Speaker 1: F Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Oh my goodness, it's
Speaker 2: it could happen here a podcast that is about things
Speaker 2: falling apart are Dystopian now and tomorrow, And for the
Speaker 2: last several days has been heavily about the Consumer Electronics Show,
Speaker 2: which is a huge event every year where one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty to one hundred and fifty thousand people flood
Speaker 2: into Las Vegas to show off all of the new
Speaker 2: gadgets and to have big, fancy panels on the future
Speaker 2: of technology. And this has been a particularly good year
Speaker 2: for the Dystopia beat. Part of that because the entire
Speaker 2: industry is obsessed right now with artificial intelligence. Now there's
Speaker 2: a couple reasons for this. Every laptop manufacturer is basically
Speaker 2: throwing out laptops with AI assistance. Microsofts is copilot, and
Speaker 2: they're doing this because laptop sales have stalled a lot
Speaker 2: of people, Like the pandemic was great for laptop sales,
Speaker 2: and then people stopped buying them because most people don't
Speaker 2: need to replace their laptops very often. So there's this
Speaker 2: desperate hope that by scaring everybody into thinking they need
Speaker 2: AI immediately, they can get folks to buy a new
Speaker 2: raft of machines. And outside of that, it's just as
Speaker 2: I'm sure you're aware, with interest rates where they are, companies,
Speaker 2: Tech companies, particularly startups, are having trouble getting VC money
Speaker 2: venture capital money invested in them. So there's this kind
Speaker 2: of desperate hope that by plugging AI constantly they can
Speaker 2: fill in the gap. So today we have probably in
Speaker 2: a week or two, we're going to have be putting
Speaker 2: out a long investigation based on number of panels we
Speaker 2: went to with executives from Google, from weirdly enough McDonald's,
Speaker 2: from Adobe, from Nvidia, from the Consumer Electronics Association, in
Speaker 2: multiple government agencies including DHS, on what they see as
Speaker 2: the future of AI. That's going to be some pretty
Speaker 2: in depth reporting. But today we want to talk about
Speaker 2: the AI products that we've been seeing and as a spoiler,
Speaker 2: they're basically all the dumbest shit you've ever heard of.
Speaker 2: So I want to introduce our panel today, coming back
Speaker 2: after catching a horrible, horrible lung infection, throat infection, some
Speaker 2: kind of infection. Yeah, Garrison got strep throat and despite
Speaker 2: the fact that we've been hanging out together, I did not,
Speaker 2: which does prove I'm genetically superior. We also have Tavia
Speaker 2: Mora coming back, our technical expert.
Speaker 3: Hello Tavia, Howdy everybody.
Speaker 2: And for the first time on well, no, not for
Speaker 2: the first time, for the third time on it could
Speaker 2: happen here, the upcoming host of the cool Zone media
Speaker 2: tech focused show Better Offline ed zitron ed.
Speaker 4: Well Gwan Hello, Yeah, sorry, Hi, Yeah, I hit my
Speaker 4: head on the way and yeah.
Speaker 5: It's a truly awful show this year.
Speaker 4: The thing that I said to Robert yesterday when we
Speaker 4: were talking about the show, and this really stood out
Speaker 4: to me, is if you had told me this was
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one, I'd have believed you. It doesn't feel
Speaker 4: despite the use of the word AI, it does not
Speaker 4: feel like tech has actually moved that far, and it's
Speaker 4: very strange.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was this period of time after the iPhone
Speaker 2: came out where every year there would be really big
Speaker 2: leaps in the tech you saw. And this part of
Speaker 2: I think why they're leaning on AI so heavily is
Speaker 2: otherwise it's just the same laptop, smartphones, speakers, connected gadgets,
Speaker 2: you know, autonomous cars and shit that we've been seeing
Speaker 2: for years and they really haven't jumped forward much. But
Speaker 2: you know, the downside of that is a lot of things.
Speaker 2: But the upside of that is people are increasingly cramming
Speaker 2: AI into insane shit in the hopes that somebody will
Speaker 2: want to buy it. And so I want to start
Speaker 2: off ed since you are not just our newest host,
Speaker 2: but also a Las Vegas native, I think people could
Speaker 2: probably assume that from your Vegas accent. Yes, natural, Yeah,
Speaker 2: What is your favorite or the first AI product do
Speaker 2: you want to get into today?
Speaker 5: I want to talk about the rabbit. The rabbit are one?
Speaker 2: Oh god? Yes.
Speaker 4: So this thing is a square box and I can't
Speaker 4: tell if it acts without your phone or with your phone,
Speaker 4: but it uses AI. You you speak into it like
Speaker 4: a walkie talkie and it does a series of actions
Speaker 4: based on what you say, so it can do all
Speaker 4: the things that Siri could do five years ago, like
Speaker 4: change music and start. But it also has like a
Speaker 4: three hundred and sixty degree camera which can Based on
Speaker 4: the extremely awkward and agonizing how a long demo twenty
Speaker 4: five minutes, but bon me, it felt like an hour,
Speaker 4: it can look at a picture of Rick Castley and
Speaker 4: start very and after several agonizing seconds stop playing never
Speaker 4: give you Up. It can also, it claims, do a
Speaker 4: series of nuanced actions like you can say, get me
Speaker 4: a cab home and also put on my tunes and
Speaker 4: also change the air conditioned at seventy four degrees, all
Speaker 4: in one one sentence. Now you may think, why do
Speaker 4: I need to spend two hundred dollars on a device
Speaker 4: to do this? And the answer is you don't. You
Speaker 4: do not need to. This thing looks cool, and on
Speaker 4: some level, I'm just glad we're getting new tat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the design is not bad. It's like a square.
Speaker 2: It looks like it's maybe two two and a half
Speaker 2: inches by two and a half inches or so something
Speaker 2: like that. Yeah, a little screen. It's like well designed
Speaker 2: from an industrial design standpoint, and I think the big Yeah,
Speaker 2: it looks like it's just that it's a it's a
Speaker 2: basically a seri that can use at, it can use Uber,
Speaker 2: it could book a flight for you. One of the
Speaker 2: things they show is it like planning a vacation in
Speaker 2: London for you, which does seem to kind of go
Speaker 2: against the point of like going somewhere new and like
Speaker 2: figuring out what you want to do there, as opposed
Speaker 2: to it's basically pulling from a list I'm sure in
Speaker 2: the AI wrote of like top ten things to do
Speaker 2: in London.
Speaker 4: And it's just very weird because all of these tech guys,
Speaker 4: who they very loudly claim their free spirits, they're independent
Speaker 4: and not control by any authority, they cannot be manipulated,
Speaker 4: all desperately want a machine to tell them exactly what
Speaker 4: the hell to do with their lives. And it's so
Speaker 4: bizarre because they we were discussing the different articles about this,
Speaker 4: and people trying to argue oy this thing, these three sis.
Speaker 4: It's like, oh, it takes out the friction between all
Speaker 4: these apps. I'm sorry, I just don't think there's that
Speaker 4: much friction.
Speaker 2: Pull out my phone. I'm on Uber, Yes, right, I
Speaker 2: pull out my phone, I pull up grub Hub, I
Speaker 2: order food it's very simple. It's remarkably easy. I don't
Speaker 2: see how talking to a square is better, Like it's
Speaker 2: the same, Like I could call someone on the phone
Speaker 2: and do it hands free, or I could text them,
Speaker 2: and I always text them because that's more pleasant.
Speaker 5: I mean, like, I have my phone open to signal
Speaker 5: right now, I can swipe up, go to Uber and
Speaker 5: less than a second saying the words move from signal
Speaker 5: to the Uber app takes a whole lot longer than
Speaker 5: just doing it with my thumb.
Speaker 2: I also do love the idea of like completely ruining
Speaker 2: the point of Signal, which is an encrypted, extremely secure
Speaker 2: message app, to be like, hey, random box, I want
Speaker 2: to feed my private messages through you and have you
Speaker 2: read them out to me as I go about my day.
Speaker 2: I don't know what your data retention policy is or
Speaker 2: what you'll be doing with it.
Speaker 5: They sold out and they made two million.
Speaker 2: Dollars, like ten million of them, some ten thousand. Sorry,
Speaker 2: it's just and it's I've read.
Speaker 4: I read like eleven articles about this thing, because I
Speaker 4: occasionally drive myself insane with these things when I see
Speaker 4: everyone excited about something, but I can't read a single
Speaker 4: article that tells me why I should buy it, even
Speaker 4: though my rap brain says, oh, take with screen I want,
Speaker 4: but then I want to use it. But I'll have
Speaker 4: to explain this to the normal people in my life
Speaker 4: why I have this, And I don't want to do
Speaker 4: that if it's useless. But on top of that, I
Speaker 4: just don't think controlling my life with voice is that useful. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't like that.
Speaker 2: I'm already and I think a lot of people are
Speaker 2: already kind of fed up with the extent to which
Speaker 2: my smartphone is a part of my life. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: like it does irreplaceable tasks at the moment for me,
Speaker 2: So I have it. This thing is number one adding
Speaker 2: a device because I think it does require your phone.
Speaker 2: But it's also, like you know, in addition to the
Speaker 2: current problems I have with privacy on my smartphone, I
Speaker 2: am adding another company and another device and another set
Speaker 2: of security potential security flaws to it.
Speaker 4: But on top of that, the thing they have failed
Speaker 4: to explain anywhere, and no journalist apparently is interrogate them
Speaker 4: about this is they claim this thing can log onto
Speaker 4: your Uber and make a flight booking, ostensibly having your
Speaker 4: passport information, your date of birth, and all this stuff.
Speaker 4: First and foremost. That's like you mentioned, the data retention
Speaker 4: policy is very strange. But where is this crap all happening?
Speaker 4: Is it happening on my phone? Is my phone just
Speaker 4: doing all this? I refuse to believe that. So you're
Speaker 4: doing this in the kind of virtual machine environment, how
Speaker 4: is that possible? Surely these companies are going to have
Speaker 4: a problem with that. Mark Sullivan for Fast Company. Actually,
Speaker 4: I think ask them this and they were like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: they'll be fine with it. They just want people using
Speaker 4: their apps. I do not think they're going to be
Speaker 4: fine with this. Companies hate it when they hand off
Speaker 4: power from the user, who will still be liable to
Speaker 4: another computer.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the other thing is just that, like part
Speaker 2: of me kind of suspects And when you watch the video,
Speaker 2: we'll play a clip from it in a second. The
Speaker 2: CEO of Rabbit very clearly, like a lot of guys
Speaker 2: in tech, wants to be Steve Jobs. And I will
Speaker 2: say one thing I kind of suspect that might actually
Speaker 2: be that would be a Steve Jobs move is he
Speaker 2: may have just been hoping that this thing coming out
Speaker 2: selling a shitload on free order and getting huge buzz
Speaker 2: would force these companies after the fact to allow integration,
Speaker 2: like he may just be gambling, Like if I get
Speaker 2: enough buzz behind me, Uber and whatnot will come to
Speaker 2: the table and be willing to work with me, because
Speaker 2: suddenly this is like the Hippus new gadget.
Speaker 4: Except ten thousand customers is actually not that many, and
Speaker 4: I actually look forward to I really can't wait for
Speaker 4: what two months to pass people to get this and
Speaker 4: someone to end up like sending the word penis to
Speaker 4: their or company slack because they wanted to order pizza,
Speaker 4: and on top of that, ordering a fly, ordering an Uber.
Speaker 4: These are actually nuanced actions. Coming to Mandeley Bay toenite
Speaker 4: Uber took me to the wrong place because it decided
Speaker 4: it wanted to go to the convention center. I did
Speaker 4: not select that. If you go to the airport, you
Speaker 4: need to put in Southwest Airlines.
Speaker 5: And what have you. With grabhab you need to do
Speaker 5: little bits.
Speaker 4: It's just most people don't order lunch, they order something
Speaker 4: for lunch, and I just don't. Ah, this whole thing
Speaker 4: just feels useless.
Speaker 3: Yeah. See, for me, it's the additional level of abstraction
Speaker 3: on top of these already abstracted apps that we use
Speaker 3: to order our basic necessities like eating and things like that.
Speaker 3: It worries me in sort of like a fantasy dystopic way.
Speaker 3: What happens when people suddenly don't use it after getting
Speaker 3: used to using it? Like what are they going to know?
Speaker 3: Are they going to know how to operate a door
Speaker 3: dash app? Are they going to know how to book
Speaker 3: a flight? That kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is kind of because one of the things
Speaker 2: there was a c neet review that said, like, well,
Speaker 2: the potential of this is that it completely removes physical
Speaker 2: use of a device. So you're using these apps, but
Speaker 2: they're just a part of your life. Uber is just
Speaker 2: a thing you to You never look at anything when
Speaker 2: you do it, And I'm like, is that better? Like
Speaker 2: I don't like the idea that you basically have a
Speaker 2: robot that you treat as like your nanny that plans
Speaker 2: your life for you. Like the amount of hype over
Speaker 2: there will be a more concerted piece about this coming out.
Speaker 2: But the first thing I thought when I looked at
Speaker 2: all these guys talking about how cool it was to
Speaker 2: be able to just tell a robot to book your
Speaker 2: flight and plan your travel and book your hotels for you.
Speaker 2: That's like part of the experience of traveling, and like
Speaker 2: choosing things to do is like one of the things
Speaker 2: that traveling is. And the desire so many people have
Speaker 2: to hand off elements of choice really reminds me of
Speaker 2: like cult dynamics. And I don't think this is a
Speaker 2: consumer thing. I think this is specifically a weird subculture
Speaker 2: of tech people of AI people, a lot of the
Speaker 2: same folks who got into NFTs. But this desire, like
Speaker 2: life is so complex and scary, I want to hand
Speaker 2: over all of my agency to a robot. It's the
Speaker 2: same thing that is behind a lot of like why
Speaker 2: people join cults. And I don't think this is a
Speaker 2: pro societal problem, but I think it is a weird
Speaker 2: problem with the group of people who are most excited
Speaker 2: to have a fucking rabbit.
Speaker 3: It seems like a sad thing to me that folks
Speaker 3: might only attend bars or restaurants that are rated like
Speaker 3: four point five and above that's decided by something else, Yeah,
Speaker 3: and they don't get to have this like experience of
Speaker 3: walking into like the sedious bar you've ever seen in
Speaker 3: your life and have like maybe possibly like a life
Speaker 3: changing experience.
Speaker 4: I was just in South Korea and we went to
Speaker 4: this fried chicken place that ended up being close actually
Speaker 4: was like we opened but nobody was there, which made
Speaker 4: me just want to leave before getting killed. And so
Speaker 4: I just went to a random chicken place across the
Speaker 4: road from my hotel, and I thought, well, it'll feed me.
Speaker 4: It was wonderful, it was delightful, and it was I
Speaker 4: could not find any reviews for it. It was just
Speaker 4: a flipping place. And I don't I think these people
Speaker 4: who are desperate for a device like this, this kind
Speaker 4: of weird nanny device. First of all, I don't think
Speaker 4: they think about the practicalities of this. I don't think
Speaker 4: this is quicker or easier better. But also they're like, oh,
Speaker 4: I wish I could just say one thing and all
Speaker 4: of these things could happen for me. Same people, by
Speaker 4: the way, who are saying that people need to pull
Speaker 4: themselves up by their bootstraps and do things for themselves.
Speaker 4: It's just I don't know if they'd even call it dystopian.
Speaker 4: It's just weird and sad to me.
Speaker 2: Speaking of weird and sad, we're going to move on
Speaker 2: to the next product in a second, but first I
Speaker 2: gotta play everybody in case you haven't seen it or
Speaker 2: heard it? The CEO of Rabbit trying to rickroll the
Speaker 2: audience with his hell device. Have you seen this, Garrison?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Okay, eyes on the screen. Everybody to activate the eye,
Speaker 2: just double tap the button. Oh funny seeing you here, Rick.
Speaker 5: Let me take a look. I'm never gonna give you up.
Speaker 3: Now enjoying.
Speaker 5: What am I getting Rick rolled in my own kenotes?
Speaker 5: Let's move on to the next one. All right, I
Speaker 5: have a question real quick.
Speaker 4: So what is the functionality he just activated? Is it
Speaker 4: that you just put you point the eye at something
Speaker 4: and it chooses an Actually the.
Speaker 2: I automatically see Rick Astley and choose to play one
Speaker 2: specific song of his. Because that actually doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: a feature. That seems like a bug.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that seems like what happens if it sees certain people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein, Yeah, what happens if it sees Jeffrey Yeah,
Speaker 2: plays children screaming like what is wow? Is this thing work?
Speaker 4: Booking trips to Florida?
Speaker 2: It I maybe it's respectable that they showed how bad
Speaker 2: the lag is because that moment where there's quiet after
Speaker 2: he like clicks on it is like it's loading it's
Speaker 2: processing for a considerable period of time.
Speaker 4: And it's just also I feel for the bloke because
Speaker 4: I know he was probably so excited to do this
Speaker 4: and he's like, I'm gonna be Steve Jobs. But man,
Speaker 4: when you can't perform, you don't perform.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, that's bad delivery.
Speaker 4: Did I just get Rick rolled in my own video?
Speaker 4: It was like that, I forget what the movie's called.
Speaker 2: Oh high Mark, Yeah it is, and obviously like English
Speaker 2: is the reverse language, but like it's a performance. You like,
Speaker 2: you practice, right, you get coached and stuff because you're
Speaker 2: trying to represent your company.
Speaker 4: Oh I tell you this from experience as I've run
Speaker 4: a PR firm. Yeah, that guy actually did practice because
Speaker 4: all of that was his actual timing wasn't bad. He
Speaker 4: just does not have that dog in him.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you bring in other people to do like
Speaker 2: that anyway, and everybody, anyone, anyone's mind on the rabbit
Speaker 2: changed having seen that. Absolutely not Garrison has a look
Speaker 2: on their face.
Speaker 5: No, it's just like what I've always wanted in a
Speaker 5: tech gadget is be able to point at three to
Speaker 5: sixty five degree camera at a picture of a musician
Speaker 5: and then wait thirty seconds and then have an AI
Speaker 5: pick a random song of theirs. That's always what I
Speaker 5: wanted for the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's that's the dream of fucking Archimedes had.
Speaker 2: That's right he was when he was building his laser.
Speaker 2: That's right that we all saw in the most recent
Speaker 2: Indiana Jones film. Speaking of the most recent Indiana Jones film,
Speaker 2: this podcast is entirely sponsored by that movie. So here's
Speaker 2: some other ads.
Speaker 5: Why are we giving free advertising to Disney? Why are we.
Speaker 6: Why?
Speaker 2: Because that movie was so close to being worth it
Speaker 2: that last twenty minutes.
Speaker 5: They fully committed, They fully get it.
Speaker 2: No Nazis machine gunning Roman Legion.
Speaker 5: Pretty funny, It's pretty funny. Well, do you know who
Speaker 5: would have loved cees our our comedian is probably yes,
Speaker 5: he probably would have would have had a great time.
Speaker 5: What what next AI product do we want to talk about?
Speaker 5: How about the pet one Garrison?
Speaker 2: You saw that?
Speaker 5: All right? So I think I think I think me
Speaker 5: and Ed both saw chat GPT for animals. Yeah damn,
Speaker 5: which is not really what it is saying. It's like
Speaker 5: it it scans a picture of your dog and then
Speaker 5: tries to tell you if it has any health problem.
Speaker 5: It's based on that picture. It's it's it's You're not
Speaker 5: you're not actually talking to your dog or anything. It
Speaker 5: just it takes pictures of animals and then it analyzes
Speaker 5: it to tell you how the dog is feeling. Blah
Speaker 5: blah blah blah blah, it's it's. I saw a product
Speaker 5: like this earlier at CES. I saw a product. I
Speaker 5: saw a product like this last year. They're just calling
Speaker 5: it chat GPT because it's an AI name. It's it's
Speaker 5: it's it's it's.
Speaker 2: It's hip like because people people, they're that that will
Speaker 2: make people spend money off.
Speaker 4: It was every CES I see something that begins to
Speaker 4: make me disassociate and I walk I walked past there
Speaker 4: and blovo the chat GPT, and my brain was just
Speaker 4: like could you just like start like glitching out? And
Speaker 4: then when I went to look it up, as Garrison did,
Speaker 4: I was so disappointed because I hope that these would
Speaker 4: just crackpots. So like, yep, you put the microphone to
Speaker 4: your dog. Now you know what your dog's saying that
Speaker 4: I would respect even if it didn't work, just if
Speaker 4: you're like, yeah, fuck it, yeah, your cat's said he
Speaker 4: hates your Your cat's been radicalized.
Speaker 5: I'm afraid.
Speaker 2: See there's a fun product in here, which is you
Speaker 2: sell to rubes and a product that you're like it
Speaker 2: translates your dog's micro expressions into language. And then the
Speaker 2: actual paying customers are sickos like us, and you just
Speaker 2: take control of somebody's pets voice.
Speaker 5: That would be so cool.
Speaker 2: You can have their like, yeah, your cat's racist, now
Speaker 2: your dog's are Nazi like this is this is.
Speaker 5: The perfect product for HB. Love Craft. I would have
Speaker 5: loved this.
Speaker 4: No if you gave me like the show light to me,
Speaker 4: but for dogs on my phone, I would spend whatever
Speaker 4: you want.
Speaker 5: A thousand dollars I.
Speaker 2: Will get I wouldn't pay like average West Coast rent
Speaker 2: prices to be able to like gaslight some family into
Speaker 2: thinking their dog is a terrorist.
Speaker 4: And see a friend of mine, Oh, what's what's wrong?
Speaker 4: Ed chat GPT said that I said that my dogs
Speaker 4: joined ISIS and I don't know. I don't know how
Speaker 4: he did it, but he's been he's talking about a
Speaker 4: caliphate according to the app. I don't know what this
Speaker 4: app is bankrupting me. I paid four and a half
Speaker 4: thousand dollars for this app a month.
Speaker 5: I don't know why I need it so because so
Speaker 5: unfortunately had to miss yesterday. So there was probably an
Speaker 5: endless number of tech innovations that I was unable to
Speaker 5: see because I had to miss one day. But with
Speaker 5: help a pencil and I was able to return today
Speaker 5: to do one final.
Speaker 2: Chat GPT of antibiotics.
Speaker 5: That's that is exactly what my doctor said, actually, but
Speaker 5: I did. I did swear revenge on cees. So I
Speaker 5: just walked around most mostly mostly the Venetian just seeing
Speaker 5: all of the worst things I could find in documenting
Speaker 5: them so I could get revenge from that twink poisonam
Speaker 5: with strap throat. So the first really good thing is this.
Speaker 5: I mostly walked around the award winning sections because that's
Speaker 5: where you find only the best. There was an award
Speaker 5: winning speaker called Audio Cu that all of their marketing
Speaker 5: was built from this horrible, horrible uh Ai image generation
Speaker 5: of this like extremely busty blonde woman in a latex suit,
Speaker 5: but if you zoom it onto her fingernails, her her
Speaker 5: fingernails are like sticking through the wrong side of her fingers. There.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, Oh my god, it's the woman's from
Speaker 4: that one movie for Oh damn it not skin the one.
Speaker 5: The other it was the woman where the alien.
Speaker 4: Was sex and then she killed people when she had
Speaker 4: sex with them. It's the same thing, Yes, terrifying. Yes,
Speaker 4: rita's a cool in and say what that is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it looks just like that. It has relaxed stick
Speaker 5: it in, which is pretty funny. So that that was
Speaker 5: pretty bad.
Speaker 2: Now I respect that. I respect that. That's a baller
Speaker 2: move right there.
Speaker 5: Again, this is this is for a speaker company like.
Speaker 3: DJ Girlfriend in the shape it's a speaker in the
Speaker 3: shape of a girlfriend.
Speaker 5: No, it's just home theater speakers.
Speaker 2: It just have a horrible AI generated woman as their spokesperson.
Speaker 3: I mean I would buy it if it was DJ Girlfriend. Though.
Speaker 2: DJ Girlfriend is a great idea for a product and
Speaker 2: might stop several.
Speaker 5: AI has brought back sexism.
Speaker 2: If you do DJ Girlfriend right, you could stop at
Speaker 2: least one mass shooting.
Speaker 3: Finally, we have a real solution now.
Speaker 5: Another product that won the CEES twenty twenty four Innovation
Speaker 5: Awards is an AI powered coffee brewer and grinder system.
Speaker 5: I'm just gonna read the description from the coffee's been missing,
Speaker 5: that's right.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 5: We wake up every morning make our little French press coffee.
Speaker 5: That's fine, But you know what could be better? An
Speaker 5: AI system that does it for you. I'm gonna read
Speaker 5: the award the award description for this product. Okay, introducing
Speaker 5: Barista Brew Coffee Brewer and Grinder System, a smart coffee
Speaker 5: system that tailors your brew to perfection with AI guided personalization.
Speaker 5: Easily adjust brewing parameters for a custom cup. New expertise needed,
Speaker 5: rate to track and refine your bruise brew iq AI
Speaker 5: suggestions for your ideal taste, simplify with one touch favorites,
Speaker 5: elevate your coffee experience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I hear all that. The one thing I
Speaker 4: think is simplify. That's that's simple. The Movie's Spacies, by
Speaker 4: the way.
Speaker 5: I love that movie. One of one of the best
Speaker 5: hr Geiger art utilizations.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and easily the horniest movie of the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 5: Which is Lot of which is which is a high
Speaker 5: high bar. So on on. On this AI coffee maker.
Speaker 5: On the front, there's a little control panel with nine
Speaker 5: different settings that you can you can change because they're
Speaker 5: all on a graph. We have we have citrus, spice, nutty, fruity, balanced, cocoa, floral, herbal,
Speaker 5: and honey, so you can you can with your with
Speaker 5: the with the ease of a touchpad, start to customize
Speaker 5: your own AI coffee, so that that is revolutionary. I'm
Speaker 5: going to be getting one for Robert this Christmas.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Garrison. I know I've always thought, you know,
Speaker 2: what I hate is the experience of uh, of exploring
Speaker 2: new flavors on my own and and learning new ways
Speaker 2: of brewing coffee, a beverage I consume every day. So
Speaker 2: I'm glad to be handing that whole experience off to
Speaker 2: a machine.
Speaker 5: That's right, and I know a lot of people used Tavia.
Speaker 2: Just brought something up that I think is relevant here.
Speaker 3: It's a Guardian article about an AI smoothie shop that
Speaker 3: opened in San Francisco well before a ce S. That
Speaker 3: is a combination of it's being driven forward with AI
Speaker 3: technology as well as five G stuff that I think
Speaker 3: had opened up and then like three weeks later had
Speaker 3: shut down.
Speaker 2: Oh that's they were like, a robot will pick the
Speaker 2: perfect smoothie for you.
Speaker 4: Well, I actually want to bring I want to bring
Speaker 4: something up. So I love smoking me. I have pellet
Speaker 4: smokers at home, and I saw a few times on
Speaker 4: this show AI grills and I just looked up one
Speaker 4: called a brisk It smart grill, and I was like,
Speaker 4: how could you possibly make a thing which is basically
Speaker 4: maintaining hot air in a tube long enough until the
Speaker 4: food's done? And what it is is it has a
Speaker 4: thing You can ask the grill what seasoning should I
Speaker 4: add to make my chicken skew a spicy or how
Speaker 4: do I see a medium rest eight? I don't fucking know.
Speaker 4: Why don't you learn to cook?
Speaker 5: You twat?
Speaker 2: It's just like.
Speaker 4: The enjoyable part of cooking is the experimentation and learning taste.
Speaker 4: But no, thank you, just like that goddamn coffee thing. Oh,
Speaker 4: I don't want to learn anything. I don't want to
Speaker 4: have a human experience.
Speaker 3: That's the thing with a lot of these AI solutions,
Speaker 3: will call them, is I feel like they're robbing people
Speaker 3: of real experiences.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for like no, been Like there's some stuff that like,
Speaker 2: you know, the ability of a smartphone to once you
Speaker 2: had to be like in a building in order to
Speaker 2: like access a phone or like use a payphone. Now
Speaker 2: you can connect with people everywhere. That's that's a clear benefit, right.
Speaker 2: There's downsides to it, obviously, but it's a clear benefit,
Speaker 2: but like, now you don't have to learn. Now, now
Speaker 2: you don't have to cook. You can let a robot
Speaker 2: do it for you. It's like, well, but why cooking
Speaker 2: is pleasurable? And if I don't want to cook, I
Speaker 2: will go to a restaurant or order food, and it's
Speaker 2: cheaper than buying several thousand dollars AI device.
Speaker 5: I mean, some things are hard to learn, which brings
Speaker 5: me to the next product that's smoking me. But had
Speaker 5: kind of like like, uh, like parenting, right.
Speaker 2: So good, okay, nice, you know what, Garrison, I'm proud
Speaker 2: of you.
Speaker 5: That was a good sex way so AI parenting, especially
Speaker 5: with your infant child. This was also in the CEES
Speaker 5: Awards section, so you know it's gonna be legit. I
Speaker 5: was able to see an demonstration of an AI baby
Speaker 5: crib that will shake your baby up and down based
Speaker 5: on facial expression analysis done by an AI, and yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna show a show it here. So here is
Speaker 5: here's the cutting edge facial expressions we have anger discussed fear, happiness, sadness,
Speaker 5: and surprise, and that basically that data will go into
Speaker 5: this little crib which will start shaking and moving up
Speaker 5: and down. Based on what they scan on your baby's face.
Speaker 4: So to be clear, there is a protocole, yes, snow
Speaker 4: that exists where drop my phone. There there's a protut
Speaker 4: called the snow which is like a for infants and
Speaker 4: it notices when they're fussing and it kind of like
Speaker 4: lightly rocks them.
Speaker 5: But the way it rocks them is so very light.
Speaker 4: It is very much a This is this is what
Speaker 4: a mother would do with a brand new baby biked.
Speaker 5: You don't want to move into much.
Speaker 4: That one has like six pictures from the intro of
Speaker 4: light to me and a hot rate monitor. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: hand over your baby to AI.
Speaker 3: Great, Yeah, this product looks like a baby Morocca. The
Speaker 3: pace that you shake in it, which is dependent on
Speaker 3: what pretty much you make pretty much well.
Speaker 2: I love it also because like a real scandal I
Speaker 2: think from the I think it was in the eighties,
Speaker 2: is like Nanny's shaking babies to death. Like the idea
Speaker 2: that like again a machine that can only go at
Speaker 2: a certain pace that's very light. You know, I get
Speaker 2: that's a labor staate, especially for like a single parent
Speaker 2: or whatnot. Like you know, some some people will need that,
Speaker 2: But I just worry. I worry that we're not all
Speaker 2: that far from our first and AI killed my baby.
Speaker 5: You know, I think I think that I think the
Speaker 5: real beauty of this product is usually when you have
Speaker 5: a newber, maybe you have to like watch it all
Speaker 5: nightcs it'll wake up, you have to like pick it up,
Speaker 5: pat it, make sure it gets back to sleep. You
Speaker 5: can just leave that baby in the bed. You can
Speaker 5: you can like go to the club, just leave the
Speaker 5: baby in the bed. If it starts crying, don't worry.
Speaker 5: The AI will take the will take over.
Speaker 2: We are on the verge of beds that can raise
Speaker 2: our children, just like the Venture Brothers.
Speaker 5: That's right, and and those and those kids turned out fine,
Speaker 5: they turned out great, perfectly. But I think luckily luckily
Speaker 5: for you, because I know none of us are babies anymore.
Speaker 5: But we are all, you know, eventually going to get old, hopefully, hopefully,
Speaker 5: and there is air products that will also assist us
Speaker 5: as we get older, using the same AI baby tech. Here.
Speaker 5: One of the one of the one of the places
Speaker 5: that me and Robert stopped by was called Blue Sky AI.
Speaker 5: It's spelled ridiculously offensively, and they refused to do an
Speaker 5: interview they were not happy, but I was able to
Speaker 5: get a pamphlet and they have an AI that I
Speaker 5: think they're mostly targeted to get at like older people.
Speaker 5: But quote, by comparing the way your facial and vocal
Speaker 5: behavior changes over time, using your facial expressions, facial muscle actions,
Speaker 5: as well as where you are looking, your body pose,
Speaker 5: and the tone of your voice, we have the potential
Speaker 5: to identify and monitor all kinds of medical conditions that
Speaker 5: manifest in the face or voice. So it's it's a
Speaker 5: facial scanning and voice scanning that uses AI to try
Speaker 5: to diagnose you with medical conditions specific specifically, the guy
Speaker 5: told us that it's it's useful for Alzheimer's. Then he
Speaker 5: realized we were journalists and the nassis to go away.
Speaker 2: And also, but yeah, that's how you know you've got
Speaker 2: a good medical.
Speaker 5: Device, a good product. At CES blue Sky uses a
Speaker 5: continuous approach apparent valiance and arousal to measure to measure
Speaker 5: expressed emotion. This better fits the real human experience of
Speaker 5: emotional states. This approach allows emotion regions to be defined
Speaker 5: and to measure the transitions away from and towards these regions.
Speaker 5: This continuous approach where appropriate can be mapped back to
Speaker 5: a much less exact categorical representation, for example, excited, calm
Speaker 5: or angry.
Speaker 3: Did they have horny?
Speaker 5: They do not have horny, not that I can see.
Speaker 2: Look, if you know old people, one thing they never
Speaker 2: stop doing is funny.
Speaker 5: Now they do have a list of all human emotions
Speaker 5: here that turn it on a map. Finally that using AI,
Speaker 5: we can finally figure out what emotions you're feeling based
Speaker 5: on your face. So you can use this just with
Speaker 5: your with your phone camera, with your with your iPad camera.
Speaker 5: They do data collection, data analysis. One of the weird
Speaker 5: use cases that we saw was, I know we saw
Speaker 5: something similar to this already, but just scanning your face
Speaker 5: when driving to tell you how you're feeling, which is
Speaker 5: just quite funny.
Speaker 2: It's a I could talk about that a second. What
Speaker 2: this reminds me of there was a product a few
Speaker 2: years ago. It was like a robot for the military,
Speaker 2: and the idea was this robot can run in dangerous
Speaker 2: situations and pickup troops that have been injured and run
Speaker 2: them out, which is probably a thing that will exist
Speaker 2: at some point and might even save lives. Right, I
Speaker 2: can see how that would be a useful thing, and
Speaker 2: the military can be very dangerous to retrieve people. Much
Speaker 2: better for a robot to get shot or blown up
Speaker 2: in that situation than another person. But to try and
Speaker 2: comfort the soldiers, they gave the robot the head of
Speaker 2: a teddy Bear, like a metal teddy Bear head. It
Speaker 2: looked like a fucking nightmare. It's just like, what, what
Speaker 2: do you think did you talk to There's all sorts
Speaker 2: of guys who have been shot in combat. Did you
Speaker 2: talk to one of them? Did you go with the
Speaker 2: experience of having your arm blown off? Corporal have been
Speaker 2: more pleasurable if a giant metal teddy Bear entered.
Speaker 4: So my first job was working on the characters and
Speaker 4: twisted metal, but then I moved into robotics. It's so
Speaker 4: cool that how many of these products are very clearly made, funded, prototyped,
Speaker 4: r and D, hired PR teams. Everyone's done these big
Speaker 4: presentations without talking to a single fucking human being.
Speaker 2: It's so cool.
Speaker 4: It's so cool how much waste there is at this
Speaker 4: shoh where not a single human soul there is a
Speaker 4: completely different subject. There was like an AI powered nail
Speaker 4: saw on thing as well. I saw, and I'm like
Speaker 4: That's definitely one where you didn't talk to talk to
Speaker 4: any woman though, because first and foremost in my experience,
Speaker 4: a lot of women are scared of a new nail
Speaker 4: place for fucking up their hands. So are they going
Speaker 4: to spend eight hundred goddamn dollars on this thing to
Speaker 4: maybe get burnt? And I saw in this article about
Speaker 4: it just now that their thing they said was, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like an espresso at home. I've had an espressos
Speaker 4: break multiple times, and I realized it may sound weird.
Speaker 4: How can you break an espresso? I'm just built different.
Speaker 4: But if I can break it in just like me.
Speaker 2: And strep throat, unbelievable.
Speaker 5: So I do have one more product. And then I'm and.
Speaker 2: Well, first, Garrison, I know you have one more product,
Speaker 2: but we also have one more ad break. Ah, we're back, Garrison,
Speaker 2: what's your next product?
Speaker 5: So we already talked about the handy, which is you know,
Speaker 5: I sure did, which is bye. By all accounts, actually
Speaker 5: like works as intended.
Speaker 2: It's a good product. The people, the PR people, and
Speaker 2: we talked to the CEO. We're not just knowledgeable, but
Speaker 2: like remarkably good at keeping a straight face while talking
Speaker 2: about their jack Well, that's professionalism. You have to respect it.
Speaker 3: Honestly, that was the most professional booth I saw the
Speaker 3: entirety of ces. They were really on point.
Speaker 2: If you are looking for a jack off machine, I
Speaker 2: can't recommend anything more highly.
Speaker 5: Well, Robert, except for our next product, which is an
Speaker 5: AI power to jack off machine. Thank god. So this
Speaker 5: is called my Hixel. It is the first it's the
Speaker 5: first app.
Speaker 2: That's an appealing names that's a name that sounds like sex.
Speaker 5: It is the first app for climax Control to incorporate AI.
Speaker 5: Now I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna read through.
Speaker 3: There really redefines edge technology. Huh.
Speaker 2: I want to make a note before you get into it.
Speaker 2: The thing that they're claiming this is useful for there
Speaker 2: are devices for and it is a real use case,
Speaker 2: which is that like, premature ejaculation is a serious problem
Speaker 2: for a lot of men. It's like it's like a
Speaker 2: quality of life issue, right, Like it stops people from
Speaker 2: feeling confident. It's a serious problem. There are prosthetic devices
Speaker 2: people can use to train themselves. That's fine, they already exist.
Speaker 2: This is basically like what if an AI could teach
Speaker 2: you how to come slower.
Speaker 5: Yes, and we have a six step layout here describing
Speaker 5: why why my Hixel is right for you. For the
Speaker 5: first step is secure and anonymonized data collection, so you
Speaker 5: can get O good all of your coming data stored,
Speaker 5: but don't worry, it's secure.
Speaker 7: See.
Speaker 2: My first question to that is why is data on
Speaker 2: me masturbating being collected at all?
Speaker 5: Well, it could be because they're putting it towards an
Speaker 5: eight week training program.
Speaker 4: No, So, first and foremost, one of the first things
Speaker 4: on the website for this is just the words happy
Speaker 4: sex here save sixty dollars and my Hixel control. But
Speaker 4: happy sex here is going to be something I think
Speaker 4: about for a while. But also it says it has
Speaker 4: my Hixel care and my Hixel control, two different things,
Speaker 4: and then my hicksl Academy and sadly you can't click
Speaker 4: on that because I've never wanted to know more about
Speaker 4: how much material could there be unless.
Speaker 3: A masturbation academy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought they just called that eton. I was
Speaker 2: a British public school joke.
Speaker 3: It's okay, I made an edging joke earlier and nobody
Speaker 3: caught it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I there's one thing in the eating boys do
Speaker 4: and they don't have sex.
Speaker 2: No masturbation. Yeah sorry. Part of what I hate about
Speaker 2: this is its name is so clearly like trying to
Speaker 2: be respectful and like respectable and tech product name as
Speaker 2: opposed to like one of the things that I respect
Speaker 2: about the Handy people is they just went ahead and
Speaker 2: called it handy.
Speaker 5: I mean it's weird because like some of their some
Speaker 5: of their free merchere were labeled with stuff like download
Speaker 5: the app to control your loads, we bring the game,
Speaker 5: you bring the joystick. The first day you went for
Speaker 5: a run, you couldn't last more than three minutes either.
Speaker 5: So it's weird how they Yeah, I had this very
Speaker 5: like sanitized branding except for their like free merch but
Speaker 5: yeah it has. It has Bluetooth connection, interactive and personalized settings.
Speaker 5: You can monitor your user evolution, and it is it
Speaker 5: is marked as a medical device. But on on their
Speaker 5: brochure there's just two really really good sentences. There's video
Speaker 5: feedback from our sexual health professionals, so after you come,
Speaker 5: you can get on a video chat and talk about that.
Speaker 5: We go there, we go looking good.
Speaker 3: It's the load talking ad on.
Speaker 4: I'd love to be one of those people. As a
Speaker 4: guy man three minutes. You can do better than that.
Speaker 4: Come on, they Are you meant to encourage them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Are you meant to commiserate with them?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What is the call here?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: But also I cannot think of a single person i'd
Speaker 4: want to talk about that with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just imagining like the guy in the other
Speaker 2: and be like no, no, no, zoom me the camera a
Speaker 2: little more. I want to see those ropes. No, that's
Speaker 2: not bad, that's not bad. Good consistency.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's move that over. Let's see his O face again.
Speaker 4: Wow, you play that, my friend? That your load management
Speaker 4: is very consistent.
Speaker 5: And I think I think we're really missing is how
Speaker 5: much how much AI will assist in this because they
Speaker 5: claim that using cutting edge technology? Eh eh my hixel
Speaker 5: Control is the first solution to include AI and machine
Speaker 5: learning for climax control treatment, which is just really really reassuring.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it basically looks like a flashlight that connects
Speaker 5: to your phone and it's an act app with anatomical
Speaker 5: realistic interior design and AI and secured it and and
Speaker 5: adanemonized data.
Speaker 3: I think this is really going to open up some
Speaker 3: avenues for sex workers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, hope, hopefully hopefully Tafia.
Speaker 2: It's It's also like the design the handy is very
Speaker 2: clearly a robot. You stick your dick inside and it
Speaker 2: jacks you off. This looks like a flesh light except
Speaker 2: the back and like the front end that we unscrewed
Speaker 2: the top and it's like a fake vagina looks like
Speaker 2: a fleshlight. The back end looks like an incense diffuser,
Speaker 2: like like someone decided these two products needed to be
Speaker 2: like what if you could fuck your you're aromatherapy bot.
Speaker 5: Finally, so that that is that is most of the
Speaker 5: the the just the groundbreaking AI products that I was
Speaker 5: able to see today. Does anyone else have any AI
Speaker 5: products they would love to talk about?
Speaker 2: It's time to talk about Ganerd. I Okayerts, you want
Speaker 2: to start us off about Ganert.
Speaker 3: Okay, I guess We attended a panel. Which panel was it, y'all?
Speaker 7: That was the DHSA AI pie that was that was
Speaker 7: the AI panel with one of the heads of the
Speaker 7: Department of Homeland Security, who I can confirm because he
Speaker 7: turned around to take a selfie has a Hank Hill ass.
Speaker 3: He was very insistent on that.
Speaker 2: No, but absolutely no. But and I'm saying this not
Speaker 2: to shame him, but because there are orthotics for that,
Speaker 2: you can get help, sir.
Speaker 3: That's even a whole episode of King of the Hill,
Speaker 3: one of the better episodes good times. So ganert Ai
Speaker 3: was announced before this talk that we had, and it
Speaker 3: was a I think the guy announcing both this this
Speaker 3: event as well as the panel had taken some time
Speaker 3: to really focus on the fact that this was his
Speaker 3: quote unquote opis.
Speaker 5: His His opis opus. He said the word opis like
Speaker 5: five times Ganert's what I'll be remembered by.
Speaker 3: This is my legacy. Yeah, and then I guess two
Speaker 3: of the designers had come up who stuck out like
Speaker 3: a sore thumb compared to the sea of khaki and
Speaker 3: blazers and things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they had clearly never ordered a drone strike,
Speaker 2: unlike our hero at Homelands Security.
Speaker 5: One of them had a wide brimmed hat that was
Speaker 5: color matched to the Ganert logo, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 5: What does Genert stand for? Ganert stands for generate, so
Speaker 5: I think it's actually just called it generate. They just
Speaker 5: took out the vowels. But this is going to be
Speaker 5: a three day event or a conference held in Arlington, Virginia.
Speaker 5: They're claiming that it's gonna have like two hundred speakers,
Speaker 5: one hundred and fifty AI sessions, more than five hundred startups,
Speaker 5: one hundred and fifty partners, one hundred investors, and around
Speaker 5: five thousand attendees. They're trying to target enterprise, governments, platforms,
Speaker 5: AI tools, AI builders, services, investors, startups, and media that
Speaker 5: it's it's these three events held simultaneously. Ones just called
Speaker 5: GOODERT or Generation AI, which is about just AI AI tech.
Speaker 5: It's about like AI companies, classes, keynotes, funding, blah blah
Speaker 5: blah blah blah. There is then Voice and AI which
Speaker 5: is about AI language services. And there's also one for
Speaker 5: gov AI, which is about public sector and how the
Speaker 5: government's gonna start integrating AI or regulating AI. And they
Speaker 5: also have one for coding called code Forward, and it's
Speaker 5: it's about where we can't just play the opening video
Speaker 5: because opening video had.
Speaker 2: No voice here, but there's yeah, there's no voice, I
Speaker 2: can read it though. Ninety seven million new jobs in AI,
Speaker 2: five hundred billion in annual AI spend by twenty twenty seven,
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty billion in VC.
Speaker 5: Funding by twenty twenty five. Gonert generate for a new
Speaker 5: world in a new market Goodert connects.
Speaker 2: And forms, elevates and inspires.
Speaker 5: It all happens at words, and we cannot emphasize it.
Speaker 5: Of how they hyped up vc cash. There was, there
Speaker 5: was so much build up for vc cash.
Speaker 2: I have I have watched people who are dope sick
Speaker 2: by Heroin with less jittery excitement in their hands and eyes.
Speaker 5: All right, So not a bit about shit like this.
Speaker 4: So I just did a brief cursory look up gener
Speaker 4: and it's and it's it's connected Confidence Voice I and
Speaker 4: gov and code Forward, and all of them are claiming
Speaker 4: the following. They're featuring GitHub, Microsoft, open Ai, Codium tab nine.
Speaker 4: Their thing on LinkedIn has twenty eight followers, and their
Speaker 4: engagement is like when I post the word twitter on Twitter,
Speaker 4: it's not very good at all. I can get more
Speaker 4: on that doing any punch picture of my asshole and
Speaker 4: get more than that. But also I cannot find a
Speaker 4: single person claiming to attend this, despite them claiming two
Speaker 4: hundred buspeakers, one hundred and fifty plus sessions, five hundred stars,
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty part one hundred investors, five thousand attendees.
Speaker 4: I can't find a single bit of evidence that anyone
Speaker 4: is ganerting around at all. And also they claim to
Speaker 4: have three different conferences, Code Forward, gove Ai, Voice Ai,
Speaker 4: and of course connert Ai and I and of course
Speaker 4: all of these are part of the ganert Ai beta experience.
Speaker 5: I don't know why you put beta.
Speaker 2: People are beta as hell.
Speaker 5: But also why have you got beta on a conference?
Speaker 5: What are you doing? But also.
Speaker 4: Featuring open AI and video, Microsoft Google and veritoon. I'm
Speaker 4: gonna guess that they've got like chat, GPT, open on
Speaker 4: a computer, an nvideo pro GPU and something Microsoft Word
Speaker 4: and they've used Google. And it's very strange because I
Speaker 4: don't know what this thing.
Speaker 2: Is, you know. I think what it is is some
Speaker 2: guys who have a degree of like nay like like
Speaker 2: some guys who are are hoping that they don't have
Speaker 2: any actual ideas for it to do with AI, so
Speaker 2: they're hoping that if they create a conference and make
Speaker 2: that be like the cees of AI, they can kind
Speaker 2: of force a place for themselves and also attract a
Speaker 2: bunch of suction up a bunch of money.
Speaker 4: I also found some I found some of the speakers
Speaker 4: You've got a fellow called Adam Goldberg, who's an account
Speaker 4: director and head of Azure Open Ai Enablement. On the
Speaker 4: go to market team open Ai. They found a sales
Speaker 4: guy from open ai and then said they got someone
Speaker 4: from open Ai. They got someone from JP Morgan Chile's
Speaker 4: data and AI design.
Speaker 5: These are all fake jobs. These aren't real jobs.
Speaker 4: And I think that these conferences are amazing as well,
Speaker 4: because all people do at them is they go they
Speaker 4: watch these things where people go up on stage and go,
Speaker 4: you know, generative AI is going to create maybe even
Speaker 4: trillions of dollars of value at some point, and you know,
Speaker 4: the synergy between generative AI and data collection but also
Speaker 4: data silos is going to be truly, truly innovative. And
Speaker 4: everyone's like, holy fucking shit, whoa holy shit piss and
Speaker 4: then they all post on Twitter and they will forget
Speaker 4: it ever happened immediately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we call that the dividend.
Speaker 5: We do call that the g dividend. So Gert's being
Speaker 5: put on by this guy who runs this like panel
Speaker 5: collection called Brands gpt at ces with a Z.
Speaker 2: No, it's not no Garrison Garrison with a Z.
Speaker 5: It should it should be. I think me and Robert
Speaker 5: both went to like one or two of these brands
Speaker 5: GPT panels. This is the one where Robert got to
Speaker 5: yell at Google and Microsoft and get them mad.
Speaker 2: No, Google and McDonald's. Mc donald's is ahead of AI,
Speaker 2: which is a thing.
Speaker 5: So they look to basically just focus on like convention programming.
Speaker 5: So now they're trying to put on their own convention
Speaker 5: that they're calling Ganert instead of just running this brand's
Speaker 5: GPT at CES. So that's that's the background. It's it's
Speaker 5: done by Mode V events. That's Mode and the letter V,
Speaker 5: but one word that's like the parent company for this.
Speaker 5: I'll be interested once we get closer to October. I'll
Speaker 5: be interested to see if this is looking more like
Speaker 5: a real event. It's it's not gonna be that far
Speaker 5: for me to travel. But no, they're promising five hundred
Speaker 5: billion dollars in annual AI spending with two hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty billion new VC cash investments, which is which is
Speaker 5: quite promising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so hopefully this beta test goes like the last
Speaker 2: video game beta test that I went to and everybody
Speaker 2: clips through the floor and disappears into a void. Well,
Speaker 2: I think that's gonna do it for us in this episode,
Speaker 2: and I want to leave you all with well, before
Speaker 2: we've got one more thing. But before we get into that,
Speaker 2: which which will be fun, I want to talk about
Speaker 2: something sobering, which is that, as you may get from this,
Speaker 2: nearly one hundred percent of the AI use cases that
Speaker 2: we saw presented were either nonsense or incredibly vague. At
Speaker 2: these different where you had people from like in Nvidia
Speaker 2: and Adobe and whatnot that like they wouldn't say, like,
Speaker 2: we're going to use AI for this specific task. They
Speaker 2: would say we're going to use AI to get more nimble,
Speaker 2: which I think means firing people, you know. Outside of that,
Speaker 2: the only real specific use cases that were not clearly nonsense.
Speaker 2: We're stuff like replacing you know, customer service workers with chatbots,
Speaker 2: which is bad, and to be fair, some also really
Speaker 2: good stuff like that telescope that used kind of machine
Speaker 2: learning in order to like clean up images so that
Speaker 2: you can get better, better images and whatnot when you're
Speaker 2: in an area with a lot of light pollution. There
Speaker 2: was some stuff like that, but usually very vague. The
Speaker 2: use cases for AI was always extremely clear were the
Speaker 2: harms and the very first panel we attended there's a
Speaker 2: company called Deloitte. They're a huge consulting firm. If you
Speaker 2: know about McKenzie, because they're currently somewhat rightfully so a
Speaker 2: bit of a bugbear on the left. Deloitte is a
Speaker 2: similar kind of organization, right I think they're a bit
Speaker 2: less toxic, but to a marginal degree. They're like a
Speaker 2: massive consulting firm. Companies bring them in in order to
Speaker 2: help them streamline and make processes more efficient in stuff.
Speaker 2: And one of their people said that according to their
Speaker 2: internal metrics, they expected half a trillion dollars in fraud
Speaker 2: this year in one year due just to voice cloning AI.
Speaker 2: And that was a more specific statement of what AI
Speaker 2: is going to do to change people's lives than absolutely
Speaker 2: any positive use case I heard presented at this comfence.
Speaker 5: Could you like explain what you mean by voice cloning
Speaker 5: so AI.
Speaker 2: You know, we did a couple of Bastards episodes talking
Speaker 2: about scams and like how they've contributed to the decline
Speaker 2: of trust in our society. One of the things that
Speaker 2: is in the last year or so become a massive
Speaker 2: problem is there are now AI things that can generate
Speaker 2: a human voice near perfectly to the point where, especially
Speaker 2: if it is a voice of say your kid calls
Speaker 2: you and they're telling you that they have been fucking
Speaker 2: kidnapped or you know, something else has happened and they
Speaker 2: need you to wire the money desperately, and you send
Speaker 2: them the money, it's a fucking scam, right. That is.
Speaker 2: We have a person from Deloitte, and I think it
Speaker 2: was a person from Adobe say that they had been
Speaker 2: called by a colleague who had gotten like a call
Speaker 2: thinking it was that seemed to be them asking them
Speaker 2: to buy a bunch of Apple gift cards. Like sit
Speaker 2: like this is extreme and it's only going to get
Speaker 2: more common. You can automate to the writing of the
Speaker 2: scams and the sending of the scams using these AI tools,
Speaker 2: and that is absolutely, in my opinion, much more of
Speaker 2: a direct way in which AI is going to affect
Speaker 2: people than any single product or even cumulatively, all of
Speaker 2: the AI products we saw at CE.
Speaker 5: All that uplifting note.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so that's a bummer, and well, we will
Speaker 2: be going into more depth about that, but I wanted
Speaker 2: to end. Tavia took notes at all of the buzzwords,
Speaker 2: particularly the AI buzzwords that we heard during the convention,
Speaker 2: and she's going to read that to us.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: You gotta tell you, this list is incredible. I've worked
Speaker 3: in and out of corporate America, and much like a cult,
Speaker 3: they have their own internal vocabulary that they use, and
Speaker 3: this convention we went to was just filthy with these buzzwords.
Speaker 3: So I'm just going to dig in. The ones that
Speaker 3: I've written down are double down. Love that one. That
Speaker 3: one comes up a lot. Versioning, versioning, version ing, which
Speaker 3: is like a legitimate term in software, but I was
Speaker 3: hearing it used in places where it didn't make much
Speaker 3: sense to do it. Then our favorite liar's.
Speaker 5: Dividend by far the best term that we've heard at
Speaker 5: the conference, so flexible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm using versions of that and everything. You know,
Speaker 2: it makes me think a lot about the murderer's dividend,
Speaker 2: which is when you know, I longer I have to
Speaker 2: deal with an annoying person.
Speaker 3: We got content credential, which is coming up a lot,
Speaker 3: especially around the topic of AI. We have data rich
Speaker 3: and it's sister term problem rich, core values, which I
Speaker 3: heard in every single panel that we were in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Usually the context of this was we don't need
Speaker 2: regulations around how AI can be made and put together.
Speaker 2: The core values of the companies is what will make
Speaker 2: sure that AI isn't used in a harmful way?
Speaker 4: Great, that's that's gonna happen.
Speaker 3: No, very trustworthy, very trustworthy groups, got risk model. And
Speaker 3: then my next term is the favorite one. It's so good.
Speaker 3: I think I'm gonna give this one to you, Robert.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I don't think we talked about this. Guardian
Speaker 2: MM or something like that was then is MM guardian
Speaker 2: MM Guardian? Which is an app you put on It's
Speaker 2: not it used to be an app. Now it is
Speaker 2: a phone you buy for your child. It's a modified
Speaker 2: Samsung Galaxy something or other.
Speaker 5: That it's not ax No.
Speaker 4: Seven.
Speaker 2: It gives your It gives you, as the parent, complete
Speaker 2: access to your kid's phone and everything they're doing. And
Speaker 2: it automatically monitors monitors all of their not just their conversations,
Speaker 2: but their browsing history, and sends you alerts. So like,
Speaker 2: if someone sends your kid a text that says you
Speaker 2: should kys you know, kill yourself. This is the example
Speaker 2: he showed us. You get a message that like there's
Speaker 2: this suicidal discussion or whatnot going on, we ask them,
Speaker 2: you know, hey, Garrison particularly was like, what if this
Speaker 2: is a situation where a parent is abusive and like
Speaker 2: using this in order to keep tabs on their kids
Speaker 2: or like hates you know, is like a child is
Speaker 2: gay or trans and their parents are not accepting of that.
Speaker 2: Like does this still can parents still like spy on
Speaker 2: them over that stuff? Are there any limitations? Are there
Speaker 2: any sort of safeguards built in in case a parent
Speaker 2: is being abusive, right to like monitor or sind to
Speaker 2: the authorities of a parent is using this in an
Speaker 2: abusive way? And their answer was no, We're purely about
Speaker 2: giving parents more power. And yeah, the term that they
Speaker 2: used was tech contracts with children.
Speaker 3: I can't think of anything more dismal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is one of the most dystopian assemblies of
Speaker 2: words I've ever heard.
Speaker 5: Should you should you should never say the phrase contracts
Speaker 5: with children. That's just that's just like, if you find
Speaker 5: your self ever ever hearing the phrase contracts with children
Speaker 5: spoken by anyone, run away for that person as fast
Speaker 5: as you can, maybe maybe maybe punch them in the
Speaker 5: face first, and then run away as fast as you can.
Speaker 2: So that's a good one.
Speaker 4: That's that's some shit you just keep in Florida, I
Speaker 4: guess now or Indiana.
Speaker 2: It's a super Florida app that is that is the
Speaker 2: center of this business.
Speaker 3: Moving on, We've got other terms called visionary and thought leaders,
Speaker 3: which comes up a lot in these types.
Speaker 4: Of I mean the pr ship people love saying thought leader.
Speaker 5: I love it thing, do eat it up.
Speaker 3: We also have edge computing, I know.
Speaker 2: Digital Yeah again handy, great company.
Speaker 3: Incredible company, very very excellent product. We have digital twin
Speaker 3: horizon scin.
Speaker 4: So digital twin's really good because it means like eight
Speaker 4: different things. It can mean literally a copy of something,
Speaker 4: or it can mean a digital version of something. It
Speaker 4: can mean like a of US thing. And these are
Speaker 4: old different industries using it, and no one can agree
Speaker 4: on the meaning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's just tradition. That's just like what they do.
Speaker 3: They have horizon scan. I actually kind of liked that one.
Speaker 3: Was the first time I heard that one. When they're
Speaker 3: just like looking into the future, I think they're calling
Speaker 3: that horizon scan use case, which came up a lot
Speaker 3: because everyone was groping for use cases for their technology
Speaker 3: and didn't seem to have any that they could bring up.
Speaker 5: The next one I heard way more than I wanted
Speaker 5: to hear which was accelerate. Yeahs always a great term
Speaker 5: to hear in tech. There was so much accelerate and
Speaker 5: accelerating relating to their tech development and their tech use
Speaker 5: cases for another one of those terms that Tavia just
Speaker 5: read off.
Speaker 2: Now, this next term is a real thing and an
Speaker 2: important thing, and not a thing that anyone in the
Speaker 2: tech industry wants or cares about. The right to be forgotten.
Speaker 2: This has actually been legislated. The reason they have to
Speaker 2: care about this to some extent is it's been legislat
Speaker 2: in the EU right, and it should be everywhere. I
Speaker 2: actually think this is an incredibly important concept, and it's
Speaker 2: basically the you know, we have people go viral that
Speaker 2: become a main character on whatever app for being a
Speaker 2: piece of shit sometimes or sometimes doing something stupid or
Speaker 2: sometimes doing something innocuous that for no reason at all
Speaker 2: makes a huge number.
Speaker 5: He's actually a really good example.
Speaker 4: There was a kid who posted a video of himself
Speaker 4: and it was like four point o GPA had a job,
Speaker 4: braised money didn't get into Harvard or something. He didn't
Speaker 4: mean it in this way, but someone took it and
Speaker 4: then turned it into ay, why kids are being kept
Speaker 4: off Harvard thing? And he dm them was like, you're
Speaker 4: ruining my fucking life. Yeah, this is how this, like
Speaker 4: the right to be forgotten should be everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is not. It is a hugely important thing. And
Speaker 2: you know, I actually give the EU a lot of
Speaker 2: credit for the fact that that has to some extent
Speaker 2: been legislated. All of that needs to be more common
Speaker 2: in other countries and more vigorously enforced. I don't I
Speaker 2: say that I have no idea how you do it
Speaker 2: with the internet working the way it does. Some of this,
Speaker 2: I actually do think is a values thing where we
Speaker 2: all need to be more okay with the fact that people,
Speaker 2: even people who can do something shitty online, deserve to
Speaker 2: not have that necessarily define the rest of their lives,
Speaker 2: especially you know, teenagers.
Speaker 4: And the next one is one that I like to
Speaker 4: associate with my posts, data poisoning. I believe every time
Speaker 4: I interact with Twitter or blue Sky, that is what
Speaker 4: I am doing. I have some data poisoning death, or
Speaker 4: I am data poisoning as a verb, or I am
Speaker 4: data poisoning myself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then we've got oh, Garrison, you want to
Speaker 2: do this one?
Speaker 5: Sure? These These are the last three that I got
Speaker 5: from an AI Ethics Panel. We have data silos, how
Speaker 5: data is all separated. We have data harmonization, kind of
Speaker 5: the opposite of data silos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's basically using AI to generate pictures of dan
Speaker 2: harmon Right.
Speaker 5: Yes, then we have the last term, which I will
Speaker 5: I will describe for you the speed capacity gap. So
Speaker 5: the speed capacity gap.
Speaker 2: I know I can answer that for you. So sometimes
Speaker 2: when I'm doing a shitload of amphetamines that I purchased
Speaker 2: from some Turkish website via the dark web, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm doing them with a friend and they o d
Speaker 2: because there's a day there's a speed capacity gap between
Speaker 2: the two of us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what that Uh, that's what DHS guy was
Speaker 5: talking about. For using AI to monitor dark web purchases.
Speaker 5: He's going to really get on that one. No, speed
Speaker 5: capacity gap the gap between tech acceleration and the capacity
Speaker 5: of society to keep up and make informed decisions about
Speaker 5: the technology, which is actually kind of a useful terms.
Speaker 5: It's it's just one of those you know, it sounds
Speaker 5: like a silly tech term, but when the when it's
Speaker 5: actually explained, like, oh, that's actually a really good way
Speaker 5: to think about the way AI is being pushed in
Speaker 5: all of these new ways, and are we actually as
Speaker 5: a society, whether that's like as a government or just
Speaker 5: like culturally, able to actually make inform decisions about how
Speaker 5: we want this tech to be integrated into our lives.
Speaker 5: And now the dark side of this term the speed
Speaker 5: capacity gap. For the to kind of solve this gap,
Speaker 5: we can either slow down a development or we can
Speaker 5: speed up our capacity, and the panelists obviously preferred the latter,
Speaker 5: and so we should just speed up our cultural capacity.
Speaker 3: Did they propose a solution for that.
Speaker 5: Well, kind of, but it's it's a little unclear. We
Speaker 5: can go through my recording at a later day once
Speaker 5: we do our full AI episode. But they're rationale for
Speaker 5: why we should instead of instead of slowing down tech
Speaker 5: development instead speed up our cultural capacity is because of
Speaker 5: the many benefits that tech improvements can be made via
Speaker 5: tech iterations. Right, the more iterations you get of technology
Speaker 5: that the more benefits are able to get from said technology.
Speaker 3: A versioning y version.
Speaker 5: Exactly, which brings us all the way back to versioning
Speaker 5: there we go.
Speaker 2: Which brings us all the way back to turkisham fetamines.
Speaker 2: Because I've been for the last twenty years trying different
Speaker 2: versions of turkishamphetamines and the blue pills. Man. You know,
Speaker 2: normally you don't hallucinate on speed, but when you take enough,
Speaker 2: it turns out you can. And so I think what
Speaker 2: I'd like to leave everyone with is the knowledge that
Speaker 2: turkisham fetamines are a thing you can purchase on the
Speaker 2: dark web and should There's no health consequences to it
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 4: I'm not part of this byroh Flyne does not support
Speaker 4: illegal drug purchases.
Speaker 5: Respective podcasts.
Speaker 2: They're not illegal if they're so new that the DEA
Speaker 2: hasn't banned them yet.
Speaker 5: That's innovation exactly exactly.
Speaker 4: That's versioning, and that is the speed capacity gap folks.
Speaker 5: That the DA can't keep up with the tech improvements.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody that's gonna do it for us here
Speaker 2: at cool Zone. Before we leave, I want to give
Speaker 2: Tabia and Ed both chances to plug their pluggables.
Speaker 5: ED.
Speaker 2: People are going to be hearing from you every week
Speaker 2: on your new show, Better Offline, which is launching in
Speaker 2: a what I'm sure you'll agree is a frighteningly short
Speaker 2: time be soon.
Speaker 4: It is going to be the best weekly tech show.
Speaker 4: It is going to do the job that no one
Speaker 4: is strong enough to do, which is ask questions, listen
Speaker 4: to the answers, then actually make a question that follows them.
Speaker 4: I'm very much looking forward to this and very excited
Speaker 4: to work with the cool Zone team and Tavia Oh.
Speaker 3: You can find me on Twitter at cutma and if
Speaker 3: you want to learn a little bit more about my
Speaker 3: interactive and immersive work, you can see that at tabimora
Speaker 3: dot com.
Speaker 4: Now you may wonder why I didn't give you any
Speaker 4: links to anything, and that was a deliberate thing called subterfuge.
Speaker 4: But you can find me at where's your ed dot
Speaker 4: at edzitron on Twitter, x rateminutes dot biers and of
Speaker 4: course plue sky Zitron, dobisky dot social.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can find my profile on hand. All right, we're.
Speaker 6: Fucking done here. Welcome to Nick What Happened Here? A
Speaker 6: podcast about I don't know. This is gonna come me
Speaker 6: out like Tuesday, right, maybe Wednesday. You probably know what
Speaker 6: this podcast is about. If you don't, It's about things
Speaker 6: falling apart putting it back together again.
Speaker 5: I'm your host Mia Wong.
Speaker 8: With me is James hi May and I'm very excited
Speaker 8: to uh to lend some stuff.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it'll be great.
Speaker 6: No nothing, Well, okay, the good news that the first
Speaker 6: guy we're talking about died. That's that's the only good news. Great, great,
Speaker 6: more good news. But we're doing some episodes about the
Speaker 6: Daily Wire. Uh, you're gonna get a lot more actual
Speaker 6: stuff about the Daily Wire in the next two episodes.
Speaker 6: This is the this is the preliminary background information episode.
Speaker 6: But you know, for people who aren't familiar with the
Speaker 6: Daily Wire, the Daily Wire is a very large and
Speaker 6: very powerful right wing media empire. They're you know, Ben
Speaker 6: Shapiro's people. Matt Walsh is there, and they are. They've
Speaker 6: become increasingly powerful because of their ability to drive the
Speaker 6: actions and sort of like not even really mid level
Speaker 6: like high mid high level like Republican officials, particularly at
Speaker 6: a state level, towards you know, horrific anti trans policies
Speaker 6: stuff like that.
Speaker 8: Yep, they've had as the incredible divorced dad power of
Speaker 8: those two guys. Like it's like a yeah, it's like
Speaker 8: a Pokemon situation, you know, like that, It's just it's inside,
Speaker 8: it's like shaken ball, but sometimes they let it out
Speaker 8: and control their Republican body with it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so okay, you know, but in order to
Speaker 6: really sort of understand who these people are and why
Speaker 6: they're able to sort of be like this, we need
Speaker 6: to talk about the ways that this is new, because
Speaker 6: you know, there's always been sort of writing like Christian
Speaker 6: media figures who do terrible stuff, but the way the
Speaker 6: daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked
Speaker 6: in the past. And in order to understand what is
Speaker 6: different about this than these sort of like previous eras
Speaker 6: of like Christian antiquer violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism.
Speaker 6: So this is this is not the normal starting place
Speaker 6: you're talking about the religious right, but if you want
Speaker 6: to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to
Speaker 6: go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism so
Speaker 6: you can understand how it shaped right when Christian organizing
Speaker 6: in the last about fifty years. I want to start
Speaker 6: this by talking about a guy who is not normally
Speaker 6: considered part of the Christian right at all. In fact,
Speaker 6: he's not even an American and his greatest influence is
Speaker 6: on his home country of Germany. The man I'm talking
Speaker 6: I want to talk about is Wilhelm rope Key. I've
Speaker 6: mentioned him on this show before, but that was several
Speaker 6: years ago. Now he is not a very well known figure,
Speaker 6: and that's not good because he is one of the
Speaker 6: smartest and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in
Speaker 6: order to really get a sense of who rope Key is,
Speaker 6: we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism. So
Speaker 6: we need to talk about Hyak and his sort of
Speaker 6: attempt to recruit a bunch of new liberals to oppose.
Speaker 6: While mostly to opposed communism, it later becomes about also
Speaker 6: opposing fascism. But the problem that Hyak has is that
Speaker 6: so in the nineteenth this is happening in the nineteen
Speaker 6: twenties and really the nineteen thirties, the problem is that
Speaker 6: the people who Hayak have been trying to recruit from
Speaker 6: Germany dream the thirties all joined the Nazi Party.
Speaker 5: So in many such cases, Yeah, it's a real issue
Speaker 5: for them.
Speaker 8: Yeah, once again the lips have let us down.
Speaker 2: Shocked.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So you know, in the in the nineteen forties
Speaker 6: after the war, when Hayak is trying to do this again,
Speaker 6: he turns to William Ropeke instead of the original guys
Speaker 6: who've been Nazis, because Roke had been out of the
Speaker 6: country for the whole Nazi things. So he kind of
Speaker 6: had skipped out on it.
Speaker 8: Okay, smart, move on his foot.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you know this, this gets him an invite
Speaker 6: to like Montpellier.
Speaker 5: And so the whole sort of the origins of neoliberalism.
Speaker 6: And rope Key is he's one of the architects of
Speaker 6: what's called orderliberalism. So the order Liberals are one of
Speaker 6: the factions of you know, they're one of the factions
Speaker 6: of neoliberalism. What's interesting about them, We're gonna talk a
Speaker 6: bit about what they believe. But what's interesting about the
Speaker 6: order liberals is that they're not really economists. I mean,
Speaker 6: some of them are, but it's a lot of sociologists.
Speaker 6: And this means that the way that they think think
Speaker 6: about the world is very different than the way that
Speaker 6: like Hayek or you know, like a like von Mises
Speaker 6: or like all the you know, the sort of like
Speaker 6: mainline like guys who are economists in the neoliberal movement think.
Speaker 6: The order liberals believe that there is a natural capitalist
Speaker 6: hierarchy in a society that produces stability. But they also
Speaker 6: understand that capitalism in general and neoliberalism, like specifically the
Speaker 6: thing they're trying to bring about, adamses people. You know,
Speaker 6: it destroys social bonds, It tears the fabric of communities apart,
Speaker 6: and it destroys the notion of any collective self identification,
Speaker 6: replacing them with sort of market exchange and empty consumer
Speaker 6: symbols masquerading his identity. You know, thing for example, the
Speaker 6: rise of stand culture or I mean, god like the
Speaker 6: thing we do, which is like, yeah, going to.
Speaker 8: Say streamers, you know, so that's friends are on your phone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So this is extremely bad, and rope Key realizes this
Speaker 6: is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism, because
Speaker 6: people don't actually like being completely autonomized market agents with
Speaker 6: no real social relations other than wages and contracts. And
Speaker 6: you know, if presented with these options, they might, for example,
Speaker 6: turn to communism or God forbid anarchism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but Roki, you know, Rokey is on the side
Speaker 5: of bad and.
Speaker 8: The side of bad. Yeah. The great title for the
Speaker 8: episode side of that, it's.
Speaker 2: Me as biography God.
Speaker 6: Roke's conclusion from this is that you can't just rely
Speaker 6: on the market passively coming into existence, because if markets
Speaker 6: were supposed to passively come into existence, or if they
Speaker 6: were you know, like the sort of like spontaneous order
Speaker 6: thing that Y talks about when he's lying, Like if
Speaker 6: that was actually true, they would just have they would
Speaker 6: be everything would be market economies already.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: It's like no, like we would have had the exact
Speaker 6: same economic and political system for the last thirty thousand years.
Speaker 2: But we haven't.
Speaker 6: So in order to do this, you have to make
Speaker 6: people into good neoliberal market subjects, and this requires the
Speaker 6: intervention of the state. The product of this is that
Speaker 6: ro Key is one of the architects of what's called
Speaker 6: structural policy. These are these are specific state policy things
Speaker 6: that are used to create markets by you know, sometimes
Speaker 6: it's it's there's a whole variety of sort of ways
Speaker 6: that this happens, but by acting on and transforming like
Speaker 6: physically people right like what they do, what they believe,
Speaker 6: how they congregates, like what things they're allowed not allowed
Speaker 6: to do, what things are incentivized. This this is structural policy.
Speaker 6: This is the origin of what's later going to be
Speaker 6: called structural or reform, which is the kind of stuff
Speaker 6: that the IMF does to an economy to create markets.
Speaker 6: By taking food for the mouths of babies, and making
Speaker 6: the babies work to get the food.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's great, it's the only way.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And that part of neoliberalism broadly, a lot of that
Speaker 6: comes from order liberalism, and it comes from people like Roke.
Speaker 6: But Ropeke realizes that, you know, there's there's a problem
Speaker 6: of structural policy as an abstract concept, right, which is
Speaker 6: that in order for it to work, you need to
Speaker 6: a take control of the state, because again, this is
Speaker 6: a state, but there is a top down state reform project, right,
Speaker 6: and b there has to be something beyond the state
Speaker 6: to create the kind of subjectivity you need to instill,
Speaker 6: you know, to instill in people to make them behave
Speaker 6: quote unquote as market agents.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 6: You can't just use the state in the market to
Speaker 6: make people behave in the way that they're supposed to,
Speaker 6: you know, to be good sort of like workers for
Speaker 6: the workers for the great market. You need something else,
Speaker 6: is specifically, neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It
Speaker 6: needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people.
Speaker 6: It needs its own kind of sort of identification to
Speaker 6: combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now
Speaker 6: part of Roke's plan, and this is something you share
Speaker 6: us with the other orderliberals is that they want to
Speaker 6: do this with you know, they want to use the
Speaker 6: patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort of
Speaker 6: social basis of all of their sort of right wing politics.
Speaker 6: This is very durable rating politics stuff they also have. Weirdly,
Speaker 6: this is one of the things it's in the fifties
Speaker 6: and sixties is there's a lot of sort of on
Speaker 6: every side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic
Speaker 6: utopianism ish about like the countryside, ya. You know, this
Speaker 6: can swing wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese
Speaker 6: fascists or the neoliberals. So they have this dream of
Speaker 6: sort of turning rural areas into these like bastions of
Speaker 6: like reaction against the left, and that did kind of
Speaker 6: happen in the US, but it didn't happen like it
Speaker 6: happened because the rural economy was completely annihilated and replaced
Speaker 6: with like a series of meth labs. Not because I
Speaker 6: guess technically was a downstream result. It's just that it didn't.
Speaker 6: It wasn't the sort of idyllic like good like farmer
Speaker 6: family things that these people wanted.
Speaker 8: So yeah, yeah, they they got there in an interesting way. Yeah,
Speaker 8: with like massive agri business and meth labs are your
Speaker 8: two choices in life?
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like and you know, so like like yes,
Speaker 6: they this is one of these things where instead of
Speaker 6: achieving their goals through cultural means, they achieved their goals
Speaker 6: through like the massive uh like unbelievable economic violence. But
Speaker 6: you know, okay, so that's that's the other thing. That
Speaker 6: that and that's all sort of standardne.
Speaker 5: Liberal theory, right.
Speaker 6: But what makes rope Key kind of unique is that
Speaker 6: she's really one of the first of these people to
Speaker 6: realize that you need another force, and that force is
Speaker 6: the Church. And this is something that people don't talk
Speaker 6: about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism, but a
Speaker 6: lot of these people are very very deeply Christian. Here's
Speaker 6: Roke talking about his ideal society, quote rendering to the
Speaker 6: king what is owed to the king, but also giving
Speaker 6: to God what belongs to God.
Speaker 8: So what belongs to God? Now one now I'm concerned.
Speaker 6: I mean, he's it's funny because like he's taken the
Speaker 6: Bible verse like that he's taking to the render under Caesar,
Speaker 6: like what belongs to Caesar.
Speaker 5: Render und blah blah, blah blah blah. But like it's
Speaker 5: he's made it enormously more alarming.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, deeply, like cause like like the thing about
Speaker 6: the render under Caesar is that that's a statement about
Speaker 6: about like living under the Roman Empire, right right, Like
Speaker 6: this is just he just wants you to fucking have
Speaker 6: a king, yes, give shit to everyone needs a god.
Speaker 5: Who is also the king.
Speaker 8: Right, it's not even like like the necessity of the
Speaker 8: state thing, like you just dump dumped in like a pointless, hereditary,
Speaker 8: inbred person to give money to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean she's not like, so okay, I should
Speaker 6: I should probably not slander him as thoroughly as I'm
Speaker 6: doing here, because I don't actually quite think he literally
Speaker 6: becomes a monarchist. But she does believe that there should
Speaker 6: be like I don't know, you describe it like there
Speaker 6: should be democratic parties, but that like actual economic policy
Speaker 6: shouldn't be like managed by them, Like you need like
Speaker 6: a super thing above the democracy, which is the IMF,
Speaker 6: to make sure that there's the little the little democratic
Speaker 6: people don't like start getting any ideas about the economy.
Speaker 8: Like a technocracy like a yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 6: Like the thing with the technocracy and this is this
Speaker 6: is genuinely kind of what has been happening in Europe
Speaker 6: is that like living under a technocracy really sucks. Like
Speaker 6: it sucks like politically, it sucks materially, and it sucks
Speaker 6: like emotionally. And you know, the right has been able
Speaker 6: to make a lot out of sort of like this
Speaker 6: opposition to like the global bureaucracies or whatever, which is like, okay,
Speaker 6: like you guys maade these things in the first place,
Speaker 6: Like I, I, you know, you don't get a fucking
Speaker 6: complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran,
Speaker 6: but you know I haven't stomped him.
Speaker 5: Yeah. But but rop Key, rope Key.
Speaker 6: You know, so a lot of the other order liberals
Speaker 6: become really sort of like you know, are become obsessed
Speaker 6: with taking over the IMF, which they do, and they
Speaker 6: take over the World Bank and they become you know,
Speaker 6: they do that stuff. Rope Key is obsessed with using
Speaker 6: the with using religion as like another kind of social
Speaker 6: force that he can bind to the other bull sort
Speaker 6: of movement together with, and so he sets out to
Speaker 6: form like like a react kind of like reactionary Catholic
Speaker 6: international to bring the ioliberalism to the world.
Speaker 8: That is a troubling concept.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it.
Speaker 6: Doesn't work, which is the good news. Well, and the
Speaker 6: problem is it doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't
Speaker 6: work because it's a bad idea. The reason that it
Speaker 6: doesn't work is that he's trying this in like the
Speaker 6: fifties and sixties and it is too early for that shit,
Speaker 6: like you know, I mean, and it's something I feel
Speaker 6: like I should at some point, I should actually do
Speaker 6: a deep dive into this on the show. But I've
Speaker 6: talked about this a couple of times. There is a
Speaker 6: very powerful form of kind of like conservative Christian politics
Speaker 6: in Europe at this time. It's like the Christian democracy movements.
Speaker 6: There's like if every single country if you look at
Speaker 6: it like this, from like the fifties through like the nineties,
Speaker 6: I mean, and even to this day. In Germany, for example,
Speaker 6: like there was a party called the Christian Democrats. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and they win like at least sixty percent of all elections,
Speaker 6: like in Italy, they're in power for like forty years.
Speaker 6: But the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of
Speaker 6: someone like Roki is that like if you if you
Speaker 6: take like these parties, right, these parties are you know,
Speaker 6: these are these are the Christian Conservatives of this era.
Speaker 6: They are way way too far left for uh, for Roki.
Speaker 6: And that's not just the sort of like Rope look
Speaker 6: got how far right rop Key as although he is
Speaker 6: so like if if you took Elder Moro, who's like
Speaker 6: the great Italian Christian democratic statesman, multiple time Prime Minister
Speaker 6: of Italy killed in an insane web of conspiracies, like
Speaker 6: if you yeah, look like if you took Elder Moro
Speaker 6: and you dropped him into the modern American Congress, he
Speaker 6: would be to the left. He is again the leader,
Speaker 6: he's like the leader of Italian well he's technically from
Speaker 6: the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's
Speaker 6: like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist,
Speaker 6: like in terms of Italian politicans, who's not also a fascist.
Speaker 6: And if you took him from like the seventies and
Speaker 6: you plopped him into the American car he would be
Speaker 6: to the left of AOC, like AOC is pro cease
Speaker 6: fire in Gaza, right, like she she's pro cease fire
Speaker 6: in in Palestine. Aldo Borrow allowed the popular threat for
Speaker 6: the Liberation of Palestine, which is the Palestinian Communist pera
Speaker 6: military to operate out of and carry out attacks like
Speaker 6: from Italy.
Speaker 8: Right, like this guy you would like she is, well,
Speaker 8: if you go far enough, right, you might get that
Speaker 8: as well.
Speaker 6: To be fair, no, but but it wouldn't be the
Speaker 6: PFLP though, Yeah, I guess, I guess some of the
Speaker 6: German neo Nazis kind of liked them, but right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: Like like imagine in the US any politician being like, yeah,
Speaker 6: the PFLP could operate out of the US or only
Speaker 6: our only our only condition is that we like we're
Speaker 6: gonna let you operate, but we're not gonna like protect
Speaker 6: you from uh like shim Bett or whatever, like the masade, Yeah,
Speaker 6: like racking pack you from the massade like that. But
Speaker 6: you know, you can you can do your stuff here.
Speaker 6: Could you imagine that shit happening? This guy was, This
Speaker 6: guy is a conservative in Europe right in He's like,
Speaker 6: you know, so this is what Roke's responding to. You
Speaker 6: like the existing Christian you know, and you know, to
Speaker 6: some extent, like the Christian the Christian Democrats are very
Speaker 6: very successful stopping communism, right, They're really good at it.
Speaker 6: They stop communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe, but
Speaker 6: they're not like capitalist enough for Roke. So when we
Speaker 6: come back from this thing Roki would have loved, which
Speaker 6: is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of
Speaker 6: what Roki was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and
Speaker 6: the Christian right. Woo yay, we're back. Rochi is having
Speaker 6: a great time.
Speaker 5: Is Grave.
Speaker 6: We're gonna get the thing that makes them spin it
Speaker 6: his grave, which I'm very excited about accent. But Okay,
Speaker 6: so you know, like as we've sort of been talking about,
Speaker 6: the Christian Democrats are not the Christian the Christian Democrats
Speaker 6: and a lot of countries are Catholic, some of them,
Speaker 6: like I think, like there are Protestant like Christian anectionsmen,
Speaker 6: but like yeah, but like a lot of a lot
Speaker 6: of them are Catholic. So I mean, it's it's it's
Speaker 6: a really interesting kind of like predecessor to like modern
Speaker 6: fire right politics where you get these like both of
Speaker 6: the US and Latin America, will you get these sort
Speaker 6: of like these Catholic Protestant alliances like this is this
Speaker 6: is like Matt Walsh, you know, we're gonna be talking
Speaker 6: about more in the next two days, like is a
Speaker 6: Catholic theocrat, right, but a lot of his base are
Speaker 6: like you know, are like Baptists and like the more
Speaker 6: even more feral charismatic Christians and like you know, but
Speaker 6: but you know, but these these groups are able to
Speaker 6: sort of work together, but they're not able. They're not
Speaker 6: working together with it. Roki wants so. And this is
Speaker 6: the thing that I think is very very scary about
Speaker 6: rok and and especially about the people who took this
Speaker 6: model right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who people who
Speaker 6: figure out the same because a lot of people, some
Speaker 6: people like kind of directly go for Roky. Some people
Speaker 6: discover it through like I very weird readings, right wing
Speaker 6: readings of Gramsci.
Speaker 5: It's a whole thing. I'll talk Yeah, one day, I'm gonna.
Speaker 6: Get Eve on the show and we're going to talk
Speaker 6: about that, because it's fucking wild.
Speaker 8: What the yeah, wow, I think that Gramsky is not
Speaker 8: the most like inaccessible you know, like it. You know,
Speaker 8: there are some like left theorists who just just vomit
Speaker 8: words so much so you can just project a meaning
Speaker 8: on it.
Speaker 2: But I have not their thing.
Speaker 6: This is, this is eve Angers like thesis is that
Speaker 6: these people saw that, like leftists are reading obviously read
Speaker 6: Gromsey and we're like, we're going to do the right
Speaker 6: wing version of this. Okay, yeah, so now it's yeah,
Speaker 6: but you know, so some of these people are rediscovering
Speaker 6: the same things that Ropi has figured out in like
Speaker 6: the fifties. But the thing that Roki is doing is
Speaker 6: he she's figured out all the essential elements of the
Speaker 6: modern Christian right. You promote neoliberalism with one hand, and
Speaker 6: then you sell the solution to the atomization that your
Speaker 6: neoliberalism causes on the other hand with the church and
Speaker 6: the church, yes, we will serve as the basis of
Speaker 6: your political organization.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that is that is a there's a way of
Speaker 8: doing it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's an interesting there's a lot of people
Speaker 6: who do this same thing. Like at some point I'm
Speaker 6: going to finish my I'm going to write the thing
Speaker 6: about like this is actually what libertarianism is for a
Speaker 6: broad extent, is that libertarians are the people who like
Speaker 6: take the problems that the market produces and then try
Speaker 6: to sell you a solution which is more of those
Speaker 6: same problems but worded differently.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah, so with people that weed now, so it's fine.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but but you know so, but this is this
Speaker 6: is the Christian version of it. But again, rope Key
Speaker 6: to a large extent is smarter than the people who
Speaker 6: come after him, because he understands that this project, this
Speaker 6: this this sort of Christian deliberal project is a constant
Speaker 6: struggle against adimization. That and and this adamization has to
Speaker 6: be actively politically combated by the Church, like both politically
Speaker 6: and socially. And if it's not like actively combated by
Speaker 6: the Church, this whole project is going to start to
Speaker 6: come apart. Now rope Key is not the man who's
Speaker 6: going to lead the mob of Christian fanatics into the
Speaker 6: Promised Land. And part of this is also because he
Speaker 6: is like too racist for like the sixties, which again
Speaker 6: like so like in the parts of the sixties when
Speaker 6: he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal
Speaker 6: in the US, right, like yeah, like that this is
Speaker 6: this is this is where we're at with this. He's
Speaker 6: too racist for that. And the thing that he's really
Speaker 6: really racist about is Rhodesia. Oh fucking hell, I didn't
Speaker 6: expect appearance. Yeah, yeah, this is this is the Rhodesia pivot,
Speaker 6: which is that like okay, so the orthodox neoliberals, people
Speaker 6: like Hayak are pro Rhodesia, right, And this is a
Speaker 6: Milton friedmand that these people are pro Rhodesia, but they're
Speaker 6: smart enough to use dog whistles and talk about it
Speaker 6: in terms of like economic terms and like stability of
Speaker 6: gar and blah.
Speaker 5: Blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 6: Roke is just openly saying race warship, like I'm not
Speaker 6: gonna read it, but he is effectively like the spiritual
Speaker 6: forefadder of like the four Chane mass shooter.
Speaker 5: Like that, that's how racist he is.
Speaker 6: And you know, it turns out that just again openly
Speaker 6: like open race war ship is like too much for Hyak,
Speaker 6: and he gets kicked out of the manju m liberal
Speaker 6: organizations and tragically, tragically for all of us, Rokey dies
Speaker 6: before you can see his beloved Rhodesia reduced to a
Speaker 6: pulp by the series events IMPERIALSS insurgencies.
Speaker 5: He dies.
Speaker 6: He dies before all of the Rhodesian or like society's
Speaker 6: fucking fuel supplies stored in one spot or blown out.
Speaker 8: I say, see, if they'd had a more distributed market economy, maya,
Speaker 8: they would have had just just that all their fuel
Speaker 8: in one giant bottle which they burned. Spoiler love for
Speaker 8: anyone who hasn't been following the history of Rhodesia, not
Speaker 8: the country anymore.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank Christ. I actually don't think Christ. Fuck Christ,
Speaker 5: Christy new ship.
Speaker 8: Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and
Speaker 8: killed bigger list, et cetera. Yeah, and of course all
Speaker 8: the American people who went over to join the Rhodesian
Speaker 8: military and killed other white Rhodesians by accident, by shooting
Speaker 8: at people who were theoretically on their side.
Speaker 6: Yeah, shout out to them. We're not going to get
Speaker 6: into North Korea backing another genocide in Zimbabwe here. That's
Speaker 6: also a fucking thing. I've not doing apologies for that
Speaker 6: because actually fucking sucked. Yeah, but you know, Okay, but
Speaker 6: he he dies before he can see his beloved Rhdesia
Speaker 6: fucking eat shit and die. But what Roki had is
Speaker 6: a very clear version of the hierarchical neoliberal society that
Speaker 6: he wanted to create. Right, and he is very especially
Speaker 6: by the end of his life, he is very explicit.
Speaker 5: About what this is.
Speaker 6: It is a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal world and to
Speaker 6: build it, the right is going to have to use
Speaker 6: the church to stave off the alienization and adamization of capitalism,
Speaker 6: and we're back now in order to build this.
Speaker 5: New world, the world that Roke sort of.
Speaker 6: Imagines, the religious right, the actual religious right that's going
Speaker 6: to bring this up into fuition, sets off from a
Speaker 6: number of angles. I think the most famous part of
Speaker 6: this is probably the sort of moral majority infrastructure, which
Speaker 6: is this network of like think Tank's political advocacy organization's
Speaker 6: TV networksailing lists, like their own insane right wing colleges. Yeah, god,
Speaker 6: terrifying places. But the fundamental social basis, right, the fundamental
Speaker 6: collective space around which the right is organized was the church.
Speaker 6: There's been a lot of sociological talk in the last
Speaker 6: few years about like quote unquote third spaces. So the
Speaker 6: third space is supposed to be this place that's like
Speaker 6: not the home or not the workplace that people can
Speaker 6: exist in inform bonds in, and you know, people talk
Speaker 6: about like bridge clubs, blah.
Speaker 5: Blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 6: But the thing about the US is that like the
Speaker 6: fucking YMCA, like all of these things that people talk
Speaker 6: about as the third space are just the church in
Speaker 6: different forms. Literally, church or a bunch of church run events.
Speaker 8: Yeah, especially like the more like rural you get like
Speaker 8: it is, yes, and this is this is one of
Speaker 8: these things like that this was actually like one of
Speaker 8: the sort of rear flame to the workers movement, right,
Speaker 8: which is that like in large parts of Appalachia, right,
Speaker 8: you have a bunch of really really militant like miners
Speaker 8: unions for example.
Speaker 6: But then you know, but all of them are also
Speaker 6: like are also are also Baptists. And that is fine
Speaker 6: as long as you know you're you're you're dealing with
Speaker 6: Baptists who are doing well. I mean, I say fine,
Speaker 6: but like it's not an existential threat to the workers
Speaker 6: movement when you're dealing with like like you know, like
Speaker 6: it's easier for an arrow to like, sorry, it's easier
Speaker 6: for a camel to walk through the head of a
Speaker 6: pin than it is for a rich man to go
Speaker 6: to have in Baptists. But the moment that still starts flipping,
Speaker 6: that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard. You
Speaker 6: see this Nasian American communities where like you know, Asian
Speaker 6: Americans generally, like the last two generations like Millennials and
Speaker 6: gen Z are tacking really really hard left, except the
Speaker 6: fucking Christians who are like forming this for this insane rearguard.
Speaker 6: Because I've complained about this before, an fucking I'm doing this,
Speaker 6: this is this, this is a Christianity episode.
Speaker 5: I could talk about this that the.
Speaker 6: Thing to think about Asian Christians is that they're all
Speaker 6: they're almost all like first Chen converts, so they all
Speaker 6: have convert brain.
Speaker 5: Which means they're completely fucking batshit. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So you know, and this is one of the things
Speaker 6: that we're talking about here, right, is that the physically
Speaker 6: the church serves as this very very important engine kind
Speaker 6: of kind of revolution. It serves this engine of sort
Speaker 6: of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of people who
Speaker 6: you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort of right
Speaker 6: wing politics from. And this is where, you know, face
Speaker 6: face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US
Speaker 6: and the sixties and seventies globally too, a face with
Speaker 6: you know, I mean literally the specter of revolutions and
Speaker 6: not even like sometimes not even in specters like you know,
Speaker 6: this is post sixty eight, right, there's been a bunch
Speaker 6: of actual uprisings. Yeah, and they're the place that they
Speaker 6: make their move is by trying to seize control of
Speaker 6: various pieces of church infrastructure. We're going to take a
Speaker 6: Catholic example and a Protestant example, and we're not going
Speaker 6: to do the obvious Orthodox example because we'd be here
Speaker 6: for a fucking century.
Speaker 5: So let's start with Roki beloved Catholic Church. I think.
Speaker 6: I don't know if I'm gonna do a little bit
Speaker 6: of left inside baseball. I think people on the left
Speaker 6: tend to be really obsessed with the like liberation theology people.
Speaker 6: But the problem with liberation theology people is that they
Speaker 6: were around for maybe like thirty years, right, but by
Speaker 6: the time you get to the end of the eighties,
Speaker 6: these people are all dead, right, Like they're either dead
Speaker 6: or they're like Ortega, and they've become these like literally
Speaker 6: they start calling themselves the Third Way and are like
Speaker 6: cutting all these deals with like really right wing social groups.
Speaker 6: And so this means that the dominant politics of like
Speaker 6: the capital like t Capital c.
Speaker 5: The Catholic Church is very gets very very right wing.
Speaker 6: Well it's not even that as much as it gets
Speaker 6: right wing, but it is very right wing, and that
Speaker 6: they're doing is very very scary. One of the things
Speaker 6: that I don't think people really realize. Is that so
Speaker 6: that probably you've heard the term gender ideology, Yeah, yes
Speaker 6: I have.
Speaker 8: Yeah, do you know where that's from? Is it from?
Speaker 8: I've fucking forgotten the place where Harry Potter goes Hogwarts. Yeah.
Speaker 8: JFK is a fucking Johnny come late bastard. Like she
Speaker 8: she she got into this game after that ship had
Speaker 8: already started. Gender ideology is a term k rowling. Jfk
Speaker 8: rowling is powerful.
Speaker 5: Speak like this.
Speaker 6: The term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church, and
Speaker 6: it's developed in reactions specifically to feminism, and very specifically
Speaker 6: it's developed in reaction to to arguments from feminists that that,
Speaker 6: you know, that gender is socially constructed, you know, because
Speaker 6: in the Catholic church's position is like, well no, that's
Speaker 6: herradic because obviously gender was assigned by God, and because
Speaker 6: gender just signed by God, like women are like you know,
Speaker 6: women are like like submissive blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah,
Speaker 6: like naturally, this is this is the natural order. This
Speaker 6: isn't like a sociologically constructed thing. This is the natural orders.
Speaker 6: Always been in talis, always billy b because they're like
Speaker 6: Nike unfathomably sexist.
Speaker 8: Is this like around there, like Elaine Pagel's beef with
Speaker 8: the Church, I'm not sure of Blaine Pagel's. If me
Speaker 8: with Elaine Pagel's God the Father Got the Mother.
Speaker 5: I think this is a bit before my time.
Speaker 8: Okay, yeah, yeah, this is uh the World's History stands
Speaker 8: at the University of California in common topic.
Speaker 5: Well, I think I think this is actually in the same.
Speaker 8: I've played videos of her to my students, and definitely
Speaker 8: in the eighties, like the vibe is powerfully eighties.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I guess that's a bit late because so
Speaker 6: a lot of the general all this stuff comes out
Speaker 6: of the early night.
Speaker 5: Well, I guess it's like early nineties.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 6: So one of the things that happens is that a
Speaker 6: lot of you know, in the nineties, the Catholic Church,
Speaker 6: and they have a bunch of like radfem allies here.
Speaker 6: By the way, do you have this massive fight in
Speaker 6: the un about like recognizing the right to abortions and
Speaker 6: other like sexually reproductive rights, And the Red Fems are
Speaker 6: pissed off because I mean there's a whole so they've
Speaker 6: been they're aligned with the Catholic Church is like an
Speaker 6: anti sex work thing and like an anti porn thing.
Speaker 6: And then also like a lot of the redfems. Well,
Speaker 6: I get I've gotten so much trouble for saying this,
Speaker 6: but like, holy shit, there's somebody those people are insanely technsphobic.
Speaker 6: Yeah damn wow, but you know, but like this is
Speaker 6: this is this, There's this massive battle inside the United
Speaker 6: Nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminist
Speaker 6: who are like normal and then like the shitty RATFM
Speaker 6: factions and the Catholic Church on the other side, and
Speaker 6: Pope Benedict in particular goes like all out on this stuff,
Speaker 6: both on the international level and intern with like local churches,
Speaker 6: like goes on the offensive against abortion in queer liberation.
Speaker 6: And meanwhile the Protestant Church is doing like exactly the
Speaker 6: same thing. They're like pro except like I think, I think,
Speaker 6: like even more fascist, which is really really and I
Speaker 6: say this is someone who has raised Lutheran like that
Speaker 6: that is really the core of Protestantism is like what
Speaker 6: if we did Catholicism but like somehow shittier, like like
Speaker 6: Martin Luther. One day I'm going to do my thing
Speaker 6: on the world's greatest kind of revolutionaries, and then one
Speaker 6: of them is Martin Luther because oh yeah, very cley,
Speaker 6: because like like I might, my argument for this is
Speaker 6: that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the person who
Speaker 6: starts out at on on the side of the revolution
Speaker 6: and then turns against it. And so Martin Luther's thing
Speaker 6: was he was trying to outflank the Catholic Church in
Speaker 6: the sixteen hundreds from the right on anti Semitism. Sorry,
Speaker 6: I meant a sixteen sixteenth century fififteen hundred, fifty hundreds,
Speaker 6: which is even worse, fifty hundreds Catholic Church they have expelled,
Speaker 6: they have like the of the this is this is
Speaker 6: in the period where they're like expelling all of the
Speaker 6: Jews from Spain, right, and Martin Luther's trying to like
Speaker 6: flank them, and this is the kind of shit that's
Speaker 6: happening like in the US at this point, which is
Speaker 6: you know, this is this is this is the this
Speaker 6: is the Protestant sort of following the Catholic like why
Speaker 6: and in some ways blazing their own trail of of
Speaker 6: going really hard right. So probably the most famous and
Speaker 6: I think definitely one of the most important examples of
Speaker 6: this is the right wing seizure of the Southern Baptist.
Speaker 5: Convention in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 6: So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention,
Speaker 6: they are a very very large and influential like group
Speaker 6: of Baptist churches, and they've been kind of like they'd
Speaker 6: been anti segregation, they've been sort of like trending left,
Speaker 6: and there's this is one of the things. This is
Speaker 6: a very very famous thing in the history, like if
Speaker 6: if you're you know, it's sort of like the history
Speaker 6: and mythos of the right wing is like in nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy nine, at this convention, these like there's like these
Speaker 6: group of pastors who are.
Speaker 5: Like, ah, the church is getting too woke or getting
Speaker 5: too left.
Speaker 6: They scrolled out this plan like on a fucking napkin
Speaker 6: to like how they were going to take over the church.
Speaker 5: And they do it. They see they.
Speaker 6: See control of the Southern Baptist Convention and they purge
Speaker 6: all of their enemies and it is very very quickly,
Speaker 6: within a matter of like a couple of years, it's
Speaker 6: converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah, they
Speaker 6: they are They ruthlessly purge acting thiscent in the churches.
Speaker 6: A bunch of churches leave because they're like what the
Speaker 6: who the fuck are these people, like just these absolute
Speaker 6: right wing fanatics. Is like I've taken controls. A bunch
Speaker 6: of churches leave, but a lot of them stay, and
Speaker 6: you know what they're what their project is is that
Speaker 6: they start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states, like
Speaker 6: in like this is this what they turn churches into,
Speaker 6: and this is what they turn households into. Because these
Speaker 6: households become enormous centers of abuse, like just unfathomable amounts
Speaker 6: of violence. Cant sort of get get sort of spread
Speaker 6: out of this stuff. And you know the way that
Speaker 6: these things work, right is is is you may have
Speaker 6: seen I have you've seen those like fucking deranged umbrella
Speaker 6: memes that the Christian right makes on Twitter. No, I think, so, okay,
Speaker 6: they're supposed to be like these like umbrellas, and there's
Speaker 6: likely or the umbrella like protects you from the things.
Speaker 6: So there's like the family and it's had the family,
Speaker 6: they're like protected by the authority of the husband. You're
Speaker 6: protected by the authority of the church, protected by the
Speaker 6: authority of like the theocratic state.
Speaker 8: Okay, no, this is like the most cursed Russian doll.
Speaker 5: It's awful.
Speaker 6: And this is just what these people believe, right, and
Speaker 6: and they they enforce this through psychological and physical violence.
Speaker 6: These people are they're sending out instruction manuals about how
Speaker 6: to beat your children right, and how to do it
Speaker 6: in ways that you won't get caught, you know. And
Speaker 6: like what I'm saying that these are like totalitarian micro states,
Speaker 6: that's not an exaggeration that that is what these households are. Like,
Speaker 6: they're unbelievably violent. You as a child, there's under constant surveillance.
Speaker 6: You're literally forced to through physical violence to maintain their
Speaker 6: gender norms. And this is the base of the Christian
Speaker 6: of the homophobic Christian right. These churches are pumping out shocktroopers.
Speaker 6: And these are the shocktroopers both of neoliberalism and homophobic
Speaker 6: and transphobic violence. And when I say shocktroopers, I do
Speaker 6: mean this literally. Because an enormous number of these people,
Speaker 6: and this is part of.
Speaker 5: The reason's politics, it starts to fall apart. Like I
Speaker 5: grew up around these people.
Speaker 6: A lot of these people went to fucking a rock
Speaker 6: and got the absolute shit blown out of them. But
Speaker 6: you know, these people, like these these churches, this is
Speaker 6: you know, you can look at the sort of panopoly
Speaker 6: of the people who do right wing like homophobic violence,
Speaker 6: right the queer basher, the peroneu kicks their kid out
Speaker 6: of their homes for being gay, the homophobic boss who
Speaker 6: fires and abuses queer workers, the doctor who assaults us
Speaker 6: and then denies his medical care. These people are pumped
Speaker 6: up by the church. And what the church is doing
Speaker 6: here is they're serving as the equivalent of sort of
Speaker 6: of unions in the left right. And when I say unions,
Speaker 6: I'm talking more like the nineteen oh seven iww of
Speaker 6: in like the twenty twenty three AFLCIO. These churches are
Speaker 6: the social and organizational space in which the right constructs
Speaker 6: its world right, it's the sort of nexus of homophobic
Speaker 6: organizing from the beginnings of the homophobic right through like
Speaker 6: their fight against gay marriage. But Kaba, something happened that
Speaker 6: Ropeke well, I think rope Key might have suspected this,
Speaker 6: But something happens that his inheritors did not expect. And
Speaker 6: that's something is the only thing I failed to consider
Speaker 6: is what if neoliberalism came for the church so one
Speaker 6: of the things that has happened in the last and
Speaker 6: I mean literally we are talking the last ten years
Speaker 6: or ten to fifteen years. Really the last like ten
Speaker 6: years church attendants and this is also actually true well
Speaker 6: of sending out on mosco attendants with the church tendants
Speaker 6: has been declining way more. It used to be like
Speaker 6: you know, if you're are you a member of a
Speaker 6: church moster synagogue r like Gallup has been pulling this
Speaker 6: since the fucking forties. It used to be the rate
Speaker 6: of it of being a member of a church, synagoguara,
Speaker 6: mosque was it was for like basically until like two thousand,
Speaker 6: it was hovering around seventy percent. It's now forty seven.
Speaker 6: That is a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of
Speaker 6: like fundamentally what the US is. The US has been
Speaker 6: a like Christian health state like since it was created,
Speaker 6: right like the US is founded by like religious extremists
Speaker 6: whose problem is that they weren't allowed to pursue Catholics enough.
Speaker 6: So this has been this has been a church country
Speaker 6: more so than like most of the European countries. You
Speaker 6: did the settling up until literally the last twenty years,
Speaker 6: and the drop between twenty ten and now is like
Speaker 6: fourteen percent. And this is this is and it's not
Speaker 6: just that the membership rates are going down, like the
Speaker 6: actual actual church attendance is going down, and so and so.
Speaker 6: In this context where less people are going to a church,
Speaker 6: less people belong to a church, the political strategies that
Speaker 6: have been based on using the church as like you
Speaker 6: default social network. Uh, they don't have the kind of
Speaker 6: reachs that they used to. Yeah, and if that's your
Speaker 6: political strategy, this is a catastrophe for you.
Speaker 5: Now you know, we can talk. There are like, there
Speaker 5: are lots of.
Speaker 6: Reasons this is happening, part of which it's sort of
Speaker 6: like the secularization of the US. Part of this is
Speaker 6: that there's been so many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in
Speaker 6: these churches that people are just fucking leaving because that's
Speaker 6: what happens. Yeah, you know, And one day, one day,
Speaker 6: the thing I really will get canceled for is when
Speaker 6: I'm gonna the episode I do about how this happened
Speaker 6: in the DSA and how it is hauled out the membership,
Speaker 6: because you know, it turns out when people get abused,
Speaker 6: they just fucking leave.
Speaker 8: Yeah, not just the d I say, like, unfortunately, Yeah, this.
Speaker 6: Happens in so many organizing like this is on the left, Yeah,
Speaker 6: stopping fucking creeps. Yeah, but like you know, fellows sist dudes. Yeah,
Speaker 6: the Christian right has particularly bad because they don't they
Speaker 6: did therever address it, right, this is part of their
Speaker 6: ideology is that this is good.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's the problem, like at least in the left,
Speaker 8: Like it keeps fucking happening, and we do recognize it's bad.
Speaker 8: We sometimes just seeming to people on the left are
Speaker 8: repaired to allow it to happen because I think it's
Speaker 8: not as bad as the alternative but which is bullshit.
Speaker 8: But yeah, when you have a church which actively kind
Speaker 8: of encourages.
Speaker 6: It, then that's actually and and and part of and
Speaker 6: the other. The other thing that's happening here, right, is
Speaker 6: that like the other thing that's generating this is just
Speaker 6: there's just the neoliberal adamisation of society, like it's it's
Speaker 6: tearing apart sort of like social bound you know. And
Speaker 6: and I mean one of the things I think you
Speaker 6: have to be careful of when you talk about neoliberalism
Speaker 6: tearing about social bonds, is that not all a lot
Speaker 6: of those bonds sucked like it was not good but
Speaker 6: everyone with seventy percent of Americans were going to church, right, Like,
Speaker 6: not good at all.
Speaker 5: That sucked. It was deeply evil.
Speaker 6: But you know, it tears apart like it tears, it
Speaker 6: tears apart bonds, not entirely without regard to ideology, but it.
Speaker 5: Still does do it.
Speaker 6: And this means this context has completely reshaped what right
Speaker 6: wing like anti career and anti transorganizing looks like. And
Speaker 6: the right right now, the right solution to that is
Speaker 6: the Daily Wire, and we will get explained that in
Speaker 6: very great length tomorrow and the day after that, So
Speaker 6: stay tuned.
Speaker 8: Does the entree of the bad guy, Well, we already
Speaker 8: had a bad guy. I guess he's dead these ones, Yeah,
Speaker 8: this is the bad guy number two, yeah, three, four.
Speaker 5: Maybe after the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, they're right up there there. And they've still
Speaker 8: got time too. You know, they're already only in their ascendency,
Speaker 8: so we shouldn't judge him too, Eddie.
Speaker 6: Yep, but yeah, this has been naked happened here, go
Speaker 6: make these people's lives miserable.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, Ben Shapai is miserable because I write a
Speaker 8: piece of mechanics about how to tag down a statue
Speaker 8: and he is still mad about it because he said,
Speaker 8: I can't wait for their piece about mods of cocktails
Speaker 8: and I never wrote that as well. So Ben Shapira
Speaker 8: can suck it. Thank you for the career help of
Speaker 8: Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 2: Ah, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 2: about things falling apart. And whenever you have things falling apart,
Speaker 2: you have the Daily Wire. I don't know, Garrison, what
Speaker 2: are we talking about today?
Speaker 5: Yeah, the Daily Wire has been our trusted companions among
Speaker 5: the rise of the alt right and this kind of
Speaker 5: just impending sense of bad that has been, you know,
Speaker 5: increasing the past five ten years, twenty years, thirty years.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: So Mia in the last episode talked about some of
Speaker 5: the neoliberal conditions that kind of led to this dip
Speaker 5: in church attendance and it's resulted in the Christian right
Speaker 5: kind of changing formations in a few interesting ways, and
Speaker 5: we're going to talk about that here, but now more
Speaker 5: specifically about how The Daily Wire has been able to
Speaker 5: profit off of this shift. So as third spaces, including churches,
Speaker 5: die off, online spaces have been gun to fill the gaps.
Speaker 5: From Facebook groups to content creators to conservative streaming services,
Speaker 5: the organizational hub of the far right has been picked
Speaker 5: up by opportunistic bloggers and aspiring movie moguls. Which brings
Speaker 5: us to twenty thirteen, a perfect year. Nothing went wrong,
Speaker 5: just a normal, normal time. So in twenty thirteen, we
Speaker 5: had failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro and a failed movie producer,
Speaker 5: Jeremy Boring. They started working together on a project called
Speaker 5: Truth Revolt. Now I assume most of us are somewhat
Speaker 5: familiar with Ben Shapiro. He was an editor at Breitbart.
Speaker 5: This he started as a young conservative blogger who gained
Speaker 5: prominence in the two thousands. In the twenty teens, So
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna waste too much time going into the
Speaker 5: background of Ben because I'm I'm guessing we all basically
Speaker 5: know who Ben Shapiro is. But I'm also guessing that
Speaker 5: almost no one listening to this probably knows who Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring is, hence the name. So I'm gonna be focusing
Speaker 5: a lot on Jeremy. I I find Jeremy to be
Speaker 5: a kind of fascinating person. I I almost weirdly enjoy
Speaker 5: watching his stuff just because I find it to be
Speaker 5: extremely fascinating. His demeanor, his his his way of going
Speaker 5: about creating a conservative media empire, I find to be
Speaker 5: really intriguing. I've I've watched Jeremy Boring stuff just as
Speaker 5: like a voyeurist observer for years now, and he's actually
Speaker 5: starting to become more of a prominent face among the
Speaker 5: right wing media ecosystem, or at least he's he's been
Speaker 5: putting his face out there for a while. Most of
Speaker 5: the time he's just been behind the scenes. So Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring is just a is a is A is a
Speaker 5: good Christian boy from a small town in Texas. He
Speaker 5: got involved in kind of local town. Yeah. I I
Speaker 5: forget the exact town because I didn't I didn't write
Speaker 5: it down in the script, but I believe it's somewhere
Speaker 5: in West Texas if I remember correctly, it's it's it's
Speaker 5: It's been a while since I watched the two hour
Speaker 5: interview with Jerity Boring where he discussed his upbringing.
Speaker 2: God, I wonder if it's Lufkin. I'm pulling it up.
Speaker 2: I'm pulling it up Slayton. Okay, okay, well still a
Speaker 2: dogshit Texas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, See that's why I did mention it because its
Speaker 5: like who.
Speaker 2: Can's in Lubbock County, min love it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he was kind of involved in some local community
Speaker 5: theater productions as a kid, and like a lot of kids,
Speaker 5: he aspired to be an actor. So as a young
Speaker 5: adult he moved to LA He very soon gave up acting.
Speaker 5: I think he had one small bit role as like
Speaker 5: a crying soldier, but besides that, he just couldn't get
Speaker 5: any work. So instead he just he decided to become
Speaker 5: a struggling screenwriter. Classic classic move. Yeah, moving from a
Speaker 5: failed actor failing yes, yes, yes, exactly. In the early
Speaker 5: two thousands, he got invited to a Hollywood Bible study
Speaker 5: group with a whole bunch of like young C list celebrities,
Speaker 5: and over time he evolved into a sort of pastoral
Speaker 5: role within the group. And then in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 5: he was able to write and produce his first movie, Spiral,
Speaker 5: starring Zachary Levi, who now played Shazam in DC's movies
Speaker 5: and really nothing else because he seems to be a
Speaker 5: deeply unlikable person who's not really been hired in many
Speaker 5: other things. But Zachary Levi was also in this like
Speaker 5: Christian Bible study group. They were both friends, him and
Speaker 5: Jeremy Boring, So they made this movie spiral. It grossed
Speaker 5: just over three thousand dollars. So not the smash hit
Speaker 5: that you know you would you you would hopeful for
Speaker 5: your first movie.
Speaker 2: That is, uh yeah, that's not great.
Speaker 5: It's not it's it's not it's not perfect. Now. Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring claims that his religious and political beliefs made it
Speaker 5: so that he wasn't able to progress very far in
Speaker 5: the Hollywood system, but he was invited to a secret
Speaker 5: meeting of conservatives in Hollywood called the Friends of ABE
Speaker 5: that Robert you should you should look up the Friends
Speaker 5: of ABE logo because it's really good.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: I think people like like, uh like John Voight and
Speaker 5: just you know those sort.
Speaker 2: Of like yeah, it sounds like I think John Voight
Speaker 2: would be a member of Yes, yes.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure John voyightt was a member of this group.
Speaker 2: God, they're and they're treating it. They're treating it. There
Speaker 2: was like a Friends of something or other group that
Speaker 2: was like an underground group providing reproductive healthcare service back
Speaker 2: before abortion, back for Roe v. Wade, which is clearly
Speaker 2: what they're Oh god.
Speaker 5: Is that who made this logo? This is like bad
Speaker 5: clip art. Oh my god, it's it's quite good. So
Speaker 5: he was he was invited to this secret meeting, the
Speaker 5: Friends of Abe, and this is where he met another
Speaker 5: friend of the pod, Andrew Breitbart. So this is this
Speaker 5: is actually really a really important Grammer was a member too, yes,
Speaker 5: a very important weird subcultural community within Hollywood. So as
Speaker 5: Jeremy was trying to move into just movie producing, he
Speaker 5: was actually asked to take over this Friends of Abe group.
Speaker 5: So he became a very central role and he made
Speaker 5: a lot of connections, connections that will soon become important
Speaker 5: when we discuss the Daily Wires own adventures in movie
Speaker 5: producing in the next episode or so. So he took
Speaker 5: over this group. Eventually he had this other smaller Bible
Speaker 5: study group, So he's kind of moving up in the
Speaker 5: world of conservative secret meetings in Hollywood. So because he
Speaker 5: met Andrew bite Bart at the Friends of Abe, Andrew
Speaker 5: bite Bart obviously knows Ben Shapiro because Shapiro used to
Speaker 5: be the editor at Breitbart News.
Speaker 2: Also, I feel the need to note the Friends of
Speaker 2: Abe was founded by Gary Sinise, who was in such
Speaker 2: beloved movies as well. I think the only beloved movie
Speaker 2: he was in was Forrest Gump, where he played Lieutenant Dan.
Speaker 5: Oh he did Bobe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is Lieutenant Dan founded the group, which is
Speaker 2: actually like Lieutenant Dan would be in the Friends of Abe,
Speaker 2: so that kind of fits. He also had apparently a
Speaker 2: bit roll our some role in Apollo thirteen. I forget
Speaker 2: who So there you go, Gary Sinise great.
Speaker 5: So around this time is when Ben Shapiro and Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring first met, just before like twenty ten. I think
Speaker 5: the two met via Andrew Bitepart, whom Ben was working
Speaker 5: for at the time at Brightbart News. Now. Jeremy and
Speaker 5: Ben hit it off, and they decided that they would
Speaker 5: want to work together to create media to quote unquote
Speaker 5: influence culture. That's a term that Boring uses quite a lot,
Speaker 5: is like influencing culture. Now. Boring was very impressed by
Speaker 5: Shapiro and sought to propel Shapiro's fame and wanted to
Speaker 5: create a platform and wanted to create a platform to
Speaker 5: increase Ben's ability to impact politics on a larger scale.
Speaker 5: He really thought he saw something in Ben that, if utilized,
Speaker 5: could make Ben into a pretty major celebrity. Boring was
Speaker 5: friendly with board members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center,
Speaker 5: an extremely racist, anti Muslim right wing think tank I
Speaker 5: believe based in law. Boring thought that Ben and David
Speaker 5: had a lot in common. They were both very like
Speaker 5: politically feisty Jewish conservatives in the LA scene, and Boring
Speaker 5: wanted to prepare Ben to sort of carry the torch
Speaker 5: of the Freedom Center using all of the resources that
Speaker 5: David Horowitz have built up over a long period of time.
Speaker 5: So for about a year and a half, Boring met
Speaker 5: with board members behind the scenes to create some sort
Speaker 5: of buy in and cast Ben Shapiro as the future
Speaker 5: for the Freedom Center, planning seeds of what it will
Speaker 5: be to come. Eventually, David Horowitz chose Ben as the
Speaker 5: heir to the Freedom Center first by giving Shapiro and
Speaker 5: Boring an opportunity to test things out by starting a
Speaker 5: company under the Freedom Center called Truth Revolt. Truth Revolt
Speaker 5: is something that I didn't I think I saw it
Speaker 5: a little bit when I was like a younger teen,
Speaker 5: but it wasn't It wasn't super popular. Truth Revolt saw
Speaker 5: some initial success as like a conservative quote unquote news
Speaker 5: site aimed at exposing leftist media. Shapiro billed Truth Revolt
Speaker 5: as the quote unquote anti media matters Now, Shapiro admits
Speaker 5: that Truth of Volt ultimately wasn't very sustainable because the
Speaker 5: whole website was designed around trying to generate traffic by
Speaker 5: being linked by Drudge Report. And at the time.
Speaker 2: That's like literally literally like a third of right wing
Speaker 2: media in the early two thousands to mid auts Like
Speaker 2: that was Alex Jones's whole strategy for a while too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the whole point was creating headlines that would be
Speaker 5: linked by this conservative news aggregator. And this isn't a
Speaker 5: very sustainable business model, at least that's what Ben claims.
Speaker 5: And because truth Revolt was operating under the Freedom Center,
Speaker 5: it was run as a nonprofit and received very limited
Speaker 5: funding and little to no advertising budget. But even back then,
Speaker 5: there was a big focus on creating video content to
Speaker 5: fill out the site and grow its own YouTube page.
Speaker 5: I have a wonderful screenshot here of some old truth
Speaker 5: Revolt videos from like nine ten years ago. We have
Speaker 5: brass tax on immigration. Andrew Clevan I think his name
Speaker 5: is Clevans. He's one of the main Daily Wire guys now,
Speaker 5: but he was involved way way back then. He has
Speaker 5: a video on Obama conspiracy theories, which I'm sure that's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't wait to dig into that one.
Speaker 5: Ben Shapiro has a lot of videos about why Jews
Speaker 5: vote leftist. We have videos about Hillary Clinton, we have
Speaker 5: the left's magical thinking. There is another Andrew Clavan video
Speaker 5: called fIF D Shades of Barack Obama. So again, all
Speaker 5: like very very like twenty twelve type stuff here, like
Speaker 5: all all very like early early twentyighteenth.
Speaker 2: They were iterating, they were cooking.
Speaker 5: They were cooking, and like cooking, sometimes your first attempt
Speaker 5: doesn't really work out. Truth of Volt started declining in
Speaker 5: around early twenty fifteen, but Jeremy Boring was working on
Speaker 5: a business plan with a more marketing driven approach. Instead
Speaker 5: of relying on like nonprofit annual donors, Boring wanted to
Speaker 5: use a more of a for profit model where they
Speaker 5: used ad revenue and the larger web traffic generated through
Speaker 5: marketing on social media, especially on Facebook, to pay for
Speaker 5: this entire media operation. Now, the old guard of this
Speaker 5: conservative think tank did not really like this plan. The
Speaker 5: Freedom Center actually fired to Jeremy Boring when he produced
Speaker 5: this plan to revamp truth Revolt, and soon after Ben
Speaker 5: Shapiro stepped down. This was in April twenty fifteen. Jeremy Bort.
Speaker 5: Jeremy and Ben attempted to buy out the site, but
Speaker 5: that didn't pan out, and eventually Truthful to just withered away.
Speaker 5: Do you know what else slowly withers away over time?
Speaker 2: Uh? You without the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 5: That's right, all right, we are back. Thank the maker
Speaker 5: for all of those wonderful products and services that let
Speaker 5: me spend about ten hours a day watching Daily Wire
Speaker 5: videos so I could write like four thousand words.
Speaker 2: Truly, this was This was Sophie's grand dream when she
Speaker 2: began this.
Speaker 5: Just have a wall of computers constantly playing Daily Wire
Speaker 5: plus exclusive contest.
Speaker 2: That was the pitch we came to corporate with, what
Speaker 2: if we expose demand to all of the Daily Wire
Speaker 2: one could possibly consume?
Speaker 5: Hell? Oh, by all right, So Jeremy Boring, failed movie producer,
Speaker 5: failed screenwriter, has been fired from Truth Revolt. Ben Shapiro,
Speaker 5: his colleague in arms, steps down in solidarity. We love
Speaker 5: to see workers unite. So Shapiro and Boring still liked
Speaker 5: their plan to use ad revenue and social media advertising
Speaker 5: to make a for profit media company. So in twenty
Speaker 5: fifteen they looked for other investors to fund a new website,
Speaker 5: and it just so happened that around this time, two
Speaker 5: Texas billionaires known as the Wilks Brothers We're looking to
Speaker 5: use their fracking fortune to quote unquote influence culture. There's
Speaker 5: that term again. Through a mutual friend, Boring was able
Speaker 5: to secure millions of dollars in seed money from the Wilks,
Speaker 5: who also later went on to fund prager You. With
Speaker 5: an influx of cash on hand, Ben and Jeremy started
Speaker 5: The Daily Wire initially just as a conservative news site,
Speaker 5: but with ambitions to become an entire conservative entertainment production
Speaker 5: and distribution house. Instead of relying on donors or links
Speaker 5: from news aggregators, their new approach was focused on creating
Speaker 5: and cultivating a long term audience. They first prioritized quote
Speaker 5: unquote investing in making Ben and other up and coming
Speaker 5: conservative figureheads more famous, in particular using an intentional social
Speaker 5: media strategy to propel people from out of the conservative
Speaker 5: bubble into the popular zeitgeist. Specifically, Jerry Boring worked to
Speaker 5: increase the personal brand awareness on sites other than Twitter,
Speaker 5: where generally most of these writers spend most of their
Speaker 5: social media hours. The point was to not just do
Speaker 5: it on Twitter, instead it on the other social media
Speaker 5: sites where actual, like regular people spend more of their
Speaker 5: time because it's mostly just other writers on Twitter versus
Speaker 5: the the actual audience that the Daily Wire wanted to
Speaker 5: attract were mostly spending their time on places like Facebook
Speaker 5: or Instagram. So fourteen months in, the Daily Wire was
Speaker 5: already cash flow positive, and we see this approach of
Speaker 5: specifically trying to like create celebrity. It really paid off
Speaker 5: if you look at how the how like the cultural
Speaker 5: figure of Ben Shapiro specifically kind of emerged in the
Speaker 5: mid two thousands, Like he became such a such like
Speaker 5: a meme with such like a recognizable character through very
Speaker 5: simple marketing on like YouTube on Facebook. It was. It
Speaker 5: was wildly successful. You cannot open up YouTube without seeing
Speaker 5: a Ben Shapiro destroys college student on campus video, like
Speaker 5: every single every single time. Now, on top of making
Speaker 5: a news site, they also decided to move into podcasting,
Speaker 5: a very controversial medium. I'm gonna I'm gonna read one
Speaker 5: quote from Ben here. Quote one area that we had
Speaker 5: no idea was going to be the center of revenue
Speaker 5: was the actual podcast. When I look back at that
Speaker 5: business plan, what we get allocated for the amount of
Speaker 5: revenue from the podcast was minimal compared to how successful
Speaker 5: the podcast became, and that cannot be understated. The Daily
Speaker 5: Wire makes a shitload of money on their podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we all were surprised by how lucrative prop podcasting
Speaker 2: wound up being like because it was around for like
Speaker 2: a decade or so before it was before people were
Speaker 2: really making any money off of it. It kind of
Speaker 2: snowballed very quickly once advertisers realized it was something they
Speaker 2: could get in on. But like it was, there was
Speaker 2: a long time where it was just sort of like
Speaker 2: a thing weird little guys like Joe Rogan did and
Speaker 2: most people didn't really think about them much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and their social media advertising plan also worked outrageously well,
Speaker 5: especially on Facebook. Routinely, over the past few years, stories
Speaker 5: published by The Daily Wire received more likes, shares, and
Speaker 5: comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a
Speaker 5: wide margin. Shapiro has more followers in The Washington Post.
Speaker 5: Their engagement outpaces the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CNN,
Speaker 5: and Fox News on average by over ten Times, and
Speaker 5: they often get more clicks on their articles than all
Speaker 5: of those outlets combined. They have like they figured out
Speaker 5: a really successful method to promoting their news content in
Speaker 5: a way that really no one else has been able
Speaker 5: to replicate. Utilizing provocative rage bait propagandized by a select
Speaker 5: few of online personalities, the Daily Wire has been able
Speaker 5: to expand the brand recognition of not just their own site,
Speaker 5: but also the personal brand of its own hosts. Ben
Speaker 5: and Jeremy brought over some of the people from Truth Revolt,
Speaker 5: but they were also scouting for new talent among the
Speaker 5: twenty sixteen conservative sphere to invest their newly acquired fracking
Speaker 5: resources into. Another quote from Ben is like surround yourself
Speaker 5: with people who are going to be successful unquote, particularly
Speaker 5: not like going after people who are currently popular, but
Speaker 5: trying to find up and coming content creators who they
Speaker 5: think they can turn into being much more successful than
Speaker 5: what they currently started as. Among the people they recruited
Speaker 5: was the relatively unknown extremist Christian writer and radio talk
Speaker 5: show host Matt Walsh, who we will get to in
Speaker 5: a sec the slightly more famous blogger Candice Owens, who
Speaker 5: was picked up a few years prior by the conservative
Speaker 5: student group Turning Point USA to be their quote director
Speaker 5: of Urban Engagement.
Speaker 6: Which.
Speaker 5: Is an awful title what they mean by I wonder
Speaker 5: what they mean by urban engagement. And then in twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: after being a Daily Wire correspondent for a few years
Speaker 5: and helping to launch Ted Cruise's own podcast, the Daily
Speaker 5: Wire hired failed actor Michael Knowles, who's basically a discount
Speaker 5: Matt Walsh, to host his own podcast. And finally, in
Speaker 5: twenty two, the Daily Wire recruited Jordan Peterson, probably their
Speaker 5: biggest get to date after he quote unquote retired from
Speaker 5: the University of Toronto. The original funding pitch to the
Speaker 5: Wilkes Brothers, who are looking to influence culture, explicitly positioned
Speaker 5: the Daily Wire not just as a news site, but
Speaker 5: as a prospective alternative to the liberal Hollywood monopoly. There
Speaker 5: there's a really interesting quote here from Jeremy Boring quote,
Speaker 5: I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment,
Speaker 5: but I think you have to go about it in
Speaker 5: a roundabout way. We need a marketing and distribution mechanism
Speaker 5: that allows us to actually put an audience on the target,
Speaker 5: because Hollywood will never cooperate. Even if you managed to
Speaker 5: make a great film, they'll never cooperate. They'll make it
Speaker 5: very difficult for you. With Ben, and with what we've
Speaker 5: been doing at Truth Revolt, we can make something that's
Speaker 5: capable of marketing whatever we produced thereafter for this particular
Speaker 5: audience unquote. So there he's emphasizing that, no matter the
Speaker 5: quality of the actual content you create for this sort
Speaker 5: of conservative media ecosystem, you first need to actually build
Speaker 5: an audience that will be able to find it. That's
Speaker 5: like their first step is building up this audience and
Speaker 5: then they can focus on actually making the content just
Speaker 5: because of how this distribution system works. That at least
Speaker 5: that was that was Jeremy's take on that. Do you
Speaker 5: know what else is really important for building up a
Speaker 5: sustainable audience? Products that's right, trustworthy products and services that
Speaker 5: our audience knows are of fantastic, fantastic quality. It's the
Speaker 5: it's the only way.
Speaker 2: We are also supported by the Wilkes Brothers, but but
Speaker 2: directly through selling hydraulic fracturing technology. So rack your backyard
Speaker 2: and join the fractvolution.
Speaker 5: We're fracking back here, all right. That was just a
Speaker 5: wonderful a wonderful frack break. My back feels is so much,
Speaker 5: so much, so much more loose. After that, I cracked
Speaker 5: for like.
Speaker 2: The house across from me exploded when fracturing fluid released
Speaker 2: natural gas that was then ignited by an oven.
Speaker 5: Speak of, speaking of fracking, I think we're both actually,
Speaker 5: even though we're on different sides of the country, we're
Speaker 5: both in like a ridiculous cold freeze right now.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's pretty cold.
Speaker 5: Yes, it is twenty two degrees right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like sixteen or something here.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're in Atlanta, so you are the last
Speaker 2: person alive in the entire city.
Speaker 5: Yes, but no, I'm sure fracking has done nothing to
Speaker 5: contribute to this anyway. So let's let's turn our dials
Speaker 5: now to twenty two once again. Normal year. Nothing bad happened,
Speaker 5: just a fun time overall. In twenty twenty one, The
Speaker 5: Daily Wire relocated from liberal Hollywood, California, to Nashville, Tennessee,
Speaker 5: with hopes of creating their own conservative entertainment empire in
Speaker 5: the music city. After over half a decade of building
Speaker 5: up an audience, the Daily Wire started to shift towards
Speaker 5: creating in house entertainment media like movies and TV, as
Speaker 5: well as producing their own neatly packaged documentaries to serve
Speaker 5: as a cultural catalyst in a way that a daily
Speaker 5: podcast show like The Ben Shapiro Show just can't write
Speaker 5: like we put out a daily podcast, and because it's
Speaker 5: a daily show, it can only have a certain level
Speaker 5: of impact for all the things we cover in a
Speaker 5: way that you know, a highly produced documentary can have
Speaker 5: like a little bit more like easily observable impact just
Speaker 5: because of how it's being packaged. So they saw this
Speaker 5: and decided they wanted to start putting a lot of
Speaker 5: resources into their own documentaries as well as their podcasts.
Speaker 5: But it wasn't just documentaries. In twenty twenty one, they
Speaker 5: also distributed their first movie, Run Hide Fight thirty eight
Speaker 5: percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a school shooter thriller
Speaker 5: movie that I have not watched. I've watched a lot
Speaker 5: of the Daily Wires original content. I am not watching
Speaker 5: Run Hide Fight. I'm sorry, I'm just not doing it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't really want to watch Diehard with school
Speaker 2: shooters and a teenage girl. That seems a bit on
Speaker 2: the nose. No, I just I simply refused. Four other
Speaker 2: original Daily Wire movies have come out since then, which
Speaker 2: we'll get to some of those in the next episode. Now,
Speaker 2: before twenty twenty, the Daily Wire was making some exclusive
Speaker 2: content behind like a membership paywall for something that they
Speaker 2: called Daily Wire All Access. But us twenty twenty one
Speaker 2: and into twenty twenty two, they rebranded and pivoted hard
Speaker 2: into promoting their own subscription based streaming service, The Daily
Speaker 2: Wire Plus. Again, they are nothing if not original. This
Speaker 2: was during a wave of plus branded streaming services. We
Speaker 2: have Disney Plus, we have Paramount Plus.
Speaker 5: I'm sure there's probably many others that I'm just not
Speaker 5: gonna bother even looking up. But the Daily Wire Plus
Speaker 5: the hit new streaming service that I'm sure your great
Speaker 5: uncle has quote. The Daily Wire Plus is the streaming
Speaker 5: home of The Daily Wire, Jordan Peterson Movies, Praeger, You,
Speaker 5: and Daily Wire Kids. We're one of America's fastest growing
Speaker 5: media companies and counter cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment.
Speaker 5: We're building the future you want to see unquote. That's
Speaker 5: their their little tagline.
Speaker 2: Thrilling. Yeah, truly, the new line cinema of racism.
Speaker 5: Such groundbreaking original content includes My Dinner with Trump.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I hadn't even heard of that one.
Speaker 2: Are you fucking kidding me?
Speaker 5: No, I'm not kidding.
Speaker 2: What is it? Is it actually on My Dinner with
Speaker 2: Andrea parody or is it just something completely disconnected that
Speaker 2: they stole a famous title for.
Speaker 5: They just stole the famous title.
Speaker 2: For damn it. It would be really funny if it
Speaker 2: was just a shot for shot remake of My Dinner
Speaker 2: with Andre but with but with Andrea as Trump, Like
Speaker 2: I would. That's respect that's actually respectable. That would I
Speaker 2: would watch that movie tonight.
Speaker 5: No, it's it's it's just a film to Dinner with
Speaker 5: Trump and like various political advisors.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah, Oh that's so lame.
Speaker 5: Do I? I don't believe the Daily Wires releasing their
Speaker 5: streaming metrics. Just like Netflix, they're keeping them secret. Similar companies, Yeah,
Speaker 5: very similar. We have other other hit hit documentaries like
Speaker 5: Kanye West's Favorite, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold by Canda Sowans.
Speaker 5: Oh God, an extremely racist misinformation or sorry, disinformation documentary
Speaker 5: about about George Floyd. We have that Mandalorian actresses movie
Speaker 5: Terror on the Prairie. We have a whole bunch of
Speaker 5: a whole bunch of stuff from Jordan Peterson after he
Speaker 5: left uh the University of Toronto and got and got
Speaker 5: kicked off Twitter. That's the exact time that he was
Speaker 5: hired at Daily Wire. He's a whole bunch of stuff
Speaker 5: of just like roundtable discussions on like the Bible, and
Speaker 5: I believe he has that dragon mythology.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's great now that that's that's a good show.
Speaker 2: I've watched all of that one that's kozy and we
Speaker 2: enjoyed ourselves quite a lot.
Speaker 5: We have We have a making a Murderer ripoff documentary
Speaker 5: by Canda so Owens called Convicting a Murderer. Again, truly
Speaker 5: original stuff. Great, but it's not just movies, TV shows
Speaker 5: and documentaries. It's also like like we mentioned, they're hit
Speaker 5: podcasts quote. The Daily Wire plus podcast network is America's
Speaker 5: sixth largest podcast publisher and produces several of the top
Speaker 5: ranked podcasts in America, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The
Speaker 5: Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Candace with Candace Owens, The Matt
Speaker 5: Wall Show, The Michael Knowles Show, and The Morning Wire,
Speaker 5: some of which do quite well on the charts and
Speaker 5: are often sometimes sometimes beaten by Robert's podcast. Anyway, So
Speaker 5: a little over a year ago, the Daily wire Plus
Speaker 5: passed one million subscribers. We don't have any updated numbers
Speaker 5: on that, so it's probably quite higher now, but at
Speaker 5: least as of as of around a year ago, they
Speaker 5: had a million subscribers, and again, as of back then,
Speaker 5: it was bringing in the company two thirds of its
Speaker 5: annual revenue. I think it was like three or so
Speaker 5: years ago they were making one hundred million dollars a year,
Speaker 5: so they were making bank across their podcasts and exclusive content.
Speaker 5: They have over three hundred employees and are still growing
Speaker 5: and are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into producing
Speaker 5: original entertainment content. In their efforts to influence politics through
Speaker 5: entertainment media, they strive to create cultural events around the
Speaker 5: release of their original documentaries. The biggest success they've had
Speaker 5: with this is what was in twenty twenty two with
Speaker 5: What Is a Woman, which rocketed the Daily wire Plus
Speaker 5: into the online spotlight and proved there was great success
Speaker 5: to be had with this style of aggressive anti trans advocacy.
Speaker 5: The film also put the previously niche figure of Matt
Speaker 5: Walsh on the map and established Walsh as an authority
Speaker 5: in queer exterminationist campaigning. I've known of Walsh for like
Speaker 5: the past decade. After he had a short lived radio career,
Speaker 5: he made a name in Christian circles as a provocative blogger,
Speaker 5: sort of like a young firebrand of the Christian right.
Speaker 5: In the early twenty teens, he had a brief stint
Speaker 5: at Glenn Beck's The Blaze before being recruited to The
Speaker 5: Daily Wire in twenty seventeen to do a daily podcast.
Speaker 5: The goal of documentaries such as What Is a Woman
Speaker 5: beyond growing the Daily Wire's a subscriber count, is also
Speaker 5: to encourage real world action while converting attention from the
Speaker 5: documentary into actual real world harassment campaigns and live events,
Speaker 5: which fuel even more content. It's like this, It's like
Speaker 5: this weird content circle that the Daily Wire does. They
Speaker 5: create content to make these real world events, which then
Speaker 5: can fuel more content. It's this perfect loop that generates
Speaker 5: them a lot of money. On October twenty first, twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, the Daily Wire put on a quote rally
Speaker 5: to end child mutilation at the Tennessee State Capitol, which
Speaker 5: was streamable on Daily Wire Plus exactly. This is a
Speaker 5: perfect example of creating this event that then allows them
Speaker 5: to also create exclusive content for their own streaming service.
Speaker 5: The Daily Wire has been in cahoots with the state
Speaker 5: government of Tennessee ever since they first moved their headquarters there.
Speaker 5: Back in twenty twenty one, the General Assembly and Governor
Speaker 5: drafted a resolution welcoming the Daily Wire to the state.
Speaker 5: Jeremy Boring regularly gets invited to dinners at the Governor's mansion.
Speaker 5: After the release of What Is a Woman? The Governor
Speaker 5: of Tennessee announced an investigation into a transgender health clinic
Speaker 5: in Nashville, and Walsh has made appearances at official state
Speaker 5: press conferences, and Tennessee's legislator has led the charge on
Speaker 5: following the Daily Wire and Walsh's political program to target
Speaker 5: trans people, ban drag shows, and lobbying school boards to
Speaker 5: ban LGBTQ materials in schools. The Daily Wire was they
Speaker 5: were kind of wise to not get too caught up
Speaker 5: in the TRUMPI and Mud from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: instead instead focusing on broader culture war issues ranging from
Speaker 5: anti liberalism, antidiversity, parental rights, religious rights, and attacks on
Speaker 5: LGBTQ people. But that also means that they didn't peak
Speaker 5: during the Trump era in the way that a lot
Speaker 5: of other conservative content people kind of did. They chose
Speaker 5: not to capitalize on the Trumpian alt right moment, and
Speaker 5: they were way too smart to go full qan On. Instead,
Speaker 5: they were kind of waiting on the sidelines, slowly growing
Speaker 5: an audience to eventually find the right moment to catalyze
Speaker 5: more widespread support and thrust themselves into the spotlight, which
Speaker 5: they have now done by crafting antiqueer propaganda to pick
Speaker 5: up the baton from the dying QAnon movement while moving
Speaker 5: the needle away from like explicitly q brained shit to
Speaker 5: simple stuff like parental rights and the more socially acceptable
Speaker 5: groomor and save the children talking points. The once more
Speaker 5: exotic target of pedophilic elites has been shifted to simply
Speaker 5: any random queer person, which is a much more tangible
Speaker 5: point of iyre and that'shere we're gonna leave us here today,
Speaker 5: kind of on the point that The Daily Wire waited
Speaker 5: and found the moment in like the first year or
Speaker 5: two of the Biden presidency to really push themselves to
Speaker 5: be the own spotlight instead of just relying in the
Speaker 5: shadow of Donald Trump in the way that someone like
Speaker 5: Tucker kind of has now done. He's not nearly as
Speaker 5: popular as he was in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 5: and The Daily Wire is now massively influential in a
Speaker 5: way that they were only kind of rising to prominence
Speaker 5: back during the Altright era. So in the next episode,
Speaker 5: we'll talk a little bit more about The Daily Wire's
Speaker 5: own anti queer advocacy and their push for original content,
Speaker 5: including a brand new child focused to streaming service, which
Speaker 5: I will talk about in the next episode. Anyway, Robert,
Speaker 5: do you have any do you have any thoughts on
Speaker 5: the Daily Wire?
Speaker 2: Well, I know that the child grooming service they're building,
Speaker 2: a big part of what they're looking to do is
Speaker 2: try to copy the show Bluey, which is like the
Speaker 2: biggest thing in children's entertainment right now, and just casual
Speaker 2: knowledge of where that is talking to parents and stuff
Speaker 2: about Bluey, Like, I feel like it might be a
Speaker 2: bridge too far for them, because they're they're they're they're
Speaker 2: trying to go after they're trying to capture like market
Speaker 2: from something that's legitimately really fucking good, as opposed to
Speaker 2: just putt it like they're they're kind of most commercially
Speaker 2: viable movies like the School Shooting Movie are from what
Speaker 2: I've read in reviews, like just kind of normal mid movies.
Speaker 2: Like they don't necessarily feel like a daily wire movie. Man,
Speaker 2: there'll be a couple of points in there maybe, but
Speaker 2: there they could more or less pass for something you'd
Speaker 2: see on Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever, which is
Speaker 2: you know, if you're competing with mid grade action movies
Speaker 2: and the like that that are a dime a dozen,
Speaker 2: you can actually do that fairly well. And it's even
Speaker 2: possible to, like well, the economics of streaming are actually
Speaker 2: deeply obscured, but theoretically it's possible to do as well
Speaker 2: with that as Netflix does with it, right because people,
Speaker 2: But if you're trying to replace a children's show that,
Speaker 2: like kids consume voraciously and are deeply in love with
Speaker 2: and is really well made, I think that's actually a
Speaker 2: lot harder than they're guessing it's going to be. Like,
Speaker 2: yeahd adults who want something to watch when they're drunk
Speaker 2: at night are a harder audience than little kids who
Speaker 2: are obsessed with a TV show that is the best
Speaker 2: in its market.
Speaker 5: It's certainly a gamble, and we will talk more about
Speaker 5: the details of this gamble in the next episode, as
Speaker 5: we will also eventually eventually talk about their brand new
Speaker 5: movie that came out last month. Lady Ballers.
Speaker 8: All right, we're done.
Speaker 2: I feel like I should call hr just because you
Speaker 2: mentioned the name of that movie.
Speaker 5: See you in the next episode.
Speaker 2: I started the episode Garrison.
Speaker 5: Really really what an energetic entry into I'm tired.
Speaker 2: Tell me things that make me sad.
Speaker 5: Oh, I don't worry, I will. That is my favorite
Speaker 5: thing to do. Let's let's yeah, let's talk about things
Speaker 5: that are actually sad for the first first half of
Speaker 5: this episode. You know, the past few years, it's kind
Speaker 5: of been increasingly profitable to be friendly to the gaze,
Speaker 5: which is kind of a new trend. You know, if
Speaker 5: if you look at the past twenty years or so,
Speaker 5: it's becoming more more profitable. Which if you're if you're
Speaker 5: like a queer accelerationist anarchist, maybe maybe that's a bad thing, right,
Speaker 5: But if you're just trying to like not get killed
Speaker 5: in the interim as the climate collapses, it's you know,
Speaker 5: maybe a good thing. That generally queer acceptance has been improving,
Speaker 5: but as it's been improven There's also been a pretty
Speaker 5: sizable backlash from some members of the Christian right who
Speaker 5: don't really like this or are trying to use this
Speaker 5: backlash as a way to promote their own economic interests.
Speaker 5: And I don't think this needs to be an either
Speaker 5: or I think this can definitely be a both scenario.
Speaker 5: Speaking of Matthew Walsh, the Catholic self described fascist, this
Speaker 5: is going to be kind of the the topic of
Speaker 5: the first half of this because he has been able
Speaker 5: to the work he's done, has been able to really
Speaker 5: propel The Daily Wire as an actual like political entity
Speaker 5: in a way that Shapiro just never really has. Shapiro
Speaker 5: was really good at creating eye catching a YouTube clickbait
Speaker 5: and stuff, but we never really saw him campaigning hard
Speaker 5: for any political cause. He was never really doing that
Speaker 5: type of stuff.
Speaker 2: They come at of different eras in different communities. For
Speaker 2: one thing, Ben Shapiro is Jewish and came of age
Speaker 2: and came into prominence in the early two thousands when
Speaker 2: conservatives had political power but basically zero like social power
Speaker 2: as they saw it, right, and so he was always
Speaker 2: positioned as like, I am sort of the I'm the
Speaker 2: insurgent conservative, like I'm Rush Limbaugh. You know, I'm going
Speaker 2: to provide a safe place for you, even though you
Speaker 2: control the government to a large extent, where I can
Speaker 2: yell at and make fun of the people that you
Speaker 2: think are bad. Right, And that's that's the only thing
Speaker 2: he ever really sought to do, is like lol, liberals dumb.
Speaker 2: Walsh comes out of the Christian kind of dominionist adjacent
Speaker 2: movement at the very least, and their goal has always
Speaker 2: been capture the seven pillars of culture, right, And so
Speaker 2: he from the beginning has thought of this more as
Speaker 2: like I am waging a Christian war against secular society
Speaker 2: and doing so like kind of methodically. So they just
Speaker 2: kind of have approached what they're doing fundamentally from a
Speaker 2: different way and came into it at different times.
Speaker 5: Walsh is definitely the most evangelical Catholic I've ever seen,
Speaker 5: and which is weird because like back when he was
Speaker 5: a popular Christian blogger, his stuff was very popular in
Speaker 5: evangelical circles, even though evangelicals generally are not very friendly
Speaker 5: to Catholics, but his stuff was widely shared because he
Speaker 5: was quite provocative. Now, he spent a few years just
Speaker 5: kind of laying low running a podcast at The Daily
Speaker 5: Wire and then What is a Woman? Really? Really propelled
Speaker 5: him into the spotlight and he got a glimpse of
Speaker 5: fame and popularity that he's been endlessly trying to replicate.
Speaker 5: And because this fame was based around hating trans people,
Speaker 5: that is what he's decided to pivot his whole career
Speaker 5: to doing. That is now his entire focus in life
Speaker 5: is about how he doesn't like trans people because it
Speaker 5: was very profitable for him. In twenty twenty two, so
Speaker 5: as a part of an ongoing right wing harassment campaign
Speaker 5: against TikTok influencer and chronic theater kid Dylan mulvaney, Matt
Speaker 5: Walsh started a viral boycott campaign against bud Light for
Speaker 5: having a brand partnership with a trans person. Now, I'm
Speaker 5: not going to spend too much time here talking about
Speaker 5: right wing boycotts. I'm sure we've all watched, you know,
Speaker 5: like Nike shoe burnings and Gillette razors being flushed down
Speaker 5: the toilet and people dropping their Kere eggs off rooftops. Generally,
Speaker 5: boycotts don't tend to work, but this bud Light thing
Speaker 5: did show some success, and success in this instance specifically
Speaker 5: refers to Walsh and the Daily Wire cronies receiving a
Speaker 5: lot of attention and free publicity, so they sought to
Speaker 5: replicate this strategy while publicly telegraphing their harassment methodology. Here's
Speaker 5: two tweets from Matt Walsh quote, here's what we should do.
Speaker 5: Pick a victim, gang up on it and make an
Speaker 5: example of it. We can't boycott every woke company, or
Speaker 5: even most of them, but we can pick one it
Speaker 5: hardly matters which and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign.
Speaker 5: Claim one scalp, then move on to the next. Our
Speaker 5: goal is to make Pride toxic for brands. If they
Speaker 5: decide to shove this garbage in our face, they should
Speaker 5: know that they'll pay a price. It won't be worth
Speaker 5: whatever they think they'll gain. First bud Light and now Target.
Speaker 5: Our campaign is making progress. Let's keep it going so
Speaker 5: as Walsh's said there, Walsh's next target was Target the
Speaker 5: Department Store, due to the store's history of prominent Pride
Speaker 5: displays in the lead up to Pride Month during twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three. Target was met with online and in person harassment,
Speaker 5: with a wave of emails and calls to individual stores,
Speaker 5: accusing them of grooming and indoctrinating kids with the presence
Speaker 5: of Pride themed apparel. People started ransacking stores, destroying pride displays,
Speaker 5: threatening violence against employees in person, as well as calling
Speaker 5: in multiple bomb threats into into many, many different stores,
Speaker 5: mirroring the harassment campaign against trans clinics and hospitals the
Speaker 5: year prior, which was also spearheaded by Matt Walsh. We've
Speaker 5: seen this tactic game prominence. This bomb threat tactic is
Speaker 5: now quite common among the right. We saw it be
Speaker 5: called into there was there was a lot of bomb
Speaker 5: threats called into like four hundred synagogues this past winter.
Speaker 5: That was, you know, most likely done by some form
Speaker 5: of neo Nazi. But we've just seen this, this specific
Speaker 5: bomb threat tactic pick up a lot because it provides
Speaker 5: a pretty sizable minor or short term disruption to regular,
Speaker 5: regular services. Now, in response to this wave of harassment,
Speaker 5: Target Corporate mandated that many stores remove their front of
Speaker 5: store pride displays in late May, all across the country,
Speaker 5: but especially in the South. Target released a statement saying
Speaker 5: they were quote making adjustments to our plans given these
Speaker 5: volatile circumstances unquote, and these adjustments included relocating or removing
Speaker 5: Pride displays due to quote threats impacting our team members
Speaker 5: a sense of safety and well being at work. Quote.
Speaker 5: Employees were also instructed to specifically remove items quote at
Speaker 5: the center of the most significant confrontational behavior unquote like shapewear, binders,
Speaker 5: and a tuck friendly swimwear, and to quote replace them
Speaker 5: with swimwear to better meet our sales goalsuot now. Walsh
Speaker 5: claimed that the tuck friendly swimwear was being marketed to kids,
Speaker 5: but it only came in adult sizes. A lot of
Speaker 5: this sort of harassment campaign isn't really based on anything truthful,
Speaker 5: but that doesn't really matter. Here's a quote from Walsh again, quote,
Speaker 5: I think this Target boycott has real staying power. Target
Speaker 5: has now branded itself as a far left organization to
Speaker 5: the point where it's embarrassing to shop there. This is
Speaker 5: the branding that makes the boycott stick. It happened about Light,
Speaker 5: I think it's happening to Target. This is what conservatives
Speaker 5: have missed in the past with failed boycott attempts. It's
Speaker 5: not enough to simply tell people not to shop somewhere
Speaker 5: or buy something. You have to make it so that
Speaker 5: they don't want to. So after a around five percent
Speaker 5: sales drop in the second quarter, and again it's hard
Speaker 5: to actually figure out what that can be attributed to.
Speaker 2: Beer sales also hit like their lowest level in recent history. Yes,
Speaker 2: you're just kind of.
Speaker 5: A Again, it's hard to see if these things are
Speaker 5: actually working, But that doesn't matter because the right can
Speaker 5: claim them as a success.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Target released an update saying, quote, the reaction
Speaker 5: is a signal for us to pause, adapt and learn
Speaker 5: so that our future approach to these moments balances celebration, inclusivity,
Speaker 5: and broad based appeal unquote. And Walsh claimed this announcement
Speaker 5: as a quote quite massive victory. Now, I hope you know,
Speaker 5: I hope many of us aren't, you know, shopping for
Speaker 5: Pride products at a store like Target. But for a
Speaker 5: lot of kids and even adults in more conservative areas
Speaker 5: of the country, Target was really the only place to
Speaker 5: get gender firming clothing like binders and trans friendly swimsuits
Speaker 5: in person. These things can be tricky to buy online.
Speaker 5: Sometimes you don't want to package showing up to your
Speaker 5: door if you can't be the one to like open it.
Speaker 5: So Target really was the only place for a lot
Speaker 5: of people to have access to this kind of stuff. Now,
Speaker 5: last year, Michael Knowles tried to kind of replicate the
Speaker 5: Matt Walsh strategy because it proved to be very, very successful.
Speaker 5: So they had Walls going out on doing very similar
Speaker 5: kind of anti transit speeches. He spoke at a lot
Speaker 5: of the big conservative conferences talking about how we need
Speaker 5: to eliminate transgenderism. He jumped on this this boycott stuff
Speaker 5: and his viewers saying, quote, we need to make the
Speaker 5: Pride symbol toxic for brands. We need to make companies
Speaker 5: think twice as we're making these symbols culturally toxic. We've
Speaker 5: got to come in with more political force to ban
Speaker 5: this stuff. Don't back down. The progress conservatives have made
Speaker 5: on this just between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: the fact that companies are trying to back off shows
Speaker 5: that we are winning. Keep pushing much much harder. Unquote
Speaker 5: and at the very least local governments were responding to
Speaker 5: this sort of thing. In another instance of the government
Speaker 5: being in cahoots with the Daily Wire, on July fifth,
Speaker 5: twenty twenty three, the Attorney's General of Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri,
Speaker 5: and South Carolina sent a joint letter adjusted to Target's CEO,
Speaker 5: ostensibly threatening legal action against Target for carrying LGBTQ merchandise.
Speaker 5: I'm going to read some quotes from this letter because
Speaker 5: it's a really interesting thing that I've never really seen done.
Speaker 5: Four in terms of like five or six of these
Speaker 5: states all coming together to actually affect the market. Quote.
Speaker 5: Target's pride campaign not only raises concerns under our states
Speaker 5: child protection and parental rights laws, but also against our
Speaker 5: states economic interests. As Target shareholders, Target's management has a
Speaker 5: finishiary duty to our states as shareholders in the company.
Speaker 5: The evidence suggests that Targets directors and officers may be
Speaker 5: negligent in undertaking the pride campaign, which negatively affected Target's
Speaker 5: stock price. Moreover, it may have improperly directed company resources
Speaker 5: for collateral, political, or social goals unrelated to the companies
Speaker 5: and its shareholders best's interests. It is likely more profitable
Speaker 5: to sell the type of pride that enshrines the love
Speaker 5: of the United States. Target's pride campaign alienates, whereas pride
Speaker 5: in our country unites. Targets management has no duty to
Speaker 5: fulfill stores with objectionable goods, let alone endor or feature
Speaker 5: them in attention grabbing displays at the behest of radical activists. However,
Speaker 5: Target's management does have a fdicciary duty to its shareholders
Speaker 5: to act in the company's best interests. Target's board and
Speaker 5: management may not lawfully dilute their findicciary duties to satisfy
Speaker 5: the boards or the left wing activists desire to foist
Speaker 5: contentious political or social agendas upon families and children at
Speaker 5: the expense of the company's hard won goodwill and against
Speaker 5: its best interests unquote. And it's just generally not a
Speaker 5: great sign when the government is trying to convince a
Speaker 5: business that it's in their legal and financial interests to
Speaker 5: throw the gaze to the wolves.
Speaker 2: Now, it's also, yeah, that's not how fiduciary duty works. Like, no,
Speaker 2: it's not a legal principle. It's more of a philosophical
Speaker 2: principle among capitalists that is dominant. But like, you actually
Speaker 2: are not breaking the law by doing something that's not
Speaker 2: in fiduciary interest of your shareholders, among other things, basically
Speaker 2: impossible to anyway whatever this is all, But it's a
Speaker 2: question of like what you can get away with right.
Speaker 2: This is what fascists always do, and it's from a
Speaker 2: strategic standpoint. If you're looking at the culture war as
Speaker 2: a kind of mutual insurgency, it's a strategy of denying
Speaker 2: terrain to the enemy, in this case, access to a
Speaker 2: place that is available in basically every state where trans
Speaker 2: people can purchase stuff like binders and get to try
Speaker 2: them all like it's making life. It's reducing maneuvering space
Speaker 2: for the enemy, as they see it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this campaign worked specifically because of the Christian
Speaker 5: rights willingness to use physical violence, property destruction, and threats
Speaker 5: against workers to achieve their goals. That is why Target caved,
Speaker 5: because enough of their employees were feeling threatened, enough of
Speaker 5: their displays were being destroyed and ransacked. No one was
Speaker 5: held accountable because they're not going to arrest these people
Speaker 5: for the stuff. And that's what causes to really have
Speaker 5: any level of success.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 5: During Pride Month back in twenty twenty three, Starbucks union
Speaker 5: members began coming forward saying that Starbucks and store managers
Speaker 5: weren't letting employees put up their usual Pride decorations, telling
Speaker 5: workers that it was a safety concern, citing recent incidents
Speaker 5: at Target and the manufactured about light controversy. Now Starbucks
Speaker 5: Corporate claimed that they made no policy changes regarding pride decorations,
Speaker 5: but that quote, retail leaders continued to work with store
Speaker 5: teams to find ways to celebrate their communities, keeping in
Speaker 5: mind our safety standards unquote. So I think this was
Speaker 5: more up to kind of like local ownership and local management.
Speaker 5: The union publicized confirmed instances of managers not letting workers
Speaker 5: wear pride pins or put up flags, and then in
Speaker 5: early June, a regional director ordered a collection of one
Speaker 5: hundred stores across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri to throw out
Speaker 5: pride decorations from previous years and were barred from putting
Speaker 5: up any pride related decor inside stores. The union claims
Speaker 5: that there was workers in a total of twenty one
Speaker 5: states that were not allowed to put up pride decorations.
Speaker 5: And I think for the Daily Wire hosts that are
Speaker 5: pushing this sort of stuff, and especially Michael Knowles, especially
Speaker 5: Matt Walsh, their motive is deeply theological for this, But
Speaker 5: for the Daily Wire, this is deeply economical because all
Speaker 5: of this also serves as free advertising for the Daily
Speaker 5: Wire and it builds the personal brand of their hosts,
Speaker 5: which is the very thing that Jeremy Boring was trying
Speaker 5: to get started with Ben Shapiro back during Truth Revolt.
Speaker 5: This was his whole idea was building up the personal
Speaker 5: brand of these of these right wing media figures, and
Speaker 5: all of this anti queer stuff provides really, really great
Speaker 5: marketing to propel these one time very niche figures into
Speaker 5: actual national spotlight. Do you know what else deserves to
Speaker 5: be put into the spotlight, Robert.
Speaker 2: Now, that's a crime. All of my ideas are to
Speaker 2: suggest crime. Let's just move on.
Speaker 5: Let's just let's you know, I think ads deserves huh.
Speaker 5: There we go the spotlight. Great, all right, we are back.
Speaker 5: It's once again time to talk about the Daily Wire
Speaker 5: Plus and their and their hit new streaming service. So
Speaker 5: when Jeremy Boring announced the Daily Wire Plus back in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two, the early marketing was made in response
Speaker 5: to the Disney Company having very very very very slight
Speaker 5: pushback on Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill. Now, a big
Speaker 5: part of the Daily Wire Plus announcement was about how
Speaker 5: Disney has been woke afying children's TV shows, and so
Speaker 5: the Daily Wire decided to position itself as a safe
Speaker 5: alternative media hub for conservative families. I'm going to play
Speaker 5: a short clip from the announcement.
Speaker 9: There is unbelievable kids content in the market. The beauty
Speaker 9: of kids content is that, unlike adult content, there's always
Speaker 9: new kids and they go back.
Speaker 3: And watch it.
Speaker 9: So there's an unbelievable library of content. Most of it's
Speaker 9: at Disney, let's be honest. But it's not that the
Speaker 9: content isn't great. It's that you can't trust the platform.
Speaker 9: You can't put your kids in front of a classic
Speaker 9: piece of Disney content because you don't know that the
Speaker 9: very next thing that plays won't be that not so
Speaker 9: secret gay agenda that teaches your daughter that she's a boy.
Speaker 9: That's why we have to have Daily wire Plus. So
Speaker 9: that is what they're framing the Daily wire Plus ass
Speaker 9: That's why the Daily wire Plus is important. Also, I
Speaker 9: love how he said that kid's content is so profitable
Speaker 9: because there keeps being kids, unlike adult content, which doesn't
Speaker 9: make any sense because.
Speaker 2: Kids we stopped a but like a plague hit, it
Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah, that's like a
Speaker 2: reverse Children of Men sort of deal. Anyway, God, what
Speaker 2: a mess that would be man. That's not a bad
Speaker 2: idea for a movie. Just people keep making more babies,
Speaker 2: but they never grow up. So just like a dwindling
Speaker 2: number of adults and infinite babies. That's not bad, not
Speaker 2: a bad idea.
Speaker 5: This is why I like watching Jeremy Boring because there's
Speaker 5: so many moments like this, because he's so not charismatic,
Speaker 5: but his complete void just makes I just can't stop
Speaker 5: staring into the void.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I already just listening to thirty seconds of him.
Speaker 2: I've had an idea for a multimillion dollar adaptation, gritty
Speaker 2: adaptation of the rug Rats. I think we could, really
Speaker 2: we can make a lot of money with this.
Speaker 5: So a press release put out by The Daily Wire
Speaker 5: itself went into more detail about the company's child content initiative.
Speaker 5: Now I'm gonna read this, this is a direct quote quote.
Speaker 5: On Wednesday evening, the Daily Wire's co CEO and god King,
Speaker 5: Jeremy Boring, announced that the Daily Wire company town Hall
Speaker 5: that the company will invest a minimum of one hundred
Speaker 5: million dollars over the next three years into a line
Speaker 5: of live action and animated children's entertainment on its streaming
Speaker 5: platform unquote, and that that term God King is constantly
Speaker 5: how Jeremy refers to himself, which I guess is supposed
Speaker 5: to be a joke, but the fact that he does
Speaker 5: it at all is is is the actual joke that
Speaker 5: the fact that he just calls himself the God King
Speaker 5: is what a what a perfect look into the soul
Speaker 5: of just a completely dead man. Yeah, he the God
Speaker 5: King of the Daily Wire. That's that's been like rewritten
Speaker 5: in like deadline variety. Actual publications have been forced to
Speaker 5: write the God King Jeremy boring anyway. So to start
Speaker 5: this child content initiative, Jeremy brought some writers from Netflix's
Speaker 5: Veggietails and The Babylon Bee to head up their kid's content.
Speaker 5: I have a picture in my script here that Robert
Speaker 5: can see of Eric Brand's gum, which is a great name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is an amazing name.
Speaker 5: Who is the co creator of the first Daily Wire
Speaker 5: kids show, Chip Chilla and Robert. Do you want to
Speaker 5: describe what's in this picture of Eric?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, there is a heavy set man wearing a
Speaker 2: T shirt that is, to be frank a little tighter
Speaker 2: than is comfortable. He's got a red beard, he has
Speaker 2: sunglasses on. It looks like right, up above his hairline.
Speaker 2: A massive Confederate flag lines the wall behind him, and
Speaker 2: he appears to be casually pointing a handgun at his
Speaker 2: penis at his dick. Yes, yes, can't tell if it's
Speaker 2: fingers through the trigger guard, but I hope so.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So that is the co creator of Chipchilla, which
Speaker 5: we will we will get to in a sec Now,
Speaker 5: I don't know this.
Speaker 2: Also, there are four to six moist spots on his
Speaker 2: shirt and it does not It doesn't. It's not a
Speaker 2: flattering look. I'm not body shaming the man. I'm just
Speaker 2: saying there are four to six moist spots on his shirt,
Speaker 2: and I wouldn't want to be filmed with with that
Speaker 2: many moist spots on my shirt while pointing a gun
Speaker 2: at my dick in front of a Confederate flag.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: I don't know if this is either despite or because
Speaker 5: of The Daily Wire's constant attacks on how Disney has
Speaker 5: a gay agenda, But The Daily Wire did manage to
Speaker 5: acquire some talent from Disney. In August of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: they recruited the showrunner of the Emmy winning animated series
Speaker 5: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, Chris Sonnenberg to be the Senior VP
Speaker 5: of Animation Development and Production at The Daily Wire. Now
Speaker 5: they most likely got this guy the Jeremy Borings and
Speaker 5: Sonnenberg's mutual friend Zachary Levi, who again was in was
Speaker 5: in Boring's first movie, and Zachary Levi also starred as
Speaker 5: Flinn Ryder Entangled and This and This Tangled animated series
Speaker 5: for the Disney Channel. So I'm guessing this is how
Speaker 5: this connection was made. But yeah, so this this guy
Speaker 5: who was actually like a very successful, like mainstream showrunner
Speaker 5: for animated animated shows, some somehow decided to agree to
Speaker 5: get hired by The Daily Wire. And this is this
Speaker 5: is now his jobs overseeing the animated production for chip Chilla.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is the Bluey knock off. I mean, yes,
Speaker 2: I get it, among other things. There's been a lot
Speaker 2: of layoffs and animation. I have no doubt that a
Speaker 2: number of people who don't align ideologically but are desperate
Speaker 2: for a job and just more morally flexible than others
Speaker 2: are going to wind up working for this project.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So this past October, the Daily Wire's multi
Speaker 5: year initiative to create a slate of children's programming finally
Speaker 5: had something to show. In another live streamed announcement, Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring ranted about how Disney is using their parent trusted
Speaker 5: brand to quote indoctrinate children into the LGBTQIA cult unquote. Now,
Speaker 5: while he praised Walt Disney as an American entrepreneur, Jeremy
Speaker 5: Boring derided the current state of the Disney Company as
Speaker 5: quote pushing all of the worst excesses of the woke left,
Speaker 5: including paying for employees abortions, promoting anti racism training end quote,
Speaker 5: going to war on behalf of the left wing social
Speaker 5: policy in Florida. Unquote. Boring framed Disney's quite tame political
Speaker 5: stances as a huge cultural loss for conservatives. And here's
Speaker 5: a part of that announcement.
Speaker 10: It would be impossible to overstate just how big a
Speaker 10: loss this is for Americans. Wuper even basic reality, Disney
Speaker 10: controls the greatest content library ever created. Their cultural reach,
Speaker 10: particularly with children, is beyond anything that's ever existed. Recognizing
Speaker 10: the scope of this loss, the Daily Wire announced that
Speaker 10: we would spend one hundred million dollars over three years
Speaker 10: to begin our own kids entertainment company, and today, on
Speaker 10: the one hundredth anniversary of the day Walt Disney founded
Speaker 10: his company. I'm proud to announce the launch of ours,
Speaker 10: introducing bent Key and Entirely New Companies for The Daily Wire,
Speaker 10: a company dedicated to creating the next generation of timeless
Speaker 10: stories to transport kids into a world of adventure, imagination,
Speaker 10: and joy.
Speaker 5: Okay, okay, so bent bent Key, Robert, how do you
Speaker 5: feel about one? The name, the name bent Key, and
Speaker 5: the and the the bent Key logo.
Speaker 2: The bent Key logo looks like a flaccid penis.
Speaker 5: He does kind of look like a flacid penis. Y.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's not an appealing name. You know.
Speaker 2: One thing you've got to say for Walt Disney, and
Speaker 2: I guess it's impossible to say. Like my head says,
Speaker 2: there's something just kind of inherently attractive about the last
Speaker 2: name Disney. Yeah, but like made it always a good brand.
Speaker 2: But maybe if, like, if he'd been named Bluffo, would
Speaker 2: it have worked? Would Bluffo Entertainment be the cultural powerhouse
Speaker 2: that it became. I can't even we can't answer Disney's
Speaker 2: such a thing. You can't answer it even.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they could have gone with a boring entertainment. But
Speaker 5: I guess they.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was not gonna happen. Bluffo's a better one
Speaker 2: than boring.
Speaker 5: But yeah, bent keys. That's the word bent and the
Speaker 5: word key, and yeah, the logo is this lowercase B
Speaker 5: with a little droopy arm connecting to the letter K.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which doesn't really look like a key, but does
Speaker 2: look a little bit like an abstracted penis. You've got
Speaker 2: the B part kind of forming the head. You've got
Speaker 2: the ties of the key are two ball. I would
Speaker 2: have given it three times if I was making the key,
Speaker 2: just so it didn't look like balls.
Speaker 4: Ah.
Speaker 5: Well, do you know what else is a really important
Speaker 5: announcement that we have for our audience now, it's these
Speaker 5: products and services that support this podcast to pay close attention.
Speaker 5: This is crucial information about the fight for America and
Speaker 5: to secure our values. Okay, all right, we are back
Speaker 5: back to talk about bent Key Entertainment, the new hit
Speaker 5: streaming service that your kids can enjoy. So the Daily
Speaker 5: Wire Kids content used to be under the banner of
Speaker 5: just Daily Wire Kids or DW Kids, right, and the
Speaker 5: choice to rebrand, even with a name as silly as
Speaker 5: bent Key, I think is actually one of their smarter
Speaker 5: moves here. They recognize that The Daily Wire is a
Speaker 5: very politically charged and possibly limiting title if they want
Speaker 5: to create a growing children's media company. Now Ever, since
Speaker 5: what is a Woman and up to their most recent
Speaker 5: releases like Ladyballers, the name the Daily Wire has actually
Speaker 5: been hidden or not included in like legal contracts and
Speaker 5: forms when people are signing up to these projects. So
Speaker 5: I think bent Key allows them to cast the widest
Speaker 5: net possible to not only you get people to buy
Speaker 5: their service, but also to get people to collaborate with
Speaker 5: them on media. And it also like it also works
Speaker 5: to attract parents that might not even be aware of
Speaker 5: what the Daily Wire is. It's just this new kids
Speaker 5: streaming service company. And also bent Key Ventures also happens
Speaker 5: to be the name of The Daily Wire's parent company,
Speaker 5: so that's probably why they picked it. I still don't
Speaker 5: know what bent Key means, but it's also the name
Speaker 5: of the parent company for The Daily Wire, which is
Speaker 5: probably the name they're gonna use for a lot of
Speaker 5: like their contracts. And they're trying to like get like
Speaker 5: actors and like producers to sign into their stuff, because
Speaker 5: whenever someone sees the Daily Wire on something, if they're
Speaker 5: smart at all they'll be like, absolutely not. But if
Speaker 5: the word bent key is on there instead, maybe that
Speaker 5: won't raise as many red flags. So the new child
Speaker 5: focused app is available for only ninety nine dollars a year.
Speaker 5: Hell hell of a steal. Wow And at launch included
Speaker 5: one hundred and fifty episodes across eighteen different shows, four
Speaker 5: of which were produced in house, with new episodes airing
Speaker 5: every Saturday morning. Their flagship show, Chipchilla is about a
Speaker 5: family of homeschooled chinchillas. Now, some have pointed out that
Speaker 5: this appears to be a blatant conservative ripoff of the
Speaker 5: very popular kid show Bluey. Yes, and I have I
Speaker 5: have a picture comparing Blue and Chip Chilla.
Speaker 2: Here the same fucking animation style.
Speaker 5: Yeah except except. I think this also shows that if
Speaker 5: you've seen any of the Blue art, you can compare
Speaker 5: it to the Chip Chilla art. They do look similar
Speaker 5: in like color palette, but there is a massive difference
Speaker 5: in like the appealing design of Blue, which actually looks
Speaker 5: pretty good versus the the design of the Chip Chilla
Speaker 5: characters just looks slightly off it. It looks kind of
Speaker 5: like they're all on like half a tab of acid
Speaker 5: versus Yeah, versus Bluey looks like has like pretty good
Speaker 5: character design like it has it has a lot of
Speaker 5: it has a lot of range for like expressions versus
Speaker 5: everyone in chip Chilla just all has the same like
Speaker 5: a wide eyed look.
Speaker 2: Pretty widely considered to be like one of the better
Speaker 2: children's animated shows. That's that's just existed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so somehow, somehow the Blue Dog Show must have
Speaker 5: been too woke. So instead in the Daily Wires version,
Speaker 5: the kids are all homeschooled and operate as like a
Speaker 5: stereotypical nuclear family. Mm hmm, so this was This was
Speaker 5: the first show they announced, but they have others. Their
Speaker 5: other original content includes a show where a middle aged
Speaker 5: woman talks to a dog puppet.
Speaker 2: God So yeah, lamb Chop okay.
Speaker 5: And two other original live action shows star child actors
Speaker 5: that teach fitness and history to kids. And all of
Speaker 5: between all of the Daily Wire original content I've watched.
Speaker 5: The thing I feel most uncomfortable about is the amount
Speaker 5: of child actors who've been forced into doing this, who
Speaker 5: don't know anything about The Daily Wire or politics. They're
Speaker 5: just these poor kids who have now been forced to
Speaker 5: participate in this like evil machine. Now I'm going to
Speaker 5: play a one minute, one minute trailer for Robert. I'm
Speaker 5: not going to play it for the audience here because
Speaker 5: you don't need to just hear this add but you
Speaker 5: will hear our reactions afterwards. So here's for Robert. Here
Speaker 5: is the trailer for bent Key. Oh God, how'd you
Speaker 5: feel about the bent Key trailer? Robert?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll see if it
Speaker 2: takes off. I'm sure it could be a profitable business,
Speaker 2: right yeah, yeah, yeah, in terms of capturing the wider
Speaker 2: cultural market, I don't see it being a Disney level
Speaker 2: success or even like a Nickelodeon level success. I'm looking
Speaker 2: at it right now on Twitter. It's got four hundred
Speaker 2: and ninety likes and six hundred something thousand views. So again,
Speaker 2: I can see them getting enough downloads to make this
Speaker 2: maybe worthwhile enough. If they're spending thirty million or more
Speaker 2: a year on production, that is going to be kind
Speaker 2: of hard, especially given like bandwidth costs and shit to
Speaker 2: I don't know, we'll say, yeah, I'm surprised if it's
Speaker 2: able to be a functional business. I don't think. I
Speaker 2: don't see anything on there that makes me think, oh
Speaker 2: this is kids are going to fall in love with
Speaker 2: this shit. Most of these, most great like children's networks
Speaker 2: and children's like entertainment companies, were driven by iconic successes
Speaker 2: that like absolutely took over and were like dominant culturally.
Speaker 2: You think about like in the early nineties, shit like Aladdin, right,
Speaker 2: and like or The Lion King, how fucking everywhere and
Speaker 2: how a generation before you had, you know, the earlier
Speaker 2: generation of Disney animated movies. You think about stuff like
Speaker 2: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or like the Uh. That
Speaker 2: kind of stuff was was not just it was dominant
Speaker 2: among kids, but it also like adults continue to watch
Speaker 2: it for generations. And I've never run into anybody outside
Speaker 2: of weird right wings, outside of not even weird right
Speaker 2: wing circles. I've never run out into anybody who has
Speaker 2: not work for The Daily Wire talking about these shows.
Speaker 5: Yes, and I think there's a few things about that.
Speaker 5: I think One, they don't need kids to like it.
Speaker 5: They only need parents to pay the annual.
Speaker 2: Fee, yeah, for it to make sense as a business,
Speaker 2: for it to do culturally what they want rather more
Speaker 2: as required.
Speaker 5: At least a few years ago, they were pulling in
Speaker 5: over one hundred million dollars in revenue per year. And
Speaker 5: one thing that Daily Wire has shown is that they
Speaker 5: are kind of playing the long game with this sort
Speaker 5: of stuff. They're not looking for short term profit. They're
Speaker 5: looking to slowly build dominance in this industry, mostly to
Speaker 5: just fulfill Jeremy and Ben's dreams of working in Hollywood.
Speaker 5: Like that's all this is, is that they're trying to
Speaker 5: fill their childhood dreams of making movies. So all of
Speaker 5: this is just being put towards making industry connections to
Speaker 5: be able to actually just make TV and films like that.
Speaker 5: That's all this is actually for. So which leads us
Speaker 5: to the most ambitious upcoming bent Key production, a live
Speaker 5: action fairy tale adaption written by Jeremy Boring in response
Speaker 5: to Disney's own upcoming remake of their class film snow White.
Speaker 10: The company Disney found it doesn't agree with their founder
Speaker 10: and visionary they're remaking their own iconic film nearly one
Speaker 10: hundred years later. They've decided to make some key changes.
Speaker 10: Their lead actress the new snow White, Rachel Ziegler, has
Speaker 10: summed it up saying, quote, I just mean it's no
Speaker 10: longer nineteen thirty seven. We absolutely wrote a snow White
Speaker 10: that she's not going to be saved by the prince,
Speaker 10: and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.
Speaker 10: She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be,
Speaker 10: and the leader that her late father told her she
Speaker 10: could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.
Speaker 10: While Disney still uses Walt's name, they've all but abandoned
Speaker 10: his legacy. Instead of telling stories about timeless truth what
Speaker 10: the ancient fairy tales were all about, Disney's new snow
Speaker 10: White is an apology for their past and will expose
Speaker 10: children to the popular but destructive lies of the current moment.
Speaker 10: Which is why, in addition to announcing the launch of
Speaker 10: our Kids Entertainment Company, I also want to announce today
Speaker 10: that company's first live action feature film, story about a
Speaker 10: princess and a prince, about beauty and vanity, about love
Speaker 10: and its power to raise us from death to life.
Speaker 10: It's our own peration of an ancient fairy tale. It's
Speaker 10: coming in twenty twenty four, and it's called So.
Speaker 5: Before I play the rest of the trailer for Robert,
Speaker 5: there is a few funny things about this clip that
Speaker 5: I just played for the audience as well. Mostly when
Speaker 5: he's describing like the new Disney snow White, it's like
Speaker 5: a very like sensible message that the lead actor was
Speaker 5: talking about. He's like, this is horrible, imassion.
Speaker 2: I also don't even think it's a great message. Like
Speaker 2: it's a very conservative message that like this woman is
Speaker 2: born to lead and it is about her finding her
Speaker 2: place in the bread, in the hierarchy of her state.
Speaker 2: Like that's a pretty conservative message. They just hate it
Speaker 2: because a Walm set it.
Speaker 5: Yes, but now will I will play you the very brief,
Speaker 5: like thirty second trailer based on like this one thing
Speaker 5: they've shot.
Speaker 3: One super.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: So bad, a tale of typeless truth.
Speaker 2: Prince would come wow, little on the nose. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: she's even got a basket of red apples, the kind
Speaker 2: of apples that don't exist anywhere but a gene engineered farm.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Oh and it's clearly snow white. Oh my god. Yes,
Speaker 2: ah fuck.
Speaker 5: So I actually I actually do want to play that
Speaker 5: for the audience because it's just so nunny.
Speaker 2: You keep that in there. That's that's good because like
Speaker 2: the song they've got in there is like completely without wonder.
Speaker 2: It's just like once upon a time a principal come
Speaker 2: or some shit. She's like in the woods picking apples
Speaker 2: that are like a color of red that you don't
Speaker 2: even see in the like that not a natural read
Speaker 2: at all, just profoundly off putting, in weird. So one
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy seventeen thousand views, So I don't know,
Speaker 2: we'll see if this beats the original snow White or
Speaker 2: whatever snow White real actors and writers are making.
Speaker 5: So this is This is snow White and the Evil Queen,
Speaker 5: And I'm not sure if you pick this up. This
Speaker 5: is this is starring failed actor and the Daily Wire's
Speaker 5: own gen Z female clone of Ben Shapiro, Brett Cooper
Speaker 5: as snow White. It's that other Daily Wire host that
Speaker 5: looks like a weird female version of Ben Shapiro is
Speaker 5: starring as Snowing and it all just looks like really
Speaker 5: bad cosplay, like the it is. It was quite something.
Speaker 5: So that is that is their first bent Key upcoming
Speaker 5: original movie. So I'm sure everyone's gonna be excited for
Speaker 5: that one. And like it seems the entire bent Key
Speaker 5: strategy is to either be so banal that it appeals
Speaker 5: to like unassuming parents who don't know what The Daily
Speaker 5: Wire is, or to create these like fake culture war
Speaker 5: outrage moments to scare parents into thinking that woke corporations
Speaker 5: are trying to turn their kids gay or or trying
Speaker 5: to tear kids into like feminists, and the only way
Speaker 5: to stop that is to give The Daily Wire one
Speaker 5: hundred dollars a year to watch failed screenwriters and actors
Speaker 5: poorly imitate better pieces of film and TV.
Speaker 2: I think the trouble they're going to have here is
Speaker 2: that there's a I think a discrepancy between what would
Speaker 2: do the best job of achieving what they claim as
Speaker 2: their social mission right, which is incepting conservative ideas into
Speaker 2: mass culture by taking over pop entertainment, and they're what
Speaker 2: is clearly their more important goal, which is making a
Speaker 2: lot of money. Because the best way to make a
Speaker 2: lot of money, and I think they there's a good
Speaker 2: chance they can succeed building a content network for their
Speaker 2: weirdo fans that cost one hundred dollars a year, But
Speaker 2: if they want to reach the most people, the best
Speaker 2: thing they do would be to get to a point
Speaker 2: where they can sell their videos streaming to Netflix and
Speaker 2: the like. But that doesn't keep people in their walled
Speaker 2: garden and also probably is less profitable over time than
Speaker 2: having a monopoly on this shit. And so I don't
Speaker 2: know what they're going to choose to do. That'll be
Speaker 2: interesting to watch, but yeah, I mean it's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing is a business. This could work for sure.
Speaker 2: We'll see about the other stuff.
Speaker 5: And again, so this is this is only half of
Speaker 5: their efforts, because on top of the one hundred million
Speaker 5: dollars put towards children's program thing which has resulted in
Speaker 5: bent Key, the Daily Wire Plus was also putting an
Speaker 5: additional one hundred million dollars into more adult oriented entertainment. Now,
Speaker 5: most of the Daily Wires production effort has been going
Speaker 5: into adapting the Christian Arthurian novels The Pendragon Cycle live
Speaker 5: action seven episode mini series directed by Jeremy Boring. The
Speaker 5: upcoming fantasy series just wrapped filming in Europe this past fall.
Speaker 5: The cast is mostly made up of like sealist actors.
Speaker 2: Never never, I don't know where they made the scarson,
Speaker 2: but never has a production seemed more Croatia than this.
Speaker 5: It's stilled in Hungary, in Italy.
Speaker 2: So oh my god, I was close. I was close.
Speaker 5: There you go there you go.
Speaker 2: Ah, Okay.
Speaker 5: The cast is made up of mostly Like sealst actors,
Speaker 5: some Daily Wire staff, and actors from small roles in
Speaker 5: like Game of Thrones and The Witcher. So this is
Speaker 5: coming out later this year. It's based on this series
Speaker 5: of novels that came out in the in the two thousands.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's like an Arthurian story, but set slightly
Speaker 5: before the rise of like England. It's it's during like
Speaker 5: the fall of like British Rome. I think is what
Speaker 5: they call it now.
Speaker 2: Guys, I'm sorry. We all got to see a great
Speaker 2: Arthurian cycle move recently, and something tells me this one's
Speaker 2: gonna have a lot less of a guy coming into
Speaker 2: a scarf.
Speaker 5: You don't think you'll think this'll be as good as
Speaker 5: The Green Knight.
Speaker 2: I don't think we're gonna get a real fucking clear
Speaker 2: shot of one guy's come in a scarf. I'll tell
Speaker 2: you that.
Speaker 5: I trust director Jeremy Boring's vision, ah man. But the
Speaker 5: project I am the most excited about is that The
Speaker 5: Daily Wire has acquired exclusive rights to adapt in Rand's
Speaker 5: Atlas Shrugged into a television series. Oh good, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: That's like that's like being an opponent of the Nazis
Speaker 2: in nineteen forty one and hearing that they've just invaded
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union, Like, oh thank god, Okay, okay, we're
Speaker 2: on the down swing of this one. Boys.
Speaker 5: I am I am so excited to see the libertarian
Speaker 5: wet dream that's gonna be this Atlas Shrugged TV show.
Speaker 5: There is no one else I would rather adapt to
Speaker 5: Atlas Shrugged than the Daily Wire parpacouse.
Speaker 2: Antlas Shrug is like famously like the least filmable thing
Speaker 2: of all time, like it's it's.
Speaker 5: The scout Heads actually could be like a fine movie,
Speaker 5: but Atlas, I don't.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm excited to think you can make Atlas Shrugged
Speaker 2: and do I hope I hope they do shot for
Speaker 2: shot that one like seventy page speech that what's his
Speaker 2: name goes on? Oh yeah, that's that's what I really want.
Speaker 5: Ah. So yeah, I am actually excited to excited to
Speaker 5: not like hate watch, but like curiously staring into the
Speaker 5: void watch their Atlas, their Atlas Shrug show. But the
Speaker 5: one Daily Wire plus series that I am not very
Speaker 5: much excited about is an upcoming adult animated a scripted
Speaker 5: series created by Adam krolla entitled Mister Burchum.
Speaker 2: God in Heaven. Yeah, I saw ads for this one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this show's description sounds like the most old man
Speaker 5: yells at cloud premise I've ever heard. Quote. Mister Burcham
Speaker 5: attempts to navigate a world he doesn't understand or approve of.
Speaker 5: He's befuddled by his gaming streamer's son Eddie, annoyed at
Speaker 5: his selfie taking snowflake students, and is constantly at war
Speaker 5: with the school district's appointed Jedi Justice Equality, Diversity and
Speaker 5: Inclusion officer, mister CARPONSEI UNQ. So that's the description of
Speaker 5: the show, which I don't know about you. That sounds
Speaker 5: like a horrible time. The cast includes Corolla as mister Burcham,
Speaker 5: Magan Kelly Roseenne Barr, conservative comedian Tyler Fisher, Daily Wire
Speaker 5: hosts Brett Cooper and Cana Owens, comedian Alonso Broden, a
Speaker 5: former Amy Schumer, writer Kyle Dunningen, and unfortunately Danny Trejoe
Speaker 5: and Patrick Warburton.
Speaker 2: That last one hurts, that last one, I know. That's
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 3: All sad.
Speaker 5: Let's I am going to play this for the audience because, oh.
Speaker 2: My I guess I'm not surprised that being in Venture
Speaker 2: Brothers didn't pay enough for him to avoid this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and apparently Warburton is a conservative. I am interested
Speaker 5: to see what some of these people were told before
Speaker 5: they agreed to this, because I know the Daily Player's
Speaker 5: name has been hidden in a lot of contracts.
Speaker 2: Well, and Adam Carol is a real comedian, Like I
Speaker 2: didn't say good, but like he is somebody who established
Speaker 2: a career in Hollywood. Yeah, I get it. So and
Speaker 2: it looks like fucking Brickleberry and all those other like
Speaker 2: dog shit, cheap shit cartoons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it looks bad. Let's let's let's have fun listening
Speaker 5: to this though.
Speaker 2: Jumping in the first one speed.
Speaker 3: Action Sawbucks looking a little chubby.
Speaker 5: Woman, amazing voice acting by making Kelly dogs are supposed
Speaker 5: to eat meat.
Speaker 2: They're just sentence of wolves.
Speaker 5: You ever see a vegan wolf on the Nature Channel.
Speaker 2: I'm a vegan, very very funny.
Speaker 5: US closers, ladies, listen up, Oh my god.
Speaker 10: Don't do anything stupid ear than last year.
Speaker 2: I'm a heteronormative cisgender white male.
Speaker 5: For which I apologize. I'm black and that used to
Speaker 5: be enough, but I'm also bilingual and a'm non binary.
Speaker 6: Where the Army we drink more before nine am, the
Speaker 6: Navy pukes do all day. He rubbed all the fur
Speaker 6: off his emotional support far the damn thing looked.
Speaker 2: Like a four legged Rosanne bar.
Speaker 7: Oh God, charity and work two words that should never
Speaker 7: go together, like women and opinions.
Speaker 5: They're salting and make me dizzy. Or it just did
Speaker 5: find a thing to fix my gaming chair.
Speaker 2: When I was on the construction site, my chair was
Speaker 2: a five gallon bucket.
Speaker 5: It was also my toilet.
Speaker 2: See, it's what's amazing about that all of the Megan
Speaker 2: Kelly and can like terrible voices character to them. Adam
Speaker 2: Carolla sounds like a parody of himself. He's going too
Speaker 2: hard into gruff. It just it's maybe maybe if I
Speaker 2: see the show, it'll be better because it may just
Speaker 2: have picked some lines where he was doing that, but
Speaker 2: there's not much character to his voice. What I will
Speaker 2: say is I hate that he's in this. But Patrick
Speaker 2: Burton still a pro every man. That man can do
Speaker 2: a line. Read, That man knows how to do a
Speaker 2: fucking line read.
Speaker 5: No, It's weird how many of these are like actual
Speaker 5: comedians who have been who are being forced to read
Speaker 5: like non binary and they're like, they don't know what
Speaker 5: non binary means. They're just being forced to read a
Speaker 5: script written by Ben Shapiro and they're like, one of
Speaker 5: these words, it doesn't matter, just keep going.
Speaker 2: Yeah, get your paycheck. I don't know, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: a bummer.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I It's weird because, like Adam Carolla, I've never felt
Speaker 2: anything positive towards or particularly negative towards until recently. I
Speaker 2: guess now I'm on the negative side. Even with this,
Speaker 2: I still feel overall good about Patrick Warburt, and he's
Speaker 2: just given me too much. Yeah, it'll take a lot.
Speaker 5: So this this, that is most of what I wanted
Speaker 5: to talk about, because the only other Daily Wire project
Speaker 5: I have anything to say about is the movie that
Speaker 5: came out a few months ago, Lady Ballers, and I
Speaker 5: I could not, I could not fit my Lady Baller's
Speaker 5: thoughts into this episode because that is that is gonna
Speaker 5: be its own, its own special event.
Speaker 2: That's that's gonna be your Fittigan's wake.
Speaker 5: Yes, So a few weeks ago I watched it for
Speaker 5: the first time. I took a lot of notes. I'm
Speaker 5: gonna watch it again here, and we are gonna go
Speaker 5: deep into the production of this movie. This thing was shot.
Speaker 5: This this just just a peak of of of of
Speaker 5: of the writing quality you're you're about to hear about.
Speaker 5: The whole strip is written in two weeks. It was.
Speaker 5: It was shot in like a month. It's it's it
Speaker 5: stars the only Daily Wire hosts. Every single actor they
Speaker 5: approached for this turned it down because they're like, absolutely.
Speaker 2: Not, no, fuck this shit.
Speaker 5: And it is a It is a a insightful, insightful
Speaker 5: look into the soul of Jeremy Boring. He wrote, directed, produced,
Speaker 5: and starred in this thing. It was shot right in Nashville, Tennessee.
Speaker 5: So that is gonna be after the weekend, this is
Speaker 5: We're gonna have a special episode of me diving into
Speaker 5: what makes Lady Baller's tick and is it any funny?
Speaker 5: The answer is not really, But we will we will
Speaker 5: go into the production of this movie, the way this
Speaker 5: movie tries to work, and what we can learn about
Speaker 5: how the Daily Wire is going to try to be
Speaker 5: producing these sorts of comedy films and try to insert
Speaker 5: itself into into the entertainment industry. So that will be
Speaker 5: that that will be the start of next week are
Speaker 5: special on Lady Ballers, any any any closing thoughts on
Speaker 5: on on bent Key or or the Daily Wire plus
Speaker 5: as as as as the Daily Wire enters the streaming market.
Speaker 2: Robert Patrick, you don't have to do this, like, just
Speaker 2: just let us know you need help. We can take
Speaker 2: care of you, you know, Patrick, We we love you.
Speaker 5: If you need help with the mortgage, we can, we
Speaker 5: can crowd fund.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can make this work, buddy, We can make
Speaker 2: this work.
Speaker 5: Anyway. Well, that does it for us today. I hope
Speaker 5: you're reding something about Jeremy Boring the most forgettable man
Speaker 5: with the most accurate name.
Speaker 2: Yep, all right, guys. Bye, Hey, We'll be back Monday
Speaker 2: with more episodes every week from now until the heat
Speaker 2: death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: It could Happen here as a production of pool Zone Media.
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Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
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