Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 115

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

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or wherever you get your podcast. Coolza Media. 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 could happen here, a podcast that is about things falling apart are dystopian now and tomorrow.

And for the last several days, it has been heavily about the consumer electronics show, which is a huge event every year where 120 to 150,000 people flood into Las Vegas to show off all of the new gadgets and to have big, fancy panels on the future 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 a AI assistance, Microsoft's

is co-pilot. And they're doing this because laptop sales have stalled. A lot 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 AI immediately, they can get folks to buy a new raft of machines. Outside of that, as I'm sure you're aware with interest rates where they are companies, tech companies, particularly startups are having trouble getting VC money, venture capital money, invest it in them. There's this kind of desperate hope that by plugging AI constantly, they can fill in the gap. Today, we have probably in a week or two, we're going to have, be putting out a long investigation based on a number of panels we went to with executives from Google, from weirdly enough, McDonald's, from Adobe, from Nvidia, from the Consumer Electronics Association,

and multiple government agencies, including DHS, on what they see is 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 after catching a 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. Hello, Tavia. Howdy, everybody. 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 CoolZone Media Tech-Focused show, Better Offline, Ed Zitron Ed what go on? Hello, yes, I'm sorry. Hi.

Yeah, hit my head on the way in. Yeah, it's a truly awful show this year. 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 2021, 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.

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 laptops, smartphones, speakers, connected gadgets, autonomous cars and shit that we've been seeing for years and they really haven't jumped forward much.

But 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're, you're, 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. What is your favorite or the first AI product you want to get into today? I want to talk about the rabbit, the rabbit R1. Oh, God, yes. 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 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 360 degree camera, which

can based on the extremely awkward and agonizing hour long demo, 25 minute, but on me it felt like an hour. It can look at a picture of Rick Hasley and start very and after several agonizing seconds stop playing, never give you up. It can also, it claims to a series of nuanced actions like you can say, it claims, do a series of nuanced actions like you can say, get me a cab home and also put on my tunes and also change the air conditioner to 74 degrees, all in one sentence. Now you may think, why do I need to spend $200

on a device to do this? And the answer is you don't. You do not need to. This thing looks cool. On some level, I'm just glad we're getting you tattooed. 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 series that can use at, it can use Uber, 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 route of like top 10 things to do in London.

And it's just very weird because all of these tech guys who they very loudly claim their free spirits, their independent, they're not controlled 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 we were discussing the different articles about this and people trying to argue other thing these three says, 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. Pull out my phone, I'm on Uber, right? I pull out my phone, I pull up GrubHub, I order food. Yeah. 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. 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. I also do love the idea of like completely ruining the point of signal, which is an encrypted, extremely secure messaging 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. They sold out and they made $2 million. $10 million of them, or $10,000, sorry. It's just, and it's, I've read, I read like 11 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 rat brain says, oh, tech 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 that if it's useless. But on top of that, I just don't think controlling my life with voices that useful. I don't like that. 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. But 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, in addition to the current problems I have with privacy on my smartphone, I am adding another company and another device and another set of security, potential security flaws to it.

But on top of that, the thing they have failed to explain anywhere, no journalists apparently has interrogated 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 date of attention policy is very strange, but where is this crap all happening? 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, asked 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 company's hate it when they hand off power from the user who will still be liable to another computer. 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 thing is just that like part of me kind of suspects and when you watch the video, we'll play a clip for a minute and 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, selling a shitload on preorder 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 hippos nuke gadget. Except 10,000 customers is actually not that many and I actually look forward to I really can't wait for like two months to pass people to get this

and someone to end up like sending the word penis to their all company slack because they wanted to order pizza. And on top of that, ordering a fly, ordering an Uber, these are actually really nuanced actions coming to Mandalay Bay tonight. 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 and what have you? With GrabHub, you need to do little bits. It's just most people don't order lunch. They order something for lunch. And I just don't... This whole thing just feels useless. 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 that after getting used to using it? Like, what are they going to know? 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. Yeah, it is kind of, because one of the things there was a CNET review that said, 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 talk 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 your life for you. 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 that 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 to like, life is so complex and scary. I want to hand 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 societal problem, but I think it is a weird problem with the group of people who are most excited to have a fucking rabbit. It seems like a sad thing to me that folks might only attend bars

or restaurants that are rated like 4.5 and above, that's decided by something else. And they don't get to have this experience of walking into the cious bar you've ever seen in your life and have maybe possibly a life-changing experience. I was just in South Korea. And we went to this fried chicken place that ended up being close. Actually, it 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 could not find any reviews for it. It was just a lip in 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 or better. But also they're like, I wish I could just say one thing and all of these things could happen for me. Same people, by the way 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've even called it dystopian, it's just weird and sad to me. Speaking of weird and sad, we're going to move on to the next product in a second. But first, I got to play everybody in case you haven't seen it or heard it. The CEO of Rabbit trying to rickroll the audience with his held device. Have you seen this, Garrison? Oh, okay, eyes on the screen everybody. So activate the eye, just double tap the button. Oh, funny thing you here, Rick!

Let me take a look! I'm never gonna give you up. I am now enjoying. What? Am I getting rigged in my own kennels? Let's move on to the next one. Alright, I have a question real quick. So what is the functionality he just activated?

Is it that you just put, you point the eye at something and it makes you choose an action? Yeah, the eye 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. Yeah, that seems like what happens if it sees certain people. Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, what happens if it sees Jeffrey? Yeah, place children screaming like what is, how is this thing work? Booking trips to Florida. thing work. Booking trips to Florida. Maybe it's respectable that they showed how bad the lag is because that moment where

there's quiet after he clicks on it is like it's loading, it's processing for a considerable period of time. And it's just also, I feel for the bloke because I know he was probably so excited to do this and he was like, I'm going to be Steve Jobs, but man, when you can't perform, you don't perform. Like, yeah, that's bad delivery. That, oh, that, did I just get Rick rolled in my own video? It was like that. I forget what the movie's called.

Oh, hi Mark. Yeah, it is. And obviously like English is his first language, but like, it's a performance. You like, you, you practice, right? You get coached and stuff because you're trying to represent your company. Oh, I tell you this from experience is, 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. Yeah, you bring in other people to do like that. Anyway, anybody, anyone's mind on the rabbit change, having seen that? Absolutely not.

Garrison has a look on their face. No, it's like... What I've always wanted in a tech gadget is be able to point a 360-5 degree camera at a picture of a musician and then wait 30 seconds and then have an AI Pick a random song of theirs. That's always what I wanted for the future. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's the dream of fucking Archimedes had that's right 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

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. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Why are we giving free advertising to Disney? Why are we? Why? Why? Because that movie was so close to being worth it.

That last 20 minutes. It's completely committed. It's completely committed. No, Nazi's machine gunning Roman Legionnaires was amazing. Pretty funny. Well, do you know who would have loved the ES? Our comedies probably. Yes.

He probably would have had a great time. What next? Yeah, Garrison, why don't you go? AI products, do we want to talk about? How about the pet one, Garrison? You saw that. All right, so I think I think me and Ed both saw a chat GPT for animals. Oh, God damn.

Which is not really what it is saying. It's like it scans a picture of your dog and then tries to tell you if it has any health problem that's based on that picture. You're not actually talking to your dog or anything. It just takes pictures of animals and then it analyzes it to tell you how the dog is feeling, blah, blah, blah, blah. I saw a product like this earlier at CES.

I saw a product like this last year. They're just calling it chat GPT because it's an AI name. It's a... It's hip, because people, they're hoping that that will make people spend money on. It was every CES I see something that begins to make me disassociate. And I walked past there and blow the chat GPT for, and my brain was just like, gant, cuz 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 hoped that these would just crack pots who were 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 were like, yeah, fuck it, yeah, you can't say it, he hates you. You can't seem radicalized, I'm afraid. See, there's a fun product in here, which is you sell to robes 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 pet's voice. That'd be so cool. You can have there, like, yeah, your cat's racist now.

Your dogs are Nazi. Like, this is the perfect product for HP Lovecraft. You put a love to this. Yes. No, if you gave me like the show Light to me, but for dogs on my phone, I would spend whatever you want a thousand dollars and I will 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 See a friend of mine. Oh, what's what's wrong, Ed?

Chat GBT said that I said that my dogs joined ISIS and I don't know how he did it, but he's been talking about a caliphate according to the app. I don't know what this app is bankrupting man. I pay four and a half thousand dollars for this app a month. I don't know why I need it. So, because so I 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 the help of Pena Sillin, I was able to return today to do one final walk. The check. GPT of antibiotics. That is exactly what my doctor said, actually. But I did swear revenge on CES. So I just walked around 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 poison Amy with strep throat. So the first really good thing is this, 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 AI image generation of this like extremely busty blonde woman in a latex suit.

But if you zoom in onto her fingernails, her fingernails are like sticking through the wrong side of her fingers. There. Oh my god. Oh my god. It's the woman's from, what, that one movie for, oh dammit, not skinned. The other, that was the woman where the alien was sexy and then she killed people and she had sex with them. It's the same thing. Yes. Terrifying. Yes. Rita's a call in and say what that is.

Yeah, it looks just like that. It says relax stick it in which is pretty funny So that that was pretty bad No, I respect that I respect that that's that's a baller move right there I get this is this is for a speaker company. It's like DJ girl friend in the shape. Oh, it's a it's a speaker in the shape of a girl No, it's just home theater speakers. It's just have a horrible AI generated woman as their spokesperson. I mean, I would buy it if it was DJ girlfriend though.

DJ girlfriend is a great idea for a product and might stop several mashings. AI has brought back sexism. Yeah. If you do DJ girlfriend right, you can stop at least one mashing. Finally, we have a real solution. Now, another product that won the CES 2024 Innovation Awards is in AI-powered coffee brewer and grinder system.

I'm just going to read the description from the coffee's been missing. That's right. I know we wake up every morning, make our little French press coffee. That's fine, but you know what could be 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 Burista Brew, coffee brewer and grinder system, a smart coffee system that tailors your brew to perfection with AI guided personalization, easily adjust brewing parameters for a custom cup. New expertise needed. Rate to track and refine your brews. Brew IQ, AI suggestions for your ideal taste.

Simplify with one touch favorites, elevate your coffee experience. Yeah, when I hear all that, the one thing I think is simplify. That's simple, the movie is spacious, by the way. Yeah. It's me. I love that movie.

One of the best HR Geiger art utilizations. Yeah, yeah. And easily the horniest movie of the 1990s. Which is high bar. So on this AI coffee maker, on the front, there's a little control panel with nine different settings that you can change because they're all on a graph. We have citrus, spice, nutty, fruity, balanced, cocoa, floral, herbal, and honey.

So you can, with the ease of a touch pad, start to customize your own AI coffee. So that is revolutionary. I'm gonna be getting one for Robert, this Christmas. Thank you, Garrison. I know. I've always thought, you know what I hate is the experience of exploring new flavors on my own 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. That's right. And I know a lot of people used to have you just brought something up that I think is relevant here. It's a Guardian article about an AI smoothie shop that opened in San Francisco well before CES. That is a combination of it's being driven forward with AI technology as well as 5G stuff that I think had opened up and then like three weeks later had shut down.

Oh, that's too bad. They were like a robot will pick the perfect smoothie for you. Well, I actually want to bring something out. So I love smoking me, I pellet smokers at home. And I saw a few times on this show, AI Grills. And I just looked up one called the brisk it, smart grill. And I was like, how could you possibly make a thing which is basically maintaining hot air in a tube

before I'm gonna off until the 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 skewers spicy? Or how do I see her meeting her at steak? I don't fucking know, why don't you learn to cook, you twant. Like, it's just like, 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.

That's the thing with a lot of these AI solutions will call them as I feel like they're robbing people of real experiences. Yeah, for like, no, 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 pay phone, now you can connect with people everywhere. That's a clear benefit, right? There's downsides to it, obviously, but it'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 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 dollar AI device. I mean, some things's hard to learn, which brings me to the next product. That's smoking me, but. Well, it is. Well, it is. Something's hard to learn.

Kind of like parenting, right? Oh, good. Okay. Nice. You know what, Garrison, I'm proud of you. That was a good sex way. So AI parenting, especially with your infant child, this was also in the CES awards section,

so you know it's gonna be legit. I was able to see a demonstration of an AI baby crib that will shake your baby up and down based on facial expression analysis done by an AI. And I'm gonna show it here. So here is the cutting edge facial expressions. We have anger, disgust, 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. So to be clear, there is a protocol that I guess. The snow exists where... I'm gonna drop my phone there. There's protocol that's snow, which is like a for infants, and it notices when they're fussing and it kind of like lightly rocks them,

but the way it rocks them is so very light. It is very much a, this is what a mother would do with a brand new baby freshly baked. You don't wanna move into much. That one has like six pictures from the intro of light to me and a heart rate monitor. And it's like, yeah, yeah,, hand over your baby to AI. Great. Yeah, this product looks like a baby Maraca, the piece that you shaking, which is dependent on what you make. Pretty much. Well, I love it

also because like a real scandal, I think from the, I think it was in the 80s 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 save, especially for like a single parent or whatnot, like, you know, some people will need that. But I just worry. I worry that we're not all that far from our first and AI killed my baby. Well, you know, I think the real beauty of this product is usually when you have a newborn I just worry. I worry that we're not all that far from our first and AI killed my baby. You know, I think the real beauty of this product is usually when you have a newborn

maybe you have to like watch it all night, 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 like, you can like, go to the club. Yeah. Just leave the baby in the bed if it starts crying. Don't worry. The AI will take over.

We are on the verge of beds that can raise our children just like the venture brothers that's right and and those and those kids turned out fine they turned out great perfect specials really but i think luckily for you because i know none of us are babies anymore but we are all you know eventually going to get old hopefully uh... that's a that's a big it hopefully and there is air products that will also assist us as we get older using the same a i baby tech here

one of the one of the one of the places that mean robert stop by was called blue sky a i it spelled ridiculously offensively and they refused to do an interview. They were not happy. But I was able to get a pamphlet and they have an AI that I think they're mostly target 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 manifest

in the face or voice. So it's a facial scanning and voice scanning that uses AI to try to diagnose you with medical conditions. Specifically, the guy told us that it's useful for Alzheimer's and he realized we were journalists and then asked us to go away. And also says, but... Yeah, that's how you know you've got a good medical device. A good product, that's the ES.

Blue Sky uses a continuous approach, a parent of valiance and a rousal 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 a much less exact categorical representation. For example, excited, calm or angry.

Does it have horny? They do not have horny. Not that I can see. Look, if you know old people, one thing they never stop doing is fucking. No, 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 with 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 something similar to this already But just scanning your face when driving to tell you how you're feeling which is just quite fun It's I could talk about this again. What this 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 an dangerous situation to pick up 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 in the military. It can be very dangerous to retrieve people, much 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, and it looked like a fucking nightmare. It's just like, what, what are you think? Did you talk to, there's all sorts of guys who have been shot in combat.

Did you 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. So my first job was working on the character's 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&D, hired PR teams.

Everyone's done these big presentations without talking to a single fucking human being. It's so cool. It's so cool. How much waste there is at this show where not a single human soul. There is a completely different subject, I realize. There was like an AI-powered nail salon thing as well I saw. I'm like, that's definitely one where you didn't talk to, uh, talk to any woman though, because, first and foremost, in my experience, a little woman is scared of a new nail place for fucking up their hands. So are they gonna spend 800 god damn 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 in the stress of what home I've ever been the stressors break multiple times and I realize it may sound weird How can you break and the stress so I'm just built different but yeah, I can break it just like me and strap throat Unbelievable Just like me and Strip Throat. Unbelievable. So I do have one more product and then I'm... 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? So, we already talked about the handy, which is, you know, like, I can't- We sure did. But by all accounts, actually, like, works as intended. 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,

we'll talk about their jack off. That's professionalism. You have to respect it. Honestly, that was the most professional booth I saw the entirety of CES. They were really on point. If you are looking for a jack off machine, I can't recommend anything more highly.

Well, Robert, except for our next product, which is an AI power to jack off machine. Thank God. So this is called my Hixle. It is the first app. That's an appealing name. That's the name that sounds like sex. It is the first app for climax control

to incorporate AI. Now I'm gonna read through their really redefines edge technology, huh? I wanna 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 premature ejaculation is a serious problem for a lot of men.

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. This is basically like, what if an AI could teach you how to come slower? Yes.

And we have a six step layout here describing why my Hicksel is right for you. For the first step is secure and anonymized data collection. So you can get all of your coming data stored, but don't worry, it's secure. See my first question to that is, why is data on me masturbating being collected at all? Well, it could be because they're putting it towards an eight week training program.

No. So first and foremost, one of the first things on the website for this is just the words, happy sex here. Save $60 in my Hicksal Control, but happy sex here is going to be something I think about for a while. But also, it says, it has my Hicksal Care and my Hicksal Control, two different things. And then my Hicksal Academy. And sadly, you can't click on that because I've never wanted to know more about What how much material could there be? Unless a masturbation academy. Yeah, I thought they just called that eaten. I was a British public school job. It's okay

I made an edging joke earlier and nobody caught it Yeah, I There's one thing the eating boys do and they don't have sex. No, Mr. Bish. Yeah, sorry. Part of what I hate about this is its name is so clearly like trying to be respectful and like respectable and a 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. I mean, it's weird because like some of their, some of their free merch were labeled with stuff like download the app to control your loads. Ha ha ha ha ha!

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. So it's weird how they, yeah, how 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, two really, really good sentences. There's video feedback from our sexual health professionals. So after you come, you can get on a video chat and talk about it.

There we go. There we go. Looking good. It's the pillow talking add on. Love to be one of those people. As a guy, man, three minutes, you can do better than that. Come on. Do they you meant to encourage them?

Yeah, yeah. You meant to commiserate with them? Yeah, what is the goal here? Yeah, but also I cannot think of a single person I'd want to talk about that with. Yeah, I'm just imagining like the guy in there and be like, no, no, no, no, zoom in the camera a little more.

I want to see those ropes. Oh, yeah, that's not bad. That's not bad. Good consistency. Okay, let's move that over. Let's see his face again. Wow. Can we play that? My friend that your load management is very consistent.

And I think we're really missing is how much AI will system this because they claim that using cutting edge technology, my Hicksal control is the first solution to include AI and machine learning for climax control treatment, which is just really reassuring. So yeah, it basically looks like a flashlight that connects to your phone and it's an app

with anatomical realistic interior design and AI and secured it and an animal and anonymized data. I think this is really going to open up some avenues for sex workers. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, Tophia. 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 flashlight except the back end, like the front end that we unscrew the top and it's like a fake vagina looks like a flashlight except the back end, like the front end that we unscrewed the top and it's like a fake vagina, looks like a flashlight.

The back end looks like an incense diffuser, like someone decided these two products needed to be, like, what if you could fuck your aroma therapy bot? Finally. So that is most of 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? It's time to talk about Gnerd Eye. Okay, Gnerd. Gnerd?

Yes, you want to start us off about Gnerd? Okay, I guess we attended a panel. Which panel was it? That was the Dhs a i yeah that was that was the a i 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 hillass he's very insisted on that 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. That's even a whole episode of King of the Hill. One of the better episodes. Good times. So Gnert 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 to really focus on the fact that this was his quote unquote opus. His opus.

He said the word opus like five times. Gnerz what I'll be remembered by. 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 like the sea of khaki and blazers and things like that. Yeah, yeah, they had clearly never ordered a drone strike unlike our hero in Homeland Security. That's right.

One of them had a wide brimmed hat that was color matched to the Ginerg logo, which is pretty cool. What is Ginerg stand for? Ginerg stands for Generate. So I think it's actually just called Generate. They just took out the vowels. But this is going to be a three-day event or conference held in Arlington, Virginia.

They are claiming that it's going to have 200 speakers, 150 AI sessions, more than 500 startups, 150 partners, 100 investors, and around 5,000 attendees. They're trying to target enterprise governments, platforms, AI tools, AI builders, services, investors, startups, and media. That it's these three events held simultaneously. One's just called Gernert or Generation AI,

which is about about AI tech. It's about AI companies, classes, keynotes, funding, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is then Voice and AI, which is about AI language services, and there's also one for Guv AI, which is about public sector, and how the government's going to start integrating AI, or regulating AI. And they also have one for coding called code forward. And it's about where we can't just play the opening video, because the opening video had no voice.

There's no voice. I can read it though. 97 million new jobs in AI. 500 billion in annual AI spend by 2027. 250 billion in VC funding by 2025. Gnert generate for a new world and a new market. Gnert connects and forms, elevates and inspires. It all happens at Gnert's. And we cannot emphasize enough how they hyped up VC cash.

There was so much build up for VC cash. I have watched people who are dope sick by heroin with less jittery excitement in their hands and eyes. All right, so, not a bit about shit like this. So, just get a brief cursory lookup, Gennett. And it's connected confidence voice I and Gov I and Code Forward. And all of them are claiming the following. They're featuring GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI, Code ium, Tab9. Their thing on LinkedIn has 28 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 than that doing any of the project picture of my arsehole to get more than that But also I cannot find a single Person claiming to attend this despite them claiming 200 plus speakers 150 plus sessions 500 stops 150 partners 100 investors 5000 attendees I can't find a single bit of evidence that anyone is a investors 5,000 attendees, I can't find a single bit of evidence that anyone is a gunnerting around at all. And also, they claim to have three different conferences, Code Forward, Gov. AI, Voice AI, and of course, Gunnert AI. And I, and of course, all of these are part of the Gunnert AI beta experience. I don't know why you put beta on a computer.

These people are beta as hell. But also, why have you got beta on a conference? What are you doing? But also, featuring OpenAI and video Microsoft Google and Veritone, I'm gonna guess that they've got like a chat GPT open on a computer, an Nvidia GPU and something, Microsoft Word and they've used Google. And it's very strange because I don't know what this thing is.

I think what it is is some guys who have a degree of like some guys who 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 CES of AI, they can kind of force a place for themselves and also attract a bunch of suction up a bunch of money. I also found some of the speakers. You've got fellow called Adam Goldberg, who's an account director and head of Azure OpenAI and a label on the go-to-market team at OpenAI. They found a sales guy from OpenAI and then said they got some of an OpenAI. They got some of them JP Morgan, she leaves data and AI design.

These will fake jobs. These aren't real jobs. 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, generate a AI is gonna create maybe even trillions of dollars of value at some point. And you know, the synergy between Gen. TVI and data collection,

but also data silos, is gonna be truly, truly innovative and everyone's like, holy fucking shit. Whoa, holy shit, piss. And then they all post it on Twitter and they all forget it ever happened immediately. Yeah, we call that the Gennert dividend. We do call that the Gennert dividend. We do call that the Gennert dividend. So Gennert's being put on by this guy who runs this panel collection called Brands GPT

at CES. With a Z. No, no, no, no, no, no. Gareson. With a Z. It should be. I think me and Robert both went to one one or two of these brands GPT panels. This is the one where Robert got to yell like Google and Microsoft and get them mad.

I got no Google and McDonald's McDonald's is ahead of AI. Yes. Which is a thing. 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 Gnert instead of just running this brand's GPT at CES. So that's the background. It's done by mode V events that's mode in the letter V, 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 $500 billion in annual AI spending with $250 billion new VC cash investments, which is quite promising. 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. I want to leave you all with, well, before we've got one more thing, but before we get into that, which

will be fun, I want to talk about something sobering, which is that as you may get from this, nearly 100% of the AI use cases that we saw presented were either nonsense or incredibly vague. At these different that we had people from like, Nvidia and Adobe and whatnot, they wouldn't say like, we're going to use AI for the 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, the only real specific use cases that were not clearly nonsense were 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, 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 use cases for AI, what 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 McKinsey because they're currently somewhat rightfully so, a bit of a bug bear 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 massive consulting firm. Companies bring them in in order to help them streamline and make processes more efficient and stuff.

And one of their people said that according to their internal metrics, they expected a half a trillion dollars in fraud this year, in one year, do just to voice cloning AI. 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 conference. Could you explain what you mean by voice cloning? So AI, we did a couple of bastards episodes talking about scams and 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 kidnapped or something else has happened. They need you to wire the money desperately

and you send them the money, it's a fucking scam, right? That is, we had 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, shit 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 CES. On that uplifting note. Yeah, let's see. So that's a bummer. And 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 now. You got to 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. Versioning. Which 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 Liars dividend. By far, the best term that we've heard at the conference. Yeah. So flexible. Yeah, I'm using versions of that and everything. You know, the best term that we've heard at the conference. It's so flexible. Yeah, I'm using versions of that and everything. It makes me think a lot about the murderers dividend,

which is when you longer have to deal with an annoying person. We got content credential, which is coming up a lot, especially around the topic of AI. We have data rich, and it's the stutter term problem rich, core values, which I heard in every single panel that we were in. 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. Great. That's going to happen. Very trustworthy, very trustworthy groups.

We got risk model. And then my next term is the favorite one. It's so good. I think I'm going to give this one to you, Robert. Yeah, because I don't think we talked about this guardian MM or something like that. What was the name? 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. That- I was not a Galaxy Note 7. It gives you as the parent complete access to your kid's phone and everything they're doing. And it automatically 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 kill yourself, this is the example he showed us. You get a message that like there's this suicidal discussion or what not going on. We ask them, 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 a child is gay or trans and their parents are not accepting of that.

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? And case apparent is being abusive, right? To like monitor or send 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 the, yeah, the term that they use was tech contracts

with children. I can't think of anything more dismal. Yeah, that is one of the most dystopian assemblies of words I've ever heard. You should never say the phrase contracts with children. That's just like, if you find yourself ever hearing the phrase contracts with children, smoking away anyone, run away from that person as fast as you can.

Maybe punch them in the face first. And then run away as fast as you can. Maybe, maybe punch them in the face first. And then run away as fast as you can. So that's a good one. That's, that's some, you just keep in Florida, I guess, now? Or Indiana, is it? It's a super Florida app.

Yeah, that is the center of this business. Moving on, we've got other terms called visionary and thought leaders, which comes up a lot in these types of offices. I mean, the PR people love saying thought leader. I love it. Thing to eat it up. We also have edge computing.

I know. Yeah, again, handy, great company. Incredible company, very, very excellent product. We have digital twin, horizon scan. So digital twins 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 metaverse thing. And these are all different industries using it. And no one can agree on the meaning. Yeah, that's just tradition. That's just like what they do. They have Horizon

Scan. I actually kind of like that one. I was the first time I, that's just tradition. That's just like they do. They have horizon scan. I actually kind of like that one. I 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. The next one I heard way more than I wanted to hear, which was accelerate. Yes. 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 read off. Now, this next term is a real thing and an important thing and not a thing that at anyone in the tech industry once or cares about the right to be forgotten uh... this is actually been legislated the reason they have to care about this to some extent is it's been legislated in in the you right and it should be everywhere i actually think this is incredibly important concept uh... and it's basically the

you know you have we have people go viral, good 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 of things. He's actually a really good example. There was a kid who posted a video of himself

and it was like 4.0 GPA, how did you all braze 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 a, why kids being kept out of Harvard thing? And he knew the emblem was like, you're ruining my fucking life.

Yeah, this is how this, like right to be forgotten should be everywhere. Yeah, it is not. It is a hugely important thing. And 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 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 teenagers. 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. I am data? Or I am data poisoning as a verb, or I am data poisoning myself. Yeah. And then we've got, oh, Garrison, you want to do this one? Sure.

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. Yeah, that's basically using AI to generate pictures of Dan Harmon, right? Yes. Then we have the last term, which I will describe for you,

the speed capacity gap. Oh, what? So the speed capacity gap. No, no, I can answer that for you the speed capacity gap. So the speed capacity gap. No, I can answer that for you. So sometimes when I'm doing a shit load of amphetamines that I purchased from some Turkish website via the dark web, you know, I'm doing them with a friend and they OD because there's a speed capacity gap between the two of us. Yeah. That's what that DHS guy was talking about. They're using AI to model their dark web purchases.

He's gonna 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 term. It's just one of those, you know, it sounds like a silly tech term, but when it's actually explained, like, oh, that's actually a really good way to think about the way AI's 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 informed decisions about how we want this tech to be integrated into our lives. And now, the dark side of this term, the speed 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. So we should just speed up our cultural capacity. Did they propose a solution for that?

Well, it kind of, but it's a little unclear. We can go through my recording at a later date once we do our full AI episode. But their rationale for why we should 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 tech iterations, right? The more iterations you get of technology, the more benefits are able to

get from said technology. Versioning. Version, exactly. Which brings us all the way back to versioning. There we go. Yeah. Which brings us all the way back to Turkish Amphetamines, because I've been for the last 20 years trying different versions of Turkashan fedamines 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 Turkashan fedamines are a thing you can purchase on the dark web and should there's no health consequences to it at all. Not a not part of this. There are a fly and just not support illegal drug purchases,

respect the podcast. They're not illegal if they're so new that the DEA hasn't banned them yet. That's innovation. Exactly. Exactly. That's versioning. And that is the speed capacity gap folks. The DEA can't keep up with the tech improvements. All right, everybody, that's gonna do it for us here at CoolZone.

Before we leave, I wanna give Tavia and Ed both chances to plug their pluggables. Ed, people are gonna be hearing from you every week on your new show Better Off Line, which is launching. I'm sure you'll agree as a frighteningly short time. Very soon, 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 am very much looking forward to this and very excited to work with the cool zone team. And Tavia. Oh, you can find me on Twitter at CU T-Mora. And if you want to learn a little bit more about my interactive and immersive work, you can see that at TaviaMora.com.

Now, you may wonder why I didn't give you any links to anything. And that was a deliberate thing called sub-difuge, but you can find me at where'syourhead.add.addZitron on Twitter, X, ratemynews.biz, and of course, blueskiesitron.bizgo.social. Yeah, and you can find my fucking done here. Hi, I'm Chris Turnney, and if you're like me, it's easy to read all the bad news about the climate and just think, we're f*****t. That's why I've started a new podcast called Unf**king the Future.

Every episode will speak to someone taking on the climate crisis in a clever way, like the filmmaker Adam McKay. We're dealing with just a gargantuan force and the number one thing I've been trying to do through the whole thing is just keep my sense of humor. Ha, ha, ha. The guest list is amazing.

UN Goodwill Ambassador Sabrina Elba, Climber activist Bill McKibben, and Maggie Beard. We even have Bill Niver's science guy. If you go into this thinking we're gonna get overwhelmed and lose, then we will. Tired out people! Listen to Unf***ing the Future, on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're on F***ing the Future!

Where's up with this cable news echo chamber, Tire? Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello? Yo! I'm Andrew Gellum, former mayor and Florida and former Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida.

What's up everybody? I'm Tiffany Cross. I am a journalist, television host. I am Angela Rye, politics and culture commentator. This is a place where we can welcome you home because at Native Lampide we talk about the real things that really matter with real folks. If I were to say to y'all right now God is good you would say all the time. If I said all the time you would say God is good. Absolutely we speak a

language that you can't even learn through ask Moses. How are they? Welcome home, y'all. Welcome home. Listen to native land pod dropping every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up everybody? I'm Duane Wei, and I've been blessed to have so many titles, so far in my life. But now I'm adding podcast hosts

with my new podcast called The Why, We're Do I Ain't Way. How did you feel about me in 2006? What it was in a lot of love there, I'd say. Yeah. So there was definitely, yeah, there was definitely some cold times. As I step it to a new phase of my life at the basketball, I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations, and new wives.

On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports, in music, in entertainment, in fashion, and we will discuss the wives in their lives. Everybody welcome Rick Ross to the podcast. My God. My brother Mello, Lindsey Bond, Paul Gassal, Pat Riley. You're a cat, that's a sorry. Welcome.

Listen to the why we're doing, wait, I already have Apple podcasts. Or whatever, you can get your podcasts. Welcome to Nick and App and hear a podcast about, I don know this is going to be out like Tuesday, right maybe Wednesday You probably know what this podcast is about if you don't it's about things falling apart putting it back together again I'm your host me a long with me is James Hi me and I'm very excited to yeah to learn some stuff. I'm sure to be great. No, nothing. Well, okay, the good news that the first guy we're talking about died.

That's the only good. Great. Great. I guess I'm not necessarily more good news. But we're doing some episodes about the daily wire. You're going to get a lot more actual stuff about the daily wire in the next two episodes. This is the preliminary background information episode. But for people who aren't familiar with the daily wire, the daily wire is a very large and very powerful right wing media empire. There are bench-apurros people. Matt Walsh is there.

And they've become increasingly powerful because of their ability to drive the actions of sort of like not even really mid level, like high, mid high level, like Republican officials particularly at a state level towards, you know, horrific anti-transpolisies, stuff like that. Yeah, they've had this incredible, divorced dad power of those two guys. It's like a Pokemon situation. It's inside just like shaken ball, but sometimes they let it out and control their Republican body with it. Yeah, and so, okay. But in order to really understand who these people are and why they're able to be like

this, we need to talk about the ways that this is due, because there's always been sort of right-wing Christian media figures who do terrible stuff. But the way the daily wire works is different than the stuff was worked in the past. And in order to understand what is different about this than these sort of like previous eras of like Christian antiquier violence, we need to talk about neoliberalism. Oh, good. This is not the normal starting place you're talking about the religious right, but if you wanna 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 the last about 50 years. I wanna 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, I want to talk about, he's Wilhelm Ropeke. I 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 these smartest and one of the most dangerous neoliberals. So in order to really get a sense of who rope key is, we need to talk about the beginnings of neoliberalism.

So we need to talk about Hayek and his sort of attempt to recruit a bunch of new liberals to oppose, while mostly to oppose communism. It later becomes about also opposing fascism, but the problem that Hayek has is that, so in the 19th, this is happening in the 1920s, and really in the 1930s, the problem is that the people who Hayek have been trying to recruit from Germany during the 30s all joined the Nazi party.

So many such cases. Yeah, it's a real issue for them. Yeah, yeah. Once again, the lips have let us down, shocked. Yeah, so, you know, in the 1940s after the war when Hayek was trying to do this again, he turns to William Brokeke instead of the original guy Super Nazis, because Brokeke had been out of the country

for the whole Nazi thing, so he kind of had skipped out on it. Okay, smart move on his butt. Yeah, smart, maven, his butt. Yeah, and this gets him in invite to like Montpellier and say the whole sort of the origin of neoliberalism. And Rope Key is one of the architects of what's called auto-liberalism. So the auto-liberals are one of the factions of, you know, they're one of the factions of, you know, they're one of the factions of neoliberalism.

What's interesting about them, I mean, 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, some of them are, but it's a lot of sociologists. And this means that the way that they think about the world is very different than the way that like Hayek or like Von Meez's or like all the sort of like mainline like guys who are

economists in the neoliberal movement think. The order of liberals believe that there is a natural capitalist 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, atomizes 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 symbols masquerading as identity.

You know, think for example, the rise of stand culture, or I mean, God, like the thing replacing them with sort of market exchange and empty consumer symbols masquerading as identity. Think for example, the rise of stand culture, or I mean, God, like the thing we do, which is like, I guess. Yeah, it's gonna save. Streamers. Yeah.

Oh, your friends are on your phone. Yeah, so this is extremely bad. And Rob Key realizes this is a real issue for the success of neoliberalism because people don't actually like being completely autonomous market agents with no real social relations other than wages and contracts. And, you know, if presented with these options, they might, for example, turn to communism or God forbid anarchism. Yeah, but Rokki, you know, Rokki is on the side of bad. And the side of bad, yeah.

Yeah, great title for the episode. And they're liars of Kolan, the side of bad. Yeah. That's me is biography. Oh God. Yeah, Rokki'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 Hayek

talks about when he's lying, like if that was actually true, they would just happen, there would be everything would be market economies already. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. It's a real key. Yeah. It's like, no, like we would have had the exact same economic and political system for the last 30,000 years, but we haven't. 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 rope key is one of the architects of what's called structural policy. And these are specific state policy things that are used to create markets by, you know,

sometimes it's, there's a whole variety of sort of ways that this happens. But it by acting on and transforming the physically people, right? Like what they do, what they believe, how they congregate, it's like what things they're allowed not allowed to do, what things are incentivized. This is structural policy. This is the origin of what's later going to be called

structural reform, which is the kind of stuff 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. That's great. Let's see anyway. Yeah, and that part of neoliberalism broadly a lot of that comes from order liberalism, and it comes from people like Ropeke.

But Ropeke realizes that 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 states, because again, this is a state, but this 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, to instill, to

instill in people to make them behave quote unquote as market agents, right? You can't just use the state in the market to make people behave in the ways they're supposed to, to be good workers for the great market. You need something else, specifically, near liberalism needs its own form of collectivity, needs its own thing that creates social bonds between people, needs its own kind of certification to combat the sort of collective society of the left. Now, part of Rob Kees' plan, and this is something he shares with the other auto liberals, is that they want to do this with, you know, they want to use the patriarchal family and small businesses as the social basis

of all of their sort of routing politics. This is very adorable, routing politics stuff. They also have, weirdly, this is one of the things it's in the 50s and 60s. There's a lot of sort of on every side of the political aisle, like kind of romantic utopianism-ish about the countryside. Yeah.

This can swing wildly between like Mao or like the Japanese fascists or the neoliberal. So they have this dream of 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. No, because of like, which I guess technically was a downstream result, it just didn't,

it wasn't the sort of idyllic like good, like far more family things that these people wanted. So, yeah, yeah, they got there in an interesting way. Yeah, with like massive agribusiness and meth labs are your two choices in life. Yeah, and like, you know, so like, yes, this is one of these things where instead of achieving their goals through cultural means, they achieve their goals through like the massive, like unbelievable economic violence. the massive, like unbelievable economic violence. But, you know, okay, so that's the other thing, and that's all sort of standard neoliberal theory, right?

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 Ropeki 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. So what belongs to God? Again, that one.

Now I'm concerned. I mean, he's, it's funny because like he's taken the Bible verse, like the, you take it to the render and the Caesar, like what belongs to Caesar render and a ball of blah, blah, blah, blah. But like it's, he's made it enormously more alarming. Yeah, yeah, deeply. Like, because like the thing about the render under C-Zer is that that's a statement about like living under the Roman Empire, right?

Right. Like, this is just, he just wants you to fucking have a king. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just wants to give shit too. Everyone needs to think. He just wants you to fucking have a king. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give shit too. I really need to say. Who was also your king. Right.

It's not even like the necessity of the state thing. Like you just dumped in a pointless hereditary in bread person to give money to. Yeah, I mean, he's not like, so okay, 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 he does believe that there should be like, I don't know, you just got to have it like, there should be democratic parties, but that like actual economic policy shouldn't be managed by them. You need a super thing above the democracy, which is the IMF to make sure that the little democratic people don't start getting any ideas about the economy.

Like a technology, like a... Yeah. Yeah, but the thing with the technology, and this is genuinely kind of what has been happening in Europe is that like Living under a technocracy really sucks. Yes, like it sucks like politically it sucks materially and it sucks like emotionally And you know the right is made be able to make a lot out of sort of like this opposition to like the global bureaucracies or whatever. Which is like, okay, like you guys made these things in the first place. Like I, you know, you don't get a fucking complain about the bureaucracies that you set up and ran,

but you know, that hasn't stopped him. Yeah, but but Robkey, 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, they take over the World Bank, and they become, you know, become obsessed with taking over the IMF, which they do, they take over the World Bank, they become, you know, they do that stuff. Rob Key is obsessed with using religion as like another kind of social force that he can bind to the Neal and Bulls sort of movement together with.

And so he sets out to form like, like a reactionary Catholic international to bring the liberalism to the world. That is a troubling concept. Yeah, so it doesn't work, which is the good news. Well, 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 the 50s and 60s, and it is too early for that shit.

Like, you know, I mean, this is something, like the 50s and 60s, and it is too early for that shit. Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, and this is something I feel like I should, at some point I should actually do a deep dive into this on the show, but I 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 every single country, if you look at it, like the 50s through the 90s. I mean, even to this day in Germany, for example,

like there was a party called the Christian Democrats and they win at least 60% of all elections, like in Italy, they're in power for like 40 years. But the problem with Christian democracy from the perspective of someone like Roky is that like if you sort of if you take like these parties, right? These parties are, you know, these are the Christian conservatives of this era.

They are way, way too far left for Rokie. And that's not just the sort of like Rokie, at how far right rope he is although he is. So like if you took Aldo Moro who's like the great Italian Christian democratic statesman multiple time prime minister of Italy killed in an insane web of conspiracies. If you took, yeah, look I like it. If you took Aldo Moro and you dropped him into the modern American Congress, he would be to the let he is again the leader he's like the leader of italian while he's that he's technically from the central left faction the christian democrats but

he's like the guy who's not a socialist or communist like in terms of italian politicians is on also a fascist and if you took him from like the seventies and you plot them into the american congress he would be to the left of a o c like a o c is pro ceasefire in Gaza, right?

Like she's pro ceasefire in in Palestine. Al-Doboro allowed the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, which is the Palestinian Communist per military to operate out of and carry out attacks like from Italy, right? Like this guy, you would like, he is. Well, if you go far enough right,

you might get that as well to be fair. No, but it wouldn't be the PFLP though. I'm like, I guess I guess some of the German neo-Nazis kind of like them, but. Right, yeah, yeah. Like imagine in the US any politician being like, yeah, the PFLP could operate out of the US or only our only condition is that we like

We're gonna let you operate, but we're not gonna like protect you from like Shim better whenever like here Yeah, the massage yeah, like I'm gonna be from the massage like that But you know you can you can do your stuff here. Can you imagine? That's shit happening. This guy was a could this guy is a conservative in Europe, right? And he's like, you know, so this is what ropekish is responding to, like the existing Christian, you know, and you know, to some extent, like the Christian, the Christian Democrats are very, very successful

as 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 rope key. So when we come back from this thing rope key would have loved which is ad transitions we're gonna talk about I More of what rope key was doing and How it shaped neoliberalism and the Christian right. Woo, yay! We're back! Rope Key is having a great time in his grave.

We're gonna get the thing to make some spin it is grave, which I'm very excited about. Excellent. But, okay, so, you know, like, as we sort of been talking about, the Christian Democrats are not the Christian, the Christian Democrats in a lot of countries are Catholic. Some of them, like, I think like there are Protestant like Christian Democrats, but like, yeah. but like a lot of a lot of them are Catholic.

So I mean, it's a really interesting kind of like predecessor to like modern far right politics, where you get these, like both of the US and Latin America, where you get these sort of like these Catholic Protestant alliances. Like friend, this is like Matt Walsh, if you know we're gonna be talking about more in the next two days, like is a Catholic the crap, right? But a lot of his base are like, you know we're gonna be talking about more in the next two days like is a Catholic theicrat, right? But a lot of his base are like you know are like yeah, that discs and like

the more even more feral charismatic Christians and like You know, but but you know, but these these groups are able to start to work together but they're not able they're not working together with it rope key wants so And this is the thing that I think is very, very scary about Robkey. And especially about the people who took this model, right, whether explicitly or implicitly, people who figure out the same thing. Because a lot of people, some people, like, kind of directly as good for Robkey, some people discover it through, like, I very weird readings, right?

When reading is a grumshi, it's a whole thing. I'll talk, yeah, one day I'm going to get Eve on the show or we're going to talk about that because it's fucking wild. Oh, what the, yeah, wow. I think the grumshi is not the most inaccessible, you know, like it, I think the grumky is not the most inaccessible, you know, like, there are some left theorists who just vomit words so much, so you can just project meaning on, didn't. But I have not had it. There's thing, there's thing, this is, this is, uh, you've had ingers like thesis is that

these people saw that, like, leftists are reading grumsy, red grumsy, and we're like, we're going to do the right wing version of this. Okay, yeah. So, yeah. But, yeah, so so many people are rediscovering the same things that Ropeke is figured out in like the 50s. But the thing that Ropeke is doing is,

he's figured out all the essential elements of the 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 this is the church. Yes, we'll serve as the basis of your political organization. Yeah, that is a way of doing it.

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 same problems, but worded differently.

Yeah, yeah. So, people I just might wait now so it's fine. Yeah, but, but, you know, so, but this is this is the Christian version of it. Um, 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, you live a project is a constant struggle against ademization that and this ademization Has to 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 60s, which, again, is quite racist. Like, so, like, in the part of the 60s when he's saying the really racist stuff, like, segregation is legal in the US, right? Like, like, that, this is where we're at with this. And he's two races from that. And the thing that he's really, really racist about is Rhodesia.

Oh, fucking hell. I can't expect a Rhodesia appearance. Yeah, yeah, this is the Rhodesia pivot, which is not like, okay, so the Orthodox neoliberal, super like Hayek, are pro-Rodizia, right? And this is Milton Friedman, that he's people are pro-rodeja. But they're smart enough to use dog whistles

and talk about it in terms of like economic terms and like stability, agar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rob Key is just openly saying race were shit. Like I'm not gonna read it, but he is effectively like the spiritual forefathers of like the 4chan mass shooter. Like that's how racist he is. Damn. And you know, it turns out that just again, openly,

like open race warship is like too much for Hayek and he gets kicked out of the Manchimiela ball organizations. And tragically, tragically for all of us, Rokki dies before he can see his beloved Rhodesia reduced to a pulp by the series of anti-imperialist insurgiencies. He dies before all of the Rhodesian or like societies fucking fuel supplies stored in

one spot or blown up. Let's go and see if they had a more distributed market economy here. They would have had just that all that fuel in one giant bottle which they burned. Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't been following me history of Rhodesia, not a country anymore. Yeah, thank Christ. Actually, don't think Christ, fuck Christ, Christ, you do shit. Yeah, thank all those people who went out there and killed bigot. They think they've been killed, bigot. Center, etc.

Yeah, and of course all the American people who went out to join the Rhodesia military and killed other white Rhodesians back, student by shooting at people who were theoretically on their side. 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 a punches for that because that shit fucked sucked. But you know, okay, he dies before he can see his beloved radition fucking eat shit die. He can see his beloved Rhodesia fucking eat shit die, but

What Robkey had is a very clear version of the Neal the hierarchical Neal or Bulls Society that he wanted to create right and he is Very especially by the end of his life. He is very explicit About what this is 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 ademization of capitalism. And we're back. Now, in order to build this new world, the world that Rob Keezer has imagined, so the religious right, the actual religious right that's going to bring this up into fruition, sets off from a number of angles. I think the most famous part of this is probably the sort of moral and the majority infrastructure, which is this network of like think tanks, political advocacy organizations, TV networks,

mailing lists, like their own insane right wing colleges. God 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 third

space is supposed to be this place that's like not the home or not the workplace that people can exist in and form bonds in. And you know, people talk about like bridge clubs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 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? Yeah, literally church or a bunch of church run events Yeah, especially like the more like rural you get like it is Yeah, and and this is and this is one of these things like this was actually like one of the sort of rear flanks of the workers Do it right which is that like in large part of Appalachia, right?

You have a bunch of really, really militants, like miners' unions, for example. 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 dealing with Baptists who are doing, well, I may say fine, but like, it's not an existential threat to the workers' treatment

when you're dealing with like, you know, like, it's easier an existential threat to the workers to admit 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 pin than it is for a rich man to go to heaven, Baptists. But the moment that stuff starts flipping, that's a very, very dangerous sort of rearguard. You see this in Asian 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, for me this is insane rear guard

because I've complained about this before when I'm fucking on them, do it. This is a Christianity episode, I could talk about this. The thing about Asian Christians is that they're all, they're almost all like first-gen converts. So they all have convert Asian Christians is that they're almost all first-gen converts. So they all have convert brain, which means they're completely powerful.

Yeah, so, you know, and this is one of the things that we're talking about here, right? That physically the church serves as this very, very important engine of kind of revolution. It serves as engine of sort of spreading reaction to politics, even among groups of people who you normally wouldn't get that kind of sort of right when politics from. And this is where, you know, face with the sort of leftward shifts in the US in the 60s, 70s and globally too, a face with, you know, I mean, literally the specter of revolutions and not even like, sometimes not even specters, like,

you know, this is post-68, right? There's been a bunch of actual uprisings. Yeah. And the place that they make their move is by trying to seize control of various pieces of church infrastructure. We're gonna take a Catholic example and a Protestant example and we're not gonna do the obvious Orthodox example

because we'd be here for a fucking century. So let's start with Rokey's beloved Catholic church. I think, 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, the like liberation theology people, but the problem with liberation theology people

is that they were around for maybe like 30 years, right? But by the time you get to the end of the 80s, these people are all dead, right? Like they're either dead 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.

But so this means that the dominant politics of like the capital, like T capital C, the Catholic church is very, gets very, very right wing. Well, it's not even that it's much that it gets right wing, but it is very right wing. And the stuff that they're doing is very, very scary. One of the things that I don't think people really realize is that so that you probably, you've heard the term gender ideology. Yeah. You have to have me.

Yeah. Do you know where that's from? Is it from, I fucking forgotten the place where Harry Potter goes. Oh, Hogwarts. Hogwarts, yeah. Hogwarts castle. JFK is a fucking Johnny cum late bastard.

Like she got into this game after that shit at a research. Gender ideology is a term to be rolling. Jfk rolling. He's a powerful, powerful fucking. They'll speak the Catholic stuff. Like, no, this, the term gender ideology comes from the Catholic Church. And it's developed in reaction specifically to feminism and very specifically it's developed in reaction to arguments from feminists that, you know, that gender is socially constructed. You know, because the Catholic Church's position is like, well, no,

that's heretical because obviously gender was assigned by God. And because gender just assigned by God, like women are like, you know, women are like, like, like, submissive blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, like natural, yeah. This is the natural order. This isn't like a sociologically constructed thing. This is the natural order.

It's always been in Tallah's role. It's Billy, because they're like unfathomably sexist. Is this like around the like Elaine Pagels beef with a church? I'm sure of Elaine Pagels, if you're new with Elaine Pagels. God the Father, God the Mother. I think this is a bit before my time. Okay, yeah, yeah. This is for World History stands at the University

of California and Common Topic. Well, I think this is actually in the same i played videos of her to my students and definitely in the eighties like the thing the vibe is powerfully eighties that i guess i guess it's a bit late because so a lot of the generalities all this stuff comes out of the early night well i guess it's like early nineties okay so one of the things that happens is that a lot of you know in the nineties the Catholic church and they that a lot of, you know, in the 90s, the Catholic Church, and they have a bunch of like Rad FM allies here, by the way, do you have this massive fight in the UN about like recognizing the right to abortions and other like

sexual reproductive rights? And the Rad FEMs are pissed off because there, I mean, there's a hole, so they've been, they're aligned with the Catholic Church. It's like an anti-sex work thing, and like an anti-porn thing. And then also like a lot of the red fins, well, I got so much trouble for saying this, but like holy shit, there's somebody

that's people are insanely transphobic. Yeah, damn, wow. But you know, but like, this is this massive battle inside the United Nations between a bunch of feminists and, or like feminists who are like normal, and then like, the shitty red femme factions and the Catholic church on the other side. And Pope Benedictine, in particular,

goes like all out on this stuff, both on the international level and in terms of like local churches, like goes on the offensive against abortion and queer liberation. And meanwhile, the Protestant church is doing like exactly the same thing. They're like, I think like even more fascist, which is really, really, and I say this is someone who was raised learthrin, like that, that is really the core of Protestantism

is like, what if we did Catholicism, but like somehow shittier? Like Martin Luther, what one day I'm going to do my thing on the world's greatest kind of revolutionaries, and then one of them was Martin Luther because, oh yeah, very clear. Because like, like, my argument for this is that the greatest kind of revolutionary is the person who starts out on the side of the revolution and then turns against it. And Martin Luther's thing was he was trying to outflank the Catholic Church in the 1600s from the right on anti-Semitism Sorry, I meant a six and 16th century 1515 hundreds which is even worse 1500s Catholic Church. They have expelled

They have like just they have what they are this is in the period where they're like, expelling all of the Jews from Spain, right? And Martin Luther's trying to like, 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, of going really hard bright. So probably the most famous. And I think definitely one of the most important And in some ways blazing their own trail of going really hard right. So probably the most famous and I think definitely one of the most important examples of this is the right wing seizure of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979. So for people who don't know about the Southern Baptist Convention, they are a very, very

large and influential group of Baptist churches. And they've been kind of like, they've been anti-saggregation. They've been sort of like trending left. And this is one of the things, this is a very, very famous thing in the history. Like if you, you know, in sort of like the history and myth of the right wing is like,

in 1979 at this convention, these like, there's like these pastors who are like, ah, the church is getting too woke, are getting too left, they scrolled out this plan like on a fucking napkin to like how they were gonna take over the church and they do it. They 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, is converted into this factory for right wing violence. Yeah, they are, they ruthlessly perjury into that and the churches, a bunch of churches leave because they're like, who the fuck are these people? Like just these absolutely right wing fanatics, just like I've taken control of so much of churches leave, but a lot of them stay. And you know, what their And what their project is, is that they start creating these sort of

totalitarian micro-states. Like, this is 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 of violence can sort of get sort of spread out of this stuff. And the way that these things work, right, is, is, is, you may have seen those like fucking deranged umbrella memes that the Christian right makes on Twitter.

No, I think so. Okay, this supposed to be like these like umbrellas and there's like each person, each something really of the umbrella like protects you from the things. So there's like the family and inside the family, they're like protected by the authority of the husband, should protect you by the authority of the church, should protect you by the authority of like the theocratic state. I, okay, no, this is like the most cursed russian dough. It's awful.

Then this is what these people believe, right? And they enforce this through psychological and physical violence. These people are, they are 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, like what I'm saying at these are like totalitarian micro-sates, that's not an exaggeration. That is what these households are like.

They're unbelievably violent. You as a child, there's under constant surveillance. You are 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 shock troopers. And these are the shock troopers both of neoliberalism and homophobic and transphobic violence.

And when I say shock troopers, I do mean this literally because in an enormous number of these people, and this is part of the reason politics starts to fall apart. Like an enormous number of these people and this is part of part of the reason Paul the so it starts to fall apart Like I grew up around these people a lot of these people went to fucking a rock and got the absolute shit blown out of them but You know these these people Like these these churches. This is you know

You can you can look at the sort of pinoply of of the people who do right wing like homophobic violence, right? The queer basher, the parry new kicks their kid out of their homes for being gay, the homophobic boss who fires and abuses queer workers, the doctors who assaults us and then to die as 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 unions in the left, right? And when I say unions, I'm talking more like the 1907 IWW of in like the 2023 FLCIO,

these churches are the social and organizational space in which the right constructs it's world, right? It's it's the sort of nexus of homophobic organizing from the beginnings of the hobo from like right through like their fight against gay marriage. But kaba something happened that rope, well I think rope he might have suspected this, but something happened that his inheritor did not expect. And that something is, I, I, there's 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 10 years, or 10 to 15 years, really the last like 10 years. Church attendance, and this is also actually true of synagogue mosque attendance, although church attendance has been declining way more. It used to be like, you know, if you're, are you a member of a church mosque or synagogue, right? Like Gallup has been pulling this since the fucking 40s. It used to be the rate of being a member of a church synagogue or mosque was, it was, for like, basically until like 2000, it was hovering around 70%. It's now 47.

And that is a catastrophic drop. That is a rewriting of like fundamentally what the US is. The US has been a like Christian hell state, like since it was created. Right. Like the US is founded by like religious extremists who's problem is that they weren't allowed to purchase two Catholics enough. This has been a church country. More so than most of the European countries you did the settling. Up until literally the last 20 years, and the drop between 2010 and now is like 14%. And this is, and it's not just that the membership rates are going down, like the 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 your default social network, they don't have the church as like your default social network. They don't have the kind of reach that they used to. Yeah. And if that's your political strategy, this is a catastrophe for you. Now, you know, we can talk, there are like, there are lots of reasons this is happening,

part of which is 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, one day, one day, the thing I really will get canceled for is what I've got the episode I do about how this happened in the DSA and how it just hauled out the membership because you know, it turns out when people get abused, they just fucking leave.

Yeah, not just the DSA, like I'm foolish and neat. Yeah, it happens in so many organizing, like this is like, this is far too often on the left. Yeah, stop fucking creeps. Yeah, but like, you know, Sello sistudes, man. Yeah, the Christian right has a particularly bad because they don't do what they do.

They never address it, right? This is part of their ideology, said this is good. Yeah, that's a problem, like at least in in the left, like, it keeps fucking happening. We do recognize it's bad. We sometimes just seemingly people on the left have to prepare to allow it to happen because they 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 it, then that's bad, actually. And part of, and the other thing that's happening here, right, is that like, the only thing I should are this is just the, is just the neoliberal administration of society. Like it's tearing apart sort of like social bound.

You know, and, and, and, and, I mean, one of the things I think you have to be careful of, when you talk about neoliberalism tearing up of those social bonds is that not all, a lot of those bonds sucked. Like, it was not good, but everyone was 70% of Americans were going to church, right? Like, not good at all.

That sucks. It was deeply evil. But you know, it tears apart, like it tears it tears apart, bonds, not entirely without regard to ideology, but it still does do it. And this means, this context has completely reshaped what right wing like anti-career and anti-transl-organizing 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 stay tuned. And three of the bag guy.

Well, we already had a bag guy, I guess, he's dead. These ones. Yeah, this is the bag guy number two. Yeah. Three, four, maybe after the Catholic church, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Yeah, yeah, they're right up there, they're there. Yeah. They've still got time, too.

Yeah. They're already only in their ascendancy, so we shouldn't judge them too early. Yep. But yeah, this has been a good happened here. Go make the people's lives miserable. Yeah. Yeah, Ben Shapiro is miserable because I wrote a piece of plot mechanics about how to tear down the statue

and he is still mad about it. He, he, he, because he said, I can't wait for their piece about models of cocktails and they write that as well. So Ben is still mad about it. Because he said, I can't wait for their piece about Modest of Cocktails and then I write that as well. So Ben Shapiro can suck it. Thank you for the career help of Ben Shapiro. Hi, I'm Chris Turnie, and if you're like me, it's easy to read all the bad news about the climate and just think, we're f**ked. That's why I've started a new podcast called Unf**king the Future. Every episode will speak to someone taking on

the climate crisis in a clever way, like the filmmaker Adam McKay. We're dealing with just a gargantuan force and the number one thing I've been trying to do through the whole thing is just keep my sense of humor. The guest list is amazing. UN Goodwill Ambassador Sabrina Elba, Climber activist Bill McKibben and Maggie Beard. We even have Bill Niver science guy. If you go into this thinking we're going to get overwhelmed and lose, then we will. Tide it out people. Listen to I'm f***ing the future.

On the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts. We're on f***ing the future. On the iHot Radio app Apple Podcast or whether you get your podcasts. We're on f***ing the future. Where's up with this cable news echo chamber, Tiff? Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello? Yo!

I'm Andrew Gillum, former mayor and Florida and former Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida. What's up everybody, I'm Tiffany Cross. I am a journalist, television host. I am Angela Rye, politics and culture commentator. This is a place where we can welcome you home because at Native Lampide, we talk about the real things that really matter with real folks. If I were to say to y'all right now, God is good, you would say. All the time. If I said all the time, you would say,

God is good. Absolutely. We speak a language that you can't even learn through us Moses. How are they? Welcome home, y'all. Welcome home. Listen to Native LandPod dropping every Thursday

on the IHART Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everybody? I'm Duane Wei and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far on my life. But now I'm adding podcast hosts with my new podcast called The Why, We're Duane Wei. How did you feel about me in 2006? Well there wasn't a lot of love there, I'd say. Oh, man. So there was definitely some cold times. As I step into a new phase of my life after basketball,

I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations, and new wives. On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports, in music, in entertainment, and fashion, and we will discuss the WISE in their lives. Everybody welcome Rick Ross to the podcast. My God! Our brother Mellow, Lindsey Bond, Paul Gassal, Pat Riley.

You're a cat, I'm sorry. Welcome, DJ. Listen to the WISE with Duane Wade on the IHR radioAR radio app Apple Podcast or whatever you can get your podcast 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. What are we talking about today? 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 increasing the past five,

10 years, 20 years, 30 years, you know. 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 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 gunned to fill the gaps from Facebook groups to content creators

to conservative streaming services, the organizational hub of the far right has been picked up by opportunistic bloggers and aspiring movie moguls, which brings us to 2013, a perfect year. Nothing went wrong, just a normal time. So in 2013, we had failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro and a failed movie producer, Jeremy Boring.

They started working together on a project called Truth Revolt. Now, I assume most of us are somewhat familiar with Ben Shapiro. He was an editor at Breitbart. He started as a young conservative blogger who gained prominence in the 2000s and the 20 teens. So I'm not going to waste too much time going into the background of Ben because I'm guessing we all basically 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 going to be focusing a lot on Jeremy.

I find Jeremy to be a kind of fascinating person. I almost weirdly enjoy watching his stuff just because I find it to be extremely fascinating. His demeanor, his way of going about creating a conservative media empire, I find to be really intriguing. I've watched Jeremy Boring stuff just as like a voyeuristic observer for years now, and he's actually starting to become more of a prominent face among the right-wing media ecosystem. Or at least 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 good Christian boy from a small town in Texas.

He got involved in kind of small town. Yeah, I forget the exact town because I didn't write it down in the script, but I believe it's somewhere in West Texas. If I remember correctly, it's been a while since I watched the two-hour interview with Jeremy Polring where he discussed his upbringing. God, I wonder if it's Lufkin. I'm pulling it up. I'm pulling it up.

Slate, okay. Okay, well, still a dog shit, Texas. Yeah, see, that's why I didn't mention it. It's like, who kids? It's in Lubbock County, Mike. Lubbock, 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 any work. So instead, he decided to become a struggling screenwriter, a classic move. Moving from a failed act. Really, failing downwards, yes. Yes, yes, exactly. In the early 2000s, he got invited to a Hollywood Bible study group with a whole bunch of like young sea list celebrities. And over time, he evolved into a sort of

pastoral role within the group. And then in 2007, 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 unlikeable person who's not really been hired in many 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 It grossed just over $3,000. So, not the smash hit that you would hope for your first movie. That is, yeah, it's not great. 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 look up the Friends of Abe Logo because it's really good. Oh my God. I think people like John Voight and just, you know, those sort of like, a little kids. Yeah, it sounds like I think John Voight would be a member of, yes. I'm pretty sure John Voight was a member of this group. God, 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 health care service back before, abortion back for Roe v Wade, which is clearly what they're, oh, God. Is the who made this logo? This is like bad clip art.

Yes. Oh, my God. 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... Pancy Portrait was a member too, so... Yes.

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 and movie producing in the in the next episode or so. So he took 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 Bipart at the Friends of Abe, Andrew Bipart obviously knows Ben Shapiro, because Shapiro used to be the editor at Brightbart News. Also, I feel the need to note,

the Friends of Abe was founded by Gary Seneese, who was in such beloved movies as, well, I think the only beloved movie he was in such beloved movies as, well, I think the only beloved movie he was in was Forrest Gump, where he played Lieutenant Dan. Oh, he did. Yeah, he, this is Lieutenant Dan, founded the group, which is actually like Lieutenant Dan would be in the Friends of Abe. So that, that, that kind of fits.

He also had apparently a bit role, or some role in Apollo 13. I forget who. So there you go. Gary Sines, great. So around this time is when Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring first met just just before like 2010, I think the two met via Andrew Bipart, whom Ben was working for at the time at Bipbart 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, is like influencing culture.

Now boring was very impressed by Shapiro and sought to propel Shapiro's fame and wanted to create a platform to create, and wanted to create a platform to create a platform to increase bend's ability to impact politics in a larger scale. He really thought he saw something in Ben that if utilized could make Ben into a pretty major celebrity. Boring was friendly with board members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an extremely racist anti-Muslim right wing think tank, I believe based in LA. Now, 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 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 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, 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 some initial success as like a conservative quote unquote news site, aimed at exposing leftist media. Shapiro built Truth of Rolt as the quote unquote anti-media matters. Now Shapiro admits that truth of Rolt ultimately wasn't very sustainable, because the whole website was designed

around trying to generate traffic by being linked by Drudge report and at the time that's like literally literally like a third of right wing media in the early 2000s to mid-Auts like that was Alex Jones's whole strategy for a while too 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 now claims. And because Truth Revolt was operating under the Freedom Center, it was run as a non-profit and received very limited funding and little to no advertising budget.

But even back then, 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 9, 10 years ago. We have brass tacks on immigration. Andrew Klavan, I think his name is Klavan. He's one of the main daily wire guys now, but he was involved in way way, way back then.

He has a video on Obama conspiracy theories, which I'm sure that's great. Yeah, I can't wait to dig into that one. 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. videos about Hillary Clinton, we have the the left's magical thinking. There's another Andrew Klovann video called 50 Shades of Barack Obama. So again, all like very, very like 2012 type stuff here, like all very like early early

20th. They were iterating. They were cooking. They were cooking, and like cooking, sometimes your first attempt doesn't really work out. Truth of it started declining in around early 2015, 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 use ad revenue

and the larger web traffic generated through marketing and 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 Jeremy Boring when he produced this plan to revamp Truth Revolt. And soon after, Ben Shapiro stepped down. This was in April of 2015. Jeremy and Ben attempted to buy at the site, but that didn't pan out

and eventually Truth Revolt just withered away. Do you know what else slowly withers away over time? You, without the products and services that support this podcast. That's right. Alright, we are back. Thank the maker for all of those wonderful products and services that let me spend about 10 hours a day watching Daily Wire videos, so I can write like 4,000 words. Truly, this was Sophie's grand dream when she began this. Just have a wall of computers constantly playing Daily Wire plus the exclusive content. That was the pitch we came to corporate with. What if we exposed a man to

all of the daily wire one could possibly consume. Oh, oh, bye. All right. So Jeremy Boring, failed movie, failed movie producer, failed screenwriter. It's 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 to make a for-profit media company. So in 2015, 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 Wilkes brothers, were looking to use their fracking fortune to quote unquote, influence culture. There's that there's that term again. Through a mutual friend, boring was able to secure millions of dollars in seed money from the Wilkes, 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 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 bubble into the popular zeitgeist. Specifically, Jeremy 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 do it on the other social media sites, where actual regular people spend more of their time. Because it's mostly just other writers on Twitter versus the actual audience that the Daily Wire wanted to attract, or most spending their time on places like Facebook or Instagram. So 14 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.

If you look at how the cultural figure of Ben Shapiro specifically kind of emerged in the mid-2000s, like he became such a meme, such like a recognizable character. Through very simple marketing on YouTube, on Facebook, it was wildly successful. You cannot open up YouTube without seeing 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 read one quote from Ben here. Quote, one area that we had no idea was going to be the center of revenue was the actual podcast. When I look back at the business plan, what we had 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. Yeah, we all were surprised by how lucrative 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 a long time where it was just sort of like a thing Weird little guys like Joe Rogan did and and most people didn't really think about them much Yeah, and their social media advertising plan also worked out radiously 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. Their engagement outpaces the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, CNN, and Fox News on average by over 10 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 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 sight, but also the personal brand of its own hosts. Ben and Jeremy brought over some of the people from Truth Revolt, but they were also scouting for new talent, among the 2016 Conservatives' fear, to invest their newly acquired fracking resources into. Another quote from Ben is like, surround yourself with people who are going to be successful." Particularly not like going after people who are currently popular,

but trying to find up and coming content creators who they 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, Candace Owens, who was picked up a few years prior by the conservative student group turning point USA to be their quote,

director of urban engagement. Which is an awful title. Mm- title. I wonder what they mean by urban engagement. And then in 2020, after being a daily wire correspondent for a few years and helping to launch Ted Cruz's own podcast, the daily wire hired failed actor Michael Nulls, who's basically a discount madwalsh, to host his own podcast. And finally, in 2022, 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 were looking to influence culture, explicitly positioned the Daily Wire not just as a news site but as a perspective

alternative to the liberal Hollywood monopoly. 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 that allows us to actually put an audience on the target, because Hollywood will never cooperate, even if you manage 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 Revolved, we can make something that's capable of Marketing whatever we produce to thereafter for this particular audience Unquote So there he's emphasizing that no matter the 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 Jeremy's take on that. Do you 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 only way. We are also supported by the Wilkes brothers, but directly through selling hydraulic fracturing technology. So, crack your backyard and join the Fract VoluTION. We're fracking back here. Alright, that was just a wonderful, a wonderful Fract break. My back feels so much, so much, so much more loose after this guy's got to act for like 20 million. The House across from me exploded when fracturing fluid released natural gas that was then

ignited by an oven. 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. It's pretty cold, yes. It is 22 freeze right now. It's pretty cold, yes. It is 22 degrees right now. Yeah, it's like 16 or something here. Yeah, yeah. And you're in Atlanta, so you are the last person alive

in the entire city. Yes. Yes. But no, I'm sure for lacking has done nothing to contribute to this. Anyway, so let's turn our dials now to 2021. Once again, normal year, nothing bad happened. Just a fun time overall.

In 2021, the Daily Wire relocated from Liberal Hollywood, California to Nashville, Tennessee, 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 podcast show, like the Ben Shapiro Show, just can't, right?

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 a highly produced documentary can have a little bit more easily observable impact, just because of how it's being packaged. So they saw this 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 2021, they also distributed their first movie, Run, Hide, Fight. 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a school shooter thriller movie. That I have not watched. I've watched a lot of the daily wires of additional content. I am not watching Run Hide Fight. I'm sorry. I'm just not doing it. Yeah, I don't really want to watch

die hard with school shooters and a teenage girl. That seems a bit on the nose. No, I just, I don't really want to watch Die Hard with school shooters and a teenage girl. That seems a bit on the nose. No, I just, I simply refuse. 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 2020, the daily wire was making some exclusive content behind like a membership paywall for something that they called daily wire all access. But across 2021 and into 2022, 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 was during a wave of plus branded streaming services. We have Disney Plus, we have Paramount Plus. 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 Prager you and daily wire kids were one of America's fastest growing media companies and counter cultural outlets for news opinion and entertainment were building the future you want to see." That's their little tagline. Drilling. Yeah. Truly the new line cinema of racism. Such groundbreaking original content includes my dinner with Trump. Oh my god. I hadn't even heard of that one. Are you fucking kidding me?

No, I'm not kidding. What is- Is it actually a my dinner with Andre parody? Or is it just something completely disconnected that they stole a famous title for? They just stole the famous title for it. Yeah, damn it. It would be really funny if it was just a shot for shot remake of My Dinner with Andre, but with Andre as Trump. Like, I would, that's respectable. That's actually respectable.

That would, I would watch that movie the night. No, it's just a film to dinner with Trump and various political advisors. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh, that's so lame. Um, we have. How did it do?

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 hit documentaries like Kanye West's favorite, The Greatest Lie Ever

Sold by Candace Owens. Oh, God. An extremely racist misinformation, sorry, disinformation documentary 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 the University of Toronto and got, and got 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 round table discussions on like the Bible. That's the exact time that he was hired at Daily Wire. He's a whole bunch of stuff. I'm just like round table discussions on like the Bible.

And I believe he has that dragon mythology. Oh, it's great. Now that's a good show. I've watched all of that one, Cody. And we enjoyed ourselves quite a lot. We have a making a murderer, rip off documentary by Candace Owens called the Conving A Murderer?

Again, truly original stuff. Great. But it's not just movies, TV shows, and documentaries. It's also like we mentioned, they're hit podcasts. Quote, the Daily Wire Plus podcast network is America's 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 Roberts podcast. Um, anyway so sometimes beaten by Robert's podcast. Anyway, so 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 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 years ago, they were making a hundred million dollars a year, so they were making bank across their podcasts and exclusive content. They have over 300 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 entertainment media, they strive to create cultural events around the release of their original documentaries. The biggest success they've had with this is was in 2022 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.

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 in the early twenty teens. He had a brief stint at Glenn Bex the Blaze before being recruited to the Daily Wire in 2017 to do a daily podcast. The goal of documentaries such as, what is a woman

beyond growing the daily wires at subscriber count, is also to encourage real world action, while converting attention from the documentary into actual real world harassment campaigns and live events which fuel even more content. 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 like this, it's like this weird content circle that the, that the daily wire does. They, they create content to make these real world events, which then

can fuel more content. It's, it's, it's, it's this perfect loop that generates them a lot of money. On October 21st, 2022, 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 incahutes with the state government of Tennessee ever since they first moved their headquarters there back in 2021. 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 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 were kind of wise to not get too caught up in the Trumpian mud from 2016 to 2020. Instead, instead focusing on broader culture war issues, ranging from anti-liberalism, anti-diversity parental rights, religious rights, and attacks on LGBTQ people. But that also means that they didn't peek 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 QAnon. 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 they have now done by crafting anti-queer 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 groomer and save the children talking points. The once more exotic target of pedophilic elites has been shifted to simply any random queer person, which is a much more tangible point of wire. And that's where we're going to 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 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 2017, 2018, 2019, and the Daily Wire is now massively influential in a way that they were only kind of rising to prominence back during the alt-right era. So in the next episode, we'll talk a little bit more about the Daily Wires' own anti-queer advocacy and their push for original content, including a brand new child-focused streaming service, which I will talk about in the next episode.

Anyway, Robert, do you have any thoughts on the Daily Wire? 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 trying to go after, they're trying to capture market from something that's legitimately really fucking good as opposed to just put it like 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, you don't necessarily feel like a daily wire movie. There'll be a couple of points in there maybe, but 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 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 deeply obscure, but theoretically it's possible to do as well what 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 more to 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. 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. Alright, we're done. I feel like I should call it jar just because you mentioned the name of that movie. See you in the next episode!

Hi, I'm Chris Turnney, and if you're like me, it's easy to read all the bad news about the climate and just think, we're f**ked. That's why I've started a new podcast called Unf**king the Future. Every episode will speak to someone taking on the climate crisis in a clever way, like the filmmaker Adam McKay. We're dealing with just a gargantuan force, and the number one thing I've been trying to do through the whole thing is just keep my sense of humor. Ha, ha, ha. The guest list is amazing.

UN Goodwill Ambassador Sabrina Elba, climate activist Bill McKibben, and Maggie Beard. We even have Bill neither science guy. If you go into this thinking we're going to get overwhelmed and lose, then we will. Tide it out, people! Listen to I'm f***ing the future on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or whether you get your podcasts. We're on f***ing the future.

What is up with this cable news echo chamber, too? Hello! We're on f***ing the future. What is up with this cable news echo chamber, Tiff? Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello? Yo! I'm Andrew Gellum, former mayor and Florida and former Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida.

What's up everybody? I'm Tiffany Cross. I am a journalist, television host. I am Angela Rye, politics and culture commentator. This is a place where we can welcome you home because at Native Lampide, we talk about the real things that really matter with real folks. If I were to say to y'all right now,

God is good, you would say. All the time. If I said all the time, you would say, God is good. Absolutely. We speak a language that you can't even learn through our s'moses. How are they?

Welcome home, y'all. Welcome home. Listen to Native LandPod dropping every Thursday on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everybody? I'm Duane Wei, and I've been blessed to have so many titles so far in my life. But now I'm adding podcast hosts with my new podcast called The Why, with Duane Wei.

How did you feel about me in 2006? What it was in a lot of love there I'd say. So there was definitely some cold times. As I step into a new phase of my life at the basketball, I find myself with new inspirations, new motivations, and new wives. On this show, I will have intimate conversations with some of the biggest names in sports, in music, in entertainment, in fashion, and we will discuss the wives in their lives. fashion and we will discuss the wise in their lives. Everybody welcome Rick Ross to the podcast. My God. My brother Mellow, Lindsey Bond, Paul Gassal, Pat Riley. Doug, that's a sorry. Welcome. Listen to the why we're doing. Wait,

on the IHAR radio app, Apple Podcast or whatever you can get your podcast. podcast or whatever you can get your podcast We're back I Started the episode games and really really what a what an energetic entry into I'm tired Tell me things that make me sad. Oh, I don't worry. I will. I that is my favorite thing to do Oh, I don't worry, I will. That is my favorite thing to do. Let's talk about things that are actually sad for the first half of this episode. The past few years, it's kind of been increasingly profitable to be friendly to the gaze,

which is kind of a new trend. If you look at the past 20 years or so, it's becoming more profitable. What you know, we, if you're like a queer accelerationist anarchist, 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. But as it's been improving, 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.

Speaking of, Matthew Walsh, the Catholic self-described fascist. This is gonna be kind of the topic of the first half of this because he has been able, the work he's done has been able to really propel the daily wires and actual like political entity. In a way that Shapiro just never really has. Shapiro was really good at creating eye-catching YouTube videos, clickbait and stuff, but he, we never really saw him campaigning hard for any political cause.

He was never really doing that type of stuff. They come at a different areas in different communities. One thing, Ben Shapiro is Jewish and came of age and came into prominence in the early 2000s. When conservatives had political power, but basically zero like social cat power as they saw it, right? And so he was always 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 be yell at and make fun of the people that you think are bad, right? And that's the only thing he ever really sought to do is like LOL Liberals dumb. 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 of culture, right? And so he, he from the beginning, his 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 kind of have approached what they're doing fundamentally from a different way and came into it at different times. But 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 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, that is what he's decided to pivot his whole career to doing. That is his now his entire focus in life is about how he doesn't like trans people.

Because it was very profitable for him in 2022. So as a part of an ongoing right-wing harassment campaign against TikTok influencer and chronic theater kid Dylan Mulvaney, Matt 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 curings off rooftops. Generally, boycotts don't tend to work, but this budlight thing 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. 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's 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 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 Walshis said there, Walshis 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 2023, 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 in multiple bomb threats into many, many different stores, mirroring the harassment campaign against transclinics and hospitals the year prior, which was also spearheaded by Matt Walsh. We've seen this tactic gain prominence. This bomb threat tactic is now quite common among the right. We saw it be called into... There was a lot of bomb threats called into like 400 synagogues, this past winter. That was most likely done by some form of neo-Nazi. But we've just seen this specific bomb threat tactic pick up a lot because

it provides a pretty sizable minor or short-term disruption to regular services. Now, in response to this wave of harassment, 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' sense of safety and well-being at work, unquote. 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 goals, unquote. Now, Walsh 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 the point where it's embarrassing to shop there. This is the branding that makes the boycott stick. It happened to bud 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 5% sales drop in the second quarter, and again, it's hard to actually figure out what that can be attributed to. Beer sales also hit like their lowest level in recent history. Yes, you're just kind of a pro-war. 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.

Yeah, 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, massive victory.

Now, I hope many of us aren't 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 affirming clothing like binders and trans friendly swimsuits in person. These things can be tricky to buy online. Sometimes you don't want a package showing up to your door

if you can't be the one to open it. 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 successful. So they had walls going out on doing very similar kind of anti-transist speeches. He's spoken a lot of the big conservative conferences talking about how we need to eliminate transgenderism. He jumped on this boycott stuff and addressed 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 on this just between 2021 and 2023. The fact that companies are trying to back off shows that we are winning. Keep pushing much, much harder." 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 5, 2023, the attorneys general of Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Carolina, sent a joint letter addressed to targets 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 before. In terms of like five or six of these states all all coming together to to actually affect the market. Quote, targets pride campaign not only raises concerns under our state's child protection and parental rights laws, but also against our state's economic interests as target shareholders. Target's management has a fiduciary duty to our states as shareholders in the company. The evidence suggests that target 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 interests. It is likely more profitable 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 stories with objectionable goods, let alone indoors or feature them in attention-grabbing displays at the behest of radical activists.

However, Targets Management does have a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to act in the company's best interests. Target's board and management may not laughily dilute their fiduciary 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 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. Yeah, and it's also, yeah, that's not how Fittishyry duty works. 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. That's, among other things, basically impossible to pre-anyway, whatever. This is all, like, it's a 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 them on. Like it's making life, it's reducing maneuvering space for the enemy as they see it. 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 in ransacked. No one was held accountable, because they're not going to arrest these people for this stuff. And that's what causes to really have any level of success. Now,

during Pride Month, back in 2023, 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 manufacturer to Bud Light controversy. Now Starbucks corporate claimed that they made no policy changes regarding pride decorations. But that, quote, retail leaders continue to work with store teams to find ways to celebrate their communities, keeping in mind our safety standards." 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. Then in early June, a regional director ordered a collection of 100 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 21 states that were not allowed to put up pride decorations. And I think for the daily wire hosts that are pushing this sort of stuff, 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 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 like national spotlight. Do you know what else deserves to be put into the spotlight, Robert? No, that's a crime. All of my ideas are to suggest crimes, so let's just move on.

Let's just, I think ads are what deserves the spotlight. Great. plus and their and their hit new streaming service. So when Jeremy Boring announced the Daily Wire Plus back in 2022, 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 part of the Daily Wire Plus announcement was about how Disney has been wokeifying 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. 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 and watch it. 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. That's why we have to have Daily Wire Plus. So that is what they're framing the Daily Wire Plus as. That's why the Daily Wire Plus is important. Also, I love how he said that kids' content

so profitable because there keeps being kids in unlike adult content, which doesn't make any sense because kids do not think we stopped aging, but like a plague hit. It doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah, that's like a reverse children of men sort of feel. Anyway, God, what a mess that would be. Man, that's not a reverse children of men sort of feel. 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 number of adults and infinite babies, that's not bad, not a bad idea. 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 make, I just can't stop staring into the void. Yeah, I already just listened to 30 seconds of him. I've had an idea for a multi-million

dollar adaptation, gritty adaptation of the Rugrats. I think we could really, we could make a lot of money with this. 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 Wires co- wires co CEO and God King Jeremy Boreg announced at the daily wire company town hall that the company will invest a minimum of $100 million

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 doesn't at all is the actual joke. The fact that he just calls himself the God King is what a perfect look into the soul of just a completely dead man.

Yeah. He, the God King of the Daily Wire. This, that's been like rewritten in like a deadline variety. Like actual publications have been forced to write the God King, Jeremy Borek. Anyway, so to start this child content initiative, Jeremy brought some writers from Netflix's Veggie Tales and the Babylon B to head up their kids content.

I have a picture in my script here that Robert can see of Eric Brandsgum, which is a great name. Yeah, that is an amazing name. 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? 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 penis. That is sick. Yes. Yes. Can't tell if his fingers through the trigger guard, but I hope so. Yeah. So that is the co-creator of Chip Chilla, which we will, we will get to an asek. Now, I don't know if this is- Also, there are four to six moist spots on his shirt. And it does not, 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 wanna be filmed with that many moist spots on my shirt. Well, pointing again at my dick in front of a Confederate flag. Now, I I don't know if this is either despite or because of the daily wires, constant attacks on how Disney has a gay agenda, but the daily wire did manage to acquire some talent from Disney in August of 2022. They recruited the showrunner of the

Emmy-winning animated series Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, Chris Sondenberg, to be the senior VP of animation development and production at the Daily Wire. Now, they most likely got this guy, the Jeremy Boerings and Sondenberg's mutual friend Zachary Levi, who again was in Boerings First movie, and Zachary Levi also starred as Flynn Rider in Tangled and this Tangled animated series for the Disney Channel. So I'm guessing this is how this connection was made, but yeah, so this guy who was actually like a very successful like mainstream showrunner shows. Some somehow decided to agree to get hired by the daily wire. And this is this is now his job is overseeing the animated production for chip chilla. Yeah, which is the blue in knockoff. I mean, yes, I get it. Among other things, there's been a lot

of layoffs in 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. Yeah, yeah. So this past October, the Daily Wires 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 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 stances as a huge cultural loss for conservatives.

And here's a part of that announcement. It would be impossible to overstate just how big a loss this is for Americans who believe in 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 $100 million 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 $100 million over three years to begin our own kids' entertainment company.

And today, on the 100th anniversary of the day Walt Disney founded his company, I'm proud to announce the launch of ours. Introducing Bent Key, an entirely new company for daily wire, a company dedicated to creating the next generation of timeless stories to transport kids into a world of adventure, imagination and joy. Okay, okay, so bent key, Robert, how do you feel about one, the name bent key and the bentke logo.

The Bentke logo looks like a flaccid penis. He does kind of look like a flaccid penis, doesn't it? Yeah. I don't know. It's not an appealing name. I, 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. 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. Like made it always a good bread. But maybe if like if he'd been named Bluppo, would it have worked? Would Bluppo Entertainment be the cultural powerhouse that it became? I can't even we can't dance Disney such a thing. You can't answer it even. Yeah. They could have gone with a boring entertainment, but I guess they did yeah, that was not gonna happen Bluff those a better one than boring But yeah bent key that's that's the words bent and the word key and yeah, the logo is this lower case B with a little droopy arm Connecting to the letter K

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 tines of the key or two balls. I would have given it three tines if I was making a key just so it didn't look like balls. Well, do you know what else is a really important announcement that we have for our audience? No. It's these products and services that support this podcast.

Pay close attention. This is crucial information about the fight for America and to secure our values. Okay. All right, we are back. Back to talk about vent 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 bentki, I think it's 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 been hidden or not included in like legal contracts and forms when people are signing up to these projects. So I think BentKey allows them to cast

the widest net possible to not only get people to buy their service, but also to get people to collaborate with them on media. And it also works to attract parents that might not even be aware of what the daily wire is. It's just this new kids streaming service company. And also BentKey Ventures also happens to be the name of the Daily Wires parent company.

So that's probably why they picked it. I still don't know what Bentkey means, but it's also the name of the parent company for the Daily Wire, which is probably the name they're gonna use for a lot of their contracts. And they're trying to get actors and producers to sign sign into their stuff because whenever someone sees the daily why aren't on something if they're if they're Smart at all they'll be like absolutely not But if if the word bent keys on there instead

Maybe that won't raise as many red flags. So the new child focused app is available for only 99 dollars a year. Hell of a steal. And at launch included 150 episodes across 18 different shows, 4 of which were produced in-house, with new episodes airing every Saturday morning. Their flagship show, Chip Chilla, is about a family of homeschooled chinchillas. Now, some have pointed out that this appears to be a blatant conservative ripoff

of the very popular kid's show, Bluey. Yes. And I have a picture comparing Bluey and Chip Chilla here. They're the same fucking animation style. Yeah, except, except I think this also shows if you've seen any of the Bluey art, you can compare it to the Chip Chilla art. They do look similar in color palette,

but there is a massive difference in the appealing design of Bluey, which actually looks pretty good versus the design of the Chip Chilla characters just looks slightly off. It looks kind of like they're all on like half a time of acid. Versus... Yeah. Versus Bluey looks like it has like pretty good character design.

It has a lot of range for expressions versus everyone in Chipchilla just all has the same like wide-eyed look. Pretty widely considered to be like one of the better children's animated shows that's just existed. Yeah. So 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.

So this was the first show they announced, but they have others. Their other original content includes a show where a middle aged woman talks to a dog puppet. God, so yeah, lamb chop, okay. And two other original live action shows star child actors that teach fitness and history to kids. And 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. There are just these poor kids who have now been forced to participate in this like evil machine. Now, I'm gonna play a one minute trailer for Robert. I'm not gonna play it for the audience here because you don't need to just hear this ad, but you will hear our reactions afterwards. So here's for Robert, here is the trailer for Bent Key.

God. How do you feel about the Bent Key trailer, Robert? 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 490 likes and 600 something thousand views. So again, I can see them getting enough downloads to make this maybe worthwhile. If they're spending 30 million or more a year on production, that is gonna be kind of hard, especially given like bad with cost and shit. To. I don't know. We'll say, I wouldn't be 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, 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 dominant culturally. You think about in the early 90s, shit like Aladdin, right? Or the Lion King, how fucking everywhere, how a generation before you had 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 it for generations. And I've never run into anybody outside of weird right wings, not even weird right wing circles. I've never run out into anybody who has not worked for the daily wire talking about these shows. Yes. 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 fee. Yeah, to make sense is a business. For it to do culturally what they want, rather more as required. At least a few years ago, they were pulling in over $100 million in revenue per year. And one thing that Eliayaya 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. 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's all this is actually for. So, which leads us to the most ambitious upcoming bent key production, a live action fairy tale adaption written by Jeremy Boring in response to Disney's own upcoming remake of their classic film, Snow White. The company Disney founded doesn't agree with their founder of visionary. They're remaking their own iconic film

nearly a hundred years later. They're remaking their own iconic film nearly 100 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 1937. We absolutely wrote a Snow White that she's not going to be saved by the prince 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 been abandoned to slagacy. Instead of telling stories about timeless truth, what the ancient fairy tales were all about, Disney's new snow 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. It's a story about a princess and a prince, about beauty and vanity, about love and its power to raise us from death to life. It's our own indication of an ancient fairy tale. It's coming in 2024 and it's called. 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. And he's like, this is horrible. A mansion. 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 of her state.

Like that's a pretty conservative message. They just hate it because a wom said it. Yes. Like that's a pretty conservative message. They just hate it because a wom said it. Yes, but now I will I will play you the the very brief like 30 second trailer based on like this one this one thing they've shot Jesus Christ So bad A tale of timeless truth Jesus Christ. So fat. A tale of timeless truth. Wow, little on the nose.

Oh my gosh, she's even got a basket of red apples. The kind of apples that don't exist anywhere, but a gene engineered farm. Oh my god. Oh, and. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh because like the song they've got in there is like completely without wonder. It's just like once upon a time, a principal commer, 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 not a natural red at all. Just profoundly off putting in weird.

So 170, 17,000 views. So I don't know. We'll see if this beats the original Snow White So 170, 17,000 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. So this is Snow White and the Evil Queen. And I'm not sure if you picked this up. This is Starring Failed Actor and the Daily Wires own Gen Z Female of Ben Shapiro, Brett Cooper as Snow White.

It's that it's that other daily wire host that looks like a weird female version of Ben Shapiro is starring as Snow White and it all just looks like a really bad cosplay. Like. cause play. Like, it was quite something. So that is that is their first bent key upcoming original movie. So I'm sure everyone's going to be excited for that one. And like, it seems the entire bent key 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 fake culture war outrage moments to scare parents into thinking that woke corporations are trying to turn their kids gay or trying to turn their kids into feminists. And the only way to stop that is to give the daily wire $100 a year to watch failed screenwriters

and actors poorly imitate better pieces of film and TV. 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 is their social mission, right? Which is, uh, incepting conservative ideas into mass culture by taking over pop entertainment. And there, what 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 there's a good chance they can succeed building a content network for their weirdo fans that costs $100 a year.

But if they want to reach the most people, the best thing to do would be to get to a point where they can sell their videos streaming to Netflix and the like. But that doesn't keep people in their walled garden and also probably is less profitable over time than having them monopoly on this shit. And I, so I, I don't know what they're gonna choose to do. That'll be interesting to watch.

But yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing as a business this could work for sure. We'll see about the other stuff. And again, so this is only half of their efforts. Because on top of the $100 million puts towards children's programming, which has resulted in bent key, the daily wire plus was also putting an additional

$100 million into more adult-oriented entertainment. Now, most of the Daily Wire's production effort has been going into adapting the Christian Arthurian novels, The Pendragon Cycle, into a live-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. Never, never, I don't know where they made this garrison, but never has a production seemed more Croatia than this.

It's still been hungry in Italy, so. Oh my God. Ah! That was close. That was close. There you go. Ah, okay. The cast is made up of mostly like sea-list 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 2000s. It's like an Arthurian story, but set slightly before the rise of England, it's during like the fall of of British Rome, I think,

is what they call it. Now, guys, I'm sorry. We all got to see a great Arthurian cycle movie recently. And something tells me this one's going to have a lot less of a guy coming into a scarf. You don't think this will be as good as the Green Knight? I don't think we're going to get a real fucking clear shot of one guy's coming to scarf. I'll tell you that. I trust Director Jeremy Boring's vision.

Oh, man. But the project I am the most excited about is that the daily wire has acquired exclusive rights to adapt iron rands atless shrugged into a television series. Oh, good. Oh, my God. That's like that's like being an opponent of the Nazis in 1941 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. I am so excited to see the Libertarian wet dream. It's gonna be this Atlas shrugged TV show. There is no one else I would rather adapt

to Atlas shrugged than the daily wire. And part of this Atlas shrug is like famously like the least filmable thing of all time. Like it's it's actually could be like a fine movie. But Atlas I don't I'm I don't think you can make Atlas Shrug to do I hope I hope they do shot for shot that one like 70 page speech that what's his name goes on. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's what I really want. Oh, so yeah. I am actually excited to,

excited to not hate watch, but curiously staring into the void watch their Atlas Rugs show. But the one Daily Wire Plus series that I am not very much excited about is an upcoming adult animated scripted series created by Adam Corolla entitled Mr. Birchum. God in heaven, yeah, I saw ads for this one.

Yeah, this shows description sounds like the most old man yells at cloud premise I've ever heard. Quote, Mr. Birchum attempts to navigate a world he doesn't understand or approve of. He's befuddled by his gaming streamer Sun Eddie, annoyed at his selfie-taking, a snow-flake students, and is constantly at war with the school district's appointed Jedi, Justice, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer,

Mr. Carponezi, unquote. 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 Mr. Birchum, Megan Kelly, Roseanne Barr, conservative comedian Tyler Fisher, daily wire host, Brett Cooper and Canis Owens,

comedian Alonzo Broden, a former Amy Schumer writer, Kyle Dunningen, and unfortunately, Danny Trejo and Patrick Warburton. That last one hurts. That last one hurts. I know. I know. It can't be that hard up, Patrick.

Come on, man. It is real sad. I am going to play this for the audience because oh my I guess I'm not surprised that being in venture brothers didn't pay enough for him to avoid this. Yeah and apparently Warburton is is a conservative. Yeah. I am interested to see what some of these people were told before they agreed to this because I know the daily wires name has been hidden in in a lot of contracts. Well, and Adam Corolla is a real comedian. Yeah.

I didn't say good, but like he is somebody who established a career in Hollywood. Yeah. I get it. So it looks like fucking brick ol' Barry and all those other like dog shit, cheap shit cartoons. Yeah. It looks bad. Um, yeah. Let's, let's have fun listening to this though. Hello, it's your name. Jumping, yeah, let's let's let's have fun listening to this though. Just a little what you need jumping in the first one rolling speed action.

Saw bucks looking a little chubby. What? So I bought a amazing voice acting by making Kelly. Dogs are supposed to eat meat. They're descendants of walls. You ever see a vegan wall on the nature channel? I love vegan. Very, very funny. for losers, ladies. Listen up! Oh my god.

I don't do anything stupid! Or then last year! I'm a heteronormative cisgender white male. For which I apologize. I'm black. I'm black. I'm used to be enough, but I'm also bilingual, and I'm non-binary.

Where are they, Army? We drink more before 9 a.m. than you, Navy Pigs, do all day. enough but I'm also bilingual and I'm non-binary. Where are they army? We treat you more before 9 a.m. that you Navy pukes to all day. He rubbed all the fur off his emotional support ferret. The damn thing looked like a four-legged person. Oh, Roseanne bar. Oh God. Charity and work. Two words that should never go together. Like women and opinions. I wanna know. I made it. They're salty and make me dizzy. So, I just did find a thing

you'd fixed my gaming chair. When I was on the construction site, my chair was a five-gallon bucket. It was also my toilet. That's it. That's it. Oh, see, it's amazing about that. All of the Megan Kelly and, like, terrible voices.

No, terrible was that. No, terrible was that. Adam Cor the Megan Kelly and, like, terrible voices. No care. No care was that. Adam Corolla sounds like a parody of himself. He's going too hard into gruff. It's, it's, maybe, maybe if I see the show, it'll be better because it made just a pick some lines where he was doing that, but there's not much character to his voice.

What I will say is, I hate that he's in this, but Patrick Burton is still a pro. That man can do a line read. That man knows how to do a fucking line read. No, it's weird how many of these are like, actual comedians 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 Slurfike. One of these words, it doesn't matter. Just keep going. Yeah, get your paycheck. I don't know. It's a bummer. Yeah. It's weird because like Adam Karola,

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 Warburden. He's just given me too much. It'll take a lot. So 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 could not fit my Lady Baller's thoughts into this episode because that is going to be its own special event. That's going to be your fitigan's wake. Yes. So a few weeks ago, I watched it for the first time. I took a lot of notes. I'm going to watch it again here.

And we are going to go deep into the production of this movie. This thing was shot. This just as a peak of the writing quality you're about to hear about. The whole strip was written in two weeks. It was shot in like a month. It stars the only daily wire hosts. Every single actor they approached for this turned it down because they're like absolutely not. No, fuck this shit. And it is a it is a insightful insightful look into the soul of Jeremy

Boring. He wrote directed,, produced, and started this thing. It was shot right in Nashville, Tennessee. So that is going to be after the weekend. We're going to have a special episode of me diving into what makes Lady Baller's tick. And is it any funny? The answer is not really. But 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 the entertainment industry. So that will be the start of next week,

our special on Lady Ballers. Any closing thoughts on bent key, or the daily wire plus, as the daily wire enters the streaming market, Robert? Patrick, you don't have to do this. Like, just let us know you need help. We can take care of you. Patrick, we love you. We love you.

If you need help with the mortgage, we can crowd fun. Yeah, we can make this work, buddy. We can make this work. Anyway, well, that does it for us today. I hope you're doing something about Jeremy Boring, the most forgettable ban with the most accurate name. Yep. Alright, guys. Bye. 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. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHART radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemeeta.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. We're f***ed. Hi, I'm Chris Turnie, and if you like me, it's easy to read all the bad news about the climate and just think, we're f***ed. That's why I've started a new podcast. It's a show about the climate crisis and what we can do about it. So stop doom scrolling and tune into I'm f***ing the future.

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