Building an Empire and Making Snow White | Jeremy Boreing | EP 389

I know that in Braveheart, William Wallace doesn't achieve the goal. He's executed; other people achieve the goal. I know that in the Pendragon Cycle, in turn, both Taliesin and Merlin and Arthur fail to achieve the goal. They get us one step closer to that goal, and they go through huge losses. So perhaps in a narrative sense, I was drawn to these stories about how it's not our job to save the world; it's only our job to do our part.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with screenwriter, director, and co-founder of The Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring. We discussed yesterday's landmark launch of the Bent Key Kids platform, what children's entertainment really should be, cultural drama, keeping politics out of it, the strange inversion of Hollywood from the transcendental and literary to the political, and the folly of propagandistic populism put forward at the expense of traditional values, culture, enjoyment, and your children.

Well, hello, Jeremy. It's good to see you.
Nice to see you. We haven't talked for a while. You've been... I'm in Lisbon at the moment. We arrived literally like an hour and a half ago, if that. So yeah, I zipped over here to the studio so that we could talk. You had a big announcement yesterday, so let's start off our conversation. Well, first of all, why don't you tell everybody who's watching and listening what our relationship is and exactly who you are in relationship to me, and so forth, and then we'll talk about last night's announcement.

Yeah, so I'm the co-founder and on a good day, co-CEO of The Daily Wire. I'm actually on a leave of absence from that co-CEO role at the moment. I'm in Eastern Europe, and Croatia today, producing our first major scripted series for Daily Wire Plus called The Pendragon Cycle. But our relationship is because of my involvement with Daily Wire where your podcast is hosted, and we make a lot of projects together, which has been a real treat for me.

One of the things that Ben Shapiro and I, when we first started working together in advance of founding The Daily Wire, we really wanted to be involved in things that we thought had weight beyond just the politics of the moment. And that may sound obvious, but we were both in a very political sphere, and so it wasn't readily apparent how to get from point A to point B, how to go from talking about politics every day to talking about deeper issues and ultimately not only criticizing culture, but to making culture—to doing something proactive in the culture.

That's what our journey has been, and in some ways, our announcement yesterday is another major step. But truly beginning to work with you a little over a year ago was a major step in that regard as well, just to move us out of only being able to talk about today, and to talk about the things that undergird the news. So that's our relationship and I think tees up well the announcement from yesterday as well, which is that we launched our new company called Bent Key, which is our children's entertainment entity.

We announced a little over a year ago that we were going to do so in the wake of those tapes that Chris Rufo leaked from Disney executives, who were talking about their not-so-secret gay agenda and inserting queerness into their content. They were talking about the reimagined Disney campaign where they were going to have more than 50% of all of the talent, of all of the onscreen characters in Disney content, be from so-called underrepresented groups.

It was just this, you know, they said the quiet part out loud, which is essentially that they were going to use this brand that has for 100 years built goodwill and trust with parents, to inculcate in children the sort of woke politics of the now. We felt a real need to challenge that. We committed to spending $100 million over three years pursuing a challenge to it, and yesterday we took the first step, which is launching this new app, this new company, Bent Key, with four original shows, with over 18 licensed shows from around the world that have all been carefully vetted to first be highly entertaining for kids and second not to betray the values of the kinds of people who find value in your work or in Daily Wire's work or Ben Shapiro's work, that they could trust that they could put their kids in front of this content and not receive sort of a woke sucker punch for their trouble.

Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. So I was thinking the rejoinder to the implicit suppositions that you're bringing to bear on this conversation is something like the left's insistence that everything is political. You know, when I taught this course at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, and it's online called Maps of Meaning, I think what it's about is the inevitable religious substrate of culture itself.

And I have a reason for saying inevitably religious. You know, the students used to ask me, you know, why was I convinced that what I was discussing wasn't just another ideology among ideologies, which is a variant of the claim that everything is political. Now, one of the things you and I have discussed and, per our work at The Daily Wire, is our belief that everything isn't political and that there's a strata of culture that is associated with deeper narrative, let's say. And fairy tales would certainly fit into that category.

That has to maintain its separateness from what's political. Now you mentioned, you know, with The Daily Wire, that part of the limitations of its original conceptualization was that it was of the moment. And, you know, I've seen that's a box in some ways that Shapiro has been in. He was participating with the Exodus Seminar, and I could tell that was a real pleasure for him because he got to stretch his significant intellectual abilities beyond the merely political.

So what do you think you have to offer at Bent Key that isn't political? And is there a way that you can defend the claim that it's actually not political? And if it's not political, then how do you know it isn't? How do you stop it from being political? And why should people find that credible given the political orientation of The Daily Wire?

Sure. Well, first of all, I don't mean in any way to say that The Daily Wire isn't political or that I'm not a political operator. Obviously, in many ways, I am. Shapiro, in many ways, is, and it's perhaps a political act to launch Bent Key at all. I mean, certainly, it's a reaction to what we see as the excesses of the left manifesting themselves in particularly children's entertainment.

But, you know, if you look at the broader work that we've been doing over the last several years—entertainment, more generally—I’ve learned not to refer to it as adult entertainment, although we would get more clicks probably if I did. So it is a political action that we're taking, but that is distinct from saying in particular with the kids’ content that the content itself will be intended to communicate politics.

I think that that's perhaps a subtle but very important distinction. Kids deserve a childhood. I think that you can make a good argument that one of the problems in our culture is that we infantilize adults, that through the university system, for example, we now refer to 23-year-olds as college kids and expect that they would not be held accountable for anything that they do as though they're still juvenile. Legal standards for 23-year-olds who at any other point in human history would have been, you know, married, parents, productive in their societies, perhaps have fought in wars, perhaps be members of the clubs and institutions that used to be a major part of what held up, sort of, the culture itself, you know, church communities and other kinds of civic organizations.

Now we call them kids, but then on the other hand, we take actual kids and in many ways deny them their childhoods, because we instead are using them as sort of social experiments to see if it's possible to inculcate into them a set of almost anti-value values. I say anti-value because they're not anything that would have historically been considered values, and they in many ways oppose the values on which civilization thus far has been built.

We want to just see what happens. What happens if we tell little boys that they're little girls? What happens if we drug an entire generation of boys out of all of the sort of biological impulses that boys have? What happens if we have children marching in political rallies and use them as political instruments? That's what I don't want Bent Key to be. So while I'm doing something political in the launch of Bent Key, what Bent Key itself, from a content point of view, is endeavoring to do is say no; you know, I don't think that adults are kids, but I think that kids, by God, should be. We should provide them with the kind of content that almost all of us up until this particular moment got to have in our youth, which was content that took the values on which our civilization was built, wrapped them in a sense of imagination, wrapped them in a sense of wonder, wrapped them in a sense of joy, and gave children the opportunity to engage with them, not as lessons but as entire worlds in which they might see themselves and project themselves into.

That's what Bent Key wants to be. There's a bunch of thoughts going on in my mind about how to distinguish the political from the— I think from the Eternal. And so we could say the deeper a story is, the less it's reflective of the immediate moment and the more it's reflective of the Eternal. Now the problem with that is that it gets if it gets too reflective of the Eternal, it tends to float away. Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, he called that the Deus Absconditus—the God who floats away, essentially.

And one of the things that Eliade did that was very interesting was note that the death of God was actually a recurring motif in culture, that a society would be founded on a religious revelation which was its core narrative, and then it would run in some ways till it exhausted that narrative or ran into a counter-proposition that took it out or it degenerated. You know, it degenerated into sort of a multi-headed paganism, something like that. But it wasn't uncommon for God to disappear and God would disappear, so to speak, when his conceptualization became so far removed from the concrete that it was as if he was—you know, the God of Einstein, just sort of an abstract cosmic force, right? You want to find a great narrative.

You announced the first live-action movie that you're going to produce, Snow White, which is a very interesting choice because it was the movie, of course, that Disney based his empire on, but also it's a timeless fairy tale. Now a timeless fairy tale is it's sort of halfway between the ultimately religious and the proximal and temporally bound. And we have evidence—there is evidence from historical research that some of the fairy tales that are commonly known are up to 15,000 years old. So, and the reason that's relevant is because they've demonstrated their eternal relevance merely as a consequence of being remembered that long.

And so one of the ways that the reason I'm saying this is because there's a technical way, to some degree, that you can distinguish what's merely political from what's timeless and eternal. Because what has the latter properties is so ancient and unchanging. And one of the things I learned in this Exodus seminar— most specifically and accurately—was that for a society to order itself properly, it has to order itself under a pyramidal structure. One element of that pyramidal structure is horizontal and that would be the Jacob's Ladder leading up to heaven.

And the other axis is communitarian. So that's reflected in a popular culture you might say—well, if enough people believe it, it's true. And you could also say that you should go along with the crowd unless you have reason not to. And you should say that you should be socialized into your cultural mores. And the objection to that is, well, what do you do then when the society goes off the rails? And how can a society go off the rails if it's only consensus? It goes off the rails like Nazi Germany or after the French Revolution or with the Soviets.

The answer to that is, well, you need that horizontal axis that orients you towards what's timeless. And the landing point here is, well, that's one of the things that great stories do, right? They bring God down to earth a little bit so that he's more human and more accessible. That's a way of thinking about it, but they also escape the constraints of what's immediate and they're not political.

And so let's take this Snow White story, for example. I mean, you placed Brett Cooper as the star. That's a very interesting choice. She's not your classic Snow White; she's quite athletic and a robust-looking person, right? She's a tough cookie, Brett. And how do you know, and why are you convinced that your political affiliations, beliefs haven't skewed your narrative comprehension? Why do you think you're a reasonable judge of that? And did you even have anything to do with the way that Snow White itself, the new movie, was constructed?

Yeah, well, absolutely. So I don't think that it's possible to say that you can completely separate my politics out. Obviously, the choices that I make are informed by who I am. What I would say is that I would offer two points of view here: one is about The Daily Wire and one is about me.

Let's start with The Daily Wire. The Daily Wire was essentially founded by three men: myself, Ben Shapiro, and Caleb Robinson. The three of us have incredibly diverse religious backgrounds. Caleb grew up and was very committed in a religious circle that is Christian, but keeps Jewish law, and so it's a very small flock kind of mentality. There's not a lot of people who see the world the way that they see it. It's a very small community, but a very devoted community, as one must be to keep all of the religious holidays, to keep Sabbath, to keep biblical kosher. You know, it was a very religious point of view that took work. Ben, of course, is an orthodox Jew, and everything that accompanies that, you know, Ben, the Jews suffer the worst terror attack in living memory of any, you know, any except the very oldest Holocaust survivors who live now have never seen anything as bad as what happened ten days ago.

And yet Ben didn't even know about it. Why? Because it was the Sabbath, and in Ben's community, they're so devoted to their religious beliefs that even in a moment like that, I could not reach Ben with any electronic device to communicate this information to him. I had to communicate something to him because I put extra security on his family and on his home, and so I had the security guard walk up and tell him some small version of what had happened.

But I use it to point out that Ben is incredibly dedicated to his beliefs, but his beliefs are incredibly distinct from Caleb's. They share all these religious holidays, they share many aspects of Old Testament law, but they depart wildly when the New Testament comes into play. And then you have me, who for 15 years taught a home church in Southern California and who is, you know, sort of New Covenant radical—the furthest from Ben and the furthest from Caleb in what I think about, you know, what the Gentile is to make of the law and other things.

I don't mean to get too far off into that, except to say that baked into the very heart of The Daily Wire is fundamental disagreement between the three founders on some of the most important questions while still seeing in one another kinship and what we see as the fight of our lifetime in our culture. And so for that reason, you know, we rarely get sucked into sort of purity politics at The Daily Wire. I think it's allowed us to weather a lot of sort of, you know, what I call purity death spirals that come along in politics from time to time.

And it makes us each question not only our own beliefs all the time because we have to find a way to work together and build this company around worldview while not sharing every aspect of our worldview, but it also makes us question the kind of content that we make. If there's a piece of content that both Ben and Caleb and I find resonates well, that must mean that it necessarily transcends some of our disagreements.

And I think that that's a fairly good way of saying that no one of our individual politics necessarily overrides the content that we make. The other thing I would say is just about me personally, which is, you know, I'm a conservative in the American sense, but I'm not a conservative in the classic European sense that is somewhat ascendant even in America today. You know, I'm very much of the Reagan moment in America where part of what American conservatism seeks to conserve is the unique brand of American liberalism that was, that came to the fore in our founding era.

You know, I think that lowercase liberalism is the immune system within a traditional society. It looks out for those who are hard done by, by the structures that are overwhelmingly good that were generated from ancient wisdom, but that nevertheless are imperfect in an imperfect world. And that liberalism does a good job of saying, well, some people are dispossessed in these systems; some people, you know, we need to question those systems. We don't need to burn them down; we don't need to throw them out, but we need to always be working to better them, and we need to be looking after the people who are left out in those systems.

You know, this is the sort of “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” brand of American liberalism—very distinct from French liberalism or European liberalism, and I think an important part of the American tradition. So to the extent that I'm a conservative, I want to maintain the institutions that I know are imperfect but I also know undergird our society. But one of those institutions at least for Americans is this unique brand of liberalism, which has always been incredibly helpful in helping our system be, again, imperfect but perhaps healthier than other systems in moments, for example, in the 20th century.

And so what comes with my particular brand of, you know, American conservatism is always self-doubt because the American liberalism in me knows that my imperfections are also manifest in the things that I do, and that my American liberalism says that I also need to be protecting people from my worst excesses, from my worst impulses, that not all of my decisions are correct, that not everything that I set my hand to is right.

And I think that that brings along—I’m certainly in no way claiming not to fail at this quite often—but I am conscious of the mistakes that I make as much as I can be. You know, we were discussing even before the show, and I won't go into specifics, but I inadvertently harmed someone who you and I both hold in high esteem recently. I'm not unaware that I did it and I'm not unaware that I have some culpability even though I didn't set about to do it deliberately.

I think that that particular view, though, also helps with this content question that you're asking. I would certainly never suggest that our content does not in some ways reflect my political opinions because I'm imperfect, but I think that the unique mixture that is The Daily Wire and the unique mixture that is my own politics perhaps uniquely prepares us and me for this moment of trying to be critical of my own impulses, trying to be critical of my own beliefs, and trying to find something that transcends them and that speaks to those institutions on which our society's been built.

Absolutely, our content will fail at that, but that's what our content's going to endeavor to do. Right? Well, it's a tricky business—I was reflecting—I saw the Snow White trailer last night, and I would say, as a neutral observer, it's pretty easy for me to determine whether something I watch or listen to is of a certain quality.

Now, I wouldn't say my judgment in that regard is unerring, but it's not too bad, and I'm reasonably informed on that front. But I did find right away, much to my chagrin—and I've experienced this before—that it was difficult for me to evaluate the Snow White trailer because I know, well, I work with you guys and I genuinely want it to succeed. I believe that your heart and your pocketbook is in the right place in relationship to this. It made it very hard for me to decide how I felt about the trailer.

So, and so this is part of the reason I asked the content question. Your claim is that there's a diverse, truly diverse range of opinion at The Daily Wire. Now, my experience, just so everybody watching and listening knows, you know, I was very concerned about forming a partnership with you guys. My negotiating team—I was quite ill while this was happening—but my negotiating team and your side went back and forth for a long time, like six months, hammering this deal out.

And it was a full-blown boxing match doing it, although always cordial on both sides. And that's how it should be because you want to hammer out a detail where all the details are hammered out, and everyone is thrilled to be on board. When we finally managed that, I was thrilled to be on board, and then we got a lot of backlash from people; you know, they were afraid that you guys would interfere with the free content that I was generating and that my approach to public communication would be somehow twisted and bent into the more political Daily Wire mode.

Most of that criticism has disappeared now; if I do something political, some of it pops back up, but most of it has disappeared. And also, any remaining concerns I had have disappeared because all I've experienced while working with The Daily Wire has been a very high level of professional excellence in everything that's been done, including all the editing of the various documentaries that I've done with you guys, a real openness to creative exploration.

I mean, we've done, I don't know, we've done five documentaries, I think, in a way on a wing and a promise. I said I was going to a certain place—we did this with the biblical museum documentary, that’s one that’s been released. I went there and I talked to people; we had a film crew, we filmed hours and hours of content. You had a great editorial staff make that into a compelling documentary, but we didn't have a detailed business plan for it worked out.

It was spontaneous and playful and investigative and creative in the best sense. So all I've found working with you so far—and this has been quite a surprise, really—is, apart from the high level of professionalism which makes everything that I've been able to do done better. I've also found that it's done nothing but facilitate anything I wanted to do that was creative, and that included The Exodus Seminar because you guys also took a big risk on that.

I mean, first of all, organizing the first part of it, which was all there was supposed to be, which was about eight episodes, and then doubling the length. You were very generous about that, and everyone who came down to participate had a remarkably good time; would be happy to do it again, and it was very productive.

The reason I'm telling that whole story is because I think I have some reason to assume that your claim to be able to engage in a creative endeavor rather than a political endeavor has some gravitas, right? It's reliable. I really saw that with the documentaries. Now, I contrast that in my own mind with the other problem which I mentioned, which is, yeah, but if you're hoping that someone will succeed and you are aligned with them in sentiment, let's say, it gets hard to actually evaluate the creative content because your biases emerge.

So what sort of response have you got to the Bent Key programming for kids that's already been viewed by children and parents, by your target market, and how has that made you feel about the possibility, like the actuality of quality and the possibility of success in that regard?

Well, as we sit here, the app has been live for just over 24 hours, and so we're only just now getting real feedback. I mean, up until now, everyone who's viewed any of the content in some way is going to be predisposed to like it in the ways that you're saying. So it's early, people are just now engaging with the content, but the feedback has been very good, except in one place.

You know, Deadline Hollywood ran a story about Snow White, and many of the comments are very negative, but of course that's because most of the people who read Deadline Hollywood are people who have another set of biases— theirs being against—and so I probably put them in the same category that I put you. You're a friend; you're a collaborator; you're a partner in many of our endeavors, and so of course your biases come to bear. Their biases are going to come to bear, but so far, the audience has really responded to the content, and we worked incredibly hard on these original shows.

A Wonderful Day with Mabel, I truly believe, is a show that kids 20 years from now will talk about the way that I talk about Mr. Rogers—something that is so dear to me from my own childhood. I think that the creators of that show, Ryan and Katie Chase, whom I've known for many years, were almost put on earth to make this content. It's beautiful, it's filled with wonder, it's filled with joy, it's filled with imagination. They are not political operators at all; they're people who ran an improv comedy school for kids in LA for a decade. They love kids, they're delighted by children, they understand children and they've made a show that I put in a category of about five pieces of content.

The Exodus Seminar being one of them, Matt Walsh's documentary What is a Woman being another. This very small group of content that I believe is the things that I'm the most proud of having published in my career. Then we have Chip Chilla. The writers who came over to do Chip Chilla are guys who've been working—they worked on Veggie Tales and other animated shows in the past—highly creative. We worked very hard to get them on board on the team—much like we worked to get you on the team.

The producers is a guy who came over from Disney, worked as the creator of the Tangled animated series, which is a true piece of art. There are no shlubs over at Disney when it comes to making great content, and I'm very proud of Chip Chilla. I think kids love it. My—I sat down—my own daughter had not gotten to see it yet; she saw her first episode before I left the house. She's three years old, and my wife texted me and said that she just came into her room and said, "Mommy, I want to sit on the potty and watch Chip Chilla."

So that's one vote of confidence. I think people are really going to respond to that content. But it is a journey. Most of the people who are excellent at making this kind of content are making it. You don't become excellent without experience, and if you have experience, it's because you've been working within the very system that we're challenging. And so, of course, the undertaking is enormous. We’re building up to the kind of quality that you see at Disney, we're going to miss. We're going to strive; there are going to be times where we hit it, there's going to be times where we miss, we're going to learn from our mistakes, we’re going to get better as we go.

I always laugh at people who walk out of the hospital with their first kid, and they have a World's Greatest Dad ball cap, and I always think, buddy, you're not even a—you're not even a mediocre dad. You've been a dad for—you've been a dad for 17 hours, you know? It's an aspirational statement though, the hat. Right? And so, I would right now wear a World's Greatest Kids Content Producer hat, not because it's what I am, but it's because it's what I aspire to be. We believe that this is an important charge; we believe that it is the mission of a lifetime to help reclaim our culture in all the ways that matter most. We're going to pour ourselves into it to the point of—well, as we've poured ourselves into everything else—to the point of breaking and finding joy in the sheer difficulty of it because we believe in the thing that we're doing.

Yeah, well, you guys are a strange bunch of conservatives, you know? Maybe that's a consequence of the strange fracturing of the political landscape because, well, first of all, a libertarian conservative is not that easy to distinguish from a classic liberal in many ways. And so, but then, you know, the research I did and that was done by a number of psychologists at the same time showed quite clearly that, say 10 years ago, the best predictors of conservative belief on the temperament side were low openness, which is interest in ideas, and is an interest in aesthetics—and certainly it's low interest in aesthetics, in particular—that was one of the big predictors of classic conservatism in our studies.

And that would argue very strongly against being interested in something particularly like child's literary entertainment. Right? So, and then, and so it now, but it is the case that all of the people that I've worked with at The Daily Wire have this very, very high level of interest in creative production. And so that does say something strange about the fractionating of culture, but it's also something I find that I find a difficult—you're a complex sort of person to understand.

And so I wanted to delve into that a little bit, and so you have this background in Christian teaching, and now you've started this crazy company, which seems to be working extremely well, and now you're branching out into the entertainment world. Now The Daily Wire has produced a number of movies; we could talk about those momentarily with some degree of success. It's like, I don't understand how it is that you're that guy.

Like, where did you develop your interest in entertainment? Why do you think you have the aesthetic capacity to make the kind of judgments necessary to run a, what's attempting to be a full-fledged entertainment network? Like, why do you think that's you? And if it is you, how did you come to have those abilities? Now you're in Europe, we could talk about this too, very deeply involved in this Pendragon Cycle. I'd like to hear more about that, but like where did these interests come from in you, and why do you think you have the ability to manage this?

Well, the first question first, where does it come from? You know, I grew up in a very rural town in West Texas called Slayton, and it's on the flattest land mass on earth called the Llano Estacado. We have towns with names like Level Land and Plain View, a town called No Trees. It is truly flat and desolate; what we have in abundance is sky because there's nothing to obscure your view of it.

This particular region has produced an enormous, disproportionate number of successful musical stars—from Buddy Holly, who was very famously from LC Texas, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Joe Ely, LeAnn Womack, you know, went to school out there—many country stars, in particular. And so a lot of people wonder why this area has produced a disproportionate number of artists in music, but those of us who grew up in it—my best friend, my childhood best friend's father sort of ran the local entertainment industry. He ran the local music industry in that part of the world, so I had access to all of that growing up.

You know, I wasn't very good at sports, but I was working backstage at theatrical and musical productions at the theater that he owned or at bars or other things from a very young age. In fact, the key that I wear around my neck for which our company is named, Bent Key, was the key to a regional theater in Post Texas called the Garza Theater where I grew up doing plays. I had access to this wonderful world of entertainment, and what I understood from the people I was getting to work with—the adults I was getting to work with—is that it was the desolation of that area.

It was the fact that we had no trees to look at and nothing but sky. Joe Ely says we had nothing but a desolate void to fill, and I think that's true. And so for any of us who had any bent in that direction, you couldn't produce enough to ever fill that void. You'd look up at the sky for your inspiration instead of being able to look around you, and that's what took me ultimately to California.

Sure, a little bit of manifest destiny, but an awful lot of stars in my eyes. I moved out there because I wanted to be an actor; I wanted to be a producer. I got out there and realized very quickly that I didn't have what it took to be a successful actor. That was a very hard moment in my life. I really—what I came to realize is that the environment that I grew up in, I thought was teaching me to be an actor, but it wasn't. What it was teaching me to be was a producer.

And by producer, what I mean is someone who creates something out of nothing, that in a way the acting that I had done in my youth hadn't been the kind of acting that true actors do. It had been the kind of acting that a producer does—the acting that is necessary to create the something out of nothing. You know, I would walk around at 16, 15, 14 years old; I would walk around with a can of black spray paint in one hand and a script in the other because I both had lines to act in the show and I was concerned with touching up the paint on the prum at the front of the stage because I hated that people would come in and see the nicks and the dings from where the set had been built.

In other words, everything that I was doing was to try to ultimately create this aesthetic experience, and acting was just in service of that. But I didn't know. I lacked the maturity to know that. One of the things I talk about very often is how I've gotten to live a dream life, truly. Dr. Peterson, I'm in Croatia; three days ago, I was in Italy; three days before that, I was in Slovenia; I was in Hungary. You know, but I live a dream life in many ways because I let my dreams die. I had these dreams as a young man, and they were very useful for getting me out the front door.

They were very useful for putting me on the path, but if I had held to them too tightly, that the path would have led to nowhere. And because, by God's grace—

That's a great observation. You know, because I counsel people to develop a vision for their life, because if you don't have a vision for your life, you're going to be playing a role in someone else's vision, and it might not be one you would award to yourself. But I also say, don't assume that it's the precise—that the precise details of this vision are what going to unfold.

But actually what it is, is it's a self-correcting system. You aim up, but you don't really know what you're doing, and then you wander towards that up. And as you go, you collect more information and that enables you to modify the vision. So I would say maybe—tell me what you think about this—that it wasn't so much that your dreams died, is that as you pursued them, they got sharper and clearer, and that meant you had to leave some of the excess detail behind.

But when you translate a vague notion, like, “I like to go to Hollywood and be successful,” that's a pretty vague plan. When you transfer that into the real world, that should sharpen, right? You should find your specific destiny. And that's also, by the way, that's the bringing down to earth of the meta-narrative, right? I mean, the meta-narrative is young man from small town goes to Hollywood and makes good, but there's not a lot of detail in that.

You flesh that out as you move forward and sharpen your vision. And so you found that you had specific talent more on the production end. So what did you discover about yourself that was relevant to the production side of things, and how did that tangle up with the instantiation of The Daily Wire and then its expansion into entertainment?

Well, I would say when I was a child, I thought as a child, right? I had this dream, as you say; it was nothing if not ambiguous. It seemed clear to me because my exposure to the world had been so small: you know, go west and make good, as you say— that seemed substantial. But, of course, anyone who's lived any life as an adult at all knows that that's not substantial in any way; there's nothing there you can hang your life on.

So I came to Hollywood, and I immediately began failing. In fact, one of the great criticisms that people make if you even read comments about the kids' announcement of the Snow White announcement this week, you'll read many people saying Jeremy Boring is a failed film producer, he's at it again, failed screenwriter.

And I always think that's a very funny criticism. I mean, after all, I don't say this with any sense of arrogance; I say it simply as a matter of fact. I'm quite successful; in any material sense, I am a quite successful person. That success is built on top of all of the failures that my detractors online are trying to mock me for. What they don't understand is how proud I am of those failures, how instrumental those failures were in helping me to come however far I've come, and it'll be future failures that take me wherever it is that I ultimately go.

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Well, you know, failure is a very interesting way of thinking about something. It's a foolish way of thinking about something if you're committed to the end goal. I mean, what I've learned in my life is that I've never done anything that I actually did that wasn't a success. Now, I would add a coded to that, which is that doesn't mean it would succeed the way I thought it would, right?

But if you put your heart into something, and the original end that you had conceived of doesn't make itself manifest, that doesn't mean that you didn't learn 10,000 useful things that you're going to be able to apply to the next project. It also doesn't mean that I've often salvaged projects from years later when I think, "Oh, okay, well, that didn't work out there, but I've got all that sitting there that I've mastered; I can now apply it to this."

And I truly don't believe that I've ever put my heart into anything in a committed way that hasn't really radically paid off, even though the timeframe of that payoff was indeterminate. And the potential initial goal might not have been realized. And then the other thing I would say about the critics who are criticizing your repeated failures is that they don't know anything about entrepreneurial activity.

And I studied entrepreneurial activity technically for a very long time, and one of the things that you see with entrepreneurs is that—and you see this with venture capital investors—is that the ratio of failure to success is very high. And you have to do a lot of things before something goes viral and bears fruit. But that doesn't mean that all those other attempts that didn't magically catch fire were failures. It just means that you have to do a lot of things before any one thing really catches on.

And so if you think that you can be successful without failure, you don't know anything about how to be successful, so that's just a foolish criticism. Now, it does sound to me, too, oddly, though, you know, because people watching and listening and watching The Daily Wire, their presumption is going to be something like—and this would have been mine—is that all of the major players in The Daily Wire world were basically politically oriented people who decided to make a foray into the entertainment world.

But what you're telling me was that, in your case—and this might be true with Shapiro too, because I know he was extremely interested in music—that you are actually primarily interested in entertainment, so to speak. And it's not such a stupid word—entertainment—because that's not what it is; let's call it culture. You were primarily interested in dramatic culture rather than politics. And so this is actually for you, this is actually a return to what you had originally dreamed of and envisioned, both in both in the general and in the particular.

I'm, as you say, I'm in Europe producing this Pendragon Cycle. When I was 20 years old, 21 years old, sitting in a, uh, apartment I couldn't afford in the worst part of the San Fernando Valley—truly looking for quarters under the couch to see if I could afford a dollar menu Jack in the Box—I, as a teenager, had been in love with Stephen Lawhead's novels, the Pendragon Cycle.

It's a young adult series about Arthurian myth and about the fall of Roman Britain and the sort of rise of sub-Roman Britain and the preservation of Christianity in this very small Celtic area in Wales, and it deeply shaped my worldview. I mean, these books were incredibly formative for me. At 21, I realized that I can't make it as an actor, I don't really know what my life is supposed to be, I'm desperately poor, and I started writing adaptations of these novels. I didn't own the rights; I had not optioned the rights from the author to write these adaptations. I didn't even know there was such a thing as optioning the rights—I was that young and that naive.

And I labored for two years trying to work on this, and here I am at the fulfillment of this moment where I'm actually producing—not only have I returned to sort of my original dream of making this cultural content in the general—but in the very particular. But even that wasn't by design; it was by taking the steps that were in front of me, by accepting the outcomes that weren't the outcomes—I didn't always accept them gracefully, but I ultimately, because of grace, was able to accept them and therefore was able to keep growing in life, and the circle brought me back around to this moment.

Yes, Ben Shapiro was a virtuosic violinist as a young man. There's a beautiful video of him playing the theme from Schindler's List for Larry King when he was nine years old or something. Andrew Klavan, who was there from the very founding of The Daily Wire, obviously, had an entire life as a fiction—as a novelist before he ever engaged with politics at all. He had written screenplays for big Hollywood films with Michael Douglas, Clint Eastwood, and others.

We were part of this West Coast Breitbartian—by which I mean Andrew Breitbartian—conservative moment that happened where all these entertainment industry people began to realize that the culture had slipped out from under them. And through people like Andrew Breitbart, through organizations like Friends of Abe, which I ended up being the executive director of for five years in LA—which was this underground group of 2,500 entertainment industry professionals who would meet in secret for fear of being discovered as conservatives—they would come together, and that moment was so unique, and it bore so much fruit.

I think it's part of why The Daily Wire is unique. We're unique A, because of the sort of built-in worldview differences between Shapiro, Boring, and Robinson. We're unique because we came out of this milieu of cultural entertainment, West Coast conservatism that happened in LA in the mid-2000s, this very unique moment in time. And we're unique because we don't pander to our audience. We're unique because we're lowercase r Republicans, because we believe that our job is, yes, never to betray our audience, yes to represent our audience, but also to lead our audiences.

You know, we don't give our audience exactly what they think that they want because our belief is that they don't actually want what they may think superficially that they want. Right? Now, that doesn't mean I have the right to betray my audience to give them what they decidedly do not want, but people will write in all the time and say, “When are you going to make a Christian movie?” Well, I know they don't actually want a Christian movie. I know that because I see the box office numbers for those types of movies.

Right? I know that what they, what they're crying out for is for Christians, for example, to make truly entertaining and meaningful content for them, the way that they express that. If you're a populist, you would just give them exactly what they're expressing. But giving them exactly misses that transcendental access. Well, I think this is the problem with leading by poll; like, one of the things you learn as a research psychologist is that it's not that easy to figure out what people think.

And you can't find out just by asking them one question. First of all, the question sets up the answer. So you have to ask them a whole panoply of questions to get anything near anything like their actual opinions. And then it is also the case that—so what does it mean to lead under those circumstances? This is where the for-profit mechanism is so powerful. Because I have two conversations with my audience. I have the polling conversation: what do you want? And they tell me what they want to want.

But then I have my for-profit conversation, which is where I give them options, and they tell me with their actions what they actually want. Right? Exactly. Right? There’s a kind of content that we all want to want, and then there's the kind of content that we actually want that we actually engage with. And that's what we're trying to do at The Daily Wire. We are trying to give our audience what they want, just not necessarily what they want to want—that's the tension that we're living.

Well, and that—well, that's what a real political leader should do too is rather than—and I've seen many, many political leaders founder on exactly this problem because they start out motivated by commitment to a set of principles (assuming they're not just, you know, the psychopathic types who are out for themselves). But they start by being motivated by a set of principles, and then they ally themselves with political consultants because they're afraid of their own inexperience; they hire people to run their campaign, which you can't do because it's your campaign.

They hire people to write their speeches, and then they just get transformed into another stamped political product, and they almost always fail. And so you need that—you can't rely on foolish sampling of public opinion to govern what you're going to offer because the public is striving towards something. But if they had it, they could describe it. But if they're aspiring towards it, they're still stumbling towards its description, and then it's incumbent on the leaders to listen and to take them to the next step.

And that is what a great storyteller should do, and the failure to do that will be punished by the market because a Christian movie could be just as propagandistic and dull, and is very much likely to be—which, if it's explicitly Christian, it's because it's not a movie; it's a piece of propaganda designed to push really what's a political agenda—not even a religious agenda; it's a political agenda disguised as a religious agenda.

And certainly, people who proclaim their Christianity all too loudly are just as likely to fall prey to that temptation as anyone else. What people want is a story that captures their imagination—right? And the imagination too; it's different than—so the neural system that governs the imagination is a different system than the system that governs linguistic content. It's more archaic, it's more emotional, it's more instinctual, it's less attuned to the moment, it's less specific and adapted to immediacy, so it's got a local impracticality, but it's got a medium to long-term vision—a much broader vision.

And great cultural drama appeals to the imagination, and it has to be of the pattern of the imagination. And that may be quite distinct. Like one of the things I've really been struck with, for example, is just as political correctness hit its height, the Marvel Universe became most popular. And it was fascinating for me to watch because Tony Stark is as close to a fascist as any Hollywood hero has ever been. Right?

I mean, he's a military-industrial, self-absorbed, hyper-Anrand capitalist, right? So he's as far away from woke as you could be. And then, and so that was extremely interesting to see. Although the Marvel people until recently never took the bait; they never got political, and so they kept the politics implicit in the story. And then I watched The Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson, and you couldn't have come up with a more anti-woke movie if you would have scripted it for that purpose.

And because that wasn't why it was scripted, it was successful. I mean, The Black Widow was literally about a communist demagogue quasi-god who lived in the sky who was a remnant of the Communist Empire taking over the minds of young women and destabilizing the whole world. It's like, well, yeah, looks like that's happening. And then what was so strange too is that Janson, who was the savior in the narrative, the only reason that she was able to break the hold of this propaganda on the minds of her female compatriots was because she had been raised in something approximating a loving nuclear family, even though it was deeply flawed and partly false.

And so, so why am I saying all that? Well, it's because you will get punished by the market if you do turn your cultural dramas into political propaganda. And it’s also very comical to see the weird reversal here too because what you see happening in Hollywood is that the actors dream of being political activists, and they seem—I've had conversations with Hollywood actors about this.

I said, look, you guys are already—you already occupy a kind of pinnacle. Why would you subordinate that pinnacle to the political? You're subordinating the greater dramatic culture to the lesser. Now, you guys are taking the reverse t because you made your largest scale success in an essentially political realm, and now you want to transcend that and move into the cultural. So it's very fascinating to watch this.

Well, I've watched—I have lived through, I think, the most rapid trans-political transformation on probably in human history. I mean, in 2008, Barack Obama could not be elected president as a Democrat if he opposed gay marriage. And in 2012, Barack Obama could not be elected as a Democrat if he—I'm sorry, yeah, he could not be elected in 2008 if he supported gay marriage, and he could not be elected in 2012 if he opposed gay marriage.

In four years, there was that rapid a change on an issue so deeply fundamental about which there were such deeply held beliefs and such deeply held passions. How could that change so quickly? And what changed, obviously, is culture. And we could debate whether that was good or bad or was it some good and some bad. That's not even the conversation I'm trying to engage in. I'm only interested in the fact of it, and the fact that the Overton Window had shifted so far—and what shifted it?

You know, 80% of what shifted it was a single network television show called Will & Grace that, for the first time on NBC, on the biggest network for comedy every single day, 15 million people brought into their homes these vibrant, wonderful characters who were gay, and it fundamentally transformed how they saw that issue. That is that is power that politicians obviously don't have.

If they did, Barack Obama wouldn't have had to have changed; he always supported gay marriage, so you would have never heard him oppose gay marriage in the first place if politics is where the real power lives. Politics is incredibly powerful, of course, but it has to operate within a cultural window, and the real failure of the right in America in my lifetime is that they seated all of that ground almost completely to the left.

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Right, right. Okay, so let’s—I’ve got two threads to walk off on from that point. The first is this: this has been a weird reversal too. I mean, one of the strangest things I've seen in the last decade—and I've seen a lot of strange things in the last decade, by the way—was the Babylon Bee. Comedians interviewed Jonathan Pageau; it was a preposterous interview because Pageau was speaking very seriously about the architectural and mythological significance of the monsters on the outside of medieval cathedrals and relating that to the fuzzy edges of cognitive and perceptual categories, which is a very sophisticated intellectual discussion.

And these idiot commentators from the Babylon Bee—and I mean idiot in the best possible way—were cracking absurd jokes in the background and acting like frat boys and being very comical, but keeping up with the conversation, and Pageau was cracking jokes along with them and keeping up quite nicely. And that was all done in the name of Christian satire, which is like, what do you mean Christian satire? Christian satire—I mean, I think the Babylon Bee has taken out The Onion; that's what it looks like to me.

And it's like, what the hell? Where did Christian satirists come from? And so I'm curious here: what do you think's going on? The first is how did you reconcile the conflict between a kind of traditional Christian Protestant American evangelism and the entertainment industry? Because that's quite the damn gulf. And why do you think that can be successfully bridged, that gulf? Why do you think it should be?

I mean, you talked about the importance of culture, but that doesn't mean that you should dance with the devil, you know, to lead people down the appropriate road. And that must have—the Hollywood culture, even though you want to be part of it, there must have been a moral quandary there.

Oh yeah, people would always say in Hollywood, in Christian Hollywood, when I was in my 20s, they would say, we have to reclaim Hollywood for Christ. And I'd be like, guys, he was never here.

I think that—right, all the bests are with Satan, as B. Simpson said. Yeah, right, that's right. I think that it is American Protestantism; that's part of it for me though. I'm decidedly not Catholic or Mainline Protestant. I didn't grow up in a church that has deep historic roots, and so I think probably, if I'm being honest with myself, you know, I know a lot of people who grow up and who are very devoted Catholics or very devoted Episcopalians, very devoted Presbyterians.

I don't even know if they believe in Christ; I don't know if they even believe in the Bible, but they certainly have had enormous benefit and enormous structure put in their life by these traditions. Probably even more precisely, I know many Anglicans who fit that description. You know, they're incredibly intelligent, and they understand the value of their church, but they don't necessarily believe that it's true, and I understand that.

I think that that's a somewhat tragic view, but I think that it's a perfectly relatable view—especially if you're in one of those institutions that has such history. But I didn't grow up in that kind of an institution. I grew up in a kind of American evangelicalism that I think is somewhat ungrounded in many ways that I think are actually, you know, as an adult I can say in many ways that I think are bad.

But one of the benefits that it has—and one of the benefits that it gave to me—is probably my belief in God is because of narrative. It's not because of institution. In other words, I came to believe in God because of the story of God, because of the redemptive story of Christ. And so in that sense I understand the power of story.

You know, we are interesting creatures, aren't we? Because we're meat, and we are the thing that transcends meat. It's very hard to know where the line between those two things is—probably because, in an ultimate sense, there isn't one. It's very hard to understand where illnesses begin. You and I—I mean, you far more than me, but certainly both of us—in our life have seen bad thoughts actually lead to physical destruction.

And so, you know, did the thing that began in the physical world transcend into the spiritual world for a person? And certainly If you believe any of the stories of the Bible—the New Testament or the Old—you must believe that there are things that start in the spiritual that then manifest themselves in the physical. Somehow that door swings both ways, and we don't fully understand that.

The problem, though, with the sort of conservatism you described earlier—the conservatism that doesn't care about narrative, that doesn't care about aesthetic—my argument would be, yes, but narrative and aesthetic care about you. Right, right; that's for sure. Right. Narrative is real. Narrative is an active force in the world.

And so... The narrative impacted me and changed my life. And so it's that understanding of the power of narrative that caused me to be drawn in that direction. Okay, okay. Well, you know, I'm writing this new book called We Who Wrestle with God, and it's going quite nicely.

One of the arguments that I lay out in there—and I believe this to be true at multiple levels simultaneously—is that a description of the structure through which we perceive the world is a story. That's what a story is, and you cannot perceive the world without a story. This is why the empiricists and the postmodernists got this right, by the way; this is why the empiricists are wrong.

There's a trillion facts; you have to rank order them in terms of their value, and a description of that rank ordering is a story. So when you watch someone on screen walk through their life, what you're seeing are the choices they make, the value choices they make, and the consequences. And we're so interested in that because we want to fill in our narrative so that we have a narrative that will allow us to orient ourselves in the world properly, and the biblical narrative is the meta-narrative of Western culture, and there's no escaping that.

Now, what the postmodernists did wrong, after realizing that we saw the world through a story, was insist that that story was one of power. And if you think the ruler of the world is the person who wields the most power, you are literally the farthest thing from a Christian you could possibly be; because the entire Judeo-Christian narrative—Moses, we talked about this in The Exodus seminar—Moses is forbidden from entering the promised land, even though he had led the Israelites faithfully for decades under the most appalling conditions, merely because he uses force once when God tells him instead to use his words. And that's it.

It's like the punishment is, hey, you're right in the border of the promised land, but you used your staff to hit the rocks when you were told to speak, and you don't get to proceed. And so you made yourself—you well, and you also made the assumption that you... That's exactly right. You used force; you used your ability to compel when you should have used your ability to invite and to entice. You didn't tell the right story.

You used—Thomas Jefferson makes this brilliant—Thomas Jefferson makes a brilliant argument in his—he wrote the Virginia Charter of Religious Freedom, and in the preamble to the Virginia Charter of Religious Freedom (I won't quote it because I would misquote it), but he essentially says, "Since God alone has both the power and the right to compel us to believe and since he chose not to, who would we be to do otherwise?" Right, great, great. Yeah, great observation.

Absolutely. Well, that—and the insistence that in the Judeo-Christian tradition that we do have true choice, true free choice, and that we can use that in the moral domain, and that is been reserved to us—that is part and parcel of the notion that we have responsibility and the right to our own destiny. I mean, one of the things things you see—I've been writing about the Prophet Elijah in this new book—and Elijah is an interesting figure because he's one of the prophets that shows up on the mount when Christ is transfigured.

It's Moses and Elijah, and it's like you might ask, well, who’s Elijah? Right? You know who Moses is, but Elijah is the first person—first of all, to take a stance against the—no, he's the most outstanding exemplar of the people who took a stance against deifying nature. So he's the enemy of the prophets of Baal, and Baal is a nature god, right? The god of the earthquake, the god of the environmentalists.

Baal is a variant of Gaia, although he's male. And so, and Elijah realizes that whatever God is is not nature, despite Nature's awesome capacity and ability to elicit something, you know, approximating admiration and awe. It's not—it's not the earthquake, and it's not the hurricane; it's not the storm. It's instead the still small voice within—that's where that line comes from.

And so, and so there's the—so that conscience has to be free in that regard, and that's all right. So let me ask you another question here. So the other thing that people are going to be skeptical about—I'm less skeptical about this now, you know, because I've worked with some of your very talented people, Jonathan Haye and Elliot Feld, for example. Brilliant editors. Brilliant!

And being an editor is very hard work, and they're very good at it. They can get to the core of a story, and I've seen them do that multiple times. That takes a very special talent, and someone who's awake, you know, that's hard. Now, where are you getting your talent, and how do you select them on the creative side? You know, because you'd think, well, who's going to go work for The Daily Wire, the new Daily Wire enterprise?

I mean, I know there's a lot of disaffected people in the entertainment industry, and they're sick and tired of being told what to do and having their talents subverted to the woke mob. But I'm curious, you've collected a lot of creative people around you, and how have you done that, and how do you assess and evaluate them?

Yeah, well, one thing that I would say is it's much easier with kids' entertainment than it has been with our more general entertainment. With general entertainment, there are a lot of disaffected people, as you say, in Hollywood. They want to come over and be a part of something that they believe in. The challenge is I can't offer them a career; I can only offer them a job.

And if the job that I offer them gets in—could actually be detrimental to their career, well then that’s a pretty bad bargain. So one of the things that we're endeavoring to do is obviously get talent where we can to grow talent internally—to stretch ourselves over time and success to be able to show people, look, this isn't a flash in the pan; there's going to be more and more opportunity over here. I think that will draw more and more talent to take that leap and come over and work with us.

On the kids' front, it's been much easier. The second I announced that we were doing this, we had huge writers from DreamWorks and Disney, huge producers from DreamWorks and Disney and other animated and kids entertainment companies jump ship and come straight to us. At first, I didn't understand why because they're taking, in some ways, an even bigger risk.

But then I realized, oh, it makes sense. If you had come to me when I was 25, let's say, and said, "Jeremy, we read this pilot that you wrote, it's fantastic, we really like it, we'd love to make it, but you know you're going to have to put an anti-gun agenda in there, and the one character is going to have to have an abortion, and these two men are going to kiss in the third act," I would have been—I may have said no because I'm a bit of a contrarian at heart, but I may have said yes, you know, because I wanted so badly for those dreams to come true.

But if you tell me to do that for a show that's going to be marketed to seven-year-olds, well, now there's really no conflict at all. I simply cannot do it. I cannot have trained—I'm not going to, for any amount of money, for any amount of my dreams coming true, get comfortable with putting transgendered characters in shows aimed at seven-year-olds.

And since that is actually what's happening at these major Hollywood studios right now, people who were drawn to kids' entertainment in particular are people who love kids. They love the innocence of children, the youth of children; they feel a responsibility. You know, the people who work at Disney are a special breed. I've worked with some of them now; they're damn near impossible to manage, by the way, because they're so creative.

They're so full of life. They're so full of vision. It makes them challenging to manage; they're incredible artists, truly in every sense of the word, and they feel deeply responsible for the content that they create. Whereas if you ask me to be a writer on Game of Thrones, it may go against some of my values, but I'd be stoked to be working on the biggest show; I'd be stoked to be working with the best people in the industry, and I'd console myself at night with the knowledge that adults can make their own choices.

Adults have the right to engage with content. Maybe the people who watch it won't even agree with it, but they'll enjoy it for other reasons. You don't feel that way with little kids. So from the second we launched, the disaffected in general entertainment put out feelers to us: keep us posted, they'll come take a meeting, and then they'll back off. On the kids' front, it's where do we sign up?

What they're being asked to do in their daily lives is evil, and they don't want to participate in evil. So what sort of applicant pool have you been able to draw from? Like how many— I don't know how many people you've hired in the Bent Key apparatus, who are creative? Can you give us an approximate number?

Yeah, you know, I've because I've been out of the country for the last many months on this leave of absence, and I found out yesterday that since I've left, we've hired almost 30 people, which is—that's a lot. That's a big number of my company. Now, I've never even met, but it's necessary for how we're doing things for me to be on this leave. But I would say two dozen creatives in the kids' entertainment is probably an accurate number.

Right, so it's still a small number, and how many inquiries have you had about the possibility of such positioning? Daily...

OK, OK, so you have a huge applicant pool to select from. Like, people, like I say, people who've worked at very high levels at very big studios, right? So it must be tempting to hire all of them.

Yeah. If we had the resources, we would have hired probably all of them by now. You know, it's—we grow out of cash flow; you'll read all these rumors about how we're funded by billionaires. We spend over $200 million a year. You'd have to be quite a billionaire to fund The Daily Wire.

There’s not—I know it's hard for people to understand how money works, but a guy with a billion dollars can't spend $200 million a year on propping up The Daily Wire. The Daily Wire is a—for, well, he also doesn't—in most cases, he also doesn't have that money; it's not like— I always think of the Scrooge McDuck image because that's what people think, you know—that the typical billionaire has a money bin where he goes and swims in pennies, and your money is out there.

If you have more money than you need for your daily necessities, your money is invested in all sorts of things. It's yours to control, but it's not yours in the simple sense that you have the money in your wallet or if it is, you're being foolish with your money. So right, the number of people on planet Earth who could just fund an operation like The Daily Wire is remarkably small.

It's not even billionaires; it's deca-billionaires. We—the Daily Wire can go away tomorrow if we fail, and that's a very real possibility all the time. There have been numerous moments in the history of the company where we've come right up against it, and even that is a huge lesson to me. I wouldn't have known that until I took this journey.

I always thought in the early years I thought, well, we'll reach a point eventually where there's some stability, but we keep expanding, we keep growing. If you're not growing, you're dying. You know, the first year that might be the only real stability, Jeremy. You know, because a biological organism tends to deteriorate very rapidly if it isn't growing and expanding, right?

The real stability might be that creative edge, and that's particularly going to be true if you're in entertainment and what that does mean, and this is one of the things I've really found exciting, by the way, about working with The Daily Wire, because I've worked with a lot of different organizations now, and some of them were quite great, like Harvard was great in the '90s when I was there, and I've started a number of companies, and they've done quite well.

And I'm accustomed to having very good graduate students around me. But one of the things I really have enjoyed about The Daily Wire is that everything is done to a high standard of excellence, so that's cool to see. And that people are taking that responsibility onto themselves—which I also really like to see because it means that you've distributed responsibility and creative freedom at the same time quite extensively.

And that gives your company a real dynamism, and I really saw that with the documentaries. And so that's, but I think that's the only kind of stability you can really hope for doing what you're doing. It has to be a living stability and not some false stability that comes from resting on your laurels and assuming that what you've already—going to—that's like burying your talents in the—I give a speech to all of our new recruits once a month. They bring, of course, I haven't gotten to do this in the last five months, but once a month they bring all the new people into a room, and I go and visit with them, and I tell them every time, The Daily Wire is an incredibly difficult place to work—it’s an incredibly difficult place to work because we have an actual mission.

And, you know, I liken it to the mission of say SpaceX, even though obviously what we do is very different. But we're trying to get to Mars, and we're building the rocket as we go, and there's every possibility at every new step that we'll crash back to Earth if you don't get breakaway velocity. There's only—the inevitability—is crashing becomes an inevitability; it's just a matter of time.

And that may well be our fate. We could one day have a billion dollars a year of revenue and then fail. You could say, well, I don't understand, you used to be succeeding with $30 million a year of revenue; how could you fail with a billion? Well, it's easier to fail at a billion because the mistakes get much more cost much faster.

The Daily Wire is hard; the pressure is intense. Every startup is hard. And our startup has actual enemies. We have all the major giants in social media, except perhaps Elon, actively trying to shut us down, trying to demonetize us. We have billionaire-funded non-profits who exist—they pay people six figures a year to listen to our content and then to try to target our advertisers into dropping us on the basis of the things that we say on that content. We have a government that's hostile to the things that we do.

The entire apparatus of our culture is arrayed essentially against our business. Of course, it's an incredibly challenging environment for people to work in. I say it is possible; it is possible that I will one day fire you because of a mistake. Of course, hypothetically, there's a mistake that you could make that's so vast I would have to fire you, and that has happened one or two times.

But in the vast majority of instances, that's not why people burn out at The Daily Wire or quit The Daily Wire and get fired. Far more prevalent is people who try to rest on past successes. If you try to rest on— I understand that temptation, but past successes will not get us to Mars. You know, we will crash with all of those past successes firmly in our pocket. It's the next success that has to happen, and the one after that, and the one after that.

And if you're not willing to continue to challenge yourself and continue to grow and take responsibility—if I walk in and say you made a mistake, I need you to say yes, I did and here's what I learned from it. I tell people my dream in life is to one day make a one billion dollar mistake. You know, you talked about enemies and risk, and I think part of the reason that it's exciting to be working with The Daily Wire is because the risk is calibrated properly.

See, one of the things you do as a therapist—I had a client who was very afraid of death. Now everyone's afraid of death, and logically so, but you can be so afraid of death that it completely obliterates your ability to live. And she was a vegan and couldn't even walk into a butcher store, and it was because the idea of death was just too much for her. She tried to stay asleep most of the time; she was very suicidal; she had a panoply of problems.

And one of the things we did in treatment—I outlined this in my book—was go watching them bombing. And that was very dramatic—it was dramatic for me too. It's not a trivial thing to see, that's for sure. And part of the reason you do that with people—and I did this because she had a dream that indicated some necessity on her part to do something that dramatic in order to lift herself out of her fear, and it really did.

And part of the reason it lifted herself out of her fear was because if you have to confront something truly terrible, this is what happens when archaic people initiate their teenagers, especially the boys: they subject them to something truly awful. And the reason they do that is because then their nervous system is calibrated properly; they know the difference between something truly awful and something that's just, you know, not that good.

And if you don't have that calibration, then everything that's just not that good becomes truly awful. Now one of the things that's cool about The Daily Wire—and this may be a consequence of the intense assault on its existence—is that because you guys are surrounded by enemies and the probability of failure is spectacular, that risk is built in.

Like just accepting that risk is built into the psyches of the people who work there. And so when I say, "Well, why don't we go do a documentary in Jerusalem and Athens and Rome, and we won't script it, and we'll just see what happens when we go there?" Everybody says, "Well