It Could Happen Here Weekly 115

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
F Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions. Oh my goodness, it's

(00:27):
it could happen here a podcast that is about things
falling apart are Dystopian now and tomorrow, And for the
last several days has been heavily about the Consumer Electronics Show,
which is a huge event every year where one hundred
and twenty to one hundred and fifty thousand people flood
into Las Vegas to show off all of the new
gadgets and to have big, fancy panels on the future

(00:50):
of technology. And this has been a particularly good year
for the Dystopia beat. Part of that because the entire
industry is obsessed right now with artificial intelligence. Now there's
a couple reasons for this. Every laptop manufacturer is basically
throwing out laptops with AI assistance. Microsofts is copilot, and
they're doing this because laptop sales have stalled a lot

(01:11):
of people, Like the pandemic was great for laptop sales,
and then people stopped buying them because most people don't
need to replace their laptops very often. So there's this
desperate hope that by scaring everybody into thinking they need
AI immediately, they can get folks to buy a new
raft of machines. And outside of that, it's just as
I'm sure you're aware, with interest rates where they are, companies,

(01:34):
Tech companies, particularly startups, are having trouble getting VC money
venture capital money invested in them. So there's this kind
of desperate hope that by plugging AI constantly they can
fill in the gap. So today we have probably in
a week or two, we're going to have be putting
out a long investigation based on number of panels we
went to with executives from Google, from weirdly enough McDonald's,

(01:55):
from Adobe, from Nvidia, from the Consumer Electronics Association, in
multiple government agencies including DHS, on what they see as
the future of AI. That's going to be some pretty
in depth reporting. But today we want to talk about
the AI products that we've been seeing and as a spoiler,
they're basically all the dumbest shit you've ever heard of.
So I want to introduce our panel today, coming back

(02:17):
after catching a horrible, horrible lung infection, throat infection, some
kind of infection. Yeah, Garrison got strep throat and despite
the fact that we've been hanging out together, I did not,
which does prove I'm genetically superior. We also have Tavia
Mora coming back, our technical expert.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Hello Tavia, Howdy everybody.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
And for the first time on well, no, not for
the first time, for the third time on it could
happen here, the upcoming host of the cool Zone media
tech focused show Better Offline ed zitron ed.

Speaker 4 (02:50):
Well Gwan Hello, Yeah, sorry, Hi, Yeah, I hit my
head on the way and yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:56):
It's a truly awful show this year.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
The thing that I said to Robert yesterday when we
were talking about the show, and this really stood out
to me, is if you had told me this was
twenty twenty one, I'd have believed you. It doesn't feel
despite the use of the word AI, it does not
feel like tech has actually moved that far, and it's
very strange.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, there was this period of time after the iPhone
came out where every year there would be really big
leaps in the tech you saw. And this part of
I think why they're leaning on AI so heavily is
otherwise it's just the same laptop, smartphones, speakers, connected gadgets,
you know, autonomous cars and shit that we've been seeing
for years and they really haven't jumped forward much. But

(03:38):
you know, the downside of that is a lot of things.
But the upside of that is people are increasingly cramming
AI into insane shit in the hopes that somebody will
want to buy it. And so I want to start
off ed since you are not just our newest host,
but also a Las Vegas native, I think people could
probably assume that from your Vegas accent. Yes, natural, Yeah,

(04:01):
What is your favorite or the first AI product do
you want to get into today?

Speaker 5 (04:05):
I want to talk about the rabbit. The rabbit are one?

Speaker 2 (04:08):
Oh god? Yes.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
So this thing is a square box and I can't
tell if it acts without your phone or with your phone,
but it uses AI. You you speak into it like
a walkie talkie and it does a series of actions
based on what you say, so it can do all
the things that Siri could do five years ago, like
change music and start. But it also has like a
three hundred and sixty degree camera which can Based on

(04:31):
the extremely awkward and agonizing how a long demo twenty
five minutes, but bon me, it felt like an hour,
it can look at a picture of Rick Castley and
start very and after several agonizing seconds stop playing never
give you Up. It can also, it claims, do a
series of nuanced actions like you can say, get me
a cab home and also put on my tunes and

(04:54):
also change the air conditioned at seventy four degrees, all
in one one sentence. Now you may think, why do
I need to spend two hundred dollars on a device
to do this? And the answer is you don't. You
do not need to. This thing looks cool, and on
some level, I'm just glad we're getting new tat.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, the design is not bad. It's like a square.
It looks like it's maybe two two and a half
inches by two and a half inches or so something
like that. Yeah, a little screen. It's like well designed
from an industrial design standpoint, and I think the big Yeah,
it looks like it's just that it's a it's a
basically a seri that can use at, it can use Uber,

(05:34):
it could book a flight for you. One of the
things they show is it like planning a vacation in
London for you, which does seem to kind of go
against the point of like going somewhere new and like
figuring out what you want to do there, as opposed
to it's basically pulling from a list I'm sure in
the AI wrote of like top ten things to do
in London.

Speaker 4 (05:51):
And it's just very weird because all of these tech guys,
who they very loudly claim their free spirits, they're independent
and not control by any authority, they cannot be manipulated,
all desperately want a machine to tell them exactly what
the hell to do with their lives. And it's so
bizarre because they we were discussing the different articles about this,

(06:12):
and people trying to argue oy this thing, these three sis.
It's like, oh, it takes out the friction between all
these apps. I'm sorry, I just don't think there's that
much friction.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Pull out my phone. I'm on Uber, Yes, right, I
pull out my phone, I pull up grub Hub, I
order food it's very simple. It's remarkably easy. I don't
see how talking to a square is better, Like it's
the same, Like I could call someone on the phone
and do it hands free, or I could text them,
and I always text them because that's more pleasant.

Speaker 5 (06:39):
I mean, like, I have my phone open to signal
right now, I can swipe up, go to Uber and
less than a second saying the words move from signal
to the Uber app takes a whole lot longer than
just doing it with my thumb.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
I also do love the idea of like completely ruining
the point of Signal, which is an encrypted, extremely secure
message app, to be like, hey, random box, I want
to feed my private messages through you and have you
read them out to me as I go about my day.
I don't know what your data retention policy is or
what you'll be doing with it.

Speaker 5 (07:13):
They sold out and they made two million.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Dollars, like ten million of them, some ten thousand. Sorry,
it's just and it's I've read.

Speaker 4 (07:20):
I read like eleven articles about this thing, because I
occasionally drive myself insane with these things when I see
everyone excited about something, but I can't read a single
article that tells me why I should buy it, even
though my rap brain says, oh, take with screen I want,
but then I want to use it. But I'll have
to explain this to the normal people in my life
why I have this, And I don't want to do

(07:40):
that if it's useless. But on top of that, I
just don't think controlling my life with voice is that useful. Yeah,
I don't like that.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
I'm already and I think a lot of people are
already kind of fed up with the extent to which
my smartphone is a part of my life. Yeah, but
like it does irreplaceable tasks at the moment for me,
So I have it. This thing is number one adding
a device because I think it does require your phone.
But it's also, like you know, in addition to the
current problems I have with privacy on my smartphone, I

(08:10):
am adding another company and another device and another set
of security potential security flaws to it.

Speaker 4 (08:16):
But on top of that, the thing they have failed
to explain anywhere, and no journalist apparently is interrogate them
about this is they claim this thing can log onto
your Uber and make a flight booking, ostensibly having your
passport information, your date of birth, and all this stuff.
First and foremost. That's like you mentioned, the data retention
policy is very strange. But where is this crap all happening?

(08:37):
Is it happening on my phone? Is my phone just
doing all this? I refuse to believe that. So you're
doing this in the kind of virtual machine environment, how
is that possible? Surely these companies are going to have
a problem with that. Mark Sullivan for Fast Company. Actually,
I think ask them this and they were like, oh, yeah,
they'll be fine with it. They just want people using
their apps. I do not think they're going to be
fine with this. Companies hate it when they hand off

(08:59):
power from the user, who will still be liable to
another computer.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah. Well, the other thing is just that, like part
of me kind of suspects And when you watch the video,
we'll play a clip from it in a second. The
CEO of Rabbit very clearly, like a lot of guys
in tech, wants to be Steve Jobs. And I will
say one thing I kind of suspect that might actually
be that would be a Steve Jobs move is he
may have just been hoping that this thing coming out

(09:25):
selling a shitload on free order and getting huge buzz
would force these companies after the fact to allow integration,
like he may just be gambling, Like if I get
enough buzz behind me, Uber and whatnot will come to
the table and be willing to work with me, because
suddenly this is like the Hippus new gadget.

Speaker 4 (09:41):
Except ten thousand customers is actually not that many, and
I actually look forward to I really can't wait for
what two months to pass people to get this and
someone to end up like sending the word penis to
their or company slack because they wanted to order pizza,
and on top of that, ordering a fly, ordering an Uber.
These are actually nuanced actions. Coming to Mandeley Bay toenite

(10:03):
Uber took me to the wrong place because it decided
it wanted to go to the convention center. I did
not select that. If you go to the airport, you
need to put in Southwest Airlines.

Speaker 5 (10:11):
And what have you. With grabhab you need to do
little bits.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
It's just most people don't order lunch, they order something
for lunch, and I just don't. Ah, this whole thing
just feels useless.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Yeah. See, for me, it's the additional level of abstraction
on top of these already abstracted apps that we use
to order our basic necessities like eating and things like that.
It worries me in sort of like a fantasy dystopic way.
What happens when people suddenly don't use it after getting
used to using it? Like what are they going to know?

(10:42):
Are they going to know how to operate a door
dash app? Are they going to know how to book
a flight? That kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, it is kind of because one of the things
there was a c neet review that said, like, well,
the potential of this is that it completely removes physical
use of a device. So you're using these apps, but
they're just a part of your life. Uber is just
a thing you to You never look at anything when
you do it, And I'm like, is that better? Like
I don't like the idea that you basically have a
robot that you treat as like your nanny that plans

(11:09):
your life for you. Like the amount of hype over
there will be a more concerted piece about this coming out.
But the first thing I thought when I looked at
all these guys talking about how cool it was to
be able to just tell a robot to book your
flight and plan your travel and book your hotels for you.
That's like part of the experience of traveling, and like
choosing things to do is like one of the things

(11:31):
that traveling is. And the desire so many people have
to hand off elements of choice really reminds me of
like cult dynamics. And I don't think this is a
consumer thing. I think this is specifically a weird subculture
of tech people of AI people, a lot of the
same folks who got into NFTs. But this desire, like
life is so complex and scary, I want to hand

(11:52):
over all of my agency to a robot. It's the
same thing that is behind a lot of like why
people join cults. And I don't think this is a
pro societal problem, but I think it is a weird
problem with the group of people who are most excited
to have a fucking rabbit.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
It seems like a sad thing to me that folks
might only attend bars or restaurants that are rated like
four point five and above that's decided by something else, Yeah,
and they don't get to have this like experience of
walking into like the sedious bar you've ever seen in
your life and have like maybe possibly like a life
changing experience.

Speaker 4 (12:24):
I was just in South Korea and we went to
this fried chicken place that ended up being close actually
was like we opened but nobody was there, which made
me just want to leave before getting killed. And so
I just went to a random chicken place across the
road from my hotel, and I thought, well, it'll feed me.
It was wonderful, it was delightful, and it was I

(12:47):
could not find any reviews for it. It was just
a flipping place. And I don't I think these people
who are desperate for a device like this, this kind
of weird nanny device. First of all, I don't think
they think about the practicalities of this. I don't think
this is quicker or easier better. But also they're like, oh,
I wish I could just say one thing and all
of these things could happen for me. Same people, by

(13:08):
the way, who are saying that people need to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps and do things for themselves.
It's just I don't know if they'd even call it dystopian.
It's just weird and sad to me.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Speaking of weird and sad, we're going to move on
to the next product in a second, but first I
gotta play everybody in case you haven't seen it or
heard it? The CEO of Rabbit trying to rickroll the
audience with his hell device. Have you seen this, Garrison?

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Okay, eyes on the screen. Everybody to activate the eye,
just double tap the button. Oh funny seeing you here, Rick.

Speaker 5 (13:54):
Let me take a look. I'm never gonna give you up.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
Now enjoying.

Speaker 5 (14:10):
What am I getting Rick rolled in my own kenotes?
Let's move on to the next one. All right, I
have a question real quick.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
So what is the functionality he just activated? Is it
that you just put you point the eye at something
and it chooses an Actually the.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
I automatically see Rick Astley and choose to play one
specific song of his. Because that actually doesn't seem like
a feature. That seems like a bug.

Speaker 4 (14:34):
Yeah, that seems like what happens if it sees certain people.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein, Yeah, what happens if it sees Jeffrey Yeah,
plays children screaming like what is wow? Is this thing work?

Speaker 4 (14:44):
Booking trips to Florida?

Speaker 2 (14:48):
It I maybe it's respectable that they showed how bad
the lag is because that moment where there's quiet after
he like clicks on it is like it's loading it's
processing for a considerable period of time.

Speaker 4 (15:02):
And it's just also I feel for the bloke because
I know he was probably so excited to do this
and he's like, I'm gonna be Steve Jobs. But man,
when you can't perform, you don't perform.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Like, yeah, that's bad delivery.

Speaker 4 (15:16):
Did I just get Rick rolled in my own video?
It was like that, I forget what the movie's called.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Oh high Mark, Yeah it is, and obviously like English
is the reverse language, but like it's a performance. You like,
you practice, right, you get coached and stuff because you're
trying to represent your company.

Speaker 4 (15:34):
Oh I tell you this from experience as I've run
a PR firm. Yeah, that guy actually did practice because
all of that was his actual timing wasn't bad. He
just does not have that dog in him.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Yeah. Yeah, you bring in other people to do like
that anyway, and everybody, anyone, anyone's mind on the rabbit
changed having seen that. Absolutely not Garrison has a look
on their face.

Speaker 5 (15:59):
No, it's just like what I've always wanted in a
tech gadget is be able to point at three to
sixty five degree camera at a picture of a musician
and then wait thirty seconds and then have an AI
pick a random song of theirs. That's always what I
wanted for the future.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's the dream of fucking Archimedes had.
That's right he was when he was building his laser.
That's right that we all saw in the most recent
Indiana Jones film. Speaking of the most recent Indiana Jones film,
this podcast is entirely sponsored by that movie. So here's
some other ads.

Speaker 5 (16:44):
Why are we giving free advertising to Disney? Why are we.

Speaker 6 (16:49):
Why?

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Because that movie was so close to being worth it
that last twenty minutes.

Speaker 5 (16:54):
They fully committed, They fully get it.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
No Nazis machine gunning Roman Legion.

Speaker 5 (17:00):
Pretty funny, It's pretty funny. Well, do you know who
would have loved cees our our comedian is probably yes,
he probably would have would have had a great time.
What what next AI product do we want to talk about?
How about the pet one Garrison?

Speaker 2 (17:18):
You saw that?

Speaker 5 (17:19):
All right? So I think I think I think me
and Ed both saw chat GPT for animals. Yeah damn,
which is not really what it is saying. It's like
it it scans a picture of your dog and then
tries to tell you if it has any health problem.
It's based on that picture. It's it's it's You're not
you're not actually talking to your dog or anything. It

(17:40):
just it takes pictures of animals and then it analyzes
it to tell you how the dog is feeling. Blah
blah blah blah blah, it's it's. I saw a product
like this earlier at CES. I saw a product. I
saw a product like this last year. They're just calling
it chat GPT because it's an AI name. It's it's
it's it's it's.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
It's hip like because people people, they're that that will
make people spend money off.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
It was every CES I see something that begins to
make me disassociate and I walk I walked past there
and blovo the chat GPT, and my brain was just
like could you just like start like glitching out? And
then when I went to look it up, as Garrison did,
I was so disappointed because I hope that these would

(18:22):
just crackpots. So like, yep, you put the microphone to
your dog. Now you know what your dog's saying that
I would respect even if it didn't work, just if
you're like, yeah, fuck it, yeah, your cat's said he
hates your Your cat's been radicalized.

Speaker 5 (18:34):
I'm afraid.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
See there's a fun product in here, which is you
sell to rubes and a product that you're like it
translates your dog's micro expressions into language. And then the
actual paying customers are sickos like us, and you just
take control of somebody's pets voice.

Speaker 5 (18:52):
That would be so cool.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
You can have their like, yeah, your cat's racist, now
your dog's are Nazi like this is this is.

Speaker 5 (18:58):
The perfect product for HB. Love Craft. I would have
loved this.

Speaker 4 (19:05):
No if you gave me like the show light to me,
but for dogs on my phone, I would spend whatever
you want.

Speaker 5 (19:10):
A thousand dollars I.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Will get I wouldn't pay like average West Coast rent
prices to be able to like gaslight some family into
thinking their dog is a terrorist.

Speaker 4 (19:20):
And see a friend of mine, Oh, what's what's wrong?
Ed chat GPT said that I said that my dogs
joined ISIS and I don't know. I don't know how
he did it, but he's been he's talking about a
caliphate according to the app. I don't know what this
app is bankrupting me. I paid four and a half
thousand dollars for this app a month.

Speaker 5 (19:40):
I don't know why I need it so because so
unfortunately had to miss yesterday. So there was probably an
endless number of tech innovations that I was unable to
see because I had to miss one day. But with
help a pencil and I was able to return today
to do one final.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Chat GPT of antibiotics.

Speaker 5 (19:58):
That's that is exactly what my doctor said, actually, but
I did. I did swear revenge on cees. So I
just walked around most mostly mostly the Venetian just seeing
all of the worst things I could find in documenting
them so I could get revenge from that twink poisonam
with strap throat. So the first really good thing is this.

(20:19):
I mostly walked around the award winning sections because that's
where you find only the best. There was an award
winning speaker called Audio Cu that all of their marketing
was built from this horrible, horrible uh Ai image generation
of this like extremely busty blonde woman in a latex suit,

(20:40):
but if you zoom it onto her fingernails, her her
fingernails are like sticking through the wrong side of her fingers. There.

Speaker 4 (20:47):
Oh my god, Oh my god, it's the woman's from
that one movie for Oh damn it not skin the one.

Speaker 5 (20:57):
The other it was the woman where the alien.

Speaker 4 (20:59):
Was sex and then she killed people when she had
sex with them. It's the same thing, Yes, terrifying. Yes,
rita's a cool in and say what that is?

Speaker 5 (21:07):
Yeah, it looks just like that. It has relaxed stick
it in, which is pretty funny. So that that was
pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Now I respect that. I respect that. That's a baller
move right there.

Speaker 5 (21:21):
Again, this is this is for a speaker company like.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
DJ Girlfriend in the shape it's a speaker in the
shape of a girlfriend.

Speaker 5 (21:28):
No, it's just home theater speakers.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
It just have a horrible AI generated woman as their spokesperson.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
I mean I would buy it if it was DJ Girlfriend. Though.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
DJ Girlfriend is a great idea for a product and
might stop several.

Speaker 5 (21:41):
AI has brought back sexism.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
If you do DJ Girlfriend right, you could stop at
least one mass shooting.

Speaker 3 (21:49):
Finally, we have a real solution now.

Speaker 5 (21:52):
Another product that won the CEES twenty twenty four Innovation
Awards is an AI powered coffee brewer and grinder system.
I'm just gonna read the description from the coffee's been missing,
that's right.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
I know.

Speaker 5 (22:05):
We wake up every morning make our little French press coffee.
That's fine, But you know what could be better? An
AI system that does it for you. I'm gonna read
the award the award description for this product. Okay, introducing
Barista Brew Coffee Brewer and Grinder System, a smart coffee
system that tailors your brew to perfection with AI guided personalization.

(22:28):
Easily adjust brewing parameters for a custom cup. New expertise needed,
rate to track and refine your bruise brew iq AI
suggestions for your ideal taste, simplify with one touch favorites,
elevate your coffee experience.

Speaker 4 (22:43):
Yeah, well, I hear all that. The one thing I
think is simplify. That's that's simple. The Movie's Spacies, by
the way.

Speaker 5 (22:50):
I love that movie. One of one of the best
hr Geiger art utilizations.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah yeah, and easily the horniest movie of the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 5 (22:59):
Which is Lot of which is which is a high
high bar. So on on. On this AI coffee maker.
On the front, there's a little control panel with nine
different settings that you can you can change because they're
all on a graph. We have we have citrus, spice, nutty, fruity, balanced, cocoa, floral, herbal,

(23:20):
and honey, so you can you can with your with
the with the ease of a touchpad, start to customize
your own AI coffee, so that that is revolutionary. I'm
going to be getting one for Robert this Christmas.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Thank you, Garrison. I know I've always thought, you know,
what I hate is the experience of uh, of exploring
new flavors on my own and and learning new ways
of brewing coffee, a beverage I consume every day. So
I'm glad to be handing that whole experience off to
a machine.

Speaker 5 (23:47):
That's right, and I know a lot of people used Tavia.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Just brought something up that I think is relevant here.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
It's a Guardian article about an AI smoothie shop that
opened in San Francisco well before a ce S. That
is a combination of it's being driven forward with AI
technology as well as five G stuff that I think
had opened up and then like three weeks later had
shut down.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Oh that's they were like, a robot will pick the
perfect smoothie for you.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Well, I actually want to bring I want to bring
something up. So I love smoking me. I have pellet
smokers at home, and I saw a few times on
this show AI grills and I just looked up one
called a brisk It smart grill, and I was like,
how could you possibly make a thing which is basically
maintaining hot air in a tube long enough until the

(24:36):
food's done? And what it is is it has a
thing You can ask the grill what seasoning should I
add to make my chicken skew a spicy or how
do I see a medium rest eight? I don't fucking know.
Why don't you learn to cook?

Speaker 5 (24:47):
You twat?

Speaker 2 (24:51):
It's just like.

Speaker 4 (24:53):
The enjoyable part of cooking is the experimentation and learning taste.
But no, thank you, just like that goddamn coffee thing. Oh,
I don't want to learn anything. I don't want to
have a human experience.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
That's the thing with a lot of these AI solutions,
will call them, is I feel like they're robbing people
of real experiences.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah, for like no, been Like there's some stuff that like,
you know, the ability of a smartphone to once you
had to be like in a building in order to
like access a phone or like use a payphone. Now
you can connect with people everywhere. That's that's a clear benefit, right.
There's downsides to it, obviously, but it's a clear benefit,
but like, now you don't have to learn. Now, now

(25:32):
you don't have to cook. You can let a robot
do it for you. It's like, well, but why cooking
is pleasurable? And if I don't want to cook, I
will go to a restaurant or order food, and it's
cheaper than buying several thousand dollars AI device.

Speaker 5 (25:47):
I mean, some things are hard to learn, which brings
me to the next product that's smoking me. But had
kind of like like, uh, like parenting, right.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
So good, okay, nice, you know what, Garrison, I'm proud
of you.

Speaker 5 (26:01):
That was a good sex way so AI parenting, especially
with your infant child. This was also in the CEES
Awards section, so you know it's gonna be legit. I
was able to see an demonstration of an AI baby
crib that will shake your baby up and down based
on facial expression analysis done by an AI, and yeah,

(26:22):
I'm gonna show a show it here. So here is
here's the cutting edge facial expressions we have anger discussed fear, happiness, sadness,
and surprise, and that basically that data will go into
this little crib which will start shaking and moving up
and down. Based on what they scan on your baby's face.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
So to be clear, there is a protocole, yes, snow
that exists where drop my phone. There there's a protut
called the snow which is like a for infants and
it notices when they're fussing and it kind of like
lightly rocks them.

Speaker 5 (26:52):
But the way it rocks them is so very light.

Speaker 4 (26:55):
It is very much a This is this is what
a mother would do with a brand new baby biked.

Speaker 5 (27:00):
You don't want to move into much.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
That one has like six pictures from the intro of
light to me and a hot rate monitor. It's like, yeah,
hand over your baby to AI.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
Great, Yeah, this product looks like a baby Morocca. The
pace that you shake in it, which is dependent on
what pretty much you make pretty much well.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
I love it also because like a real scandal I
think from the I think it was in the eighties,
is like Nanny's shaking babies to death. Like the idea
that like again a machine that can only go at
a certain pace that's very light. You know, I get
that's a labor staate, especially for like a single parent
or whatnot. Like you know, some some people will need that,

(27:41):
But I just worry. I worry that we're not all
that far from our first and AI killed my baby.

Speaker 5 (27:49):
You know, I think I think that I think the
real beauty of this product is usually when you have
a newber, maybe you have to like watch it all
nightcs it'll wake up, you have to like pick it up,
pat it, make sure it gets back to sleep. You
can just leave that baby in the bed. You can
you can like go to the club, just leave the
baby in the bed. If it starts crying, don't worry.
The AI will take the will take over.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
We are on the verge of beds that can raise
our children, just like the Venture Brothers.

Speaker 5 (28:11):
That's right, and and those and those kids turned out fine,
they turned out great, perfectly. But I think luckily luckily
for you, because I know none of us are babies anymore.
But we are all, you know, eventually going to get old, hopefully, hopefully,

(28:32):
and there is air products that will also assist us
as we get older, using the same AI baby tech. Here.
One of the one of the one of the places
that me and Robert stopped by was called Blue Sky AI.
It's spelled ridiculously offensively, and they refused to do an
interview they were not happy, but I was able to

(28:54):
get a pamphlet and they have an AI that I
think they're mostly targeted to get at like older people.
But quote, by comparing the way your facial and vocal
behavior changes over time, using your facial expressions, facial muscle actions,
as well as where you are looking, your body pose,
and the tone of your voice, we have the potential
to identify and monitor all kinds of medical conditions that

(29:15):
manifest in the face or voice. So it's it's a
facial scanning and voice scanning that uses AI to try
to diagnose you with medical conditions specific specifically, the guy
told us that it's it's useful for Alzheimer's. Then he
realized we were journalists and the nassis to go away.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
And also, but yeah, that's how you know you've got
a good medical.

Speaker 5 (29:39):
Device, a good product. At CES blue Sky uses a
continuous approach apparent valiance and arousal to measure to measure
expressed emotion. This better fits the real human experience of
emotional states. This approach allows emotion regions to be defined
and to measure the transitions away from and towards these regions.
This continuous approach where appropriate can be mapped back to

(30:02):
a much less exact categorical representation, for example, excited, calm
or angry.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
Did they have horny?

Speaker 5 (30:09):
They do not have horny, not that I can see.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
Look, if you know old people, one thing they never
stop doing is funny.

Speaker 5 (30:16):
Now they do have a list of all human emotions
here that turn it on a map. Finally that using AI,
we can finally figure out what emotions you're feeling based
on your face. So you can use this just with
your with your phone camera, with your with your iPad camera.
They do data collection, data analysis. One of the weird
use cases that we saw was, I know we saw

(30:38):
something similar to this already, but just scanning your face
when driving to tell you how you're feeling, which is
just quite funny.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
It's a I could talk about that a second. What
this reminds me of there was a product a few
years ago. It was like a robot for the military,
and the idea was this robot can run in dangerous
situations and pickup troops that have been injured and run
them out, which is probably a thing that will exist
at some point and might even save lives. Right, I
can see how that would be a useful thing, and
the military can be very dangerous to retrieve people. Much

(31:06):
better for a robot to get shot or blown up
in that situation than another person. But to try and
comfort the soldiers, they gave the robot the head of
a teddy Bear, like a metal teddy Bear head. It
looked like a fucking nightmare. It's just like, what, what
do you think did you talk to There's all sorts
of guys who have been shot in combat. Did you

(31:28):
talk to one of them? Did you go with the
experience of having your arm blown off? Corporal have been
more pleasurable if a giant metal teddy Bear entered.

Speaker 4 (31:37):
So my first job was working on the characters and
twisted metal, but then I moved into robotics. It's so
cool that how many of these products are very clearly made, funded, prototyped,
r and D, hired PR teams. Everyone's done these big
presentations without talking to a single fucking human being.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
It's so cool.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
It's so cool how much waste there is at this
shoh where not a single human soul there is a
completely different subject. There was like an AI powered nail
saw on thing as well. I saw, and I'm like
That's definitely one where you didn't talk to talk to
any woman though, because first and foremost in my experience,

(32:21):
a lot of women are scared of a new nail
place for fucking up their hands. So are they going
to spend eight hundred goddamn dollars on this thing to
maybe get burnt? And I saw in this article about
it just now that their thing they said was, oh, yeah,
it's like an espresso at home. I've had an espressos
break multiple times, and I realized it may sound weird.
How can you break an espresso? I'm just built different.

(32:42):
But if I can break it in just like me.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
And strep throat, unbelievable.

Speaker 5 (32:48):
So I do have one more product. And then I'm and.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
Well, first, Garrison, I know you have one more product,
but we also have one more ad break. Ah, we're back, Garrison,
what's your next product?

Speaker 5 (33:10):
So we already talked about the handy, which is you know,
I sure did, which is bye. By all accounts, actually
like works as intended.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
It's a good product. The people, the PR people, and
we talked to the CEO. We're not just knowledgeable, but
like remarkably good at keeping a straight face while talking
about their jack Well, that's professionalism. You have to respect it.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
Honestly, that was the most professional booth I saw the
entirety of ces. They were really on point.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
If you are looking for a jack off machine, I
can't recommend anything more highly.

Speaker 5 (33:41):
Well, Robert, except for our next product, which is an
AI power to jack off machine. Thank god. So this
is called my Hixel. It is the first it's the
first app.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
That's an appealing names that's a name that sounds like sex.

Speaker 5 (33:59):
It is the first app for climax Control to incorporate AI.
Now I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna read through.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
There really redefines edge technology. Huh.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
I want to make a note before you get into it.
The thing that they're claiming this is useful for there
are devices for and it is a real use case,
which is that like, premature ejaculation is a serious problem
for a lot of men. It's like it's like a
quality of life issue, right, Like it stops people from
feeling confident. It's a serious problem. There are prosthetic devices
people can use to train themselves. That's fine, they already exist.

(34:34):
This is basically like what if an AI could teach
you how to come slower.

Speaker 5 (34:38):
Yes, and we have a six step layout here describing
why why my Hixel is right for you. For the
first step is secure and anonymonized data collection, so you
can get O good all of your coming data stored,
but don't worry, it's secure.

Speaker 7 (34:58):
See.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
My first question to that is why is data on
me masturbating being collected at all?

Speaker 5 (35:03):
Well, it could be because they're putting it towards an
eight week training program.

Speaker 4 (35:10):
No, So, first and foremost, one of the first things
on the website for this is just the words happy
sex here save sixty dollars and my Hixel control. But
happy sex here is going to be something I think
about for a while. But also it says it has
my Hixel care and my Hixel control, two different things,
and then my hicksl Academy and sadly you can't click
on that because I've never wanted to know more about

(35:33):
how much material could there be unless.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
A masturbation academy.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, I thought they just called that eton. I was
a British public school joke.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
It's okay, I made an edging joke earlier and nobody
caught it.

Speaker 4 (35:45):
Yeah, I there's one thing in the eating boys do
and they don't have sex.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
No masturbation. Yeah sorry. Part of what I hate about
this is its name is so clearly like trying to
be respectful and like respectable and tech product name as
opposed to like one of the things that I respect
about the Handy people is they just went ahead and
called it handy.

Speaker 5 (36:06):
I mean it's weird because like some of their some
of their free merchere were labeled with stuff like download
the app to control your loads, we bring the game,
you bring the joystick. The first day you went for
a run, you couldn't last more than three minutes either.

(36:28):
So it's weird how they Yeah, I had this very
like sanitized branding except for their like free merch but
yeah it has. It has Bluetooth connection, interactive and personalized settings.
You can monitor your user evolution, and it is it
is marked as a medical device. But on on their
brochure there's just two really really good sentences. There's video

(36:49):
feedback from our sexual health professionals, so after you come,
you can get on a video chat and talk about that.
We go there, we go looking good.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
It's the load talking ad on.

Speaker 4 (37:02):
I'd love to be one of those people. As a
guy man three minutes. You can do better than that.
Come on, they Are you meant to encourage them?

Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (37:10):
Are you meant to commiserate with them?

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah? What is the call here?

Speaker 5 (37:13):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (37:14):
But also I cannot think of a single person i'd
want to talk about that with.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah, I'm just imagining like the guy in the other
and be like no, no, no, zoom me the camera a
little more. I want to see those ropes. No, that's
not bad, that's not bad. Good consistency.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Okay, let's move that over. Let's see his O face again.

Speaker 4 (37:28):
Wow, you play that, my friend? That your load management
is very consistent.

Speaker 5 (37:36):
And I think I think we're really missing is how
much how much AI will assist in this because they
claim that using cutting edge technology? Eh eh my hixel
Control is the first solution to include AI and machine
learning for climax control treatment, which is just really really reassuring.

(37:56):
So yeah, it basically looks like a flashlight that connects
to your phone and it's an act app with anatomical
realistic interior design and AI and secured it and and
adanemonized data.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
I think this is really going to open up some
avenues for sex workers.

Speaker 5 (38:13):
Yeah, hope, hopefully hopefully Tafia.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
It's It's also like the design the handy is very
clearly a robot. You stick your dick inside and it
jacks you off. This looks like a flesh light except
the back and like the front end that we unscrewed
the top and it's like a fake vagina looks like
a fleshlight. The back end looks like an incense diffuser,
like like someone decided these two products needed to be

(38:40):
like what if you could fuck your you're aromatherapy bot.

Speaker 5 (38:45):
Finally, so that that is that is most of the
the the just the groundbreaking AI products that I was
able to see today. Does anyone else have any AI
products they would love to talk about?

Speaker 2 (38:55):
It's time to talk about Ganerd. I Okayerts, you want
to start us off about Ganert.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Okay, I guess We attended a panel. Which panel was it, y'all?

Speaker 7 (39:06):
That was the DHSA AI pie that was that was
the AI panel with one of the heads of the
Department of Homeland Security, who I can confirm because he
turned around to take a selfie has a Hank Hill ass.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
He was very insistent on that.

Speaker 2 (39:21):
No, but absolutely no. But and I'm saying this not
to shame him, but because there are orthotics for that,
you can get help, sir.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
That's even a whole episode of King of the Hill,
one of the better episodes good times. So ganert Ai
was announced before this talk that we had, and it
was a I think the guy announcing both this this
event as well as the panel had taken some time

(39:50):
to really focus on the fact that this was his
quote unquote opis.

Speaker 5 (39:53):
His His opis opus. He said the word opis like
five times Ganert's what I'll be remembered by.

Speaker 3 (40:00):
This is my legacy. Yeah, and then I guess two
of the designers had come up who stuck out like
a sore thumb compared to the sea of khaki and
blazers and things like that.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah. Yeah, they had clearly never ordered a drone strike,
unlike our hero at Homelands Security.

Speaker 5 (40:17):
One of them had a wide brimmed hat that was
color matched to the Ganert logo, which is pretty cool.
What does Genert stand for? Ganert stands for generate, so
I think it's actually just called it generate. They just
took out the vowels. But this is going to be
a three day event or a conference held in Arlington, Virginia.

(40:42):
They're claiming that it's gonna have like two hundred speakers,
one hundred and fifty AI sessions, more than five hundred startups,
one hundred and fifty partners, one hundred investors, and around
five thousand attendees. They're trying to target enterprise, governments, platforms,
AI tools, AI builders, services, investors, startups, and media that
it's it's these three events held simultaneously. Ones just called

(41:05):
GOODERT or Generation AI, which is about just AI AI tech.
It's about like AI companies, classes, keynotes, funding, blah blah
blah blah blah. There is then Voice and AI which
is about AI language services. And there's also one for
gov AI, which is about public sector and how the
government's gonna start integrating AI or regulating AI. And they

(41:27):
also have one for coding called code Forward, and it's
it's about where we can't just play the opening video
because opening video had.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
No voice here, but there's yeah, there's no voice, I
can read it though. Ninety seven million new jobs in AI,
five hundred billion in annual AI spend by twenty twenty seven,
two hundred and fifty billion in VC.

Speaker 5 (41:48):
Funding by twenty twenty five. Gonert generate for a new
world in a new market Goodert connects.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
And forms, elevates and inspires.

Speaker 5 (41:58):
It all happens at words, and we cannot emphasize it.
Of how they hyped up vc cash. There was, there
was so much build up for vc cash.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
I have I have watched people who are dope sick
by Heroin with less jittery excitement in their hands and eyes.

Speaker 5 (42:19):
All right, So not a bit about shit like this.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
So I just did a brief cursory look up gener
and it's and it's it's connected Confidence Voice I and
gov and code Forward, and all of them are claiming
the following. They're featuring GitHub, Microsoft, open Ai, Codium tab nine.

(42:42):
Their thing on LinkedIn has twenty eight followers, and their
engagement is like when I post the word twitter on Twitter,
it's not very good at all. I can get more
on that doing any punch picture of my asshole and
get more than that. But also I cannot find a
single person claiming to attend this, despite them claiming two
hundred buspeakers, one hundred and fifty plus sessions, five hundred stars,

(43:02):
one hundred and fifty part one hundred investors, five thousand attendees.
I can't find a single bit of evidence that anyone
is ganerting around at all. And also they claim to
have three different conferences, Code Forward, gove Ai, Voice Ai,
and of course connert Ai and I and of course
all of these are part of the ganert Ai beta experience.

Speaker 5 (43:23):
I don't know why you put beta.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
People are beta as hell.

Speaker 5 (43:26):
But also why have you got beta on a conference?
What are you doing? But also.

Speaker 4 (43:32):
Featuring open AI and video, Microsoft Google and veritoon. I'm
gonna guess that they've got like chat, GPT, open on
a computer, an nvideo pro GPU and something Microsoft Word
and they've used Google. And it's very strange because I
don't know what this thing.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
Is, you know. I think what it is is some
guys who have a degree of like nay like like
some guys who are are hoping that they don't have
any actual ideas for it to do with AI, so
they're hoping that if they create a conference and make
that be like the cees of AI, they can kind
of force a place for themselves and also attract a

(44:11):
bunch of suction up a bunch of money.

Speaker 4 (44:12):
I also found some I found some of the speakers
You've got a fellow called Adam Goldberg, who's an account
director and head of Azure Open Ai Enablement. On the
go to market team open Ai. They found a sales
guy from open ai and then said they got someone
from open Ai. They got someone from JP Morgan Chile's
data and AI design.

Speaker 5 (44:30):
These are all fake jobs. These aren't real jobs.

Speaker 4 (44:33):
And I think that these conferences are amazing as well,
because all people do at them is they go they
watch these things where people go up on stage and go,
you know, generative AI is going to create maybe even
trillions of dollars of value at some point, and you know,
the synergy between generative AI and data collection but also
data silos is going to be truly, truly innovative. And

(44:57):
everyone's like, holy fucking shit, whoa holy shit piss and
then they all post on Twitter and they will forget
it ever happened immediately.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Yeah, we call that the dividend.

Speaker 5 (45:09):
We do call that the g dividend. So Gert's being
put on by this guy who runs this like panel
collection called Brands gpt at ces with a Z.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
No, it's not no Garrison Garrison with a Z.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
It should it should be. I think me and Robert
both went to like one or two of these brands
GPT panels. This is the one where Robert got to
yell at Google and Microsoft and get them mad.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
No, Google and McDonald's. Mc donald's is ahead of AI,
which is a thing.

Speaker 5 (45:39):
So they look to basically just focus on like convention programming.
So now they're trying to put on their own convention
that they're calling Ganert instead of just running this brand's
GPT at CES. So that's that's the background. It's it's
done by Mode V events. That's Mode and the letter V,

(45:59):
but one word that's like the parent company for this.
I'll be interested once we get closer to October. I'll
be interested to see if this is looking more like
a real event. It's it's not gonna be that far
for me to travel. But no, they're promising five hundred
billion dollars in annual AI spending with two hundred and
fifty billion new VC cash investments, which is which is

(46:20):
quite promising.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Yeah, so hopefully this beta test goes like the last
video game beta test that I went to and everybody
clips through the floor and disappears into a void. Well,
I think that's gonna do it for us in this episode,
and I want to leave you all with well, before
we've got one more thing. But before we get into that,
which which will be fun, I want to talk about

(46:43):
something sobering, which is that, as you may get from this,
nearly one hundred percent of the AI use cases that
we saw presented were either nonsense or incredibly vague. At
these different where you had people from like in Nvidia
and Adobe and whatnot that like they wouldn't say, like,
we're going to use AI for this specific task. They
would say we're going to use AI to get more nimble,
which I think means firing people, you know. Outside of that,

(47:06):
the only real specific use cases that were not clearly nonsense.
We're stuff like replacing you know, customer service workers with chatbots,
which is bad, and to be fair, some also really
good stuff like that telescope that used kind of machine
learning in order to like clean up images so that
you can get better, better images and whatnot when you're
in an area with a lot of light pollution. There
was some stuff like that, but usually very vague. The

(47:28):
use cases for AI was always extremely clear were the
harms and the very first panel we attended there's a
company called Deloitte. They're a huge consulting firm. If you
know about McKenzie, because they're currently somewhat rightfully so a
bit of a bugbear on the left. Deloitte is a
similar kind of organization, right I think they're a bit
less toxic, but to a marginal degree. They're like a

(47:50):
massive consulting firm. Companies bring them in in order to
help them streamline and make processes more efficient in stuff.
And one of their people said that according to their
internal metrics, they expected half a trillion dollars in fraud
this year in one year due just to voice cloning AI.

(48:12):
And that was a more specific statement of what AI
is going to do to change people's lives than absolutely
any positive use case I heard presented at this comfence.

Speaker 5 (48:23):
Could you like explain what you mean by voice cloning
so AI.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
You know, we did a couple of Bastards episodes talking
about scams and like how they've contributed to the decline
of trust in our society. One of the things that
is in the last year or so become a massive
problem is there are now AI things that can generate
a human voice near perfectly to the point where, especially
if it is a voice of say your kid calls
you and they're telling you that they have been fucking

(48:49):
kidnapped or you know, something else has happened and they
need you to wire the money desperately, and you send
them the money, it's a fucking scam, right. That is.
We have a person from Deloitte, and I think it
was a person from Adobe say that they had been
called by a colleague who had gotten like a call
thinking it was that seemed to be them asking them
to buy a bunch of Apple gift cards. Like sit

(49:11):
like this is extreme and it's only going to get
more common. You can automate to the writing of the
scams and the sending of the scams using these AI tools,
and that is absolutely, in my opinion, much more of
a direct way in which AI is going to affect
people than any single product or even cumulatively, all of
the AI products we saw at CE.

Speaker 5 (49:35):
All that uplifting note.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
Yeah, yeah, so that's a bummer, and well, we will
be going into more depth about that, but I wanted
to end. Tavia took notes at all of the buzzwords,
particularly the AI buzzwords that we heard during the convention,
and she's going to read that to us.

Speaker 5 (49:51):
Now.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
You gotta tell you, this list is incredible. I've worked
in and out of corporate America, and much like a cult,
they have their own internal vocabulary that they use, and
this convention we went to was just filthy with these buzzwords.
So I'm just going to dig in. The ones that
I've written down are double down. Love that one. That
one comes up a lot. Versioning, versioning, version ing, which

(50:15):
is like a legitimate term in software, but I was
hearing it used in places where it didn't make much
sense to do it. Then our favorite liar's.

Speaker 5 (50:24):
Dividend by far the best term that we've heard at
the conference, so flexible.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah, I'm using versions of that and everything. You know,
it makes me think a lot about the murderer's dividend,
which is when you know, I longer I have to
deal with an annoying person.

Speaker 3 (50:37):
We got content credential, which is coming up a lot,
especially around the topic of AI. We have data rich
and it's sister term problem rich, core values, which I
heard in every single panel that we were in.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Yeah. Usually the context of this was we don't need
regulations around how AI can be made and put together.
The core values of the companies is what will make
sure that AI isn't used in a harmful way?

Speaker 4 (51:04):
Great, that's that's gonna happen.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
No, very trustworthy, very trustworthy groups, got risk model. And
then my next term is the favorite one. It's so good.
I think I'm gonna give this one to you, Robert.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah, because I don't think we talked about this. Guardian
MM or something like that was then is MM guardian
MM Guardian? Which is an app you put on It's
not it used to be an app. Now it is
a phone you buy for your child. It's a modified
Samsung Galaxy something or other.

Speaker 5 (51:33):
That it's not ax No.

Speaker 4 (51:35):
Seven.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
It gives your It gives you, as the parent, complete
access to your kid's phone and everything they're doing. And
it automatically monitors monitors all of their not just their conversations,
but their browsing history, and sends you alerts. So like,
if someone sends your kid a text that says you
should kys you know, kill yourself. This is the example
he showed us. You get a message that like there's

(51:57):
this suicidal discussion or whatnot going on, we ask them,
you know, hey, Garrison particularly was like, what if this
is a situation where a parent is abusive and like
using this in order to keep tabs on their kids
or like hates you know, is like a child is
gay or trans and their parents are not accepting of that.

(52:20):
Like does this still can parents still like spy on
them over that stuff? Are there any limitations? Are there
any sort of safeguards built in in case a parent
is being abusive, right to like monitor or sind to
the authorities of a parent is using this in an
abusive way? And their answer was no, We're purely about
giving parents more power. And yeah, the term that they
used was tech contracts with children.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
I can't think of anything more dismal.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Yeah, that is one of the most dystopian assemblies of
words I've ever heard.

Speaker 5 (52:52):
Should you should you should never say the phrase contracts
with children. That's just that's just like, if you find
your self ever ever hearing the phrase contracts with children
spoken by anyone, run away for that person as fast
as you can, maybe maybe maybe punch them in the
face first, and then run away as fast as you can.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
So that's a good one.

Speaker 4 (53:14):
That's that's some shit you just keep in Florida, I
guess now or Indiana.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
It's a super Florida app that is that is the
center of this business.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
Moving on, We've got other terms called visionary and thought leaders,
which comes up a lot in these types.

Speaker 4 (53:28):
Of I mean the pr ship people love saying thought leader.

Speaker 5 (53:32):
I love it thing, do eat it up.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
We also have edge computing, I know.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Digital Yeah again handy, great company.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
Incredible company, very very excellent product. We have digital twin
horizon scin.

Speaker 4 (53:48):
So digital twin's really good because it means like eight
different things. It can mean literally a copy of something,
or it can mean a digital version of something. It
can mean like a of US thing. And these are
old different industries using it, and no one can agree
on the meaning.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, that's just tradition. That's just like what they do.
They have horizon scan. I actually kind of liked that one.
Was the first time I heard that one. When they're
just like looking into the future, I think they're calling
that horizon scan use case, which came up a lot
because everyone was groping for use cases for their technology
and didn't seem to have any that they could bring up.

Speaker 5 (54:25):
The next one I heard way more than I wanted
to hear which was accelerate. Yeahs always a great term
to hear in tech. There was so much accelerate and
accelerating relating to their tech development and their tech use
cases for another one of those terms that Tavia just

(54:46):
read off.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Now, this next term is a real thing and an
important thing, and not a thing that anyone in the
tech industry wants or cares about. The right to be forgotten.
This has actually been legislated. The reason they have to
care about this to some extent is it's been legislat
in the EU right, and it should be everywhere. I
actually think this is an incredibly important concept, and it's
basically the you know, we have people go viral that

(55:09):
become a main character on whatever app for being a
piece of shit sometimes or sometimes doing something stupid or
sometimes doing something innocuous that for no reason at all
makes a huge number.

Speaker 5 (55:19):
He's actually a really good example.

Speaker 4 (55:20):
There was a kid who posted a video of himself
and it was like four point o GPA had a job,
braised money didn't get into Harvard or something. He didn't
mean it in this way, but someone took it and
then turned it into ay, why kids are being kept
off Harvard thing? And he dm them was like, you're
ruining my fucking life. Yeah, this is how this, like
the right to be forgotten should be everywhere.

Speaker 2 (55:41):
Yeah, is not. It is a hugely important thing. And
you know, I actually give the EU a lot of
credit for the fact that that has to some extent
been legislated. All of that needs to be more common
in other countries and more vigorously enforced. I don't I
say that I have no idea how you do it
with the internet working the way it does. Some of this,
I actually do think is a values thing where we

(56:04):
all need to be more okay with the fact that people,
even people who can do something shitty online, deserve to
not have that necessarily define the rest of their lives,
especially you know, teenagers.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
And the next one is one that I like to
associate with my posts, data poisoning. I believe every time
I interact with Twitter or blue Sky, that is what
I am doing. I have some data poisoning death, or
I am data poisoning as a verb, or I am
data poisoning myself.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Yeah, and then we've got oh, Garrison, you want to
do this one?

Speaker 5 (56:42):
Sure? These These are the last three that I got
from an AI Ethics Panel. We have data silos, how
data is all separated. We have data harmonization, kind of
the opposite of data silos.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Yeah, that's basically using AI to generate pictures of dan
harmon Right.

Speaker 5 (56:58):
Yes, then we have the last term, which I will
I will describe for you the speed capacity gap. So
the speed capacity gap.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
I know I can answer that for you. So sometimes
when I'm doing a shitload of amphetamines that I purchased
from some Turkish website via the dark web, you know,
I'm doing them with a friend and they o d
because there's a day there's a speed capacity gap between
the two of us.

Speaker 5 (57:27):
Yeah, that's what that Uh, that's what DHS guy was
talking about. For using AI to monitor dark web purchases.
He's going to really get on that one. No, speed
capacity gap the gap between tech acceleration and the capacity
of society to keep up and make informed decisions about
the technology, which is actually kind of a useful terms.

(57:48):
It's it's just one of those you know, it sounds
like a silly tech term, but when the when it's
actually explained, like, oh, that's actually a really good way
to think about the way AI is being pushed in
all of these new ways, and are we actually as
a society, whether that's like as a government or just
like culturally, able to actually make inform decisions about how
we want this tech to be integrated into our lives.
And now the dark side of this term the speed

(58:11):
capacity gap. For the to kind of solve this gap,
we can either slow down a development or we can
speed up our capacity, and the panelists obviously preferred the latter,
and so we should just speed up our cultural capacity.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
Did they propose a solution for that.

Speaker 5 (58:29):
Well, kind of, but it's it's a little unclear. We
can go through my recording at a later day once
we do our full AI episode. But they're rationale for
why we should instead of instead of slowing down tech
development instead speed up our cultural capacity is because of
the many benefits that tech improvements can be made via

(58:51):
tech iterations. Right, the more iterations you get of technology
that the more benefits are able to get from said technology.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
A versioning y version.

Speaker 5 (58:59):
Exactly, which brings us all the way back to versioning
there we go.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Which brings us all the way back to turkisham fetamines.
Because I've been for the last twenty years trying different
versions of turkishamphetamines and the blue pills. Man. You know,
normally you don't hallucinate on speed, but when you take enough,
it turns out you can. And so I think what
I'd like to leave everyone with is the knowledge that
turkisham fetamines are a thing you can purchase on the

(59:25):
dark web and should There's no health consequences to it
at all.

Speaker 4 (59:28):
I'm not part of this byroh Flyne does not support
illegal drug purchases.

Speaker 5 (59:34):
Respective podcasts.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
They're not illegal if they're so new that the DEA
hasn't banned them yet.

Speaker 5 (59:40):
That's innovation exactly exactly.

Speaker 4 (59:43):
That's versioning, and that is the speed capacity gap folks.

Speaker 5 (59:50):
That the DA can't keep up with the tech improvements.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
All right, everybody that's gonna do it for us here
at cool Zone. Before we leave, I want to give
Tabia and Ed both chances to plug their pluggables.

Speaker 5 (01:00:05):
ED.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
People are going to be hearing from you every week
on your new show, Better Offline, which is launching in
a what I'm sure you'll agree is a frighteningly short
time be soon.

Speaker 4 (01:00:15):
It is going to be the best weekly tech show.
It is going to do the job that no one
is strong enough to do, which is ask questions, listen
to the answers, then actually make a question that follows them.
I'm very much looking forward to this and very excited
to work with the cool Zone team and Tavia Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
You can find me on Twitter at cutma and if
you want to learn a little bit more about my
interactive and immersive work, you can see that at tabimora
dot com.

Speaker 4 (01:00:43):
Now you may wonder why I didn't give you any
links to anything, and that was a deliberate thing called subterfuge.
But you can find me at where's your ed dot
at edzitron on Twitter, x rateminutes dot biers and of
course plue sky Zitron, dobisky dot social.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Yeah, and you can find my profile on hand. All right, we're.

Speaker 6 (01:01:06):
Fucking done here. Welcome to Nick What Happened Here? A
podcast about I don't know. This is gonna come me
out like Tuesday, right, maybe Wednesday. You probably know what

(01:01:29):
this podcast is about. If you don't, It's about things
falling apart putting it back together again.

Speaker 5 (01:01:34):
I'm your host Mia Wong.

Speaker 8 (01:01:35):
With me is James hi May and I'm very excited
to uh to lend some stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
I'm sure it'll be great.

Speaker 6 (01:01:45):
No nothing, Well, okay, the good news that the first
guy we're talking about died. That's that's the only good news. Great, great,
more good news. But we're doing some episodes about the
Daily Wire. Uh, you're gonna get a lot more actual
stuff about the Daily Wire in the next two episodes.
This is the this is the preliminary background information episode.

(01:02:07):
But you know, for people who aren't familiar with the
Daily Wire, the Daily Wire is a very large and
very powerful right wing media empire. They're you know, Ben
Shapiro's people. Matt Walsh is there, and they are. They've
become increasingly powerful because of their ability to drive the
actions and sort of like not even really mid level

(01:02:30):
like high mid high level like Republican officials, particularly at
a state level, towards you know, horrific anti trans policies
stuff like that.

Speaker 8 (01:02:40):
Yep, they've had as the incredible divorced dad power of
those two guys. Like it's like a yeah, it's like
a Pokemon situation, you know, like that, It's just it's inside,
it's like shaken ball, but sometimes they let it out
and control their Republican body with it.

Speaker 6 (01:03:00):
Yeah, and so okay, you know, but in order to
really sort of understand who these people are and why
they're able to sort of be like this, we need
to talk about the ways that this is new, because
you know, there's always been sort of writing like Christian
media figures who do terrible stuff, but the way the

(01:03:21):
daily wire works is different than this stuff has worked
in the past. And in order to understand what is
different about this than these sort of like previous eras
of like Christian antiquer violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism.
So this is this is not the normal starting place
you're talking about the religious right, but if you want

(01:03:43):
to actually understand what's happening right now, you have to
go back to the origin and structure of neoliberalism so
you can understand how it shaped right when Christian organizing
in the last about fifty years. I want to start
this by talking about a guy who is not normally
considered part of the Christian right at all. In fact,
he's not even an American and his greatest influence is
on his home country of Germany. The man I'm talking

(01:04:06):
I want to talk about is Wilhelm rope Key. I've
mentioned him on this show before, but that was several
years ago. Now he is not a very well known figure,
and that's not good because he is one of the
smartest and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in
order to really get a sense of who rope Key is,

(01:04:28):
we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism. So
we need to talk about Hyak and his sort of
attempt to recruit a bunch of new liberals to oppose.
While mostly to opposed communism, it later becomes about also
opposing fascism. But the problem that Hyak has is that
so in the nineteenth this is happening in the nineteen
twenties and really the nineteen thirties, the problem is that

(01:04:50):
the people who Hayak have been trying to recruit from
Germany dream the thirties all joined the Nazi Party.

Speaker 5 (01:04:55):
So in many such cases, Yeah, it's a real issue
for them.

Speaker 8 (01:05:00):
Yeah, once again the lips have let us down.

Speaker 2 (01:05:03):
Shocked.

Speaker 6 (01:05:04):
Yeah, So you know, in the in the nineteen forties
after the war, when Hayak is trying to do this again,
he turns to William Ropeke instead of the original guys
who've been Nazis, because Roke had been out of the
country for the whole Nazi things. So he kind of
had skipped out on it.

Speaker 8 (01:05:21):
Okay, smart, move on his foot.

Speaker 6 (01:05:23):
Yeah, and you know this, this gets him an invite
to like Montpellier.

Speaker 5 (01:05:29):
And so the whole sort of the origins of neoliberalism.

Speaker 6 (01:05:31):
And rope Key is he's one of the architects of
what's called orderliberalism. So the order Liberals are one of
the factions of you know, they're one of the factions
of neoliberalism. What's interesting about them, We're gonna talk a
bit about what they believe. But what's interesting about the
order liberals is that they're not really economists. I mean,

(01:05:55):
some of them are, but it's a lot of sociologists.
And this means that the way that they think think
about the world is very different than the way that
like Hayek or you know, like a like von Mises
or like all the you know, the sort of like
mainline like guys who are economists in the neoliberal movement think.
The order liberals believe that there is a natural capitalist

(01:06:17):
hierarchy in a society that produces stability. But they also
understand that capitalism in general and neoliberalism, like specifically the
thing they're trying to bring about, adamses people. You know,
it destroys social bonds, It tears the fabric of communities apart,
and it destroys the notion of any collective self identification,
replacing them with sort of market exchange and empty consumer

(01:06:40):
symbols masquerading his identity. You know, thing for example, the
rise of stand culture or I mean, god like the
thing we do, which is like, yeah, going to.

Speaker 8 (01:06:50):
Say streamers, you know, so that's friends are on your phone.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:06:56):
So this is extremely bad, and rope Key realizes this
is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism, because
people don't actually like being completely autonomized market agents with
no real social relations other than wages and contracts. And
you know, if presented with these options, they might, for example,

(01:07:16):
turn to communism or God forbid anarchism.

Speaker 5 (01:07:20):
Yeah, but Roki, you know, Rokey is on the side
of bad and.

Speaker 8 (01:07:25):
The side of bad. Yeah. The great title for the
episode side of that, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
Me as biography God.

Speaker 6 (01:07:40):
Roke's conclusion from this is that you can't just rely
on the market passively coming into existence, because if markets
were supposed to passively come into existence, or if they
were you know, like the sort of like spontaneous order
thing that Y talks about when he's lying, Like if
that was actually true, they would just have they would
be everything would be market economies already.

Speaker 5 (01:08:03):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:08:07):
It's like no, like we would have had the exact
same economic and political system for the last thirty thousand years.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
But we haven't.

Speaker 6 (01:08:12):
So in order to do this, you have to make
people into good neoliberal market subjects, and this requires the
intervention of the state. The product of this is that
ro Key is one of the architects of what's called
structural policy. These are these are specific state policy things
that are used to create markets by you know, sometimes
it's it's there's a whole variety of sort of ways

(01:08:35):
that this happens, but by acting on and transforming like
physically people right like what they do, what they believe,
how they congregates, like what things they're allowed not allowed
to do, what things are incentivized. This this is structural policy.
This is the origin of what's later going to be
called structural or reform, which is the kind of stuff

(01:08:56):
that the IMF does to an economy to create markets.
By taking food for the mouths of babies, and making
the babies work to get the food.

Speaker 8 (01:09:04):
Yeah, it's great, it's the only way.

Speaker 5 (01:09:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:09:07):
And that part of neoliberalism broadly, a lot of that
comes from order liberalism, and it comes from people like Roke.
But Ropeke realizes that, you know, there's there's a problem
of structural policy as an abstract concept, right, which is
that in order for it to work, you need to
a take control of the state, because again, this is

(01:09:30):
a state, but there is a top down state reform project, right,
and b there has to be something beyond the state
to create the kind of subjectivity you need to instill,
you know, to instill in people to make them behave
quote unquote as market agents.

Speaker 8 (01:09:46):
Right.

Speaker 6 (01:09:46):
You can't just use the state in the market to
make people behave in the way that they're supposed to,
you know, to be good sort of like workers for
the workers for the great market. You need something else,
is specifically, neoliberalism needs its own form of collectivity. It
needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people.
It needs its own kind of sort of identification to

(01:10:07):
combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now
part of Roke's plan, and this is something you share
us with the other orderliberals is that they want to
do this with you know, they want to use the
patriarchal family and small businesses as like the sort of
social basis of all of their sort of right wing politics.
This is very durable rating politics stuff they also have. Weirdly,

(01:10:30):
this is one of the things it's in the fifties
and sixties is there's a lot of sort of on
every side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic
utopianism ish about like the countryside, ya. You know, this
can swing wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese
fascists or the neoliberals. So they have this dream of

(01:10:50):
sort of turning rural areas into these like bastions of
like reaction against the left, and that did kind of
happen in the US, but it didn't happen like it
happened because the rural economy was completely annihilated and replaced
with like a series of meth labs. Not because I

(01:11:11):
guess technically was a downstream result. It's just that it didn't.
It wasn't the sort of idyllic like good like farmer
family things that these people wanted.

Speaker 8 (01:11:19):
So yeah, yeah, they they got there in an interesting way. Yeah,
with like massive agri business and meth labs are your
two choices in life?

Speaker 6 (01:11:30):
Yeah, and like and you know, so like like yes,
they this is one of these things where instead of
achieving their goals through cultural means, they achieved their goals
through like the massive uh like unbelievable economic violence. But
you know, okay, so that's that's the other thing. That
that and that's all sort of standardne.

Speaker 5 (01:11:48):
Liberal theory, right.

Speaker 6 (01:11:50):
But what makes rope Key kind of unique is that
she's really one of the first of these people to
realize that you need another force, and that force is
the Church. And this is something that people don't talk
about a lot when they talk about neoliberalism, but a
lot of these people are very very deeply Christian. Here's

(01:12:10):
Roke talking about his ideal society, quote rendering to the
king what is owed to the king, but also giving
to God what belongs to God.

Speaker 8 (01:12:20):
So what belongs to God? Now one now I'm concerned.

Speaker 6 (01:12:30):
I mean, he's it's funny because like he's taken the
Bible verse like that he's taking to the render under Caesar,
like what belongs to Caesar.

Speaker 5 (01:12:38):
Render und blah blah, blah blah blah. But like it's
he's made it enormously more alarming.

Speaker 6 (01:12:45):
Yeah, yeah, deeply, like cause like like the thing about
the render under Caesar is that that's a statement about
about like living under the Roman Empire, right right, Like
this is just he just wants you to fucking have
a king, yes, give shit to everyone needs a god.

Speaker 5 (01:13:05):
Who is also the king.

Speaker 8 (01:13:08):
Right, it's not even like like the necessity of the
state thing, like you just dump dumped in like a pointless, hereditary,
inbred person to give money to.

Speaker 6 (01:13:18):
Yeah, I mean she's not like, so okay, I should
I should probably not slander him as thoroughly as I'm
doing here, because I don't actually quite think he literally
becomes a monarchist. But she does believe that there should
be like I don't know, you describe it like there
should be democratic parties, but that like actual economic policy

(01:13:41):
shouldn't be like managed by them, Like you need like
a super thing above the democracy, which is the IMF,
to make sure that there's the little the little democratic
people don't like start getting any ideas about the economy.

Speaker 8 (01:13:54):
Like a technocracy like a yeah, yeah, but.

Speaker 6 (01:14:01):
Like the thing with the technocracy and this is this
is genuinely kind of what has been happening in Europe
is that like living under a technocracy really sucks. Like
it sucks like politically, it sucks materially, and it sucks
like emotionally. And you know, the right has been able
to make a lot out of sort of like this
opposition to like the global bureaucracies or whatever, which is like, okay,

(01:14:23):
like you guys maade these things in the first place,
Like I, I, you know, you don't get a fucking
complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran,
but you know I haven't stomped him.

Speaker 5 (01:14:33):
Yeah. But but rop Key, rope Key.

Speaker 6 (01:14:35):
You know, so a lot of the other order liberals
become really sort of like you know, are become obsessed
with taking over the IMF, which they do, and they
take over the World Bank and they become you know,
they do that stuff. Rope Key is obsessed with using
the with using religion as like another kind of social
force that he can bind to the other bull sort
of movement together with, and so he sets out to

(01:14:57):
form like like a react kind of like reactionary Catholic
international to bring the ioliberalism to the world.

Speaker 8 (01:15:05):
That is a troubling concept.

Speaker 5 (01:15:07):
Yeah, so it.

Speaker 6 (01:15:08):
Doesn't work, which is the good news. Well, and the
problem is it doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't
work because it's a bad idea. The reason that it
doesn't work is that he's trying this in like the
fifties and sixties and it is too early for that shit,
like you know, I mean, and it's something I feel
like I should at some point, I should actually do
a deep dive into this on the show. But I've

(01:15:30):
talked about this a couple of times. There is a
very powerful form of kind of like conservative Christian politics
in Europe at this time. It's like the Christian democracy movements.
There's like if every single country if you look at
it like this, from like the fifties through like the nineties,
I mean, and even to this day. In Germany, for example,
like there was a party called the Christian Democrats. Yeah,
and they win like at least sixty percent of all elections,

(01:15:54):
like in Italy, they're in power for like forty years.
But the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of
someone like Roki is that like if you if you
take like these parties, right, these parties are you know,
these are these are the Christian Conservatives of this era.
They are way way too far left for uh, for Roki.

(01:16:17):
And that's not just the sort of like Rope look
got how far right rop Key as although he is
so like if if you took Elder Moro, who's like
the great Italian Christian democratic statesman, multiple time Prime Minister
of Italy killed in an insane web of conspiracies, like
if you yeah, look like if you took Elder Moro

(01:16:39):
and you dropped him into the modern American Congress, he
would be to the left. He is again the leader,
he's like the leader of Italian well he's technically from
the central left faction of the Christian Democrats, but he's
like the guy who's not a socialist or a communist,
like in terms of Italian politicans, who's not also a fascist.
And if you took him from like the seventies and
you plopped him into the American car he would be

(01:17:00):
to the left of AOC, like AOC is pro cease
fire in Gaza, right, like she she's pro cease fire
in in Palestine. Aldo Borrow allowed the popular threat for
the Liberation of Palestine, which is the Palestinian Communist pera
military to operate out of and carry out attacks like
from Italy.

Speaker 8 (01:17:19):
Right, like this guy you would like she is, well,
if you go far enough, right, you might get that
as well.

Speaker 6 (01:17:26):
To be fair, no, but but it wouldn't be the
PFLP though, Yeah, I guess, I guess some of the
German neo Nazis kind of liked them, but right, yeah, yeah,
Like like imagine in the US any politician being like, yeah,
the PFLP could operate out of the US or only
our only our only condition is that we like we're
gonna let you operate, but we're not gonna like protect

(01:17:47):
you from uh like shim Bett or whatever, like the masade, Yeah,
like racking pack you from the massade like that. But
you know, you can you can do your stuff here.
Could you imagine that shit happening? This guy was, This
guy is a conservative in Europe right in He's like,
you know, so this is what Roke's responding to. You
like the existing Christian you know, and you know, to

(01:18:11):
some extent, like the Christian the Christian Democrats are very
very successful stopping communism, right, They're really good at it.
They stop communism from taking hold anywhere in Europe, but
they're not like capitalist enough for Roke. So when we
come back from this thing Roki would have loved, which

(01:18:33):
is ad transitions, we're going to talk about more of
what Roki was doing and how it shaped neoliberalism and
the Christian right. Woo yay, we're back. Rochi is having

(01:18:59):
a great time.

Speaker 5 (01:19:00):
Is Grave.

Speaker 6 (01:19:00):
We're gonna get the thing that makes them spin it
his grave, which I'm very excited about accent. But Okay,
so you know, like as we've sort of been talking about,
the Christian Democrats are not the Christian the Christian Democrats
and a lot of countries are Catholic, some of them,
like I think, like there are Protestant like Christian anectionsmen,
but like yeah, but like a lot of a lot

(01:19:23):
of them are Catholic. So I mean, it's it's it's
a really interesting kind of like predecessor to like modern
fire right politics where you get these like both of
the US and Latin America, will you get these sort
of like these Catholic Protestant alliances like this is this
is like Matt Walsh, you know, we're gonna be talking
about more in the next two days, like is a
Catholic theocrat, right, but a lot of his base are
like you know, are like Baptists and like the more

(01:19:47):
even more feral charismatic Christians and like you know, but
but you know, but these these groups are able to
sort of work together, but they're not able. They're not
working together with it. Roki wants so. And this is
the thing that I think is very very scary about
rok and and especially about the people who took this

(01:20:08):
model right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who people who
figure out the same because a lot of people, some
people like kind of directly go for Roky. Some people
discover it through like I very weird readings, right wing
readings of Gramsci.

Speaker 5 (01:20:26):
It's a whole thing. I'll talk Yeah, one day, I'm gonna.

Speaker 6 (01:20:29):
Get Eve on the show and we're going to talk
about that, because it's fucking wild.

Speaker 8 (01:20:35):
What the yeah, wow, I think that Gramsky is not
the most like inaccessible you know, like it. You know,
there are some like left theorists who just just vomit
words so much so you can just project a meaning
on it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
But I have not their thing.

Speaker 6 (01:20:53):
This is, this is eve Angers like thesis is that
these people saw that, like leftists are reading obviously read
Gromsey and we're like, we're going to do the right
wing version of this. Okay, yeah, so now it's yeah,
but you know, so some of these people are rediscovering
the same things that Ropi has figured out in like
the fifties. But the thing that Roki is doing is
he she's figured out all the essential elements of the

(01:21:14):
modern Christian right. You promote neoliberalism with one hand, and
then you sell the solution to the atomization that your
neoliberalism causes on the other hand with the church and
the church, yes, we will serve as the basis of
your political organization.

Speaker 8 (01:21:31):
Yeah, that is that is a there's a way of
doing it.

Speaker 6 (01:21:35):
Yeah, and it's an interesting there's a lot of people
who do this same thing. Like at some point I'm
going to finish my I'm going to write the thing
about like this is actually what libertarianism is for a
broad extent, is that libertarians are the people who like
take the problems that the market produces and then try
to sell you a solution which is more of those

(01:21:56):
same problems but worded differently.

Speaker 8 (01:21:58):
Yeah. Yeah, so with people that weed now, so it's fine.

Speaker 6 (01:22:03):
Yeah, but but you know so, but this is this
is the Christian version of it. But again, rope Key
to a large extent is smarter than the people who
come after him, because he understands that this project, this
this this sort of Christian deliberal project is a constant
struggle against adimization. That and and this adamization has to

(01:22:25):
be actively politically combated by the Church, like both politically
and socially. And if it's not like actively combated by
the Church, this whole project is going to start to
come apart. Now rope Key is not the man who's
going to lead the mob of Christian fanatics into the
Promised Land. And part of this is also because he
is like too racist for like the sixties, which again

(01:22:52):
like so like in the parts of the sixties when
he's saying the really racist stuff like segregation is legal
in the US, right, like yeah, like that this is
this is this is where we're at with this. He's
too racist for that. And the thing that he's really
really racist about is Rhodesia. Oh fucking hell, I didn't
expect appearance. Yeah, yeah, this is this is the Rhodesia pivot,

(01:23:14):
which is that like okay, so the orthodox neoliberals, people
like Hayak are pro Rhodesia, right, And this is a
Milton friedmand that these people are pro Rhodesia, but they're
smart enough to use dog whistles and talk about it
in terms of like economic terms and like stability of
gar and blah.

Speaker 5 (01:23:30):
Blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 6 (01:23:31):
Roke is just openly saying race warship, like I'm not
gonna read it, but he is effectively like the spiritual
forefadder of like the four Chane mass shooter.

Speaker 5 (01:23:40):
Like that, that's how racist he is.

Speaker 6 (01:23:42):
And you know, it turns out that just again openly
like open race war ship is like too much for Hyak,
and he gets kicked out of the manju m liberal
organizations and tragically, tragically for all of us, Rokey dies
before you can see his beloved Rhodesia reduced to a
pulp by the series events IMPERIALSS insurgencies.

Speaker 5 (01:24:01):
He dies.

Speaker 6 (01:24:03):
He dies before all of the Rhodesian or like society's
fucking fuel supplies stored in one spot or blown out.

Speaker 8 (01:24:09):
I say, see, if they'd had a more distributed market economy, maya,
they would have had just just that all their fuel
in one giant bottle which they burned. Spoiler love for
anyone who hasn't been following the history of Rhodesia, not
the country anymore.

Speaker 5 (01:24:23):
Yeah, thank Christ. I actually don't think Christ. Fuck Christ,
Christy new ship.

Speaker 8 (01:24:27):
Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and
killed bigger list, et cetera. Yeah, and of course all
the American people who went over to join the Rhodesian
military and killed other white Rhodesians by accident, by shooting
at people who were theoretically on their side.

Speaker 6 (01:24:42):
Yeah, shout out to them. We're not going to get
into North Korea backing another genocide in Zimbabwe here. That's
also a fucking thing. I've not doing apologies for that
because actually fucking sucked. Yeah, but you know, Okay, but
he he dies before he can see his beloved Rhdesia
fucking eat shit and die. But what Roki had is

(01:25:04):
a very clear version of the hierarchical neoliberal society that
he wanted to create. Right, and he is very especially
by the end of his life, he is very explicit.

Speaker 5 (01:25:17):
About what this is.

Speaker 6 (01:25:18):
It is a Christian, white supremacist, patriarchal world and to
build it, the right is going to have to use
the church to stave off the alienization and adamization of capitalism,

(01:25:38):
and we're back now in order to build this.

Speaker 5 (01:25:42):
New world, the world that Roke sort of.

Speaker 6 (01:25:44):
Imagines, the religious right, the actual religious right that's going
to bring this up into fuition, sets off from a
number of angles. I think the most famous part of
this is probably the sort of moral majority infrastructure, which
is this network of like think Tank's political advocacy organization's
TV networksailing lists, like their own insane right wing colleges. Yeah, god,

(01:26:06):
terrifying places. But the fundamental social basis, right, the fundamental
collective space around which the right is organized was the church.
There's been a lot of sociological talk in the last
few years about like quote unquote third spaces. So the
third space is supposed to be this place that's like
not the home or not the workplace that people can

(01:26:27):
exist in inform bonds in, and you know, people talk
about like bridge clubs, blah.

Speaker 5 (01:26:33):
Blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 6 (01:26:34):
But the thing about the US is that like the
fucking YMCA, like all of these things that people talk
about as the third space are just the church in
different forms. Literally, church or a bunch of church run events.

Speaker 8 (01:26:50):
Yeah, especially like the more like rural you get like
it is, yes, and this is this is one of
these things like that this was actually like one of
the sort of rear flame to the workers movement, right,
which is that like in large parts of Appalachia, right,
you have a bunch of really really militant like miners
unions for example.

Speaker 6 (01:27:08):
But then you know, but all of them are also
like are also are also Baptists. And that is fine
as long as you know you're you're you're dealing with
Baptists who are doing well. I mean, I say fine,
but like it's not an existential threat to the workers
movement when you're dealing with like like you know, like
it's easier for an arrow to like, sorry, it's easier
for a camel to walk through the head of a

(01:27:29):
pin than it is for a rich man to go
to have in Baptists. But the moment that still starts flipping,
that's a very very dangerous sort of rear guard. You
see this Nasian American communities where like you know, Asian
Americans generally, like the last two generations like Millennials and
gen Z are tacking really really hard left, except the
fucking Christians who are like forming this for this insane rearguard.

(01:27:53):
Because I've complained about this before, an fucking I'm doing this,
this is this, this is a Christianity episode.

Speaker 5 (01:27:57):
I could talk about this that the.

Speaker 6 (01:27:59):
Thing to think about Asian Christians is that they're all
they're almost all like first Chen converts, so they all
have convert brain.

Speaker 5 (01:28:06):
Which means they're completely fucking batshit. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:28:09):
So you know, and this is one of the things
that we're talking about here, right, is that the physically
the church serves as this very very important engine kind
of kind of revolution. It serves this engine of sort
of spreading reactionary politics even among groups of people who
you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort of right
wing politics from. And this is where, you know, face
face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US

(01:28:30):
and the sixties and seventies globally too, a face with
you know, I mean literally the specter of revolutions and
not even like sometimes not even in specters like you know,
this is post sixty eight, right, there's been a bunch
of actual uprisings. Yeah, and they're the place that they
make their move is by trying to seize control of
various pieces of church infrastructure. We're going to take a
Catholic example and a Protestant example, and we're not going

(01:28:53):
to do the obvious Orthodox example because we'd be here
for a fucking century.

Speaker 5 (01:28:58):
So let's start with Roki beloved Catholic Church. I think.

Speaker 6 (01:29:03):
I don't know if I'm gonna do a little bit
of left inside baseball. I think people on the left
tend to be really obsessed with the like liberation theology people.
But the problem with liberation theology people is that they
were around for maybe like thirty years, right, but by
the time you get to the end of the eighties,
these people are all dead, right, Like they're either dead

(01:29:26):
or they're like Ortega, and they've become these like literally
they start calling themselves the Third Way and are like
cutting all these deals with like really right wing social groups.
And so this means that the dominant politics of like
the capital like t Capital c.

Speaker 5 (01:29:48):
The Catholic Church is very gets very very right wing.

Speaker 6 (01:29:56):
Well it's not even that as much as it gets
right wing, but it is very right wing, and that
they're doing is very very scary. One of the things
that I don't think people really realize. Is that so
that probably you've heard the term gender ideology, Yeah, yes
I have.

Speaker 8 (01:30:11):
Yeah, do you know where that's from? Is it from?
I've fucking forgotten the place where Harry Potter goes Hogwarts. Yeah.
JFK is a fucking Johnny come late bastard. Like she
she she got into this game after that ship had
already started. Gender ideology is a term k rowling. Jfk

(01:30:32):
rowling is powerful.

Speaker 5 (01:30:35):
Speak like this.

Speaker 6 (01:30:39):
The term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church, and
it's developed in reactions specifically to feminism, and very specifically
it's developed in reaction to to arguments from feminists that that,
you know, that gender is socially constructed, you know, because
in the Catholic church's position is like, well no, that's

(01:30:59):
herradic because obviously gender was assigned by God, and because
gender just signed by God, like women are like you know,
women are like like submissive blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah,
like naturally, this is this is the natural order. This
isn't like a sociologically constructed thing. This is the natural orders.
Always been in talis, always billy b because they're like
Nike unfathomably sexist.

Speaker 8 (01:31:21):
Is this like around there, like Elaine Pagel's beef with
the Church, I'm not sure of Blaine Pagel's. If me
with Elaine Pagel's God the Father Got the Mother.

Speaker 5 (01:31:32):
I think this is a bit before my time.

Speaker 8 (01:31:35):
Okay, yeah, yeah, this is uh the World's History stands
at the University of California in common topic.

Speaker 5 (01:31:41):
Well, I think I think this is actually in the same.

Speaker 8 (01:31:45):
I've played videos of her to my students, and definitely
in the eighties, like the vibe is powerfully eighties.

Speaker 6 (01:31:52):
Yeah, so I guess that's a bit late because so
a lot of the general all this stuff comes out
of the early night.

Speaker 5 (01:31:55):
Well, I guess it's like early nineties.

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
Okay.

Speaker 6 (01:31:59):
So one of the things that happens is that a
lot of you know, in the nineties, the Catholic Church,
and they have a bunch of like radfem allies here.
By the way, do you have this massive fight in
the un about like recognizing the right to abortions and
other like sexually reproductive rights, And the Red Fems are

(01:32:20):
pissed off because I mean there's a whole so they've
been they're aligned with the Catholic Church is like an
anti sex work thing and like an anti porn thing.
And then also like a lot of the redfems. Well,
I get I've gotten so much trouble for saying this,
but like, holy shit, there's somebody those people are insanely technsphobic.
Yeah damn wow, but you know, but like this is

(01:32:41):
this is this, There's this massive battle inside the United
Nations between a bunch of feminists and or like feminist
who are like normal and then like the shitty RATFM
factions and the Catholic Church on the other side, and
Pope Benedict in particular goes like all out on this stuff,
both on the international level and intern with like local churches,
like goes on the offensive against abortion in queer liberation.

(01:33:04):
And meanwhile the Protestant Church is doing like exactly the
same thing. They're like pro except like I think, I think,
like even more fascist, which is really really and I
say this is someone who has raised Lutheran like that
that is really the core of Protestantism is like what
if we did Catholicism but like somehow shittier, like like

(01:33:25):
Martin Luther. One day I'm going to do my thing
on the world's greatest kind of revolutionaries, and then one
of them is Martin Luther because oh yeah, very cley,
because like like I might, my argument for this is
that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the person who
starts out at on on the side of the revolution
and then turns against it. And so Martin Luther's thing
was he was trying to outflank the Catholic Church in

(01:33:46):
the sixteen hundreds from the right on anti Semitism. Sorry,
I meant a sixteen sixteenth century fififteen hundred, fifty hundreds,
which is even worse, fifty hundreds Catholic Church they have expelled,
they have like the of the this is this is
in the period where they're like expelling all of the
Jews from Spain, right, and Martin Luther's trying to like

(01:34:06):
flank them, and this is the kind of shit that's
happening like in the US at this point, which is
you know, this is this is this is the this
is the Protestant sort of following the Catholic like why
and in some ways blazing their own trail of of
going really hard right. So probably the most famous and
I think definitely one of the most important examples of

(01:34:27):
this is the right wing seizure of the Southern Baptist.

Speaker 5 (01:34:31):
Convention in nineteen seventy nine.

Speaker 6 (01:34:33):
So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention,
they are a very very large and influential like group
of Baptist churches, and they've been kind of like they'd
been anti segregation, they've been sort of like trending left,
and there's this is one of the things. This is
a very very famous thing in the history, like if

(01:34:55):
if you're you know, it's sort of like the history
and mythos of the right wing is like in nineteen
seventy nine, at this convention, these like there's like these
group of pastors who are.

Speaker 5 (01:35:03):
Like, ah, the church is getting too woke or getting
too left.

Speaker 6 (01:35:07):
They scrolled out this plan like on a fucking napkin
to like how they were going to take over the church.

Speaker 5 (01:35:12):
And they do it. They see they.

Speaker 6 (01:35:13):
See control of the Southern Baptist Convention and they purge
all of their enemies and it is very very quickly,
within a matter of like a couple of years, it's
converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah, they
they are They ruthlessly purge acting thiscent in the churches.
A bunch of churches leave because they're like what the
who the fuck are these people, like just these absolute

(01:35:36):
right wing fanatics. Is like I've taken controls. A bunch
of churches leave, but a lot of them stay, and
you know what they're what their project is is that
they start creating these sort of totalitarian micro states, like
in like this is this what they turn churches into,
and this is what they turn households into. Because these
households become enormous centers of abuse, like just unfathomable amounts

(01:35:58):
of violence. Cant sort of get get sort of spread
out of this stuff. And you know the way that
these things work, right is is is you may have
seen I have you've seen those like fucking deranged umbrella
memes that the Christian right makes on Twitter. No, I think, so, okay,
they're supposed to be like these like umbrellas, and there's
likely or the umbrella like protects you from the things.

(01:36:20):
So there's like the family and it's had the family,
they're like protected by the authority of the husband. You're
protected by the authority of the church, protected by the
authority of like the theocratic state.

Speaker 8 (01:36:31):
Okay, no, this is like the most cursed Russian doll.

Speaker 5 (01:36:34):
It's awful.

Speaker 6 (01:36:35):
And this is just what these people believe, right, and
and they they enforce this through psychological and physical violence.
These people are they're sending out instruction manuals about how
to beat your children right, and how to do it
in ways that you won't get caught, you know. And
like what I'm saying that these are like totalitarian micro states,
that's not an exaggeration that that is what these households are. Like,

(01:36:55):
they're unbelievably violent. You as a child, there's under constant surveillance.
You're literally forced to through physical violence to maintain their
gender norms. And this is the base of the Christian
of the homophobic Christian right. These churches are pumping out shocktroopers.
And these are the shocktroopers both of neoliberalism and homophobic
and transphobic violence. And when I say shocktroopers, I do

(01:37:18):
mean this literally. Because an enormous number of these people,
and this is part of.

Speaker 5 (01:37:21):
The reason's politics, it starts to fall apart. Like I
grew up around these people.

Speaker 6 (01:37:25):
A lot of these people went to fucking a rock
and got the absolute shit blown out of them. But
you know, these people, like these these churches, this is
you know, you can look at the sort of panopoly
of the people who do right wing like homophobic violence,
right the queer basher, the peroneu kicks their kid out

(01:37:46):
of their homes for being gay, the homophobic boss who
fires and abuses queer workers, the doctor who assaults us
and then denies his medical care. These people are pumped
up by the church. And what the church is doing
here is they're serving as the equivalent of sort of
of unions in the left right. And when I say unions,
I'm talking more like the nineteen oh seven iww of
in like the twenty twenty three AFLCIO. These churches are

(01:38:08):
the social and organizational space in which the right constructs
its world right, it's the sort of nexus of homophobic
organizing from the beginnings of the homophobic right through like
their fight against gay marriage. But Kaba, something happened that
Ropeke well, I think rope Key might have suspected this,
But something happens that his inheritors did not expect. And

(01:38:32):
that's something is the only thing I failed to consider
is what if neoliberalism came for the church so one
of the things that has happened in the last and
I mean literally we are talking the last ten years
or ten to fifteen years. Really the last like ten
years church attendants and this is also actually true well

(01:38:54):
of sending out on mosco attendants with the church tendants
has been declining way more. It used to be like
you know, if you're are you a member of a
church moster synagogue r like Gallup has been pulling this
since the fucking forties. It used to be the rate
of it of being a member of a church, synagoguara,
mosque was it was for like basically until like two thousand,

(01:39:17):
it was hovering around seventy percent. It's now forty seven.
That is a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of
like fundamentally what the US is. The US has been
a like Christian health state like since it was created,
right like the US is founded by like religious extremists

(01:39:40):
whose problem is that they weren't allowed to pursue Catholics enough.
So this has been this has been a church country
more so than like most of the European countries. You
did the settling up until literally the last twenty years,
and the drop between twenty ten and now is like
fourteen percent. And this is this is and it's not

(01:40:03):
just that the membership rates are going down, like the
actual actual church attendance is going down, and so and so.
In this context where less people are going to a church,
less people belong to a church, the political strategies that
have been based on using the church as like you
default social network. Uh, they don't have the kind of

(01:40:25):
reachs that they used to. Yeah, and if that's your
political strategy, this is a catastrophe for you.

Speaker 5 (01:40:33):
Now you know, we can talk. There are like, there
are lots of.

Speaker 6 (01:40:35):
Reasons this is happening, part of which it's sort of
like the secularization of the US. Part of this is
that there's been so many fucking atrocious abuse scandals in
these churches that people are just fucking leaving because that's
what happens. Yeah, you know, And one day, one day,
the thing I really will get canceled for is when
I'm gonna the episode I do about how this happened
in the DSA and how it is hauled out the membership,

(01:40:57):
because you know, it turns out when people get abused,
they just fucking leave.

Speaker 8 (01:41:00):
Yeah, not just the d I say, like, unfortunately, Yeah, this.

Speaker 6 (01:41:02):
Happens in so many organizing like this is on the left, Yeah,
stopping fucking creeps. Yeah, but like you know, fellows sist dudes. Yeah,
the Christian right has particularly bad because they don't they
did therever address it, right, this is part of their
ideology is that this is good.

Speaker 8 (01:41:21):
Yeah, that's the problem, like at least in the left,
Like it keeps fucking happening, and we do recognize it's bad.
We sometimes just seeming to people on the left are
repaired to allow it to happen because I think it's
not as bad as the alternative but which is bullshit.
But yeah, when you have a church which actively kind
of encourages.

Speaker 6 (01:41:38):
It, then that's actually and and and part of and
the other. The other thing that's happening here, right, is
that like the other thing that's generating this is just
there's just the neoliberal adamisation of society, like it's it's
tearing apart sort of like social bound you know. And
and I mean one of the things I think you
have to be careful of when you talk about neoliberalism
tearing about social bonds, is that not all a lot
of those bonds sucked like it was not good but

(01:42:00):
everyone with seventy percent of Americans were going to church, right, Like,
not good at all.

Speaker 5 (01:42:06):
That sucked. It was deeply evil.

Speaker 6 (01:42:08):
But you know, it tears apart like it tears, it
tears apart bonds, not entirely without regard to ideology, but it.

Speaker 5 (01:42:17):
Still does do it.

Speaker 6 (01:42:19):
And this means this context has completely reshaped what right
wing like anti career and anti transorganizing looks like. And
the right right now, the right solution to that is
the Daily Wire, and we will get explained that in
very great length tomorrow and the day after that, So

(01:42:39):
stay tuned.

Speaker 8 (01:42:40):
Does the entree of the bad guy, Well, we already
had a bad guy. I guess he's dead these ones, Yeah,
this is the bad guy number two, yeah, three, four.

Speaker 5 (01:42:53):
Maybe after the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Speaker 8 (01:42:56):
Yeah yeah, they're right up there there. And they've still
got time too. You know, they're already only in their ascendency,
so we shouldn't judge him too, Eddie.

Speaker 6 (01:43:04):
Yep, but yeah, this has been naked happened here, go
make these people's lives miserable.

Speaker 8 (01:43:11):
Yeah, yeah, Ben Shapai is miserable because I write a
piece of mechanics about how to tag down a statue
and he is still mad about it because he said,
I can't wait for their piece about mods of cocktails
and I never wrote that as well. So Ben Shapira
can suck it. Thank you for the career help of
Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 2 (01:43:44):
Ah, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
about things falling apart. And whenever you have things falling apart,
you have the Daily Wire. I don't know, Garrison, what
are we talking about today?

Speaker 5 (01:44:00):
Yeah, the Daily Wire has been our trusted companions among
the rise of the alt right and this kind of
just impending sense of bad that has been, you know,
increasing the past five ten years, twenty years, thirty years.

Speaker 8 (01:44:18):
You know.

Speaker 5 (01:44:19):
So Mia in the last episode talked about some of
the neoliberal conditions that kind of led to this dip
in church attendance and it's resulted in the Christian right
kind of changing formations in a few interesting ways, and
we're going to talk about that here, but now more

(01:44:39):
specifically about how The Daily Wire has been able to
profit off of this shift. So as third spaces, including churches,
die off, online spaces have been gun to fill the gaps.
From Facebook groups to content creators to conservative streaming services,
the organizational hub of the far right has been picked

(01:45:03):
up by opportunistic bloggers and aspiring movie moguls. Which brings
us to twenty thirteen, a perfect year. Nothing went wrong,
just a normal, normal time. So in twenty thirteen, we
had failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro and a failed movie producer,
Jeremy Boring. They started working together on a project called

(01:45:25):
Truth Revolt. Now I assume most of us are somewhat
familiar with Ben Shapiro. He was an editor at Breitbart.
This he started as a young conservative blogger who gained
prominence in the two thousands. In the twenty teens, So
I'm not gonna waste too much time going into the
background of Ben because I'm I'm guessing we all basically

(01:45:50):
know who Ben Shapiro is. But I'm also guessing that
almost no one listening to this probably knows who Jeremy
Boring is, hence the name. So I'm gonna be focusing
a lot on Jeremy. I I find Jeremy to be
a kind of fascinating person. I I almost weirdly enjoy

(01:46:10):
watching his stuff just because I find it to be
extremely fascinating. His demeanor, his his his way of going
about creating a conservative media empire, I find to be
really intriguing. I've I've watched Jeremy Boring stuff just as
like a voyeurist observer for years now, and he's actually
starting to become more of a prominent face among the

(01:46:33):
right wing media ecosystem, or at least he's he's been
putting his face out there for a while. Most of
the time he's just been behind the scenes. So Jeremy
Boring is just a is a is A is a
good Christian boy from a small town in Texas. He
got involved in kind of local town. Yeah. I I
forget the exact town because I didn't I didn't write

(01:46:55):
it down in the script, but I believe it's somewhere
in West Texas if I remember correctly, it's it's it's
It's been a while since I watched the two hour
interview with Jerity Boring where he discussed his upbringing.

Speaker 2 (01:47:07):
God, I wonder if it's Lufkin. I'm pulling it up.
I'm pulling it up Slayton. Okay, okay, well still a
dogshit Texas.

Speaker 5 (01:47:15):
Yeah, See that's why I did mention it because its
like who.

Speaker 2 (01:47:17):
Can's in Lubbock County, min love it.

Speaker 5 (01:47:20):
Yeah, he was kind of involved in some local community
theater productions as a kid, and like a lot of kids,
he aspired to be an actor. So as a young
adult he moved to LA He very soon gave up acting.
I think he had one small bit role as like
a crying soldier, but besides that, he just couldn't get

(01:47:41):
any work. So instead he just he decided to become
a struggling screenwriter. Classic classic move. Yeah, moving from a
failed actor failing yes, yes, yes, exactly. In the early
two thousands, he got invited to a Hollywood Bible study
group with a whole bunch of like young C list celebrities,

(01:48:02):
and over time he evolved into a sort of pastoral
role within the group. And then in two thousand and seven,
he was able to write and produce his first movie, Spiral,
starring Zachary Levi, who now played Shazam in DC's movies
and really nothing else because he seems to be a
deeply unlikable person who's not really been hired in many

(01:48:22):
other things. But Zachary Levi was also in this like
Christian Bible study group. They were both friends, him and
Jeremy Boring, So they made this movie spiral. It grossed
just over three thousand dollars. So not the smash hit
that you know you would you you would hopeful for

(01:48:43):
your first movie.

Speaker 2 (01:48:44):
That is, uh yeah, that's not great.

Speaker 5 (01:48:47):
It's not it's it's not it's not perfect. Now. Jeremy
Boring claims that his religious and political beliefs made it
so that he wasn't able to progress very far in
the Hollywood system, but he was invited to a secret
meeting of conservatives in Hollywood called the Friends of ABE
that Robert you should you should look up the Friends

(01:49:08):
of ABE logo because it's really good.

Speaker 2 (01:49:10):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (01:49:12):
I think people like like, uh like John Voight and
just you know those sort.

Speaker 2 (01:49:17):
Of like yeah, it sounds like I think John Voight
would be a member of Yes, yes.

Speaker 5 (01:49:20):
I'm pretty sure John voyightt was a member of this group.

Speaker 2 (01:49:22):
God, they're and they're treating it. They're treating it. There
was like a Friends of something or other group that
was like an underground group providing reproductive healthcare service back
before abortion, back for Roe v. Wade, which is clearly
what they're Oh god.

Speaker 5 (01:49:37):
Is that who made this logo? This is like bad
clip art. Oh my god, it's it's quite good. So
he was he was invited to this secret meeting, the
Friends of Abe, and this is where he met another
friend of the pod, Andrew Breitbart. So this is this
is actually really a really important Grammer was a member too, yes,

(01:50:01):
a very important weird subcultural community within Hollywood. So as
Jeremy was trying to move into just movie producing, he
was actually asked to take over this Friends of Abe group.
So he became a very central role and he made
a lot of connections, connections that will soon become important
when we discuss the Daily Wires own adventures in movie
producing in the next episode or so. So he took

(01:50:25):
over this group. Eventually he had this other smaller Bible
study group, So he's kind of moving up in the
world of conservative secret meetings in Hollywood. So because he
met Andrew bite Bart at the Friends of Abe, Andrew
bite Bart obviously knows Ben Shapiro because Shapiro used to
be the editor at Breitbart News.

Speaker 2 (01:50:46):
Also, I feel the need to note the Friends of
Abe was founded by Gary Sinise, who was in such
beloved movies as well. I think the only beloved movie
he was in was Forrest Gump, where he played Lieutenant Dan.

Speaker 5 (01:51:01):
Oh he did Bobe.

Speaker 2 (01:51:02):
Yeah, this is Lieutenant Dan founded the group, which is
actually like Lieutenant Dan would be in the Friends of Abe,
so that kind of fits. He also had apparently a
bit roll our some role in Apollo thirteen. I forget
who So there you go, Gary Sinise great.

Speaker 5 (01:51:21):
So around this time is when Ben Shapiro and Jeremy
Boring first met, just before like twenty ten. I think
the two met via Andrew Bitepart, whom Ben was working
for at the time at Brightbart News. Now. Jeremy and
Ben hit it off, and they decided that they would
want to work together to create media to quote unquote
influence culture. That's a term that Boring uses quite a lot,

(01:51:45):
is like influencing culture. Now. Boring was very impressed by
Shapiro and sought to propel Shapiro's fame and wanted to
create a platform and wanted to create a platform to
increase Ben's ability to impact politics on a larger scale.
He really thought he saw something in Ben that, if utilized,
could make Ben into a pretty major celebrity. Boring was

(01:52:10):
friendly with board members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center,
an extremely racist, anti Muslim right wing think tank I
believe based in law. Boring thought that Ben and David
had a lot in common. They were both very like
politically feisty Jewish conservatives in the LA scene, and Boring
wanted to prepare Ben to sort of carry the torch

(01:52:32):
of the Freedom Center using all of the resources that
David Horowitz have built up over a long period of time.
So for about a year and a half, Boring met
with board members behind the scenes to create some sort
of buy in and cast Ben Shapiro as the future
for the Freedom Center, planning seeds of what it will
be to come. Eventually, David Horowitz chose Ben as the

(01:52:53):
heir to the Freedom Center first by giving Shapiro and
Boring an opportunity to test things out by starting a
company under the Freedom Center called Truth Revolt. Truth Revolt
is something that I didn't I think I saw it
a little bit when I was like a younger teen,
but it wasn't It wasn't super popular. Truth Revolt saw

(01:53:14):
some initial success as like a conservative quote unquote news
site aimed at exposing leftist media. Shapiro billed Truth Revolt
as the quote unquote anti media matters Now, Shapiro admits
that Truth of Volt ultimately wasn't very sustainable because the
whole website was designed around trying to generate traffic by

(01:53:35):
being linked by Drudge Report. And at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:53:40):
That's like literally literally like a third of right wing
media in the early two thousands to mid auts Like
that was Alex Jones's whole strategy for a while too.

Speaker 5 (01:53:48):
Yeah, the whole point was creating headlines that would be
linked by this conservative news aggregator. And this isn't a
very sustainable business model, at least that's what Ben claims.
And because truth Revolt was operating under the Freedom Center,
it was run as a nonprofit and received very limited
funding and little to no advertising budget. But even back then,

(01:54:12):
there was a big focus on creating video content to
fill out the site and grow its own YouTube page.
I have a wonderful screenshot here of some old truth
Revolt videos from like nine ten years ago. We have
brass tax on immigration. Andrew Clevan I think his name

(01:54:32):
is Clevans. He's one of the main Daily Wire guys now,
but he was involved way way back then. He has
a video on Obama conspiracy theories, which I'm sure that's great.

Speaker 2 (01:54:43):
Yeah, I can't wait to dig into that one.

Speaker 5 (01:54:46):
Ben Shapiro has a lot of videos about why Jews
vote leftist. We have videos about Hillary Clinton, we have
the left's magical thinking. There is another Andrew Clavan video
called fIF D Shades of Barack Obama. So again, all
like very very like twenty twelve type stuff here, like

(01:55:07):
all all very like early early twentyighteenth.

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):
They were iterating, they were cooking.

Speaker 5 (01:55:14):
They were cooking, and like cooking, sometimes your first attempt
doesn't really work out. Truth of Volt started declining in
around early twenty fifteen, but Jeremy Boring was working on
a business plan with a more marketing driven approach. Instead
of relying on like nonprofit annual donors, Boring wanted to
use a more of a for profit model where they

(01:55:36):
used ad revenue and the larger web traffic generated through
marketing on social media, especially on Facebook, to pay for
this entire media operation. Now, the old guard of this
conservative think tank did not really like this plan. The
Freedom Center actually fired to Jeremy Boring when he produced
this plan to revamp truth Revolt, and soon after Ben

(01:55:57):
Shapiro stepped down. This was in April twenty fifteen. Jeremy Bort.
Jeremy and Ben attempted to buy out the site, but
that didn't pan out, and eventually Truthful to just withered away.
Do you know what else slowly withers away over time?

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):
Uh? You without the products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:56:20):
That's right, all right, we are back. Thank the maker
for all of those wonderful products and services that let
me spend about ten hours a day watching Daily Wire

(01:56:40):
videos so I could write like four thousand words.

Speaker 2 (01:56:44):
Truly, this was This was Sophie's grand dream when she
began this.

Speaker 5 (01:56:50):
Just have a wall of computers constantly playing Daily Wire
plus exclusive contest.

Speaker 2 (01:56:56):
That was the pitch we came to corporate with, what
if we expose demand to all of the Daily Wire
one could possibly consume?

Speaker 5 (01:57:04):
Hell? Oh, by all right, So Jeremy Boring, failed movie producer,
failed screenwriter, has been fired from Truth Revolt. Ben Shapiro,
his colleague in arms, steps down in solidarity. We love
to see workers unite. So Shapiro and Boring still liked
their plan to use ad revenue and social media advertising

(01:57:24):
to make a for profit media company. So in twenty
fifteen they looked for other investors to fund a new website,
and it just so happened that around this time, two
Texas billionaires known as the Wilks Brothers We're looking to
use their fracking fortune to quote unquote influence culture. There's
that term again. Through a mutual friend, Boring was able

(01:57:48):
to secure millions of dollars in seed money from the Wilks,
who also later went on to fund prager You. With
an influx of cash on hand, Ben and Jeremy started
The Daily Wire initially just as a conservative news site,
but with ambitions to become an entire conservative entertainment production
and distribution house. Instead of relying on donors or links

(01:58:12):
from news aggregators, their new approach was focused on creating
and cultivating a long term audience. They first prioritized quote
unquote investing in making Ben and other up and coming
conservative figureheads more famous, in particular using an intentional social
media strategy to propel people from out of the conservative

(01:58:34):
bubble into the popular zeitgeist. Specifically, Jerry Boring worked to
increase the personal brand awareness on sites other than Twitter,
where generally most of these writers spend most of their
social media hours. The point was to not just do
it on Twitter, instead it on the other social media
sites where actual, like regular people spend more of their

(01:58:55):
time because it's mostly just other writers on Twitter versus
the the actual audience that the Daily Wire wanted to
attract were mostly spending their time on places like Facebook
or Instagram. So fourteen months in, the Daily Wire was
already cash flow positive, and we see this approach of
specifically trying to like create celebrity. It really paid off

(01:59:18):
if you look at how the how like the cultural
figure of Ben Shapiro specifically kind of emerged in the
mid two thousands, Like he became such a such like
a meme with such like a recognizable character through very
simple marketing on like YouTube on Facebook. It was. It
was wildly successful. You cannot open up YouTube without seeing

(01:59:39):
a Ben Shapiro destroys college student on campus video, like
every single every single time. Now, on top of making
a news site, they also decided to move into podcasting,
a very controversial medium. I'm gonna I'm gonna read one
quote from Ben here. Quote one area that we had
no idea was going to be the center of revenue

(02:00:00):
was the actual podcast. When I look back at that
business plan, what we get allocated for the amount of
revenue from the podcast was minimal compared to how successful
the podcast became, and that cannot be understated. The Daily
Wire makes a shitload of money on their podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:00:14):
Yeah, we all were surprised by how lucrative prop podcasting
wound up being like because it was around for like
a decade or so before it was before people were
really making any money off of it. It kind of
snowballed very quickly once advertisers realized it was something they
could get in on. But like it was, there was

(02:00:35):
a long time where it was just sort of like
a thing weird little guys like Joe Rogan did and
most people didn't really think about them much.

Speaker 5 (02:00:43):
Yeah, and their social media advertising plan also worked outrageously well,
especially on Facebook. Routinely, over the past few years, stories
published by The Daily Wire received more likes, shares, and
comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a
wide margin. Shapiro has more followers in The Washington Post.

(02:01:04):
Their engagement outpaces the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CNN,
and Fox News on average by over ten Times, and
they often get more clicks on their articles than all
of those outlets combined. They have like they figured out
a really successful method to promoting their news content in

(02:01:24):
a way that really no one else has been able
to replicate. Utilizing provocative rage bait propagandized by a select
few of online personalities, the Daily Wire has been able
to expand the brand recognition of not just their own site,
but also the personal brand of its own hosts. Ben
and Jeremy brought over some of the people from Truth Revolt,

(02:01:44):
but they were also scouting for new talent among the
twenty sixteen conservative sphere to invest their newly acquired fracking
resources into. Another quote from Ben is like surround yourself
with people who are going to be successful unquote, particularly
not like going after people who are currently popular, but
trying to find up and coming content creators who they

(02:02:07):
think they can turn into being much more successful than
what they currently started as. Among the people they recruited
was the relatively unknown extremist Christian writer and radio talk
show host Matt Walsh, who we will get to in
a sec the slightly more famous blogger Candice Owens, who
was picked up a few years prior by the conservative

(02:02:28):
student group Turning Point USA to be their quote director
of Urban Engagement.

Speaker 6 (02:02:33):
Which.

Speaker 5 (02:02:35):
Is an awful title what they mean by I wonder
what they mean by urban engagement. And then in twenty twenty,
after being a Daily Wire correspondent for a few years
and helping to launch Ted Cruise's own podcast, the Daily
Wire hired failed actor Michael Knowles, who's basically a discount

(02:02:56):
Matt Walsh, to host his own podcast. And finally, in
twenty two, the Daily Wire recruited Jordan Peterson, probably their
biggest get to date after he quote unquote retired from
the University of Toronto. The original funding pitch to the
Wilkes Brothers, who are looking to influence culture, explicitly positioned

(02:03:16):
the Daily Wire not just as a news site, but
as a prospective alternative to the liberal Hollywood monopoly. There
there's a really interesting quote here from Jeremy Boring quote,
I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment,
but I think you have to go about it in
a roundabout way. We need a marketing and distribution mechanism

(02:03:41):
that allows us to actually put an audience on the target,
because Hollywood will never cooperate. Even if you managed to
make a great film, they'll never cooperate. They'll make it
very difficult for you. With Ben, and with what we've
been doing at Truth Revolt, we can make something that's
capable of marketing whatever we produced thereafter for this particular
audience unquote. So there he's emphasizing that, no matter the

(02:04:05):
quality of the actual content you create for this sort
of conservative media ecosystem, you first need to actually build
an audience that will be able to find it. That's
like their first step is building up this audience and
then they can focus on actually making the content just
because of how this distribution system works. That at least
that was that was Jeremy's take on that. Do you

(02:04:27):
know what else is really important for building up a
sustainable audience? Products that's right, trustworthy products and services that
our audience knows are of fantastic, fantastic quality. It's the
it's the only way.

Speaker 2 (02:04:42):
We are also supported by the Wilkes Brothers, but but
directly through selling hydraulic fracturing technology. So rack your backyard
and join the fractvolution.

Speaker 5 (02:05:04):
We're fracking back here, all right. That was just a
wonderful a wonderful frack break. My back feels is so much,
so much, so much more loose. After that, I cracked
for like.

Speaker 2 (02:05:15):
The house across from me exploded when fracturing fluid released
natural gas that was then ignited by an oven.

Speaker 5 (02:05:25):
Speak of, speaking of fracking, I think we're both actually,
even though we're on different sides of the country, we're
both in like a ridiculous cold freeze right now.

Speaker 2 (02:05:33):
It's it's it's pretty cold.

Speaker 5 (02:05:36):
Yes, it is twenty two degrees right now.

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):
Yeah, it's like sixteen or something here.

Speaker 5 (02:05:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):
Yeah, and you're in Atlanta, so you are the last
person alive in the entire city.

Speaker 5 (02:05:47):
Yes, but no, I'm sure fracking has done nothing to
contribute to this anyway. So let's let's turn our dials
now to twenty two once again. Normal year. Nothing bad happened,
just a fun time overall. In twenty twenty one, The
Daily Wire relocated from liberal Hollywood, California, to Nashville, Tennessee,

(02:06:14):
with hopes of creating their own conservative entertainment empire in
the music city. After over half a decade of building
up an audience, the Daily Wire started to shift towards
creating in house entertainment media like movies and TV, as
well as producing their own neatly packaged documentaries to serve
as a cultural catalyst in a way that a daily

(02:06:37):
podcast show like The Ben Shapiro Show just can't write
like we put out a daily podcast, and because it's
a daily show, it can only have a certain level
of impact for all the things we cover in a
way that you know, a highly produced documentary can have
like a little bit more like easily observable impact just
because of how it's being packaged. So they saw this

(02:07:00):
and decided they wanted to start putting a lot of
resources into their own documentaries as well as their podcasts.
But it wasn't just documentaries. In twenty twenty one, they
also distributed their first movie, Run Hide Fight thirty eight
percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a school shooter thriller
movie that I have not watched. I've watched a lot

(02:07:25):
of the Daily Wires original content. I am not watching
Run Hide Fight. I'm sorry, I'm just not doing it.

Speaker 2 (02:07:31):
Yeah, I don't really want to watch Diehard with school
shooters and a teenage girl. That seems a bit on
the nose. No, I just I simply refused. Four other
original Daily Wire movies have come out since then, which
we'll get to some of those in the next episode. Now,
before twenty twenty, the Daily Wire was making some exclusive

(02:07:53):
content behind like a membership paywall for something that they
called Daily Wire All Access. But us twenty twenty one
and into twenty twenty two, they rebranded and pivoted hard
into promoting their own subscription based streaming service, The Daily
Wire Plus. Again, they are nothing if not original. This

(02:08:13):
was during a wave of plus branded streaming services. We
have Disney Plus, we have Paramount Plus.

Speaker 5 (02:08:21):
I'm sure there's probably many others that I'm just not
gonna bother even looking up. But the Daily Wire Plus
the hit new streaming service that I'm sure your great
uncle has quote. The Daily Wire Plus is the streaming
home of The Daily Wire, Jordan Peterson Movies, Praeger, You,

(02:08:41):
and Daily Wire Kids. We're one of America's fastest growing
media companies and counter cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment.
We're building the future you want to see unquote. That's
their their little tagline.

Speaker 2 (02:08:59):
Thrilling. Yeah, truly, the new line cinema of racism.

Speaker 5 (02:09:04):
Such groundbreaking original content includes My Dinner with Trump.

Speaker 2 (02:09:09):
Oh my god, I hadn't even heard of that one.
Are you fucking kidding me?

Speaker 5 (02:09:13):
No, I'm not kidding.

Speaker 2 (02:09:14):
What is it? Is it actually on My Dinner with
Andrea parody or is it just something completely disconnected that
they stole a famous title for.

Speaker 5 (02:09:22):
They just stole the famous title.

Speaker 2 (02:09:24):
For damn it. It would be really funny if it
was just a shot for shot remake of My Dinner
with Andre but with but with Andrea as Trump, Like
I would. That's respect that's actually respectable. That would I
would watch that movie tonight.

Speaker 5 (02:09:37):
No, it's it's it's just a film to Dinner with
Trump and like various political advisors.

Speaker 2 (02:09:43):
Oh my god. Yeah, Oh that's so lame.

Speaker 5 (02:09:47):
Do I? I don't believe the Daily Wires releasing their
streaming metrics. Just like Netflix, they're keeping them secret. Similar companies, Yeah,
very similar. We have other other hit hit documentaries like
Kanye West's Favorite, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold by Canda Sowans.

(02:10:09):
Oh God, an extremely racist misinformation or sorry, disinformation documentary
about about George Floyd. We have that Mandalorian actresses movie
Terror on the Prairie. We have a whole bunch of
a whole bunch of stuff from Jordan Peterson after he
left uh the University of Toronto and got and got

(02:10:32):
kicked off Twitter. That's the exact time that he was
hired at Daily Wire. He's a whole bunch of stuff
of just like roundtable discussions on like the Bible, and
I believe he has that dragon mythology.

Speaker 2 (02:10:43):
Oh, it's great now that that's that's a good show.
I've watched all of that one that's kozy and we
enjoyed ourselves quite a lot.

Speaker 5 (02:10:50):
We have We have a making a Murderer ripoff documentary
by Canda so Owens called Convicting a Murderer. Again, truly
original stuff. Great, but it's not just movies, TV shows
and documentaries. It's also like like we mentioned, they're hit
podcasts quote. The Daily Wire plus podcast network is America's

(02:11:11):
sixth largest podcast publisher and produces several of the top
ranked podcasts in America, including The Ben Shapiro Show, The
Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Candace with Candace Owens, The Matt
Wall Show, The Michael Knowles Show, and The Morning Wire,
some of which do quite well on the charts and
are often sometimes sometimes beaten by Robert's podcast. Anyway, So

(02:11:36):
a little over a year ago, the Daily wire Plus
passed one million subscribers. We don't have any updated numbers
on that, so it's probably quite higher now, but at
least as of as of around a year ago, they
had a million subscribers, and again, as of back then,
it was bringing in the company two thirds of its
annual revenue. I think it was like three or so

(02:11:59):
years ago they were making one hundred million dollars a year,
so they were making bank across their podcasts and exclusive content.
They have over three hundred employees and are still growing
and are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into producing
original entertainment content. In their efforts to influence politics through

(02:12:19):
entertainment media, they strive to create cultural events around the
release of their original documentaries. The biggest success they've had
with this is what was in twenty twenty two with
What Is a Woman, which rocketed the Daily wire Plus
into the online spotlight and proved there was great success
to be had with this style of aggressive anti trans advocacy.

(02:12:42):
The film also put the previously niche figure of Matt
Walsh on the map and established Walsh as an authority
in queer exterminationist campaigning. I've known of Walsh for like
the past decade. After he had a short lived radio career,
he made a name in Christian circles as a provocative blogger,
sort of like a young firebrand of the Christian right.

(02:13:04):
In the early twenty teens, he had a brief stint
at Glenn Beck's The Blaze before being recruited to The
Daily Wire in twenty seventeen to do a daily podcast.
The goal of documentaries such as What Is a Woman
beyond growing the Daily Wire's a subscriber count, is also
to encourage real world action while converting attention from the

(02:13:24):
documentary into actual real world harassment campaigns and live events,
which fuel even more content. It's like this, It's like
this weird content circle that the Daily Wire does. They
create content to make these real world events, which then
can fuel more content. It's this perfect loop that generates
them a lot of money. On October twenty first, twenty

(02:13:45):
twenty two, the Daily Wire put on a quote rally
to end child mutilation at the Tennessee State Capitol, which
was streamable on Daily Wire Plus exactly. This is a
perfect example of creating this event that then allows them
to also create exclusive content for their own streaming service.
The Daily Wire has been in cahoots with the state

(02:14:05):
government of Tennessee ever since they first moved their headquarters there.
Back in twenty twenty one, the General Assembly and Governor
drafted a resolution welcoming the Daily Wire to the state.
Jeremy Boring regularly gets invited to dinners at the Governor's mansion.
After the release of What Is a Woman? The Governor
of Tennessee announced an investigation into a transgender health clinic

(02:14:25):
in Nashville, and Walsh has made appearances at official state
press conferences, and Tennessee's legislator has led the charge on
following the Daily Wire and Walsh's political program to target
trans people, ban drag shows, and lobbying school boards to
ban LGBTQ materials in schools. The Daily Wire was they

(02:14:47):
were kind of wise to not get too caught up
in the TRUMPI and Mud from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty,
instead instead focusing on broader culture war issues ranging from
anti liberalism, antidiversity, parental rights, religious rights, and attacks on
LGBTQ people. But that also means that they didn't peak

(02:15:09):
during the Trump era in the way that a lot
of other conservative content people kind of did. They chose
not to capitalize on the Trumpian alt right moment, and
they were way too smart to go full qan On. Instead,
they were kind of waiting on the sidelines, slowly growing
an audience to eventually find the right moment to catalyze
more widespread support and thrust themselves into the spotlight, which

(02:15:34):
they have now done by crafting antiqueer propaganda to pick
up the baton from the dying QAnon movement while moving
the needle away from like explicitly q brained shit to
simple stuff like parental rights and the more socially acceptable
groomor and save the children talking points. The once more
exotic target of pedophilic elites has been shifted to simply

(02:15:57):
any random queer person, which is a much more tangible
point of iyre and that'shere we're gonna leave us here today,
kind of on the point that The Daily Wire waited
and found the moment in like the first year or
two of the Biden presidency to really push themselves to
be the own spotlight instead of just relying in the

(02:16:17):
shadow of Donald Trump in the way that someone like
Tucker kind of has now done. He's not nearly as
popular as he was in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen,
and The Daily Wire is now massively influential in a
way that they were only kind of rising to prominence
back during the Altright era. So in the next episode,
we'll talk a little bit more about The Daily Wire's
own anti queer advocacy and their push for original content,

(02:16:42):
including a brand new child focused to streaming service, which
I will talk about in the next episode. Anyway, Robert,
do you have any do you have any thoughts on
the Daily Wire?

Speaker 2 (02:16:55):
Well, I know that the child grooming service they're building,
a big part of what they're looking to do is
try to copy the show Bluey, which is like the
biggest thing in children's entertainment right now, and just casual
knowledge of where that is talking to parents and stuff
about Bluey, Like, I feel like it might be a
bridge too far for them, because they're they're they're they're

(02:17:18):
trying to go after they're trying to capture like market
from something that's legitimately really fucking good, as opposed to
just putt it like they're they're kind of most commercially
viable movies like the School Shooting Movie are from what
I've read in reviews, like just kind of normal mid movies.
Like they don't necessarily feel like a daily wire movie. Man,

(02:17:41):
there'll be a couple of points in there maybe, but
there they could more or less pass for something you'd
see on Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever, which is
you know, if you're competing with mid grade action movies
and the like that that are a dime a dozen,
you can actually do that fairly well. And it's even
possible to, like well, the economics of streaming are actually

(02:18:02):
deeply obscured, but theoretically it's possible to do as well
with that as Netflix does with it, right because people,
But if you're trying to replace a children's show that,
like kids consume voraciously and are deeply in love with
and is really well made, I think that's actually a
lot harder than they're guessing it's going to be. Like,

(02:18:23):
yeahd adults who want something to watch when they're drunk
at night are a harder audience than little kids who
are obsessed with a TV show that is the best
in its market.

Speaker 5 (02:18:33):
It's certainly a gamble, and we will talk more about
the details of this gamble in the next episode, as
we will also eventually eventually talk about their brand new
movie that came out last month. Lady Ballers.

Speaker 8 (02:18:50):
All right, we're done.

Speaker 2 (02:18:51):
I feel like I should call hr just because you
mentioned the name of that movie.

Speaker 5 (02:18:56):
See you in the next episode.

Speaker 2 (02:19:16):
I started the episode Garrison.

Speaker 5 (02:19:18):
Really really what an energetic entry into I'm tired.

Speaker 2 (02:19:23):
Tell me things that make me sad.

Speaker 5 (02:19:25):
Oh, I don't worry, I will. That is my favorite
thing to do. Let's let's yeah, let's talk about things
that are actually sad for the first first half of
this episode. You know, the past few years, it's kind
of been increasingly profitable to be friendly to the gaze,
which is kind of a new trend. You know, if

(02:19:47):
if you look at the past twenty years or so,
it's becoming more more profitable. Which if you're if you're
like a queer accelerationist anarchist, maybe maybe that's a bad thing, right,
But if you're just trying to like not get killed
in the interim as the climate collapses, it's you know,
maybe a good thing. That generally queer acceptance has been improving,

(02:20:12):
but as it's been improven There's also been a pretty
sizable backlash from some members of the Christian right who
don't really like this or are trying to use this
backlash as a way to promote their own economic interests.
And I don't think this needs to be an either
or I think this can definitely be a both scenario.

(02:20:33):
Speaking of Matthew Walsh, the Catholic self described fascist, this
is going to be kind of the the topic of
the first half of this because he has been able
to the work he's done, has been able to really
propel The Daily Wire as an actual like political entity
in a way that Shapiro just never really has. Shapiro

(02:20:57):
was really good at creating eye catching a YouTube clickbait
and stuff, but we never really saw him campaigning hard
for any political cause. He was never really doing that
type of stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:21:10):
They come at of different eras in different communities. For
one thing, Ben Shapiro is Jewish and came of age
and came into prominence in the early two thousands when
conservatives had political power but basically zero like social power
as they saw it, right, and so he was always

(02:21:31):
positioned as like, I am sort of the I'm the
insurgent conservative, like I'm Rush Limbaugh. You know, I'm going
to provide a safe place for you, even though you
control the government to a large extent, where I can
yell at and make fun of the people that you
think are bad. Right, And that's that's the only thing
he ever really sought to do, is like lol, liberals dumb.

(02:21:53):
Walsh comes out of the Christian kind of dominionist adjacent
movement at the very least, and their goal has always
been capture the seven pillars of culture, right, And so
he from the beginning has thought of this more as
like I am waging a Christian war against secular society
and doing so like kind of methodically. So they just

(02:22:16):
kind of have approached what they're doing fundamentally from a
different way and came into it at different times.

Speaker 5 (02:22:21):
Walsh is definitely the most evangelical Catholic I've ever seen,
and which is weird because like back when he was
a popular Christian blogger, his stuff was very popular in
evangelical circles, even though evangelicals generally are not very friendly
to Catholics, but his stuff was widely shared because he
was quite provocative. Now, he spent a few years just

(02:22:44):
kind of laying low running a podcast at The Daily
Wire and then What is a Woman? Really? Really propelled
him into the spotlight and he got a glimpse of
fame and popularity that he's been endlessly trying to replicate.
And because this fame was based around hating trans people,

(02:23:04):
that is what he's decided to pivot his whole career
to doing. That is now his entire focus in life
is about how he doesn't like trans people because it
was very profitable for him. In twenty twenty two, so
as a part of an ongoing right wing harassment campaign
against TikTok influencer and chronic theater kid Dylan mulvaney, Matt

(02:23:26):
Walsh started a viral boycott campaign against bud Light for
having a brand partnership with a trans person. Now, I'm
not going to spend too much time here talking about
right wing boycotts. I'm sure we've all watched, you know,
like Nike shoe burnings and Gillette razors being flushed down
the toilet and people dropping their Kere eggs off rooftops. Generally,
boycotts don't tend to work, but this bud Light thing

(02:23:50):
did show some success, and success in this instance specifically
refers to Walsh and the Daily Wire cronies receiving a
lot of attention and free publicity, so they sought to
replicate this strategy while publicly telegraphing their harassment methodology. Here's
two tweets from Matt Walsh quote, here's what we should do.

(02:24:12):
Pick a victim, gang up on it and make an
example of it. We can't boycott every woke company, or
even most of them, but we can pick one it
hardly matters which and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign.
Claim one scalp, then move on to the next. Our
goal is to make Pride toxic for brands. If they
decide to shove this garbage in our face, they should

(02:24:33):
know that they'll pay a price. It won't be worth
whatever they think they'll gain. First bud Light and now Target.
Our campaign is making progress. Let's keep it going so
as Walsh's said there, Walsh's next target was Target the
Department Store, due to the store's history of prominent Pride
displays in the lead up to Pride Month during twenty

(02:24:55):
twenty three. Target was met with online and in person harassment,
with a wave of emails and calls to individual stores,
accusing them of grooming and indoctrinating kids with the presence
of Pride themed apparel. People started ransacking stores, destroying pride displays,
threatening violence against employees in person, as well as calling

(02:25:15):
in multiple bomb threats into into many, many different stores,
mirroring the harassment campaign against trans clinics and hospitals the
year prior, which was also spearheaded by Matt Walsh. We've
seen this tactic game prominence. This bomb threat tactic is
now quite common among the right. We saw it be
called into there was there was a lot of bomb

(02:25:36):
threats called into like four hundred synagogues this past winter.
That was, you know, most likely done by some form
of neo Nazi. But we've just seen this, this specific
bomb threat tactic pick up a lot because it provides
a pretty sizable minor or short term disruption to regular,
regular services. Now, in response to this wave of harassment,

(02:26:02):
Target Corporate mandated that many stores remove their front of
store pride displays in late May, all across the country,
but especially in the South. Target released a statement saying
they were quote making adjustments to our plans given these
volatile circumstances unquote, and these adjustments included relocating or removing
Pride displays due to quote threats impacting our team members

(02:26:24):
a sense of safety and well being at work. Quote.
Employees were also instructed to specifically remove items quote at
the center of the most significant confrontational behavior unquote like shapewear, binders,
and a tuck friendly swimwear, and to quote replace them
with swimwear to better meet our sales goalsuot now. Walsh

(02:26:44):
claimed that the tuck friendly swimwear was being marketed to kids,
but it only came in adult sizes. A lot of
this sort of harassment campaign isn't really based on anything truthful,
but that doesn't really matter. Here's a quote from Walsh again, quote,
I think this Target boycott has real staying power. Target
has now branded itself as a far left organization to

(02:27:06):
the point where it's embarrassing to shop there. This is
the branding that makes the boycott stick. It happened about Light,
I think it's happening to Target. This is what conservatives
have missed in the past with failed boycott attempts. It's
not enough to simply tell people not to shop somewhere
or buy something. You have to make it so that
they don't want to. So after a around five percent

(02:27:29):
sales drop in the second quarter, and again it's hard
to actually figure out what that can be attributed to.

Speaker 2 (02:27:35):
Beer sales also hit like their lowest level in recent history. Yes,
you're just kind of.

Speaker 5 (02:27:40):
A Again, it's hard to see if these things are
actually working, But that doesn't matter because the right can
claim them as a success.

Speaker 2 (02:27:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:27:48):
Yeah, and Target released an update saying, quote, the reaction
is a signal for us to pause, adapt and learn
so that our future approach to these moments balances celebration, inclusivity,
and broad based appeal unquote. And Walsh claimed this announcement
as a quote quite massive victory. Now, I hope you know,

(02:28:09):
I hope many of us aren't, you know, shopping for
Pride products at a store like Target. But for a
lot of kids and even adults in more conservative areas
of the country, Target was really the only place to
get gender firming clothing like binders and trans friendly swimsuits
in person. These things can be tricky to buy online.
Sometimes you don't want to package showing up to your
door if you can't be the one to like open it.

(02:28:32):
So Target really was the only place for a lot
of people to have access to this kind of stuff. Now,
last year, Michael Knowles tried to kind of replicate the
Matt Walsh strategy because it proved to be very, very successful.
So they had Walls going out on doing very similar
kind of anti transit speeches. He spoke at a lot

(02:28:52):
of the big conservative conferences talking about how we need
to eliminate transgenderism. He jumped on this this boycott stuff
and his viewers saying, quote, we need to make the
Pride symbol toxic for brands. We need to make companies
think twice as we're making these symbols culturally toxic. We've
got to come in with more political force to ban
this stuff. Don't back down. The progress conservatives have made

(02:29:14):
on this just between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three,
the fact that companies are trying to back off shows
that we are winning. Keep pushing much much harder. Unquote
and at the very least local governments were responding to
this sort of thing. In another instance of the government
being in cahoots with the Daily Wire, on July fifth,

(02:29:37):
twenty twenty three, the Attorney's General of Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri,
and South Carolina sent a joint letter adjusted to Target's CEO,
ostensibly threatening legal action against Target for carrying LGBTQ merchandise.
I'm going to read some quotes from this letter because
it's a really interesting thing that I've never really seen done.

(02:30:00):
Four in terms of like five or six of these
states all coming together to actually affect the market. Quote.
Target's pride campaign not only raises concerns under our states
child protection and parental rights laws, but also against our
states economic interests. As Target shareholders, Target's management has a

(02:30:20):
finishiary duty to our states as shareholders in the company.
The evidence suggests that Targets directors and officers may be
negligent in undertaking the pride campaign, which negatively affected Target's
stock price. Moreover, it may have improperly directed company resources
for collateral, political, or social goals unrelated to the companies
and its shareholders best's interests. It is likely more profitable

(02:30:44):
to sell the type of pride that enshrines the love
of the United States. Target's pride campaign alienates, whereas pride
in our country unites. Targets management has no duty to
fulfill stores with objectionable goods, let alone endor or feature
them in attention grabbing displays at the behest of radical activists. However,

(02:31:04):
Target's management does have a fdicciary duty to its shareholders
to act in the company's best interests. Target's board and
management may not lawfully dilute their findicciary duties to satisfy
the boards or the left wing activists desire to foist
contentious political or social agendas upon families and children at
the expense of the company's hard won goodwill and against

(02:31:27):
its best interests unquote. And it's just generally not a
great sign when the government is trying to convince a
business that it's in their legal and financial interests to
throw the gaze to the wolves.

Speaker 2 (02:31:41):
Now, it's also, yeah, that's not how fiduciary duty works. Like, no,
it's not a legal principle. It's more of a philosophical
principle among capitalists that is dominant. But like, you actually
are not breaking the law by doing something that's not
in fiduciary interest of your shareholders, among other things, basically
impossible to anyway whatever this is all, But it's a

(02:32:06):
question of like what you can get away with right.
This is what fascists always do, and it's from a
strategic standpoint. If you're looking at the culture war as
a kind of mutual insurgency, it's a strategy of denying
terrain to the enemy, in this case, access to a
place that is available in basically every state where trans
people can purchase stuff like binders and get to try

(02:32:28):
them all like it's making life. It's reducing maneuvering space
for the enemy, as they see it.

Speaker 5 (02:32:34):
Yeah, and this campaign worked specifically because of the Christian
rights willingness to use physical violence, property destruction, and threats
against workers to achieve their goals. That is why Target caved,
because enough of their employees were feeling threatened, enough of
their displays were being destroyed and ransacked. No one was
held accountable because they're not going to arrest these people

(02:32:56):
for the stuff. And that's what causes to really have
any level of success.

Speaker 8 (02:33:01):
Now.

Speaker 5 (02:33:02):
During Pride Month back in twenty twenty three, Starbucks union
members began coming forward saying that Starbucks and store managers
weren't letting employees put up their usual Pride decorations, telling
workers that it was a safety concern, citing recent incidents
at Target and the manufactured about light controversy. Now Starbucks
Corporate claimed that they made no policy changes regarding pride decorations,

(02:33:22):
but that quote, retail leaders continued to work with store
teams to find ways to celebrate their communities, keeping in
mind our safety standards unquote. So I think this was
more up to kind of like local ownership and local management.
The union publicized confirmed instances of managers not letting workers
wear pride pins or put up flags, and then in
early June, a regional director ordered a collection of one

(02:33:46):
hundred stores across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri to throw out
pride decorations from previous years and were barred from putting
up any pride related decor inside stores. The union claims
that there was workers in a total of twenty one
states that were not allowed to put up pride decorations.
And I think for the Daily Wire hosts that are

(02:34:08):
pushing this sort of stuff, and especially Michael Knowles, especially
Matt Walsh, their motive is deeply theological for this, But
for the Daily Wire, this is deeply economical because all
of this also serves as free advertising for the Daily
Wire and it builds the personal brand of their hosts,
which is the very thing that Jeremy Boring was trying

(02:34:30):
to get started with Ben Shapiro back during Truth Revolt.
This was his whole idea was building up the personal
brand of these of these right wing media figures, and
all of this anti queer stuff provides really, really great
marketing to propel these one time very niche figures into
actual national spotlight. Do you know what else deserves to

(02:34:53):
be put into the spotlight, Robert.

Speaker 2 (02:34:56):
Now, that's a crime. All of my ideas are to
suggest crime. Let's just move on.

Speaker 5 (02:35:01):
Let's just let's you know, I think ads deserves huh.
There we go the spotlight. Great, all right, we are back.
It's once again time to talk about the Daily Wire

(02:35:24):
Plus and their and their hit new streaming service. So
when Jeremy Boring announced the Daily Wire Plus back in
twenty twenty two, the early marketing was made in response
to the Disney Company having very very very very slight
pushback on Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill. Now, a big

(02:35:47):
part of the Daily Wire Plus announcement was about how
Disney has been woke afying children's TV shows, and so
the Daily Wire decided to position itself as a safe
alternative media hub for conservative families. I'm going to play
a short clip from the announcement.

Speaker 9 (02:36:04):
There is unbelievable kids content in the market. The beauty
of kids content is that, unlike adult content, there's always
new kids and they go back.

Speaker 3 (02:36:12):
And watch it.

Speaker 9 (02:36:13):
So there's an unbelievable library of content. Most of it's
at Disney, let's be honest. But it's not that the
content isn't great. It's that you can't trust the platform.
You can't put your kids in front of a classic
piece of Disney content because you don't know that the
very next thing that plays won't be that not so
secret gay agenda that teaches your daughter that she's a boy.

(02:36:34):
That's why we have to have Daily wire Plus. So
that is what they're framing the Daily wire Plus ass
That's why the Daily wire Plus is important. Also, I
love how he said that kid's content is so profitable
because there keeps being kids, unlike adult content, which doesn't

(02:36:55):
make any sense because.

Speaker 2 (02:36:57):
Kids we stopped a but like a plague hit, it
doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah, that's like a
reverse Children of Men sort of deal. Anyway, God, what
a mess that would be man. That's not a bad
idea for a movie. Just people keep making more babies,
but they never grow up. So just like a dwindling

(02:37:19):
number of adults and infinite babies. That's not bad, not
a bad idea.

Speaker 5 (02:37:25):
This is why I like watching Jeremy Boring because there's
so many moments like this, because he's so not charismatic,
but his complete void just makes I just can't stop
staring into the void.

Speaker 2 (02:37:41):
Yeah, I already just listening to thirty seconds of him.
I've had an idea for a multimillion dollar adaptation, gritty
adaptation of the rug Rats. I think we could, really
we can make a lot of money with this.

Speaker 5 (02:37:53):
So a press release put out by The Daily Wire
itself went into more detail about the company's child content initiative.
Now I'm gonna read this, this is a direct quote quote.
On Wednesday evening, the Daily Wire's co CEO and god King,
Jeremy Boring, announced that the Daily Wire company town Hall

(02:38:17):
that the company will invest a minimum of one hundred
million dollars over the next three years into a line
of live action and animated children's entertainment on its streaming
platform unquote, and that that term God King is constantly
how Jeremy refers to himself, which I guess is supposed
to be a joke, but the fact that he does

(02:38:37):
it at all is is is the actual joke that
the fact that he just calls himself the God King
is what a what a perfect look into the soul
of just a completely dead man. Yeah, he the God
King of the Daily Wire. That's that's been like rewritten

(02:38:57):
in like deadline variety. Actual publications have been forced to
write the God King Jeremy boring anyway. So to start
this child content initiative, Jeremy brought some writers from Netflix's
Veggietails and The Babylon Bee to head up their kid's content.

(02:39:17):
I have a picture in my script here that Robert
can see of Eric Brand's gum, which is a great name.

Speaker 2 (02:39:24):
Yeah, that is an amazing name.

Speaker 5 (02:39:26):
Who is the co creator of the first Daily Wire
kids show, Chip Chilla and Robert. Do you want to
describe what's in this picture of Eric?

Speaker 2 (02:39:35):
Yeah, Well, there is a heavy set man wearing a
T shirt that is, to be frank a little tighter
than is comfortable. He's got a red beard, he has
sunglasses on. It looks like right, up above his hairline.
A massive Confederate flag lines the wall behind him, and
he appears to be casually pointing a handgun at his

(02:39:56):
penis at his dick. Yes, yes, can't tell if it's
fingers through the trigger guard, but I hope so.

Speaker 5 (02:40:02):
Yeah. So that is the co creator of Chipchilla, which
we will we will get to in a sec Now,
I don't know this.

Speaker 2 (02:40:11):
Also, there are four to six moist spots on his
shirt and it does not It doesn't. It's not a
flattering look. I'm not body shaming the man. I'm just
saying there are four to six moist spots on his shirt,
and I wouldn't want to be filmed with with that
many moist spots on my shirt while pointing a gun
at my dick in front of a Confederate flag.

Speaker 1 (02:40:33):
Now.

Speaker 5 (02:40:34):
I don't know if this is either despite or because
of The Daily Wire's constant attacks on how Disney has
a gay agenda, But The Daily Wire did manage to
acquire some talent from Disney. In August of twenty twenty two,
they recruited the showrunner of the Emmy winning animated series
Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, Chris Sonnenberg to be the Senior VP

(02:40:56):
of Animation Development and Production at The Daily Wire. Now
they most likely got this guy the Jeremy Borings and
Sonnenberg's mutual friend Zachary Levi, who again was in was
in Boring's first movie, and Zachary Levi also starred as
Flinn Ryder Entangled and This and This Tangled animated series
for the Disney Channel. So I'm guessing this is how

(02:41:19):
this connection was made. But yeah, so this this guy
who was actually like a very successful, like mainstream showrunner
for animated animated shows, some somehow decided to agree to
get hired by The Daily Wire. And this is this
is now his jobs overseeing the animated production for chip Chilla.

Speaker 2 (02:41:38):
Yeah, which is the Bluey knock off. I mean, yes,
I get it, among other things. There's been a lot
of layoffs and animation. I have no doubt that a
number of people who don't align ideologically but are desperate
for a job and just more morally flexible than others
are going to wind up working for this project.

Speaker 5 (02:41:56):
Yeah. Yeah, So this past October, the Daily Wire's multi
year initiative to create a slate of children's programming finally
had something to show. In another live streamed announcement, Jeremy
Boring ranted about how Disney is using their parent trusted
brand to quote indoctrinate children into the LGBTQIA cult unquote. Now,

(02:42:23):
while he praised Walt Disney as an American entrepreneur, Jeremy
Boring derided the current state of the Disney Company as
quote pushing all of the worst excesses of the woke left,
including paying for employees abortions, promoting anti racism training end quote,
going to war on behalf of the left wing social
policy in Florida. Unquote. Boring framed Disney's quite tame political

(02:42:49):
stances as a huge cultural loss for conservatives. And here's
a part of that announcement.

Speaker 10 (02:42:56):
It would be impossible to overstate just how big a
loss this is for Americans. Wuper even basic reality, Disney
controls the greatest content library ever created. Their cultural reach,
particularly with children, is beyond anything that's ever existed. Recognizing
the scope of this loss, the Daily Wire announced that
we would spend one hundred million dollars over three years
to begin our own kids entertainment company, and today, on

(02:43:18):
the one hundredth anniversary of the day Walt Disney founded
his company. I'm proud to announce the launch of ours,
introducing bent Key and Entirely New Companies for The Daily Wire,
a company dedicated to creating the next generation of timeless
stories to transport kids into a world of adventure, imagination,
and joy.

Speaker 5 (02:43:36):
Okay, okay, so bent bent Key, Robert, how do you
feel about one? The name, the name bent Key, and
the and the the bent Key logo.

Speaker 2 (02:43:51):
The bent Key logo looks like a flaccid penis.

Speaker 5 (02:43:56):
He does kind of look like a flacid penis. Y.

Speaker 2 (02:43:59):
I don't know. It's not an appealing name. You know.
One thing you've got to say for Walt Disney, and
I guess it's impossible to say. Like my head says,
there's something just kind of inherently attractive about the last
name Disney. Yeah, but like made it always a good brand.
But maybe if, like, if he'd been named Bluffo, would
it have worked? Would Bluffo Entertainment be the cultural powerhouse

(02:44:23):
that it became. I can't even we can't answer Disney's
such a thing. You can't answer it even.

Speaker 5 (02:44:29):
Yeah, they could have gone with a boring entertainment. But
I guess they.

Speaker 2 (02:44:33):
Yeah, that was not gonna happen. Bluffo's a better one
than boring.

Speaker 5 (02:44:37):
But yeah, bent keys. That's the word bent and the
word key, and yeah, the logo is this lowercase B
with a little droopy arm connecting to the letter K.

Speaker 2 (02:44:49):
Yeah, which doesn't really look like a key, but does
look a little bit like an abstracted penis. You've got
the B part kind of forming the head. You've got
the ties of the key are two ball. I would
have given it three times if I was making the key,
just so it didn't look like balls.

Speaker 4 (02:45:07):
Ah.

Speaker 5 (02:45:08):
Well, do you know what else is a really important
announcement that we have for our audience now, it's these
products and services that support this podcast to pay close attention.
This is crucial information about the fight for America and
to secure our values. Okay, all right, we are back

(02:45:40):
back to talk about bent Key Entertainment, the new hit
streaming service that your kids can enjoy. So the Daily
Wire Kids content used to be under the banner of
just Daily Wire Kids or DW Kids, right, and the
choice to rebrand, even with a name as silly as

(02:46:02):
bent Key, I think is actually one of their smarter
moves here. They recognize that The Daily Wire is a
very politically charged and possibly limiting title if they want
to create a growing children's media company. Now Ever, since
what is a Woman and up to their most recent
releases like Ladyballers, the name the Daily Wire has actually

(02:46:22):
been hidden or not included in like legal contracts and
forms when people are signing up to these projects. So
I think bent Key allows them to cast the widest
net possible to not only you get people to buy
their service, but also to get people to collaborate with
them on media. And it also like it also works
to attract parents that might not even be aware of

(02:46:44):
what the Daily Wire is. It's just this new kids
streaming service company. And also bent Key Ventures also happens
to be the name of The Daily Wire's parent company,
so that's probably why they picked it. I still don't
know what bent Key means, but it's also the name
of the parent company for The Daily Wire, which is

(02:47:04):
probably the name they're gonna use for a lot of
like their contracts. And they're trying to like get like
actors and like producers to sign into their stuff, because
whenever someone sees the Daily Wire on something, if they're
smart at all they'll be like, absolutely not. But if
the word bent key is on there instead, maybe that
won't raise as many red flags. So the new child

(02:47:27):
focused app is available for only ninety nine dollars a year.
Hell hell of a steal. Wow And at launch included
one hundred and fifty episodes across eighteen different shows, four
of which were produced in house, with new episodes airing
every Saturday morning. Their flagship show, Chipchilla is about a

(02:47:50):
family of homeschooled chinchillas. Now, some have pointed out that
this appears to be a blatant conservative ripoff of the
very popular kid show Bluey. Yes, and I have I
have a picture comparing Blue and Chip Chilla.

Speaker 2 (02:48:07):
Here the same fucking animation style.

Speaker 5 (02:48:09):
Yeah except except. I think this also shows that if
you've seen any of the Blue art, you can compare
it to the Chip Chilla art. They do look similar
in like color palette, but there is a massive difference
in like the appealing design of Blue, which actually looks
pretty good versus the the design of the Chip Chilla

(02:48:30):
characters just looks slightly off it. It looks kind of
like they're all on like half a tab of acid
versus Yeah, versus Bluey looks like has like pretty good
character design like it has it has a lot of
it has a lot of range for like expressions versus
everyone in chip Chilla just all has the same like
a wide eyed look.

Speaker 2 (02:48:50):
Pretty widely considered to be like one of the better
children's animated shows. That's that's just existed.

Speaker 5 (02:48:58):
Yeah, so somehow, somehow the Blue Dog Show must have
been too woke. So instead in the Daily Wires version,
the kids are all homeschooled and operate as like a
stereotypical nuclear family. Mm hmm, so this was This was
the first show they announced, but they have others. Their

(02:49:19):
other original content includes a show where a middle aged
woman talks to a dog puppet.

Speaker 2 (02:49:25):
God So yeah, lamb Chop okay.

Speaker 5 (02:49:28):
And two other original live action shows star child actors
that teach fitness and history to kids. And all of
between all of the Daily Wire original content I've watched.
The thing I feel most uncomfortable about is the amount
of child actors who've been forced into doing this, who
don't know anything about The Daily Wire or politics. They're
just these poor kids who have now been forced to

(02:49:50):
participate in this like evil machine. Now I'm going to
play a one minute, one minute trailer for Robert. I'm
not going to play it for the audience here because
you don't need to just hear this add but you
will hear our reactions afterwards. So here's for Robert. Here
is the trailer for bent Key. Oh God, how'd you
feel about the bent Key trailer? Robert?

Speaker 2 (02:50:13):
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll see if it
takes off. I'm sure it could be a profitable business,
right yeah, yeah, yeah, in terms of capturing the wider
cultural market, I don't see it being a Disney level
success or even like a Nickelodeon level success. I'm looking
at it right now on Twitter. It's got four hundred
and ninety likes and six hundred something thousand views. So again,

(02:50:37):
I can see them getting enough downloads to make this
maybe worthwhile enough. If they're spending thirty million or more
a year on production, that is going to be kind
of hard, especially given like bandwidth costs and shit to
I don't know, we'll say, yeah, I'm surprised if it's
able to be a functional business. I don't think. I
don't see anything on there that makes me think, oh

(02:50:58):
this is kids are going to fall in love with
this shit. Most of these, most great like children's networks
and children's like entertainment companies, were driven by iconic successes
that like absolutely took over and were like dominant culturally.
You think about like in the early nineties, shit like Aladdin, right,

(02:51:22):
and like or The Lion King, how fucking everywhere and
how a generation before you had, you know, the earlier
generation of Disney animated movies. You think about stuff like
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or like the Uh. That
kind of stuff was was not just it was dominant
among kids, but it also like adults continue to watch

(02:51:42):
it for generations. And I've never run into anybody outside
of weird right wings, outside of not even weird right
wing circles. I've never run out into anybody who has
not work for The Daily Wire talking about these shows.

Speaker 5 (02:51:53):
Yes, and I think there's a few things about that.
I think One, they don't need kids to like it.
They only need parents to pay the annual.

Speaker 2 (02:52:02):
Fee, yeah, for it to make sense as a business,
for it to do culturally what they want rather more
as required.

Speaker 5 (02:52:09):
At least a few years ago, they were pulling in
over one hundred million dollars in revenue per year. And
one thing that Daily Wire has shown is that they
are kind of playing the long game with this sort
of stuff. They're not looking for short term profit. They're
looking to slowly build dominance in this industry, mostly to
just fulfill Jeremy and Ben's dreams of working in Hollywood.

(02:52:31):
Like that's all this is, is that they're trying to
fill their childhood dreams of making movies. So all of
this is just being put towards making industry connections to
be able to actually just make TV and films like that.
That's all this is actually for. So which leads us
to the most ambitious upcoming bent Key production, a live

(02:52:53):
action fairy tale adaption written by Jeremy Boring in response
to Disney's own upcoming remake of their class film snow White.

Speaker 10 (02:53:03):
The company Disney found it doesn't agree with their founder
and visionary they're remaking their own iconic film nearly one
hundred years later. They've decided to make some key changes.
Their lead actress the new snow White, Rachel Ziegler, has
summed it up saying, quote, I just mean it's no
longer nineteen thirty seven. We absolutely wrote a snow White
that she's not going to be saved by the prince,

(02:53:24):
and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.
She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be,
and the leader that her late father told her she
could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.
While Disney still uses Walt's name, they've all but abandoned
his legacy. Instead of telling stories about timeless truth what
the ancient fairy tales were all about, Disney's new snow

(02:53:44):
White is an apology for their past and will expose
children to the popular but destructive lies of the current moment.
Which is why, in addition to announcing the launch of
our Kids Entertainment Company, I also want to announce today
that company's first live action feature film, story about a
princess and a prince, about beauty and vanity, about love
and its power to raise us from death to life.

(02:54:07):
It's our own peration of an ancient fairy tale. It's
coming in twenty twenty four, and it's called So.

Speaker 5 (02:54:14):
Before I play the rest of the trailer for Robert,
there is a few funny things about this clip that
I just played for the audience as well. Mostly when
he's describing like the new Disney snow White, it's like
a very like sensible message that the lead actor was
talking about. He's like, this is horrible, imassion.

Speaker 2 (02:54:32):
I also don't even think it's a great message. Like
it's a very conservative message that like this woman is
born to lead and it is about her finding her
place in the bread, in the hierarchy of her state.
Like that's a pretty conservative message. They just hate it
because a Walm set it.

Speaker 5 (02:54:49):
Yes, but now will I will play you the very brief,
like thirty second trailer based on like this one thing
they've shot.

Speaker 3 (02:55:02):
One super.

Speaker 2 (02:55:05):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (02:55:08):
So bad, a tale of typeless truth.

Speaker 2 (02:55:12):
Prince would come wow, little on the nose. Oh my god,
she's even got a basket of red apples, the kind
of apples that don't exist anywhere but a gene engineered farm.

Speaker 5 (02:55:30):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (02:55:32):
Oh and it's clearly snow white. Oh my god. Yes,
ah fuck.

Speaker 5 (02:55:39):
So I actually I actually do want to play that
for the audience because it's just so nunny.

Speaker 2 (02:55:43):
You keep that in there. That's that's good because like
the song they've got in there is like completely without wonder.
It's just like once upon a time a principal come
or some shit. She's like in the woods picking apples
that are like a color of red that you don't
even see in the like that not a natural read
at all, just profoundly off putting, in weird. So one

(02:56:06):
hundred and seventy seventeen thousand views, So I don't know,
we'll see if this beats the original snow White or
whatever snow White real actors and writers are making.

Speaker 5 (02:56:17):
So this is This is snow White and the Evil Queen,
And I'm not sure if you pick this up. This
is this is starring failed actor and the Daily Wire's
own gen Z female clone of Ben Shapiro, Brett Cooper
as snow White. It's that other Daily Wire host that
looks like a weird female version of Ben Shapiro is

(02:56:41):
starring as Snowing and it all just looks like really
bad cosplay, like the it is. It was quite something.
So that is that is their first bent Key upcoming
original movie. So I'm sure everyone's gonna be excited for
that one. And like it seems the entire bent Key

(02:57:01):
strategy is to either be so banal that it appeals
to like unassuming parents who don't know what The Daily
Wire is, or to create these like fake culture war
outrage moments to scare parents into thinking that woke corporations
are trying to turn their kids gay or or trying
to tear kids into like feminists, and the only way

(02:57:23):
to stop that is to give The Daily Wire one
hundred dollars a year to watch failed screenwriters and actors
poorly imitate better pieces of film and TV.

Speaker 2 (02:57:33):
I think the trouble they're going to have here is
that there's a I think a discrepancy between what would
do the best job of achieving what they claim as
their social mission right, which is incepting conservative ideas into
mass culture by taking over pop entertainment, and they're what

(02:57:53):
is clearly their more important goal, which is making a
lot of money. Because the best way to make a
lot of money, and I think they there's a good
chance they can succeed building a content network for their
weirdo fans that cost one hundred dollars a year, But
if they want to reach the most people, the best
thing they do would be to get to a point
where they can sell their videos streaming to Netflix and

(02:58:15):
the like. But that doesn't keep people in their walled
garden and also probably is less profitable over time than
having a monopoly on this shit. And so I don't
know what they're going to choose to do. That'll be
interesting to watch, but yeah, I mean it's the kind
of thing is a business. This could work for sure.
We'll see about the other stuff.

Speaker 5 (02:58:36):
And again, so this is this is only half of
their efforts, because on top of the one hundred million
dollars put towards children's program thing which has resulted in
bent Key, the Daily Wire Plus was also putting an
additional one hundred million dollars into more adult oriented entertainment. Now,
most of the Daily Wires production effort has been going
into adapting the Christian Arthurian novels The Pendragon Cycle live

(02:59:00):
action seven episode mini series directed by Jeremy Boring. The
upcoming fantasy series just wrapped filming in Europe this past fall.
The cast is mostly made up of like sealist actors.

Speaker 2 (02:59:11):
Never never, I don't know where they made the scarson,
but never has a production seemed more Croatia than this.

Speaker 5 (02:59:18):
It's stilled in Hungary, in Italy.

Speaker 2 (02:59:20):
So oh my god, I was close. I was close.

Speaker 5 (02:59:24):
There you go there you go.

Speaker 2 (02:59:25):
Ah, Okay.

Speaker 5 (02:59:27):
The cast is made up of mostly Like sealst actors,
some Daily Wire staff, and actors from small roles in
like Game of Thrones and The Witcher. So this is
coming out later this year. It's based on this series
of novels that came out in the in the two thousands.
It's it's it's like an Arthurian story, but set slightly
before the rise of like England. It's it's during like

(02:59:51):
the fall of like British Rome. I think is what
they call it now.

Speaker 2 (02:59:54):
Guys, I'm sorry. We all got to see a great
Arthurian cycle move recently, and something tells me this one's
gonna have a lot less of a guy coming into
a scarf.

Speaker 5 (03:00:06):
You don't think you'll think this'll be as good as
The Green Knight.

Speaker 2 (03:00:09):
I don't think we're gonna get a real fucking clear
shot of one guy's come in a scarf. I'll tell
you that.

Speaker 5 (03:00:14):
I trust director Jeremy Boring's vision, ah man. But the
project I am the most excited about is that The
Daily Wire has acquired exclusive rights to adapt in Rand's
Atlas Shrugged into a television series. Oh good, Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (03:00:38):
That's like that's like being an opponent of the Nazis
in nineteen forty one and hearing that they've just invaded
the Soviet Union, Like, oh thank god, Okay, okay, we're
on the down swing of this one. Boys.

Speaker 5 (03:00:52):
I am I am so excited to see the libertarian
wet dream that's gonna be this Atlas Shrugged TV show.
There is no one else I would rather adapt to
Atlas Shrugged than the Daily Wire parpacouse.

Speaker 2 (03:01:06):
Antlas Shrug is like famously like the least filmable thing
of all time, like it's it's.

Speaker 5 (03:01:12):
The scout Heads actually could be like a fine movie,
but Atlas, I don't.

Speaker 2 (03:01:17):
I'm I'm excited to think you can make Atlas Shrugged
and do I hope I hope they do shot for
shot that one like seventy page speech that what's his
name goes on? Oh yeah, that's that's what I really want.

Speaker 5 (03:01:31):
Ah. So yeah, I am actually excited to excited to
not like hate watch, but like curiously staring into the
void watch their Atlas, their Atlas Shrug show. But the
one Daily Wire plus series that I am not very
much excited about is an upcoming adult animated a scripted
series created by Adam krolla entitled Mister Burchum.

Speaker 2 (03:01:55):
God in Heaven. Yeah, I saw ads for this one.

Speaker 5 (03:01:59):
Yeah, this show's description sounds like the most old man
yells at cloud premise I've ever heard. Quote. Mister Burcham
attempts to navigate a world he doesn't understand or approve of.
He's befuddled by his gaming streamer's son Eddie, annoyed at
his selfie taking snowflake students, and is constantly at war

(03:02:19):
with the school district's appointed Jedi Justice Equality, Diversity and
Inclusion officer, mister CARPONSEI UNQ. So that's the description of
the show, which I don't know about you. That sounds
like a horrible time. The cast includes Corolla as mister Burcham,
Magan Kelly Roseenne Barr, conservative comedian Tyler Fisher, Daily Wire

(03:02:43):
hosts Brett Cooper and Cana Owens, comedian Alonso Broden, a
former Amy Schumer, writer Kyle Dunningen, and unfortunately Danny Trejoe
and Patrick Warburton.

Speaker 2 (03:02:57):
That last one hurts, that last one, I know. That's
I know.

Speaker 3 (03:03:04):
All sad.

Speaker 5 (03:03:06):
Let's I am going to play this for the audience because, oh.

Speaker 2 (03:03:10):
My I guess I'm not surprised that being in Venture
Brothers didn't pay enough for him to avoid this.

Speaker 5 (03:03:16):
Yeah, and apparently Warburton is a conservative. I am interested
to see what some of these people were told before
they agreed to this, because I know the Daily Player's
name has been hidden in a lot of contracts.

Speaker 2 (03:03:28):
Well, and Adam Carol is a real comedian, Like I
didn't say good, but like he is somebody who established
a career in Hollywood. Yeah, I get it. So and
it looks like fucking Brickleberry and all those other like
dog shit, cheap shit cartoons.

Speaker 5 (03:03:44):
Yeah, it looks bad. Let's let's let's have fun listening
to this though.

Speaker 2 (03:03:51):
Jumping in the first one speed.

Speaker 3 (03:03:54):
Action Sawbucks looking a little chubby.

Speaker 5 (03:03:56):
Woman, amazing voice acting by making Kelly dogs are supposed
to eat meat.

Speaker 2 (03:04:02):
They're just sentence of wolves.

Speaker 5 (03:04:04):
You ever see a vegan wolf on the Nature Channel.

Speaker 2 (03:04:07):
I'm a vegan, very very funny.

Speaker 5 (03:04:10):
US closers, ladies, listen up, Oh my god.

Speaker 10 (03:04:15):
Don't do anything stupid ear than last year.

Speaker 2 (03:04:17):
I'm a heteronormative cisgender white male.

Speaker 5 (03:04:21):
For which I apologize. I'm black and that used to
be enough, but I'm also bilingual and a'm non binary.

Speaker 6 (03:04:28):
Where the Army we drink more before nine am, the
Navy pukes do all day. He rubbed all the fur
off his emotional support far the damn thing looked.

Speaker 2 (03:04:36):
Like a four legged Rosanne bar.

Speaker 7 (03:04:40):
Oh God, charity and work two words that should never
go together, like women and opinions.

Speaker 5 (03:04:50):
They're salting and make me dizzy. Or it just did
find a thing to fix my gaming chair.

Speaker 2 (03:04:55):
When I was on the construction site, my chair was
a five gallon bucket.

Speaker 5 (03:05:00):
It was also my toilet.

Speaker 2 (03:05:04):
See, it's what's amazing about that all of the Megan
Kelly and can like terrible voices character to them. Adam
Carolla sounds like a parody of himself. He's going too
hard into gruff. It just it's maybe maybe if I
see the show, it'll be better because it may just
have picked some lines where he was doing that, but
there's not much character to his voice. What I will

(03:05:25):
say is I hate that he's in this. But Patrick
Burton still a pro every man. That man can do
a line. Read, That man knows how to do a
fucking line read.

Speaker 5 (03:05:35):
No, It's weird how many of these are like actual
comedians who have been who are being forced to read
like non binary and they're like, they don't know what
non binary means. They're just being forced to read a
script written by Ben Shapiro and they're like, one of
these words, it doesn't matter, just keep going.

Speaker 2 (03:05:55):
Yeah, get your paycheck. I don't know, it's it's it's
a bummer.

Speaker 8 (03:06:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:06:01):
I It's weird because, like Adam Carolla, I've never felt
anything positive towards or particularly negative towards until recently. I
guess now I'm on the negative side. Even with this,
I still feel overall good about Patrick Warburt, and he's
just given me too much. Yeah, it'll take a lot.

Speaker 5 (03:06:21):
So this this, that is most of what I wanted
to talk about, because the only other Daily Wire project
I have anything to say about is the movie that
came out a few months ago, Lady Ballers, and I
I could not, I could not fit my Lady Baller's
thoughts into this episode because that is that is gonna
be its own, its own special event.

Speaker 2 (03:06:43):
That's that's gonna be your Fittigan's wake.

Speaker 5 (03:06:47):
Yes, So a few weeks ago I watched it for
the first time. I took a lot of notes. I'm
gonna watch it again here, and we are gonna go
deep into the production of this movie. This thing was shot.
This this just just a peak of of of of
of the writing quality you're you're about to hear about.
The whole strip is written in two weeks. It was.
It was shot in like a month. It's it's it

(03:07:09):
stars the only Daily Wire hosts. Every single actor they
approached for this turned it down because they're like, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (03:07:17):
Not, no, fuck this shit.

Speaker 5 (03:07:20):
And it is a It is a a insightful, insightful
look into the soul of Jeremy Boring. He wrote, directed, produced,
and starred in this thing. It was shot right in Nashville, Tennessee.
So that is gonna be after the weekend, this is
We're gonna have a special episode of me diving into
what makes Lady Baller's tick and is it any funny?

(03:07:43):
The answer is not really, But we will we will
go into the production of this movie, the way this
movie tries to work, and what we can learn about
how the Daily Wire is going to try to be
producing these sorts of comedy films and try to insert
itself into into the entertainment industry. So that will be
that that will be the start of next week are
special on Lady Ballers, any any any closing thoughts on

(03:08:07):
on on bent Key or or the Daily Wire plus
as as as as the Daily Wire enters the streaming market.

Speaker 2 (03:08:13):
Robert Patrick, you don't have to do this, like, just
just let us know you need help. We can take
care of you, you know, Patrick, We we love you.

Speaker 5 (03:08:25):
If you need help with the mortgage, we can, we
can crowd fund.

Speaker 2 (03:08:29):
Yeah, we can make this work, buddy, We can make
this work.

Speaker 5 (03:08:35):
Anyway. Well, that does it for us today. I hope
you're reding something about Jeremy Boring the most forgettable man
with the most accurate name.

Speaker 2 (03:08:45):
Yep, all right, guys. Bye, Hey, We'll be back Monday
with more episodes every week from now until the heat
death of the Universe.

Speaker 1 (03:08:57):
It could Happen here as a production of pool Zone Media.
One more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Coolzonmedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.