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

26:49But 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 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.

27:28And I would call that the ultimate prescription. And this is where we get into realisms. 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 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. And 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.

28:09But 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. 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 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.

28:48And then the era of the internet, 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 and 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.

29:25That's a tendency left and right, but we're dealing with it much more on the right today. 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 from there on gives 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 then be like, well, you know, they were interested in what I had to say about the Middle East. So why shouldn't my epidemiology be taken seriously? Why is Why shouldn't I weigh in on the transathletes in sports discussion?

30:13Well, 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 on to it or accumulate more of it. We start wielding it for different reasons than 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, the cheer 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 saying now true?

30:56And shouldn't it be the case that when someone shows you you've been lied to? Shouldn't your first instinct to be to say, oh, I am too trusting. Not, oh, I should trust this new person to tell me. Yes, it's just a replacement for the last guard. It's a new guard that comes in. That's so interesting. That dynamics, 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 over their skis to ensure that what they're 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.

31:39I 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 Mayflower.

32:15But 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.

33:04I always, I 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, what 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, 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.

33:35You 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, to a group of people that you can speak to, go, no, dude, trust yourself. I think you're right here. I think that you've got, I think there's some data. 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.

34:12Does 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.

34:46The left is admirable in its 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, Ladyballers. 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.

35:32We 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.

36:06I 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 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?

36:47Or 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 aren't starting They're 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 We're not particularly good.

37:27Yeah, 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, a 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 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 out -group?

38:08Because if it's permanently out -group, out -group, out -group, 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 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 stick to that purity spiral you mentioned. I call it a purity death spiral whenever I refer to it.

38:39And 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 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.

39:21I'm a human being, 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.

39:37I 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 day of the wire, 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 and they don't hold those movies any kind of standard.

40:13they only want to hold us to a standard because they don't, they're not honest with themselves. Most people aren't probably 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, clicks and clicks and cash. That's right. I know what people really want because they watch it. I know that people don't, there's not, 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 and talk about how great what I can only imagine is than they do spending time talking about how good modern family was, right?

40:53It'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 wanna be is like, you know, with all respect to companies like Pureflix, I am not Pureflix. I'm not saying the Pureflix. Pureflix is a, it's owned by Sony now, it was started by Michael Scott and David A.

41:28R. 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's exactly right. What I would much rather do is hold up, uh, is hold up things that are intention.

42:00As I said, lowercase R Republicanism involves tension, tension between representing and never portraying 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.

42:42You 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 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. You know, 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.

43:21And 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 ladyballer, so I'm not going to watch it. We'll then go home and watch reruns of friends.

43:54friends. 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.

44:31Yeah. 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 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 not how that works. It hurts some people's feelings, I suppose, but it's funny, man. I'm not nodding the hurting people's feelings business, I guess. It's interesting.

45:12It's interesting for me to think 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.

45:55And therefore, conversely, the right has scored some cultural victories. But we're still losing in the areas that matter the most. and we're still losing our freedom every day to this regulatory bureaucracy that is essentially gained, ascended to almost absolute power in the country. 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. And in that kind of a conflict, there's not really any winning for the good guys in the short term.

46:43That'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.

47:22Yeah. And, yeah. But what we need is somebody who has a, I'm not trying to make this about presidential politics, I think it's far bigger. Well, we need as a movement, his 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 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.

48:06Jordan's moved on, he's doing these things with Arches. 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, the book of Exodus or something else, right? Like 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, kind of, 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.

48:45younger 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 guard? 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 and a 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.

49:24You 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, well listen there's enormous opportunity in the create our economy. I mean, you know, 20 year olds can have a voice in a way that 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 whist any sense of wisdom. Young people don't have any wisdom to have ideas.

49:57And 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 represents a hardware change.

50:30And when hardware changes software has to change, and we're not developing the software we're 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 the internet and AI 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 and 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 I'd social media and technology again.

51:23I 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 flights. 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?

51:59You know, I, it's funny. I went through a big phase of listening to Gary Vee. 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 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. that 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.

52:39I 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 want to 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. He'd 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 Klaven's show is incredibly important.

53:30I'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 Stephen Crowder. I think that he's absolutely hilarious. I don't love him anymore. I have some fairly some fairly public disagreement with Stephen 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.

54:13But 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's in very short. Yeah, the content, get the content spun up, guys. Come on. Can I make a suggestion for someone that I think you should acquire? I think that, I think that daily why 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, you know, make him sufficiently media engine savvy, I think that that could be beyond huge. I do. I agree with that absolutely.

54:55He'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 them on, but he is... Yeah, and 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. Fantastic. Where should people go?

55:36So you've got this new lady ballers thing that's out now. You've got Penn, Reagan series. The Kandragon cycle. Yeah. Yep. That's it. What else have you got? There's something else that you announced recently. It's no one. We just announced our new show without him, Corolla, our first animated comedy series called Berkschum, which I think people will really get a kick out of. It's Corolla 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.

56:16And we've got our bin key app now, which is not for 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 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.

56:57But the right, you know, 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 Story. Yeah, dude. Let me 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 bestselling authors, Iowa Idaho. This shows, I've been a, a, a, a, one visa recipient of your great nation for two years and I don't know the difference between Idaho and Iowa.

57:38Penguin Random House and bestselling authors Sue Iowa over school book banning law. The publishing giant and four authors including John Green and Jodie Pico, joined several teachers, a student and the state's teachers union in filing federal lawsuit. the nation's largest publisher and several bestselling 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. Random House, they posted it on their Instagram, which was what I saw it yesterday. Their position was where pro -first amendment, this is like an imposition on the world of publishing in some way.

58:21I 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. 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 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 four, all four of which I'm proud, two of them are truly daily wire creations.

59:09an 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 Bolas, the new movie, why should they go? Have you got any codes? Is that codes happening at the moment?

59:42No 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.