Modern Wisdom - #717 - Jeremy Boreing - Going To War With Mainstream Media

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

Jeremy Boreing is the co-founder and CEO of the Daily Wire. Independent media is having a moment. YouTube numbers dominate mainstream TV and podcasts wipe the floor with radio. But is it possible for movies, children's programming and more to tumble next? Expect to learn what it's like to work with Ben Shapiro, where Disney keeps going wrong, the problems with modern day Conservatives, whether Jeremy will hire Douglas Murray, why children's TV shows are so important to get right, the dangers of audience capture and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 5.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get $150/£150 discount on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Jeremy Boring, he's the co-founder and CEO of The Daily Wire. Independent media is having a moment. YouTube numbers dominate mainstream TV and podcasts wipe the floor with radio, but is it possible for movies, children's programming, and more to tumble next? Expect to learn what it's like to work with Ben Shapiro, where Disney keeps going wrong, the problems with modern-day conservatives, whether Jeremy will hire Douglas Murray, why children's TV shows are so important to get right,

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But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Jeremy Boring. What do you say when people ask you what you do? I say that I am just a lowly shampoo, razor and chocolate mogul. I've only been saying that for about a week though. Yeah, that's a new industry for you. No, it is a terrifying question when people ask you what you do when you're in entrepreneur because you never quite know what to lead with and whatever you lead with will be the box that people put you in. So I try never to answer the question very honestly. When I was a teenager, I had, I was the first person I knew with a cell phone

other than, you know, bankers, so I didn't know. But I was an early adopter of the flip phone. And my first voicemail, I was probably 17 and I said, Jeremy Boring, writer, producer, and shameless self-promoter. Ah, very nice. Yeah, I feel that myself as well. You know, what do you say about who you are? You know, what you do very largely determines the way that people see you.

And yeah, if you've got a lot of different things, you're interested in lots of different things. That being said, the word entrepreneur is the most whunky title that anybody could bestow on themselves second only to thought leader. Yeah. anybody could bestow on themselves second only to thought leader. Yeah, well, I certainly never identify myself as either of those two things. Can you give me the origin story of the daily wire from your perspective? I'd be very interested to hear this. Yeah, absolutely. You know, a long time ago, a boy loved a girl, 1979. No, the real truth is the daily wire, it is one of those kinds of

stories. So many sundry paths that were all seemingly leading in different directions, brought us to this moment where the daily wire was formed. You have Ben Shapiro, who wondered, and child prodigy, violinist, who wanted to be the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court who became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist as a teenager as first bestselling book as a teenager who, you know, went to Harvard Law and imagined a future for himself working in law and then politics, but who found himself being the fastest talking person in an industry known for slow talking. You've got me who, you know, kind of the classic go west young man, small town, big aspirations guy, moves to Hollywood to be an actor and sort of quickly encounters the reality that he doesn't have what

it takes to succeed in that business. For if in phases came to that realization. You have Caleb Robinson, our co-founder and co-CEO who got made very early at his first kid as a teenager and his first business as well as a teenager, putting in docs underwater in lakes and Texas. We just all had this background that in no way seemed like it was pointed toward running a major media company. But, you know, the shorter window version of it

is that I met Ben Shapiro at a coffee bean on a Vinturable of Art and Studio City. And I recognized pretty quickly that Ben was a once in a generation talent. And a lot of the things that people thought were liabilities, for example, how quickly he speaks. I thought it could be real assets that deployed in the right areas.

And I was at a low moment, sort of in my Hollywood aspiration. How old were you at this point? No, I think this probably 12 years ago, 14 years ago, something like that. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I was not young, I was 30. But I saw something in Ben and I thought it was worth taking a detour,

taking a break from the things that I'd been working on to help Ben. And Ben saw something in me, Ben wanted to be in business and he prides himself on creating opportunities for his friends and he does a great job of that. So Ben started creating these tiny opportunities for me to like make videos for the internet

and make a little money. Now when I say a little money, I mean like $5,000 kind of gigs, you know? And then I started seeing opportunities for Ben to really become prominent and started pursuing those with the influence that I had at that time. Largely influence with conservative wealthy people in Hollywood who contributed to various 501 C3s on

the right where I thought I could find openings for Ben. And together we just sort of helped each other along this path towards success. I heard Ben talk about a time where you were more front facing in terms of talent and Ben was more operator in terms of behind the scenes and then some point that seemed to flip a little bit what's the what went on the. Yeah, well, I think Ben maybe selling himself a little bit short there, you know, he was doing a lot of front facing work, but he was a Harvard trained attorney when we met he was general counsel for a media company. So he was working more operationally in those early days. And I was just trying to be a writer and producer within the Hollywood system. So in that sense, perhaps I was a bit more front facing. But the real thing that happened was Pierce Morgan. Ben had a very famous encounter with Pierce Morgan over gun control in the wake of a terrible school shooting.

I believe it was Parkland. And and Ben just brought all of the things that make Ben Shapiro such a special talent to bear in that interview. And and I realized in that moment, you know, there was a real change happening away from sort of corporate brand media toward individual influencer media. I don't think we're really using the term influencer at that time, but at that time I called it talent based as opposed to a company based. And I said to Ben, you know, we need to make you famous the right way to change the culture,

the right way to impact the political conversation isn't really through company forming right now. It's through personality forming. So let's work together on that. Yeah, people don't follow things. They follow people. You look at it. Sure. Uh, Christy honor and Aldo, 50 million followers, Ray Al Madrid, 25 million followers. Elon Musk, 200 million followers. I don't know what Tesla or SpaceX or anything else has, but it's not going to be as much. People relate to people.

There's something as well, kind of this Ick that people have around corporatism and the overly polished persona that is a pretend version of a person. Someone said to me over dinner the other night, they referred to it as trying to speed hack authenticity or growth hack authenticity, or growth hack authenticity. And it's not, that's not really a thing. Like authenticity is emergent. It naturally comes out of doing the thing.

So I understand that. One of the interesting takeaways from that, there may be a lot of people listening who are in business or content creation or whatever, who think, well, I can do the front facing stuff, but I'm also not a bad operator. What insights or advice have you got for people who ambivots when it comes to their behind the scenes in front of the scenes skill set?

Well, a lot of people become famous, and we live in an era where it's easier to become famous than it's ever been before. But to actually have a career over time in the, in the, whatever we want to call it, the influence space, you know, to, to be a voice that people trust, to be someone who people believe lives authentically, believes we'll tell them the truth, believe has something to say that's worth listening to. You actually have to be one of those things. I think one of the challenges that a lot of emerging voices have right now is they do figure

out how to use the system to maximize their opportunity to put together an audience in the short term. But if you have nothing to offer, if you have nothing to say, you're not going to succeed. One thing I'm proud of at the Daily Wires, just how intelligent our hosts are. You sneeze when you lie and God knew that Michael Moles is not that talented, he's not that smart. No, you know, I'll actually brag on Michael

because I never do. When we gave Michael his first show, obviously an intelligent guy, but he felt outmatched, and he started reading. And when I say reading, I mean, Michael would read two books a week, and the two books weren't like the 40,

or the four hour work week, you know, they were like, he was reading philosophers and he was reading, you know, church fathers and he was reading, you know he was reading the Western canon. At a rate of two books a week, he had a full-time job working for us and then a full-time job reading and he maintained that pace for probably 40 years. So you can imagine just how much over a hundred important works a year, four hundred important works in his first four years. And that's why he has a voice that's lasted

for as long as he has. It's not just that he's a hot take guy. It's not just that he figured out, you know, how to ride whatever current cultural wave there might be. There's a business aspect of that too, which is you can make a lot of money really quickly on the internet.

But money doesn't stack very well. You know, we live in a moment right now in particular where there's almost no yield anywhere. If I had achieved the success that I've achieved in the last four years financially, four years earlier, I would own a huge real estate portfolio, would all be cash flowing. I'd be championing the 1% rule and the 50% rule in a way we would go. But today those things don't work, those systems don't work. The market doesn't work. And so the only way that you can actually have sustained financial success is through,

not, not, this is a loaded term, but I'm gonna use it a little bit differently than other people use it. Wealth creation. And people will say that owning real estate is wealth creation, but it really isn't. It's growing wealth that you already encountered. Well, perpetuation.

It's wealth perpetuation. Wealth creation is finding market opportunities and creating value. And that's harder than having a hot take that gets a lot of clicks on the internet. So I think that the voices who are going to be around a decade from now are the voices who don't pander to their audience, who don't just say exactly what they think people want to hear, who tell the truth as they see it while also representing their audience authentically and with respect, and who create real value opportunities for that audience. You see it with a lot of companies who are trying to release products now, which we also

do at the daily wire. I don't know exactly what it will be over time, but I think it's going to be the people who are finding those opportunities to create value that are going to succeed long-term. Tell you what's interesting about that Michael's story is so few people in the world of content creation as far as I can see. But, but, but, but, really, in any industry that isn't sport or maybe classical music treat their pursuit like an athlete does, or like a professional. And this is something I came across

an essay from a friend, David Parrell, three or four years ago, and he said, treat yourself like an athlete, was the title of it. Now, the actual, in classic Twitter style, I didn't read the essay for 18 months, but I loved what I I interpreted the essay as. The essay that he wrote wasn't what I created

in my own mind, but it really got me thinking, I'd read Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art and then Turning Pro, and I thought, wow, like imagine what would happen if you treated the pursuit of my chosen career, which is podcasting, like an athlete, what happens if I get a comedy coach, an improv coach, an addiction coach, what happens if I work out the different ways that sleep or hydration or breath work or cold exposure, impact the way that I feel and how quick my mind works?

What happens if I start doing on all of these different things because an athlete does mindset training and they'll do preseason conditioning an athlete does mindset training and they'll try to do preseason conditioning and they'll run drills and they'll look at game tape and they'll spend time with people that have got growth mindsets and they'll be with this coach and that coach and the other coach and they'll think about hydration and nutrition and supplementation. All this stuff is like, well, you know, if you say that this is your thing, why leave more capacity on the table than fully going for it? And it's cool to hear someone like Michael that steps out and is able to discuss philosophical works

but to realize that there was a trajectory even to that. And I think that this is one of the beautiful things and one of the inspiring things about YouTube and this more fourth-world breaking world that we're a part of, because it helps normal people that haven't yet got there, which is what every single person was, at the beginning of their journey, think,

oh wow, I can go back to episode one of whatever the hell thing it is that I love now and realize just how shit it was, and maybe it's even shitter than what I do on my first episode. Oh my God, I could be, you know? So yeah, I really love that idea. You know, people ask me sometimes,

when are you gonna have a show? And I jokingly say, well, jokingly and not jokingly, they're all my shows. But the truth is, one reason I don't have a show is because I know that it takes work to be good at it. And I don't have, it takes a lot of work to do what I do. And you can't do everything. There's a great, there's a line that I stole

from an episode of Star Trek or something where the character says, no one can live all the lives that they would choose. No one can live all the lives that they desire. A choice has to be made, and that's true. There are a lot of things we could be, but you can only be great at a handful of things, and you have to make those choices along the way.

So, I don't have a full-time podcast, not because I don't have the opportunity, I could launch a podcast today, and it would be within some reason a top podcast, just because I have the power of a huge company behind me that knows how, exactly how to do it, exactly how to market it. But, I don't have something to say every day.

That's not the world that I occupy. I occupy the world of creating the opportunities for my hosts to be able to thrive at what they do. Yeah, you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. That's exactly right. Very difficult realization. One of my friends, Alex talks about, you've seen the Matrix and there's that sandbox tutorial where Nio is being led by Morpheus through

busy street and there's a woman in a red dress and he's watching the woman in a red dress and then he says, Nio, what are you watching me are the woman in the red dress? And the point is that attractive opportunities are distracting even when you should be focused on other things. But one of the challenges that you encounter as you begin to develop a little bit more is it's not a hypothetical 10,

it's a thousand hypothetical 1000s. And your ability to say no needs to continue to scale along with your skill set. And that is something, I'm really, really feeling at the moment. The last 18 months for me has been pretty big change, pretty big step change in terms of a lot of stuff. And it's a skillset, no one teaches you. No one teaches you how to say no more effectively, to things that you would have begged to say yes to only six months ago.

And that's... I suppose that's one of the... There's definitely a degree of envy I have for some of the guys that work under yourself because there is infrastructure and guidance and just a little bit less figuring out on your ownness, which must be nice and it probably helps them to just focus on making the content rather than being in the engine room working out, whether or not this decision or that decision is the right one to make structurally. Yeah. And you're also dealing with, at the point that you are in your career right now, you're dealing with the three, I talk about the Salapas, the three most corrosive elements

that exist in the world, fame, wealth, and power. And you're beginning to have a measure of each of those as your channel grows and as your brand grows. And you know, they're not to be handled lightly. Each one of them comes with a whole range of temptations. One of the temptations is to try to protect the thing that you've built and your ability, all the things that allowed you to attain it, start to seem like liabilities when you start trying to figure out how to preserve it. And it's a real challenge. And I also give you an example. Well, for example, it takes risk taking to create wealth,

but preserving wealth tends to be people's natural tendency is to become more risk-averse as they go, because they don't want to lose the thing that they've made. And so in time, especially in this kind of space, you become almost the opposite of what you were. The very thing that helped you to succeed becomes something that you fear will cause you to fail. And all of that is because when you have something,

you want to keep having it. Something to lose now. You have something to lose. So I think that it's incredibly difficult. I've spent a lot of time in my life helping people who are at various stages of a journey towards success. And I didn't know that that was going to be my life, but really from the time that I was 21 to today, I've been more Merlin than King Arthur.

I've been the guy over the shoulder of the guy many, many times in various capacities, but I've seen them all go through what I kind of consider the almost predictable patterns of success. There are just things that everyone goes through along that journey. What are the most common pitfalls that you see? most common pitfalls that you see. You know, one of them is that convenience starts to become more and more and more important to you and understandably so because, you know, inconveniences cost you time and mental and emotional energy and you have less and less of that to offer. But the downside of that, the positive is you start maximizing your time over target. The more time you spend folding your laundry, the less time that you're spending reading

the book. So Michael Moles has to make a choice in a limited number of hours in the day. Do I spend it folding laundry or do I spend it reading the book? He's going to get much more value long term out of reading the book. So the inconvenience of folding the laundry is something that he needs to replace. He needs someone else, you know, better that he spend money paying someone to do something that you could do or anybody can fault their own laundry. What a stupid thing for someone not to do.

And that's true. But if that same hour could be spent accruing value to yourself, you should spend it accruing the value and the person whose job is to fold laundry also benefits because that's how they accrue value. But the negative side of it is, you do reach a point where if your best friend had a flat tire three blocks from your house, you would send a tow truck. And when you reach that stage of avoiding being inconvenienced,

you've now accepted yourself out of kind of common humanity. You see this with successful people all the time they become. On one hand more human and on the other hand less human and the goal is to become more without becoming less not easy. That's very interesting you know there is a the almanac of naval ravercant is a book written by my friend Eric Jorgensen, came out about five years ago. I think it's the most highlighted per word book on Kindle Ever. I think that's a record that it holds. It's very, very dense, very easy to read, but dense as in it was all aphorisms and maxims pieced together into a narrative. And as soon as that book came out, everybody in my world started talking about leverage, right? That was the sexy word, leverage through code, leverage through media, leverage through capital, leverage through labor.

And I get it. People outsource, busy people outsource things, and they do other things instead. But there are certain things. But you can't outsource your humanity. There are certain things that you should keep a hold of. And there are certain things, even within the business, that you should keep a hold of as And there are certain things even within the business that you should keep a hold of as well. So you mentioned before about this kind of, almost this balance between content that gets plays

and avoiding audience capture or avoiding just sort of tossing red meat to the mob in a very predictable kind of way and ensuring that the playing it safe or just simply saying what people want to hear is something that you don't do. I do think that this is a criticism that gets lobbied, an awful lot toward the right because the content by its nature tends to be a bit more reactionary.

How do you think about this balance and what's your insight around the reactionary right kind of accusation? Yeah. Well, the right is reactionary. There's no question it always has been throughout all of history. A healthy society needs a healthy left because you need a group of people who are questioning the status quo. You need a group of people who are creative and trying to create the next thing in the future. But you need to balance against that with a healthy right, a healthy conservatism. I would suggest that in a truly ascendant culture, truly healthy culture, you're always

going to have more people trying to hang on than you are people trying to critique. But you do have to have people critiquing because the status quo is flawed. People are flawed. Therefore, the status quo is flawed. There are people who get left behind in the systems that exist. You need people challenging those systems. And so it is the nature of the right to say to the people who want to make change. Hey, hold on, wait just a minute.

And that's a perfectly good thing, where it becomes bad as in a system like ours today, where the left has become ascendant, where the left has cultural and political and economic hegemony across our culture. In that situation, you have more people trying to undermine the system than you have trying to preserve the system. And in those moments, the reactionary nature of the right becomes, you could say on one hand, it becomes more important, and that's true. It's probably more important than it's ever been. On the other side, you could say, it becomes almost completely a deconstruction of its own, which is to say that at a certain point, the right isn't actually trying to preserve. The right has become revolutionary and is trying to create, but what they're trying to create

runs the risk of being retrograde. And that is incredibly, that is the incredibly difficult moment that we find ourselves in on the right in the West today, that we are, we are in the name of conservatism. We're not actually trying to conserve it all, we're trying to build. And truly, there are some things that need to be built. There are structures on the left now that need to be torn down. But when the right becomes revolutionary historically, it usually has somewhat dark implications because the right is trying to build something that constrains a lot of the good that's

done by the left. How do you battle the worst instincts of the left without embracing the worst instincts of the right? And while America is in an amazing job of that, historically, it's very hard now because the right is in truly defeat across all of the most powerful institutions in the country. So how do you do it? Well, part of how you do it is with what I call lower case R Republicanism. And that's in opposition or in contrast to populism. Populism says, give the people what the people want. But that isn't really what populism believes.

I mean, for one, in America and in the West generally, the people disagree really with the the fundamental core propositions of the right. We like to say in America, we the people on the right, we like to say they've lost touch with we the people, but the problem is they've actually become the people. There are more of them. They win every popular presidential election, every popular national election. And so it's not actually populism purports

to give the people what they want, what it really means is to give a certain group of people what they think they want. What Republicanism lowercase R says is, no, our job is to represent the values and interests of our audience, of our constituency, but also to lead them, also to be a check against some of their worst instincts.

Also to point out to them where sometimes what they think they want isn't what they really actually want in the moment, no different than any other group of people. I mean, I often think that what I want is some ice cream, and that is true in the moment, but it's not what I actually want over time. It's not that I actually want to build, and it's always been the case that a healthy society has to have leadership that both responds and represents the people, but also to some degree challenges the worst impulses of the people.

Now on the other side of that, you have tyranny. So on one hand, you have the tyranny of the people, populism, and on the other hand, you have the tyranny of the elite. Let's call that authoritarianism. And there is no perfect way to say, well, what is the system that balances between those two? Because people aren't perfect, and the world isn't perfectable? But it is, in its own messy way, I think lowercase are republicanism.

It's a dedication to the belief that both things are possible and that while there's tension between the two, we have to endeavor to find a way to navigate that tension. And so the daily wire challenges are our audience, but we don't betray our audience. That makes us, I think, somewhat unique in the space. Hmm. What do you think the right is getting wrong, mostly at the moment? Hmm. Well, I think that the right has, in most cases, the right has accurately arrived at a diagnosis of the problem. But quite often it's wrong in

its prescriptions. And it's wrong in its prescriptions for a variety of reasons, one, because we're so beat up for so long, particularly since the ascendancy of Barack Obama in 2008, when the instruments of government, particularly in America, started being turned directly against us. And we were being crushed deliberately crushed by the system, targeted and destroyed by the system. And that makes you less thoughtful. It makes you even more more reactionary. And sometimes we're wrong just because things aren't always the obvious.

And so, for example, lots of people have given me financial advice in my life. And a lot of them are people I really look up to, parents and grandparents and other kinds of mentors. But none of them had any money. And so most of the advice that I've got, and I think this is true for most people, most of the wisdom that we've got, most of the advice we've gotten about money is from people who never had too since to rub together.

And so it turns out a lot of the things that they say that seem almost axiomatic are just false. The one that I always like to tell people is, my parents told me, probably your parents told you, money doesn't grow on trees. What a lie, money does grow on trees. Money is there just to be created. Wealth and value are actually created.

But most of our parents were incredibly hardworking, blue collar people who worked for a wage. And in their life, in their experience, money doesn't grow on trees. Money isn't created, it's earned. And so that's the best advice they can give us, but it's wrong advice. And in the final analysis, it's wrong advice. And so I think that a lot of the places where the right goes wrong is when it, when it embraces ideas that seem axiomatic, but that ultimately aren't enough. The world is complex. The world is

fallen. People are messy. Answers are often nuanced. And then both left and right are often looking for a prescription that can't exist. And I would call that the ultimate prescription. And this is where we get into realisms. So people, at the worst extreme, you have anti-Semitism emerging left and right in a major way right now, where people have rightly identified that the elites in our society have accumulated too much power unto themselves. They've betrayed the people.

And we've become kind of conspiratorial in our answer to that. So we start looking for a way to destroy the elites. We start trying to label the elites and find commonality among the elites, and that leads us into things like anti-Semitism or radical populism, which wants to overthrow even the concept of elites. But of course, it wants to overthrow the concept of elites while ascending new elites. The other place where I think that the right makes mistakes is what I call cultism. You know, cult leader always wins your trust by telling you something, by telling you

a forbidden truth. And it's just in the mind of a man when someone points out to you that you've been lied to and those blinders are lifted and you see the light for the first time, your first thought is gratitude and amazement. Your second thought should be skepticism about other things that you believe and other people who tell you things. But it is in the mind of a man, instead that your second instinct is

to now believe anything else that the person who just revealed you, the hidden truth tells you. And in the era of the internet, where we ascend voices, particularly on the right, on the basis of the internet, where we ascend voices, particularly on the right, on the basis of them speaking one forbidden truth. And now we just can't,

now we just believe anything that that person tells us. You see this with actors like Andrew Tader, someone else who do point out something that is true and that we have not really been allowed to see and if we did see it, we weren't allowed to say it. But then people put all their trust in Andrew Tate because he revealed that truth to them. They don't realize that he's leading them down a lot of really dark paths.

And that I think that that's a tendency that's really evident on the right. I mean, that's a tendency left and right. But we're dealing with it much more on the right today. That's so, that's so interesting that Saying something which many people feel is true or say in the privacy of their own homes no matter one side of the political spectrum they're on gives a kind of cult leader type

Clevoyance to the person like they're speaking truth to power like they're able to say the things and then the temptation of that Actor to them be like well, you know, they they were interested in what I had to say about the Middle East So why shouldn't my epidemiology be taken seriously? Why why is it why shouldn't I weigh in on the trans athletes in sports discussion? Well, but also because of the corrosive power of wealth, fame and money that when people start giving us those things, we start looking for ways to hang onto it or accumulate more of it.

We start wielding it for different reasons. Then we start saying things for different reasons. Then the reason we said the first things that we said. That's something that anyone in the position that you're in or the position that I'm in has to really guard against it all times. Are you saying things that are true? Are you saying things because you believe that the saying of them is in service of the good?

And the audience needs to be aware when they're listening to someone, yes, this person revealed to you for bitten truth, but it's what they're listening to someone, yes, this person revealed to you a forbidden truth, but it's what they're saying now true. And shouldn't it be the case that when someone shows you, you've been lied to? Shouldn't your first instinct to be be to say, oh, I am too trusting. Not, oh, I should trust this new person to tell me. Yes, yeah, it's just a replacement for the last God is a new God that comes in. Yeah, that's so, that dynamic. So, so very interesting.

How do you think do you guys have a strategy internally or do you speak to your talent in a way to kind of help them not get out of their skis to ensure that what they're talking about is within the domain of competence that they have? Mm-hmm. I mean, it's tough when people talk for a living, they often say things before they've thoughtfully what that's talking about is within the domain of competence that they have. I mean, it's tough. When people talk for a living, they often say things before they've thoughtfully considered them. I think that we have a far above average,

or I think we have a really good batting average on this, I think I should say. One of the great things that we have in our company, and you said that you have a certain kind of envy for some of our guys because of the business infrastructure. And I understand that we provide a lot of support for our team in that. But there is something that we provide at a more human level. And it really is camaraderie that, you know, we really do sit down and have a cigar.

I don't really smoke cigars anymore. Although I did just launch a great cigar company called Mate Flower. But I've basically stopped smoking. But we just sit down with cigars or whiskey or sit down by the fireplace and have friendships and talk about these things and challenge each other. Without the cameras on all the time.

Without the cameras on. I think the fundamental principle what you're talking about here is if you're doing something regardless of what it is, personal growth, changing from one type of thinking or group of friends or industry or place that you live, whatever. When you're moving from that to something else, there are going to be pitfalls and temptations and uncertainty and self-doubt. And it's important to have other people who are on that journey,

and ideally, a little bit further ahead of you on that journey, so that you can just fact check whether or not this was true. I always, I mean, make this analogy because I was an only child, so it was always, team parent was always right because there was two of them, and only one of me. And I was never able to go to someone else and say, hey, was, do you think dad was right when he said that thing? So I kind of just accept, you know, you were talking about

axiomatically, it's like, it's just this wave of things. It's like, well, no one else has said that it's not, I have this sense that it might not be right, but who am I to say no, they're the parents, you're the child, right? And it's kind of a little bit like that relationship with the world. You know, I have this sense that I might be right about this. Some people in the world, maybe most people in the world, seem to say that I'm not, I really feel this.

And without someone that you can speak to, ideally a group of people that you can speak to, go, no dude, like trust yourself. I think you're right here. I think that you've got, I think this is them, that's super, super important. We're smashing ideas into other ideas here all the time, both publicly, which is our job, but much, much more importantly, I think privately, which is where we, where I think our, hopefully our character is going to be more formed by that aspect of what we do. Does that mean that we all come to the same conclusions on, say, a political issue, no? But it certainly means that we've explored our political beliefs in a crucible, and it certainly means that we've explored our moral beliefs and even more of a crucible.

What do you think that the left is getting right? Is this something that you wish the right would do more like the left is? Are there any lessons that you wish that you guys could take away? Well, absolutely. I mean, the left is admirable, especially when the left is healthy. It's admirable and it's care for the people who are left behind by the system. The left is admirable and it's recognition that the greater good isn't good for everyone. The left is creative in ways that the right is historically not creative.

Creating things is a fundamentally liberal proposition. And so, one of the challenges that we have, and we're trying to answer it at the daily wire, is to be creative for conservatism. That's why we're putting out this movie, Ladybullars, that's why we're putting out the pin dragon cycle. So why we put out documentaries like, what is a woman? It's why we sell razors and chocolates. We're constantly trying to build,

we don't want to just be critics of the culture. We want to be creators of the culture. We don't want to just be critics of the culture. We want to be creators of the culture. We don't want to be critics of business. We want to be creators of business. We don't want to just be voices. We want to be not just talkers, but doers. And I think that there is some of that, of course, on the right,

and there's more and more of it every day. I'm not holding us out as somehow the only people doing it, but there are precious few of us. And if we want, I guess what I would say is, if we want to build the future for the country, we better get pretty good at building. And we better have a future that people want to aspire to,

that people want to live in. I think far too often, the right speaks in absolutes that alienate people. So here's a great example. The daily wire is, you know, if there's one issue that every person at the daily wire agrees about its divorce, divorce is bad, divorce destroys society,

divorce destroys children, we talk about it all the time, and we talk about it in very practical ways, the consequences of divorce, the damage that divorce does to children, the damage that divorce does to the soul. But there's a lot of divorce people out there. Sometimes they hear us talk about these things, and they'll write into me, and they'll say, you know, cool, I get it, divorce is bad, but I did get a divorce now what? Or cool, I get it. Finishing high school has been talks about the sort of predictive ways of knowing if you'll

be a success in life. Cool. Don't do drugs, but I did. Cool. Don't get arrested, but I did. Cool. Don't get your girlfriend pregnant, but I did. Now, what are you?

Now what? And I think that the right isn't always good at having an answer to the now what? Because we're so busy fighting for sort of even the idea of foundational truth that we forget that most people's lives have not neatly adhered to that. And most people are not starting their journey with our ideas at the beginning as clean slates. They're starting it having already lived in the messy world that is.

The left's very good at that. And we're not particularly good at that. It is alienating, and it's also very uninspiring to just be a critic all the time. Right. You know, if all that you're doing is being cynical or skeptical or tearing down or whatever it might be, it's just not that inspiring, you know, like it's cool and I understand, in some ways it's very easy to rapidly gain an audience by identifying mutual distaste for an outgroup rather than mutual love of an in group. This is one of my rubrics that I use to judge whether or not a content creator

is, well, meaning or not, and acting in good faith, is their audience bonded together over the mutual love of an in group or the mutual hatred of an outgroup? Because if it's permanently outgroup outgroup outgroup, that's just a purity spiral by a different name. And you're gonna get shaved off the outside of it when you don't do something that concords with whatever their particular worldview is. So you mentioned there, obviously, this kind of intimate relationship between media and culture.

And this is something that you guys are increasingly trying to contribute to. How do you think about the relationship between media and culture? Well, for sure. Well, first I want to speak to that purity spiral you mentioned. I call it a purity death spiral whenever I refer to it. And I won't abide being categorized in a way that I can't live up to. And so, you know, I think that especially in the conservatives, well, I shouldn't say that because the left has their own

and perhaps even more totalitarian versions of this, but they're just not traditionally ethnic. They're not built around traditional morality. But it is certainly the case that a big part of what we do on the right, a big part of what we do with the daily wire is talk about morality and moral ideals. But foundational to my belief about the world is that I have not,

in any way, ascended to a point of moral idealism, of moral ideal. I'm a human being, I'm I'm chock full of flaws. I wear many of them right out in the open and there's a whole bunch more that people don't know anything about and hopefully never do, right? Nobody wants their heart to be seen by anyone else. I make a point to never allow my success to come from presenting myself as the example of how a person is supposed to live their lives morally. And I make a point of not putting out content that I think panders to the audience

that only once things that are wholesome, for example. A lot of the fans of the day of the war, I love the most, are always mad at me because when we put out a movie, it isn't wholesome. But first of all, I don't think they actually want wholesome movies. I think that they all watch down to Naby in the office and friends and Marvel movies. They don't hold those movies any kind of standard.

They only want to hold us to a standard because they don't, they're not honest with themselves. Most people aren't my problem myself included. People don't know what they actually want. They know what they want to want. They reveal what they actually want through their economic behavior. Yeah, they're clicks, clicks and cashies cash. That's right. I know what people really want because they watch it.

I know that people don't, you know, there's not, I think a movie like I can only imagine is good and it does good in the world. If I know that there are a lot fewer people, even on the right who actually sit around and talk about how great what I can only imagine is then they do spending time talking about how good modern family was, right?

It's just the nature of it. We actually want things that are different than what we admit out loud that we want. I say all of that to say, I refuse to put out movies that pander to my audience. I will only put out movies that I think are great and that I think that hold up as entertainment. And that, you know, even if they're not great,

they're on the road to being great by which I mean we're becoming better and better and better as we go. But what I don't want to be is like, you know, with all respect to companies like Pureflix, I am not Pureflix. I'm not saying Pureflix. Pureflix is a, it's owned by Sony now. It was started by Michael Scott and David A.R. White and they made Christian movies and they did a great job.

From a business point of view, they created something really good. They found a market inefficiency and they answered that market inefficiency. But the problem with making your identity purity is what you just said. Eventually, since you are not pure because spoiler alert, no one is, you will be destroyed by that standard that you created.

Correct. The standard that you hold others to is the standard that you will be judged by that standard that you created. The standard that you hold others to is the standard that you will be judged by. That's exactly right. What I would much rather do is hold up things that are intention. As I said, lowercase R Republicanism involves tension, tension between representing and never betraying your constituency, but also challenging and leading your constituency away from their worst impulses. Similarly, I think in the realm of art,

it's our job to represent our audience, but also give our audience the truth of what they actually want, not what they want to want. And I think in the daily wire our job is to talk about moral and philosophical and political ideals, but juxtapose that with talking about grace and what opportunities exist that meet people where they are that help them course correct

and steer the ship a little bit better. In the real world where we've all made a ton of mistakes and are only gonna make more as we go forward. What did you learn during the production of the new movie, Lady Ballers? What was insightful or instructive or revealing during the process of that, either filming or publication? Yeah.

One of them is how afraid people are to laugh now. It's even on the right people would not associate themselves with the movie when we were trying to make it and inviting our friends to be a part of it. Because of absolute fear. These are people who will speak out about the issue, but they'll only speak out about it in very, very serious tones. And they'll all say, oh, mockery is a huge weapon. You know, we, the left is so good at mockery and we're so bad at it, but then they don't actually want to make any jokes. And they don't want to make jokes because they're afraid of the audience. And they're afraid of the audience because they have set themselves up in a relationship with the audience that requires purity of them. And it requires purity from them that the audience themselves will not give. As I say, you know, an audience

member who will say, you told an off-color joke and ladybballer, so I'm not gonna watch it. We'll then go home and watch reruns of friends. What is that about? Well, friends never entered into the purity compact with them. And so I think we have to not enter into the purity compact with our audience either. We have to be much more thoughtful. So I was surprised that people's sort of unwillingness to have a laugh about these really sensitive... There was a news story that I saw, and maybe it wasn't a news story, it might have been like a Reddit thread or something, that I think you guys had used extras for a particular scene, and then people walk out. Some people didn't know

that it was actually for the daily wire, and then that got leaked on Reddit. Yeah. How's that? It was pretty funny. You know, some guys who came in to be extras stormed the basketball court saying Ben Shapiro is a Nazi, which I think that they should look up Ben Shapiro and then they should look up Nazi. I mean, I think there are a lot of problems with their assertion, but you know, the argument that we didn't disclose to the extras exactly what the movie was about could be made by any extra who is ever on any movie.

That's not how that works. So, it hurts some people's feelings, I suppose, but that's funny, man. I'm not nodding the hurting people's feelings business, I guess. It's interesting. It's interesting for me to think about about what the future of culture slash culture was is. It feels to me, I don't know whether you agree with this, but I think a number of people have made this point. And it seems right to me that we're past peak woke. That peak woke was kind of summer 2020-ish, back end

of then. And I wonder what comes next. What do you think? This must be something you think about strategically very, very closely. I think that it is true that peak woke may have been the summer of 2020. It's true that the left has suffered some cultural losses, really, for the first time in my lifetime. And therefore, you know, commercially, the right has scored some cultural victories. But we're still losing in the areas that matter the most. I mean, we're still losing our freedom

every day to this regulatory bureaucracy that has essentially gained, ascended to almost absolute power in the country. And Congress doesn't legislate anything to speak of. So we live in an incredibly dangerous time. And what I worry is that if we don't have better leadership on the right, we're going to end up into a very European style conflict between the worst aspects of the left and the worst aspects of the right. We're going to end up into a very European style conflict between the worst aspects of the left and the worst aspects of the right. And in that kind of a conflict, there's not really any winning for the good guys in the short term.

That's the thing that I'm the most fearful of. I want to contribute to the existence of a healthy American right. Because I believe that a healthy American right is the immune system that can clean up all the problems from wokeism on the one hand to bureaucratic tyranny on the other to, you know, loss of national identity, all of it, you know, loss of economic power and stagnation and inflation. All of that can be solved by having a healthy right in this country. And so, you know, it's a real challenge.

It's a challenge that, understandably, when people get punched in the nose over and over and over again, they just want somebody who will punch back. Yeah. And, yeah. But what we need is somebody who has a, and I'm not trying to make this about presidential politics. I think it's far bigger.

What we need as a movement is leadership that teaches us both, yes, to fight, but also what to fight for, to fight for the right things. And that's tough when you've been getting clobbered in the face for a decade. Yeah. It's very strange to think about how people respond and how they're seduced by particular types of talking points. I think I said this to Jordan Peterson. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago. I

think in part the ascendancy of someone like Andrew Tate can be laid at the feet of Jordan's moving on from the conversation to young men. Jordan's moved on. He's doing these things with Arkeys. Now, thinking about God a lot more. He's got this new book, We Who Ressel With God. He's doing 12-part series on the daily wire about Genesis or the book of Exodus or something else. He's moved on from that conversation. And people will step into that vacuum, and they will step into that vacuum

in every different subset all the way down. You mentioned there again about, I've heard you talk, I think it was Megan, with Megan Kelly about how politics is dominated by old people, but content creation and the movement of culture, at least on the ground at the moment, from the way that I see it,

it's dominated by young people, younger people, certainly younger people than the incumbent that typically would have been the gatekeepers with whatever was going on. What's the future of that look like? How can it be the case that politics is still this old guard, and yet culture moving seems to be a much younger, more finger on the post, God? Well, sadly, I think that that somewhat representative of what Europe looks like before the

First World War, that you had an elite that had lost touch with the people, an elite that had accumulated too much power unto itself. The whole continent was being run by people who were far out of touch from an age and demographic point of view. You know, people, you had a very, very old leadership in Europe at that time, and young people felt left behind. And we're in many ways left behind. The danger that we have now, listen, there's enormous opportunity in the creator economy.

I mean, you know, 20-year-olds can have a voice in a way that would know gatekeepers. And that, there's a lot of good that will come from that. There's bad that comes with it, too. One thing that you lose when you lose the gatekeepers is you lose any filtering mechanism and any sense of wisdom. Young people don't have any wisdom, they have ideas. And so in the tension between the good that comes from that and the bad that comes from it, we have to find a way to navigate toward the good

and away from the bad. It's good that we have more voices. It's good that there aren't gatekeepers who can keep out ideas, good ideas that they oppose. The negative is, there's also no gatekeepers to keep out the bad ideas that we should all oppose. Yeah, and there's things that can limbically hijack, which are not worthy of the attention

that our brains want to give them. That's exactly right. I talk about this a lot that technology is like a technology represents a hardware change. And when hardware change is software has to change, and we're not developing the software fast enough to deal with all the change that's happened in the system in our lifetime. We haven't, we've barely dealt with the printing press, and now we're trying to deal with, you know, the internet and AI and, and you name it, and so many of our problems today, it may be the case that all of our problems today

in the West are just not yet understanding what to do with the Internet and mass communication. I think downstream from that is there's an awful lot to be laid at the feet of it. Jonathan Heights just released his or announced his new new book, which is coming out in March of next year. I'm very interested to speak to him about that because so much of so much, and there's almost like an excuse that people can just throw. It's like social media and technology again. I do think that it gets both overused and underused for things. People forget about it axiomatically or like the thermodynamics of the system, and then

they use it as a scapegoat buggy man to explain things which are actually, well, no, that's just agency or sovereignty or individual integrity that someone hasn't decided to deploy. Here's one question I had for you. Who was some of your favorite content creators outside of the guys that are at DW? Because you must get delayed flight.

You get stuck in airports and stuff. You've got to watch something to distract you. Who do you turn to? Who do I listen to? You know, it's funny. I went through a big phase of listening to Gary V. And I was listening to Gary V because Gary V is not like me in any way.

I don't even understand, like, fully one third of the words that come out of Gary Vaynerchek's mouth, I do not know what they are. It's some music reference to genre that I don't know, some sports reference that I will never understand. It's something about wine that I don't get. He's from a completely different world than I am,

but he is always interesting. He's always challenging. He's always pushing himself, he's always thinking, I get a kick out of that because it's not me, it's not what I'm like. I like to listen to NPR offerings, even though I disagree with almost everything, all of their presumptions, but there's such a quality to their approach that it always hooks me and it inspires me to wanna bring more quality of that kind to the work that we do. Of late, I've listened to, it's funny to say,

I listened to a lot of Jordan Peterson now and I did not listen to Jordan Peterson even six months ago to speak of, I mean, I read his book. I was familiar with him. Newly be a great asset to the daily wire. But I find myself more and more listening to Jordan. And the person who we produce who I now listen to every week, even though I've been friends with him and been producing him for a decade, I've never listened routinely to his show. But I think Andrew Klavin's show is incredibly important. I'm not listening to it as the producer of it to make notes on it. I'm actually listening to it because of the wisdom that it contains and the insights that he has.

I've always loved Steven Crowder. I think that he's absolutely hilarious. I don't love him anymore. I have some fairly public disagreement with Steven at the moment, but I still think that he's one of the most talented funny guys out there. And especially in our space, no one, there's not that much that is funny. So it's so refreshing to hear Stephen's approach in that regard. I think Glenn Bex, the greatest living broadcaster, I think Dennis Pregner's one of the greatest,

and sort of in a weird way, least recognized in the age of the internet, he is very recognized in radio. But I think that if you just took the library of things that Dennis has said and started chopping them up for Instagram, he'd be one of the biggest influencers in the world in very short. Yeah, the content, get the content spun up, guys. Come on. Can I make a suggestion for someone that you should acquire? I think that, I think that daily why I need to put an offer on the table and take Douglas Murray. I think that if you got Douglas Murray and used the correct engine to make him sufficiently media engine savvy, I think that that could be beyond huge. I do. I agree with that, absolutely.

He's just, I've been friends with him for four years or so now. Every time that I get to catch up with him, there's another level to something that we talk about that I find particularly interesting or particularly charming. I don't agree with, it turns and turns of things that I don't agree with him on, but he is important. And also also I really think that we need to start to add a little bit of the anglicized British across into what it is that you're talking about. So I'm team Murray for you to bring across the daily

one. I'll have him kick back 10% to you if we make him an offer. Ah, fantastic. Where should people go? You've got this new Lady Bull is thing that's out now. You've got Penn, Reagan series, Penn Dragon cycle. Yeah, that's it. That's coming out. What else have you got? There's somebody else that you announced recently.

It's no one. We just announced our new show without him, Corolla, our first animated comedy series called Birchham, which I think people will really get a kick out of. It's Korola and Patrick Warburton and Roseanne Barr and tons of great comic actors voicing these animated characters. And it's a real throwback to like politically incorrect, 90s animated show.

I think it'll be a real breath of fresh air for people. And we've got our bent key app now, which is not for the adults, but for kids. It's a separate entity from daily wire for all the reasons, but it's something that we're very proud of. And then I think if we cultivate it well, I think it could be our actual legacy in the world because giving children a place in this culture to actually be children, I think is maybe be our actual legacy in the world, because giving children a place in this culture

to actually be children, I think, is maybe the great calling of our time. That's something kind of strangely revolutionary and not. I haven't seen any of your children's content yet. Although I would be interested to have a look at it. It's like, it's so strange to just try and make presumably children's content about children's stuff that doesn't really have

any crazy agenda that comes along. But the right, it's really, really strange to me that there isn't even more parents pushing back. There's this thing in Idaho at the moment and Penguin Random House just yesterday announced that they would be counted suing the state of Idaho or something in a random house. Yeah, dude, let me pull this up really quickly for you.

I mean, embarrassing when you pull it up on the daily wire. Ah, how funny. Penguin Random House sue Idaho. Let me see here. Penguin Random House and best selling authors, Iowa, Idaho, this shows, I've been a O1 visa recipient of your great nation for two years, and I don't know the difference between Idaho and Iowa. Penguin Random House and Best Selling Authors sue Iowa over schoolbook banning law.

The publishing giant and four authors including John Green and Jodie Peaco, joined several teachers, a student and the state's teachers union in filing federal lawsuit. The nation's largest publisher and several best selling authors have filed Thursday challenging. I was new law that bans public school libraries and classrooms from having practically any book that depicts sexual activity. So random house, they posted it on their Instagram, which was all right, sorry, yesterday. And yeah, I don't know, that's their position was where pro-first amendment, this is like an imposition on the world of publishing, in some way.

I don't know. The first amendment is sacred. Kids don't have unlimited free speech rights, because they're kids. The idea that you have the right to say anything you want to a child was nowhere in the imagination of the founders of this country. The idea that we should be arguing over whether or not it's a violation of the rights of a publisher to sell sexually explicit content to kids is just completely jump the shark

as a society. Yeah, go check out Benke. It's a, I'm very, very proud of it. We have 18 shows there now. A lot of it licensed, but four daily wire originals. And of those, all four of which I'm proud, two of them are truly daily wire creations, an animated show called Chip Chilla, and a live action show called Mabel McClay. And I think we have the opportunity over time to build something meaningful, beautiful

that is not, you know, it's not about partisan politics, it's about values, it's about imagination, it's about wonder and creativity, and all the things that sort of undergird a society, the things that you're supposed to learn in the childhood that you're supposed to have. Jeremy Boring, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out Lady Bollas, the new movie, why should they go? Have you got any codes? Is that codes happening at the moment?

No codes at the moment. Go to dailywireplus.com and you have to be a subscriber, but I think we're running the biggest discount on subscriptions that we run all year right now as we speak. There it is, Jeremy, I appreciate you. Thank you. Man, thank you for the time.