“I Got Banned For Saying This!” Steven Crowder Reveals Who’s REALLY Running The US Economy

Graham Stephan (0:00)

What is something that the left is fundamentally right about that the right does not want to acknowledge?

Jack Selby (0:05)

Nothing.

Graham Stephan (0:14)

How difficult is it to change someone's mind?

Steven Crowder (0:18)

Depends.

I have plenty of friends, I'm fine having a few enemies. They're all in the same room, they're all going to the same parties. And when they all share the same worldview, it's a blind spot.

Jack Selby (0:30)

How much money have you lost by not being PC?

Steven Crowder (0:35)

Many tens of millions of dollars. I've had people say that I was a hate speaker because I said soccer was, I do, I think so.

Graham Stephan (0:42)

What political beliefs have you changed your mind on?

Steven Crowder (0:44)

I don't know that anyone has ever actually convinced me to take a more left position.

Graham Stephan (0:48)

Optimistic or pessimistic about America in 10 years?

Steven Crowder (0:51)

People aren't going to like this answer.

Graham Stephan (0:57)

Steven Crowder, thank you so much for coming on The Iced Coffee Hour.

Steven Crowder (0:59)

Thank you for having me on The Iced Coffee Hour without iced coffee, by the way.

Graham Stephan (1:03)

Our apologies.

Steven Crowder (1:04)

I was wondering if you were going to have it.

And I was like, hey, do you think, I turned to Lane, the brain, my producer, I said, do you think they just got locked into this where they were having an idea, someone's like, I know, Iced Coffee Hour. And then you realized you always had to have inventory and you're locked in.

Graham Stephan (1:17)

That is 100% true. Is it? Yeah, so people think that the name means something. It hardly means anything. And it was just our viewers said, we kind of like this. It's kind of got a ring to it. We signed up for it and we can't change it now because it's been like seven years.

Jack Selby (1:31)

We had no idea the podcast would be this big.

Steven Crowder (1:33)

Oh, that's what everybody says. Oh, stop it. You guys worked your ass off. This didn't just happen by accident.

Graham Stephan (1:37)

I didn't know it was going to be this big. But you can still work hard.

Steven Crowder (1:40)

Yeah, I know. But maybe just going forward, you should call it like your beverage of choice hour because people will be expecting iced coffee.

Graham Stephan (1:46)

That would be newtonic. Shout out Chris Williamson. I love a newtonic. But anyways, I first found out about you in late high school, early college from the Change My Mind series, you would go to her college campuses, put up a sign that said Change My Mind and have some really fascinating political and sometimes philosophical or psychological discussions. I'm curious, how difficult is it to change someone's mind?

Steven Crowder (2:09)

It's not that difficult if you categorize them as two separate people. So I was at Fox News for four and a half years, and everything was like a quadrant view. And we would be in the same room sometimes. Imagine us all here, but we want to make it seem like you're in DC and you're in New York where one time I got suspended because the guy was sitting next to me and I said, hey, high five my quadrant. And I reached into his and the producer was like, you can't do that because people thought you were in different cities.

So in comedy and stand up comedy, if you can tell a joke in four words that you're telling in ten, do it in four. Brevity is a soul of wit.

With debates that are on air on legacy media, it was about buying up as much time as you could, repeating the same point or saying nothing. It's about eliminating accountability, sounding smart, but buying up time.

And you do it for like four minutes, five minutes. I said, well, these are not as interesting as the conversations that I have off air. I actually wrote a book, pitched it. It was turned down by every major conservative publisher. They said, absolutely not. No one's ever going to want to read this. We want the Obama blueprint was big. Like we want doomsday books right now. That's what sells. I pitched the idea as a segment. I pitched the idea to do it online. No. So I just went out and did it. The first time I did it, I think was in a sandwich board, because we couldn't actually get a permit to go anywhere. You'll have a conversation with someone and they'll go, I never really thought of that. But there are two kind of separate groups of people. This was the book treatment that I wrote. There are those who are default liberal, less so today. But back in the day when we were raised, it was rock against Bush symbol on all the Republicans. It was ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, CNBC. I came up under Andrew Breitbart where everything was left. In other words, if you were not politically active, but you were going to take the default position according to what you watch, what you listen to, you would be a liberal.