Bill Gephardt: Transforming Trust into Triumph – A Deep Dive into Integrity in Business

Recorded over Zoom

Bill’s companies: GephardtApprovedd.com and GephardtDaily.com

This episode features Bill Gephardt, a consumer advocate and the founder of Gephardt Approved, a business vetting service. The discussion revolves around his career, the evolution of information consumption, and his views on personal legacy.

Bill Gephardt shares his journey from journalism to becoming a consumer advocate. He explains the genesis of Gephardt Approved, which started as a segment on Channel 2. The service vets businesses based on their legal history, customer complaints, and other factors. He emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions to avoid being scammed, using the analogy of the “riddle of the Indian” to illustrate his point.

Gephardt also discusses the changing landscape of information consumption. He expresses concern about the trend of people only consuming information that aligns with their existing views, creating “bubbles” of information. He believes this trend limits exposure to diverse perspectives and ideas, which can lead to a narrower worldview. He suggests that reading headlines from a physical newspaper can help broaden one’s horizons.

He also shares his early entrepreneurial experiences, including running a neighborhood newspaper and working in various jobs, such as repairing pinhole leaks at oil fields. These experiences, he believes, have contributed to his understanding of different industries and consumer needs.

Towards the end of the podcast, Gephardt reflects on how he would like to be remembered. He expresses that people are often remembered as an aggregate of others and that accurate remembrance is rare. He refrains from defining his legacy, leaving it up to others to decide how they want to remember him.

Overall, the podcast provides an insightful look into Bill Gephardt’s career, his views on consumer advocacy, and his thoughts on the changing landscape of information consumption.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello and welcome to episode number three of the Maker Manager Money podcast. A podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business owners, and business partnerships to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and to inspire future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and this episode is unofficially sponsored by Zoom. Since this is the first one, but certainly not the last one we’ll be doing over Zoom. My guest today is a Utah legend. I used to watch him do his Get Gephardt segments on Channel 2 back in the day, he retired, but came out of retirement to launch gephardtapproved.com, a business directory of Gephardt approved local businesses and gephardtdaily.com, which strives to keep local news alive. Welcome to the show, Bill Gephardt.

Bill Gephardt – vetting businesses & local news – mmmpod:
Well, thank you Kyle. It’s great to be here with you.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. I have a list of questions a couple miles long that I speeched to texted this morning on my walk, so let’s just-

Bill Gephardt – vetting businesses & local news – mmmpod:
Well, then I’ll just try to answer with yes and no.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Bill Gephardt:
That way you can get through them all.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, well, let’s start off with what are your thoughts about retirement and the golden years since you came out of retirement to launch a business?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, I just don’t know if there should be a whole bunch of difference between what you do for a living because you’re doing something. I mean, we sleep, and we eat, and we do something and hopefully we do something that we like at least a little bit. And if you like doing something at least a little bit and you don’t do that anymore, and now what are you going to do? You can go garden, you can… But you got to wait for things to grow in between the act of gardening.
And so what I did is I just tried to think of something that I could do that I could continue to do, and I will continue to do something, always. Yes, I travel. Yes, I do all the things that a retired person might do, but I also have a business and I have people that work with me. And it is something that is… It’s something to do. I won’t say that it keeps me going, but it is something to do rather than gardening or playing golf. Matter of fact, when I retired, I liked playing golf and I could play golf all the time. And sure enough, for two straight weeks, I played golf every single day. And at the end of that run I was out with eight guys, two foursomes, and I was on the tee box and I was the first one to tee off, and I put my ball down on the tee and I stepped up and I addressed the ball, and I was just about ready to take my back swing, and I picked my club up and I said, “Fellas, why don’t one of the other ones of you go first?” And they go, “You all right? Everything okay?” And I said, “Oh, yeah, it’s fine.”
But what I was thinking and what I muttered to myself as I was about to hit the ball is, “Here we go again.” And so playing golf became a job. And I said I would rather have fun playing golf, which I spent my whole life doing, than making it a job. And so I started a business and I still play golf. And when I go to play golf, like I’m playing golf on Friday in the evening and I can’t wait for that tee time. I’m very much looking forward to it. And that’s a much better way to play golf than, “Here we go again.” Because I have good scores, without bragging, I’m in that top 5% that they call it, but it’s not a job. It’s actually fun.
So that’s why I started Gephardt Approved. I just tried to take the trust that people in Utah had in me and see if I could rub that off onto some honest businesses and it has worked for those honest businesses. I still turn down maybe 30% of the businesses that apply to be Gephardt approved because I just don’t want… I back them with a personal thousand dollar guarantee. So if you do business with a Gephardt approved company, I’m telling you, they’re an honest company. They have integrity, and if they don’t and if they cheat you, I will pay you a refund of up to a thousand dollars of whatever you paid them. And it’s putting a little skin in the game. I have had to pay it a couple of times over the 12 years that we’ve been in existence. Maybe, I don’t know, 12 or $13,000 I’ve had to pay altogether, which is the cost of doing business. But with all of the revenue that we generate for so many businesses, this little 12 or $13,000 is… I mean, just part of what we do. So that’s what I do now.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. And what is the process of vetting businesses?

Bill Gephardt:
I do what you should do and never do. If you hire somebody to put in a swimming pool for three or $400,000, that’s a substantial investment and you ought to do at least a little bit of diligence. You ought to find out if they have insurance, you ought to find out if they’re licensed. You ought to find out not just what the comments section says, because the comments on a business, no matter what Google or Facebook say about the vetting that they do of the comments, you can still really mess them up. And you can get A+ ratings and five star ratings when you are a con artist. Because I see it many, many times where… And I don’t know exactly how it’s done, but I know that some businesses actually cheat people and they still have five star ratings. And I know one company that has I think about 6,000 reviews a year. Really? You have 6,000 customers a year in your business that has only maybe a half a dozen employees? A lot of it is fake.
So we go beyond that and we’re looking at lawsuits. We check federal courts and state courts to see if a company has been sued or if a company does some suing because one lawsuit doesn’t… One law, two lawsuits, one lawsuit a year that’s meaningless. What we’re looking for is a pattern. So I used to take a look at health spas, for example, where some health spas that I looked at sued [inaudible 00:06:40] every single day throughout the year, including Sundays and Easter. Every day was the average.
Well, when you walked into that health spa in the first place, did you expect you would wind up on the lousy end of a lawsuit? And the answer is, you signed a contract. And they don’t do these much anymore, these kinds of contracts, but you signed a contract that was good for five years and you had to pay $27 a month for five years every single month. And then you wound up you don’t go. And so you decide, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” after a month or two or three, which is typical by the way, and you decide you don’t want to pay anymore.
And the health spa says, “No, we have already sold that contract to a finance company. You don’t owe us. You owe the finance company.” And the finance company says, “You got to pay us or we’re going to sue you and we’re going to win.” And they sued one person a day, every day, including Christmas and Easter. Now, that’s a company that’s using the courts as a collection system, and I don’t want to Gephardt approve them.
On the other hand, you’ve got companies that are constantly sued because they don’t get along with their customers. Well, [inaudible 00:07:56] to put a swimming pool in or an addition to your home or even somebody to cut the grass once a week all summer, you want those jobs done and you’re perfectly willing to pay for it. And if you have a complaint, you expect the business to step up. And if they don’t, then the business sues you or you sue the business. And either way, I don’t want to see those kinds of patterns. So I will tell the business what we found. And we found all kinds of things, even the teeniest little things that have got nothing to do with whatever they’re doing as a business, like parking tickets and… that they paid. And once we found a speeding ticket that was 10 years old on the fella who owned the business, and his wife was sitting there when we did the interview and she said, “I told you I knew you got a ticket back then.” And that becomes funny.
So it’s all out there and we do the vetting that you should do. And of course what we do depends on the business. So with a lawyer, we’re going to check with, for example, the Bar Association. And with a bankruptcy, we’re going to look at the federal systems, with the bank because bankruptcy’s a federal thing in law. So it depends what the business is as to what exactly we’ll look at.

Kyle Knowles:
The genesis of Gephardt Approved was Gephardt, right?

Bill Gephardt:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
On Channel 2. Is that correct?

Bill Gephardt:
It was. It is.

Kyle Knowles:
How did you start doing that when you were on Channel 2?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, there are a million consumer reporters and consumer investigative reporters, and I needed to try to set myself apart. And so I’m not the first one to think of doing this, but I used my name rather than an investigative reporter or a consumer reporter. Everybody’s got that. How about if we have it Gephardt? What can we put with Gephardt? How about alliterative? Let’s have Get Gephardt.

Kyle Knowles:
I like the alliteration.

Bill Gephardt:
And then there’s something that kind of falls off somebody’s tongue and it is associated with an individual. Because would you rather watch… I don’t know who your favorite Anchorman was, maybe it was Mark Kobel. Would you want… Somebody might say, “Why do you watch Channel 2?” And people would say, “Well, I really like Mark Kobel.” “Well, do you know Mark Kobel?” “No, I’ve never met him, but I really like him. He seems like a really nice guy and he’s somebody I trust.” On the other hand, I’ve seen TV stations do this where they’ll have more anchors than any other TV station in town. “Well, I don’t care. I like Mark Kobel. I don’t care how many anchors you have.” And I’ve seen TV stations across the country pervert consumer investigative reporting as if the more the merrier. That’s just not the way it works in my view.
“We have more investigative reporters than any other TV station in town.” “Who cares? I like Bob Schwartz.” “I like Bill Gephardt.” That’s what people are looking for. They’re looking for someone with whom they can relate, not for a group. And so, if we can nail down just a name, the name of your podcast could have something to do with Kyle, or how about Knowles Knows, as something? There’s one. Knowles, it’s kind of hard to say. Or the Knowing Knowles, the Knowing Knowles Podcast, something like that. Now it relates directly to you, not just a podcast about business. It’s Knowle knows about business. Did I start something?

Kyle Knowles:
Maybe. Maybe we’re going to have to do a rebrand. Maybe.

Bill Gephardt:
Yeah. Yep, yep. So there you go.

Kyle Knowles:
And how many years did you do that for Channel 2? The Get Gephardt?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, let’s see. I got here in 1999, I think. And before that I was in Los Angeles for most of my career. Before that I was in Indianapolis. And before that I grew up in Western New York. I grew up in the Buffalo, New York area.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And so when you came to Salt Lake City and started working for Channel 2, you started from the get-go doing Get Gephardt from the beginning.

Bill Gephardt:
I did.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Bill Gephardt:
I did because, well, we had to negotiate to come up here because I’ve been in market number two and they take very good care of you in large markets like that. When I was recruited there and they took good care of me. Now, the reason I left is because TV started to get a… Even before the internet, TV started to get a little bit goofy. I mean, there started to be more cable, there started to be more of spreading out of the advertising dollars I think. And so local TV started to have to cut back a little bit. And they weren’t as committed, I guess, to what I did because what I did was expensive. It’s easy to go out and cover a wreck. You send out a crew and the story is already there. You heard it on the police scanners and you send out a photographer and a reporter, they take some pictures, you go, you have your observations, and then you go talk to a cop as to what they believe happened, maybe do an interview with the cop and you’re all done in 20 minutes. And you bring that back or you feed that back to the station and you’re done.
With investigative or consumer reporting, you have to make sure you’re absolutely right. Not that you don’t have to make sure you’re absolutely right when you’re covering an accident. It’s just easier to be absolutely right, in my view. But if you’ve got somebody complaining… Here’s the secret to investigative reporting and, frankly, to interviewing and reporting, period. Never assume that anybody you’re talking to is telling the truth, including your mother. Everybody has an agenda. And so when somebody comes to you and they complain about a company, I’m assuming they have an agenda, and I’m assuming that they’re not telling me the complete truth. And that has saved me almost every single day of my journalism career because people have said that they did business with a business and they had never even set foot in the door of that business. They were trying to get me to… It was a competitor trying to get me to say something negative about a competitive business. So never assume that.
And then, when you talk to your own mother, Kyle, and you’re sitting at the kitchen table talking to her and she has a complaint, you know in your head if that’s legit or if she’s just complaining. Now, you might not say anything because you’re not about to be on TV, but if you were to take your mother’s complaint and you’re about to put that complaint about a business on a TV, you’d go, “Now, just a minute, mom, are you sure something else didn’t happen in between there?” And then she eventually is going to say, “Well, maybe, but still they shouldn’t have done that to me.” And that’s how you begin to vet out a story. And so always assuming that you’re not being told the complete truth, which is not a lie, it’s an agenda that you have to get your way through that agenda. And then you finally find out that they weren’t ripped off at all. They were just overcharged. “I know, but you agreed to that amount of money,” and all of these things that could come about.
Anyway, that’s expensive reporting. And in Los Angeles, they began to cut back on that stuff a little bit. And I finally said… And I was going to add another idea for a business in Los Angeles. And then, Channel 2, where I came, was owned by CBS in New York. And a very good friend of mine, who is a friend of mine to this day, was at a CBS-owned TV station in Baltimore and they asked him to be the news director at the terribly rated, and it was, it was the bottom of the pack, Channel 2. And I said, “I don’t know if I want to go up there to Salt Lake. I kind of have something else that I’m kind of thinking about doing, and Salt Lake’s a smaller town. Yes, I ski. Yes, I enjoy the mountains. Yes, I’ve been to Salt Lake before, but I just don’t think so.”
And then they offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse. And I said, “Okay, I’ll come up for one year, but if I get a job offer back in Los Angeles, then I get to leave within 90 days.” And they agreed to that. And sure enough, I had a job back in Los Angeles, offered more than once, [inaudible 00:16:41] two or three different TV stations. And I came back and I gave Channel 2 here 90 days. But, at that time, it was kind of a negotiation thing because I was very happy with Salt Lake. Frankly, I wish I’d been born here because I think you can be born in Utah, live to be a hundred, do something different every single weekend outdoors, and still not get it all done by the time you’re a hundred years old. That’s how I feel about Utah. It’s just beautiful.
And so while I was offered those jobs back in Los Angeles, I really didn’t… I’ll go, but I really didn’t want to. And Channel 2 and CBS stepped up because we had gone from… In just nine months, we’d gone from the last place to second place and we were doing great. And so I wanted to stay and they wanted me to stay and here I am. But then we started seeing agenda television groups by the TV station and I wanted nothing to do with that because there is no fake news as we’re told. Reporters, I know them. I know them at the national level. I know them at the local level. We are all disciplined, or at least we were. Who, what, where, when, why. People didn’t know my politics. People guessed at them all the time. They were usually wrong and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Not supposed to know how I’d say it. And reporters are good…
Sinclair Broadcasting is an agenda-driven television group where they force their anchors to say things that are not necessarily vetted by the anchors or the reporters. And it’s conservative stuff. Now, I don’t care if you’re a conservative or a liberal, but we as reporters, again, you’re not supposed to know what we are in terms of our politics. And I could not work for a TV station that would have all its people, no matter what they found, to be against vaccines, for example. Or to be in favor of one particular presidential candidate over another. That was just not something I could do so I quit. And my son took over, but my son also left Channel 2, the agenda-driven group, and he went over to Channel 5 where they’re not agenda-driven over there at all. You don’t know what those people… If you look at them, you can guess what they are. A lot of people say they’re all LDS members because this TV station is owned by the church. But I worked there for a few months, a couple of years doing some morning news stuff, and I can’t tell you, the church never put its finger in that newsroom. That’s a real newsroom over there.
So anyway, my son Matt took over and he’s doing Get Gephardt from Channel five now. And that’s the story of my career and what I did here. Then I started Gephardt Approved, which, if that makes money, which it did, I can start Gephardt Daily, which if you go to gephardtdaily.com, that’s where you’ll see the local news ’cause I’m frankly worried about local news. I’m worried that we’re not going to have local news forever, that we’ll have national news and we’ll always know what’s going on in Washington because we’ll have the New York Times and whatever. But what about local news? What about that $100 million sewer project they’re putting in in front of your home and how’re you going to find out whether or not the mayor took a million or 2 million off the top for letting a deal go through. Or maybe the contractor took a couple of extra million taxpayer dollars and put them in his own pocket. How are you going to know that if local news isn’t around? The national boys will show up when you have a mass shooting at your local school. They’ll show up for a week or two, then they’ll go away. Local news is going to be the key and I worry about it.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you know of any markets that are doing a better job with local news outside of Utah? Are there markets where other people are fighting to keep local news alive?

Bill Gephardt:
I do. I do. There are people like me and they’re trying many different experiments. Some are trying the nonprofit model, which is the direction the Salt Lake Tribune has gone, where it’s a nonprofit organization and they are… After I started Gephardt Daily, which is 100% online, both the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune stopped publishing newspapers. Because it’s expensive to take all that stuff and run it down to the printing press, and then put it on a bunch of trucks and put the gasoline in the trucks, and drive it all over the state. It’s much easier when your entire publication can go through the internet. There are fees that you have to pay to the internet, but it’s so fractional compared to what you would have to pay.
Now, they put out a newspaper a couple of times a week. It’s a different kind of a newspaper. The stuff is a day or two late and around the country you see newspapers failing like crazy, which is just tragic. You see many of them popping up in one revenue model or another, trying to continue the news. And all of us on the news side are struggling, no question about it. And what we’re going to do about that, I don’t know. So you can have a first amendment, and you can have the freedom to be able to say whatever you want as long as you don’t maliciously slander someone. And so you can say any political view you want and what you’ll wind up with, I think, if we continue going down not a great road, is undisciplined reporters who are not really reporters at all. They’re just going off on, “I hate Republicans,” or, “I love Republicans,” or, “I hate Democrats,” or, “I love Democrats,” either way. But what you’ll have is undisciplined people not trying because they’re trained to do so, get the other side of the story always, always, there is no fake news, always, and you’re going to wind up with basically letters to the editor.
Now, that’s not disciplined news. There may be some facts here and there in a letter to the editor, but it’s an entirely somebody’s opinion and news is not supposed to be anybody’s opinion. Well, now wait a minute? Isn’t there a news media bias? There is, I suppose. But I think if there’s a bias, it’s a bias toward interesting stuff, or sensationalism, or something that is different from the norm. So if we follow you around all day and nothing happens, we’re not going to put that on the air because nobody wants to hear about it. But if you’re walking around all day and you walk by a building that explodes and you’re the witness to that explosion, we’re going to put you on TV as a witness to that explosion because something interesting happened to you.
So I think news is not everything that everybody and everything does all day. It’s sensational or aberrant from the norm, or just follow-up stuff, or investigative stuff. That’s what news is and always has been. And it’s not fake. I keep saying that because we had a president, President Trump who said the news is fake, and he called it fake news, and that’s just another part of his nonsense. And I don’t say that politically. I say that because it’s not true that the news… It began with the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and people like that who talked about the lame stream media and on and on. We’ve been doing the same thing forever. And just because you don’t like something that we reported does not make it untrue or unimportant. It’s not fake.
We know what fake news is. Fake news in opposite land, for example, is what Fox News got sued for and lost to the tune of three quarters of a billion dollars. Because what they were saying about Dominion Voting was maliciously false, and the fact that the election was stolen. I know this is a controversial thing for me to say. It was not stolen. And if it was, and for those who say it was, I look them in the eye and I say, “It was? One piece of evidence, that’s all I want. Just one piece of evidence that it was stolen. Not that there were five instances of voter fraud over here and another three instances over here of a dead person voting. No, I want… You show me the evidence that it was stolen.” And so far nobody has come up with what they call evidence that the election was stolen. And the news media, the legitimate news media is reporting that and that’s not fake. That’s real. I’m a little passionate about that.

Kyle Knowles:
It sounds like it and you have a lot of history behind your thoughts about it too. So as far as the news goes, do you think the younger generation, the up-and-coming generation is interested in the news or… We’ve gone through this whole cycle, the past 20 years of clickbait and people wanting views and eyeballs and all those kinds of things. So some of those things sensational, or something that’s entertainment, or funny, or sad, or whatever, has been posted on the internet time and time again to try to draw eyeballs. But does this newer generation, are they interested in news in your opinion?

Bill Gephardt:
They are. They’re just not interested in disciplined news as much. We’ve always had a problem with people being informed. And so people will say, “I don’t read the paper and I don’t watch the news.” And I say, “Well, what if I did it this way? What if I put this back when newspapers were doing great? What if we do this? I’m going to put the news thing on. I want you to subscribe to the newspapers.” That’s what I did with my kids. “And I want you to just read the comics. That’s all. You like the comics? Do you have one or two comics that you like? Just read it. That’s all. How about the sports page? Do you like sports? Just take the front page off whatever you want to do and just read the sports.”
And you know what that got them doing? In the process of picking up the paper on the doorstep and bringing it in the house, they would look at the headline, and maybe look at two headlines, and then the next day they might look at three or four, and then they might have a discussion about that with somebody. That’s disciplined news that they’re just reading headlines and pretty soon they’re going to be directed down to see some of the other stuff. All of us cannot be expected to know everything or remember everything that we hear or read in a newspaper. Indeed, we’re reminded of stuff and people will tell us stuff that they saw or read and we’ll go, “I hadn’t heard that. Well, that’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” That’s okay. Okay. All of that. We are all interested in information. The trouble is we are getting into bubbles and we only click on the information that we want. And I can’t force anybody to get information that they don’t want. But if they can be at least exposed to it, which is what we’ve had up until the internet, if they can at least be exposed to some of this stuff, they will broaden their horizons a little bit. They’ll be aware of other countries and other cultures and other religions and other… everything. Other political views.
I’m not asking anybody to change their views. But isn’t it important that we can at least defend our own views? That’s what I’d think. And so the newer generation, I don’t think is probably as well-informed about everything and they are super well-informed about the things that they want to be informed about. Kind of good news, bad news, being super informed about stuff that pops up on TikTok, the variety of 10-second, 15-second things that pop up on TikTok, or you’re scrolling through Facebook and if somebody puts an article up, they’re putting that article up there that you can click on so that it reinforces their particular viewpoint. And you’re only friends with people where your… Generally speaking, where your viewpoint is reinforced. And that does not allow us much opportunity, in our limited times between sleeping and eating, does not allow us a lot of time to delve into stuff that maybe would be foreign to us, that maybe we… It’d be nice if we were informed about that stuff.

Kyle Knowles:
Are you-

Bill Gephardt:
I’m not a guy… I’m listening, but as far as I’m concerned the glass is half full. I’m not condemning younger people. I think they’re great. I was a younger person once and I was different than my parents and my grandparents. So actually I tend to be optimistic. But when looking for a critique, I’m saying, “Yeah, I, the old guy, wishes the news would go back a little to keep us more broadly informed.” But my mind could be changed.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, fair enough. From previous discussions, it sounded like you were an entrepreneur at a very early age selling a neighborhood newspaper.

Bill Gephardt:
Oh God, yes.

Kyle Knowles:
What can you tell me about that?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, I really don’t know how this happened. I lived in a suburb of Buffalo and we published as 11 year olds, I don’t know why we started doing this, the Glen Springs Weekly Press. There were about 400 people that lived in this area of Williamsville called Glen Springs. And there were several roads on that. And there were all these, like I say, 400 people and we got a Ditto Master. Do you what a Ditto Master is? Do you know a ditto is?

Kyle Knowles:
Sounds like some sort of copier.

Bill Gephardt:
Mimeograph. You know what a mimeograph is? Okay, well people still don’t need it even because we have copy machines now that do all of our work for us. And I suppose printing presses to some degree. But a Ditto Master was… It looked like carbon paper. Anybody know what carbon paper is? Anyway, you type on this thing and it put a blue mark in the shape of the letters, in paragraphs and whatever on the other side of the… backwards on the paper. Then you’d take the paper and you put it in this ditto machine which had alcohol and you’d spin it around, it’d spit out white pieces of paper with blue ink on it. And the blue ink was the alcohol that had eaten into the blueing and put it on the… So it was a printing press.
Anyway, we would print 400 of those and we sold them for three cents each. And when we went around to collect… It was two columns. So we had a column on each side. It said Glen Springs Weekly Press up here. And then we had a paragraph here, a paragraph here, with a little tiny headline. Down here we had little jokes that we lifted from Boy’s Life, but we never told them about it. It was total stealing. We didn’t even know we were stealing. Anyway, we would go and when we collected our three cents and some people gave us a nickel, and some people gave us a quarter, and we were in heaven with a quarter because that bought five Reese cups when we could… That’s what a quarter represented.
And when we collected our money, we would say, “Anything happening?” And people would tell us that, “Well, I’m pregnant,” somebody would say, and we’d write that. You know, “Missy Schwartz is pregnant and expecting.” We wouldn’t say pregnant. We wouldn’t use that word. It was expecting and, “Is expecting on November 3rd,” or whatever the expectant date was. And, “Somebody’s putting a new swimming pool in their backyard,” and just stuff. And the neighborhood absolutely ate it up. And we did that every week for several years and then just stopped doing it one day. But it was fun. That was Glen Springs Weekly Press. It was me, Nancy Kregner, Tommy Wideler, Joe Salan. I can’t remember the others that did this. And that was my first foray into publishing. And then, as I went to high school, and college, and then after college and stuff, I continued on into newspapers, radio and finally television.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So you owned your own business for a little while there as an 11-year-old running around, but then how many years did you work for someone else before you decided to start your own business after retirement? The rest of the time?

Bill Gephardt:
50.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Bill Gephardt:
Yeah, 45 years. Yeah, I was working for… So I worked for TV stations 50 years.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So how old were you?

Bill Gephardt:
45 years doing… Hm?

Kyle Knowles:
Sorry, go ahead. How old were you when you started Gephardt Daily or Gephardt Approved?

Bill Gephardt:
63.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Bill Gephardt:
63 when we started Gephardt. I retired early if you will. Maybe 62. I retired early and then just started this business with some people, but it was a… The Glen Springs Weekly Press, it was a business, but not really. We didn’t keep the books. We did put money aside to buy the reams of paper on which to print the stuff. And then we had to buy a box of Ditto Masters for 250, but that lasted six months or whatever. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it wasn’t a real business where… There were certainly no taxes involved. We didn’t have IRAs or anything. We’d just collect a little money, buy some candy, type on the Ditto Master with a few strikeouts here and there, print the thing, deliver it, get three cents a copy. That’s what it was. And split the money.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. No legal department.

Bill Gephardt:
No legal department. I did get into trouble though because one of those pregnancies I talked about was a… Came from a woman who announced this, and again, it was expecting, nothing about pregnant. I’m not sure I knew what that meant, but it was expecting. And the father came down the street and went toe-to-toe with my father. I’m not allowed to print that stuff. It’s the first time I learned about First Amendment, by the way, because I thought I was in trouble because an adult is coming down on me, but my father never came down on me. He started reading the copy when it went out. But there’s absolutely nothing in First Amendment that would prevent us from telling the truth that we got from the woman who is expecting. It’s just that the… And the guy was a lawyer and he came down, he threatened to sue us and on and on, and my father said, “Take the first shot, have a ball.” And it never happened, of course, because even back then, First Amendment protected the truth.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. Did either of your parents run their own business?

Bill Gephardt:
My father was an industrialist in the foundry side, as was my grandfather on my mother’s side. My grandfather on my father’s side was a downstream oil guy. You know what the [inaudible 00:36:30] is? Upstream is when they explore for the oil and downstream… I don’t know exactly what the cutoff point is. Downstream is, I think, after it is refined and put in the big tanks and then it goes to the gas stations or wherever the fuel or refined product is going. So my grandfather was in the downstream area of that, and I worked on that for a while too. I had a million jobs.
We repaired pinhole leaks, high pressure pinhole leaks at the tank farms. And we did it in not a legal fashion. My uncle, who was of course related to my father’s dad, whatever, long story… I worked one summer with him and we went around to the Texaco oil fields and they’d have little pinhole. Well, when you had a pinhole leak, the government, the safety people, rightly, demanded that you drain the entire thing and then clean it to get rid of all the fumes and then clean the area around the leak and then go in and replace whatever was leaking. Well, that was a really expensive job. So they called us in. When I say us, remember I just worked there, so don’t yell at me. And they had these big CO2 canisters and there were four of us in the crew. And then Don, who was the boss, and he was the welder, and he’d hook up the ground of his welder over here somewhere, and then he’d have a little welding [inaudible 00:38:03]. He’s going to go in there and he’s going to weld that leak while it’s leaking of fuel, gasoline. How could we do that without everything exploding?
Well, here’s how. We turned on these CO2 thing and aimed them… Great big tanks, you understand? And aimed them at the leak and it got very cold. And then he would hold his breath and go in, he’s a very good welder and just weld over that little spot. And then one of us would go in on that spot to cool it, and then we’d all step back and it was done just like that. So rather than costing I don’t know how many tens of thousands of dollars to fix it, it costs whatever that costs just to fix it in seconds. And we drove all over the East fixing those things. And I also worked in a rendering plant. Do you know what a rendering plant is?

Kyle Knowles:
No.

Bill Gephardt:
It’s what happens to all the meat products. Used to be all the dead dogs from the SPCA and on and on, that’s where all that stuff went. And it was ground into a fine pudding, if you will. And then it was heated at various temperatures and the fat and meats burned away. And what was left was bone meal and the bone meal… And oil, tallow. And the tallow was used to make candles and jello of all things. They don’t do it anymore. And all the bacteria was gone. It was a real stinky job. And then the bone meal goes into milk bones and it goes into both the tallow and the bone meal, which is ground into a fine powder, goes into supplements for cattle feed and chicken feed and farm stuff.
I had a million jobs. I worked construction. I was a tugboat captain in the Buffalo Harbor for a while. I did all kinds of things with the goal always to try to get back into journalism. I had to make money though. I had to support myself.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. So I feel like you have your finger on the pulse of business in Utah. Is this a good time to start a business? Is this a bad time to start a business? And where do you feel like Utah is headed as far as a business climate?

Bill Gephardt:
I am no expert in any of that. But what people have told me is if you’ve got a product that will sell, it will sell… Sometimes a lousy economy, which this is not, I don’t think. A lousy economy is just the thing your product needs. So you will prevail like crazy in a lousy economy. And sometimes in a good economy when everybody’s doing what you do, it’s tough to compete because everybody’s doing it. Whether this is a good climate or not, I’ve heard it’s not a good climate, but I don’t see the problem. I mean, as far as I know, the price of eggs went through the roof, but that wasn’t an economic problem. That was a bird flu problem.
Well, now the price of eggs is all the way down where at Smiths, it was 99 cents for 18 eggs on special the other day. So apparently that price has come down. Fuel prices went way up through the roof. The only thing I objected to about that is that the President was either being blamed for the price going up or given credit for the price coming down. And I have never in my life seen a connection between a president and fuel prices. So fuel prices go up, it allows the economy… That’s a great time to be in the fuel business, isn’t it? So I don’t know. I think if you’ve got a business idea… Again, I’m no expert. I’m not lecturing anybody. If you’ve got a good idea and it works, then do it. People are going to eat. So food is always going to sell. So maybe it’s food that you do. I don’t know. Again, I’m no expert on any of it. And I’m certainly not an expert on even the things that I do except the journalism. It’s just I’m trying to find things that people will support. And I think that’s the key to business is to find something that people will support.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that answer. What is the hardest thing about owning your own business?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, it’s dealing with all the crap that you have to deal with. I have a super great crew now. Really do. But not everybody I’ve ever hired has been great. And so dealing with that is a problem. Everybody’s a little different. So everybody’s got a little bit of different complaints about stuff that’s a little different. Dealing with the government regulations that you didn’t even know existed is kind of a problem. Taxes are a problem. Everybody wants to deal with credit cards now and who the big beneficiary of that is. The credit card company. Pardon me. Every single thing that we have and owned, in my opinion.
How’d you like to get a 5% raise today, Kyle? All you’ve got to do is get everybody in the world to stop using credit cards because that’s what it costs. Well, I think they charge three or four, 5%. And then there’s the stuff that goes on top of that, the paperwork and whatever. And so everything costs more. Would you like to pay by check? Oh, nobody pays by check. How about cash? Oh no, no, no. Cash? Oh, my god. We don’t use cash. How about credit cards? Well, everything costs more. And the beneficiary of that is the credit card company. I will tell you, I despise and always will the worst instrument that has ever been created in my view for personal finance and that’s the debit card. If you have a debit card and you can hand it through the screen, I’ll be pleased to cut it up for you right now and you won’t know the difference. Because I don’t know if you use a debit card, why you would use it. You know what I’m talking about?

Kyle Knowles:
I think I do because I cut up my debit card every time it comes from the bank.

Bill Gephardt:
That’s right. And tell them not to send you anymore. And the reason is because… But you do use a credit card, right?

Kyle Knowles:
Yes.

Bill Gephardt:
A credit card… Here’s the way it happened. Credit cards were there and they were great. And they had a thing called Regulation 9. And that was all the rules involving credit cards and it worked great. And if you didn’t… They made some rules where they couldn’t send you an active credit card unless you had actually applied for it. They made up a bunch of rules as they went along. E… Correction, not regulation [inaudible 00:44:41] Regulation E, that’s what I’m talking about for credit cards. And then along comes the debit card and the bank lobby said, “You know, debit cards are the same as credit cards. So let’s just continue doing everything under Regulation E.” And Congress said, “Okay, that sounds good to me. We don’t know nothing about it, but, okay.” And so they did.
But the problem is, first of all, credit cards are good because if I hit you over the head and steal your credit card and go up and charge a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff, as soon as you come to, you report that problem and the charge goes back not to you, it goes back to the business, which is not great for the business. But you need to accept a good credit card if you’re a business person. It goes back to the business and you’re not charged a thing. And they have 90 days to do that. It’s either 60 or 90, I forget, but they have 90 days to… If they cannot resolve this, they have to give you the credit back on your credit card. And that’s no problem. They just give you the credit.
If it’s your debit card, it’s the same rule. So I hit you over the same head and I steal your debit card and I go charge up a thousand dollars, it comes out of your bank account, that’s your actual money. When you come to, you report it to the debit card company and they say, “We’ll investigate,” and they have the same 60 days to investigate. And if they can’t come up with an answer, they have to take the money, not credit, money, and put it provisionally back into your account. Think how motivated they must be, I say sarcastically, to reach into their own pockets and put money into your account. Credit no problem, but money, big problem.
So I know of people who in, for example, in Utah, in Provo, there was this young couple just got married and they needed to go to a concert. And the tickets for the concert were, I think, $200 a piece. But they didn’t have any money, but they’re going to save and save and they had enough money for this. So they buy two tickets. And guess what. The Ticketmaster messed up and they charged them six times. So rather than having $400 going out, they had 2,400. They’re now overdrawn. They owed about $400 in bank fees for being overdrawn on the checks they’d written. Meantime, the landlord’s come and saying, “Where’s my check?” And the electric company says, “Where’s my money?” And there’s a gas company and all the rest of them saying, “Where’s my money?” And all they could say was, “You’re going to have to wait until this is resolved with the debit card company.” Which would never have happened if they had used a credit card, it would simply have been credited back to them and they could pay all their bills.
This happens all the time with debit cards. You just don’t hear about it all the time unless you get somebody like me on the subject. So I still, and I’ll tell people, and I’ve said this right into a TV camera, the same way I’m saying it into a camera right now, “If any banker or anybody can come out there and tell me why I’m wrong about debit cards, come forward, I will apologize and I’ll put your story on the air.” And in 30 years, nobody has done that. Debit cards are awful. Credit cards are great.

Kyle Knowles:
You heard it here. This is a public service announcement actually.

Bill Gephardt:
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given either in business or life?

Bill Gephardt:
Buy low, sell high, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know. Best piece of advice. Apple? I don’t know. People give me advice all the time and I weigh it. And I really don’t know if I could single out… It’s kind of like somebody asking me, what is… In your 45 years of doing television news, what’s the best story you’ve ever done? That’s a question. I did one every day and I still don’t have a good answer for that. If you come up with something, if you suggest some consumer thing, I can probably go on, ad nauseum, just like on debit cards, about what I think of a certain something involving advice or a story or consumer or ripoffs or something.
I don’t know. I pass out advice sometimes. I say things like, “How do you know… If you’re going into a subject that you don’t know anything about, how do you know if you’re being ripped off?” I think the latest rip… It used to be little old ladies always get ripped off at the mechanic’s place when they’re getting their car fixed. Because the guy would say, “Oh boy, your framistat. When’s the last time you had your framistat looked at?” And they’d go, “Framistat, I don’t know.” Or blinker fluid. You know, “You really need to change your blinker fluid,” and all of these… And I’m being silly now, but it was people being overcharged.
You know what I think the new auto mechanic scam is? I think it’s internet because nobody knows anything about the internet, but except for the fact that they use it every day. So people can come up to you and sell you stuff on the internet. Well, how do you know if something that they’re selling you is something you actually need? Same thing with cars. Go find out something that you the answer to, one or two things that are complicated that you know the answer to, ask the question, and if the answer comes back the truth, you can assume every other thing that they say is the truth.
It’s like the riddle of the Indian? You ever heard of the riddle of the Indian?

Kyle Knowles:
No.

Bill Gephardt:
Well, you’re walking down a path in Utah, and you’re trying to get to Salt Lake, and you come to a fork in the path. And there are two Indians standing there at the path. One is from the tribe that always tells the truth, and one is from the tribe that always lies. You know that, but they both look exactly the same. So you get to ask two questions. You have to pick one Indian, which look exactly the same. You get to pick one of the two, and you get two questions of that one Indian, which Indian do you pick? And what two questions do you ask?
And the answer is either Indian. You pick one of them, you walk up and you say… On a beautiful sunny day, you ask, “Is it a beautiful sunny day?” And if the Indian says, “Yes, it is. Boy, isn’t this a beautiful sunny day?” You say, “Which way to get to Salt Lake?” And you take that path. If that Indian that you talk to says, “Oh, what a beautiful sunny day. [inaudible 00:51:31] oh no, it’s raining, thunder, lightning, it’s cold. What a horrible day this is.” You ask him which way to get to Salt Lake, what he tells you, you take the opposite path. Always ask something that you know the answer to because all the Indians look exactly the same. So all the mechanics, all the SEO people, search engine optimization people, they all look the same. What two questions do you ask of one of the SEO guys to know if you’re getting ripped off or not? If you’re told the truth, you can assume everything else is the truth. If you’re told a lie, you can assume everything else is a lie. That’s advice I got from somebody else.

Kyle Knowles:
[inaudible 00:52:11].

Bill Gephardt:
So there you go.

Kyle Knowles:
Really good advice.

Bill Gephardt:
I thought of one.

Kyle Knowles:
Really good advice. What’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Bill Gephardt:
I have a full head of hair. That’s one thing. And so do you if you take that hat off, we’d find out you have a full head of hair too.

Kyle Knowles:
Wait, now we’re turning into con men.

Bill Gephardt:
Yes, we are. So I don’t know. What’s something someone… They don’t know that I used to fly airplanes. They don’t know that I was a tugboat captain, I don’t suppose. They don’t know that I was a really blue collar guy and a huge supporter, blue collar stuff based on what I came from. Based on what I came from. I’m just not a highbrow guy at all. I can drink wine out of a box as well as I can drink fine wine that is somehow… I used to make my own wine. I used to make my own beer. I learned a little something about different kinds of beer and different kinds of wine as I made those things. I went to a whiskey tasting thing in… I’m saying it’s a business that does whiskey tasting and I learned something about whiskey. What I learned about whiskey is you just ferment the mash and it’s pretty much all the same from there. And look, I’m not being a snob about it. I’m being the opposite. But you can get expensive whiskeys and cheap whiskeys, and they pretty much taste the same. That’s what I know about whiskey.

Kyle Knowles:
I like it.

Bill Gephardt:
So that’s something maybe people don’t know about me. I don’t know.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, we’re nearing the end of our time. Just have a lightning round of a list of questions. Favorite candy bar?

Bill Gephardt:
That would be a Butterfinger.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite musical artist.

Bill Gephardt:
That would probably be the Eagles, as a group, that’d probably be the Eagles, I suppose. I have lots of favorites in that area.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite cereal?

Bill Gephardt:
Well, let’s see. I don’t eat cereal, but I suppose the occasions that I do it would be Rice Krispies, I suppose.

Kyle Knowles:
Mac or PC.

Bill Gephardt:
Oh, that’s two religions there, huh? I tell you what, every time a computer breaks down that question comes up. I’m a PC guy, but I used to be an Apple guy, and I’ve got people in my business for whom I buy computers and some like PCs and some Apples. And the ones that like the PCs think the Apples are just awful and vice versa. And this goes all the way back 50 years or however many years computers have been around where there were people that said, “Apple is great because you don’t have to put in all of the code words to make something happen. XH slash slash, XEQ and all that. No, no. You just click on something or you put in run family and it would run the family thing.” And then pretty soon the PC’s caught up. So which one? Right now it’s a PC, but it could be an Apple next time. I don’t know.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Google or Microsoft.

Bill Gephardt:
Well, that’s two religions again. And what I mean by religions, you can’t talk to super dedicated religious people out of one or the other. I operate on a Microsoft system and I Google all the time. What’s that tell you?

Kyle Knowles:
Do you use Gmail or Outlook for your email?

Bill Gephardt:
I like Outlook because it seems better for me. It indents, it hits the tab and stuff. I guess probably then I like Microsoft better than Google because when I open my computer, it goes to Google and then I have to go down to Microsoft in order to do stuff. And I’ve tried to write in Microsoft, but I don’t think it’s made for writers. I don’t know what it’s made for. I think the other is made for writers. Does that answer it? I don’t know.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you use the OfficeSuite, like Word and Excel? Or do you use Google Sheets and Google Documents?

Bill Gephardt:
[inaudible 00:56:22] Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I used it [inaudible 00:56:24] that ’cause I’m old and I just haven’t gotten used to the other stuff because I’ve… People who work for me and my IT people say, “Absolutely, go Google.” And I do, but it’s not as easy. And I mean, it’s not as easy for writing. I mean, the tab key in Microsoft indents. The tab key moves onto the… Moves onto send. So I have trouble with that, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Dogs or cats?

Bill Gephardt:
Dogs. Although I like cats. I got a dog. He’s sitting behind my screen here. Keeps me company, a border collie. He keeps me the company all the time. Dogs. But I like cats too.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Bill Gephardt:
Phantom. Les Mis is heavier. Both are entertaining. Phantom is super entertaining. The way the stage magically transforms and changes more so than Les Mis. Les Mis has, I think, more of a message. But just for pure entertainment, yeah, I like the other. Yeah. So there you go.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, last question-

Bill Gephardt:
How about you? How about you? What do you like?

Kyle Knowles:
I’m Les Mis on that.

Bill Gephardt:
Les Mis? Okay.
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
You like the message. Okay.
The message and the… It’s more moving to me, but Phantom is definitely more of a spectacle and entertaining that way.

Bill Gephardt:
It is.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Bill Gephardt:
Yep.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Last question. How do you want to be remembered?

Bill Gephardt:
I don’t know. I don’t know. Boy, I haven’t thought about that. How do I want to be remembered? Kind of an nihilist. So I don’t think that anybody gets accurately… Anybody, including Jesus Christ. I don’t think anybody gets accurately remembered for long after they’ve expired. I think we’re remembered as an aggregate of others. And if there’s any afterlife, it’s the aggregate of all the people. So if I go away, somebody else will come back that replaces me, or a group of… an aggregate of mines will come back to replace me.
Be remembered? I don’t know. I probably go to a lot of trouble not to hurt anybody else unless they’ve hurt me first, or unless they’ve hurt a friend of mine or something. I don’t know. I think I’m too… A little bit too maybe self [inaudible 00:59:09]. I don’t like analyzing myself and I don’t like other people when they, you know, “I’m a fine person. I’m a gardening person. I’m a kind person.” It depends on who you’re talking to. We will decide whether or not you are kind. You don’t need to point that out to us. And so I think it is a little bit too arrogant maybe for me to try to tell you how I’d like to be remembered. I think that’s going to be up to you to figure out how you want to remember me or anybody else. But I do think that I exist and my continued existence for the next thousand years will be in an aggregate of people, if that makes sense.

Kyle Knowles:
It does. And your motivation right now, and your purpose is what?

Bill Gephardt:
Keep others employed. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m fine for myself. I need to keep others employed and I need to keep others on the same mission that I am, which is honesty and preserving local news. Whether I’ll be successful is another question, but that’s it.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you Bill. Thank you for being so generous with your time today and being on the podcast. I’ve had a really good time hearing and learning more about you, and I just want to thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Bill Gephardt:
You bet, Kyle. Anytime.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.

Bill Gephardt:
Yep.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Bill Gephardt:
Thanks.

Kyle Knowles:
Take care.