 So, Dan Price is the CEO of a Seattle-based company that made headlines back in 2015 when he announced that he'd be cutting his own pay in order to give all of his company's 120-plus employees a massive pay raise. And back in a 2019 interview that he did on the Kelly Clarkson show, which apparently is a thing that exists that I was unaware about, he explained how the reason why he did this was actually because of a conversation that he had with one of his employees who was working two jobs and struggling to make ends meet. And had she not opened his eyes, he wouldn't have done this. And now, sometime has passed and after all of the fear-mongering and the attacks that he received from Fox News because he chose as a private business owner to do something that was favorable to his employees, he's announcing the results. His company did not go under as Fox News hosts had predicted. In fact, it's doing better than ever. So he writes, Six years ago today I raised my company's minimum wage to $70,000 per year. Fox News called me a socialist whose employees would be on the bread lines. Since then, our revenue tripled, where a Harvard Business School case study in our employees had a 10 times boom in homes bought. Our revenue tripled, headcount grew 70%, customer base doubled, babies had by staff grew 10 times, 70% of employees paid down-dead, homes bought by employees grew 10 times, 401k contributions grew 155%, turnover dropped in half, 76% of employees are engaged at work, two times the national average, customer attrition fell to 25% below the national average, we expanded to a new Boise office and enacted $70,000 minimum wage there. Our highest paid employee makes four times our lowest paid employee down from 33 times. So we always hear this argument that, you know, these companies, they just can't afford to give their workers a living wage or offer them benefits because if they do that, you know, they're not going to be able to make a profit, except he proved them wrong. And he shared a compilation on Twitter of Fox News saying all these terrible things about him, and even called him crazy, essentially, take a look at this compilation. We're going to discuss the implication of this and, you know, speculate on what they're saying now and whether or not anyone who attacked him had a change of heart. What I wanted to announce today is we're going to have a minimum $70,000 period for everyone that works here. Have you seen the CEO of the Seattle based company who raised the minimum wage at his credit card processing company, the $70,000 per year lunatic of all lunatics, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments. I hope this company is a case study in MBA programs on how socialism does not work because it's going to fail. Thoughts on this guy? First, personally, I think he's a socialist, but this is the man who's doing it. Are you a socialist? Well, look, you know, I don't support a minimum wage increase because it's a job killer, but he's a private business owner. If he wants to do this in between hugging trees. I have a hunch we're going to know Dan Price for a really long time. But the 130 employees of Gravity Payments, I think they're going to be on the welfare line. So I have to say, Eric, I think he's pretty foolish. I think he's pretty foolish, pretty foolish, pretty foolish, pretty foolish. The whole world pretty much was against it and said we would fail. People started having babies, buying homes, paying down debt. They got healthier people, multiple people lost 100 pounds, beat cancer. A home ownership skyrocketed, especially first time home ownership. We had 70% of the people at the company report that they had paid down debt. Happy employees make a much better company. For the second time, the CEO of Credit Card Processing Company, Gravity Payments, is slashing his salary in order to raise the pay of his employees. Three, two, one. We purchased the company in Idaho, but we've been successful enough that we're able to afford to do it. And we're very proud of that. We have nearly tripled our processing volume from a little over three billion dollars to over 10 since we implemented this. You were laughed at. You were called a socialist. You were told that the business would fail, that this would be a study at Harvard Business School and how not to operate a business. And actually, now you're being studied as an example of something that worked for you and clearly worked for these workers. I think what Dan has done is not only extraordinary for his own employees. I hope it sets an example for companies all over this country. The sacrifice, you know, was worth the experiment and worth what came afterwards. Dan, I salute you. It is astonishing to me how often Fox hosts use the word socialist and very clearly have no idea what it means. They just use socialist as a synonym for things that they think are bad or stupid. Unbelievable. Now, it looks like Dan Price is getting the last laugh. Will people like Stuart Varney, who's a supposed expert broadcasting on Fox Business News, will he come out and apologize for calling Dan Price a lunatic because Stuart Varney claimed that this was a really dumb idea so much so that it makes you a lunatic to do something like this because your business very obviously isn't going to be able to sustain itself if you treat your employees like human beings. So what now, Stuart, looks like you have to eat crow as do the rest of your colleagues on Fox News and Fox Business. Now, the reason why Stuart Varney and other Fox hosts were against this when in theory, I mean, as capitalists, they shouldn't have a problem with this, right? What a private company chooses to do, a decision that they make. That shouldn't really be offensive to a capitalist. But the reason why they denounce this is because if Dan Price was able to prove that this works and treating your employees like human beings and actually paying them a living wage isn't bad for business, perhaps the government might want to replicate what Dan Price's company is doing and they can't have that, right? Except, I mean, they have nothing to worry about. Our Congress has been paid for by large multinational corporations. We can't even get a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage. So for them to denounce this and go out of their way to try to make it seem as if what Dan Price was doing was terrible. Now they all look like idiots. But of course, they're not going to apologize. They're not going to report on the truth here. They're just going to sweep this under the rug. I mean, Charles Payne at least covered it on Fox Business. But look, overall, what Dan Price is doing here is phenomenal. I absolutely appreciate the message that he's championing. And I hope that what he's doing catches on. The issue, however, that I have with this story, and I hope that this isn't the main takeaway for liberals. And I suspect maybe some will take this as the main conclusion is that workers shouldn't have to rely on the kind heartedness and generosity of their employer. They shouldn't cross their fingers and toes in hope that maybe their employer will have a conversation with them and recognize their humanity and actually choose to treat them a little bit better. It should be mandated. They should have to treat their employees better. They should have to pay their employees a living wage. This isn't some sort of a solution. Like hoping that CEOs do the right thing and give their employees more benefits. That's not going to solve the issues because, one, they're not going to do that. And two, even if Dan Price is doing a good thing here, even if he's different than the rest, still the structure in America, the way that companies are formed and created and exist as organizations. It's inherently exploitative. The employer employee relationship alone. That system in and of itself is bad because even if Dan Price is unilaterally choosing to do good things, the fact remains that his employees living good lives and even having a livelihood will hinge on his willingness to let them have that, right? So it shouldn't be the case that at any point in time, if your employer doesn't like you, you just can be let go like that and lose everything, not just your livelihood, but your health insurance, which is tied to your employer. We have to have a new system and that is democracy in the workplace. They call Dan Price a socialist, but what is socialism? Socialism is when workers own the means of production. Does Dan Price's employees actually own the company? Is this a worker owned co-op? No. So for them to say that he is a socialist in and of itself is extremely stupid and proves how ignorant they are. But what should happen is there should be mandatory worker co-ops. When our employers control so much of our lives, we should have democracy in that space. We have democracy when it comes to politics. Why can't we have democracy in the workplace? If employees dedicate their lives in every waking minute they have to their employers, shouldn't they actually have a little bit more control over what that company does? Shouldn't they not have to rely on what CEOs tell them to do? Shouldn't it not be a dictatorship? This is what I hope people take away from the story. There are other scandals involving Dan Price, that his brother apparently sued him after he made this announcement. And there's disputes about why he was being sued. The claim is that perhaps Dan Price made this decision not necessarily out of the goodness of his heart, but because in order to deny his brother profits from the company, I don't care, honestly, the scandals itself. That's not interesting to me. The story itself, I think, is good, right? I think that the message that Dan Price is promoting is good. It's beneficial and I hope that it catches on. But again, it's not the main takeaway that I want people to have. The main takeaway is that it shouldn't be like this, where we have to cross our fingers and hope that there's more Dan Price's out there. It should be mandated. The employer-employee relationship shouldn't exist, it's exploitative. People should have a say in what their companies do, not just one person or a small board. People should have a say. People should own the companies that they work for.