What was your writing process for the movie?

So for me, step one is always the sort of setup.

What is sort of the premise of the film? And so the idea that I wanted to, you know, have essentially a two-hander in the LaBianca, that was the premise.

And then the question was, okay, who are the characters that allow me to explore certain characteristics about humanity and explore the characters in the best possible way? And so the first character that I came up with is Rob's character, Alexei.

who is this old Russian literature professor, habitual drunkard, itinerant informer for the NKVD, which is the predecessor for the KGB, but also going through this personal transformation, a person who's really screwed up his life and now needs to redeem himself.

I want all the characters to have arcs.

That I was very focused on, is that every single character should have some sort of arc over the course of the film.

What was your role in bringing each of these actors on board and how involved were you?

What mistakes do you think Democrats are going to make and what mistakes do you think Republicans are going to make?

So I think Democrats will overshoot the mark.

I think they will take this as a mandate to do every crazy thing they ever wanted to do because both parties have a tendency to do that.

You win an election and then you think, I can do what? I want.

And I think Trump did that in 2024 and it didn't end well for him in 2026.

I think Democrats are likely to do the same thing.

They'll push forward some sort of bill for Medicare for all.

Where do you see this going? Is Vance a shoe-in or not? Is Rubio going to run? What are the signs of it? I think

But for this election in particular, what actually is on the line?

So I think that there are a few things that are very clearly on the line.

The first thing that's on the line is the possibility of replacements on the Supreme Court.

So obviously, Justice Alito is in his late 70s.

Justice Thomas is in his late 70s or early 80s.

And so the possibility that one of them steps down, God forbid, has a health event and that you have to replace them, that goes away if the Democrats take the Senate because they will just hold that up until after the 2028 election.

So that's number one.

Will Republicans learn any lessons in case of a blue tsunami? And if so, what lessons should they learn?

So even if you had a grand deal –

Well, the grand deal would have to include – well, the grand deal would have to include Smotrich.

And I think that that is the part that, you know, the Netanyahu government would probably insist on.

Smotrich is, of course, quite popular with a lot of former Bennett voters.

A lot of people who originally voted for Bennett were living in what are called in Hebrew the shtachim, right? They were living out in the settlements.

Virtually all of those people voted for Smotrich this time or Ben-Gavir.

Ben-Gavir actually is performing evenly with Smotrich this time, which is kind of interesting.

And there is no way that you can form a government in Israel with the joint list, which got double the number of seats as Rahm.

Why do you find that so intriguing?

Well, if the Republicans lose Texas, it's almost a lock that they lose the Senate if they lose Texas, because obviously Texas is a deep red state.

The president won it by double digits.

And James Tallarico is leading that race, but within the margin of error.

And this is true of pretty much all of the races that are now being labeled toss up.

All of them are margin of error races.

Obviously, Texas being a heavily red state in terms of registered voting means that Paxton should have the advantage.

Who wins that argument?

But why don't you just give us the briefest rundown of what Pawn Shop is and what happened in Livingston, Montana?

Sure.

So Pawn Shop is a movie essentially about an ICE agent who is caught in a rough conflagration and then has to take a detainee and basically get that detainee to deportation proceedings and goes through a variety of machinations or is being attacked by police.

ice watch members or groups like Antifa.

And he holds up in a pawn shop, essentially, in order to protect himself and to protect the detainee from this crowd.

And this thing became sort of a cause celeb on the left because the film was interpreted as quote-unquote pro-ice propaganda.

Now, the film is not anti-ICE for sure, because, again, it's a Daily Wire production, which means that we are not anti-ICE here.

But is it really just that all of their political priors are so – deeply ingrained that they don't realize that they're potentially hurting themselves long term by not supporting successful film production or encouraging people to shout down and stop the production of films that they don't like?

What's your take on this?

I think that's exactly right.

Obviously, there is a contingent who would love to see President Trump do poorly in the midterms, who want Republicans to lose.

Some of these people are openly saying they want Republicans to lose, by the way.

Some of them are openly standing in favor of the pro-terrorism candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.

So there are some people who are attempting to destroy the Republican Party from within in the hopes that they will then be able to sort of take over whatever remains of the Republican Party.

I don't think that it's going to work.

Isn't there a lot of good that the Republicans can talk about in terms of both the administration's policies as well as the bad, that the Democrats are the worst as they've ever been?

Yeah.

And so the fact that inflation's been hanging out in the 2 to 3% range, that doesn't, that, that doesn't answer the question for him, and he never really kind of went out and made that aggressive pitch.

And then because of Liberation Day, and because he has all these plates that are spinning right now ranging from going after members of the legacy media to the Iran War, I think that the, i- if I were to make sort of o- a one-sentence critique of why President Trump's approval ratings are so low, I think the American people say, "Listen, we need things to be easier to afford.

We need a, we need an easier economy on us.

We're worried about e- or, like, we're worried about the economy, and the president is distracted." I think that's sort of the one...

Not, not he's terrible, not he's awful, not everything he's doing is a disaster the way Democrats are portraying it, but he's distracted.

He's not focusing on the things that we want him to focus on, and everything feels like a distraction right now.

Mm-hmm

Tell us a

little bit about that first.

Well, I'm so excited to be here, Scott.

Believe it or not, I listened to a bunch of Packet Pusher podcasts and even this one.

So I don't know how I got here, but I guess we're here to have a conversation.

I haven't been a network engineer for that long.

I will be starting my sixth year as a network engineer in December.

Like if you, if you add a, would you put a percentage? How often does that really happen amongst your

uh and you know all of the previous calls to get him off of social media or again with run high fight infidels and the actual people being hanged by cranes or being you know pushed off of roofs and that kind of stuff

Yeah, I mean, that part is always kind of astonishing.

So when Kyle wrote the script, one of the things that he was attempting to do, Kyle Rankin, the writer-director of the movie, one of the things he was trying to do with the terrorists is have them say things that terrorists say.

So he has them do things that terrorists legitimately do.

And it's something that Americans really don't face down all that often, unless you're on kind of like the dark recesses of the Internet.

You just don't see any of that stuff.

Every so often it pops into our consciousness when ISIS beheads an American, for example.

It's like this is the least popular midterm in history.

And there's more than them, but they-- It's a fair-- It's, it's-- Is it an ideology? What is it? I mean, I know we know that it is, but what, how do you describe it?

I mean, I, I, again, I, I do think it's an ideology, but I think it's an ideology rooted that somewhere in the relatively recent past, I'd say probably the 1930s, America took this dramatic wrong turn, and ever since then, essentially white Americans, Christian Americans, have been getting screwed, and, and they're being screwed by a sort of transnational elite, and the only way to cure America of that ill is for us to give up power to the Russians and Chinese.

Now, I can agree with some of the critiques that, you know, affirmative action and the welfare state have discriminated against a wide swath of, of Americans.

I mean, that clearly is true.

But the, the prescription, which is to ditch the Declaration of Independence, to ditch individualism, to ditch the meritocracy, is precisely the opposite of what you need, and so they've settled on this conspiratorial belief that anyone who's successful in America must have been a product of this perverse, fake meritocracy.

That's exactly what the left says.

Right? The left says that everybody who's successful in America is a victimizer.

But go ahead.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, there are some theaters across the country who have planned a screening, and then they've canceled the screening under what we would consider to be, I would say, politically inauspicious circumstances.

We've seen posters for the movie that are being put up in New York, torn down.

It's exactly what you would expect.

I mean, there are going to be a lot of people who are scared for a variety of reasons, both political and possibly just safety-based, to screen the film.

Because, again, it has people saying things that a lot of people don't really want to hear.

And obviously the reviews that are coming out so far are pretty much everything we expected.

We're not going to see Congress

Tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, there are some theaters across the country who have planned a screening and then they've canceled the screening under what we would consider to be, I would say, politically inauspicious circumstances.

We've seen posters for the movie that are being put up in New York, torn down.

It's exactly what you would expect.

I mean, there are going to be a lot of people who are scared for a variety of reasons, both political and possibly just safety-based, to screen the film.

Because, again, it has people saying things that a lot of people don't really want to hear.

And obviously the reviews that are coming out so far are pretty much everything we expected.

on this.

Right

... across the country.

I think a lot of that demographic change has not been to the benefit of the United States, which is why I'm not in favor of mass migration.

That is not the same thing as taking a snapshot of students at University of Texas.

It turns out a huge majority of those students are, are citizens of the United States and, and many of them were born in the United States, and then saying, "These people don't belong here." I mean, I don't know whether those people belong here or not because I don't know what their belief systems are.

In- in fact, the only thing I know about them is that they're rooting for the University of Texas at a University of Texas football game.

Now, if you had taken that picture in, say, Little Somalia in Minnesota, I would've said, yeah.

My ancestors.

Why can't we preserve that? Why are you called an ethnostater or any slur or pejorative on the internet if you want to actually preserve that? Why is that?

Now, again, I, I, I don't think it's wrong to want a Christian state at all.

I think there, there are several states, including, for example, Poland, where it's actually written into the constitution of the state that it, that it's a Christian state.

The United States happens to be unique in the fact that it's not written into our law.

There were states at the origin where it was written into the law that you had to be a Protestant in order to hold public office, so it actually barred Catholics, it barred Jews, it barred Muslims, it barred everybody who's not a Protestant.

That, I believe, was true in 8 of the original 13 states, 9 of the original 13 states.

So, you know, it, it depends on how restrictionist you wanna get about all of this, but the reality is America...

Yes

But in your mind, what does Abdul Al-Sayed really represent here politically if he's capable of winning

this race? I mean, he clearly despises the United States.

I mean, this is somebody who tweeted just a few years ago on 9-11 that while some people misinterpreted some ideas on 9-11 and killed some Americans, then Americans misinterpreted some ideas and killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims abroad.

And this, again, is the sort of cycle of violence explanation of radical Islam, Islamism, terrorism.

And he does this all the time.

And he did this when a member of the Dearborn community, a Muslim from Dearborn, drove a truck into a Jewish preschool trying to murder hundreds of Jewish preschoolers.

just outside of Dearborn.

But it is jarring to see it play out and see people like Chuck Schumer just sort of whistling past his own graveyard, Ben.

Also, the co-founder of the new Daily Wire film releasing on Wednesday, Run, Hide, Fight Infidels is the title of it we're going to talk about that shortly it looks like a really good movie ben thanks for coming and we appreciate it how much self-hatred would a jewish person have to have to vote for democrats in this next election

uh...

i mean a a fair bit yeah i said this before the truth is that Judaism is many things.

Like Jewishness is an ethnicity, but it's also a religious practice and it's also a system of belief.

It's a Jewish nation.

And so what people tend to do is say, I was born to a Jewish family, therefore I am Jewish.

Well, you are technically Jewish, but that doesn't mean that you have any Jewish priorities.

What do

That's what's so, so troubling.

I mean, that's certainly true.

I also think the anti-Semitism is more a symptom than a cause.

So you have a Democratic Party that is driven on base envy that anybody who is successful is a victimizer.

Anybody who is unsuccessful has been victimized and exploited.

And then when people look around the United States and they look for an overeducated.

high income group.

We're learning some of the old CIA crowd who tried to go after Trump in 2016 and later behind this issue, along with Joe Biden and and barack obama i mean ai where do you come out on ai why are democrats opposed to progress

How do you see the two coexisting and fitting together?

together?Yeah, we are very, very excited to be bringing Sport in State content to Daily Wire in this partnership.

You're gonna be able to watch shows like this one streaming at Daily Wire.

You're also gonna be able to see written content that's going to be appearing at dailywire.com that is also posted on Sport in State.

We wanna see you guys thrive.

We wanna see Sport in State become even more successful.

And one of the things that we're very much focused on in the coming years is trying to reunify what seems to be a pretty fragmented conservative movement.

Um, w- what is, what's like the, the time machine Dad Ben of five gonna go back and tell Dad Ben of one, "You know what you should know? Get ready for this"?

As you know, I mean, he could get rid of those, a bunch of them,

That is certainly a possibility, but obviously the president is very wedded to the idea of the tariff spring manufacturing home.

I've expressed my disagreement with that policy in terms of pricing.

And again, I think if you look at sort of the president's approval ratings, where the streams crossed from approval to disapproval was directly on Liberation Day, when I think the American people sensed that the president had priorities other than pure affordability.

With that said, the tariffs have contributed some to the sort of price spiral that we've seen.

But the reality is that the rate of inflation has remained relatively low to mid-range under President Trump.

And what people, I think, are very angry about is the fact that over the course of the last five or six or seven years, you've seen an increase in prices that amount to 20 or 25 percent, not the fact that year over year you're seeing an increase in prices of about 3 percent.

What is the solution to that, do you think?

How do you see the two coexisting and fitting together?

Yeah, we are very, very excited to be bringing Sport and State content to Daily Wire in this partnership.

You're gonna be able to watch shows like this one streaming at Daily Wire.

You're also gonna be able to see written content that's going to be appearing at dailywire.com that is also posted on Sport and State.

We wanna see you guys thrive.

We wanna see Sport and State become even more successful.

And one of the things that we're very much focused on in the coming years is trying to reunify what seems to be a pretty fragmented [laughs] conservative movement.

Um, what, what, what is, what's like the, the time machine Dad Ben of five gonna go back and tell Dad Ben of one, "You know what you should know? Get ready for this"?

Really?

Yeah.

Uh, no, I, I was a marketing consultant after running some early-stage startups, uh, and then be- working in marketing at early-stage startups, and, uh, my consultancy was just sort of hitting its head on the ceiling.

And so I was probably gonna go back and, and get a J-O-B, uh, and, and figure out, you know, how to get back on the corporate track, and the MarTech podcast took off like a bat out of hell.

It was just the right person, place, and time.

It was back when podcasting was, like, cheap and easy, audio-only, and, uh, you know, if you had one that was, like, semi-credible, everybody ate it up.

And, uh, so we came out of the gates relatively quickly before I knew what I was doing, and then I realized how hard it was to, you know, produce that much content, and then I started doing multiple shows, and everything sort of took off from there, and then I started d- getting into production infrastructure, and that's kind of what we do now and where my use of AI comes in, is mostly in automating these processes that we've been doing for, you know, close to 10 years to produce podcasts without them actually feeling like they're AI, like they're mechanical-

It's... [laughs]

Shop now at MinkyCouture.com. That's Minky, M-I-N-K-Y, Couture, C-O-U-T-U-R-E, .com.

one of the great failures that we're experiencing in modern society, obviously, is a failure of conversation.

That there's a difference between verbal and oral learning and just reading things.

And that as we become a society where we don't talk to each other as much, that one of the things you lose about the narrative is the person who's telling you the narrative.

That when your parent tells you a bedtime story, it's not just the bedtime story, it's that your parent is telling you the bedtime story.

When you sit around the campfire and you abstract that larger story, it's the people who you're talking to, who you trust, to be good people who are telling you their various stories that allow you to abstract that out.

And so as literacy has increased over the course of the world, that's allowed for the spread of knowledge, but it's also shallowed some of the stories themselves because you sitting in a room reading the Bible is actually not the same thing.

Well, I think the evidence points in that direction.

December 2020 is what? So-

That this is right when Pfizer was announcing that the, a- and, and when the administration was announcing that the vaccine not only prevented death, but also prevented transmission, which it turns out was not rooted in data.

They were just lying.

Okay, now, you could say, "I think the government's lying to me all the time." That is a heuristic.

That is stupid.

Sometimes the government is lying to you.

Okay, sure.

'Cause I know he came on, I asked him the question.

Uh, you, you gonna smack around Maher tonight, or what?

You know, I, I, I'm, I'm, I think that it'll probably be pretty, pretty cordial.

I mean, I think that Maher is secretly one of us.

Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I think that, I think that Maher is tired of the...

I mean, his show was called Politically Incorrect.

I mean, I, I think that he is tired of the identity politics.

I think he's tired of the intersectional nonsense.

Yeah