Morning Wire - DW Introduces New Kids App: Bentkey | 12.24.23

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

An interview with Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing on why they launched Bentkey, a new kids entertainment company. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

But it's called the three musketeers. Yes, it's called the three musketeers, because at first, Artanian isn't a musketeer yet, but eventually proves he is worthy of the title. They should have called it like some musketeer. That was a clip from the new animated series Chip Chilla, one of 18 shows that debuted Monday on Bent Key, the Daily Wire's new streaming app for kids.

The company, which also produces this show, of course, launched the platform with over 150 episodes of shows for kids of all age ranges. By the end of its first day, Bent Key was the number one downloaded kids app in the Apple store. In this previously aired episode of Morning Wire, Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham, talks to Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boring about the company's new venture into children's entertainment.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's December 24th, Christmas Eve, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire. The following is an interesting. interview with Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham and Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boring. So Jeremy, I am in the midst of the heavy mom years. All my friends are moms. We're constantly talking about this problem of entertainment, and especially really that need to monitor our kid's shows for content we don't want them exposed to. It's truly become a constant source of aggravation. So I can tell you that the minute you announced the Bent Key app on Monday, my phone blew up.

There has been nothing like this as far as for my demographic, this level of excitement and enthusiasm. And so I think the first question that I would want to ask you is, what was your inspiration for this particular venture? And when you were thinking about what you wanted this kids entertainment platform to offer, what kind of shows did you have in mind? Well, I think one of the reasons that Daily Wire has been successful is because we don't necessarily give people exactly what they think they want.

we give them what we think they actually want. And so at Daily Wire, I've always said, part of our job as lowercase our Republicans is to represent our audience, never to betray our audience, but also to help lead our audience to the thing that they actually want. And so if you watch many of the movies

that we've produced along the way, we try to make movies that are actually good, entertaining movies for adults and aren't movies that sort of pander to, you know, complete ideological purity because I think that that actually results in being uninteraining. But when we got the opportunity to make content for kids, I feel completely the opposite.

Adults should be challenged. Adults should be exposed to things that they don't always agree with so that adults can make good decisions and inform decisions. Kids do not have the tools to make those kinds of decisions. You say you're a mom in your core mom years. You're on the front lines of the most important battle not only of our time, but of all time. And that's implicating values into children. It's teaching children how to become the adults that we will. want to see them become. And for that reason, when I started thinking about what kind of content

we want to make in our kids' entertainment operation, the answer was obvious to me. I want to make wonderful, beautiful, hilarious, highly entertaining content that is chalk full of goodness, that parents can trust implicitly, that they don't have to worry when they put their kids in front of one piece of our content. What's that going to roll into as the next piece of content? Of course, parents should vet our content, just like they do everything for their kids. You're the most responsible person for your kids. But what if you don't? If you, if you didn't, I wanted to still be okay because we're vetting that content. So is there a particular scene in one of the shows that are available on the Bent Key app right now that stands out to you a sort of emblematic of that kind

of goodness that you're talking about? I would honestly say that I think every single scene of a wonderful day with Mabel McLean. Perfectly encapsulates what we're trying to create. Okay, well, on that note, let's pause for just a second and listen to a clip of Mabel McLeigh and her dog, Jasper. Yeah, I'm stuck. What is, you, uh, chew up a bottle of glue again? No, no, that was a sticky situation.

But no, it's nothing like that, you see. What I mean, I'm having a hard time being creative, see? Oh, I'm all out of ideas. I can't seem to make no more. Oh, I'm just not creative after all. You, not creative? Show us what you're making. I am trying to make a time machine.

A time machine. A time machine. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do right here. Oh, my, oh, my. Where'd you get an idea like that? Well, see, kind of how it came about was like this. I'm kind of, I was missing you so much. Mm-hmm.

That I figured if I make a time machine, then I could speed up time and get you to come home soon. Oh, I see. Jasper, that is so sweet and so creative. So even though my kids are long past preschool age, a friend of mine who does have a three-year-old watch several episodes, and she told me that she was really struck by the quality of the production that has gone into Mabel McClay, but she did wonder how Daily Wire,

given that it is something of a new player to this game, is going to be able to keep up the pace of that level of production. You know, we've launched 18 series, almost 150 episodes on the app today with new episodes coming every single Saturday. We're bringing back Saturday morning cartoons. But only four of those shows are original productions. It'll take a long time before we've produced enough original content that everything on the app is ours. Now, that's not to say that everything on the app hasn't been embedded.

It has been every single minute of every single show. But obviously, the shows that we're making best represent what our vision long term for the company is. So you mentioned that only four of the series are original, so that means then you purchased quite a number of series there. How do you decide when you're looking at potential content to purchase, what is it that you see in these shows that make you want to sign on the dotted line, say we want to buy that show and sign you up? Well, first, it has to be good. My dream is that 18 years from now, I'll be on some college campus somewhere, or I'll be at some, TPSA event or something, and some young conservative will come up to me and say something. And there are two things that they could say.

One of them is, Ben Key, yeah, man, my parents used to make me watch that. The other is, oh, yeah, Bent Key, I grew up with that. I want the latter. So I'm looking for content that I believe children will absolutely love. And then the hard part starts, which is making sure that that's content that I can sleep at night knowing that I exposed children to in the first place. And that's why we have a dedicated team reviewing everything that we're licensing and everything that we're creating from script, from inception to script, to storyboards and all the way through to make sure that this is content

that never betrays the values of our audience. Well, you know, when I was looking through the current offerings, it was very clear to me that there's been an effort right out of the gate to serve all the different kids' ages, demographics all at once. I have a 14-year-old. I have a 14-year-old, a nine-year-old. I have a nieces and nephews who, you know, range all the way from like two to ten over at my house. And so what I did appreciate was that we went from, as you just mentioned, Mabel McLeigh and some other shows for the very youngest set, and then to Roons and How Ridiculous, which appeals to older kids. And in fact, I have a quick clip of that show, How Ridiculous, here that finds the Australian trio well known, if you're not familiar from

YouTube and they're doing one of their signature competitions, this time involving some bulletproof glass. We have lots of sheets of two inch thick bulletproof glass. Can they stop this wrecking? I don't know. It's very big. What about all this stuff? What about the rest of the line up? Tungsten cubes, brass cubes, javelin, melon, rubber band, ball. Now some are going to be thrown, some are going to be dropped from the top of the tower. We're each going to pick each other's items. The competition today is who can do the most damage to their bulletproof. glass sheet. It'll tell you, Jeremy, there was an audible cheer from the nine and ten-year-olds in our

house when they saw that how ridiculous was available. So one of the things I wondered was, was it a deliberate decision? And I'm assuming it was, and so why, to say, let's get something for all of these age ranges and release them all right out of the gate rather than sort of release them one at a time. What was the thinking behind that? I suppose that it's because we believe this is the most important. work we have ever undertaken. The politics of the day is urgent, but the culture is important. And most of our daily wire efforts here before have been focused on the urgent problem.

This is a turn to the important problem, the generational problem. And you can't just say, well, let's start with four-year-olds and be on the 100-year plan or the 20-year plan to raise them to adulthood. You've got to go meet all the needs where the needs exist. Doesn't mean you can do all of that all at one time, all the time. But we certainly thought at launch, we needed to be serving all kids. And then you'll learn over time which kids are reacting better to the kind of content that you're making. And you'll make more investments in those areas. But right out of the gate, it was very important to us to serve all of the needs that a parent might have in this regard. You know, and you mentioned that what you're not trying to do here is create entirely ideologically

driven entertainment here. That it's something that kids really enjoy. But to do that, you need really talented artists potentially across the ideological spectrum themselves. So how do you recruit the talented artists who aren't afraid of being associated with a conservative company? Well, it's always challenging in our part of the ideological world to recruit great artists. For one thing, artists tend to be liberal. I mean, it's a very natural thing that occurs that conservatives tend to forsake the arts across all of history. And liberals tend to engage in the art across all of history. Then you run into the problem of if they come work for us, they are in some ways risking their career. And it's a lot to ask someone to risk their career for a job. What I will say, though, is that it has been much,

much easier to recruit with our kids' entertainment program than it has been with our general entertainment program. And I think the reason is this. If you risked it all, you left your home and your family, you went west young man, you waited tables, even after law school, you went to work in the mailroom at one of the big agencies, all of that to try to get your foot in the door in Hollywood. And you had the opportunity to write on some HBO show that's one of the most high-quality shows ever made, but a lot of what's in it you don't necessarily approve of. There's a high probability you'll take that opportunity, because you'll rationalize and probably not altogether incorrectly. Yes, I don't agree with everything about this show,

but the opportunity to work at this high level can't be denied, and adults can make their own decisions. But when you ask people to do that with content that is aimed at seven-year-olds, they simply can not live with themselves. You're now not asking them to do something where people can make rational choices. You're asking them to treat children like their specimens in a petri dish and to experiment on them with all of these radical new ideas. And the kinds of people who are drawn to children's entertainment love children. And so they simply can't sleep. And so they simply can't sleep at night. And for that reason, we have had a bit of an embarrassment of riches in this department. People want this to work. They want to come work for this company. They want to see

it succeed because they don't want to do evil. Yeah, it's been interesting to me to hear the buzz from people that I know in some of these studios, particularly Disney, I'll say, who quietly have reached out to me, to others I know and said, hey, what's going on over there? Do you have room for someone like me, for someone, you know, with my talents. But part of what I've noticed, and obviously you leaned into this a little bit in the announcement was the dichotomy between what your vision is and where, say, a company like Disney is now. And one of the things you announced, along with this app launch, is that you're working on a

live action adaptation of Snow White. And here's a little clip from that first teaser. Once upon in time a prince would call that. So how do you respond to those headlines, like the one at the Hollywood reporter that I happen to see this week, that said that Daily Wire is trolling Disney with this new Snow White adaptation? Do you think that's a fair characterization? Well, yes, it's an accurate characterization. We are political. The Daily Wire is political.

Launching Bent Key is a political act. The content at Bent Key is not political. It's pre-political. It's four children. I don't believe the children should be hogs in our sort of political war machine. I believe that children should be children. But of course, launching the company is political, and of course making Snow White is political.

It's a reaction to the political move by Disney to remake their own animated classic, a tale of timeless truth at fairy tale that's probably centuries old before it was written down by the Brothers Graham that contains the kind of wisdom that generation after generation, after generation, after generation benefited from. And to say, as Rachel Ziegler did, yes, not 1937 anymore. Rachel, the story wasn't written in 1937.

Those truths existed in that story long before Disney was born or Disney's parents or his grandparents or his great-grandparents were born to throw that out as though you know best because you have imbibed the de jour woke politics, right?

The crazy radical ideas of this fleeting moment. that's the very reason that Ben-T has to exist. And so responding to that is, yes, a troll of Disney. It's a rebuke of Disney. It's saying to Disney, if you weren't doing what you're doing, we wouldn't have to do what we're doing. But we do have to do what we're doing. Because, as I said at the top,

I think this is the most important fight that Ben Shapiro or Caleb Robinson or Jeremy Boring or The Daily Wire have ever engaged in. This is what I most hope is our legacy. So if this is a political act, then let's talk about the decision to separate the branding, to get a little bit of distance between the Daily Wire and Bank Key. Why make that decision when the Daily Wire is such a recognized brand already? Because the Daily Wire is such a recognized brand.

Because while the act of launching into Kids Entertainment is political, it's so important to me that the content not be political. I don't want to do what the left is doing, which is rob children. of their childhood to make them little foot soldiers in my ideological war. I believe that we win when children are able to have a childhood and form into well-rounded adults who will, I believe, most often choose our politics if we introduce them to the right values and the right ideas at the right times. But I don't want to just replicate their disregard for childhood.

I've heard in the last 48 hours since our announcement, I've heard from some of my more left-wing friends, not radical left-wing friends. not radical left-wing friends. Some of my more left-wing friends thanking me for launching this because even they want their children to have childhoods. They don't want to see their children used as pawns in this political fight. Are there shows from your childhood or, you know, as you were growing up over the years, that you remember and you think, that was a great show, that was a great film.

That's what I aspire to that stick out in your mind today? Oh, absolutely. The first one is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. I grew up with no cable. I grew up with network television, which was three channels back then. But we had PBS. And I loved Mr. Rogers. For this very reason, Mr. Rogers was about goodness.

I can't tell you what Fred Rogers' politics were, but I know that my politics were built on a foundation that Fred Rogers helped to create by loving and celebrating childhood, by inspiring me to use my imagination, to think about what was right and what was wrong. That show has sort of been my North Star as I've thought about the kind of content that we want to create. Well, it's interesting then because very much when I was watching Mabel McLeigh,

I thought of that, that we don't really have this kind of thing anymore. And she brought me back to Fred Rogers in a way I didn't really remember for years. Absolutely. You know, I've known Ryan and Katie Chase who created that show for two decades. They ran a kids improv school in L.A.

They love children. They understand children. children, they know the power of childhood. I think they were in many ways put on earth to make this show. And in our earliest conversations, I kept saying, Mr. Rogers, Mr. Rogers, Mr. Rogers. I think what they created, though, is in no way derivative. If anything, it's sort of like one part Mr. Rogers, one part, Mary Poppins. It has this whimsy and magic that Mr. Rogers didn't have.

But it has all the goodness and all of the sort of relating to kids, meeting kids where they are. aspect of what Fred Rogers was able to create with Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. So that was very much on their mind and on my mind as that show was developed. Well, thanks so much, Jeremy. You know, as I said, as a mom, finding entertainment for our kids that not only doesn't undermine our values, but in fact actually can help establish them is a constant source of concern. So more and better options in this area is really welcome. We very much appreciate it. Thank you. That was an interview with DailyWire culture reporter Megan Basham and DailyWire co-founder Jeremy Boring.

And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.