Karol Markowicz Show: From Hollywood to Activism with Robbie Starbuck

Summary

Podcast Title: The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Episode: Karol Markowicz Show: From Hollywood to Activism with Robbie Starbuck
Release Date: April 11, 2025
Host/Author: Premiere Networks

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Introduction and Background

In this compelling episode of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton welcome guest Robby Starbuck, a filmmaker and conservative activist. The conversation delves into Robby's journey from a successful career in Hollywood to becoming a prominent figure in conservative activism.

Transition from Hollywood to Activism

Robby Starbuck opens up about his decision to leave Hollywood at the peak of his career to pursue activism. He shares, “[11:10] Robby Starbuck: So a lot of times when somebody says that they worked in Hollywood, it's like, you know, on some project no one's ever heard of... But you worked with Smashing Pumpkins, Akon, Eve... and then you left it all behind to go be an activist. Why?”

Robby explains that his family's history, particularly his great grandfather Rafael’s experiences with communism in Cuba, profoundly influenced his commitment to freedom and opposition to authoritarianism. “[11:36] Robby Starbuck: ...I would stand up if that same sort of thing was ever happening in America. We both agreed America was the last stand for freedom...”

Impact on Career and Blacklisting

The conversation shifts to the repercussions Robby faced in Hollywood after publicly endorsing former President Trump in 2015. “[13:44] Robby Starbuck: ...everything stopped because of me coming out and endorsing Trump in 2015.” Robby candidly discusses being blacklisted, losing major contracts, and how his outspoken political stance led to the abrupt halt of his production company's collaborations with giants like Paramount Pictures.

He reflects on his unique position in Hollywood, noting his absence from traditional social scenes and award ceremonies, which perhaps made his activism more noticeable. “[14:35] Robby Starbuck: I never fit in Hollywood... that's part of the reason I was successful is because I was sort of an anomaly...”

Personal and Family Impact

Robby shares the personal toll his activism took on his family, particularly his children, “[16:45] Robby Starbuck: ...our daughter lost friends when I came out as conservative... my daughter, our oldest son...”

He discusses how his children have navigated social challenges, such as his daughter facing peer exclusion and his son encountering debates over figures like Elon Musk. Robby emphasizes the importance of instilling resilience and critical thinking in his children to withstand societal pressures and biases.

Views on DEI and Corporate Policies

A significant portion of the discussion centers on Robby's critique of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in corporations. “[23:36] Robby Starbuck: ...DEI was essentially a Trojan horse for very far-left politics.”

Robby argues that DEI initiatives, as implemented, have become divisive and counterproductive, leading to increased discrimination and poor corporate performance. He highlights successes in his activism, noting that numerous companies have revised their DEI policies under his influence, resulting in improved workplace environments and better market performance. “[25:15] Robby Starbuck: ...dozens of companies have changed their policies because of us, wiped out all the WOKE stuff...”

Social and Political Observations

Robby and the hosts explore broader societal shifts, particularly among young people. “[20:20] Robby Starbuck: ...young people aren't having relationships and it's probably not because the men want their women to stay home...”

Robby attributes this trend to the overreach of left-wing indoctrination in schools, which has inadvertently fostered a rebellious spirit among young conservatives. He believes this generation is becoming more independent-minded and less susceptible to authoritarian influences, leading to a future electorate with strong conservative values.

Advice and Closing Thoughts

Towards the end of the interview, Robby offers heartfelt advice to his younger self and listeners. “[29:58] Robby Starbuck: Hold fast and work hard...Be relentless. Don’t give up at the first sign of failure.”

He emphasizes perseverance and rational decision-making over emotional reactions, advising individuals to remain steadfast in their pursuits despite setbacks. Robby underscores the importance of cultivating a balanced, reasoned approach to life and politics to foster a more unified and resilient society.

Notable Quotes

• Robby Starbuck on standing against authoritarianism: “[11:36] ...America was the last stand for freedom...”
• Robby Starbuck on being blacklisted: “[14:35] ...I never fit in Hollywood...”
• Robby Starbuck on DEI programs: “[23:36] ...DEI was essentially a Trojan horse for very far-left politics.”
• Robby Starbuck on personal resilience: “[29:58] ...Be relentless. Don’t give up at the first sign of failure.”

Conclusion

This episode offers an insightful look into Robby Starbuck's transformation from a Hollywood director to a dedicated conservative activist. His experiences highlight the challenges and rewards of standing firm in one's beliefs amidst widespread opposition. Through his story, Robby advocates for rational discourse, resilience, and the importance of fostering a society grounded in reason over emotion.

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Disclaimer: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections of the original podcast transcript to focus on the substantive dialogue between Robby Starbuck and the hosts.

Transcript

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[Matt Walsh]

Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on iheartradio. There's been this kerfuffle on the right in the last few days. Megyn Kelly had a clip where she talked about how conservative men don't want their women to work. Let's roll that clip.

[Carol Markowitz]

Here's what's happening on the right. Young women and I talk to young conservative women all the time about their lives and their goals and, you know, the things that they want. And what's happening is they can't find men who are maybe more conservative. Usually they're looking for somebody who is religious. You know, like they're a lot of conservative women tend to be God, God loving conservatives and they can't find a lot of young men who want to marry a working woman. Now this is an actual problem that's, that's coming up on the right. And to me it's so sad because it's like, how did we get to the point where we, we're now telling young conservative amazing women that they're not attractive if they also work, if they choose to, let's say, do what I'm doing and what you're doing and like get their voice out there. But I'll stick with me just because I think conservatives listening to this will like the thought of another Megyn Kelly voice up and coming. Well, why wouldn't we want that? Why would we take somebody who's talented in this field and really wants to make a difference and have the messaging to her be you're really not that valuable unless you give it up and go into the home and only have a family and only raise a family. And not only are we sending her that message, but young men are actually believing that they're actually believing, especially on the right because like the trad mom has gotten so popular and it's like, no, if we do that, we're not going to have any strong conservative or right leaning women to provide a role model for younger conservative women who, and there's nothing to apologize for here, don't necessarily want to spend all their 20s and their 30s getting married and having kids or can't they just weren't able to meet somebody and definitely don't need to be shamed over it.

[Matt Walsh]

I love Megan a lot and I get what she's saying. Don't snuff out the potential of girls to be Something amazing. And there's nothing wrong with working and having a family, obviously. And the pushback to this has come from people like Matt Walsh who say men don't want to have a girl boss wife. They want someone to care for them and for the kids. And I think more than anything else, the men don't want their kids raised by someone else while the woman works long hours. Understandable. I think the truth is that most people don't have jobs they super love. And I mean men and women here. I love what I do. I have loved it all along. I've done it when it didn't pay a lot. But it's a choice because I've been blessed to have an off ramp if I want one. My husband still talks about this magical time where I was briefly his stay at home girlfriend when I had gotten laid off four months before our wedding. He enjoyed that, of course. And I've kind of done it all. I was a stay at home mom after that. I owned a business in New York City for a few years. So I worked outside the home and I've been a work at home mom for much of the last decade. Plus most people don't work because their job is so fulfilling or they just can't get enough of it. Which kind of is my case. I love what I do. I'm obsessed with what I do. I do it even when I don't have to do it. People work for the money and it's hard to have a family on just one income. Yes, you can make sacrifices, but you, you never know what happens in life. And if you somehow lose that one income you're relying on, it could be very tough. But more than anything else with this whole thing, I hear from women who are confused at this conversation altogether. Where is this pool of men who need their wife to stay home? They say, I know when I was a stay at home mom, even moms with similar financial circumstances told me they were jealous that my husband was okay with me staying home. It's not such a common thing for men to be into and I'm sure that Megan and I have somewhat similar schedules. I have to travel from time to time, but I'm done by 3pm nearly every day. And I'm the one who picks up my kids from school and I'm there for dinner every night. It's not a typical schedule for most working people. All of this to say we're getting too into the weeds on this. The problem starts that young people aren't having relationships and it's probably not because the men want their women to stay home and not work. We need to focus on the big picture and fix that first. Thanks for listening. Coming up next, an interview with Robby Starbuck. Join us after the break.

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[Robby Starbuck]

Welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on iheartradio. My guest today is Robby Starbuck. Robbie is a filmmaker and conservative activist. So nice to have you on Robby.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[Robby Starbuck]

So a lot of times when somebody says that they worked in Hollywood, it's like, you know, on some project no one's ever heard of and they're not really taking any huge chances, leaving their career behind. But you worked with Smashing Pumpkins, Akon Eve, I mean, people, everybody knows, everybody should know, maybe. And then you left it all behind to go be an activist. Why?

[Ryan Seacrest]

You know, maybe, yeah, I'm a little crazy. So maybe, you know. Yeah, I directed Oscar winning actors, actually some of the biggest music stars, you know, people like Natalie Portman, Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dogg, you know, and I think I was, I'm sort of an anomaly in the sense that not only did I leave Hollywood and do that, but I came out at the peak of my career versus a lot of people in Hollywood. What they do is they wait until they don't. Yeah, yeah. They wait until they don't have jobs anymore, you know, and they're like, okay, yeah, actually I'm a Republican. You know, for me it's fair. My family came from Cuba and they lost everything to communism. And so probably the most important figure in my life was my great grandfather Rafael. And I always called him Payo. That was his name. I remember very distinctly some talks we had had about how Marxism and Castro rose to power in Cuba and how things happened. What were the warning signs. And essentially I'd always made the Promise to him that no matter what the cost, I would stand up if that same sort of thing was ever happening in Americ. We both agreed America was the last stand for freedom, that if the same thing happened here, that was it, at least for 100 years.

[Robby Starbuck]

Nowhere else to go. That's it.

[Ryan Seacrest]

There's nowhere else to run to. I mean, Ronald Reagan used to tell this story about a Cuban refugee where he's talking to two businessmen, and the businessmen are like, I'm so sorry. We're so lucky. And the Cubans started laughing at them, and they couldn't understand why. And they said, why are you laughing? And he's like, I'm not the lucky one or you're not the lucky ones. I am because I had somewhere to go to. You don't have anywhere to run to if it happen to you, you know, and it's. It's the truth, you know? So I knew in that world, you know, I wasn't going to be like some total savior or something like that that was going to just change the dynamics of the industry. But I knew that if I came out and I was honest about where I stood on things, that it would make it a little bit easier for the next person. And beyond that, also, it moves the needle of social acceptability and, you know how you can converse about these things. And I knew what the cost would be. I don't pretend otherwise.

[Robby Starbuck]

Like, they didn't take it super well.

[Ryan Seacrest]

No, they didn't take it well. And I'm not one of those people that's going to pretend I didn't know I was going to get blacklisted. I knew what was going to happen, and it happened pretty much overnight. I mean, we had some massive contracts at the time. We didn't just do. You know, I wasn't just a director. I owned a production company that had some huge clients, like Paramount Pictures, where we did a lot of production for them that people don't realize other companies do. And so we had managed quite a few really big projects from the Terminator movies, Transformer films, things along those lines. And pretty much overnight, everything stopped because of me coming out and endorsing Trump in 2015. And, you know, it took a little while for some people, but eventually me talking about politics enough pushed everybody off, which is sort of interesting, you know, because if I had been doing it the opposite direction, of course it would be a huge start. I'd probably have an Oscar right now, you know, but that was actually kind of. The funny thing is, I never fit in Hollywood And I think that was actually part of the reason I was successful is because I was sort of an anomaly in the sense that I never went to any of the parties. Even when I was up for major awards, like at the MTV VMAs and stuff like that. I never went. I never went and accepted awards that I won. I didn't believe in it. I thought the whole thing was kind of disgusting and we have real problems. And I think the self congratulatory BS at these award shows is honestly kind of sickening. So, you know, I never was quite a fit. But that, that's at least a little bit of an explanation why I came out and was honest about my politics.

[Robby Starbuck]

So you don't feel any bitterness about that, about being blacklisted in Hollywood and not getting to do the work that you were doing?

[Ryan Seacrest]

I'm just not a terribly bitter person. You know, I don't get too high or low. I'm very analytical and reasonable and I knew what would happen. So I didn't go into like the emotional state of, oh, how does this make me feel? It was, it was more so a reality. You know, you deal with it, you move on, you adjust. And in many ways I'm thankful it all happen the way that it did because one amazing thing that I got to experience and most people will never get to experience that, I would say outsider looking in. It's one of those like glass half full things. You kind of have to decide how you see it. Some people would be heartbroken by what happened with friendships. They'd be like, oh my gosh, I lost all these friends. For me, I consider it the most beautiful gift I could ever be given. And beyond my wife and my kids, it was like this clarity of you really know who your friends are. And it's just like in an instant it becomes so clear because I think for a lot of people, you know, they think they have all these friends. And again, another lesson from my great grandfather. He told me when I was very young, he said, you'll understand this someday, but if when you die, you have enough friends to fill up one full hand, you are a very, very lucky man. And you know, I thought I had all these friends and then, you know, I come out and find out, you know, essentially that if you're, you know, sort of acc, even of wrong, think you could lose them overnight, right? And so that clarity is a really wonderful thing. And that's something I'm very thankful for, that it happened to me.

[Robby Starbuck]

I think your children are small, but are you Going to tell them the stories about losing friends and how that's actually a gift and don't take it so hard if you do the right thing and you lose friends. That's just the way it goes.

[Ryan Seacrest]

So I have four kids with my wife and our oldest is actually 16, so she's close to out of the house. I mean, we're looking at colleges and stuff. She's a real, she's a smart cookie. We're so lucky. But in the respect of her and our oldest son, he's 12, they both got to experience a lot of this themselves. You know, our daughter lost friends when I came out as conservative where, like, their parents told them you can't hang out with them anymore because their parents are, you know, this, that or the other thing. I mean, I. Whether they were calling me a racist or whatever, which was so funny because they're all white liberals. Right. And my family's Latino.

[Robby Starbuck]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ryan Seacrest]

The chief complaint seemed to be that I backed the immigration policy of Trump. And if not only back, I'm actually, I would say to the right of Trump on immigration in the sense that, you know, I'm Latino. I understand very clearly what is happening at our border. I understand the dangers involved. And I will say what we just saw happen in the last 24 hours with El Salvador is a lot more of what it would look like in my world, you know, but for everybody involved. And it would send a very clear message and we would know longer have illegal immigration anymore. I think Trump is eminently reasonable when it comes, when it comes to immigration. And so it's kind of funny that was their chief complaint about me. You know, it's like, oh, you're the racist, right? It's, you know, it's, it's kind of funny. But yeah, no, they got to experience it. So they know, right. They know all of the pitfalls here. They're very intelligent and wise beyond their years. Our younger ones will definitely explain it to you because we have an eight year old and then we have a newborn as well. And, you know, it's interesting. The newborn is going to have a very, very different upbringing than the rest of them because he's coming in at a very different time. He'll never know his dad is like, you know, super creative, you know, person. It's going to be something very different. I mean, I'm sure he'll, he'll know I'm creative in some sense, but it'll be different, you know, so definitely lots of stories. But I would say, you know, what they'll get more stories about like what our family went through in Cuba because that's something that generationally you want to bake into the DNA of your. Because you want them to be the defense mechanism against it ever happening again.

[Robby Starbuck]

It's so hard. I mean, I was born in the Soviet Union, so I have a very kind of similar story. But it's so hard because these kids, we live in Florida now, so it's actually already a little better for them. We lived in New York. I was able to kind of draw the parallels and say, look what happened to my family in the Soviet Union. Look how easily it could happen during COVID in New York. But in Florida they live this magical free life where, you know, in New York I had them like not tell people what I do for a living in Florida, like tell everybody, I don't care. But you know, they still run into some resistance sometimes. My 12 year old son is arguing with girls at his school because he's a big Elon Musk fan. And they're like, elon's a racist. And you know, how, why do you like him? And my son's like, really into like technology and science and he's like, elon's a genius. Genius.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yeah.

[Robby Starbuck]

But you know, they're gonna have to.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, you know what's, you know what's funny is like seeing, I will say this, it's very interesting with my oldest daughter who's 16. When she was younger, she was absolutely the outcast when it came to politics because she was always in your family.

[Robby Starbuck]

Oh yeah.

[Ryan Seacrest]

In her pure, in her peer group, the entire peer group was very, either afraid of politics or they had sort of accepted hook, line and sinker, sinker the, the left wing, you know, ideology. Now today, I think honestly every friend of hers is extremely to the right, you know, if not at least a center right person. But most of them are on the same page of like, they're full, full bore on board with the MAGA agenda, you know, which is so different from just, you know, eight years ago. And I think it's that young people had a couple of things happen. Number one, Covid, they had to experience the totalitarian control of largely Democrats and experiencing the failures. Yeah, yeah, Nothing made sense and it was illogical at every, every step of the way. And then they had to experience the Biden administration's failures. When it came to just how you live a normal life. These kids are coming up realizing, oh my gosh, we're going to be saddled with all this debt. Am I ever going to be able to own a home? You know, what are these things that should be stabilizing forces in my life? And they're not, they're not around anymore and they're realizing the failures of policy. The other thing too is kids are getting smarter than we give them credit for. They have total access to all information. And it's much harder to lie to these kids today than it was, you know, 20 years ago about politics because they have everything at their fingertips and they can go and they can question you. And what are teenagers and young people in college really great at? Questioning authority. So they're going to go and question it. Exactly. And the other thing we have going for us is the rebellious spirit of maga, right? The rebellious spirit of America. First, when you have all these like overgrown hall monitors who are your teachers in school and they're all harping pronouns and you know, all this ridiculous stuff, what is your average, especially young male going to do? They're going to rebel against it. And so in some beautiful way, the left took it so far with the indoctrination in schools that they actually created a monster and helped hand us these young men who, you know, in their eyes, I'm saying monster. In reality, what they've made is, is free thinking young people who are going, no, we don't want to be a part of this control mechanism, a part of this system of indoctrination. We're going to think for ourselves. And they've adopted, I would say, you know, really great political values at this, at this stage. And so we have a job to do. Obviously we can't fail these young people, but if we don't fail them and we actually do a good job, I think we're going to see a very different electorate in the coming years.

[Robby Starbuck]

So I met you for the first time recently and I told you that I think that you're, you've really found your calling. And you know, as I was getting ready for this interview, I was googling you and like, you know, looking up stuff that I wanted, wanted to discuss. But you know, a lot of the articles about you say that you target companies to, you know, stop them from having diversity and that kind of thing where I think, you know, you help companies that have leaned too far into the woke world probably are hurting their bottom lines and are being, you know, catered. They cater to like the Human Rights campaign, which is obviously a far left special interest group which uses their corporate index to equity index to get companies to do what they want. And you Sort of help them find their way back to sanity. How did you get into that and what's that like?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, you know, it's interesting. Kind of goes back to the first answer about why I came out politically, you know, with my, my great grandfather. You know, what was happening with dei, it was essentially a Trojan horse for very far left politics.

[Robby Starbuck]

Yeah.

[Ryan Seacrest]

And the people who are running these DEI programs are left wing activists. And so recognizing that, it's one of those signs that I was talking about earlier that things can go terribly wrong very quickly. It's why Elon Musk has spoken up about this and the President has spoken up about this. Because it's not that including one another is just a bad thing. That's not the sense that anybody gets. It's not the argument I'm making. It's that DEI in itself, the actual ideology is poisoned by left wing politics and none of it means what it purports to mean. And everybody pretty clear on that now because they've experienced it a lot like what I was talking about with young people. Why they've shifted. Right. They experienced the opposite. They experienced the thing and now they're going the other direction. Well, same thing with adults in the workplace. They experienced ei, and now many of them are going in a different direction because they saw how divisive it truly was and how discriminatory it turned out to be. And so for me, I saw, you know, really an opportunity with the following. I had to make a difference. And that's how it started. As I said, I think we can make a difference on this front and tear away some really divisive racist policy if we make enough noise and make people aware of what's going on. And ultimately, yeah, we were very successful and have been very successful at it. I think that my life has given me a lot of different unique tools and I sort of fused them all together for this. So it's unique and I think it's doing a lot of good. Because if you think about it now, eight months, I guess we're nine months later after we started this campaign, dozens of companies have changed their policies because of us, wiped out all the WOKE stuff. And so we're talking about millions and millions of workers in America who get to go to work and not have politics injected, not have all of these divisions injected, not have to worry that their race is going to stop them from getting promoted. Everybody being treated fairly and decisions made on merit. And that's the way it should be. Right. And the companies that we've helped do this. They've actually performed better in the marketplace. They're doing great with their values. And so the exact opposite of what the left wing media tried to tell us for the last decade. If you stray away from this, you're going to go bankrupt. Well, actually it's the companies that embrace the eye that are going bankrupt. You know, like today it was Forever 21 just declared bankruptcy. A company that had fully embraced DEI. In fact, their head of DEI had even admitted to a Fortune reporter that essentially, you know, there's a quote that what they were doing wasn't quite legal. And you know, it's, it's interesting to see how these companies that are going down so often, if you see a Chapter 11 announcement, you can just go and Google search that company name + diversity, equity, inclusion and you will see they had a DEI department. Yeah, it's, it's interesting and I have not found a case otherwise in recent history.

[Robby Starbuck]

Amazing. We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Markowitz Show. What do you worry about?

[Ryan Seacrest]

You know what's interesting, like, I think I'm actually extremely normal. You know, I just worry about the normal dad stuff. You know, like I worry about my kids getting hurt. You know, I worry, I have a 16 year old, so I worry that once she starts dating, she'll get her heart broken. You know, I worry like our young one who just learned how to ride a bicycle is going to get her knee scraped and stuff like the normal worries. But you know, they're also the types of things where I know they have to happen. It's like it's growth takes pain sometimes, right? So if I protect my little one from ever getting her knee scraped on a bike, is she going to ultimately learn certain things to keep herself safe? It's going to be much harder for her to learn them. Right? And you try to teach them, you try to tell them the right thing to do. But if they, if they ignore it five times in a row and then they go and they get their knee spread, right, what are you going to do? Like they learn from that, right? My oldest daughter, as much as I never want her to go and date and get her heart broken, you know that that's kind of a rite of passage for everybody. People get their hearts broken and you learn from it. And you know, so that's the stuff I worry about is dad stuff. When it comes to the politics of the world, I've learned that worry gets you nowhere and you're much better off planning and Having, you know, very clear, concise direction that you're wanting to go and that you need to execute very clearly. And to execute clearly, you can't be clouded by emot. And so I'd say that's the truth. Politically, I don't allow myself to get fearful or anxiety ridden about anything.

[Robby Starbuck]

Last four years weren't anxiety ridden.

[Ryan Seacrest]

You know, honestly, I didn't let myself get like that. I mean, it's hard to explain, I think a unique ability to turn off some of those subsets of emotions and just focus on the actual problem and how you fix it and how can you be a part of changing things. And so that's where I tried to gravitate towards. I will say there were moments during the four years of Biden administration where I did get very angry. There were certain things that happened, you know, where I just. You can't help but get angry. When Lake and Riley was murdered, you know, I thought about my own daughter, you know, that's headed to college, you know, not long in the future because she's graduating early too, from school. So she's just brilliant kid. And you know, as a dad, like, like, you see that girl? I saw my own daughter, you know, and so I see a country that's not protecting the kids who matter the most, you know, our future. And we're not protecting them from violent criminals. Like, who are we? You know, so there were moments like that where I got very, very angry. But in general, like day to day anxiety, it gets you nowhere. You know, even in a situation like that, you just need to be focused on how to create changes. And that's my mindset has always been wake up every day and get a W, no matter how small it is. Like, get some kind of win, even if it's tiny. Advance the ball.

[Robby Starbuck]

Love it. What advice would you give your 16 year old self?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Hold fast and work, you know, work hard. I think that's the thing when you're 16, it's very easy to see, you know, that things in front of you are not working out and to give up. It's very easy to give up at 16. It's very easy to give up at 17, 18, 19, 20. And the thing that you've got to realize if you're at that age is that it's not the end. It really does actually get better. And you need to just put down your head and work. Do the work, don't give up. You know, every successful person is defined by their failures. And I mean that to say, like, I've failed 95% of the time in my life at things that I tried to do. And, okay, it doesn't seem like it because I've been incredibly successful at 5% of it, and that 5% that I've been incredibly successful at, in the end, I only got there because I never gave up during the 95% of the time that I failed. And a lot of people give up along the way, and they'll say, it's too hard. The system's rigged against me, whatever it is. Right. The truth is, there were people more talented than me. There's people smarter than me. There's people who have many different things where they're just better at that thing than I am. The thing that I always beat them at was that I didn't give up and that I will stay on it. One way, it's been described to me as I'm like a dog with a bone. Just, I'm relentless. And so I would tell young people, be relentless. You know, don't give up at the first sign of failure. Like, failure is just a symptom of succeeding. You just have to continue, continue, continue until you get there. And almost every great thing that our country has achieved comes with sort of that Same map where 95% failure rate. You finally succeed, and everybody only remembers the success. But you personally, if you're the person behind it, you remember the failure. Because had you not gone through it and had you not given up, you wouldn't have ever gotten to the success. And so I think that's probably the thing that separates exceptional outcomes from very average outcomes or bad outcomes, is not giving up and persevering and being relentless.

[Robby Starbuck]

I love that. Well, I ask all of my guests to leave us with a. Something that advice, piece of advice that they could offer my listeners on how they can improve their lives. What do you got? I mean, you just gave us a lot.

[Ryan Seacrest]

So I. Yeah, just I. I gave a little bit of therapy session. Oh, you know what? Actually, I. I do have one. This is. This is probably the single most important thing to me. It's actually something I. I'm. I'm planning on making a video about to talk more and expand on. But essentially, we have a problem with people being overly emotional in society and making their decisions out of an emotional place. It's the reason why the mainstream media like Huffington Post, and I won't even call them mainstream, they have such a low readership at this point. But they're legacy media, right? Like Huffington Post, New York Times did this a number of other papers did this. They ran with these headlines saying Elon Musk denies Hitler killed millions. And so why did they run those headlines? Why did they run those headlines? They ran them because they could technically get away with it. And it was because he actually posted something that was pointing out that Hitler and Mao and Stalin didn't personally go out there and kill millions of people each. He was pointing out that when you have a fully adherent public sector that all believe one ideology, it can be incredibly dangerous because they're the ones who were willing to carry out the evil murder barbarous plans of people like Stalin, Hitler and Mao. And that's what he was pointing out. But the media doesn't want your average scroller to know the context behind what he's saying. Instead, they want you to scroll by and believe that Elon Musk is Hitler or he's a Nazi and he loves Hitler and he's excusing the Holocaust. That's what they want people to believe. And so the truth is, how do you get there to that belief? Because you have those friends in your life who believe those things that they scroll past with these headlines that are just fully a farce. And the truth is they get there through being overly emotional. We need a society that is reasonable. And when you get too high or too low emotionally, we need to remind people to take that eagle eye view, pull out, look at it as an unbiased observer, the best way that you can possibly do and ask yourself, is it really this bad or is it really this good? Whatever it might be, however high or low you are, are. But ask yourself a series of questions to figure out if you're really making good decisions or if you're really being fair to the people that you're judging. I think that's something that societally, if we want to decrease division and we want a more intelligent society, better outcomes for our kids, we're going to decrease the amount of decisions that are made with emotion and increase rapidly the amount of decisions that are made with pure reason. And that's probably the thing that I would tell everybody to kind of take a moment and look in the mirror and examine their own life and how many of their, you know, decisions are making out of pure emotion. You know, I've seen so many relationships break up over this too. My wife and I are blessed to be married 17 years. And I think a big reason that we have such a great marriage is because we approach any problem we have very rationally, like, you'll never catch me and my Wife being like, you know, screaming about an issue, like, that's not how you solve problems. So, like, I guess to pin this all down, it's, it's that we have to remind ourselves to be the adults in the room and to look at things very objectively and work on that. For the overly emotional people, work on it. Try to work on having a more balanced response to things. Because your emotionality, if you look at your life, I want to ask you, where has it gotten you? Has it gotten you anywhere positive or has it only led to negative outcomes? When you look at the totality of your life, you're going to trend negative. I guarantee you. If you're an overly emotional person, which means that if that's the sense you get, you examine your life and you go, oh, yeah, it's brought me mostly negative outcomes. I'm sure there's a few positive. Right. But brought you mostly negative ones. You need to look in that mirror and go, okay, it's time to do that work, to peel back, you know, all this and get to a better place.

[Robby Starbuck]

I love that he is Robby Starbuck. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll check out that video. I actually needed to hear that today more than you would know. Thank you so much, Robby.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Thank you.

[Matt Walsh]

Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Markowitz Show. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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