Can The Daily Wire Destroy Mainstream Media? - Jeremy Boreing

what do you say when people ask you what you do I say that I'm am just a lowly shampoo razor and chocolate mle I've only been saying that for about a week though yeah that's a a new a new industry for you what what it is a terrifying question when people ask you what you do when you're an entrepreneur because uh you never quite know what to lead with and whatever you lead with will be the box that people put you in so I I I 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 who I didn't know but I was an I was an early adopter of the of the flip phone and my first voicemail I said I was probably 17 and I said uh Jeremy boring writer producer and Shameless self-promoter ah very nice yeah I I I feel that myself as well you know what what what do you say about who you are you know you 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 wanky title that anybody could bestow on themselves second only to thought leader yeah well I I certainly never uh 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 uh you know a long time ago a boy loved a girl 1979 no the the real truth is the daily wire it is one of those kinds of stories so many sunry 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 you know wonderin child prodigy violinist who wanted to be the first Jewish me member of the Supreme Court who became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist as a teenager at his first bestselling book as a teenager who you know Pro went to Harvard Law and imagined a future for himself working in law and then politics but who found himself being the fastest talker 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 in that business uh for in phases came to that realization um you have Caleb Robinson our co-founder and Co CEO who you know very got married very early had his first kid as a teenager and his first business as well as a as a teenager putting in docks underwater in lakes and Texas like we just all had this background that in no way seemed like it was pointed toward running a a major media company but you know the the shorter window version of it is that I met Ben Shapiro at a Coffee Bean on ventur Boulevard in 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 could be real assets if deployed in the right areas and I was in a low moment sort of in my Hollywood aspiration my how old are you at this point no I I think this probably 12 years ago 14 years ago something like that 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 and Ben saw something in me you know 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 you know and 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 with the influence that I had at that time largely influence with conservative wealthy people in Hollywood who contributed to various 501c3 on the right where I thought I could find openings for Ben and and together we just sort of helped each other along this path toward success I heard Ben talk about a time where you were more front faing in terms of talent and Ben was more operator in terms of behind the scenes and then at some point that seemed to flip a little bit what's the what went on there yeah well I think Ben may be selling himself a little bit short there you know he he was doing a lot of front-facing work but he was a Harvard trained attorney and 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 you know a 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 you know Ben had a very famous encounter with Piers Morgan over gun control uh in the wake of 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 I at that time I called it Talent based as opposed to company based and I 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 uh personality forming so so let's work together on that yeah people don't follow things they follow people you look at uh Cristiano Ronaldo 50 million followers Real 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 to people and 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 uh someone said to me over the other night they referred to it as trying to speed 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 you know 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 yeah what insights or advice have you got for people who are ambiverts when it comes to their uh behind the scenes in front of the scenes skill set well a lot of people become famous I we live in a 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 will 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 that I think one of the challenges that a lot of emerging voices have right now is they 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 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 wire is just how intelligent our hosts are you sneeze when you lie and God knew that is not that talented he's not that smart uh no you know what I 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 4 Hour Work Week you know they were like he was reading philosophers and he was reading uh you know Church fathers and he was reading you know the 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 four years so you can imagine just how much over a hundred important Works a year 400 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 H 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 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 it 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 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 going to 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 encounter perpetuation it's wealth perpetuation wealth creation is 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 and with respect and to create real value opportunities for that audience you know you see it with a lot of companies who are trying to release products now which we also do 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 who are finding those opportunities to create value that are going to succeed long term tell you what's interesting about that Michael story is so few people in the world of content creation as far as I can see or breedan 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 a an essay from a friend David Perell three or four years ago and he said uh 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' 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 Steven pressfield's uh the war of Art and then turning pro and I thought wow like imagine what would happen if you treat The Pursuit Of My Chosen career which is podcasting like an athlete what happens if I get a comedy coach and 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 that's right 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 mindset 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 it's 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 you know someone like Michael that steps out and has 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 wall breaking world that we're a part of because it helps normal people that haven't yet got there which is what all 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 [ __ ] it was and maybe it's even [ __ ] than what I do on my first episode oh my God like I could be you know so yeah I really love that idea you know people ask me sometimes when when are you going to 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 there's a great there 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 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 you have to make those choices along the way so I 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 TP podcast just because I have the power of a 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 uh one of my friends Alex talks about you've seen The Matrix and there's that sandbox tutorial where Neo is being led by Morpheus through a 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 Neo were you watching me or the woman in the red dress and the point is that um 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 you know I'm really really feeling at the moment the last 18 months for me has been a pretty big change pretty big step change in terms of a lot of stuff and it's a skill set 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 6 months ago and um 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 um because there is infrastructure and guidance and um and just a little bit less figuring out on your ownness uh which must be nice and it probably help 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 know you're also dealing with at the point that you are in your career right now you're dealing with the three I I talk about this a lot but 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 they're not to be handled like lightly you know each 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 uh 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 how so give give me an example well for example it takes risk-taking to create wealth but preserving wealth tends to be pe 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 the very thing that helped you to succeed become 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 it's incredibly difficult you know I've spent a lot of time in my life helping people who were at various stages of a journey towards success and you know I I didn't know that that was going to be my life uh but really from the time that I was 21 to today I've I've been more Merlin than King arur you know I've been the guy over the shoulder of the guy many many times in in various capacities but I I've seen them all go through what I kind of consider the the almost predictable patterns of success there there are just things that everyone goes through along that Journey what are the what what are the uh 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 ne the downside of that the positive is you start maximizing your time over Target you know the more time you spend folding your laundry the less time that you're spending reading the book and so Michael noes 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 go well anybody can fold their own laundry what a stupid thing for someone not to do and that's true but if if that same hour could be spent accruing value to yourself you should spend it acing the value and the person whose job is to fold laundry also benefits because that's how they AC 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 you've now accepted yourself out of kind of common Humanity you see this with successful people all the time they 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 was uh the almanac of Naval rant is a book written by my friend Eric Jorgenson it came out about five years ago I think it's the most highlighted perw book on Kindle ever I think that's the a record that it holds it's very very dense very easy to read but dense is 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 um I I get it I 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 well so you 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 uh 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 lobbed an awful lot toward the right because the content by its nature tends to be a bit more reactionary how do you think how do you think about this this balance and what what's your 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 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 uh the next thing in the future but you you need to balance against that with a healthy right a healthy conservatism I would suggest that in a truly ascendent culture a truly healthy culture uh you're always going to have more 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 fa flawed there are people who get left behind in the in the systems that exist you need people challenging those systems um 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 that's a perfectly good thing where it becomes bad is in these is in a system like ours today where the left has become ascendant where the left has cultural and political and economic hemony 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 and that is incredibly that is the incredibly difficult moment that we find ourselves in uh on the right in the west today that we are we are in the name of conservatism we're we're not actually trying to conserve at 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 torn down but when the right becomes revolutionary historically it usually has somewhat dark implications because the right is trying to is trying to build something that constrains a lot of the good that's done by the left how do you how do you battle the worst instincts of the left without embracing the worst instincts of the right and while America has done an amazing job of that historically it's very hard now because the right is in truly defe feet across right all the 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 I call lowercase R republicanism and that's in opposition or or in contrast to populism populism says you know 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 the core propositions of the right we like to say in America we the people on the right we like to say they've they've lost touch with we the people but the problem is they've actually become the people you know there are more of them they win every popular uh presidential election every popular national election and so it's not it's not actually while populism purports to uh 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 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 Al 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 the thing that I actually want to build and it's always been the case that a healthy Society has to have uh 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 called that authoritarianism and there's 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 perfect but it is in its own messy way I think lower casr republicanism it's 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 to find a way to navigate that tension and so the the daily wire challenges our audience but we don't betray our audience that makes us I think somewhat unique in the space yeah what do you think the right is getting wrong mostly at the moment I think that the right has in most cases the right has accurately arrived at a uh diagnosis 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 ascendency of Barack Obama in 2008 when the instruments of government particularly in America started being turned directly against us and we were 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 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 two cents 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 entries 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 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 uh a prescription that can't exist and I would call that the ultimate prescription and this is where we get into real isms so people you know 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 uh in our in our society have accumulated too much power unto themselves they've betrayed uh the people and we've become kind of conspiratorial in our answer to that and so we start looking for a way to destroy the elites and 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 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 the right makes mistakes is what I call cultism you know a 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 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 internet where we Ascend voices particularly on the right on the basis of them speaking one forbidden Truth uh and and now we just can't now we just believe anything that that person tells us you see this with you see this with actors like Andrew Tate or 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 tape 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 uh 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 um saying something which many people feel is true or say in the privacy of their own homes no matter what side of the political Spectrum they're on gives uh a kind of cult leader type Clairvoyance 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 to then 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 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 on to it or accumulate more of it we start wielding it for for different reasons than we start saying things for different reasons than 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 at all times are you saying things that are true uh are you saying things because you believe that the saying of them is in service of the good and it's and the audience needs to be aware when they're listening to someone yes this person revealed to you a a forbidden truth but is 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 yeah it's a it's just a replacement for the last God is a is a new God that comes in yeah that's so that Dynamic is so so very interesting how do you think do do you guys have a a strategy internally or do you speak to your talent uh in a way to kind of help them not get out over their skis to sure that what they're talking about is within the domain of competence that they have yeah I mean it's tough when 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 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 know you 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 of support for our team in that but there is something that we provide at a more human level and it it really is camaraderie that you know we really do sit down and have a have a cigar I don't really smoke cigars anymore although I did just launch a great Cigar Company called Mayflower but I've basically stopped smoking but we do sit down with cigars or whiskey or uh sit down by the fireplace or and have friendships and talk about these things and challenge each other and 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 me 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 would you 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 it's like well no one else has said that it's not have this sense that it might not be right but I who am I to say no they're the parents you're the child right um and it's kind of a little bit like that relationship with the world you know his here 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 but I 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 I think you're right here I think that you've got I think there's some there there that's super super important we're smashing ideas into 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 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 in even more of a crucible what do you think that the left is getting right is there 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 uh especially the when the left is healthy it's it's admirable and its care for uh the people who are left behind by the system the left is admirable in its recognition that uh that the greater good isn't the isn't good for everyone uh the left is creative in ways that the WR is historically not creative um creating things is a fundamentally liberal proposition and so one of the challenges that we have and and we're trying to answer it at the daily wire is to be creatives for conservatism that's why we're putting out this movie lady Ballers it's why we're putting out the pin dragon cycle it's why we put out documentaries like what is a woman it's why we sell razors and chocolates we're we're constantly trying to build you know 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 creative creators of business we 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 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 if we want to build build the future for the country uh 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 it's divorce divorce is bad divorce destroys uh Society divorce destroys children we talk about it all the time and we talk about it in in very uh um practical ways the consequences of divorce the the damage that divorce does to Children the damage that divorce does to the soul but there's a lot of divorced 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 is a you know the Ben 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 do 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 aren't starting they're not starting their Journey with our ideas at the beginning as clean slates they're starting at having already lived in the messy world that is the left's very good at that and we're we're not particularly good yeah it is it is alienating and it's also very uninspiring to just be a Critic all the time 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 ingroup this is one of my uh rubrics that I use to judge whether or not a content creator is um well-meaning or not and acting in good faith is Their audience bonded together over the mutual love of an ingroup 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 going to 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 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 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 conservative 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 tradition traditionally ethic 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 at 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 um you know I'm I'm a human being I'm I'm chalk full of flaws I wear I wear many of them uh 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 nobody wants their heart to be seen by anyone else um 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 wants things that are wholesome for example you know a lot of my a lot of the fans of the daily wire who I love the most are always mad at me because when we put out a movie it isn't wholesome well first of all I don't think they actually want wholesome movies I think that they all watch down to Abby in the office and friends and Marvel movies and they don't hold those movies to any kind of standard they only want to hold us to to a standard because they don't they're not honest with themselves uh most people aren't my probably myself included you know 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 and their clicks clicks it clicks and cash is Cash yeah that's right you know I know what people really want because they watch it I know that people don't you know there's there's not uh I think a movie like I can only imagine is good and it does good in the world I know that there are a lot fewer people even on the right who actually sit around talk about how great what I I can only imagine is than they do spending time talking about how good Modern Family was right it's just it's just the nature of it we 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 uh you know with all respect to companies like pureflix I am not Pure Flix I'm not saying Purex Pure Flix is a it's owned by Sony now it was started by Michael Scott and David AR white and they and they made Christian movies and they they did a great job from a business point of view they created something really good they found a market and efficiency and they answered that market inefficiency but the pro 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 correct the standard the standard that you hold others too is the standard that you will be judged by that's exactly right what I would much rather do is hold up uh is hold up things that are in ttention 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 uh I think in in the realm of art it's our job to uh represent our audience but also give our audience the truth of of what they actually want not what they want to want and I think in your in the daily wire our job is to talk about moral and philosophical and political ideals but just oppose 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 you know in the real world where we've all made a ton of mistakes and are only going to make more as we go forward what did you learn during the production of the new movie lady Ballers what was uh in ightful or instructive or revealing during the the process of that either filming or or publication yeah one of them is how afraid people are to laugh now you know it's 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 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 in lady baller so I'm not going to watch it will then go home and watch reruns of friends what is that about well friends never entered into the 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 at people's sort of unwillingness to have a laugh about these really sensitive there was a um there was a a news story that I saw maybe it wasn't a news story it might have been like a Reddit thread or something yeah that I think you guys had used extras for a particular scene and then did people walk out some people didn't know that it was actually for the daily wire and then that that got leaked on Reddit yeah how was that pretty it was pretty funny you know some guys uh who came in to be extras stormed the basketball court saying Ben Shapiro is a Nazi which I think that they should look up in Shapiro and then they should look up Nazi I mean I think there were 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 was ever on any movie that's that's not how that works so it it hurt some it hurt some people's feelings I suppose but it's funny man I'm not notd in the hurting people's feelings business I guess it's interesting it's interesting for me to think about about what the future of cultureculture Wars is it it feels to me I don't know whether you'd agree with this but I think a number of people made this point and I I it seems right to me that we're past Peak woke that Peak woke was kind of Summer 2020 is back end of then um MH 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 it's true that the left uh has suffered some cultural losses really for the first time in my lifetime and therefore you know conversely the r 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 uh bureaucracy that is essentially gained ascended to almost absolute power in the country me Congress doesn't legislate anything to speak of so we we live in an incredibly dangerous time and what 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 and in that kind of a conflict there's not really any winning for the good guys in the short term uh I 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 s from wokeism on the one hand to uh uh 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 but what we need somebody who has a 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 that's tough when you've been getting clobbered in the face for a decade yeah yeah it's very it's very strange to think about how people respond and how they're seduced by particular types of uh of talking points I think I said this to 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 Ark he's now thinking about God a lot more he's got this new book we who wrestle with God he's doing 12p part series on The Daily wire about Genesis or the book of Exodus or something else right like he's he's moved on from that conversation and um people will step into that vacuum yeah and they will into that vacuum in every different subset all the way down you mentioned there again about kind of been 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 H what's the what's the future of that look like how how can it be the case that politics is still this like old God and yet culture moving seems to be a much younger more finger on the pulse guard well sadly I think that that's uh that's somewhat representative of what Europe looked 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 a 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 were and were 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 W with no Gatekeepers and that 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 wi any sense of wisdom young people don't have any wisdom they have ideas and uh 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 um 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 lyic hijack which are not worthy of the attention that our brains want to give them right that's exactly right I about this a lot that technology is like a technology represents a hardware change and when Hardware changes software has to change and we are not developing the software fast enough to deal with all the change that's happened in the system uh In Our Lifetime you know 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 uh and and you name it and so many of our problems today it it may be the case that all of our 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 uh which is coming out in March of next J 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 it's social media and Technology again I do think that it gets both overused underused for things people forget about it atically or like the thermodynamics of the system and then they use it as a scapegoat Boogeyman to explain things which are actually well no that's just agency or sovereignty or individual Integrity that someone hasn't decided to to deploy here's one question I had for you who who are some of your favorite content creators outside of the guys that are at DW because you must get delayed flights you get stuck in airports and stuff you got to watch something to distract you who do you turn to who do I listen to um you know I it's funny I went through a big phase of listening to Gary V and I was listening to Gary Vee because Gary Vee is not like me in any way I don't even understand like fully one-third of the words that come out of Gary vander'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 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 and I get a kick out of that because it's because I'm 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 uh to their to their approach that it always hooks me and it inspires me to want to bring more quality of that kind to the work that we that we do uh of late um I've listened to it's funny to say I listen 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 and was familiar with him knew he'd be a great asset to the Daily wire but I I find myself more and more listening to Jordan and the person who we produce who I now listen to every week uh even though I've been friends with him and and been producing him for a decade I've never listened routinely to his show but I think Andrew claven 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 and the insights that he has uh I've always loved uh Steven Crowder I think that he's absolutely hilarious I don't love him anymore uh I have some fairly 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 space no one there's not that much that is funny so it's so refreshing to to hear Steph's approach in that regard I think Lyn Beck's the greatest living broadcaster I think Dennis Prager is one of the greatest uh and and sort of in a weird way least recognized in the age of the internet he is very recognized in radio I think that 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 get the content get the content spun up guys can I make a can I make a suggestion for someone that I think you should acquire I think that I think that daily wi needs 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 uh there's another level to something that we talk about that I find particularly interesting or particularly Charming I don't agree with there tons and tons of things that I don't agree with him on but he is something yeah and also I 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 uh for you to bring across the daily y I'll have him kick back 10% to you if we make him an offer fantastic uh where should people go you've got this new lady Ballers thing that's out now you've got pen Dragon series p p Dragon cycle yeah yep that's it uh that's coming out what else have you got there's something else that you announced recently Snow White we just announced our new show with Adam Corolla our first animated uh comedy series called burum which I think people will really get a kick out of it's It's Corolla and War Patrick War Burton and Roseanne Bar and tons of great comic comic actors voicing these animated characters and it's a real throwback to like Politically Incorrect 9s animated shows I mean I think 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 not for the adults but for kids it's a a separate entity from daily wire for all the reasons but something that we're very proud of and that 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 is maybe the great calling of of our time that's something kind of strangely revolutionary and not I haven't seen any of your children's content yet um 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 have any crazy agenda that comes along for the ride you know I it's really really strange to me that there isn't even more parents pushing back does this thing in Idaho at the moment uh and and uh penguin Random House just yesterday announced that they would be counter suing the state of Idaho or something know random story yeah dude I let me let me pull this up really quickly for you be embarrassing when you pull it up on the daily wire ah how [ __ ] penguin Random House Sue Idaho let me see here penguin random house and bestselling authors Iowa Idaho this shows look I've been a a 01 Visa recipient of your great nation for two years and I don't know the difference between Idaho and Iowa penguin random house and bestselling authors Sue Iowa over school book Banning law the publishing D Giant and four authors including John Green and jod Pico 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 iow was new law that bans Public School libraries and classrooms from having practically any book that depicts sexual activity So Random House uh they posted it on their Instagram which was where I saw it yesterday and um yeah I don't know that's their position was we're pro First Amendment we are this is like an imposition on the world of publishing in some way um I don't know the the first amendment is is sacred um kids don't have unlimited free speech rights because they're kids the 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 and the idea that we should be arguing whether over whether or not it's a violation of the rights of a publisher to sell sexually explicit content to kids is just proof that we've just completely jumped the shark as a society yeah go check out Ben key 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 and of those four 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 mlay and I I think we have the opportunity over time to build something meaningful beautiful that is not um 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 underg 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 Ball's the new movie Where should they go have you got any codes is there codes happening at the moment no codes at the moment go to dailywire plus.com and you have to be a subscriber but I think we're running the biggest discount on subscriptions that we'll 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 if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe