The Eric Metaxas Show - Tony Lyons (Encore)

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

Tony Lyons of Skyhorse Publishing outlines several books targeted for cancellation, which his company has published, including, "The Real Anthony Fauci." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey, folks, I have an exciting guest, not like all those other guests. This one is exciting. His name is Tony Lyons.

He is the publisher of Sky Horse, publishing. What is that? Well, why don't I just ask him? He's right here. Tony, hello. Welcome. You're a New Yorker. Yes. And you, you're a publisher. Yes. You, what you publish in this day and age is so, what's the word? It's newsmaking that you are publishing the books you're publishing, which is, it's, itself is newsworthy to me. The idea that publishing certain books is controversial and newsmaking is itself newsmaking, if people can follow that. So tell us what is Skyhorse publishing? So we're publishing. Move closer to the microphone because we really want to hear you. So we're publishing a lot of books that are controversial right now, but in the past they

wouldn't have been controversial. So in some cases, they're both sides. of an argument. So we live in a democracy. It's supposed to be okay to have dialogue and debate. But, you know, at this exact moment in history, you're not allowed to have dialogue and you're not allowed to have real debate. And so Skyhorse publishes lots of books where they're controversial right now, like Woody Allen, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Alan Dershowitz. you know, in the past, these people haven't been that controversial. Many of the people who we publish about COVID, like Dr. Robert Malone, have become very controversial, but, you know, he was a real, you know, incredibly well-respected doctor and researcher, and now he's controversial because he doesn't follow a very specific narrative.

And that's true with all of these kinds of books, that if you deviate, from a very specific narrative, suddenly you can be canceled. Now, the reason that I was most excited to have you on was because of the Woody Allen autobiography. I was trying to explain to someone this morning that it is almost impossible to really do justice to the level of madness in which we find ourselves. From the 1960s, when I was a little kid in New York,

Woody Allen was like a god, okay? He was one of the most famous people rocketing across the cultural landscape. He had specials on network television. He was involved in movies. In the 70s, his films became more dramatically famous. Annie Hall, Manhattan. I mean, he was just one of those people in this pantheon. it's hard to overstate the level of fame that he had.

He was writing regularly humor pieces, genius humor pieces for the New Yorker magazine, and they were collected in anthologies. So it's just impossible to overstate how high his star rose. In the 80s, he does crimes and misdemeanors. He does a series of movies that goes on and on and on and on. And then, of course, there's this debacle with Mia Farrow and whatever. So his things kind of get funky. But to anybody, he was still just a living legend for decades already.

So when I heard that he's publishing an autobiography that he's written the story of his life, I just thought, this is wow, wow, wow. You know, this is like Napoleon is writing his biography or Winston Churchill or Richard Nick. I mean, this is going to be a big book. everybody is going to want this book. Everybody's going to talk about this book. And he found a publisher. What's the name of the publisher that he found?

Hachette. Hachette. Yeah. They're going to make a lot of money off of publishing Woody Allen's book. And then something happened. What happened? So, you know, the amazing story there is that Hachette's view of that book was exactly like your view, that he's an iconic character, that he's an iconic character, that he's,

He's got an incredible story that there's a huge market for that story. So they really wanted to publish it. And then when the sort of woke crowd of people who believed that he needed to be canceled because he might have done something wrong 30 years before, even though that's controversial and nothing's been proven. So he hasn't been convicted of anything. and in this country, in a democracy, he's supposed to then, you know, not have to suffer any consequences. Look, we want to be honest.

This is complicated. It's not open and shut. But before we continue on the Woody Allen line, which I want to, I want to mention to people, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of RFK, one of the leading figures in 20th century politics, American history, obviously assassinations. fascinated in 1968, five years after his brother. His son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote a book recently called The Real Anthony Fauci. He gets into some of this stuff about Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the global war on democracy and public health. So here's a figure who you think, well, he's on the left, but he's starting to see some of the things that others are seeing. He wants to write a book

about Anthony Fauci, getting into this stuff, and you'd think if anybody would be unbiased, he's not some, you know, conservative or Christian. He's somebody that is really a mainstream figure who is aware of the dangers and the things that are happening in big farmers. So he writes a book, similar thing. If you're even talking about it, you're demonized.

You publish that book. Right. The real Anthony Fauci. So I just want to say that so people understand we're going to be talking about Anthony Fauci in the time we have together. But the reason the Woody Allen thing is so interesting to me and why I was so excited to have you on is because usually you're innocent until proven guilty. In other words, even if you are someone who we have questions about, if it's not really, really clear, we do not cancel you. We do not demon. I mean, if somebody said that Charles Manson has written a really funny book, you need to read it,

I would say, I don't know that, now, of course, he's passed away. But I'm saying, like, it's not like this idea shouldn't exist. There are some people where you just want to say, you know, if Adolf Hitler wrote a charming children's story, I don't know that I want, even if it's really charming, I don't know that I want my kids reading it. Right. So we have to understand that there are people that are convinced. that Woody Allen did some horrible stuff. I'm convinced that they're mistaken,

but the fact of the matter is, when you have a figure like this, write a book like this, and you don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and Hatchet, a gigantic publishing firm, is intimidated to where they pull the book. I just thought, there are just moments when you say, if you wanted to know if you're living in a crazy world, this just happened.

Sure. So how in the world did it come to you, publish this book? So, you know, people know that I believe that, you know, even if somebody has been convicted of a crime, which then gets really complicated, but I think that a book has to kind of stand by itself and that he's, like I said, an iconic figure. It's a beautifully written book. And, you know, his brand new book, which is a collection of comic pieces that he's written, which is called Zero Gravity, is a beautifully written book. So the idea of the idea that Are you publishing that?

Yes. I can't believe it. So that's coming out in June. Okay. So this is amazing because, look, we've got figures like Roman Polanski. We know that he sexually abused a 13-year-old. Like, that's not debatable. He doesn't say, no, it never happened.

It happened. But Hollywood still welcomes him. They give him standing ovations at things. So I think we want to be honest and say, this is complicated. It's definitely complicated. But I think I think the real headline here

is that when John Milton wrote Aereopagitica in the 17th century, he lays out why we need to have freedom of the press, freedom of expression. This is before the United States of an... Oh, we're going to go to a break here.

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about free speech. We're talking about John Milton's Aereopagitica. We're talking about Woody Allen and Anthony Fauci and Robert of Kennedy Jr. And Big Pharma, because I'm talking to Tony Lyons, who's the publisher of Sky Horse Publishing. Got to ask you, how long has Sky Horse Publishing been publishing? How long have you been doing this? How'd you get into it? Yeah, we've published about 10,000 books in 15 years. We have 18... 10,000 books? Yes.

So, and we have 18 different imprints, but the main Skyhorse publishing imprint is the one that publishes many of these sort of controversial books now. How did you get into this, Tony? I mean, where were you raised, and how did you find your way into publishing? Sure. I was raised in New York City

and let's see, my father was a publisher and a writer and a professor. If you don't mind my asking, where was he a professor? Hunter College in New York. Amazing. And he worked at Crown Publishers, which at the time was the biggest publishing company in New York and in the world, and is now part of Random House. So I went to law school and then practiced law for a short period. then I joined his publishing company, worked there for about 10 years, and then started Skyhorse.

So, but you didn't start it with a particular mission, or did you? I mean, when you started it, we were kind of living in a semi-normal world where people published monsters like Woody Allen and Robert of Kennedy Jr. So how did you find your way into this rarefied atmosphere of publishing these controversial figures? Sure. So I would always love to have been. publish these kinds of books, but I didn't get the opportunity to do it because places like Hachette, you know, wanted to publish books by somebody like Woody Allen. And, you know, even in this case, they really wanted to publish the book up until the very end. So they didn't view him

any differently than I did. The only difference was when they got a certain level of pressure, it became a bad business decision for them to publish it. They were going to lose authors. They were going to lose employees. Okay. So this is interesting. Interesting. They, it becomes a business decision. It's like the Godfather, hey, this is business. That's why we got to blow your brains out. I apologize in advance.

It is interesting that when people say that, it's a bad business decision, right? It's a bad business decision sometimes to speak the truth, but if you have a conscience or if you fear God, you say, well, I'm going to do the right. thing, even if it's ostensibly a bad business decision, because in the long run, depending on how you define business, I'm going to say it's a good business decision to do what I think is right when everybody's telling me not to. But it seems corporate culture today doesn't have those values. Right. Yeah, and I have decided that I'm going to publish the books that I think ought to be published, and I'm not going to worry about the consequences, that I'm more concerned with the consequences of living in a country where you can't publish these kinds of books?

Right. I was going to say, but you would think that people at Hachet and others that they would care about that. Obviously, they care about the bottom line, and they don't care about the very thing that enables us to function in a free culture and to make money from publishing books, they don't seem to care about that. In other words, it seems that they're willing to throw those values under the bus for the short term, which is not nice. And, you know, many people who are pushing them towards that, whether it's employees or authors or news media, are sort of misjudging what the role of a publisher is. So they're confusing a sort of law enforcement role. And they're including sort of looking at it as a value judgment versus thinking that a publisher ought to bring the information to the public and then the public gets to decide. You can say the same thing about Amazon.

I mean, Amazon has canceled a few books by people that I know. And I think to myself, that's not your job, Amazon. Your job is to publish, but I believe you can get a copy of Mind Kampf. You can buy the Marquis de Sade. I mean, you can buy satanic works. You can buy all kinds of nightmare stuff from Amazon, except they said, oh, Abigail Shrier wrote a book that questions the transgender ideology. And we don't like her.

She's canceled. We don't like, you know, there are a number of people that I know that have published books, and I thought, in a free society, you wouldn't even, it wouldn't even occur to you not to carry that book or not to publish that book. So we're in a new day. And it's because of that that Skyhorse Publishing suddenly is standing alone, bravely. Yeah, there's this idea that all of these different places, whether it's the government or the New York Times or, you know, lots of other. media platforms want to protect us from misinformation. But what they're really saying is that they want to decide what the truth is.

So misinformation just then becomes a code word for something that they disagree with. So the New York Times, you know, we tried to place an ad for the real Anthony Fauci in the Times. And it was a complicated process. But the Times finally decided after telling us that all they cared about was that the ad itself was true, they decided not to run ads for the book because it claimed that Dr. Fauci had lied. You mean Kennedy? Oh, because the book claimed.

Right, because Robert Kennedy Jr. claims that Fauci lied, and they said we will not promote that. More than that, it has a blurb from a Nobel Prize winning scientist on the back that says that Dr. Fauci lied. Wow. So I provided them with just an incredible amount of information showing that the New York Times itself had claimed that Dr. Fauci has lied, that every major newspaper at some point in the last year or two had noted that he had lied about something. He had confessed to lying and explained why he lied saying that it was in the public interest for him to sort of protect frontline workers by not letting the American. public in his mind know certain things that would lead them to use masks too much so that frontline workers couldn't get them or those kinds of things. So he was claiming that he was lying

for noble reasons. I don't believe that, but he was claiming that. So there's no question that Dr. Fauci has lied, but they decided they didn't want to run these ads. So, you know, and that's what's really fascinating in this, you know, historical period. that you can have a book that winds up being the best-selling book in America. So the real Anthony Fauci has sold more than a million copies. You can't advertise for it in major newspapers. You can't advertise for it on platforms like YouTube. You know, none of the major tech platforms let you place ads for it.

Even interviews that discuss the book have been taken. taken down. So even the idea that a balanced discussion of this controversial book, where people agree with certain points and disagree with certain points that you're supposed to be able to do in a democratic country, even that gets taken down. So with no publicity really allowed for the book, bookstores censoring it, boycotting it, libraries boycotting it. You know, on every level some kind of censorship, and it, over a three or four month period, becomes the best-selling book in America. And how do people get the book? Is Amazon brave enough to carry the book? Yeah, so they have...

Ooh, that's brave. Yeah, they have made a decision not to take big, controversial books down now. They had made other decisions in the past, but right now they're leaving them up. I think, you know, you just have to try to figure out, so where are we now? Because most people, they're busily living their lives. They don't have time to think about this. But we lived in a culture, you know, I mentioned aeropagitica. John Milton, from John Milton until today, until recently, we understood these things.

We understood that the only solution if somebody's putting out bad books is to put out some good books. you know, put out everything and let people decide. And that really was the standard in a free society until extremely recently. Sure. I mean, whether it's a book by Woody Allen or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or, you know, any of a whole number of authors whose work have been canceled, it seems like the better way to deal with books that you disagree with is to describe what you disagree. agree with. I mean, I don't think historically it's ever gone well for a society that is deciding what people can think about, what they can read. I mean, that's an understatement. People, I mean, look, there are people, maybe young people that are so ignorant that they don't understand that 10 minutes ago, there was this thing called the Soviet Union, that today,

as we have this free conversation, there is the Communist Party in China that is brutally crushing, Prisoning, persecuting, torturing, murdering people with whom they disagree. If you don't care about that, you have no soul or you sold your soul. You need to care about these things, and you need to care when that kind of thinking enters this culture. And it's something that I talk about whenever I can. We're going to continue talking to Tony Lyons, several books, but the one we're going to talk about is the real Anthony Fauci, huge bestseller, despite people trying to cancel it.

right back. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed. And when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. Our economy is in trouble and you need to take steps to protect yourself. If all your money is tied up in stocks, bonds, and traditional markets, you are vulnerable. Gold. is one of the best ways to protect your retirement. No matter what happens, you own your gold.

It is real, it is physical, it's always been valuable since the dawn of time. Legacy precious metals is the company I trust for investing in gold. They can help you roll your retirement account into a gold-backed IRA where you still own the physical gold. They can also ship gold and precious metals safely and securely to your house. Call Legacy at 866-528-1903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Tony Lyons, who is the publisher of Skyhorse Publishing. So, Tony, we're talking about, you know, major figures like Robert of Kennedy Jr. and Woody Allen and Alan Dershowitz. These are all dramatically left-leaning figures. These are liberals of the old school.

So the fact that, you know, the revolution, that the Marxist, the Red Guards, the French Revolution, you know, they sort of eat their own eventually. It happened around Stalin, right? Like the people right around him, suddenly he didn't trust him. They're dead. Sure. This is what happens in that kind of a world. Right.

And people seem to think like, well, I just don't want it to happen to me. me. Instead of taking a stand for truth when you have an opportunity, you just kind of kick the can down the road, hoping that it doesn't come for you. Right. And so, it's come for Dershowitz. It's come for

Woody Allen. I mean, we had Laura Logan on the program. She was one of the premier celebrated journalist at CBS. Like, just, you know, it doesn't get more big. That this is

somebody that's just celebrated by the mainstream and then suddenly goodbye. Right. So we're here in America. And I guess, I mean, when did you have an inkling as a publisher at Skyhorse that this was happening or that you would be able to benefit by taking the stand you're taking? Yeah. So when I first saw a book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., it was a book called Thimerosol, Let the Science Speak.

So it was a really basic book about the dangers of. of mercury in early childhood vaccines. And that was a big thing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He had been fighting on all sides for about 20 years, trying to fight corporate greed and government corruption. And he had come across lots of really good peer-reviewed studies showing that mercury and early childhood vaccines caused brain damage.

And so he published this book. It had hundreds and hundreds of studies in it. and so the book was on a rush schedule, so we didn't send any copies out to the media before publication. And I was, this is about 10 years ago. This is in 2010. So when the book came out, it got no reviews of the content of the book, but there were all of these hit pieces on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That came out simultaneously with the book. So I was curious at the time, you know, having never seen this before, how it is that a book comes out that's got, you know, it had a blurb from a Harvard-trained scientist, it had blurbs from a lot of really high-profile people. It's a really serious book,

and it's an analysis of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. So this is not anti-science. This is not some, you know, made-up point of view. This is an analysis of real science. So that book was just massacred in the press. So everybody, came down on it as just the act of publishing it was a terrible thing. We were terrible for publishing it. Robert F. Kennedy. So that's when you entered these waters, basically. Right. So I saw then that these were not people who had read the book. This was corporate media. This was government scientists, government officials who were corrupt, who were deciding that this was bad for them. Okay. So let's be honest. When you say corrupt, all they cared about is money. And now what they care about,

is that this will harm them. So rather than deal with that and deal with the consequences because we were supposed to live in the light, we were supposed to care about truth, they said, no, we will crush him, we will kill the baby in the cradle, we do not want it to get out of the cradle,

we don't want it to grow up where people can see it. We need to squash it from the get-go. And that means we can't deal with what it says because if we deal with what it says, it may end up that he has a point. And we don't want anyone to know that he might have a point. So we just have to demonize him, call him names, and do everything we can. That's kind of where we are right now. Right. So, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

You know, is a guy who's really fighting for public health. He's, you know, he's making no money on it. He's sacrificing so much of his life so that he's taking so much heat for the things that he believes in, for coming out and saying the things that he thinks are going to save people's lives. So, you know, and then you put him up against somebody like Dr. Fauci. Now, I don't know in the end, you know, what the truth is. And, you know, like I said before, when we were discussing this, you know, it's not a question of knowing what the truth is. It's the question of being willing and being able to have real dialogue and debate in this country.

So Dr. Fauci himself says that his favorite movie is the godfather. So to go back to what you said before. So he says, and he repeats this to people who he works with, it's not personal, it's just business. And that's his favorite line in the Godfather. So you put him up against somebody like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He actually says that he's doing it for the money, that he's concerned with...

That Fauci is doing it for the money. That Fauci is saying that he's concerned with the financial return on investment, of his big pharmaceutical company partners. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is giving up, you know, everything, sacrificing everything to bring a story of corruption to the American public, and no newspaper in the country will review it. It's amazing. If you don't care about the truth, if you only care about money,

I kind of think, haven't these people read what happens if you live your life that way? you better be pretty sure there's no God who's going to judge you because if there is, you know, you might want to hedge your bets and think about truth once in a while. Sure. We're talking to Tony Lyons, publisher of Skyhorse Publishing. We'll be right back. Hey, folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell. Well, Mike has just announced that you will receive one of his book.

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Or call 800, 978, 3057. That's 800, 978, 3057. Use the promo code, Eric. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to the publisher of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Alan Dershowitz and Woody Allen. To get back to Woody Allen, I still can't get over the fact that if somebody said to me a few years ago,

Woody Allen is writing his autobiography. It's kind of like somebody saying Bill Clinton is writing a tell-all book about his right. You'd just be like, wow, that's going to be interesting, except Bill Clinton doesn't have a genius sense of humor. Woody Allen's sense of humor on the page is genius. There is no one who is better at being funny in print than Woody Allen. Literally no one.

And so the idea. that Hachett publishing just caves to the political pressure, again, there are moments where you just say, wow, that's huge. Because it's one thing to kick me under the bus or to kick. There are certain people that you'd say, I'm not paying such a price. But the idea that Woody Allen could become radioactive. Sure. And that people could suddenly decide we're not going to get anywhere near him.

so that he has to turn his lonely eyes to, you know, Skyhorse. It's amazing. Yeah, so his new book, you know, this, it's called Zero Gravity coming out in June. And it's a collection of humorous essays, many of which ran in The New Yorker. And it's just an incredibly funny book. And so the idea, like you said, that the world wants to protect people from these essays, you know, because they think that he did something wrong. So I would say, you know, even if he did something terrible, even if he did something incredibly bad, what an author writes

stands on its own. And, you know, these are funny, they're insightful, he's an iconic American figure. You know, why would people not want to have the opportunity to read that? They don't have to buy it. I mean, the way to respond to it if you don't like him or if you question him in some way and you really just don't want to read the book, then don't buy the book. Well, I mean, listen, I can see both sides of this in the sense that I can see that there are people, and this is who we're talking about, they've convinced themselves that they're doing something virtuous. They've convinced themselves that we cannot allow someone who has sexually abused children to have a voice. If I believed that he had done that, then it becomes a different kind of conversation because you want to say, well, has he rep – I mean, I'm a Christian. So I'd say, has he repented of that? You know, we know that David Berkowitz, son of Sam, murdered a number of people.

But I also know that what he did in the 70s, he has publicly, profoundly repented of. acknowledged what he did. You know, in other words, there's a lot to talk about in every case. But we're living in a time where, you know, what Christians call grace and forgiveness, it doesn't exist. And it was the canceled culture has something just, it's puritanical and moralistic, in the negative sense of puritanical, in the worst sense, the pejorative sense, where there is no space for we've all screwed up.

or has he apologized? Do we have evidence? In other words, we can't talk about that. And so you do feel like it's a Stalinist show trial. There are certain people making decisions and looking around and seeing who will dissent. If you dissent, you're dead. And people just say, well, I just want to have a nice career

and I will go with the flow. Sure. But I don't want to live in a country where the government can legislate what I can read or what I can think. I mean, it's one thing to protect the public from some kind of physical danger, but to protect the public from this broad ray of ideas and from a broad array of people and voices, that I think is really scary, that the better way, that the way that will work is to disagree in the marketplace of ideas. And what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book shows you is that you can have the most censored book in America, no reviews, boycotting, censorship of all kinds, and it's the best-selling book in America over, you know, 20 or 25 weeks.

So that's another reason that censorship shouldn't be allowed in this country because it doesn't even achieve the intended effect. And let me ask you another question. you're saying that the real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is, it is one of the bestselling books in America, or it has been. So then the question is, has the New York Times put it on the New York Times bestseller list, or do they say no? Yeah, so what the New York Times did, you know, which is part of their whole sort of group of censorship tools. So what they do is they have what they call a proprietary algorithm that they use to decide which books to put on the top of their list. So they generally take the best-selling books, the 30 or 40 best-selling books, and they decide what they want to do. And so with the real Anthony Fauci, in its first week, it sold 139,000 copies according to NPD BookScan.

It was by far the best-selling book in America in that week. And the New York Times made it number seven. So, you know, what they said was that they have this complicated algorithm and that based on that, it got knocked down for a whole bunch of different factors. Well, but I'm still amazed that they even put it on the list because sometimes they are just, I mean, look, they're playing games. And this is part of what we have to do. We have to respond to where we are now.

in America and understand that everything we thought 10 minutes ago is no longer true, that when something appears on the New York Times, it doesn't mean what it says. If it says it's the number four bestselling book in this category, you have no idea whether that is true. You can't know. Sure. I mean, if it's a conservative book, the odds of it being on the top of the bestseller list are much, much lower.

There's no question there. And part of the reason is that they use, a very small number of bookstores, and they give them extra weight. And they know the political leanings of those bookstores, and they don't try to discount that in any way. It is kind of called lying. It's really, this is where we are. And we just have to be honest about it and talk about it

and do what we can and make sure we're not part of it. We'll be right back. Final segment with Tony Lyons, publisher of Skyhorse Publishing. publisher at Skyhorse Publishing, Tony Lyons, who's published huge bestsellers, the real Anthony Fauci is the one we're talking about right now. Okay, so I have to ask you, the Woody Allen book, can you say how many copies that sold? I just imagine in this weird world it wouldn't have sold that many copies. Yeah, so the book sold 50,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list. But, you know, clearly there was a much bigger market for it.

And that's sort of the punishment for publishing books now that are controversial, that they don't get reviews, that bookstores boycott them, libraries boycott them. In the normal world, you could not have – I would have been annoyed at how I couldn't avoid that book. Now, there's in a normal world, everyone – cover the New York – there would have been 10 articles. in the New York Times looking at different angles of it and reviews, and there would have been a big puff piece profile in the New York Times magazine and on and on and on because, holy cow, Woody Allen wrote his autobiography. Like, it doesn't really get bigger than that.

It would be like, you know, if Henry Kissinger had a sense of humor and he wrote his autobiography. It's just kind of amazing. When you say 50,000, because I'm in the book world, I realize that doesn't make sense. All of my books sell more than 50,000. My books, and you're telling me autobiography of Woody Allen, this should have sold in the millions or at least a million or something like that. And you're saying it sold 50,000.

I mean, honestly, it's preposterous. It's just crazy. Yeah. But mostly, you know, with the controversial books that are coming out right now, we are seeing that they're actually selling really well. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell. Well, certainly this one, the real Anthony Fauci. It is hard to tell, though, what would have happened.

But, you know, the idea of censors on all these different levels, trying to protect the American public from misinformation, but not being willing to discuss the contents of any of these books. So this, for example, the real Anthony Fauci has 2,194 citations. It's got, like I said before, a blurb from a Nobel Prize, winner. It got many more blurbs after the book came out. So it's got hundreds of doctors and scientists and researchers who are giving this book out, who believe that it's a real blueprint for fighting medical and pharmaceutical corruption in America. And yet nobody has covered the

issue of the allegations that are made in the book. It's all about whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done something wrong. And so every single hit piece on him, so the New York Times recently did a hit piece on him. And in that hit piece, they mentioned that he wrote a book, even though it's clear that the article is all about trying to get people not to read the book. So they just say the same thing that was in 10 other articles. So there's a playbook of how to try to make sure people don't read specific books. Look, this has happened to me, obviously, in a much smaller level, but it's exactly the same playbook. I've seen it. A lie gets out there. Somebody reports something. I say, that's not right. And then it's reported again and again and

again and again and again. And pretty much everybody knows I did something that I know I didn't do, or I said something that I know I didn't say. But the lie is out there. It's been said a thousand times. and they're people who clearly don't care whether it's true. They simply want to demonize you. They want to cancel you. That's kind of where we are. We're at a time, but I want to say, Tony Lyons, it's an honor to meet you.

It's an honor to know you and to know that you're doing what you're doing and that Skyhorse Publishing has actual values and that it's not just about the bottom line. We hope the bottom line does well, but you seem to care about more than that. And if you care about more than that, It seems to me the bottom line usually takes care of itself. Tony Lyons, congratulations on everything you've done, and thank you.

Thanks a lot.