Ian Carroll had spent years following the GameStop story when he finally sat down to make a video about it. He chose a research post he admired and started trying to explain it.
Then he got stuck.
Reading something, agreeing with it, and being able to explain it to somebody else turned out to be different experiences. The questions that stopped that first video helped Ian find the approach he wanted to take: letting people see him work through what he was learning.
Tab had found Ian through his GameStop content. Here, he asks about the life that came before the videos. Ian talks about kitchen jobs, outdoor guiding, teaching, and trying to turn ultra-running adventures into something he could build a life around. He was searching for work that could hold his attention and give him something he wanted to share.
Teaching offered a connection between those experiences. His parents worked in education, and he had spent years around classrooms and conversations about how people learn. Social media gave him a different room to enter, with people asking questions about money, institutions, and the stories shaping their understanding of the world.
As Ian explains the ideas that drew him into independent research, Tab follows the questions outward. They discuss media ownership, public influence, conspiracy theories, and alternative history, moving between Ian's interpretations and the things both men are still trying to make sense of.
That uncertainty becomes part of the conversation itself. How do you stay open to a new explanation without letting it harden into something you can no longer question? What happens when changing your mind has to happen in front of the people who followed you?
Ian began with a video he thought he understood. Finding the gaps gave him a reason to keep asking, and a different way to invite people into the search.
In their own words
Read the conversation
Follow along with Tab Salsman and Ian Carroll as they talk about GameStop, independent research, and the experiences behind Ian’s online work.
Show full transcript
Transcribed from the source recording. Timestamps may differ from the edited video.
Ian Carroll
Obviously, conspiracies exist. The question is, which ones are real and which ones are not, right?
Tab Salsman
Well, thank you, Ian, for doing this. Um, a little backstory. It's kind of interesting as you're hanging out here in Austin.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, dawg.
Tab Salsman
I'm at a party. You happen to be at that party. And I recognize you from all of the GameStop, AMC, TikTok videos that were floating around. And I always thought this. I always thought.
Tab Salsman
That guy has a good head of hair. It's what got me where I'm at. I've had to ask you, if we could, if you could come over, if we could talk about a lot of different things, and obviously, you also said, funny enough, you needed a haircut.
Ian Carroll
I had just been thinking about it like the day before.
Tab Salsman
It's getting way out of control.
Tab Salsman
So this is very serendipitous.
Ian Carroll
Everything in Austin has been very serendipitous. Like that was the first gathering I had been out to. That was the first, like, I had just gotten to town. And I mean, I've been meeting great people after great people connections after just cool things have been coming together.
Ian Carroll
And this is a great example of that. It's like, I need a haircut. Oh, you run a haircutting podcast. That's unreal. Let's go.
Tab Salsman
You know, the thing is, is I love getting to know people and I like to get to know people who are particularly in things that I don't know anything about, right? Like I would love to have.
Tab Salsman
Medical people and neuroscientists and quantum physicists. Like I love this because I've had people like that in my chair and I've learned so much from them. But the thing that I wanted to like, really get to know with, with have bringing you on is really like, how did you arrive at this place of like, what it is that you do?
Tab Salsman
Because I'm gathering right now, very quickly that somebody is following this podcast. They have no idea who Ian Carroll is, but they're going to get to know who Ian Carroll person is. Not so much the avatar you present through social media. First thing's first, what are we doing with your hair?
Ian Carroll
We're mostly, I mean, mostly you're doing whatever you want with it.
Ian Carroll
Because every time I sit down in a haircutter's chair for my whole life, I've always thought of it as like, you're an artist and you have a canvas. And I'm an artist and I know that I hate people messing with my, my, Yeah. So I'm not very attached to what the end result is here. You're going to make something awesome.
Ian Carroll
But we've been working on this kind of like, um, initially I asked for a mullet in Boise and I asked an 18 year old who had just graduated from hair school for a mullet.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And that was when I had hair longer than yours all right on my back out of control. And I was expecting, so I told her as a joke, like for the election, I want a mullet in Idaho.
Tab Salsman
Okay.
Ian Carroll
I was expecting like a. Mullet and instead she gave me like the most, uh, Hollywood short backed, like trim proper thing I've ever seen. And it was a great haircut. She gave me a great haircut. She kind of saved me from myself. But we're sort of letting the mullet become a little more of a joke now, while we're keeping the front a little fun.
Ian Carroll
But this, the last one I got was in Arizona and the dude gave me a great cut that grew out in a really not great way. Like it just, these layers here are such that the hairs here can get longer, are longer than these. And so they can come in a weird way where they sit weird in my eyes. This is just getting to be like a whole, this swoop is just this giant now that you missed the part a little bit, um, where my hair naturally parts.
Ian Carroll
So these hairs here are constantly wanting to fall like this. Um, and so I think what we're going for is something that's like a mullet Hawk. That, uh, is mostly just about having fun, but is also just like an easy business look in the front with an easy little, like, I want this to be quite a bit shorter so it can be way more under control.
Ian Carroll
In general, what I do, like my haircare routine is zero. I just don't, I almost never use shampoo or conditioner. I get it wet. And I put a hat on and when I put it under a hat, as it dries, it falls out like that.
Tab Salsman
Okay.
Ian Carroll
Every time.
Tab Salsman
Awesome. Uh, you're not the first person I know who doesn't really rely on shampoo or conditioner.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So it's, uh, one of my clients, he said, uh, what made it, what made him not want to start washing his hair or if he did, he would do it very infrequently.
Ian Carroll
Infrequently. And I started getting family owned. Product like founder and family owned brand products and stuff. And I've kind of, I worked with a few early on and now I just kind of still working with what was sent to me.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
But, uh, you know,
Tab Salsman
it said that
Ian Carroll
low key,
Tab Salsman
most, he goes, haven't ever noticed that all the people who are, I mean, he's a correct term. Unhoused can all have a full head of hair. I was in, uh, what's he said that I remember I was driving through downtown LA, like not too long after that. And I know it's like all the unhoused all had a lot of hair and I was like.
Tab Salsman
I don't know how accurate that is, but it was just a really interesting observation. It's a
Ian Carroll
funny meme either way.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. Right. So, um, I get it. That's fine. So let me just kind of repeat back what I heard. You want something that if you need to clean it up, it's very easy to clean up, but you also want something that's fun.
Tab Salsman
Uh, so mullet hawk being more wide than through here, the mullet back and through here. Yeah. And then what are we doing with your little Superman sweep up here?
Ian Carroll
Um,
Tab Salsman
do you want this to be kind of like off your face like that after it dries with the towel? I mean, that's how the hat or. Are you okay with some pieces just kind of falling down?
Ian Carroll
I want it to be much shorter than it is so that when, because it will inevitably fall down, especially when it is like, yeah, you know, cleaner, not salted from sweat.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. Cause all of this right here is all
Ian Carroll
exactly
Tab Salsman
like here, here and here.
Ian Carroll
And so it'll naturally kind of swoop in like this once it's falling and I'd want it to be falling in my forehead and not down into my eyes.
Ian Carroll
I'm a runner. So I want to be able to not have to wear a hat when I'm on a run. Um, because now I have to wear a hat.
Tab Salsman
Yes.
Ian Carroll
I think that a lot of the hairdressers that have done my hair since I've been in this look have thought that I'm really attached to this like. Thing here and I'm not, um, I don't, I don't like, maybe it's the right move for the hair.
Ian Carroll
Maybe it's not, I don't know. Um, I do like, like this swoop, it's often fun because it often will have like a cool swoop here with like one or two strands coming like this, which is like a cool, like movie look, um, that just kind of naturally happens when it falls that way. But I'm not attached to any specific thing other than like, to me, the utility to simply that it's not in my hair and not in my face.
Ian Carroll
Um, and I, I actually am finding that I like the mullet because I don't have to have this fate. Like your dude's faith or naturally like your neckline just looked like stupid and you have to get it cut back up every time because it's starting to grow down your neck.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um, and so it's kind of fun actually how the mullet keeps me from having to do that.
Ian Carroll
I'll keep
Tab Salsman
each your neck warm and limp.
Ian Carroll
Yep. And so, um, I'm totally up for you kind of just. Taking a stock of what is here and making choices about how it will fall best. Like how this part works and what is best to do with this chunk here. So I think that's the part that has given most hairdressers trouble of sort of figuring out how to make this part blend with the concept.
Tab Salsman
And do you use any styling products?
Ian Carroll
I never have in my life until I bought my first suit and went to my first, like, really important formal event, um, with, for this job. And so now I do have some kind of like low, like just some low key.
Tab Salsman
What type of product is it? We don't need to get into the specifics of the brand.
Tab Salsman
Like, is
Ian Carroll
it
Tab Salsman
a pomade or a cream?
Ian Carroll
It's like a pomade, I think. Yeah. I don't, I've never, I've not ever gone for like the hard hold, like stiff. Latino kind of like, um, but it's,
Tab Salsman
I always think of wall street.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
No, I've, I've got a few that just sort of give it a little bit of hold up. Um, just to kind of keep this swoop in place and I don't need it when it's a fresh cut and it's shorter because it'll just always fall.
Ian Carroll
Right. It's once it gets longer like this, that if I, if I were to go on like to an event and, and hope, like expect this to stay here, it'll inevitably wind up like. Doing Lord knows what, which is still, you know, great hair, but
Tab Salsman
all of this, like, I see what you're talking about.
Ian Carroll
It's a little out of control.
Tab Salsman
So I'm going to tell you what I believe the hairdresser before me was thinking is because your cowlick is right here. If you take this. Too short. It could potentially stand.
Ian Carroll
It does actually, when it's not So it's shampooed today. Yeah. And when it's not shampooed often, this is, this piece right here is doing this
Tab Salsman
Yes.
Tab Salsman
Sticky now.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
So this is where I wanna ask a few more questions about if you don't want the hair to be in your face when you're, we
Tab Salsman
could take this in many different directions. So. One is how prominent do you want someone to go like, Oh yeah, he has a mullet haircut. Like I could go through and take the size, not down to like the skin, but take it pretty short, nice and clean. Like very, like very, very, very classic right in through here.
Tab Salsman
And I could box that in right through here. Right. But, and if we can make this part look very, like very classic. But the shorter I make this, the more likely that this cowlick is going to explode, it's going to blossom. Um, with that, that means that this top area, I would want to cut it so it has a little bit more texture.
Tab Salsman
So it would look a little bit more like messier. So you could like get it when your cowl is dry, you could put whatever that stuff is and you move it in and then it just looks kind of like fun and wild intentionally versus It's trying to control a piece of the hair that it doesn't want to go in that direction.
Ian Carroll
I've always been a sucker for the wild look, even though my hair is so fine and thick naturally that it inherently becomes this kind of very like combed, like smooth look. Um, I've always wished I had like that. I mean, like I'm, I'm a nineties kid, so I grew up on like nineties boy bands. So growing up, I always like wanted that NSYNC like hair, which I know I don't have, um, but yeah, in general, like what I do, like between ultra running and weightlifting and like.
Ian Carroll
Being just a dirty hippie kind of in, in my nature, it's like, I'm inherently going to have dirtier, sweatier, messier hair
Tab Salsman
and that gets separation.
Ian Carroll
Exactly. And I like, I like that layered look. Um, and so I think that a lot of hairdressers I'm coming in with like freshly washed hair and they're seeing this and they're thinking, Oh, he wants a business look and it's like, no, not really, actually, like I'm, it looks good this way, but I'm actually more inclined towards the messier kind of layered.
Ian Carroll
Sort of looks anyways.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So you probably, like, if you had to do a short haircut, you'd probably be like, I, you rather have like the short, messy haircut of like Brad Pitt and like fight club.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Okay.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Which is a cool haircut.
Ian Carroll
It's cool haircut.
Tab Salsman
It's still my favorite. It's the. Coolest messy haircut of all time.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. And my messy, my messy haircut somehow winds up still with this like sick swoop in the front, which is like pretty dope. So
Tab Salsman
you should just, you should just go with Superman.
Ian Carroll
What do you mean?
Tab Salsman
Like, cause Superman has the.
Ian Carroll
Oh yeah.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, you should do it. I mean, you're tall enough to look like a superhero.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
My
Speaker unclear
hair
Tab Salsman
would totally do it. Seven, three.
Ian Carroll
No, I'm like six, six.
Tab Salsman
Okay, when you're not 6'6 everyone feels 7'3
Ian Carroll
When I meet people that are my height and we're looking eye to eye, we both think that the other person is taller, because we never are looking eye to eye, so we think we're looking up.
Tab Salsman
My friend Ryan is 6'6 and he gets weirded out when there's anybody taller than him.
Ian Carroll
Oh yeah, that's crazy.
Tab Salsman
And at my bachelor party, we were in downtown LA, and we got into the elevator because we're going to something, some bar thing for my bachelor party. And Glenn Big Baby Davis was in the elevator, and he's 6'9 6'10 And my friend was like, freaked out. Like, why? Because we just met, like, basketball players.
Tab Salsman
He's like, no, I get weird when people are taller than me. And I'm like, really?
Ian Carroll
I think it's awesome.
Tab Salsman
I think it's the strangest thing.
Ian Carroll
I think it's amazing.
Tab Salsman
When we shook his, when I shook his hand. Glen Davis. Okay. My, his palm, I'm not even kidding here, was the size of my whole hand. And I was like, Oh my God, this is a big fucking dude.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. And he was actually really cool. Yeah, fucking dope dude.
Ian Carroll
You know, last time I met a 6'9 person, I was like, dude, can we get a photo and can I like wrap my hand around your waist? And like, It was great.
Tab Salsman
Not like,
Ian Carroll
what do you think? It was great. No, it was great, dude.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. The tallest person I've ever met.
Tab Salsman
I was 16, no, 17. It was like a San Diego Comic Con and it was the Undertaker. And he had like four bodyguards around him. And all I could think is like, he doesn't
Ian Carroll
do that. Why
Tab Salsman
does he have these guys? He lives here in Austin. A lot of people live here in Austin. Every, every week I find somebody new lives here.
Tab Salsman
Okay. So let's do this. Um, if you're down, let's try and go for like a pool. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to pull a page. Out of the late nineties British Hairdressing book and what they did is they had this cool little, uh, mullet. It was more conservative of a mullet than what you have, but we can, don't have to play by those rules.
Tab Salsman
The thing that I like is they kept this really nice and kind and then they kind of did like almost like a faux hawk in the front.
Ian Carroll
Uh,
Tab Salsman
again, this was of the time of the faux hawk was like mainstream. This was like 98, 99 before,
Ian Carroll
before I was cool.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. Yeah. I've always said any time the people who do the investment banking and the wealth management, like those young kids, uh, that are in suits when, uh, in, in Newport beach, that, that office was called PIMCO PIMCO was right next to the salami.
Tab Salsman
So when the PIMCO guys came in wanting the stuff that we were into, we knew it was over. That's how we just knew. The trend, you know, was done.
Ian Carroll
New trend.
Tab Salsman
New trend. Like, they're talking about faux hawks and they're getting more ridiculous and more, more stupid looking. We're like, we're not doing any of this shit, you know?
Tab Salsman
So what I'm thinking about is before that, which is like almost early 2000, late 90s. UK
Ian Carroll
footballer,
Tab Salsman
David Beckham had some of the stuff where it was kind of messy. You kind of could do a faux Hawk. He can make it slip back and clean, but he had this back here.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Are you cool with something like a
Ian Carroll
hundred percent, man?
Ian Carroll
As long as you're having fun doing it and you think you're proud of your art. Well, I
Tab Salsman
like to think I like to do whatever I'm doing with pride, which is why I'd rather have a very long conversation and make sure. Because it may not be something I'd love, but if I can do well for you and it makes you happy, then I did my job correctly, you know, you're an artist too.
Tab Salsman
So it's like somebody said, um, someday, sometimes you get to do whatever you want. And other days you have to paint the kingdom the way they want to be painted. And I thought that was a really great analogy is what we're doing as hairdressers, because yeah, it is an art form. It was a temporary art. It's like Christa, right?
Tab Salsman
It's like installations the last six weeks and it changes and evolves. But at the same time, somebody's coming in wanting to look at their back. So what does that mean to you? Not to me, but what does that mean to you? Because I could give you this cool haircut, but if you're not going to use product, you're not going to use a blow dryer.
Tab Salsman
You're not going to do all this shit. Then I just set you up for failure.
Ian Carroll
The reason why I like what you've suggested is because it gives me the option to use product and stuff like that and to turn it into a couple of different couple of different vibes. Yeah. Could be very slick vibe or it could also be a very messy vibe, but it also sounds like it's going to look great and feel great when it's just like my average casual day with no attention.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So what I'm thinking about is actually like. So this part will be like right around, let me see, I'm sinking about somewhere around here, like up, right. And a random thing, if you'd look at photos of like really cool hair, it doesn't look good on like a person when people are searching is if you measure, measure the width here.
Tab Salsman
It's almost equal.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
There's like a proportions, like these weird ratios. A
Ian Carroll
hundred percent.
Tab Salsman
So I'm thinking somewhere around here, right? Because if I do that, that part with salt right around the middle of your forehead, right? Maybe a little higher. The cowlick in place. You know, you're okay with it being a little shiver in the front.
Tab Salsman
Absolutely. Cool. Cause it gives you a little bit more life.
Ian Carroll
Exactly.
Tab Salsman
And all that. And I'm thinking that would be the tallest part and then back here, it'd be a little bit shorter and crappier. It'll just kind of slightly increase because I'm thinking you see yourself from here. Everyone else sees you from the side, from three quarters and behind.
Tab Salsman
And so I'm thinking a cool profile look would be something kind of short and crappy and messy back into here. Again, allowing this cowlick area to like explode with chaos. Like that's what you want it to do and then have it get increased in the front and then here in the back, it'll go from short and then it will get into longer.
Tab Salsman
It's going to, your profile is going to go short to long, short to long this way. I think we're good.
Ian Carroll
And I think that the thing that I've been unsatisfied with with a few of the other hairdressers that have done this haircut for me in the last year is that they've let this stuff stay too long. Yeah. And it's, that's what's made this giant, like.
Ian Carroll
Uh, shelf of hair here that is just feels like this, like mop kind of,
Tab Salsman
well, I know one that's completely, most people are this, they want that length in the front. And so hairdressers are conditioned by clientele they have. So if there's something that seems really far removed from what they've experienced on a regular basis, they're not likely to dive into it because.
Tab Salsman
They don't do it enough to know the outcome. Yeah. No, we're here to set trends. We're not here to follow the trends. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, all right. Let's keep you up, man.
Tab Salsman
All right, dude. So I just scared you through the AMC GameStop timeframe. So that's 2020.
Ian Carroll
Yep.
Tab Salsman
To 2021. Yeah. 2021 really blew up. And you started, I believe, on TikTok.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. And I didn't start making content back then. I just started buying GameStop shares back then.
Tab Salsman
Okay. So I want to kind of like. Give you what I know, and I want you to fill in all the blanks.
Tab Salsman
Is that cool? Totally. Awesome. Yeah. So here's what I know about you. You started off with AMC GameStop. I believe they're like more Tik TOK videos, or at least that's how I remember having them get sent to me because I had a lot of friends were. They were into this. My wife started doing the stock market thing.
Tab Salsman
She, she got into the Robinhood. She was watching the zip trader. She was watching this and that she, you know, my wife also had her series seven investment license at like 18 years old. So this is something she was already interested in. I have no clue what I did know is that I've done the whole thing.
Tab Salsman
They're interesting from a cultural observation perspective that young people were finally getting involved. I thought it was also very ironic of what Robinhood eventually did. Very ironic of the name. Um, and since then you have taken this format that got popular and you've kind of like moved it all around.
Tab Salsman
What started you going down this, this thing? Cause you've amassed, I know on Instagram, you're like approaching 600, 000 followers. What's your Tik TOK? About
Ian Carroll
7 million.
Tab Salsman
That's insane.
Ian Carroll
That's a lot.
Tab Salsman
That's a lot. That's a lot of eyes on you.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. It's weird.
Tab Salsman
That's a lot of ice.
Ian Carroll
I'm very quickly too. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And let's be real. Like 50 percent of those people have a lot invested in this haircut. I'm not eluding my, like deluding myself about why the women follow me and some of the others. It's
Tab Salsman
the womb, right?
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean a little bit of clarification, a little, and a whole bunch of sort of elaboration.
Ian Carroll
Um, in 2021, it was January 2021 is when GameStop started to blow up and it became this huge news story. And I didn't hear about it until like the biggest day of the cycle. And my brother let me know because he, he's real smart, very similar, and he's got his eyes on things. And he, he like got my eyes on it.
Ian Carroll
And I watched. The big price movements and then it dropped and I got really into digging into Reddit and like this cultural phenomenon Like you were saying
Tab Salsman
yeah
Ian Carroll
of like like I'm a little brother. I'm a I'm an F the system guy I'm definitely even and this is before I knew anything. I was like a lifelong Democrat at the time I was a Washington State like not native, but I'd grown up there and
Tab Salsman
yeah,
Ian Carroll
was it into outdoor sports?
Ian Carroll
And
Tab Salsman
it sounds like your classic Pacific Northwest.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, she totally classic Pacific Northwest country. Yeah. And I guess to clarify, I had started to ask a lot of questions because during COVID plus BLM up there, that got me kind of just wondering about like what my kind of worldview was.
Tab Salsman
Okay.
Ian Carroll
Um, but I hadn't really like filled in any of those gaps.
Ian Carroll
I just had questions. And, uh, then getting involved, like, so at first I watched GameStop stock price go crazy. And then I kind of did a little research about why and what people were doing. And I realized that like the thesis. About short selling and about how like not so much that like, we're going to make money, but more so that like, we're going to protest the system by using their own rules against them to take their money from them.
Ian Carroll
And that just like spoke to my soul. So at first, if I remember correctly, I first bought bed baths and beyond right in like February of 2021 because I was like broke beyond beliefs. And it was cheaper and it seemed like the same movements. And so I think I bought a little bit of Bed, Bath Beyond and a little bit of AMC and then like a little bit of GameStop.
Ian Carroll
And as I did more research, I realized that it seemed like the other stocks that were involved were not the same as GameStop. And I sold the Bed, Bath Beyond and the AMC and just focused on GameStop. And I got really into being involved in reading those communities and reading those forums. And, uh, sort of learning along the way with all of them and that became this like multi year journey from 2021 through 2023, we're all locked down in our houses.
Ian Carroll
I was working as a ultra running guide and then because I had been in restaurants, I've been in cooking, uh, everything from dishwashing all the way up to being a chef and a kitchen manager through up until 2020. And then when restaurants closed down, I spent a year getting paid by the government to do whatever I wanted.
Ian Carroll
And that turned pretty quickly into like, you know, just, uh, I started writing books. I started making a whole bunch of art again. I just started learning French on my own just to like keep myself busy. So I didn't just like smoke weed and do nothing with my life the whole time. And, uh, as the, yeah, right. I mean, I'm felling in Washington and as the government money started to stop flowing, I had no desire to go back into kitchens with COVID restrictions.
Ian Carroll
It was like. Just
Speaker unclear
it
Ian Carroll
was not my vibe and it was like, I mean, kitchens are, I was already realizing the kitchens are going to kind of, kind of kill you. They're just like a lot of hard work, very little reward, very bad for your body and soul. Um, and so I was driving Uber eats, um, in between running guiding, cause running guiding is kind of, I mean, it's seasonal.
Ian Carroll
But it's amazing. Um, and I love it and I love the people I was doing it with that went on for a long time, just kind of observing what was going on with GameStop and doing my thing, guiding and driving Uber Eats and trying to make it. And I spent a year trying to do ultra running content because I knew that I had a lot of skillsets that matched with content.
Ian Carroll
I had done a lot of creative work. I'd done a lot of photography work. I understood like lighting and storytelling and writing. And, um, and I thought, what makes me special? Like, what can I monetize about myself? And I thought, ultra running makes me special.
Tab Salsman
You didn't want to do OnlyFans?
Ian Carroll
I mean, with hair like this.
Tab Salsman
Maybe. I mean, the mustache alone is very, I mean,
Ian Carroll
you
Tab Salsman
could easily play a plumber. I
Ian Carroll
mean, to be fair, it was early in the OnlyFans days.
Speaker unclear
I'm
Tab Salsman
here to lace a pipe.
Ian Carroll
And like, I had the wrong mindset. I had the mindset of like, what can I do that will be popular instead of what, what do I believe in? Like, what is true to me? Like what's my, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? What do I love? What's my Dharma? And as I was in that process of trying to produce ultra running content in this adventure content and realizing that the business model of that content is horrible.
Ian Carroll
Um, and. Also that it's not my Dharma because I like going on adventures for myself. Like when I go on, I've never signed up for an official ultra marathon, but I've run a whole, like probably dozens of, yeah, definitely dozens of ultra marathons, all solo self supported. Or as a guide supporting other people, um, cause I just hate signing up for things.
Ian Carroll
I hate bureaucracy. I hate like lines and all that bullshit, but I love taking care of myself and big adventures and trying to do what seems impossible. And so I eventually realized that my Dharma was, was learning and teaching cause I I'm the son of two teacher educators.
Tab Salsman
Um,
Ian Carroll
so like when I was a like grade school kid, my like.
Ian Carroll
My daycare was going and sitting in the back of the class at like teacher ed class at the college.
Tab Salsman
If you don't mind me asking, what were the subjects at your parents?
Ian Carroll
They taught teachers,
Tab Salsman
they taught teachers how to teach.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. So like my mom through, so they had both, they met when they were kind of teacher educating and working in schools that were sort of like lab schools where they were studying how educational works and how kids learn.
Ian Carroll
And then by the time I was a kid growing up, my dad was a teacher educator that mostly taught elementary ed. So he was teaching elementary teachers how to teach. And my mom became the principal of a really cool, uh, private school that was very much like. The execution of my dad's work and not to say that it was his work, but just say the execution of the concept of teacher at
Tab Salsman
that school.
Ian Carroll
And so I went to that school. So I was like dinner conversation was, how do you teach teaching? And then my school experience was being taught by some of the greatest teachers like I've ever, you know, I could ever imagine. And then I quickly started volunteering there. When I went to high school, I went back and started volunteering as a.
Ian Carroll
Improv theater teacher, and then as a afterschool daycare, and then as an assistant writing teacher, and then as an assistant, like summer school science programs. So my, like from 14 through 26 or seven, I kind of bopped in and out of and around through all sorts of bizarre, cool teaching jobs that, uh, we're all sort of like kind of off the record, kind of on the record, kind of like intern, kind of like.
Ian Carroll
He's just Ian, because it would be like a parent would recommend me or a teacher that I'd worked with in the past would recommend me. And I had no, I have no high school diploma. I just kind of like slipped through the cracks and just like,
Tab Salsman
so you didn't graduate high school?
Ian Carroll
Nope.
Tab Salsman
Really?
Ian Carroll
No. And it's a, it's a long story, but basically
Tab Salsman
I, I, I do find it really interesting that individuals, like I wanted to graduate early and my parents told me I needed to stay in school for the social aspect.
Tab Salsman
Uh, at that point I wanted to be like, do you know who your son is? Yeah. Right. I am the most social person. Yeah, exactly. So like, uh, I looked at school as a hindrance on me being able to actually like grow a hundred percent. And, um, so like, I don't, I'm not the biggest fan of. Formal schooling, because I don't think it benefits everybody.
Ian Carroll
Yup.
Tab Salsman
And it's a, I always call it the teaching paradox, um, which this is what I call it. There might be a technical term for it. You might relate to what I'm talking about, but in school, you learn about all these amazing brains, these amazing icons, right? You hear about like Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, right?
Tab Salsman
You hear about Galileo and all these people who like basically said, fuck the system. But in school. You're taught about all these great revolutionaries, but you can't do that in that institution. It's very interesting.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, it's very duplicitous in a certain way.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, it's a paradox. And it's like, like, we were supposed, we, you want us to be, this is to be like these people.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. But at the same time, you don't want to say, do any of these behavioral traits.
Ian Carroll
But stay in line, sit down, shut up.
Tab Salsman
Exactly. And so, that to me is one of the, the, like, Like most like grueling, you know, no, that's cool. Family guy, but it grinds my gears, right? It's just like, what the fuck?
Ian Carroll
I mean, that's the story of like my parents work their whole lives.
Ian Carroll
The story of my education too. I couldn't agree more, man. And I mean, realistically, I dropped out because I got pneumonia and failed classes based on attendance, um, in my final term of senior year. So it was just like, do I want to go back to be a super senior just to get this piece of paper? And the answer was hell no.
Ian Carroll
Um, so I traveled and started doing, I started, I went and traveled to Guatemala and taught fourth grade in Guatemala. Um, for what would have been my super senior year. And that totally changed the trajectory of my life to traveling. And yeah, I've, I've spent probably like. Three or more years cumulatively in Guatemala at this point, working and living.
Ian Carroll
And
Tab Salsman
do you speak Spanish?
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Yeah, fluently. I mean, at this point it's like, it's, it would be broken fluent today, but it would come back immediately. It's
Tab Salsman
still much better than my,
Ian Carroll
so I was like, I was a hotel man. I was teaching fourth grade in Spanish to my own children, um, in like a little village, and then I was a hotel, like bartender and then a hotel manager.
Ian Carroll
And
Tab Salsman
so you had to speak,
Ian Carroll
yeah, I wasn't working in it. Um, super fun, super interesting. I mean, that's just kind of like. That's that sort of like crunchy kind of like Northwest kid that we were talking about of like traveling, seeing the world, like backpacking, got into rock climbing, stuff like that.
Tab Salsman
All the people I've ever met who grew up in that area, I just found them to be very mellow.
Tab Salsman
They're grounded.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
I didn't feel there was an air of pretentiousness. I felt that they're like,
Ian Carroll
I would, I would disagree strongly now, but, but back in the day,
Tab Salsman
it's the same way I've talked about California is, you know, uh, but everybody I know, cause they're all now my age. Right. So it's not like I'm talking about people who are 19 and 25, but when I was 25 and 19, the people that came from that area were like, that's cool, man.
Tab Salsman
You do
Ian Carroll
exactly.
Tab Salsman
And that's that, that, that was always like what I thought. It was not to mention my favorite band and favorite bands were all from the grunge era. Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. The home of grunge.
Tab Salsman
Oh yeah. And Jimi Hendrix. Don't forget Jimi
Ian Carroll
Hendrix. Yeah. Yeah. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Northwest, even though I very intentionally left the Northwest now.
Ian Carroll
Um, but we got onto that because I was talking about education because I realized that my Dharma has always been to teach and I've always known that. And I actually kind of got out of teaching because. I was realizing that, I mean, aside from not having an degree. So the path is hard to, to weave there.
Ian Carroll
But, um, I also realized that education happens where attention is being paid and more and more in classrooms. I was, we all have been noticing that like, Oh, the kids aren't paying attention to their teachers unless you're an incredible teacher. Which is the goal, but they're paying attention to their screens because their actual teachers are all of the influencers that are influencing their thoughts and behavior.
Ian Carroll
Mm-hmm . And so realistically, if you actually get down to the heart of what education is, influencers are our teachers. Now, whether we like it or not, that's the nature of the, the phrase influencer is they're influencing youth. And so I kind of was realizing that like, for better or for worse, if you want to be a teacher in the future, that's gonna be inside of a screen.
Ian Carroll
And that kind of scared me off because it's very scary to put yourself out there and it's very scary to try and fail. And when you have no followers, obviously it's like you're, you feel like you're going to fail. So I kind of went through like four or five years of just kind of like that was where I stopped teaching completely and was just working in kitchen and then just doing ultra running and stuff like that, which was awesome.
Ian Carroll
But eventually through the Instagram stuff, trying to do ultra running Instagram, I realized like my Dharma is teaching and I need to change the direction of this and launch something totally different. And through a whole bunch of kind of like tumultuous and, uh, really synchronistic events, I closed down the old Instagram and launched this new, I'd never been on Tik TOK before.
Ian Carroll
I had kind of avoided social media, like the plague until trying to do that Instagram thing. Um, and I launched the Tik TOK, which I'd never been on, but I had been studying the, the. The landscape for about a year now at that point, while I was doing the other one. And so I launched on TikTok with what was going to be GameStop content, right?
Ian Carroll
I, uh, had pulled up because I was thinking like really a thought process in my mind started with what kind of got me over the hump of fear about the teaching thing and about trying to, trying to do it. Was being in GameStop and seeing all this great research into financial corruption happening within our little.
Ian Carroll
You're just gonna read it and bubble. And no one's making content about it. No one is spreading it out to the general public, and I've, and we all know that like, if you want the word out, you need short form video these days. And so, I was like, I'll do
Tab Salsman
it. Yeah, and short form is only getting short.
Ian Carroll
Big deal.
Tab Salsman
It's like, if you don't book someone in the first three to seven seconds,
Ian Carroll
it's
Tab Salsman
done.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
It doesn't matter, like you have to You have to quit in Tarantino, the clip, you have to start with the most exciting part first and then maybe do the explanation later on. A hundred
Ian Carroll
percent for better or for worse.
Ian Carroll
It's just, it is what it is. Deal with it.
Tab Salsman
There you go. It's like, it's like if it's raining outside and you don't have any, you choose not to bring an umbrella. Don't complain.
Ian Carroll
Yep. You're still dancing in the rain.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. I'm going to take this part shorter. I'm already starting.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, dude, dude. Yeah, dude. I'm against
Tab Salsman
automatically wants to stick up.
Ian Carroll
So don't worry about it. I'm not worried about it. I'm um, I was like ready to pull the trigger on GameStop content. Cause what I was basically going to do is just pull up the DD, meaning due diligence, like the research that everyone's doing, pull it up, cite them as my source, be like, Hey, this guy, this user made this great post and this is what it says.
Ian Carroll
And here's a short from video about it. And I pulled up the first one that I love that was like this amazing one that changed my whole perspective on like the stock market and everything. And I sat down in front of my camera and was like trying to figure out how do I condense this and turn this and translate this intelligent short form video content format.
Ian Carroll
And it took me about 20 minutes to realize that I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about. Um, I don't know anything about the stock market despite being in this forum for years. I don't like, I don't understand finance. I don't understand how money works. I don't understand how global politics, I don't understand fucking anything.
Ian Carroll
And all of my opinions are based off of like reels and shit.
Tab Salsman
Somebody might say, had you gotten that diploma, maybe I'm just fucked.
Ian Carroll
Maybe you'd be an expert. I know, right? There's
Tab Salsman
always that asshole in the fucking comments
Ian Carroll
that says
Tab Salsman
something.
Ian Carroll
Well, they're, they're not wrong entirely. Like had I gotten a diploma and gone to school for business or something, I would have at least had some foundation in something.
Ian Carroll
I would argue that it would be a very corrupt foundation that was funded by the people I was trying to hold accountable.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, but at the same time, like the, I don't think anyone goes into business school going, I'm going to learn about corruption. No, not at all. Presented as the, the, the ethical moral standard.
Tab Salsman
And there's a whole nother separate ethics and moral standard case. Implied just watch the movie wall street. Like just watch that, like that right there sets the tone, all of this. So. You're doing these short form videos. You don't know what the fuck's going on.
Ian Carroll
Well, I'm not doing them yet. I didn't even publish
Tab Salsman
that.
Tab Salsman
No, I'm sad. You're doing these. You don't know how to explain it. You realize you don't know much of what's going on.
Ian Carroll
I don't know. Yeah. I realized I don't know anything. And so it took about 20 minutes to basically shelve the whole idea and realize if I'm going to do this, I should do it honestly from my, where I'm at.
Ian Carroll
I don't, you don't need to pretend to be someone. You don't need to pretend to know what you don't know. You don't need to like. I was still in this mindset of trying to produce what I thought people wanted, what I thought would work. And I realized that what I'm here for is to learn. And as a teacher, if you really teach, you know, that the process of teaching is the process of learning and the process of like learning and teaching is intricately just.
Ian Carroll
It's intimately tied together. What I needed to do was learn and share the process of learning, because I also knew strategically that no one wants to be preached at from someone with zero followers. If you have zero followers, you're a nobody and you know nothing regardless of your credentials. That's the thing about new media.
Ian Carroll
And so I knew that it would be more successful if I didn't present myself as telling people what's real, but rather presented myself as learning along with them and highlighted the information instead of highlighting myself. And so I made my first video. About who owns the media and I just pulled up, like, I just Googled it.
Ian Carroll
It was like, who owns CNN, who owns NBC, who owns Fox news. And that basically led me to stock, uh, like stock ownership charts, which leads you to black rock and safe street and Vanguard being the top owners of everything. And it was right at this time in our kind of zeitgeist when everyone was down with the black rock conspiracy theories.
Ian Carroll
And, um, And when TikTok had just released 10 minute videos and was pushing longer videos intentionally, which I didn't realize at the time.
Tab Salsman
Which is kind of crazy because everything has been. Is, uh, if you do like right now, like Instagram, if you have a video over, uh, three men, it will not be pushed to new followers.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So they're intentionally saying that's great that you did this, but no one's going to see it unless it follows our rules of engagement.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. And what TikTok was realizing, I believe at the time was that. If you could get creators to make quality, long form content, people could watch like three to 10 minutes, you could serve a lot more at, you could serve a lot more like advertising dollars.
Ian Carroll
You could, you could get a lot more watch time and keep them on the app for longer. I think was their, their. And I don't know if that proved true or not, but regardless, I benefited tremendous tremendously because my very first video went extremely viral, got hundreds of thousands of views. My second video went viral.
Ian Carroll
My third video went viral and I got 300, 000 followers a month for the first three months. And so within one week at the time I was, I was paying a very small amount of rent, like, you know, 500 or something to my, uh, a month to my parents to rent out like their studio apartment thing, um, through COVID.
Ian Carroll
Cause I had moved out of my long story with my roommates. Um, and I went to them, I was like, Hey, listen, guys, um, I know rent is due in like two weeks here. Um, and I don't know how to explain this to you, but like, there's a thing going on with this social media thing I'm doing right now, and I'm already making money on it and it's going to be crazy.
Ian Carroll
And. We should probably defer this month's rent so that I can just start making videos and not keep wasting my time driving Uber Eats, making 4 to deliver burritos and stuff. Because this is like, this is already clearly happening and we deferred that month's rent and by my second month on Tik TOK, it might've been my third, but I'm pretty sure it was my second.
Ian Carroll
I made 12, 000 on views alone with no sponsors or brands or anything. So it was like an immediate launch to the moon. Um, I got very lucky in that regard, but there was some strategy involved and it's hard to separate the two. And so at the first, what I was doing is I was just like. I basically like humbled myself back down to ground zero, which is, you know, easy when life has kicked you in the teeth a million times on your way to where you are.
Ian Carroll
Um, and just been like, I don't know anything. I'm just gonna start learning and asking questions. And I, you know, one question inherently leads to the next, to the next, to the next. And so that just started this process of me trying to figure out like the big picture of what's going on, who controls the world, who controls the systems in our lives.
Ian Carroll
Like what about history is real? What is lies? Like what is, what are the politicians doing? How is money working? Cause when you like, I think we all, especially like leading into the, since 2008, especially into the COVID era, we've all had this growing sense in the zeitgeist that there's something seriously wrong in this world.
Ian Carroll
And we all have a very different opinion, I think. About what exactly is wrong, but I think we all understand that at a certain level, it's corruption, whether you're on the liberal side and you think it's like corruption in like the Republican politicians and Trump and like the billionaire class and stuff, or whether it's on the Republican side and you think it's corruption of like our social fabric and our ideals and like, like subversive stuff or whether, you know, everyone has their own kind of view of what the problem is, but it all centers around corruption of.
Ian Carroll
Financial control of things, I think in some form, because we all know that money rules the world. And I think we just arrive at different perspectives of like which money is controlling the world in which direction. Um, and at the time I didn't really have a horse in the race because I had been raised very liberal and I had voted for Obama.
Ian Carroll
Um, you know, I was that guy. And, but I had also kind of had that shattered by COVID and by BLM, especially. Because being in near Seattle during BLM and watching that kind of liberal mindset from the inside really did not square with rationality for me. And so I sort of had, was in between the two world views.
Ian Carroll
At the time. And so I just started digging into the money side of it at first. Um, and intentionally I stayed nonpolitical for a long time because I wanted to not alienate people so the conversation could be as balanced and as focused on the money as possible. And I knew that eventually inherently looking for the big picture truths would lead to politics.
Ian Carroll
But for a while, I just stayed with money because I, I knew that I wanted a solid foundation of understanding like the real power systems before I kind of got caught up in all the propaganda and all the, you know, the moment you get into, I mean, money too, but politics is just so fraught with lies on all sides.
Tab Salsman
I mean, this is the reason why I've always said, like my public cast, I'm not going to ever share. My own personal views, mainly because I'm not wanted on either side. And I, and I say that very publicly. If somebody asked me, I'm like, look, I don't really get classified into one side or the other. And, uh, I think there's a Chris rock, uh, thing.
Tab Salsman
He goes, there's some shit I like on the left and some shit I like on the right. And I've always told everybody they go, who do you like? What do you like? I go. I'm the weirdo. I don't care about the people I care about the policies that are put in front of me. Right. And
Ian Carroll
it's weird that that's weird.
Tab Salsman
It is.
Tab Salsman
This is what's strange, right? That looking at the policy, is that policy going to be beneficial to me? My family, my city, my friends, my family, you know, like clients, like I, I'm looking at those things, those policies, like everyone thinks like you, you've heard this for so many years. Maybe I've only heard this.
Tab Salsman
You know, uh, the national elections don't matter as much as the local elections. And I don't think that message really hit home until people were affected during 2020 to 2022 based on the choices of their local elected officials. And then that's when everybody was like, Oh, these things actually matter.
Tab Salsman
I don't like this, or I do like that. Right. And it happened across like, Every state that we're dealing with people waking up to the fact that maybe I don't actually like these things, or maybe I like what's going on over there. And so you have the great migrations, right? I'm trying to always play from a point of Switzerland here.
Tab Salsman
That's my thing. I always tell people I'm a political junkie. In the same way you have a person who's just obsessed with sports statistics, like you ask them, what's your favorite team? They go, I don't really have their team, but I'll tell you what's really exciting to watch right now is there's this tennis player and then they go, well, what's the greatest team right now?
Tab Salsman
Well, the greatest team is over here in the NBA because we're like, they're like, I like that.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Because, um, I've had clients that work for different presidents, administrations. One of my good friends from high school. Uh, he was the one who, he was a campaign manager for
Ian Carroll
Fetterman.
Tab Salsman
So between having clients that were from George W.
Tab Salsman
Bush, and then another friend who works for Fetterman, who is the ground game for Iowa for Budapest, I feel that like, I have such a variety of people in the world that I don't ever really take a hard stance position because I think what you're trying to do is you wanted to open up this area of conversation.
Tab Salsman
So people can come in and go, here's what I know I'm wanting to learn something. And then after I'm presented with information, I now can sound my own opinion.
Ian Carroll
I mean, when I'm glad I talked about the educational side of it, like my parents background and that background, because that is fundamental to where I'm coming from and what I'm doing.
Tab Salsman
Yeah,
Ian Carroll
is I. I had, I mean, I don't have a higher education, um, and that, you know, there's value to having a higher education, but my lower education was good and not because of anything like technical or specific about it, but because it, um, it really instilled in me a hands on approach to understanding how we got to know what we know, how did the academy of ideas that we currently live our lives operating off of evolves.
Ian Carroll
And that is through a process of inquiry and debate. And I would argue that in the maths and sciences, in the STEM fields, it, it evolves through a process of inquiry, which is the scientific method in general, you know, applied to these different fields. And in the humanities and the social sciences and the arts, it evolves through a process of debate, more or less, you know, generally applied to each of those different fields.
Ian Carroll
And that is fundamentally a, a process that is not partisan, right? The process of inquiry is a process of asking a question, looking for evidence, doing tests and experiments, seeing what happens, drawing conclusions, re rewriting your hypothesis, and continually learning. More and more and more, our education system is moving away from that.
Ian Carroll
And definitely more and more our science and political theater systems are completely divorced from that. And I think that COVID was a great, like not just COVID about the like medical stuff, but COVID just about like politics and like the world and everything. Um, and so, so
Tab Salsman
this was
Ian Carroll
like your big wake up.
Ian Carroll
It was definitely when
Tab Salsman
it was your wake up.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I woke up in 2020. It took me a couple of years to get the guts and I posted my first video. In May of 2023. So I'm still less than two years into this. So it's been a wild ride.
Tab Salsman
So my timeline of discovering you is warped because I thought it was wrecked.
Tab Salsman
A
Ian Carroll
lot of people think so. Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
But how do I know that that didn't actually happen? Because I have some fruit of a loom stuff.
Ian Carroll
I know, right?
Tab Salsman
Mandela effect, right? No, but it does feel like I, I also wonder because there was so much going on during that time. It doesn't like those years bored and they blur, they do not feel like there is a cutoff.
Tab Salsman
I feel like 2020 starts in spring. Like it doesn't actually start. It didn't start in January, it started in the spring because that's when everything was like radically different.
Ian Carroll
Yep.
Tab Salsman
And then it didn't really like the 2020 didn't really lift until about like a year ago.
Ian Carroll
I feel like the veil didn't even lift until this presidential election.
Ian Carroll
And I don't mean that in a political sense. I mean that in kind of like a, there were no vast shifts. It was like a slow, gradual easing. But like I was living up in Washington state where to this day there are still signs up. There are still mask mandates at certain stores. People are still wearing masks in their cars.
Ian Carroll
And so like in where I was based, yeah, the 2020 atmosphere never really lifted. And there was no shift in that policy ever until this election it's felt. And maybe that's because of the life I've lived in, like the traveling I'm doing, but
Tab Salsman
yeah. Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. In general, it's just been a very weird timeline.
Tab Salsman
So yeah. So you're up in the Pacific Northwest where I was there like last fall or something like that. And I was at the Oregon Valley and I did feel that those things were still present and present and also very normal. Like it wasn't, uh, like you don't see any of that stuff here in Texas.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
You just don't.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. It's like a blanket. It's like a. It is a monoculture that, um, to where like up in Bellingham, Washington, for example, I knew a lot of people that disagreed with it, or were actually like Trump voters or, you know, just, or were liberals that weren't down with the sort of authoritarian nature of it or the non bodily autonomy of it, but it is such a, um, the, the mindset is so homogenous up there with so few pockets of dissent.
Ian Carroll
There's no like. Okay. There's no diversity of opinion in the cities up there that those people know very dang well to keep their mouths shut. Um, and I was slowly becoming one of those, um, to the point where like I'd be on my cooking job and, and like the guy next to me on the cooking line all day is spending all day just like spouting, uh, really intense political opinions.
Ian Carroll
Um, which are normal opinions to have in that part of the country, like, but without even giving a moment's thought to the fact that I might have a different opinion than him, um, and the NRS team. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was honestly like, I mean, I'm not, not trying to complain about it. It's not like it was like oppression, but it feels, it feels a little oppressive to be in a place where like, you just stop voicing your opinion.
Ian Carroll
You just stop communicating. Cause it's like the. I mean, I mean, like legitimately you'll lose your job in a lot of those situations. If you start voicing those opinions,
Tab Salsman
I understand. I mean, I always maintain a public appearance of my social media, which is, I only post hair, family, food. I never say, Hey, this person's great.
Tab Salsman
Go vote for them. I've never done that. I don't feel the need to do that. I don't feel like that's really. Um, my, my job, I don't feel like that's my purpose. My purpose is to raise two boys and to be a good husband
Ian Carroll
and to
Tab Salsman
give great haircuts.
Ian Carroll
That's it.
Tab Salsman
That's it. That's
Ian Carroll
all I want to do. If only 99 percent of America thought that way, we would save the country immediately.
Tab Salsman
Well, you were talking about your, your aha moment. So I wanted to ask you before this, cause you said something earlier about not really liking authority.
Ian Carroll
Yeah,
Tab Salsman
where does that come from this? I mean,
Ian Carroll
good question.
Tab Salsman
That's why I'm asking because you don't have this uh, I feel like because visually when you think of people that are very rebellious and they have a tendency to want to Almost like an animal that's poisonous.
Tab Salsman
They have bright colors
Ian Carroll
and they look that way
Tab Salsman
they to warn you by the way I'm a little dangerous
Ian Carroll
now
Tab Salsman
and to have These things where you're a little bit more, uh, what's we're looking for. I
Ian Carroll
mean, I look pretty clean cut. I look pretty crude, right?
Tab Salsman
Yeah. Mustache crew cut.
Ian Carroll
I mean, I look like I could be like an ex jock, like sports player and stuff.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, absolutely.
Ian Carroll
Good question.
Tab Salsman
You don't have any sort of like wild colored hair, facial tattoos, piercings. Your, your style of clothing isn't to like draw attention to make people. It's very simple. Oh. Uh, almost as plain as a white t shirt. Yeah, growing up in the heavy metal scene in Southern California.
Tab Salsman
I also had a lot of friends that were in punk bands. They call them music and they're very visually striking people. And they are also very much against authority. So like, I think people kind of, uh, wait, if you will visual with also that, where you have someone who looks very, uh, very, very. Basic let's use that word very, very, very plain, very, you know, John Smith or, or, you know, Mike Jones, whatever names that sound very, very vanilla.
Tab Salsman
And then to find out that they have quite a wild, uh, streak in them is, I think it's always surprising to people.
Ian Carroll
This is a very perceptive question. Um, because this is not something that is, uh, I have a very, like, I don't have to think about my answer at all because it's very intentional. Um, I grew up, uh, which one came first?
Ian Carroll
Skateboarding came first. I mean, the, the, the hate for authority, I think comes from being a younger brother. And the, the, the thing that I've always hated the most, my greatest fear and my greatest, um, uh, enemy has always been powerlessness. There's nothing I hate more than feeling powerless. Like whether that's being pinned down by your older brother.
Ian Carroll
Or just the powerlessness of like being in a situation where you have no control. Um, that is the thing I hate the most in the world. And there's no better example of that than an oppressive government or like your school, like, you know, telling you how it's going to be or whatever it is, you know? And so I don't, I mean, I assume that's related to how I naturally fell into like loving skateboarding, not so much team sports.
Ian Carroll
And then I got really into graffiti art and I wrote graffiti, um, not always. You know, in the right places, I
Tab Salsman
mean, it wasn't publicly sanctioned graffiti.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Non sanctioned graffiti through middle school and high school. I don't know if my mom actually technically knows that yet, which I assume she assumed it, but, um, don't
Tab Salsman
send her this podcast.
Ian Carroll
Oh, she'll find it eventually. It's no big deal. You know, we've been through much worse. Um, but like, yeah, I was like sneaking out, like in middle school, high school and stuff to like, go write graffiti. Um, and I was like a skater kid, a snowboarder and stuff. And at the time I looked the part, like I was dressing that way.
Tab Salsman
Well, I mean, I see the holes.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I got big plugs. Um, and I, I mean, I used to have super long, crazy hair. I got tattoos. Um, and I mean, I'm from like the hippie world. I've, uh, I've done a whole, all kinds of music festivals. I used to work music festivals doing harm reduction and security. Um, I've toured the California coast doing music festivals.
Ian Carroll
Um, so I'm totally from that world. And then at a certain point I realized, uh, I don't really know the thought process that went into deciding this, but I've always loved, um. What's the word I'm looking for here is my favorite people are those that don't judge books by their covers, but are wise enough to understand that the world is complex and that they might not know everything and that, that they are lifelong learners.
Ian Carroll
And those are the people that are, that don't, uh, just immediately assume you are as you appear. And so I, now I intentionally appear. In a different way than I actually am so that people that assume that I am just this like kind of like vanilla normal looking kind of like center of the road, dude, will treat me that way.
Ian Carroll
And I can immediately identify that they're treating me that way.
Tab Salsman
Yeah,
Ian Carroll
and, and it's not that I'm like, then I dismiss them or don't like them, but it's like, it, it kind of, it makes me aware that like, maybe they're not going to be the most like. Maybe they're not the person I'm going to have the conversation about the nature of psychedelics with, right?
Ian Carroll
Maybe they're not the person I'm going to have a conversation about, like, whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or not with, right?
Tab Salsman
Yeah, no, I'm with
Ian Carroll
you. Um, and so I actually almost started using it in my mid twenties as a way to, um, filter people. Um. And find people that are truly like open minded and like, and cause those are my people and, and I mean, I still have a lot of that in me, but I also threw, you know, I got into working out and I got into health and fitness and I got into running and all these other things that, yeah, feel free to do whatever you want with
Tab Salsman
those guys.
Tab Salsman
I'm just looking for your, uh, symmetry here. Yeah. I'm just making sure that we're good. So that way we'll be getting into this top area. It's like.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Now that your hair is dry and seeing your hair is very straight, you know, I'm just looking like, oh, well this bevels out a little bit. And so I just need to, you know, sorry,
Ian Carroll
no, but yeah, you're very perceptive to notice that I don't look like that rebellious spirit.
Ian Carroll
And in a lot of ways I have tempered it and found balance, um, uh, which I attribute hugely to my brother. Um, he's always been the balanced one and I've always been the crazy one. And my mom's greatest fear my whole life was that I would fall into hard drugs and fall off the face of the earth and do something horrible.
Ian Carroll
Um, and it wasn't an unfounded fear. Cause when I was young, I was a total wild child, total thrill seeker. Um, like I was the dude, like jumping over roads on my snowboard and like sneaking out and getting into trouble. Like, but I was fortunate and they had instilled enough sort of like positive values in me and enough sort of like, uh, uh, I guess like aspirations for greatness that I always had this little voice in my head of like, don't ruin your life.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um, and I had enough wisdom to understand what will and will not ruin your life, at least to a certain degree. Um, so I stayed, you know, a relatively same course while being a total experience seeker.
Tab Salsman
It's funny you said like, will it will not ruin your life. Like I know so many people who, uh, when I say so many, yeah, not hundreds, but definitely closer to 20.
Tab Salsman
Uh, who went off to go to college and college was what exactly messed them up. They had no understanding of not going out every night. Yeah.
Ian Carroll
You
Tab Salsman
know, so like they, they experienced freedom for the first time and what happens. Academic probation, and then, you know, doing the right thing, let them down the wrong path.
Tab Salsman
Right. So like, I always think it's interesting how then you also have other people who start off. Sounds much like yourself where they start off very wild, very early. And then by the time they're at that age of like they're in their early to mid twenties, they kind of go. I think I'm done here.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
It's like four scale.
Tab Salsman
Now I'm going to go back home.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, exactly.
Tab Salsman
I'm done.
Ian Carroll
Yup. A hundred percent. I mean, I've always, I'll always have that streak in me. That's how I do what I do. That's who I am. But, but certainly through. I mean, really, I attribute a lot of it to, uh, working out to finding fitness and health. Cause I, I grew up very malnourished.
Ian Carroll
I have Crohn's disease or something similar. And yeah, it's, I mean, it's not diagnosed because so my mom has Crohn's disease and it took her 47, I think, years for a doctor to diagnose it. And it was her eye doctor that finally caught it because you start to go like, I think it's that you start to go blind with certain symptoms and they were like.
Ian Carroll
And she started to go blind and her eye doctor was like, what the hell is going on? And so, but she had been like suffering from these like extreme, like she has almost died multiple times has lost multiple parts of her intestine, all the like all kinds of stuff. Like I grew, as I was growing up, she was on almost 50 pills a day.
Ian Carroll
Um, and then as I was hitting puberty and the symptoms started, the same symptoms started to appear in my life, she was finding a diet solution that is very similar to like a carnivore or a like. No carb diet kind of a thing that totally turned her life around. And suddenly it's like. Two pills and four vitamins a day.
Ian Carroll
And so I realized, fortunately at an early age of like, Oh, I have the same thing and I have the solution right in front of me. And although it's a lot of work to like, you know, make, if you want a muffin, you make it out of almond flour. And if you want a snack, like you, you cook some meat, but Oh boy, the change, the transformation of how you, of how I felt, I went from like, I didn't even understand what it meant to feel like a whole sheet healthy human.
Ian Carroll
And so in finding health and then finding fitness and then working out.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
That just changed the game in a big way.
Tab Salsman
You're probably going to get a chair in your water now.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I'm not going to drink anymore. Yeah. Probably better because we don't want to go pee during the, until we're done here. So.
Tab Salsman
All right.
Tab Salsman
Cool. So this is where we're at right now. You got your.
Ian Carroll
Heck yeah, dog.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So. I'm going to.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. I think you're picking up exactly what I'm putting down on this.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um, and I assume you're going to kind of like put those sideburns under control later too.
Tab Salsman
I'm going to wait till we're all done. I think our sideburns are kind of like the, I, like there's certain parts of the hair cap that are like.
Tab Salsman
Putting the cherry on top of
Ian Carroll
the final detail.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. It's like when you're doing like a yogurt parfait, like you can just put the yogurt wherever, right? But you want to make it look nice. You want to make it a little bit controlled. Then you got to figure out do you want to put the berries on the
Ian Carroll
fruit?
Ian Carroll
So
Tab Salsman
to me, it's like yogurt, berries, granola drizzle the time.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. You're speaking to the chef and me, dude.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. That's the way you do
Ian Carroll
it. You can't garnish before the meal's done.
Tab Salsman
And that's what this is
Ian Carroll
to check out that faux Hawk with the curl. That's what's up.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So this is going to be cool.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
So, so you started off with just learning and just sharing your exploration.
Tab Salsman
You're inquiring, which by the way, I think we don't have enough. I don't think we have enough people who are Chariots in the world.
Ian Carroll
Oh, totally. We
Tab Salsman
just don't. I
Ian Carroll
mean, the education system in not all cases, but in many cases is designed to sort of like. People like, uh, railroad teachers into kind of perpetuating a system that kind of kills curiosity.
Ian Carroll
It's no fault of 99 percent of teachers. It's just, you know, the system perpetuates it. That's what they're
Tab Salsman
told to do. Yeah. Yeah. They're taught, you know, like. I'm doing math homework with my son who's in second grade and he's showing me how they're doing math. Yeah. And I kept telling him, I'm like, this is, I go, I understand that your teacher told you to do math like this, but it's way hard.
Tab Salsman
He's like, no, let me show you. And he shows me, I go, can I show you a real fake? He got really upset at me because I'm showing him something different. He goes, I have to do it like this. I have to show my work like this. And I go, I understand you have to do this. Let me show you the way that. Your mama and I learned how to do adding and subtracting, like very easy.
Tab Salsman
And he's like, Whoa, this is easier. I'm like, why did they change all this stuff? Like, why did they go? Because I can see how my son's getting confused. I'm looking at this like 95 steps or exaggerating, but it feels like 95 steps to do something so simple and like, you just do this and that
Ian Carroll
over time, I feel like, as you can, and this is, you know, it's a different version of this in every state and different testing and different plate, but like in general.
Ian Carroll
Over time, I feel like education is skewed away from teaching the fundamentals of thought and how to perceive and understand and ask questions and find answers. And it is skewed towards systems, teaching kids systems that are, that cut them off from that ability and instead are rote memorizations. And techniques that don't apply beyond the, for the, you know, the context in which they're taught.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um, and, you know, there's definitely a conspiratorial edge to why that would happen, and I don't know, I don't necessarily believe that there's a conspiracy to it, but I certainly have seen the trend from the inside and the outside of the education system.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um, and it's, it's heartbreaking coming from a world where I.
Ian Carroll
I very much grew up in the world of how to teach children the most like from like systems thinking and like curiosity and inquiry and how to teach themselves and. And I also grew up in a place where like I worked in, I went to, and then worked at a school where we saw the results of those systems, creating brilliant thinkers, like for, like, I'm way dumber now, but when I graduated from that school where my mom was the principal, um, I went into high school, three grades ahead in math, two grades ahead in Spanish and two grades ahead in science.
Ian Carroll
Um, and then I immediately started failing every single class at public high school because it was so boring that I was just screwing off. And checking out a class and like just playing pranks. And
Tab Salsman
isn't it funny that the people I've always thought about this, like I was taking college night courses at 16.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, that was bored. Exactly. And they didn't offer the philosophy and ethics classes at a high, at a college level in high school. That was, um, stimulating to me. And I wonder if one of my sons, if not both of my sons. Are sort of in that same world where they're, they kind of tune out of school. Not because they can't do it, but because their mind is thinking about far more exciting things because they want to learn that they're not getting taught, uh, the things that are of interest because they're dumbed it down.
Ian Carroll
I would argue that 90 to 95 percent of kids probably are in that that boat, like way more than people, most like parents or people think because. It's not just a problem of their dumbing down, which they are, and they have been for a long time, and we know that teaching, and that comes right back to like the George Bush, like Obama era of like teaching no child left behind to the lowest common denominator and keep everyone at that denominator.
Ian Carroll
But now actually, I think that especially like our generations, especially Gen Z generation realizes that our kids are growing up in an information saturated world that though it doesn't, they don't, um, the information doesn't present in the same way. And what we think of as intelligence isn't the same.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Um, they know so much more than we could possibly understand. And if you don't listen for how they're communicating that intelligence, like how. The world has changed from the world we grew up in. It's really easy to miss the fact that like, Oh, this kid is light years ahead of my understanding of things.
Ian Carroll
They're just learning about it from a world that I don't understand.
Tab Salsman
I was telling my wife last night, cause we were talking about social media and this and that. I said, we were not raised to be equipped to the reality in which we live in. My kids are going to be more equipped if things don't change drastically in the next 20 years.
Tab Salsman
It's a very, very odd thing to be thinking about is that, you know, you're only able to really understand and handle with due respect. I mean, let me get all this hair off you.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, totally.
Tab Salsman
All right, so I'm going to, let's do a quick check with the hair. The front still needs to go short.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, a little bit.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
A lot.
Ian Carroll
Oh yeah, you haven't really shortened it at all. No. You just kind
Tab Salsman
of textured it. I was just trying to get. splattering yogurt in
Ian Carroll
the bottom.
Tab Salsman
I'm just trying to get the unnecessary off so I can start seeing like these pieces.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. And see what it's going to do.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So that's where I'm like, okay, now I know what I need to be doing to get that to work. So I would style your hair by pushing this all forward and then pushing this up versus writing your hands all the way back. Think of your hair like a wood grain. If you go against the grain, it does, it's not smooth.
Tab Salsman
It's rough. So your hair going back is against the grain. Your hair going forward is with the grain or the way you'd want to cut steak. I can come up
Ian Carroll
with. I'm totally with you, man.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. I, a client actually brought that to my attention. He goes, I think you need to cut with the grain on my hair. What do you mean?
Tab Salsman
I did the haircut. Perfect. By the both the way it's supposed to do. And it did not work out. It's in a layer. Right. It didn't exactly.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
And
Ian Carroll
uh, you're exactly on point. Perfect.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. So see how your hair wants to move forward and that's why these pieces, that's why they're leaving them longer. Cause if you're pushing your hair back, it doesn't.
Tab Salsman
So the modification of how you would style your hair, I would recommend is just push this all forward and then lift up what you want up in the front.
Ian Carroll
Yep.
Tab Salsman
Cool.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. No, I like what you're doing up there. I'm not stressed at all.
Tab Salsman
Good. I'm glad one of us isn't now. So this whole thing has really turned into like, you just now diving down a bunch of radicals.
Ian Carroll
Absolutely. Yeah. It's totally evolved.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. I mean, uh, Um, let's, let's not like tiptoe around, you're, you're hitting some things that are some very sensitive subjects for a lot of people. Oh yeah. And you know, I've always been a fan of, you know, I don't want to say controversial or I definitely like.
Tab Salsman
Contrary personalities, because I had a client and I said this in another podcast, but I'll say it again, because I think it needs to be said is that in nature with wild horses, the ones on the front and on the sides are called French. And the purpose of these French horses is to warn the rest of the horses to avert danger.
Ian Carroll
This is a good metaphor.
Tab Salsman
So when people say they are on fringe, that's a fringe belief, I know in nature, particularly when with horses. That it serves a very life saving purpose. So when somebody goes, they're fringy, I go, Ooh, I'm interested because anything that was, that's revolutionary started off on the fringes of society,
Ian Carroll
both good things and horrible things.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, I remember one of my, um. My philosophy teacher can't remember his name, but he everything we're learning was like during about like soccer days. And then we learned about everything that was like pre Christian, uh, beliefs and everybody in the class who was raised heavily on Christian beliefs, all were arguing the belief system of that time.
Tab Salsman
With their belief system that came later and he goes, no, by the way, your belief system was considered a fringe and a cult.
Ian Carroll
Yep.
Tab Salsman
And the person goes, I am not part of a call. He goes, the difference between a cult and religion are numbers and it stuck with me. I was 16 going on 17 and that stuck with me and it made me start doing like viewing everything throughout history and current events as a very like, I'm not even going to be connected to these things because.
Tab Salsman
That had a huge, tremendous impact on me.
Ian Carroll
Sounds like that was your moment of like seeing the herd for what it is. Not as necessarily bad, but just as that you don't want to identify. I personally, I'm speaking for myself. Sometimes it's right to be with the herd because sometimes the herd is right. But you don't want to stake your entire identity and your survival and your, you know, your past on betting that the herd will always be right.
Ian Carroll
You want to be thinking independently of like, where is this herd going? And what are the fringes saying? And why are we going where we're going? And what does that mean for me?
Tab Salsman
Was radicalized with free thought. I like to use that phrase, um, much earlier.
Ian Carroll
Yeah,
Tab Salsman
I, um, I have always had an interest in extraterrestrial
Ian Carroll
life.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
And I am, I'm a product of watching the X Files. Let's go. So for me, you go to the paranormal section of the bookstore or a library. And you would have all of this stuff, like, you know, those supernatural dimensions, quantum physics, all this abstract thinking stuff, and then, you know, aliens, and then you'd have conspiracies and some of those conspiracy books had a variety of things.
Tab Salsman
And so, and some of those things included extraterrestrial stuff. So that's for me, the book that I was able to use as a book report. I remember what it was. The book report, uh, the frame, what I was able to do, but I read the book, behold, the pelvis first pressing by Bill Cooper in 1995. So this book had only been on for a few short years at that time.
Tab Salsman
And that was my moment of me going. I have no clue if any of this is true, but it was very exciting to read. And if anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, it's a strange book, especially when you get to page 225, they talk about SSRIs at that time and the 2nd amendment. It's interesting and you know, sets in 1995 and then you fast forward to.
Tab Salsman
April 20th, 2000. And so some people say, Oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. There isn't. And I feel like that could be, uh, what's the word? Uh, per, uh, pejorative, pejorative. That's right. And I look at it, it could be for some, I just look at it. Like, I, I don't know what's true and what's not true. Like the joke, uh, at the joke, the saying about jokes, 13 percent of truth is in every joke, right?
Tab Salsman
Or something like that. Like there's truth in everything. There might be some stuck. You know, and so you've definitely gotten into more conspiratorial
Ian Carroll
hope big time
Tab Salsman
now than he asked him. Like you were
Ian Carroll
in some ways. I mean, in some, I mean, like, I really, I blew up on the black rock conspiracies and it's not that I was peddling like black rock controls the world.
Ian Carroll
That was never my stance. My stance was always like, what do we actually know for sure? Like, what are the stats? What are the numbers? What are the facts? How can we uncover the truth of what is going on here? Um, I mean, and I love unpacking the concept of conspiracy theory, and I don't take it as a pejorative at all.
Ian Carroll
I just take it as anyone that thinks it is a pejorative hasn't really thought through. Because, I mean, the legend, the myth, um, is that the CIA didn't invent, but they popularized the word conspiracy theory in the media around the JFK assassination.
Tab Salsman
Absolutely.
Ian Carroll
And then they debunked that by saying, no, we didn't, we, we investigated where we didn't do that because you can see that it was used before that and other books occasionally.
Ian Carroll
It's like, yeah, cool. Whatever. Great. Debunk guys doesn't matter. It's irrelevant whether or not the CIA invented it because if you just think about the word conspiracy, what conspiracy means is people working together to achieve a goal and the concept of a conspiracy in this context implies like an evil goal or like an illegal goal, right?
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
So what is organized crime? That's a conspiracy. What is a intelligence agency? That's a conspiracy. What is a political party? That's a conspiracy, right? You say parents planning 100%! Conspiracy. If they were working together to achieve a goal, right? And you would be an absolute fool to presume that in our corporate world, no corporation would ever conspire.
Ian Carroll
To do something right and I can talk for at length about McDonald's conspiring with the maker of their ice cream machines to make broken ice cream machines, which is being proven out in court and official court documents. Um, that they conspired for decades to be selling broken ice cream machines to all the McDonald's franchises so that their buddies over at Taylor that make the machines would make all their money off of, off of repairs.
Tab Salsman
I'm going to pause you right there. Can I tell you something?
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
When I did Heath MacDonald, I never encountered a broken ice cream machine. So when I saw all of these memes, I was like, what is this? Like birds aren't real?
Ian Carroll
No, but I love making jokes about birds.
Tab Salsman
But because I'm like, I've never ever experienced broken ice cream.
Ian Carroll
How long ago did you last eat McDonald's? Like, did you kind of stop eating McDonald's 10 years ago or more?
Tab Salsman
Oh, yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, exactly.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, I stopped eating McDonald's in my mid 20s.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I'd be very curious. So, I don't know personally when the ice cream phenomenon started, but I know there is a website now that actively live tracks around the country.
Ian Carroll
Which mcdonald's ice cream machines are up and which ones are down and you can look in real time at an ice cream machine map and it's like I've checked when I was doing that story I checked it you know every other day and it was averaging out between like 15 and 25 percent of mcdonald's ice cream machines were down at any given time.
Ian Carroll
Um, yeah, the meme definitely has legs, and there's a reason when you dig into the court filings of this company called Kitsch that is suing Taylor and McDonald's, you realize that there is a very genuine conspiracy there, and there's like endless examples of corporations. You know, committing either white collar crime or RICO fraud or all these other things, um, and being prosecuted for and going to prison, paying huge fines, whatever, you know, whatever floats your boat.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And so that's just one example is the corporate world then like not to mention the political world. And so when we really think about it, obviously conspiracies exist. The question is which ones are real and which ones are not right.
Tab Salsman
I'm glad you brought that one up.
Ian Carroll
You know where I'm headed. Bingo.
Ian Carroll
I mean, that's where my whole platform has always been headed is. When I started, it was like, who controls the world? What would it cause? Like, we all have this story we're told in school that like, we elect the American president and the American empire is fighting for peace and democracy. And sure, we made some mistakes, but in general, we're like kind of the good guys, more or less.
Ian Carroll
And we're doing our best to, like, make the world a safer, freer place. And we have this, like, kind of global narrative of history that we're taught in school. But I think we all kind of understand that history is written by the victors, and that we're probably not being told the full story. I
Tab Salsman
don't
Ian Carroll
think anyone knows the full story.
Ian Carroll
Not in the slightest. Look,
Tab Salsman
the reason I say that is I don't think I've always said that if somebody really told the truth of what happened Everyone has a, everyone is wrong and everybody's a little right.
Ian Carroll
Yep. The truth is many things, but one thing it is definitely not as simple. Um, and I think that inherently, especially when you're trying to teach kids history from a history book, you're oversimplifying beyond all belief, even if you were trying to tell them the truth.
Ian Carroll
And I would argue that in many instances, we are actively not trying to tell kids the truth because The truth is that the U. S. government and elements of the U. S. government have been involved in things like smuggling drugs into our own country to get our own citizens hooked on drugs, uh, starting wars illegally without telling us and trying to keep it covered up and then getting found out.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Possibly being involved in the assassination of our own president. Things like that. I
Tab Salsman
mean, that was just a recent thing that's coming up, you know?
Ian Carroll
Yeah. We're getting a lot more about that one.
Tab Salsman
That's another another time
Ian Carroll
so I've been digging into like right from the start I knew that my content was gonna be conspiracy theory oriented and part of that is because of the nature of like trying to get To the truth, but it's also just fun.
Ian Carroll
I just it's just It's fun. I love ancient Egypt stuff. I love alien stuff. It's just fun.
Tab Salsman
Like I don't make fun of people I don't go like please like Harry Potter.
Ian Carroll
So you believe in wizards?
Tab Salsman
I don't do that. But why
Ian Carroll
not? I could. Could. Like,
Tab Salsman
prove it. The majority of most of the fans of Harry Potter don't believe wizards are real.
Tab Salsman
I would, I would, that would be my hypothesis. And I would follow that up with that they probably wish those things were real.
Ian Carroll
Oh, totally. Or like dragons, or like, well, I, hang on, yeah, we could go down the dragon
Tab Salsman
route. Yeah, talk about dragons. But it's one of those things where I'm like, you know, I'm definitely like, uh, I'm with you on that.
Tab Salsman
I, I think that like, they're. But when people say that you like conspiracies, I tell people they're fun
Ian Carroll
Yeah. They're
Tab Salsman
fun
Ian Carroll
Yeah. You don't have to take everything so seriously. Like calm down,
Tab Salsman
calm down. Like
Ian Carroll
just cause you talk about an idea does not mean you believe it. Just cause you talk to a person does not mean you agree with them.
Ian Carroll
yea
Tab Salsman
I know, but I get accusations now if we actually went through it, you and I would agree on some things and vastly different. Totally. But the one thing we, I think the thing that we want to agree on more is having the platform or the space to have a civil conversation.
Ian Carroll
You know, to have a conversation where you don't have to judge a person, a person's character based upon the ideas they're willing to discuss.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Right. Cool. Like, and, and so like, I'm at the point now where in social media, I get attacks that are like, Ian, you talked to this person that once talked, that's in a photo with this other person. How can you explain justifying that? And I'm like,
Tab Salsman
yeah,
Ian Carroll
uh,
Tab Salsman
I have a feeling I'm going to have to do the same thing with you.
Ian Carroll
Oh, a hundred percent you will.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. And I'm going to be like, look, man.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
You know?
Ian Carroll
Yeah. You do not.
Tab Salsman
I guess you could also do the same thing with people who, um, everyday people, you'd be like, look, why are you still listening to that pup daddy song? Why is it still saved on your Spotify playlist? How could you sleep at night knowing what may have happened at Neverland Ranch with Michael Jackson?
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
How dare you listen to anything produced by, you know. Uh, the guy, uh, the specter, like the wall of sound, like the white specter, is that I think it's a red specter, something like that, you know what I'm saying? Like, there's all of these people, you could easily say, I can't believe, like, Oh, you can even get bigger as, um, you like the movie Naked Gun, it had OJ in it.
Tab Salsman
Yeah, exactly.
Ian Carroll
I like where this is going up here too, but it's like the ultimate expression of the thought police and it's, it's creeping into our culture in a million little ways and the piece of like liberalism and the left that. Um, I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating to call this a piece of liberalism, but the piece that I have, I have and will always retain from that political upbringing that I think we need more of in this world in every way is just tolerance and, and like the ability to not need to like, Okay.
Ian Carroll
Like judge everyone for everything like where I come from and maybe this is not the left anymore, right? But I feel like I grew up in a place where like you don't need to judge someone based upon who they love or what? They believe or it's like are they hurting people? Are they hurting you? Are they making your life worse?
Ian Carroll
Are they stealing? Are they committing crimes? Like are they? Or are they just making like their own life choices that make them feel good that have nothing to do with you? Like just leave them alone, bro.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And then it's like the beauty of the world is getting to like interact with those of those other people.
Ian Carroll
If everyone thought like me, it'd be boring. If everyone thought exactly like you, you would never learn anything. You would never experience a different culture. You would never experience a different perspective. I mean, you know,
Tab Salsman
I love meeting people who have a different background and background could be so many things.
Tab Salsman
Background could be. The most obvious thing, like male, female, non binary, uh, different color, uh, eye color, hair color, height, weight, it doesn't matter. Different background is different. You can have two people who look identical, but they come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. And this is where like, it gets fun for me because when you talk to people, like when you start really getting out of like the very upfront, basic things that visually define us differently.
Ian Carroll
Okay.
Tab Salsman
That's where it gets interesting to me because I found that like people who grow in a lower socioeconomic class, they have a lot more in common together regardless of what they look like. My favorite conspiracy theory was that, um, we, we are at our greatest, um, during the Occupy Wall Street. That was when we had, that's when we were, uh, the most,
Ian Carroll
that's when
Tab Salsman
we were closest.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. And then everyone in the castle got real scared and mentions of racism and sexism and all these other culture war topics exploded in the media. Yeah. Not by accident because that's how you divide people amongst each other and have them fight each other.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. And a client brought that up to my attention.
Ian Carroll
Bingo.
Tab Salsman
And I was like, and they were in, um, and, and just for context, this individual worked in college.
Ian Carroll
Yeah,
Tab Salsman
and they were saying they noticed that after that there was a lot more division and less unity on the campus people normally would get together. Now they're not. I've never lived those lives. I'm only observing things and reporting on what people going and that's a hard thing for people to just because I didn't live it and I can't, I can't.
Tab Salsman
Mention what somebody did that word, like what they noticed. It's just, it's just a strange thing.
Ian Carroll
And I think it's unfortunate right now, but like, I, I think we're, I'm trying to intentionally avoid getting like informational in this podcast. Cause it's way more fun to just be on this sort of like big picture.
Ian Carroll
Like the. But, um, this is, I feel this is the conversation that needs a hundred percent. We need to stop worrying about the micro, the minutia we disagree about and start realizing that we all share so much more in common. But there is one fundamental thing that I've learned along this, the journey about like history and just like a fact of the world that is really important.
Ian Carroll
And it's that intelligence agencies are like, they're real. And, and the CIA is not the only one, you know, there's every country has their own several intelligence agencies and they all have their own interests. But in general, Intelligence agencies exist. They were founded during the cold war and built up during the cold war from nothing to some of the most massive insane black budgets.
Ian Carroll
And this is true of every nation that has an intelligence agency. And those intelligence agencies job is explicitly to control the information space. And it has been from the very start because the cold war was the transformation of realizing we're not going to fight war with guns anymore because it's too dangerous to fight against each other when we have nukes.
Ian Carroll
Now we're going to subvert each other with ideology. And it's very clear when you read about the history of the CIA and the history of the KGB and the history of all these other intelligence agencies. That their job right from the start was to control how people think about politics in the world and their history.
Ian Carroll
And they do that in foreign countries by like starting a coup, funding a radio station that like, you know, creates separatist propaganda or whatever it is. But they also, we've learned more and more since the Pike and Church committees all the way till today. That they do it here too, by trying to control our media and our information space as well.
Tab Salsman
I remember reading, and I may have read this wrong, but like one of the head, like not the founders of the CIA, one of the top like controllers of the CIA was. Ex Nazi propagandists through Operation Paperclip because NASA is, you know, Von Braun was one of the most amazing, uh, rocket, uh, missile guys in the Nazi party.
Tab Salsman
And they, you know, Operation Paperclip people, but it's, it's, it's a fascinating because after World War II, America took. Some Russia took the others and they installed all of these high ranking non tribal Nazi party members and they installed them into these high ranking, um, intelligence agencies or like NASA.
Ian Carroll
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's complicated.
Tab Salsman
You get,
Ian Carroll
I mean, I'll take you on that.
Tab Salsman
That's the flaw. Hang on. That's the one that I'm able to get most people to now start to question stuff.
Ian Carroll
Oh, yeah.
Tab Salsman
Because it's not only is it was ringing for the longest time and then probably in the last 10 years, it's been proven to be.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I'm not sure when the first document releases were. I think that we got some of that during, uh, the church and pike committees in the 70s. Um, but not the whole picture. And then we got more declassification. Um, Annie Jacobson wrote a really good book called Operation Paperclip. I highly recommend everyone read it if they're interested.
Tab Salsman
Is there anything you're seeing that you're like, you know what? Can we make that shorter? Can we move this around? The front being a little shorter or the back? I don't know.
Ian Carroll
The front could go a little shorter.
Tab Salsman
Okay.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, the front could go shorter. Um, it won't ever really, unless I purposely give it this much body, it won't have this much body on the average day.
Ian Carroll
I would imagine that if you think it It is not like, I don't know how hair works. This part could get shorter if that makes sense for how the hair will lay. Um, but it's not a huge deal. Like I really, I like the shape. It's like somewhere between like looking like a military crew cut and somewhere between like when it's actually like laying and curling, it'll like just have like different, it'll look different from every angle in terms of who you think I am, which I think is kind of fun.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. I, I, I do feel that I don't know if this needs to get shorter.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, exactly. I think it's just really puffy right now.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to dampen it down again, but I need to see where it is at its most expansive.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
So let's go through and just bring this part down a little bit more.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Cool.
Ian Carroll
And I don't think it needs to come down much at all, but
Tab Salsman
no, like maybe that much.
Ian Carroll
This piece right here, this one right there, that part of my hair always has a real mind of its own and it all, and it's always very like temperamental and, and. And so I don't know if the solution to that is to like, bring it up, like cut it a little more in, or if it's like at the right length right now, but I just, I'm seeing it do its little shape thing that it always does in that corner.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. I think going through and making it part of this.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, exactly.
Tab Salsman
That, that was the, yeah. Thank you for pointing that out about your hair because. I love, I'll tell you what I've learned is when someone tells me their hair does something to not go, you don't know what you're doing. I can't say, I have a client, she goes, she curly hair and she said, do not defuse my hair.
Tab Salsman
And I'm like, oh, okay. Watch this. My hair gets big. I'm like, you don't know what you're doing. You've been doing it wrong this whole time, blah, blah, blah. So what did I do? What did 26 year old town do?
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
I defuse her hair. And it looked awful and I said, you were right. I told you, why did you not believe me?
Tab Salsman
I said, well, most often clients are doing the wrong application. They're doing their own product. They're using the wrong, everything. And so I just assume that people are just doing everything wrong. And so I don't believe them. And that's when I realized like, maybe, maybe some people do know what they're talking about.
Tab Salsman
And so when somebody says that I don't write it off anymore, I go, okay. And then I try to see it from their perspective, what it is that's about right now, because I don't see something, but you're like, Oh, as it grows out, I'm like, okay, that makes sense. So thank you for telling
Ian Carroll
me, I mean, you've also just hit on the root of what I call the expert bias, which is that we've lived in a world of experts where we're trusting the experts for so long on the media, in our classrooms, in our textbook, like in every format and that's, you know, experts are great, but we've been realizing more and more that as the sort of corporatocracy has gained power in the world for the last several hundred years, More and more, they're capable of buying experts and buying the education that creates experts and funding education in order to skew the testimony of experts.
Ian Carroll
Oh, yeah. And, and so in, in sort of doing what I do more and more as I got further into things, I started to confront this like problem of who do you trust with this information because in the financial world, for example. You very quickly start to realize that the big banks and the system that is running the world right now is the one funding financial education.
Ian Carroll
And so they're getting educated into believing that this is the status quo and it's normal, but it's actually like basically just normalized fraud in many instances. But then there's other instances where if you get too deep in that mindset, you start to. Think, you know, things that you do not know, because reality is extremely complex and the like instrumentation that we use to understand science, for example, this point.
Ian Carroll
Is very complex and you might be misreading this graph or misunderstanding this chart or, you know, there's so many ways that being not an expert can make you think, you know, more than you do. So it's like this impossible balance of how do you get to the root of information without accidentally parroting propaganda that was paid for, um, you know,
Tab Salsman
yeah, I mean, when you're talking about the, uh, Not being an expert.
Tab Salsman
I always think of, uh, Terrence Howard.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Like with his whole thing.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
And, uh, Weinstein. Yeah. Like they were talking back and forth. That was an amazing thing. And I actually really got a lot more respect for how Weinstein handled.
Ian Carroll
I like Weinstein a lot.
Tab Salsman
I just like how he handled talking to somebody
Ian Carroll
who Yeah.
Ian Carroll
To be clear, we're talking about Eric Weinstein, not Harvey Weinstein right now. Right.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Or was it Brett? Are we talking about Brett? I think we're talking about Brett, right?
Tab Salsman
Yeah, not Dark Horse.
Ian Carroll
I mean, I like Eric and Brett Weinstein. I like them both a
Tab Salsman
lot.
Ian Carroll
Even though I disagree with a lot of their political views and a lot of their stance on things, I love their inquisitive nature and their willingness to change their minds and their willingness to debate.
Ian Carroll
Like they are the true. Uh, if they're the epitome of the academy that we should be upholding, you know, the academy of ideas, the educators that like from a slightly more liberal perspective, you know, I really admire them.
Tab Salsman
I don't really care what political side somebody is on when it comes to academics as long as.
Tab Salsman
The pursuit for the truth is what is above all bingo. Like if they go, I think this is the case. And then it comes out when I was wrong. Guess what? Now, we all know that to me is the most meaningful thing for humanity.
Ian Carroll
I mean, I think we all know deep down that what we really want is not. This side or that side, what we really want is balance.
Ian Carroll
And that's the whole point of why the system is how it is, is what's supposed to be balanced. We're supposed to have some liberal ideas in the sense of like, we want to pool our resources and work collectively to help make society and more inviting, inclusive and better place for those that. Our disadvantage or could use some help or your grandma or whatever it is, but we also want some conservative values in order to not let the sort of like, like liberalism can very quickly lead to trampling on people's voices and individuals and individualism can very quickly lead to leaving people behind that we would love to bring with.
Ian Carroll
And we all kind of know that we actually, we want each side of that political divide to temper each other and to have a rational conversation in the middle where they both. Check and balance each other on the pursuit of truth and policy and such. But it's that duality has been weaponized by mostly piles of money that realize that if you can get the sides to fight against each other, you can just make so much money off of the conflict, so to speak.
Tab Salsman
And I think some of these groups, perhaps, you know, if they exist, they probably have. Trillions of dollars that we don't even know about
Ian Carroll
who knows, I mean, if only we had, we, we need more whistleblowers and we need whistleblower protection. So the people that know these things are in those rooms, having those conversations hearing, like, there's a lot of good people inside of these corrupt organizations that would speak out if we had whistleblower protections.
Ian Carroll
And so when we look at how our government treated someone like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden,
Tab Salsman
it's not
Ian Carroll
like, oh my gosh, like what a crime against our country to treat them that way.
Tab Salsman
I always think that like, if, um, you know, you remove our country out of it and you were to ask somebody like, Hey, imagine somebody came forth and said, Putin is doing, or any leader that we consider to be today's boogeyman.
Tab Salsman
Right. We don't like. We would be applauding, I think, that individual.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, for leaking information about the government. 100%.
Tab Salsman
I just think that it's just because it's our guy.
Ian Carroll
Well, it's only because it's our guy right now. Like, so if we look back at George Bush and the Iraq War, everyone's hyped on exposing the corruption of the Iraq War.
Ian Carroll
Now we all get it because we've got enough distance that half the public population hasn't chosen to die on that hill and be like, no, I'm on this side because Republicans are correct. It's like, Yeah. Yeah. But also, this whole war was based on faulty intelligence, and, and it was, there was corruption to every level in profit taking, um, and, and so it's weird how we continually think that this one, and it's ironic I'm saying this because I've been coming out relatively in support of the current administration, so it's ironic that I'm saying this, and I, I, I get the irony.
Ian Carroll
Is that it's always like this one is different. Um, you know, I, uh, I think for me, I'm just sitting back
Tab Salsman
watching a lot of, uh, everybody just losing their minds on both sides. Yup. And, um, I think you're completely correct. When you distance yourself, you get a much clearer perspective, um, about what happened.
Tab Salsman
Maybe in my insight is 2020. Sometimes when you're so in the mix.
Ian Carroll
Is it possible to know in the moment? Because you don't have the leaks yet, you don't have the clarity yet, you don't have all the information yet. In a lot of ways we're all just guessing at the moment.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
But it's important to be able to admit that you were wrong.
Ian Carroll
Like, that is one of the most, one of the traits I respect the most, especially in the public sphere. Because it's so easy when you're a public figure to get locked into your perspective and not be able to change your mind and then you kind of die on the wrong hill.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Um.
Tab Salsman
I'm gonna get an eyebrow.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I get it.
Tab Salsman
You got a couple.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I get it.
Tab Salsman
Trying to connect with your mustache.
Ian Carroll
Oh, yeah, dog. Yeah, I'm gonna have some wild old man eyebrows when I get older. I used to have a really intense unibrow, too. I don't know why, but it kind of mellowed out.
Tab Salsman
There's a, a girl named Mark. And she has.
Ian Carroll
Oh, you should look closely at my ears too.
Ian Carroll
I get like weird growers coming out of the top here. I think I recently shaved them.
Tab Salsman
I don't, I don't,
Ian Carroll
cool. Then it's good. I got them like, yeah, there's this one.
Tab Salsman
You have some right here, but she, she's known for, for. Like large
Ian Carroll
Uhhuh ,
Tab Salsman
she's this beautiful girl. She has this crazy, uh, thick un brown and I only know her about her because she, uh, knew this model of, I dunno if it's still friends.
Tab Salsman
I don't really keep in contact with any of them anymore. But, um, I was in New York and this girl who was a a, a model haircut mom to me, her, that was, she brought her friend to dinner. And that was this chicken up. She's like this big thing and, uh, she's known for her, you know, and she was like super cool.
Tab Salsman
And I asked her about, she's like, why can't a girl just let her eyebrows be natural? And like, if we're talking about being natural, like, and I'm saying that was an interesting thing to go against the society norms of what is natural, like shaving your legs as a societal norm for women. That doesn't actually have to be knob.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
I mean, I'm a big believer in like, I, I'm like, I don't, yeah, do your thing, dude. I don't, but also like, there's this balance of ideas of like, do your thing, but actions have consequences. And so like, you know, I look how I want to look. But people might not find me attractive and that's fine. And it's like live with the, you know, live, you can't control them and they can't control you.
Ian Carroll
And that's the beauty of America. Like I hate to say it, that's the beauty of American freedom of like, you know, you just live in a world and make your choices and live your life and don't hurt anyone. Like don't subtract from the population, whatever, don't be evil, but you also can't control other people and change.
Ian Carroll
Like you can't. Change the outcomes of your actions, you
Tab Salsman
know,
Ian Carroll
and so for, as an example, like when I say what I'm going to say on, on my platform, you know, that's great. But I also have to live with the backlash or the outcome or what that's going to do to me. Like, you know, you know, you have to, you know, actually have consequences and
Tab Salsman
every action as an opposite and equal reaction.
Tab Salsman
Exactly. You make a big wave, that wave could come back to haunt you
Ian Carroll
for sure. And we live in a real world. So, you know, I just do my best to try to perceive the world as it is. As best as I can and do what I think is right, you know, and that's always evolving and changing
Tab Salsman
this. I see pieces that, um,
Ian Carroll
yeah, it's like this kind of corner here is going
Tab Salsman
to get tossed.
Tab Salsman
I'm like, yep, I'm going to go through and do a little free capping. So, given everything you've, you've, you've researched, which I'm not going to get into. Yeah. I think you've covered almost every topic except for Bigfoot. Might not. What are some topics? Like, what is it? Let's just go down. Let's play, uh, like 20 questions of conspiracy.
Ian Carroll
Uh huh.
Tab Salsman
What? We're gonna do three categories. A conspiracy you think is ridiculous and stupid and should just be completely. So, we don't need to revisit it. What conspiracy do you want to be true? Because you wouldn't want it to, it would, you know, you want it to be true for whatever reason.
Ian Carroll
And
Tab Salsman
lastly, which one do you believe to be true regardless of what the narrative is officially saying?
Ian Carroll
I'll see. The one that I've. Um, I'm going to rephrase the phrasing a little bit because, um, the one that I think is not true, but I don't think it's ridiculous. I think it's very understandable that people believe in it and I have no problem with talking to people. And actually I've got really close friends that believe in it is flatter.
Ian Carroll
Um, and, and there's, I mean, you, it's a multi hour long debate, but I believe that a lot of the evidence that people cite as credible evidence of why flat earth is, is, and a lot of the ones that get people started on it are actually evidence that. UAPs and extraterrestrial or non human intelligence life is real and it's being misinterpreted as, as a coverup of flat earth, because for example, it is true that NASA puts out all kinds of fake footage.
Ian Carroll
You can see that they're using wires in their footage. You can, it is quite clear that NASA is putting out footage and claiming it's outer space or ISS footage, and it is clearly not. And that's a crazy rabbit hole to go down Antarctica stuff, great rabbit hole to go down. Lots of truth to that. Moon landing stuff.
Ian Carroll
Lots of truth. If you want to go down that kind of, so there's a lot of stuff that people cite as flat earth evidence that is like, yeah, something's going on, but I think it is probably a coverup of the UAP phenomenon.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And there's so many just like basic questions. Like I try not, I'm not a scientist, so I try not to get into like the technicals of like.
Ian Carroll
Lasers and lines. Rather like think of how many people would have to be in on it. Everyone that did ever gone to college to work on any kind of technology that has a GPS system. Everyone that's ever helped build a cell phone, helped build a car, right? Not to mention if you were to fly from. One point on the flat earth map to the farthest point on the flat earth map.
Ian Carroll
The flights do not square on the flat earth map, not to mention the sun. Um, so there's so many elements of the flat earth conspiracy that I totally get why people believe it. And I totally get their distrust of science at this point. I don't think it's ridiculous. Um, but I think it's, I think
Tab Salsman
it's not true, but you just think it's not true.
Ian Carroll
Yes. And I think that God's creation is so much. I think it actually is a disservice to God to think that his creation would be so simple. I think that God has created something infinitely more complex,
Tab Salsman
even with the Bible adverse about the
Ian Carroll
the feminine. Yeah, I've read it and I've looked into it and I think that the Bible in no way describes like, I think that people are getting extremely generous with their interpretations of See, he just said it's flat and they're, and they're ignoring, if you were to give the same level of generosity of interpretation to what he's, when we're talking about flat, there's all kinds of other places where you choose to like totally flip that generosity in a different direction in order to read it that way.
Tab Salsman
I was just curious.
Ian Carroll
Yeah,
Tab Salsman
I've never, I
Ian Carroll
mean, I'm also no biblical scholar and I'm very willing to have debates and discussions about those things. So it's like, I can be wrong, but I don't think that yet.
Tab Salsman
I want to have a flat earther. Come on.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, that'd be real interesting. There should be a flat earth Dave.
Ian Carroll
I've not debated him and I've not seen a lot of his stuff, but people are always like, yo, flat earth Dave, you, you know, you had a debate flatter with Dave.
Tab Salsman
I don't want to debate. I just want to listen. Because anytime I've ever seen, uh, comments on flattered. The flat earth person in commerce goes, dude, if you do the research, you'll understand.
Tab Salsman
And my argument is, well, I'm not going to do the research, so I need you to tell me the most, like the most convincing thing, because I'm not going to waste my time on it.
Ian Carroll
They do have, there are good arguments and some of them seem good, but actually if you understand, like you can do experiments in your own time that will show why it comes off that way.
Ian Carroll
And some of them are arguments that are far more complex to understand why they may not be real or not. It's complicated, but that one I think is not true. Um, and I've, I've looked into it a fair bit and thought about it a lot.
Tab Salsman
By the way, how's this film? Much better, right?
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Loving it.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
Cool.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Lots of different styles available from this. It can be very crude, very mainstream,
Tab Salsman
run your hands through the back,
Ian Carroll
be
Tab Salsman
a little crazy.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, I think that you've probably nailed, I can't quite see from here, but a lot of the other people weren't getting this blend from here and here into the back, right?
Ian Carroll
And yeah, I'm yeah, a hundred percent, dude. Yeah, fun. It's different. And I think it'll grow out fun too.
Tab Salsman
It'll be fun. It'll, it'll definitely get you a lot more out. You're figuring this haircut's
Ian Carroll
a little peacocky.
Tab Salsman
You know what I'm
Ian Carroll
saying? Yeah, exactly.
Tab Salsman
There's nothing wrong with peacock.
Ian Carroll
Bring it dude. I mean, I am an influencer by profession now, whether I like it or not.
Ian Carroll
That's right. You have to see a little spot.
Tab Salsman
All right. So now the next one, um, one that you think is true.
Ian Carroll
Um, a conspiracy. I'm trying to think of like the most Wild conspiracy that I think it
Tab Salsman
could be like,
Ian Carroll
no, I know I got one out. I mean, there's a lot of them like JFK that are obviously true. Look into it.
Ian Carroll
It's easy, but the one that is. Clearly true that is very scandalous is coming out right now on Candace Owens's channel and it is that the president of France is married to a man that is almost 40 years older than him that was his teacher when he was 15 is when they first got together. And she left her family to marry her 15 year old student and she is actually a he and his brother is it's a whole rabbit hole and the evidence is beyond compelling and it would be like it would take 50 seconds for the French first family to immediately debunk the rumors and Candace Owens has repeatedly invited them to just present us with a photo of you.
Ian Carroll
In your early life present us with a single piece of documentation to refute this, please. And rather than doing that, they are sending out defamation letters that are like, like, uh, picking on like little intricacies of like, you said that this thing happened there, not there. And so you're defaming us by saying that rather than just being like, here's a photo of me when I was a kid.
Tab Salsman
I have not heard that.
Ian Carroll
It's crazy. I just ordered the book Becoming Brigitte. Um, which is it's so Candace is reporting on a story that was done over eight years by a French journalist named, uh, Xavier Poussard, and he published his work in French and this has been happening over the last several years, multiple journalists have mysteriously died while reporting on this story in France.
Ian Carroll
And Candace found Xavier's work and then picked it up, contacted him, and is now translating it to an English speaking audience and blowing it up. And she is about to take down the leadership of the French regime, which is And to be clear, it's no problem with a trans person being in charge of the country.
Ian Carroll
The problem is with a trans person pretending they're not trans, marrying their student, and then running the country with him as a figurehead for, you know, how it's a whole scandal. And it opens up all kinds of questions about just what kind of secrets are the most powerful people in the world keeping.
Tab Salsman
Yes. That's me. It's crazy. I have not heard that. I think I stick. Probably is a bit more pedestrian.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, it's a pretty wild one. That would be wild.
Tab Salsman
Alright, and what's the one that you
Ian Carroll
wish really want to be true? That's a really good question. The conspiracy theory that I really want to be true is ancient civilizations pre Diluvian conspiracy theories about an ancient civilization of like pre Great Flood pre asteroid comet impact Um, the, the Younger Dryas Hypotheses, the Graham Hancock Theories, and to be clear, I think that they are true.
Ian Carroll
Um, and I think we have lots of evidence to support it, but I desperately want it to be true because it is just so fascinating and it recolors all of the history of religion because all of religion traces back through those ancient, like it's all borrowed from what came before. It's all re, uh, writings of the same pre diluvian stories of these ancient gods that were beings that lived longer than normal humans.
Tab Salsman
Sort of the giggle man. Oh
Ian Carroll
yeah. But even beyond that, I'm talking about like the creation myths of the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Mayans, and they all share the same themes, which are giants and very long lived, like hundreds of years of lifespan, uh, technologies or superpowers that like might've explained how they built all those megalithic stone structures, Um, and I'm actually scheming on writing a fiction book that's like a sci-fi fantasy book.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
That is about those conspiracy theories. But it is, it is like the modern, it's like in a way where you wouldn't be able to disprove it based upon what we have in our world today to look at as evidence. Yeah. And so it's like, uh, like somewhere in the magical reel of like, it's the story of what could have happened before the great flood.
Tab Salsman
Yeah.
Ian Carroll
And we would wind up in the same world we have today and we wouldn't know the difference between whether it was real or not, because. There's just a certain element of history that is just so, um, we, we pretend like we know more than we do. We don't have a single full skeleton of a dinosaur, like the amount of archeological evidence we have of ancient civilizations is.
Ian Carroll
It's minuscule compared to what we sort of present as conclusions from that evidence, which is fine. You know, there's nothing wrong with drawing conclusions, but I think that it gets lost in translation in the game of telephone from the experts actually looking at the primary sources down to the children learning about it.
Ian Carroll
We pretend like we know everything and really like we used to think that you could feel the shape of your head and that would tell you whether you're mentally insane. Like there's just all kinds of assumptions built in. Yeah. All sorts of stuff. So.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. Um,
Ian Carroll
this is exactly what I was going for, bro. It's like a whole new look.
Ian Carroll
I love it. It's so fun. Thanks, man.
Tab Salsman
Oh, cool. Yeah. I was just curious. Cause I mean, you, you live in that world far more than I do. I I'm like the weekend warrior, you know, you know, I have my, my set, um, you know, things that I would love to be true that I think are true. And then there's the ones that I think are just like.
Tab Salsman
I'm not going to even give it any air or oxygen for sure, you know,
Ian Carroll
a lot of them just take too much time to even get anywhere with. So
Tab Salsman
yeah,
Ian Carroll
it's like, you know,
Tab Salsman
yeah. And, and, and I, I, sometimes I think I, uh, I think my answer is never on 100%, like one way or the other. Oh, it's always in percentages of just exactly that.
Tab Salsman
I think like, like somebody that gave me an example about to go to the yeah. Yeah. And I said, well, let's look at the time. There was a lot of crappy Canada were in a space race with Russia. It wouldn't surprise me if we had built a studio and filmed something to show that we did
Ian Carroll
that.
Tab Salsman
There was a CIA studio in the Hollywood Hills.
Tab Salsman
Sharon Leto of 30 seconds of Mars. He owns that. That's his property.
Ian Carroll
I went and visited when I was there.
Tab Salsman
Yeah. He was in a former CIA property, right? They had studios and stuff. So like, we know that those things existed. Like, it wouldn't surprise me if we did that in the event that we never made it to the moon, we could still see, we did like, I, I'm under the beliefs, my thing that, like, you know, I don't know, I think it is like, this is where I live in this world is I think the footage we saw was fake.
Tab Salsman
I think we did go in like, that's where, and I think they did that because they just said, like, the plan is showing this. And of course we get there and if we don't get there, we come up with a lie that they died on the way back from the moon, right? That was, that was the, that's what I think may have happened.
Tab Salsman
But then there's like a bunch of other things, like, I don't know, like, um.
Ian Carroll
People speculate that they found an alien base up there, or there was like technology up there or anything like
Tab Salsman
Antarctica.
Ian Carroll
Exactly. A whole bunch of questions about Antarctica.
Tab Salsman
So what's really cool, uh, I thought was neat is I was teaching a haircutting class in the suburbs of Detroit.
Tab Salsman
And so I went to the Henry Ford Museum
Ian Carroll
in
Tab Salsman
Dearborn. Have you been? No, but I'm curious where this story goes. They have planes of humble bird.
Ian Carroll
Yeah.
Tab Salsman
They have, they have the chair that G that Lincoln was shot in, they have a lot of weird shit. I've never, I've not been to DC, so I have not been to the, to the Smithsonian or anything like that.
Tab Salsman
But I imagine that this is what Smithsonian is like. But it was really, I would love to go to the Smithsonian's basement where they keep all the secret stuff. You mean if I'm a giant? Yeah, dog.
Ian Carroll
Yeah, dog. You know what I'm talking
Tab Salsman
about. I'm playing a little dumb here on this, but I, I, I know most of what you've talked about.
Tab Salsman
The one about Frank's was new to me. Um, but yeah, Matt, thank you for shipping the ship and let me give you a fun little
Ian Carroll
dude. I
Tab Salsman
appreciate it, man. Like a little throwback. Soccer cut and uh, it'll go good with your running and um, next time you're in Austin, man, don't be a stranger. Uh, this has been fun.
Tab Salsman
It's fun to talk to people and not feel judged or have anybody going like, I can't believe this.
Ian Carroll
Yeah. Right. Let's legalize fun again. Like, let's just have some fun guys. It's important to just connect with people because talk to people, have fun. Like you don't need to agree with everyone. You can just talk and just tell them to shoot the shit.
Ian Carroll
That's what I'm saying. Thanks man. So thank you. Yeah, totally.
