we assume that certain groups are more in danger in certain situations than other groups of people are in other different situations. You don't know what it's like to walk down the street and blah, blah, blah.

Actually, I have been in an extremely dangerous situations that my life was very much at risk. I was lucky. I made a couple of interesting maneuvers to avoid the danger. But there's definitely places in the United States and definitely outside the United States where a white man walking down the street is not necessarily at all safe.

I think there is something weird going on there where there's this, it seems like these arguments are coming from people who have never traveled at all. These people are living in a very small microcosm who have just never encountered the fact that the world has very much tribal lines. You travel to certain locations and people will know who you are. You're not allowed there. If you start walking down the street in North Korea, you will be caught pretty quick.

John Robertson

Well, there's all kinds of things that come around. I used to argue during the political campaigns, that and the other. Hillary Clinton was taking a lot of money as was the Democratic Party. Because the newest group that was on the rise was Muslim, they wanted to own that group. They turned their back on the Jewish people for that.

If you started watching what they were doing constituency-wise. They were raising more money from that. But they're running around in 13 Sharia law countries, taking money from them. From people that it's still legal, okay, and encouraged to kill gay people, and women to be treated like sub…

Robert Hansen

Property.

John Robertson

Yeah. Yet, it's okay for that. But don't you dare be a Baptist. Baptists may not approve of gay but they're not trying to kill us. It’s not in the law. There's different levels or consequence levels for that. Nothing should matter. I just say as racism goes back to the Clint Eastwood movie. I think as the pendulum swings back, hopefully out of this identity politics, people can start being okay with laughing at each other again.

Take Clint Eastwood. That whole role. Seeing it and being a part of it. How it's acted. How he meant it. All of those things. Most people look at that movie. They realize the arc, how this man and how his experience and he is respectful. They understand it. They understood from that barber scene is racism. However, if you were to just read that on a text, it doesn't work. The guy is just displaying.

Robert Hansen

There’s a nuance there. People have got up.

John Robertson

Give it a rest. Let people be and be for their differences. That you're not going to perfect that stuff.

Robert Hansen

Times change. If you look at comedy from even just 20 years ago, right. You go back and look at just the normal pop culture, comedy. Nothing even crazier. It's filled with racist epithets, and very overt sexual. I remember when I was a kid. I definitely use gay as an epithet. That is so gay.

I know if you were to go back in time, probably not even that far, you'd find things I said that at the time were reasonable and not even considered unusual amongst my friend group. Obviously, I don't have problem with you being gay or anybody else for that matter. There's something about the lens. It's been put out. It’s a moral panic about the fact that they think…

John Robertson

Moral panic is an interesting way to put it.

Robert Hansen

I did not come up with that term. But I think there is a moral panic around. We once did not have rights. It might go back to not having rights again.

John Robertson

That's a political agenda.

Robert Hansen

Well, okay. It is. Except for I don't think Roe v. Wade is what people want to make it out in the press for many reasons. But it is an example of where people can point to it and say, “Hey, look, we had rights 10 minutes ago. Now we don't have them anymore.”

John Robertson

That would be wrong because that doesn't mean that those rights don't exist. There needs to be education and pushing that stuff back to the states. There's bigger agendas that push on all of those things. That could lead over to gay marriage. We want it in the Supreme Court. There are people saying, “Oh, well, they want to push that back.” That's not the same thing as abortion.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, but there is something going on. Conservatives used to be, just get out of the bedroom, just focus on business. Let me do my thing. It's actually more like Le Liberté. It's what the Liberals wanted, except with a tilt of having some religious overtones here and there.

But there has been a shift fairly recently. Largely DeSantis I think is leading the way on a lot of this. Where going after Disney and their corporate, they have all these tax loopholes. Why do you have these tax loopholes? Just remove them. Now I don't think DeSantis really cared one way or another about those loopholes. I think he cared about Disney being so woke and having their philosophy invade popular culture. This was punishment.

To some extent you could say, well that's just again government getting in the way. Government shouldn't have subsidized any of that in the first place. That should have just been all capitalism. In that sense, that's more pure capitalism. But it's being used as a bit of a...

John Robertson

It’s a wedge issue. It's always going to be used that way. Politicians will always do that. That's how they mobilize support for something they wanted to do anyway. Okay, now we've got a good reason to go after Disney. What have you? I hate it when that stuff happens. But that's just life. That's the way politics work.

Robert Hansen

I think that is straight up politics. It's one of those things that just gets so much airplay.

John Robertson

There's the point. The narratives are what the press wants the narrative to be. You could say 15 things. Then you say one thing like that. Well, in reality, that gay marriage should actually be a state issue. In reality, if you look at it, now if a politician says…

Robert Hansen

Or if it's not go ahead and pass a law. If it's a federal issue fine.

John Robertson

But if they said that, and then said what you just said. Or but I don't think that's where we are. Whatever else they said to say that will never happen. I wouldn't even be for it myself, blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden, the only thing that's covered is that one sound bite.

They're going to put it to any because it's covering an agenda that's built on fear. That says, “Let's say, this can happen.” They've tried to make abortion into the same issue. Saying that this is what can happen in the courts.

Robert Hansen

Let me pause for just a second. I think it's worth saying what actually happened because I think a lot of people heard one thing. I think it's worth explaining what actually happened. I'm not going to go into history of Roe v. Wade. Which I should probably bring somebody in to specifically cover that because I've got a lot of thoughts about that. The history of it.

It's very interesting actually. Norma McCorvey is really, really interesting backstory about all that. But I think the problem is people thought that for whatever reason that that was a good case law. Basically what the Supreme Court said. Well, whoever passes case law originally said, it's probably somewhere in one of these amendments that this is covered. But they never specifically said why.

If you actually read the amendments, there's not a single line that really carves it out and say, that's where someone gets their abortion rights from. What the courts just did is they said, “Well there's no good place to anchor this piece of jurisprudence. You have to kick it back down.” If you want to have a law, you have a law. Then it is law, and then you're good. If you want to have a state law, then you have a state law. But there's no bill of rights. There's no amendment that basically covers that.

John Robertson

I go back on it, and I look at essentially, I would have considered myself pro-choice. For the most part, my granddad used to joke and say he was pro-choice and say, “I was prochoice. As a matter of fact, I believe that abortion should be legal clear up to the age of 18 years old.” He was talking about his son who was misbehaving. He said, “I had a lot less trouble with my son. If I say I can still take you out.” But in reality the oldest adage of when is it alive.

Robert Hansen

I'm personally of the opinion, people should be able to do whatever they want with their own body, period. Do whatever.

John Robertson

Yeah, but I don't know. I just don't agree with abortion on demand and being able to do it. There are two. I was really moved by a couple of people, I didn't really care one way or the other until I started actually listening. I started looking at the stats from Planned Parenthood on why it was originally created in the first place.

Why is it that 70% of them are in minority and black area? There’s a lot of them. What were they doing and what were they doing in harvesting? When you start finding out all of the stuff that's going on.

Robert Hansen

I'm not at all saying there isn't some weird stuff going on in many regards. But what I am saying is, well getting away from the morality…

John Robertson

I just don't think it should be encouraged. I don’t think it should be illegal.

Robert Hansen

But regardless of the morality of it, I think the important point is the press took something that happened which is actually boring case law stuff. It's like, well, unfortunately this thing doesn't make sense because there's no place that this exists in these documents. Kicking it back down. If you want to create a law, create a law.

But there isn't a current law to anchor this to. I understand people being upset about what it means to them or what they think it means to them. But this is one of those the press really, really wanted everyone to get very angry about it, instead of doing something simple like now let's create a law.

John Robertson

Do you like the movie Wag the Dog? Okay. That leak, which is the first time a leak like that's happened in the Supreme Court. It's all politically driven. The bigger reaches of the case are, it's just the timing of it. Was just trying to reset the narrative. Trying to get some of those people that they were losing back. The press is driving it and largely involved in it. They don't even mind saying that's the strategy anymore.

That to me is what's bad about it. They're taking stuff like that then they're using that to build more fear and more fear and more fear of rights. That’s not where the Supreme Court was going on this. As we get from a court that was going too much towards legislating law instead of lawmakers doing it, and judging law based on constitutionality. Which is their job. That's what this Court is doing. When you look at cases like that, it's not saying this is right or this is wrong.

Robert Hansen

I don't think they should have any sense of morality in what they're doing other than this is morally the correct thing to do because this is what the law says. The law says this so we have to adhere to the law. Whatever the law of the land is.

John Robertson

We used it. We played the game with marriage equality. We played the game. We played it with Republican, Democrat. We went back. We did a case. We went through. But that wouldn't have passed without Republican Supreme Court members’ approval. You wouldn't have had it.

We were playing the thing there but we had to sell the story. But we had to unite and not attack. You got to build a consensus. You got to be able to sell the point. These things just happened that way. I'm just not a believer. I hate it when those things become just so black and white.

Robert Hansen

I think people just need to learn that how you solve issues like this is get policy passed. That's how it works. The court should not do anything other than make sure the policy that you got passed is being met.

John Robertson

They all say, but sometimes you have to have an activist court in order to get that policy passed, if you can't get passed. Guess what? If that were entirely true, we wouldn't have gay marriage right now because it wouldn't have passed.

Robert Hansen

It’s a very slippery slope too. Now you have to pack courts and all kinds of terrible things.

John Robertson

I think that in my objectives right now we're bringing these four gates. These things that we're trying to do. We're trying to let all sides be able to tell their stories, and have equal rights to be able to tell their stories and not be beaten down.

Be able to argue it like we did. Marriage equality versus Human Rights Campaign which was just pushing it down. Democrats and using it to attack all Republicans. The Human Rights Campaign just became a political action committee for Democratic candidates. That's wrong. I don't want to be a puppet. They're doing that off the backs of all gays.

We’re not all the same. We don't think the same. We should have every freedom to be different. They shouldn't be passing that and using that as a wedge issue just to drive all their fundraising. That's just not smart. It's not the way to get things passed.

Robert Hansen

I've long felt like you're a bit of a kingmaker. I mean a lot of governors and businessmen and billionaires and all the people who make things happen. Where do you think this is going? Who do you think is going to be or do you have a favorite for 2024?

Do you see these types of wedge issues becoming a problem for existing incumbents? What do you feel? What do you think is going to happen? If you are a betting man.

John Robertson

It’s the economy stupid. The problem is, but it's more than that now, it is liberty. It is rights. People are now, uh you fooled me. We're not doing this again. Okay, monkey pox. They're not even talking about the same stuff with that. We can't do that anymore. People are showing them. This is the highest disapproval of a president in history ever, ever, ever.

Robert Hansen

I think the latest poll I saw, was it 573? Whatever it is. 7, 570?

John Robertson

I don't know. 73%.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, it was I think a 35% approval rating on Biden across the board. Even less for younger aged people who tend to…

John Robertson

More importantly with independents, and with people and with a lot of the women that were, there was a 73% disapproval rate.

Robert Hansen

Well the younger generation is actually probably more of interesting signal because that means it's almost entirely going to be economy. They generally will vote more strongly when there's massive movements in the economy because they're more directly impacted by it.

John Robertson

Well, I think right now, it's more of a combination than ever before of liberty and of people and of rights. They're now thinking that we have a chance to lose our country. We were going towards the direction before the election where socialism was so on the rise. Young people were like, “Oh, I think that's a good idea.” They've just learned what it means.

Robert Hansen

They learned in school. How else would they get it?

John Robertson

But they just learned. They're watching it. They're going shit. We found over a million TikTok kids. Their parents are liberal. Guess what they're not. They're not white suburban youth. Those are the ones that are the most woke because the Lord only knows what's going on there. But the guilt, I have no idea. But it's a Hispanic female.

I just started collecting them and saying, look at this. Look at how articulate. Look what they're fighting for. They're fighting for liberty. They're not calling it Republican or Democrat. They want the right to be able to do and to say. They're fighting for it more articulately than most, anybody that I see except for say, Chip Roy and a few. In Congress, they're fighting for it.

I just think, right now, I feel more positive about the direction because I've watched this next generation. I've watched so many Hispanics down in South Texas for these various different reasons. I’ve witnessed. I’ve made decisions and are completely changing. Because they're saying, this party which was great during Kennedy and great during Johnson did all this. They're not them anymore.

What they're doing is disregarding us. They can't have a less effective spokesperson than Kamala Harris. Just look at everything that they're doing. They're just chasing constituents away in a big way because it's affecting their actual life. The gas prices. They cut the pipeline. They did the stuff. They made this happen. They made this happen. They made that happen.

Robert Hansen

Who do you think is going to be the 2024 front-runner?

John Robertson

I wasn't a Trump supporter at first. Obviously, I was a Perry supporter. But when he ran, I looked at Trump. I said, unfortunately, it's like a divorce lawyer. If you like your divorce lawyer, you've got the wrong one. I need him to go in there and wreak havoc and do danger. Sorry Jason it's just a discussion. If you want that, you need the guy.

The things he was doing needed to be done. He needed to be seen as crazy by the rest of our NATO. No one was paying it. All the stuff he did, he did it right. Everyone's incomes went up. He did it in a weird way. I wasn’t a supporter of his but I grew to like what he did. I spent time with him.

Robert Hansen

Are you are you thinking he's going to come back?

John Robertson

I'm scared he's going to come back.

Robert Hansen

Is that your best bet?

John Robertson

I’m inside on some of that. I would say that the only thing that's changing it is Biden and what's going on right now. No one thought it would be this bad. No one thought that they would have, absolutely. Colonel Klink could have done a better job. Now, the more that happens, the more Trump is starting to go off what I believe, maybe know to have been the original strategy. Which was to take the air out of the room for all the other candidates.

Take the money out of the room for all the other candidates that could appear for the primary. Be Trump, Trump, Trump. Then Trump comes as a kingmaker and endorses DeSantis. That's a good plan. But the more Biden is such a mess and the more this is such a mess. They can't get rid of Biden because then they got Kamala. They're in a horrible situation.

You go back and play tapes of what Trump said and warned. It's all happening even more so than he said it would happen. The more that goes on, the more it emboldens him. Where his ego may take over and say, “No, I can win this again. I want to prove that I can win this again.” I'm hoping that that doesn't happen.

Robert Hansen

You first, or I don't know if this is the first. But you used to know Tiffany Trump fairly well because you were next-door neighbors?

John Robertson

Well, Marla was a neighbor and friend in LA. Then she moved to Calabasas and this and the other. And as Tiffany was going and growing up, I watched her grow up and always had that relationship. She's a wonderful young lady. She's engaged. But, yeah, I had an experience with her.

Robert Hansen

I always thought it was interesting because…

John Robertson

In fact, she got her brand new Audi when her father bought her this Audi A5 the night Jason was starting his big play he was doing in Hollywood. She was so scared, she was coming over. I took Al Ruddy’s parking space that was reserved for 80-something-year Al Ruddy, producer of The Godfather. Got it out of a mentor of mine to give to Tiffany Trump so that her new Audi could be parked in front and she wouldn’t get a dent.

Robert Hansen

When the election night was happening and leading up to it, I was basically hanging out very heavily with a very left leaning or largely left leaning I would say, group of friends. It is Austin. I remember the election night, sitting there on a couch. There's a bunch of people in my living room there. They had the whole glass ceiling thing. There's a big auditorium. It was going to be this massive, bursting through the glass ceiling is a big symbolic thing.

Everyone is so excited. There's popcorn and champagne flowing. This is Hillary. Yeah, Hillary. Then Trump won. I got to tell you, I don't even think Trump knew he was going to win. He got this little tiny ballroom. It was 50 people in there. It's totally unglamorous. I remember looking over to my right. I saw no less than three people crying.

That was really striking too because I'm not that invested in politics. Also I'm not that emotional about things like that. But to watch multiple people that I am very close to suddenly break down into tears was really strange. Then we found out that you guys were downtown. My wife at the time and I went down to hang out with you guys. It was a party. It was the exact opposite. It was drinks. Let's have a great time.

John Robertson

It was fantastic. I knew we were going to win. I just got a small ballroom. It was cheaper.

Robert Hansen

The delta between those two things was so strange. I can't even describe what a strange sensation it was to go from one extreme to another extreme in such a short period of time. We're talking literally minutes.

John Robertson

I remember.

Robert Hansen

How did everyone get it so wrong? Then what ended up happening…

John Robertson

When they drink their own Kool-Aid. The press and the polls. The thing with Trump was different because everyone was…

Robert Hansen

But even Trump got it wrong. Hillary got it wrong. Trump got it wrong. The polls just got it wrong.

John Robertson

Trump spoke out even though whatever billionaire status he is. He spoke to the blue collar. He spoke to the rust belt. It was things that people, no matter if they're not Nobel economist, understand. Which is politics shouldn't be that difficult.

He said if we reduce the corporate income tax so that we're not paying more than China, we bring businesses back to this country. If we can repatriate money that’s stuck out of the country.

Robert Hansen

Which directly benefits him.

John Robertson

Then we can use that money with tax credits to rebuild manufacturing. That's the way you're going to increase. Then the next thing is deregulation. We've got to compress the time it takes for businesses to function and get their stuff done. You've got to reduce old and ridiculous regulation. That, more than even tax policy, fueled the whole thing.

Obama and them were stuck in the thing. This is the new normal. We're never going to be growing again like that. We're too big. Every excuse they threw in. If you just get out of people's way. Now there obviously has to be laws and rules in this and the other. But they go so far overboard. We all have experienced them even in small businesses.

People just needed a chance. It took off. Jobs took off and took off in those areas. When you start constricting that again. Fuel energy, for the first time we weren't energy dependent. We could tell those other people to go away. All of a sudden all that stuff came together. To build that environment, you can focus on environmental through Conservancy and things that make sense.

But when it becomes a religion, and you're using it like they're doing now. They know full well what they're doing now. They just are willing to do it because they think we just have to throw away everyone's current lives now in order to get this to the next point when all that stuff doesn't even work. We found out in Texas. We are the most diverse energy, our grid, of any.

My real father was a utility president and was a public utility. I know I grew up around that whole thing. I knew what was going on. When you get rid of our ability to produce energy and dependent on things that aren't proven and can shut down, you're going to create big problems.

Robert Hansen

I had another guest on. Keenan Goleman talking about that quite a bit. Those are not particularly great energy sources.

John Robertson

But guess what they're also not allowing. Gigafund, which is a great fund. Steve Oskoui and Luke. They're great guys. Largest investors in SpaceX. Steve and I walk. We talk about a lot of things. He's not a traditional, they're not traditional VC because they don't care about the little things.

They don't even care about the things that most VC care about. They care about the crazy guy who thinks he can change the world. They think he can too. They care about the person from wherever they come from on the big problems. Education. Energy. We're looking at nuclear energy. We're looking at, there's things going on at Texas A&M.

There’s things going on with energy pod. But we still have all these restrictions against. You can't even do an energy product on nuclear without it being EPA in federal government driven. There's only one little loophole in that right here. But in having things where the energy consumed its own waste, where it's safe. Where it's not.

There's all this stuff that they're investing in that people are doing that are just changing the whole notion of nuclear energy. There's things that are changing, making wind more reliable. Innovation solves these problems. Not restricting. It's always we innovate our way out.

Robert Hansen

Back to my question here. One of the things I thought that the press didn't quite understand about the politics of the time was you had things like the WikiLeaks thing that came out about what Taylor was looking at. Which, by the way, I never even saw anyone at all talk about the fact that one of the things in her emails was top secret message. It was basically saying that Tony Blair has to get our authority before this goes live. More or less saying that we're in control of the government. Our government and theirs.

But also, aside from those little sideshow things, I think people did not really get that there's a huge amount of people in the United States that are disenfranchised. They are not the people who are living in skyscrapers. They're not even living in towns. These weird rural areas all over the place. They look at a guy like Trump. He sounds a lot like somebody that they would have over at a barbecue.

John Robertson

He's successful.

Robert Hansen

He's very successful. He's saying things that on the surface seem to make sense. Whether they actually do or not is almost totally irrelevant. Hillary on the other hand, they've seen her. They've seen her husband. They’ve sat through that episode. It did not help them at all in their rural location in Appalachia.

John Robertson

The other is, you're hitting on this because a lot of those people aren't polled. They don't relate to polls. They're not marked into polls. Only a couple that got it right. I don't remember what they are but we talked about it. But when you look at it there was also a lot of people. I was pulled numerous times. I never once said I was for Trump. Not once.

When it got through all of that stuff. It was a phenomena in that regard. That there were so many people there. Because they finally said, “Well, this guy's pulled himself out of a lot of problems. He has confidence. He has a plan. What has she really done except be entitled. We really don't like her. Even her husband doesn't like her.”

Those things that people think. There are a lot of people that would say they're for Hillary. But when it really came down to it, they just didn't vote or they voted differently

Robert Hansen

Preference falsification. Why did Biden win?

John Robertson

There was so much going on in the six key states. There were little things that were extending the time to vote, and creating an environment so that so much can be done that you just can't track. They're very smart about it. But I think it's a bigger reason. I hate to think we had anything to do with it. But we were preaching right at the last part of the election that Trump needed to start in his rallies.

He needed to go and say, “This is what I'm doing next.” Because he did every single thing he promised. Everything. Successfully. Now what were people thinking? We did a thing called break it up. Which was we talked with Rick Cornell. We came up with some statistics and some tracking with big data. Real big data. People have Cheetos on their shirts and all of that. Not the analysts that the politicians use.

I had to have an argument in the White House with some of those people after the election about it. But the whole problem was Trump went after big government. The proverbial swamp. He was actually making a big difference. Just like he was with China. He had beat off a lot of people. They were scared of him. Because the swamp is not made up of just this little conspiracy.

It's just this groupthink that forms. I call them Mean Girls. It's like this husband and wife. They both work in government. Maybe their career tract. They've gone up the levels that whatever agency. Or they flipped from agency to agency. Or they play ball. Their kids are playing ball with people and the party with that are in the press. That are all in this little, they look at it.

They use the word passenger for the elected people. Those are just the passengers. We are the ones who run everything. Trump was making a big difference in beating up on them to the point where he was damaging them. The swamp looks at politicians. We need the competition between Democrats and Republicans as if you're in a fighting rink. But don't you dare take it outside the rink. We need you so both sides can raise money to fund our machine on K Street. But we don't want you to go outside of that.

We need there to be the conflict. But in reality, we don't want that much to change because we really run everything. Okay. With that group think that's happened. The idea to break it up meaning let's take all these, Department of Energy, and move them to all these different states. Maybe it's the 38 states that we like but what have you. You start breaking up Washington. Making the Department of Energy can be in Texas. Department of this.

Start moving those around and making those federal agencies be where they're not all in one place, and all in their control group with their other people going in and out. You've just got to find a way to break that up. They started preaching that. That's people inside. Half the people in the Trump White House were not his friend. I saw it immediately when I was in there. I had to argue with some of them. It was amazing.

Robert Hansen

You more or less gave him a recipe for how he could theoretically utilize the local electorate laws. To say that you guys get to decide who gets to be president. You don't have to rely on the vote. You can do whatever you want. Why didn’t he go for it? Why didn't he do it?

John Robertson

Well, when we were looking at it at that time, there were people that we discovered later because an associate of ours, Morgan had come up. He was just selling me on the idea. I went got Rick Perry. We got Rick Grinnell on the phone. Marla Maples actually helped. It was amazing. We went because he had given a talk on the problem with the swamp. He was full on board with that. He's another gay conservative.

We had that conversation with him on a Saturday late afternoon. By Sunday morning, Don Jr. was on Maria Bartiromo talking about it. Break it up. Boom. They were starting to be in rallies. It was all over. We had Twitter things, break it up three. It just started to get momentum. But forces inside, mainly Mike Pence, his chief of staff who really had control over a lot of the inner workings around the White House more than Mark Meadows because secretly they would meet behind. He was the swamps control person in there.

Rick Perry told me stories when he was Secretary of Energy about how they had assigned him. Certain people in this and the other. He caught them just totally circumventing what he wanted to do. Said it's a hard thing. Trump had more energy than he ever dreamed up. He was able to just keep his world tight and focus on it. But he got into a situation where the advice he was giving him started coming as it did later from the wrong lawyers.

They were influenced to the point in my opinion, that he drank their own Kool-Aid. They just saw the numbers. They saw the numbers. They weren't seeing what was being done on the other side in the States to create the environment for them to have votes that just show up. Like in Georgia where they could go and get their early voting.

People were pointing it out but I don't think Trump listened. They could go and get their mail and vote. Then they could get early voting. In essence, the way it was done in Georgia, the labels weren't on the actual ballot. Just on the second envelope. You could get your mail in.

Robert Hansen

Well, let's talk about election tampering in a second. I'm just curious. Do you have any sense for if he had followed your advice do you think he would still be president?

John Robertson

I think so. Well, it had to be done early enough and kept on that. But I don't know. I can't say that actually because that machine was so hell bent on him. Some of the state legislators, they had passed these rules that made the voting. We found neighborhoods where 99% of the people voted.

That doesn't happen in the villages in Florida where they have nothing else to do. Okay. You don't have that when they've never had that level of vote. 20 and 30 people out of the same. But they're just so many problems that haven’t been addressed.

Robert Hansen

Let's leave that off the table for a minute. Let's just talk about election fraud as a thing as opposed to this specific election. Because I think there's some weird perception in the United States that we have this incredible sanctity of voting. I have all kinds of reasons to believe that is not true. I'll just start enumerating some of them.

A very good friend of mine was engaged in one of the penetration tests on one of these voting machines. I'm like, “Oh, how did that go? It sounds interesting.” He's like, “Robert, it's one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my entire life. It’s a complete waste of my time.” I'm like, “Okay, how did that go?” He is like, “Well, they brought me and five other people into a room. And they said, “You have one hour to find whatever you want, is going to be wrong with this thing.””

Which is a very strange thing. Normally, in penetration tests, they give you days, weeks, or whatever, enough time to do the test. And he's like, “Well, no, there was five different people who all were hired, different companies, so we're all in conflict with one another.”

One machine and they didn't bring anybody technical. There was one sales guy who wanted to do a pitch to explain how it works and the underpinnings of it, or whatever, which is all just eating into that one hour. So they've really independently got no more than a few minutes each on this device.

Obviously weren't able to do anything in that few minutes because you can't even get started with something like that. So effectively, the penetration test that was sanctioned and allowed to be done on this machine effectively did not happen at all, really, it just did not occur.

That's one example. Another example is I saw a situation, it was actually in California, a journalist got in touch with me, he's like, “Hey, Robert, will you take a look at this, there's this website, I think it might be compromised, I'm not 100% sure and I want to know if it's possible.”

It was a California website that had, it was basically the voter registration system or something. And the very first page, the only form on that page, had an exploit called a SQL injection, that would allow me a bad guy, or whatever to log in, and basically do anything I want.

The way that particular system was set up, it was designed to have no logging whatsoever, so that it preserved the privacy of whomever entered the data. So there's no way to actually validate if any of it’s been changed at any point. And yet a guy like me could literally on the very first page, very first form, get into it.

Then I took, I think it was the Ukrainians, they open sourced their systems so that anyone could take a look at it. And I found dozens of issues with that one. And another example is out of Florida, there was another journalist who got in touch with me. He's like, “Hey, Robert, there's these people coming in.

And they want me to take a look at this thing. They claim to compromise all these databases. They have all this information.” They sent it to me, and it was absolutely 100% doctored, totally fake, but they were trying to convince the FBI, Secret Service, a bunch of press people and a whole bunch of other politicians, that in fact, the things were being tampered and broken into when it was absolutely all fake.

Then of course, we have WikiLeaks and so on. So there's lots of examples out there of election tampering that I personally have seen.

John Robertson

You have that knowledge and I know a lot of people that do, that's not the technology of it is, I'm aware, and I'm an editor of but I'm not the guy who can break down the code. But we had people like that. Some of the stuff we evaluated, for instance, in Georgia was amazing what was actually going on.

In Wisconsin, and the six states when you could look at these numbers, the big data doesn't lie, was pointing out this stuff. Then you go back and you could track where the votes and how they were doing it and they were building databases of votes in DeKalb County, where then they could see what they needed and then all of a sudden the vote could just be run all the way then at the last minute.

From votes where there was nothing, you couldn't prove they were taken out of the envelope, so you didn't know who the voter were. They just had currency, it was like currency, they could just run through there, there's no way to track that. In the voting system they set up, there's no way to track whether that's fraudulent.

I myself, look at there's no logical reason why you don't have voter ID. Unless you are intentionally trying to, it's entirely too difficult to say, “Oh, you're disenfranchising someone,” we don't even have to fight that argument. That's so stupid. In California, I committed voter fraud, but then admitted it just to prove a point in my neighborhood. Because my guy across the street didn't, didn't vote wasn't going to vote.

I went down and voted as myself, then I went down and voted as him. And then before I gave it in I got the precinct person, this was in a garage in a neighborhood where the voting was going on. And I just said, “I just did this. And I'm literally just about to stick this in here.” And I had my phone filming it. And guy goes, “Well, then I should have you arrested.” I say, “I haven't done it. I'm just telling you.”

Robert Hansen

This is how easy it is to do it.

John Robertson

“What do you have to say about this?”

Robert Hansen

So there's a difference between being able to do something or it having been done in the past or done on a small scale or whatever, and actually changing an election. There's a pretty big delta between those two.

John Robertson

You don't have to do it. You got it in six states, you got it through legislators to make that stuff happen. And those states that mattered that were swing, I don't know whether it means that the election was thrown or not, by all of that, I just know that I was disgusted by how much fraud there actually was.

I was disgusted by the fact that where there's smoke, there's fire with these voting machines. I don't remember the name of it now, the guilty one. And the only county I believe in Texas where there was a problem with the vote was the only county that used those machines, in Collin County, I believe, up in Dallas and Fort Worth area.

You look at it, and there were just massive problems with it. In Georgia, we had people that were brought together as part of this that on televised live during the run offs for the Senate after the presidency, this was just to prove the point.

They had all those elections going on there. A hacker on the system in front of the state legislature asking him during the actual election, televised, “Where do you want me to hack?” plug into this. Plugs in, changes the formulas for the numbers of votes, the wait, is still the exact number of votes just changes, it's 1.56 to this.

The ratio so that it adds up to the same number of votes. But your vote for Trump was only point eight and changed it with stupid formulas in the math. No one would cover that, it was covered on Fox, but no one else was covering it. I'm like, “McFly, how?” And so I lost faith in the election.

Robert Hansen

That certainly points to deficiencies in our voting system, regardless of whether anything did or didn't happen or did or didn't happen at scale. Obviously, voter fraud happens all the time.

John Robertson

To me, it's easy to fix. Why aren't we fixing it?

Robert Hansen

I think I literally heard a story about a girl in Austin who was voting in multiple states.

John Robertson

Oh, we found that all over the place. In Georgia we were testing it. That's what we were working on.

Robert Hansen

This happens so frequently, obviously we need a better system.

John Robertson

If you just took the people that weren't legally voting where they should have voted in Georgia, that actually voted and didn't have the legal right to vote, that would have changed the Georgia election. Enough right there.

We finally got the Secretary of State and the government had to admit that those numbers were wrong. Of course, it's too late. But there you go. That's just got to be fixed. you can't go and complain about this election now. But it did identify and it did at least, I thought that we lived with this super sophisticated system that couldn't be broken, and I learned differently.

Robert Hansen

Now I'd like to talk about educational a little bit because Texas is a weird place in general for all kinds of reasons. And one of the ones is we have a new university that's coming online, which I hear you know a bit about. It is University of Austin, UATX which is uaustin.org.

They have such people as Barry Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Lee. And its whole premise is Pursuit of Truth. And how do we get here that Texas has this thing popping up here?

How did we get here that we have to have an institution filled with all these amazing people all in one place? Because they can't interrogate the truth, they can't do whatever they need to do in any of the different institutions in the United States. What how did we get here?

John Robertson

Well, the institutional group thing that's going on and how that's been taken over, a lot of these people are angry because they went to Stanford, or they went to Harvard or a lot of these places, and they can no longer have their kids go there.

There was another guy in New ATX and I can't remember his name. That was famous for taking, essentially Mein Kampf, and then changing it a little bit, and putting a thing and submitting it as a paper as him being a left leaning and all of this stuff. And he was revered for it. He's like, “It's Mein Kampf.”

He got away with it three times before finally, and of course, he's been beaten like a drum because the ridiculousness of it. So when UATX was the mindset of it was Comey was just to say, we need an elite university that is not going that direct, it's saying no to that.

We need to have it as a place where people from all persuasions can come and have those ideas and argue it out and do what education was meant to do. And over 6000 applications came in the second it was announced, from all over the world,

Robert Hansen

I believe that.

John Robertson

Donations, and all of this stuff going on with that, and it doesn't even know exactly what it's going to be yet. But it knows that this foundation of liberty and this foundation of having the freedom to be able to speak without just being canceled into oblivion was such a powerful call to people like Joe Lonsdale.

When it was for me to say that I can't have my kids going to the school that I love so much because it's no longer that, you can't have any ideas, you can't trust the ideas that come from it.

Sooner or later, it's easier for them to just play the game, but then they don't end up with the right education. And these people are very, very serious about wanting to fix it. And Texas, it's just the right place for that.

Robert Hansen

One thing that's interesting is COVID really did a number on a lot of smaller schools. It's going to bankrupt an enormous amount of schools. I was looking at the list of endowments for that same time period and they went up tremendously. And that makes sense because a lot of people didn't show up.

So you got to have some way to keep these massive institutions afloat. The second largest was, UT Austin. That's kind of interesting because it almost weirdly flies in the face of something you once told me that UT is basically one of the very few colleges if not, maybe the only one that is absolutely totally independent and will never go bankrupt because it makes money, not loses money.

John Robertson

Well, the University of Texas System and the Texas A&M system, have permanent university fund, and UTIMCO manages that. It's University Texas and A&M. It's a fund and it's based on oil and revenues and energy and land.

It is just massive and it perpetuates and they have to spend a certain amount of it a year but they still argue over their budget cuts and they're this and they're that. and University of Texas, the way it's set up, it is massive. Its endowment is entirely separate, though. And that's massive.

A&M is structured a little bit differently. It’s like actually now in a better position because A&M is considered state assisted not state supported because of the amount of their budget that comes outside of the state.

Robert Hansen

Which they could probably turn off because they have enough capital coming in. If they had to.

John Robertson

They can do what they want in a lot of ways. A&M has its own aircraft, instead of TxDOT aircraft, A&M has Gulfstream whatever. But they also have Texas education, they have real estate extension, agriculture extension, energy extension, they're all extensions services that are independent of the university.

Whereas the University of Texas system, they all report to the state, A&M don't, they report to the chancellor, and they have all of that where they can do it, they run their own system. And in the past, that hasn't been important.

But now all of a sudden it is because as universities moved to where the undergraduate stuff can be done more online, when you get to bigger universities, they are going to be more research oriented, and all of the stuff that's coming towards that, and A&M has better than anyone on the planet, these extension services, and they're a tier one research school.

But the way they're structured, allows them public private partnerships out of the zoo, and other small universities just don't have that.

Robert Hansen

One of the things I read online, I can't remember where I read this, but I thought it was pretty interesting. They said, “Yes, I'm okay with people being able to decide that their education wasn't valuable enough for whatever, they need to default on their loans or whatever. But I think that should be paid off by whichever college they went to.”

John Robertson

The interesting solution. Interesting question.

Robert Hansen

I thought that was very interesting because one of the problems a lot of the CEOs I talked to, they say pretty regularly as well, why are we paying so much to this institution, which has clearly produced this mass of people who are unemployable?

Why don't we only incentivize colleges who are actually doing the job? And why aren't they required by law to say what the population density is that are actually employed and what they're being employed by or whatever. So that, at minimum, they're going to get state funds, or government funds or whatever, you can, at least as taxpayer know where this money is going?

The extra money that comes from states. So I don't know if I love that idea. But I did think it was interesting. What do you think?

John Robertson

First of all, make a note, your producers make a note, let me make a referral invitation for you to have your RSnake. Steve Oskoui. I don't know if you've met Steve with me or not. But he is Giga fund, and lives here in Austin, for a while, and they are, like I said, the largest investors in SpaceX. He was Founders Fund, he was all of that stuff. He's young.

But their education solution, I think he would be an interesting guest anyway. But one of the things they've done with education is on the tuition that's paid and there's any other, if you're not getting the job, and you're not satisfying what the employers are hiring, if you're not employer ready, and if you're not getting that job, they refund your tuition.

There's an education program all built around some of the schools that they're funding and building which is changing the way…

Robert Hansen

As a new entrance into a college, I would love that, at least it makes absolutely sure that all of our incentives are aligned.

John Robertson

Yes. That’s what he's trying to do. Let’s not look at education by baby steps as to what we can and can't do. Let's look at what it should be and why. And let's build things like that. Whether it's education, home building, all the things going on, that's what Giga fund is doing.

Go research some of them, I'll make that introduction to have you on because those ideas on education and who they're supporting, and why that works with his involvement also with UATX and with my projects, it's just solving bigger problems with bigger solutions and removing the barriers to ask what if and then supporting those ideas that can over time make sense, without the short term thinking that most VCs have to do.

Robert Hansen

Where do you think we are going and how do you think we got here? The point of my question here is more like, the GOP and the Democrats have done this weird dance where they've moved across lines. The Democrats were the party of slavery, chattel slavery, and the GOP was about removing that chattel slavery. That's the origins of the GOP.

Then now, we have an issue on the GOP side, where there's a significant concern of that is getting an enormous amount of support from that same group of people, the KKK, for instance, which barely exists at all anymore. But other organizations call it proud boys or whatever that might be the next generation of those things.

We also have this strange change in politics, where I think for the most part, religion really wasn't part of politics for quite a while in the early 1800s, and maybe even early 1900s and then it became a huge point in the mid-1900s and beyond.

It was basically, if you're not very religious and pray to God every single day, there's no chance you're going to get elected. And that is still to this day, something that every politician has to prove if they're going to even step on stage.

John Robertson

I don't know if that's the case anymore or not?

Robert Hansen

Even Trump he carried a Bible across the street for a photo op.

John Robertson

That's for fundraising and money.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, but that's exactly my point.

John Robertson

Because those are the base that vote and you just don't want to chase them off.

Robert Hansen

That is entirely my point.

John Robertson

But Catholics have to do the same thing. And that's why they on the left, that's why they're going after it, especially on a religious basis, that more different, it’s all fundraising.

Robert Hansen

Do you see that declining? Or do you think that's increasing? Do you see the parties distancing themselves internally, from these groups to avoid the stigma?

John Robertson

I think during primary times, and during elections in general, there's always a fundraising class and always a fundraising element and you have to address it, it's part of it. And therefore, if there's a pile of money somewhere, they're going to go after it.

Robert Hansen

So you think we're going to continue to see greater divergence of the left and the right?

John Robertson

I don’t think you have to do that. I think there's new parts of the right that are coming up, Peter Thiel, the new Republican. The people that we think are more libertarian in nature, or they're this but they're less religiously imposing, they're less Puritan. And there's many, many more of them coming out.

Robert Hansen

Is that a push to the center? Is that what you're thinking?

John Robertson

Not necessarily the center, they're still rapidly this way, or that way, sometimes more extreme when it comes to drugs or what have you. But they're just taking some of the old guard out of it, while not chasing them out of the party. They're just allowing the others in instead of allowing that element to push them out.

You're saying no, no, no, that's over there and yes, that's necessary, and this or the other, and you may not like the church, you may not even believe in God, but we're Judeo Christian country, which means we're built on those principles of freedom and this, out and the other, and that's what built our system of liberty. So people are saying, “But that doesn't mean I have to be a slave to modern religion.”

My particular church, or raising money off this sin, or that, the fear mongering and things that churches get pointed to, I don't go to church, I'm a big believer, I have faith, I have it from my reasons. But I don't want them raising money off anti-gay stuff. And that's not happening as much anymore, but it does.

I think that people rejected religion, and religion is having to get smarter in order to bring people back in. And people that are spiritual in nature are saying, “We got to,” they recognize that there's a spiritual need.

Even if they're not totally religious spiritual, in many cases, they'd rather have their kids educated at a Jesuit school than they would at something that's preaching the stuff that the public schools are teaching now. It's kind of a complicated question when it comes to religion and it polarizes.

Robert Hansen

I'm just curious if we're going to see greater division or we think this country can heal itself?

John Robertson

I think it heals itself, I think it's healing itself. I'd say that now I would answer it completely different two years ago, I'm shocked at how it's healing itself.

Robert Hansen

So we're not facing down the barrel of a civil war or anything crazy like that?

John Robertson

Not unless that's what if they get their self against the ropes there and start taking away our rights and our gun rights and or what have you to the point that people start reacting to it. I don't believe we're there. I believe and see a lot more hope just on the banter in the traffic of the young and the TikTok and the people that are fighting for liberty.

Robert Hansen

See, I see not an insignificant amount of people inside Texas talking about the Republican Texas as a very real option. Let's just break off. Let's get out of this because United States is mismanaging itself, let's just be our own country again.

John Robertson

Texas is very well able to do so. Especially when it gets these problems with the energy grid, because it has its own energy grid for a reason. It just needs to get it on unwoke and back on track to what it’s producing.

There was some derelict nature, but essentially, it has the economy, it has the aspect to do it. And that's always this option people like to talk about, it's harder to accomplish. But in our lifetime, if things were to go too far to the left and the track that we were on, I would see that as a real possibility for first time, at a certain point.

Robert Hansen

That's what's surprising to me, this isn't a fringe thing. This is a lot of people saying.

John Robertson

It’s under the cover, but Rick Perry got chastised for saying it back when and called a racist and all that. But he his point was, “Look, if it ever gets to that point we’re set up to take our football and rock and we could survive as a country.”

If enough people are having enough of their stuff taken, then this stuff on the border, which is all that matters in Texas right now, is the border. Right now, what I can't understand, but why more people understand than the press is talking about his fentanyl. That's killing more people than anything.

It's just being brought right over the border and the people down in south Texas, Washington DC mayor's complaining about 3500 people, that I'm happy to say, Larry, a friend of mine, Larry Abramson came up with the idea a long time ago, and about paying for the buses.

I sent it to Governor Abbott chief of staff and their sound off, we're going to do that. And then later, they said, “We're going to do that,” and sending just busloads.

Robert Hansen

That was your friend's idea.

John Robertson

Larry's idea. Larry, I call him LNN, Larry News Network because he's always ahead. And he's typically right because he focused on it. And he thinks through it and he's analytical. He’s a movie producer, he can break down movie scripts, like nothing, but he thinks through not at.

He just doesn't understand why people aren't seeing some of this stuff. But he's been a ride on all these issues, safety, moms, all of that stuff. And so when you look at it, he's also an everyman, where people are speaking to people that are saying,

Robert Hansen

He being Perry, or Larry?

John Robertson

Larry, in this case, saying these are the things that are hitting, and he's quicker at it than most of the political campaigns and they're consultants. And I hate the Republican Party's consultants because it's all about how they make money off of it. And they too often miss the point.

The people are finding it anyway. And people are finding their way there because they just want their liberty and they don't like seeing this was working. And now you've totally blown it up. And we know you blow it up, Biden, we're not stupid. You can't sell us on the fact that you didn't blow this up.

So why are you doing it and we want this change. I think these shifts that are taking place now are going to be longer lasting, and that the parties are reshaping again, especially as Peter Thiel and people like that start spending more money and more effort putting more people like Blake in Arizona and some of the characters that are being put back in and a lot of money in support in their campaigns in Georgia and in other places.

We were fighting I said “Why isn't anyone seeing this?” This is a few years back. So I feel like I'm on an island doing this for myself and Elon Musk comment was, so “where's our George Soros? Where is this? Why aren't we organized?” I feel like, Republicans are always out working and they're doing their stuff they're not organizing and doing that stuff.

I said, “Well, why don't we have people organizing? And why? Where is our George Soros who's thinking through this at those levels and putting money towards even the DEA elections and all that stuff? Why aren't we doing that? And Elon Musk comment is, George Soros is a rounding error.

We're here now, we're doing it. We're attacking, there is stuff going on. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of is meaning, and a lot more help. And one of the angles is we've got to help open these gates in education, where the people don't feel like they have to hide where the voices can come out.

There's power and force, where people want that freedom and aren't scared to speak up. And I see that happening more in the last few months and I am literally motivated by it. Not just these hidden million tic toc kids, but there's it's starting to happen with the youth and the independence. And I see more organized, and I can't say some of the stuff that's going on.

But there's stuff going on, even here in Austin, city council and all kinds of different things to just at least make it libertarian. But then starting on some of these other key cities in the country, there is a force, there is stuff going on and ways to get our media back.

So media and movies, making it all right to be a capitalist, making it all right to win, making it all right that good things are done, the rich people aren't as bad. These stories are waiting to come out. And there are a lot of them out there.

They just haven't been able to be greenlit. And now they're more and more able to be green lit. There's some things that have had to been done but we're inside the gate, and they don't know where we are and we can green light things, and that's going on more. There are going to be a lot more stories and I'd like a lot of those to be made here in Texas.

The TV shows are 8 episode TV shows which are movie and a sequel because people are watching it more at home. And the quality of that content coming out is going to be a great home for more stuff to be done here in Texas.

Which leads to how do we prove to the other parts of the Republican Party that content is not just liberals and entertainment, content is the second largest or third, sometimes largest export of this country, and Texas should own that. so it's not just entertainment, but it's education, it's all the same content is massively important.

We are educating those people at A&M and at University of Texas that are all populating the animation companies, ILM, all that stuff going back since 1979, and the architecture school, at Pixar, all of those, they're just being filled with people from our universities here. And instead of sending them there, we should be moving those companies here.

There's a lot of ways to do it. And there's some people working on how we get that done because like other things that are opposite of what you thought, Hispanics in South Texas voting Republican because they're sick.

That same thing can be happening as people reject what's going on in Hollywood, and you'll see more stars starting to come out and say enough, they're not playing that game anymore. And we had friends of Ava out there in Hollywood.

But more of that stuff as it starts to come to this environment, I think people are going to want to expand the number of stories they can tell. And when those can get greenlit, you create an ecosystem. And we have one thing here in Texas, that's really massive.

And that is all these other little Podunk states, Oklahoma, they are offering incentives to bring people in until they last for a little bit then they get voted out. But what we have if we make it work, it's not just based on legislated budgets, but it's based a form of what, franchise tax credits.

You only vote on it once in the legislature. We have that other states don't, as we have more big companies and more companies moving here and more companies moving here that would love to be able to participate in it, divert some of their friends to go towards things.

We can create a whole new incentive program here that's not based on a legislative budget, and it can be better than any other incentive program. And at that point we can own the industry. And I just have to work through that process with the politics here to help that happen.

Robert Hansen

So what’re you doing you do on these days? Tell me about Arena Edge.

John Robertson

Well, it goes back to some of the origins of, I've always been about communication, I've always believed in Peter Thiel and Blake Masters concept of take what's done, and that people have to do want to do need to do it better, and do it cheaper and make it more accessible and that's a good place to start.

We've fought for a long time back from satellite education, internet, all this stuff back how can content video, it's so important, it's so compelling, but there's still massive places all around the world, where bandwidth is an issue and all of these things tying up or issues even in next generation internet and all these things going on in 5G.

They're still these problems, always. So as we've gone through this generationally, we looked at where we are right now. And we started asking the question, literally into 2017, 2018, is, WebEx sucks. It's 25, 28 years old, but you have all these different, and Zoom is new WebEx. Matter of fact, he used to run WebEx.

You start looking at those things. And we had video and we had communication, we have the ability to do it, regardless of bandwidth. We have an enterprise grade, we started developing that. And we said, ”What we need is just like an ecosystem for the cell phone.” You have video like Zoom, and WebEx, but then you’ve got to have a learning management system if you're in your company.

Then you got to have Vimeo or YouTube, and you’ve got to have Dropbox and you have a way to teach these people how to make shows and editors, you can't do that. if you're a teacher recording your class on Zoom unless you know, it's almost impossible to edit.

If little Bobby says the F word, guess what? That’s it. There's all kinds of so we wanted to create a mobile first, a system that unifies just like the iPhone has done, so to speak, the Android has done for the phone. Now the phone on your phone is just another rarely used app because you're doing all these other things with it.

But you pull that together in a unified system, people shouldn't have to know how to do all of that stuff. It should just work. So Arena Edge was created to take all of our experience in those communication platforms all the way back to the things that go back to Skype, some of that stuff was developed in our world, all the way back to pre-caching, all the way about a bandwidth.

We were doing more video on the internet than anybody else before YouTube back in 2001. We understand that market, we said, “How can we bring this together?” And we said we're looking at things like medical diplomacy, about the whole thing for medicine all over the world.

How can you make rural areas be as app communication wise, and everything? All of those things tie in, it's not just education, it’s not just entertainment content. It's real stuff. And so these platforms have all been cobbled together.

Then the people that develop apps now are just putting this one and this one and this one together, but they're not enterprise grade, and they can't accomplish what's needed to make this one unified platform where all of that can work. So we just redid and rebuilt, and took everything that we had been doing and created that environment.

Then COVID comes and just as we're getting ready to be at that, all of a sudden there's this huge… and now all these companies WebEx, Cisco didn't invest more in WebEx, Why? Because they didn't have to. They're doing cybersecurity and all that stuff while they need to be doing that?

Zoom, all these things are all antiquated systems that haven't been revisited, and Covid all of a sudden, the teachers are screaming at the CEO of Cisco, like, “Why does this suck? Why can't we make this and this and this and this, we can't even edit this?”

They were all coming up for what we were designing. So we are the right place at the right time with Arena Edge. We can't even say what it does on the website because we haven't dumbed down on the website, but we have our REITs, our REITs platform and the whole purpose of it.

And we're really starting to focus a lot on medical right now, just because of a lot of opportunities globally, we're doing things that, everyone has a need for nurses, and all over the world. And we're doing a thing with Texas A&M and the nursing where we're making that the content, and we've just signed contracts.

As medical starts to become more diplomacy. Even in China, they're demanding Western medicine now. They used to hide it. When we're doing studios, they would hide Western medicine inside of soundstages so that only the rich people were going in there.

But now they've turned that upside down. They're saying “We've got to be better at bringing in new equipment, our 23,000 hospitals because our people are we're going to have a revolt. Our people are demanding Western medicine, they've realized this Eastern stuff isn’t cutting it.”

So how do they pay for that? They can't. guess how they're doing it? They're saying, “Okay, you can come in, this is what your Chinese covers, your insurance. But if you want this from the West, you can get it. But you have to pay for it.” It's another tax on their wealthy to make them.

Our platform, I'm not even pro-China and I say that to them all the time, our platform is the only one, we just got a license there to, even Microsoft Teams, you have to go through… Zoom was kicked out and even helped develop it, it was kicked out of China. All those things, you have to go through a VPN.

Then if they find you, it's illegal, they cut you off. Imagine and all the enterprises that are doing business in China and have operations there, even the DOD, they can't have video communication, unless they use WeChat.

So we've got the right because the Chinese want to control since ours is a unified platform, they found it, they found us we didn't find them and now they wanted and all their medical. Well A&M working on international medical diplomacy. That’s the W, the world health.

Robert Hansen

WHO

John Robertson

Is compromised. They're saying we need to be doing that. And we’re the good housekeeping seal of approval. They brought John Scott, all the best universities and all the stuff they're doing. They're spending more on technology there than any other of the schools.

So with their content, we're making that the content in our platform, they have to train 8 million nurses in Western. The Bahamas is another example. And all the islands going on all these countries. And in the rural counties, even in the US are needing this type of stuff. The enterprises that deal with selling that equipment and then having to train and work.

We can't do everything but we're expanding that way. That's what we're doing right now in this company, we are just at the right place at the right time, we built the right platform. And it's not just cobbled together apps, so much so that the demand for that is starting to become readily apparent, it's just an easier way to do it.

Once you start comparing that, we had to dumb it down and make it look like Zoom. We were trying to do too fancy with it, but we make it look like what they expect. But then you start adding, it looks like Netflix plus Zoom. You have all your channels, you have all your stuff, and it makes it easy, and it's as easy as TV, that's kind of a slogan we wrestle with.

That to me is important for education, it's important for communication and it's important for my retirement. Because with that doing what it's doing and having the contracts that starting to get the value of that company, is important, I won't go into any more than that.

Robert Hansen

How do people get in touch with you if they find this compelling and they want to know more? How do they find you online or follow you or whatever?

John Robertson

They can go to Johnny towel boy on Instagram. My name is John Robertson on Instagram under Johnny towel boy is an easy way to get me personally but they can go track me down at emails j,robison@newrepublicstudios.com Or I'm getting my cell phone out

Robert Hansen

No that's fine.

John Robertson

IG is good to go, track down and send messages or my emails. And then in all seriousness, you can get to that and someone can help get you in touch with me.

Robert Hansen

John, thank you very much for doing this. We probably could have done twice this very easily, but I feel like I would have left, come back, and well and then you would have still been eating those chocolates.

John Robertson

I'm not eating chocolate. There's no chocolate we’re eating here. I'm not Rosie O'Donnell.

Robert Hansen

Thank you, John.