Inside Daily Wire: Jeremy Boreing Breaks Silence on Ben, Candace & Tucker | PBD #819

Patrick Bet-David explains why great leaders invest heavily in their people, create ownership, and reward loyalty with equity. Learn how thinking like an owner transforms employees into A-players and why just a few exceptional people can change the trajectory of an entire company. GET THE NEW FLB 1'S: https://bit.ly/4mXV9gd HOW TO RAISE STRONG KIDS (FREE LIVE WEBINAR): https://bit.ly/4fRBuik THE VAULT 2026: AUG 31ST TO SEPT 1ST: https://bit.ly/4mZdLhD CHECK OUT JEREMY'S CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/@UCGHtep7hxIpz2D6RAQ8Kp0g TEXT PBD TO 310-340-1132 TO GET A COPY OF THE 2026 PBD PODCAST SURVEY! SPONSOR THE VAULT 2026: https://bit.ly/4mFBPpw CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj KALSHI: http://kalshi.com/pbd TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real time! SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @ValuetainmentComedy @theunusualsuspectspodcast @HerTakePod @bizdocpodcast ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I told people even as early as 2018. I said Tucker Carlson's the most dangerous person in American politics.

• 0:05Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think are the main issues between Ben and Tucker?

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Ben Shapiro.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  They disagree about America the most.

• 0:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Has it always been like this? Or is this the most fractured it's been going into 2028?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  It's never in my lifetime been like this. Tucker is essentially at war with the Trump administration now. He's making some of the worst accusations about the president that anyone out there is making.

• 0:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Would you trust a JD for 2028?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Not today.

• 0:36Patrick Bet-David?

  The top three big partners are you, Ben, and Caleb, right? So Caleb took over, but then Caleb recently stepped down. Was it intentional for Caleb to only go for 12 months?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  You know.

• 0:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Was the goal to sell to Fox News with Daily Wire? What was the goal? Because Daily Wire used to hate Fox, and that was their enemy. And now they want to be able to sell to Fox.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Obviously, you keep scoring business by making profit.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Candace Owens, who's now left Daily Wire.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  We terminated Candace Owens.

• 1:06Patrick Bet-David?

  10 out of 10 times, you would have fired her again?

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Candace has more "it" than any other personality I've ever encountered. 10 out of 10 times, I would have fired her again. 9 out of 10 times, I would have fired her 2 months earlier.

• 1:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think that brought unnecessary pressure on the company?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  You know, the year that I fired Candace Owens, we ended that year better than we started it.

• 1:24Patrick Bet-David?

  After Candace left, you grew in subscribership and revenue?

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Is conservative media company The Daily Wire going under?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people are kind of dancing on Daily Wire's grave. And I told them at that meeting, within 90 days, Tucker Carlson is going to say America was the bad guy in World War II. And every single one of the executives in my company looked at me like I was crazy.

• 1:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Jeremy Boreing, great to have you on.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Very nice to be here. Thank you.

• 1:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes. Last time was, what, about a couple of years ago?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, 2023, I believe.

• 1:58Patrick Bet-David?

  23. So, question for you. Do you miss being the CEO of Daily Wire versus being a content creator today? I know you're still running a business, you're a business guy, but do you miss being an operator?

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 2:12Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you miss about it?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Well, my ambition has never been to be a podcast host. At one time, I owned and operated one of the 10 largest podcast companies in the country. It would have been very easy to launch a podcast during those days when, you know, on this side of the Daily Wire, it's actually challenging.

• 2:27Patrick Bet-David?

  So you never did, you never had a podcast?

• 2:28Speaker 00

  I hosted our backstage show, which was, we all got together once a month. Every now and then, if there was some, like, thing that we felt like the CEO of the Daily Wire needs to weigh in, I would do a little one-off, speak to the audience, or a town hall, or something. But no, I've never, never tried to be in the hosting grind the way I am now.

• 2:46Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you like it now?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  It's an act of creation, so I love that. I like having a voice back after spending a year, kind of in the wilderness after leaving Daily Wire. I like having my team back together and being in motion again. But, you know, there's nothing like the thrill of running a business, of running a business at scale. We had 275-plus employees when I left, and, you know, a couple hundred million dollars of annual revenue. You know, that's a, that's an enormous amount of pressure that always forces you to be your very best. And, you know, it's addictive, that kind of, you know better than anyone, that's an addictive lifestyle.

• 3:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so do you think, like, sometimes, because sometimes when, when there's a, there's a guy like you, and I wonder how you're gonna answer this, sometimes when there's a guy like you, when you're working with a guy like you, it's annoying, okay? But when the guy leaves, you also say, shit, he did a lot of stuff we didn't even think about. You know, it's kind of like, well, that guy was doing this, and he was doing this. Yes, he was annoying, yes, he was kicking our ass, yes, he was difficult, yes, he was, you know, thought very highly of himself and all this stuff, but my God, it's tough to replace this guy. Do you think something like that happened after you left?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  You like to think so. I know that I wasn't an easy guy to work for. I used to, we used to have, we'd start our day every day with what we called the 10:30 meeting, where we would get... An assortment of people together from the top executives in the company to a lot of the management of the company and we would just make sure that everyone was sort of chasing the same set of priorities, especially in a news business. It's very dynamic, things change every day that require an immediate pivot. Some story breaks, some opportunity for one of the hosts appears. Those aren't things that you plan weeks or even days in advance. You have to be very responsive. And I would often say in the 10:30 meeting, I know that I'm a difficult person to work for. I know that if you're looking for work-life balance, this probably isn't the company for you.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  I don't really believe in the concept of work-life balance. We're building a rocket ship while it's in flight and that's one of the hardest things you can ever do, but that's what we have to do to pursue the mission of the company. And so in that way, I'm certainly aware that I was a tough boss, but I'm also aware that I really drove the company. The style of leadership at the time was very hands-on and I was very in the weeds with my team and every day choosing a direction, ordering the priorities of the company and keeping everyone on mission, which I think it's probably true in every business, but

• 5:19Speaker 00

  it's particularly true in an ideology-first business, that you both have business objectives and missional objectives. And resolving the tension between those two things was also a huge part of what I was engaged in in leadership. And listen, I'm not the only person on earth who can do it, but I suspect that there's some pain points in the transition.

• 5:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, how do you find? Because I think, who replaced you? Caleb, the other third one, who's the top three big partners are you, Ben and Caleb, right? So Caleb took over, but then Caleb recently stepped down in the third week of May or fourth week of May and then the new guy is the Jeopardy guy or the Wheel of Fortune guy.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, Mike Richards is his name.

• 5:59Patrick Bet-David?

  So was it intentional for Caleb to only go for 12 months or however long it was and then to bring somebody else in? Was that an intentional part of strategy?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't really speak to that.

• 6:10Patrick Bet-David?

  So that wasn't your decision, that was post?

• 6:12Speaker 00

  My breakup with the company is a true breakup. I left in 2025 in March and other than the kind of contractual commitment...

• 6:25Speaker 00

  A breakup of this nature, obviously, comes with a lot of lingering commitments and lingering restrictive covenants, and I own a very tiny piece of the company now that's probably primarily a part of the enforcement mechanism behind restrictive covenants as much as anything. But I'm not a part of the company. I haven't spoken to anyone at the company, you know, in any sort of official capacity in, I guess, almost 18 months now. So I can't really speak to what happened with Caleb in the last few weeks.

• 6:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Are you still in touch with them? Are you still in touch with Caleb and Ben? Do you guys still communicate?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  No.

• 7:00Patrick Bet-David?

  No communication?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  No, I've said publicly before, Ben reached out to me the day that Charlie was assassinated. Obviously, we met Charlie on the same day when Charlie was only a teenager, and in some ways, I feel like TPUSA, The Daily Wire, and PragerU all kind of came up at the same time and to varying degrees, came up together. You know, there were times where we saw each other as rivals, I'm sure. You know, it's a competitive space, but for the most part, we were friends and we were building our businesses at the same time and in the same space. And so, you know, that was a, as it was for everyone, it was a very painful moment, and it was nice to hear from Ben in that moment. But, you know, we're not in a place

• 7:45Speaker 00

  in our relationships right now where we're in communication.

• 7:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. And so...

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Weddings and funerals are part of the relationship.

• 7:52Patrick Bet-David?

  It's tough. It's emotional, you know. It's very tough. You know, it's kind of like, it's okay, Connor, just bring it to me. It's kind of like, you know, I don't know if you're an NBA guy or not, but when you see Magic sitting across and talking to Isaiah Thomas and Isaiah is like, you know, they're kind of sharing their frustration with each other. When you're looking at, you know, which one was the other clip that happened? I think it was Kobe and Shaq.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:16Patrick Bet-David?

  And there's a part about Shaq asks him a question. Shaq says, "Did you intentionally want to win fifth to have one more than me?" And Kobe's like, "Fuck, yeah. Yeah, of course I want to have one more than you, Willie." And he starts laughing. "I knew you wanted to beat me." "Of course I wanted to beat you." You know, it was an interesting conversation together. But no, when I look at you guys and what you guys build, you guys, you took it as the CEO of the company from zero to a billion. It's not easy to do. And in the media space, when now looking back, you know, for others that are going into this space...

• 8:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, how do you process, because if we look at the history, I've read the book, They Call Me Ted, how Ted Turner, OG, built CNN and what happened, but he wasn't talent. And even in the book at the end, he says, the news must be the talent, not the, you know, what do they call it, not the reporter, but what do they call it on TV?

• 9:09Speaker 00

  The anchor.

• 9:10Patrick Bet-David?

  The anchor, not the anchor. The anchor's not the talent, it's the story, the story. So the anchor needs to talk, very much like Walter Cronkite. Today at 6:00 PM, John Doe walked through the building and he was shot. And all of a sudden, instead of, I cannot believe, you know, it's more of an animated. So, is it really worth building a media company with the podcasting model, knowing like, if I look at everybody at Daily Wire, okay? And let's take Daily Wire as the, you know, the largest conservative, you know, digital media company, whatever we want to put it out there, right? You guys are not on TV, it's not like you're on, you know, you have like your own channel, like Fox News, Newsmax, that's not the business model.

• 9:53Patrick Bet-David?

  But when you get the talent that comes in, they're on YouTube, yeah, you do some products, CTA, all this stuff, Michael Knowles, phenomenal job, Matt Walsh, incredible talent, you know, Jordan Peterson, you got all these different people that you have. Now, looking back, do you think it's a model that works? Because, say you sign up for three years, these are people that can leave you and go create content on their own. You know, like, what's her name, Cooper?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Brett Cooper.

• 10:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Brett Cooper went, nice channel, I think she's at 2 million subscribers. Candace went, she's at, you know, whatever, 6, 7 million subscribers. Versus on TV, some of them can't translate to digital. You know, there's, I won't say a lot of the names, a lot of the TV guys, 90% of them, I don't think they can go build a podcast and excel. So do you think it's worth building a media company with podcasting digitally?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, well, we had a great run, right? 10 years at the Daily Wire, our revenue grew every single year, year over year. We went far beyond anything that we could have imagined when we first started the company. But we were always aware of that, of the challenge that you're talking about. You know, we, when we started, we really started with two shows. We started with Ben Shapiro and Andrew Clavon. And then we had our editorial department, a bunch of writers covering the news. And in those early years, Ben took off like a rocket ship. And now, that was by design. I mean, Ben and I had been working together on Ben's brand for many years before Daily Wire ever started. We had a sort of proto-Daily Wire company that we had built within a conservative nonprofit called the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It was called Truth Revolt.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And I had, I had sort of early on seen in Ben what I thought was generational talent. And that instinct obviously bore out. I think Ben's the most important political commentator of his generation. But not many people saw it at the time that I saw it. And they didn't see it mostly because it was old guard, linear media guys. You know, Ben didn't have an obvious voice for radio. He didn't have an obvious face for television. He talked too damn fast. And I was running an organization called Friends of Abe, which was like a kind of Hollywood secret society, basically. Alcoholics Anonymous for-

• 12:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  For-

• 12:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Very familiar with those guys.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  And so, I had access to all of this Hollywood talent. And, and I would do things for people. You know, I'd, I'd help this writer get a job on this show every now and then, or that, that sort of thing. And I, I started seeing, I thought there was an opportunity for Ben to become the successor to David Horowitz. High intellect, Jewish, fighter by, by nature. And so, David was getting older. His foundation, you know, needed a, needed an heir.

• 12:31Patrick Bet-David?

  David's son is the guy that's worth four billion dollars?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, the same.

• 12:34Patrick Bet-David?

  He wrote the book called The, The Hard Things About Hard Things, I think. You, I don't know if you know about that book or not. It's a phenomenal book. So, that's his son?

• 12:42Speaker 00

  That's his son.

• 12:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, got it. I had him on one time, I think 10 years ago. David.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  David, yeah. And David wrote one of the most important books of, of the second half of the 20th century for conservatives called Radical Son, about his journey from not just the left, but the radical left. I'm talking about, you know, being involved almost in, in criminal race type stuff and, you know, real communist type, type subversions. And then becoming this champion of conserve, of the conservative movement. So from my position in Friends of Abe, I was able to kind of influence the board a little bit and get them to think differently about Ben. And then I worked with Ben. I, you know, I sent someone over like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. I sent a Hollywood stylist over to clear out Ben's closet and, you know, help him learn how to dress for camera.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And we would strategize together every single day about ways for him to break out in media. And we wanted to prove the old guard wrong. We knew that there's this new opportunity, that Ben's skills really lent themselves to what new media could be. There's a great moment early in Daily Wire, first year. Ben was hosting six hours of talk radio at that time. He had a three-hour show in Seattle and a three-hour show in LA. And I went to Salem, for whom he did the LA show, and said, you know, we want this show to be nationally, we want Ben to have a nationally syndicated show. And Daily Wire-

• 14:04Patrick Bet-David?

  What year is this at the time?

• 14:05Speaker 00

  2016.

• 14:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, okay. So 10 years ago.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  10 years ago.

• 14:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  2015, 2016. And I said, you know, we will pay for the show to be syndicated, but we'd like you guys to syndicate it. And the head of programming at Salem said, Ben Shapiro is not national talent. You know, guy goes on to be the biggest podcast in the conservative movement for almost a decade. And we earn and deploy a billion dollars' worth of revenue, you know, wasn't national talent. But I said all that only to say that we knew by 2018 that we had a bit of a problem on our hands, which is that Ben was breaking away from the business. The Ben Shapiro brand was becoming much bigger than the Daily Wire brand.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  It wasn't lost on Ben and I, for example, that, because Ben and I, to some degree, owned the, owned Ben's show at that time, separate from the company. Kind of complicated business relationship between all the pieces at that time, that we could go take the show away from the Daily Wire. Daily Wire knew that, that that would be the end of the company. We resolved all those problems through negotiation and ways that we structured the business to be mutually beneficial. But then we realized, well, now the problem is, we were owners of Daily Wire itself in a way that we hadn't previously been.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  So it's bad for us. What if Ben gets hit by a bus and he's incapacitated for six months? The company can't survive that. And so we started very methodically trying to build the Daily Wire brand to be able to lose any one of its hosts, up to and including Ben, which obviously would have been a catastrophic loss to endure. But if you're going to be a steward of this brand, the Daily Wire, it has to be able to endure even the loss of its core talent. And that's when we started, we brought Michael Knowles on and developed a show around him. We launched, we brought Candace on, you know, as the years went on. We brought Jordan Peterson on. We launched Morning Wire. We moved into entertainment. We started making movies. We moved into children's entertainment. All of that was a way of making

• 16:08Speaker 00

  sure that the Daily Wire brand itself was robust enough that it could survive. And that bore out. When we launched our first movie, we doubled the size of our, you know, we were five years in at that point. The first movie added as many subscribers just on itself as we had added in five years of just being a podcast company. By the time...

• 16:28Patrick Bet-David?

  How many did it add, brother? What would the number be?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  You know...

• 16:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, like that kind of number?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Just sub one hundred thousand the first year and then...

• 16:35Patrick Bet-David?

  From the movie?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. The first five years, we added about sub one hundred thousand.

• 16:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, got it.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And then the movie added another eighty thousand or whatever it was, right? Like, basically doubled. By the time I left, you know, we had more than ten X subscriptions based on the entertainment play. Now, the entertainment play includes the movies and it includes Matt Walsh's documentaries, right?

• 16:56Patrick Bet-David?

  What was a woman?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Which were huge...

• 16:58Patrick Bet-David?

  How much did that add? What was in the, because I've heard some numbers with that one, like a few hundred thousand.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  We did very well on What is a Woman and Am I Racist. I can't, I probably can't disclose now that I'm not the CEO exactly what those numbers were.

• 17:09Patrick Bet-David?

  But somewhere between a hundred to a half a million.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  We did very well on the documentaries. We did very well on most of our entertainment properties. You know, the Terror on the Prairie, the Gina Carano film, paid for itself within three days of announcing that we were doing it. You know, the Lady Ballers, the last time I was here, I think it was to promote Lady Ballers. You know, Lady Ballers added more subscribers than we had had in the first five years of the company. The movies were very lucrative.

• 17:33Patrick Bet-David?

  So Lady Ballers brought a hundred thousand subscribers?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And it was all based on this idea. We can't be, the Ted Turner idea. How do we deal with the fact that talent can go independent? Or even if they don't go independent, terrible things can happen. You know, people get hurt, people fall off. What do we do? And in that, in 2024, it all came to sort of fruition because Candace Owens, who is one of our largest hosts, you know, we parted ways with her. And we grew. You know, the year that I fired Candace Owens, we ended that year better than we started it. Why? Because the brand, because the brand was successful.

• 18:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Subscribership or revenue?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Both?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:14Patrick Bet-David?

  After Candace left, you grew in subscribership and revenue?

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 18:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  2024 is the best year of subscriptions and the best year of revenue in the history of the company.

• 18:23Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't know, though.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Why do you think?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Well, because the plan worked. The plan was to build a company that was robust enough to absorb those kinds of losses, and we succeeded at it.

• 18:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so then how about when Brett Cooper left? Was there an impact there or no?

• 18:36Speaker 00

  No. Candace and Brett are distinct. Candace was primarily a YouTube sensation, incredibly talented, but appealing to sort of a new audience for Daily Wire, mostly a YouTube audience, wasn't really yet an integral part of like subscriptions or an integral part of revenue. Very successful show. I think it would have gone on to do enormous business for us over time. And obviously, she's borne out that she's a real talent and can be independent and has done very well on her own. But Brett wasn't a... I sometimes hear people, primarily young people and primarily on YouTube, say Brett Cooper was the biggest show at the Daily Wire. Of course, that isn't true.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Brett was a huge, rapidly growing, emerging talent, but she wasn't in any way a central part of our subscription or revenue engine at that point.

• 19:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Brett wasn't. Okay, so...

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Candace, of course, was.

• 19:29Patrick Bet-David?

  I get that. So then that leads to the recent layoffs that happened. Stories came out, I think, the last 12 months, they had two sets of layoffs. One layoff that comes in, then the last one that comes in, and then, hey, it's not as many as you guys say it is. It's not 100 people, it's not 80 people, it's really only 40 people, 50 people. And as a guy that operates, it's very hard to run a business. So you're going to go through your season. So I know what it is to be on the inside and how difficult this is. So it's coming from a guy that's on the inside. So if that's the case, and it's grown after Candace, after Brett, why are the layoffs happening?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Well, I can probably speak more to the first round of layoffs because they came very rapidly on the heels of my departure. The second round of layoffs happened more than a year after I leave, and I, as I say, I don't have trans- Yeah, I don't have a view and I have more of a view than most because I still know a lot of people there and I know how things have historically worked so I can make certain inferences, but I don't have visibility into the company that you might expect me to have. The first round of layoffs are consistent with me leaving the company. It was a huge change in the structure, the fundamental structure of the company, the fundamental business model of the company, the fundamental relationships that sort of undergirded the company.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  And so, you know, some projects became orphans. And so, it makes perfect sense that when you're, when the founding CEO of the company, the founder and CEO of the company, the guy who sort of conceived of the thing and has led it for a decade, leaves, there's going to be other turnover that happens as a result of that. You know, as you, as the new, you know, as my business partners and their consultants pursued their new strategy, that new strategy is going to leave some orphan situations. And so, you know, my top two lieutenants left within a week of me leaving. They both, they both left, not, weren't fired, but...

• 21:24Patrick Bet-David?

  So they were loyal to you, meaning they liked working for you? Because that's typically what happens. CEO leaves, the, the leadership team that reports to them, that has a close relationship, they leave.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that they obviously had loyalty to me and they work for me now in my new venture. I think also they had loyalty to the strategy that we'd been unfolding for the last five years and to the extent that that strategy was changing, you know, they, they didn't see that as a, they didn't see the new strategy as being one that they wanted to invest in. So they leave. But then, of course, those people who were in some of those other departments, like the, the children's department was one of the things that was largely shut down in the days after me leaving. So of course, there were, you know, quite a few employees just of that department who no longer had value that they could add to the company because the company was no longer pursuing that strategy.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  So I think that initial round of layoffs that happened is, was mostly about a pivot into a new strategy, which, you know, as you say...

• 22:27Speaker 00

  That's just part of business. You have to be able to adapt. You have to be able to pivot. You have to be able to change. Obviously, I disagree with the new strategy, or I would still be there running the old strategy. That doesn't mean that the new strategy can't be effective. It doesn't mean that the new strategy can't succeed. But in pursuing that new strategy, they had to make a lot of foundational changes to the company, and some people lost their jobs as a result of that. The new round of layoffs, I can only speak to what's been said publicly. You know, Ben says that they've seen challenges over the last year. Some of them are very obvious, like Jordan Peterson being sidelined. To lose Jordan Peterson is a huge blow, I think, to the entire conservative movement to lose

• 23:12Speaker 00

  his voice. But he's a major part of the economics of how the company was working before he took ill. So you're going to see challenges there. And then I just also suspect that any, you know, I think a lot of conservative media companies have seen some attrition during the second Trump administration, just because conservatives tend not to do great with victory. You know, we're a great opposition party. We're a great opposition movement. Then you win, and everybody kind of breathes out, exhales for a minute, and they don't pay as much attention to conservative media for a season. And then I suspect that there's just the realities of a transition. If you're implementing a new business strategy for the company, you're implementing new governance strategy for the company, a new leadership team for the

• 23:57Speaker 00

  company, new executives at almost every department of the company over the last year, even if that strategy all bears out to be successful, there's just going to be some rough patches in the transition. So I suspect that that's all you're seeing. I think a lot of people are kind of dancing on Daily Wire's grave, because Daily Wire's been ascendant for over a decade, and nobody, you know, America loves underdogs. We don't really love number one. So I think there's a lot of people who are eagerly dancing on Daily Wire's grave. I just think that that's unfounded. You know, Daily Wire still has nine figures of revenue. Daily Wire still has some of the most talented people in the movement working for them.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  I suspect that all the people who are sort of cheering their demise are going to be disappointed by the fact that their demise is not at hand. They're just going through the difficulties that businesses go through.

• 24:48Patrick Bet-David?

  I got 50 questions to follow up. So I don't know what direction I'm going to go with the Knicks. I guess we'll go to the first one is was the vision to sell to Fox because I would get calls, people saying Daily Wire is about to sell to Fox. Daily Wire is trying to sell to Fox. Daily Wire used to hate Fox and that was their enemy and now they want to be able to sell to Fox. And if you notice, Ben Shapiro hasn't been on Fox for a long time because Daily Wire and Fox are enemies because behind closed doors, was the goal to sell to Fox News with Daily Wire? What was the goal?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  No.

• 25:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Was there ever the conversation about a sale with Fox?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a conversation, you know, as you know, everything's for sale. The movement is small. You have a lot of conversations, but we were never looking to sell the Daily Wire. That was not, that was never really part of our strategy. We were, you know, we wanted to have maximal missional impact. Obviously, you keep scoring business by making profit, by generating revenue. We wanted to grow. We wanted to grow revenue. We wanted to grow profitability. We wanted to grow influence and impact. We wanted to deeply impact culture. We wanted to make more content. We wanted a stronger editorial team. One of the things that Daily Wire has been very successful at since I left, I think, is building out their editorial team, which is, you know, now they've got a White House correspondent.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  We, before, that happened before I left, that we sent Mary Margaret O'Leahen to be our White House correspondent, but you see the amazing work she's done over the last year and a half. You see the hires that they've made even in the last three or four months in their editorial teams. They've been dominant. I mean, they brought in some amazing editorial talent. That was, that's what we thought about. Were there moments where, you know, you're in a rough patch and you start thinking, damn, I'd like some liquidity out of this thing. What if it all falls apart tomorrow?

• 26:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's called being in business.

• 26:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep. Totally get it. Was it ever close where you guys almost sold?

• 26:39Speaker 00

  No.

• 26:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Like if it's, you know, home bases, home run, were you ever at third base?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  No, we were never at third base.

• 26:45Patrick Bet-David?

  First base?

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, we get to third base now.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  There were times where we were emotionally, we had already rounded the bases twice.

• 26:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you, do you ever look back and say, man, maybe we should have sold? Does that thought ever cross your mind?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, for me, if I, if I could have foreseen.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  How things ended up for me at the company. And it would have been better for me if I, if we had sold the company.

• 27:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  But no, I never look back and wish that we had sold. Yes, yes, I can say, of course, it would have ended better for me if we had sold in 2023 or 2024.

• 27:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Financially.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Financially.

• 27:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Yep.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  But I look at what we did in 2023, we made the Pendragon cycle. I look at what we did in 2024, like so many companies, but like the biggest of so many companies, we impacted a pivotal election for the country. We finished and released Am I Racist?, which became the biggest theatrical release of a documentary in a decade. We terminated Candace Owens, which I feel like was a moral, of moral, morally important thing to do and important for the health of the conservative movement more broadly.

• 27:57Patrick Bet-David?

  10 out of 10 times, you would have fired it again? Or is there a part of you, it's like, we could have?

• 28:01Speaker 00

  10 out of 10 times, I would have fired her again. 9 out of 10 times, I would have fired her 2 months earlier.

• 28:05Patrick Bet-David?

  How about?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Not a minute of, not a minute of regret.

• 28:08Patrick Bet-David?

  1 out of 10 times, would you have signed her?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:11Patrick Bet-David?

  So the signing was good?

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's easy. I've said that I look back and signing her was the biggest mistake of my life. That's not actually, of my professional life. That's not actually fair or true. Not firing her earlier is a bigger mistake, more of a bigger moral mistake. I had misgivings about Candace when we hired her. But on the whole, I believe that she would be, that she was and would continue to be a force for good. I believe that we could successfully help her trend in a positive direction. I believed, I believed and still believe that she's the, she has the most star power of any person I've ever met. That's after 20 years in Hollywood. I mean, I've met giant movie stars. Candace has more it than any other personality I've ever encountered.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Winsome, charming, hugely talented. So in retrospect, is it a mistake that I hired her? Sure, because of the way it played out, but I wouldn't say 1 out of 10, I would have hired her. You know, 7 out of 10 do-overs, I still would have hired her.

• 29:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Reason why I'm asking this question is the following. Look, I look at, I look at everybody as a talent, right? I look at Candace as a talent. I look at a lot of these guys as talent, you know, Jordan Peterson, all these guys.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it worth doing it? Because I don't think anybody's going to be able to control Candace. I don't think anybody's going to be able to control even a Tucker. I don't think anybody's going to be able to control some of these, you know, the talent. So is it like even now you're not there anymore? Would you go back into the model ever? Let's just say you raise a hundred million dollars. Would you go back to signing talent again? Or how would you do it differently? Would you go after the best? The current Jordan Peterson, the next Michael Knowles, the next Matt Walsh? Would you make that investment?

• 29:57Speaker 05

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• 31:56Speaker 00

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• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yes. Breaking talent is very difficult. You know, seeing talent in someone who doesn't already have an established audience is very, very difficult. Obviously, at the time that we, that I started working with Ben, he had been the youngest syndicated columnist in the country, so he was obviously a talented guy. He had made some sort of cable news appearances. Obviously, a talented guy, had a, had a sort of small one, one market radio show, was developing himself in that regard. But he wasn't obvious, it was not obvious that he was going to be Ben Shapiro to most people. You know, I, I'm not the only one who saw it. Ben's family knew it, Ben believed in himself.

• 32:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Who else knew outside of family? Because family's going to believe, and you believe, but who else saw it? Like, anybody else?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Ben's family believes in him uniquely, not just the way that all, Ben's family wasn't just supportive, they really believed, you know. But no, not, not many people saw what Ben was going to be. Michael Knowles, you know, Michael, I saw Michael as huge talent. But Michael hadn't done anything like this. He was an actor, and I could tell that he was, he was gifted as an actor, but he hadn't done anything like this. Brett Cooper.

• 33:24Patrick Bet-David?

  I've seen some pictures, old school pictures of Michael Knowles, you know.

• 33:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Good-looking young stud. Michael knows. I had no... Just the other day, they were telling me, "This guy looks like an actor." "He looks like an actor that's, you know, maybe right there like..." "That picture looks like he was on General Hospital." You know, he was like on the, you know, some of the...

• 33:45Speaker 00

  If that guy had gotten one single hit on General Hospital, you'd have never seen him. Michael wanted to be an actor. He had it so bad. Michael had it so bad that when he started working for us, he came to work for us as... He had been doing Andrew Clavain's personal social media. And so, we hired him to be our social media director.

• 34:05Patrick Bet-David?

  How old is he at this time?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Oh, none. He's none years old, you know? I don't know, 22?

• 34:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so he's a baby?

• 34:11Speaker 00

  He's a baby. And 23, maybe? So, Michael comes over. And I was like, "Man, this guy, he's so freaking charming and winsome, and he's so smart." The audience, if you ever put a camera on him, even for a little social media video, everybody loves him. And so, I started working on him, you know? And I remember, I remember very clearly, taking him to breakfast one day at my favorite breakfast spot in L.A. called Jinky's in Sherman Oaks.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And I just told him, I said, "Michael, you gotta walk away from the acting." Like, it's a...

• 34:45Speaker 00

  It's a waste of you.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  And you're gonna spend your entire life chasing the thing that you don't have when I'm telling you that there's a thing that you can have right now. And the acting thing...

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Acting is a thing you can just do in success. Like, it's not a thing that you... The only time that acting is impossible is right now. But come do the thing that's possible for you. Come use your gifts, you know? And... But even at that, we had this idea one day that we were gonna make this movie that Andrew Clavain and I had worked on a script together about Samson from the Bible. And it was...

• 35:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you ever read Samson Syndrome, the book?

• 35:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 35:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Maybe that was a book. Please continue. Samson, you and Clavain?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Michael gets it in his head that we're gonna cap. This movie isn't baked. The script is good, Drew did a great job. But I mean, this movie never got past first base. Michael Knowles started gaining weight so that he could look like a Jewish warrior. He was like, you guys are gonna put me in it, right? I was like, Michael, I don't think we're even gonna make this movie, and there's no way I'm gonna put you in it. He starts having pizzas delivered to work. He gets on a regime where I think he gained 30 pounds.

• 35:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop it.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  No.

• 35:57Patrick Bet-David?

  He can't gain 30 pounds.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  I mean, he blew up like a big red balloon.

• 36:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Because he thought it was gonna give it... That's how bad this guy had it to be, to be an actor, you know? But look what he actually is. Look what he's accomplished. In the time that Michael's been doing a show, he's educated himself. I mean, he went to Yale, he wasn't a slob.

• 36:15Patrick Bet-David?

  No, no, no, no.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  But he's educated himself.

• 36:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Michael's honestly one of the most... I don't know, I may put him as number one most likable out of all the conservative talent in the world. I don't know if I put anybody ahead of him.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  And incredibly intelligent. And the same with Brett Cooper. Brett Cooper was a Hollywood actress. She was a series regular on a show called Heathers. But she had never succeeded in commentary. She'd never succeeded as an online host. My team had created this show called The Comment Section. We had cast a girl to be in it, and it had not worked out with the first gal that we cast. So they went back to square one, looking for someone. They'd created this format, and they thought the format would work, but they needed a good host. They found Brett, they brought her to me, and it was just obvious this gal had enormous talent. But at that time, it was completely unrecognized talent. Now, hiring a Jordan Peterson at the height of his career, that costs a lot of money. But it's kind of a no-brainer.

• 37:13Patrick Bet-David?

  You guys didn't make money off that one, though.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Of course you want Jordan Peterson on your brand.

• 37:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you make money off of Peterson?

• 37:17Speaker 00

  You know, we made a little bit of money off of Peterson.

• 37:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Not that much.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  But not that much.

• 37:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  But what Peterson did is he helped secure the brand. He helped to elevate the brand.

• 37:25Patrick Bet-David?

  And I remember the announcement. Massive announcement, the whole, what was it? The lobster thing you guys put on the website. It was, you know, all this stuff. So going back, maybe this is the better question to ask. Is the model a model of getting household names or building?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Well, it's both. You secure the brand with some household names, but the economic model is in breaking new talent.

• 37:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And of course, it's the case, as you see with Brett, you can build talent. You can't make someone talented. We're not responsible for Brett being talented. That's Brett. But we're responsible for helping come alongside that talent, cultivating it, building a brand around it. The day comes when she wants to leave, she can take that. An audience is going to follow her online. We have parasocial relationships with the audience. They're going to follow us to some degree.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  She's really been able to build on that. And I think particularly today, in the post-second Trump win, you experienced it here, I'm sure, the huge change in how the platforms treated us after Trump won again in 2024. You know, suddenly you're not being demonetized, suddenly you're not being shadow banned, suddenly you're not being boxed out. Right now is a great moment for independent talent to have independent success. This is just a phase like every other phase. It's a cycle, you know? The Democrats are going to take power again at some point in the future. The platforms are going to turn on us again at some point in the future. And networks are going to be more valuable to talent again in the future because they provide.

• 38:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Networks are going to be more valuable to talent in the future. What do you mean by that?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Well, I think networks were very helpful to talent in the Biden years because we helped talent navigate.

• 39:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Instead of being independent, go with somebody.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Go with somebody.

• 39:12Patrick Bet-David?

  So during the conservative, go by yourself. During a liberal, team up with somebody.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  I think that right now, that certainly seems to be the case.

• 39:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting perspective. So, okay, so Crowder, would you have done anything differently with Crowder?

• 39:25Speaker 00

  I would have called him from California instead of Nashville, so it was a one-party consent state. No.

• 39:33Patrick Bet-David?

  That's a technical statement. There are only few people who understand.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  No, I wouldn't have done anything. I stand by the offer that we put in front of Crowder.

• 39:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  It was a good faith offer. It was a lot of money. It was a very respectful offer. I think Crowder showed.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Sort of like personal disloyalty and disrespect. And I think it kind of shows some of what's wrong with our business that what Crowder ultimately did was he needed a controversy to launch himself as an independent talent. And a great controversy is to get into a fight with the big guys, you know?

• 40:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And by the way, Candace defended the guys hardcore against Crowder. I don't know if you remember that.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Oh, I do remember.

• 40:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Candace went hardcore after Crowder.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was very appreciative of her.

• 40:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I remember that. I remember because to me, I'm in the middle, right? Like, I don't know if, you know, what level of, to me, I'm more in the place where I'm thinking, is it worth going in and building long-term? Or do I have to deal with every four to eight years, depending on who the president is, that the talent's going to go and be independent and say, we don't need you, we can do it, do we do it, do we not do it?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Well, but you say, I understand that. Andrew Clavain, Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Jordan Peterson, these talent never, never

• 40:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Left.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Left.

• 40:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I mean, Jordan has left as a result of, I don't know if he's, I don't know if he's left. He's sidelined.

• 40:51Patrick Bet-David?

  No, no, no, this, he's, he's fine. He's just sidelined.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  He's just sidelined. Candace, we fired, and Brett left. We've had one talent really leave in the way that you would be concerned about talent just leaving you. You have to, you have to continually help talent to become more successful. If, if the network is helping talent get more views, more money in their pocket, more opportunity for growth, then they're going to be incentivized to stay with you. And if you, if you fail at that, you're going to lose them. Sometimes you might lose them for other reasons because human relationships are complicated, business is complicated. But for the most part, for the most part, talent is going to go where they see opportunity. So you just have to be the opportunity.

• 41:33Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you, what do you look for? So for talent, you know, I built an insurance agency, you know, national, 60,000 agents. So I had to look and see what this guy has, what that guy has. And what I used to value of somebody being a broker eventually and opening up an office wasn't that valuable. Versus I realized, no, that was sexy, not important. These are the three qualities that are important. What is it on the talent side? Like, when you saw Ben or Brett Cooper or Knowles, what are you looking for?

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, in the early days, what I was looking for was ideological alignment meets raw talent meets

• 42:08Speaker 00

  What I would consider to be like a strong ethical foundation.

• 42:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  So I knew with Ben that I had talent. I knew that I had ideological alignment. And I knew that if Ben, if the going got tough politically, Ben wouldn't say something that he didn't believe just to make money, which to me was incredibly important. I didn't want someone who would go grift, you know? I didn't want someone who would let the, let the audience wield them as opposed to trying to both represent and lead the audience. I call it lowercase r republicanism. You have to lead and you have to represent. There's tension there, but you have to, that's your job. Your job is to navigate that tension, not to become a populist who lets the mob, because the mob is often wrong. Populist answers to the mob, don't answer to the mob.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  But not an elitist who says the people are wrong and only the smartest guy in the room is right. Lowercase r republicanism says you have to, you have to live somewhere between those two things. You have to be mindful of both of those impulses and navigate them. So, you know, Andrew Clavain. I knew Andrew Clavain is never going to say one freaking word he doesn't believe. I'm not going to have a situation where he gets so too big for his britches or afraid of the audience or whatever it is, right? Michael, same kind of thing. Matt, same kind of thing. I think that as time went on, I also looked for things like, can they speak to a demographic that we have not been successful at speaking?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  You know, I took on more business considerations by that, by those later days. And in some cases, I made bad judgment calls because I, you know, you have, you always have these competing priorities, not just in business, but in your life, right? How do I be a good father? How do I be a good CEO? Just those two. You know, people call work-life balance, that's like a total, that's nonsense. But there is tension between those two roles and you, it's not a question of which one do you do well? You have an obligation to do both of them very well. You have the obligation to succeed in both of those areas. That requires constantly assessing how you've ordered your priorities. And so in business, it's the same. At the Daily Wire, the number one priority had to be the mission. We're an ideological operation.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  We exist for, for an ideological purpose.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  The math has to be a priority. If you go into negative cash flow, the gears stop spinning right away. So you've got to make money. You have to reach people, or none of this, or you'll be doing this for like self-congratulatory reasons, as opposed to actually making an impact and making a difference. At various times, you get misaligned. At various times, the biggest problem you have is that the company's not making enough money and you're going to run out of cash in 90 days. And so you hard pivot toward addressing that problem. But if you stay in a position where making money is the number one priority, then definitionally, all of your other priorities become subordinate to that one, which means the ideology, the mission, becomes subordinate to money, which means character becomes subordinate to money,

• 45:13Speaker 00

  which means honesty and integrity become subordinate to money. So you're constantly fighting that. And I think that, you know, in the case of some of, particularly, say, with Candace, I probably had misaligned my priorities a bit there. I thought she can speak to a whole range of people who we're not great at speaking to, women in particular. She's a much more aggressive fighter than any of the rest of us are. I mean, we're all fighters. Daily Wire is always fighting, but we sort of fought from a kind of intellectual. Candace, she'll knife you, you know? And I thought, we need that.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  That's a color that we need in the sort of tapestry. And I think that I probably didn't prioritize rightly whether or not I really believed that Candace would always say what she believes is true. Did I really believe that Candace would behave ethically? Yeah. She was famous. She was a huge opportunity. She had these... She represented opportunities in areas we didn't have and I kind of let myself make a decision from probably the wrong place.

• 46:27Patrick Bet-David?

  With her?

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, with Candace.

• 46:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  And of course, other decisions along the way, but specific to talent.

• 46:33Patrick Bet-David?

  No, that makes sense.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Specific to talent.

• 46:35Patrick Bet-David?

  That makes sense. So to close this topic up and move to the next one, so do have a couple of names as pillars, but you have to be good at building because building is probably the more profitable and stable strategy long-term of what to do. That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay. In regards to the movie that you did, what was the name of the movie that you did, the big one?

• 46:57Speaker 00

  The Pin Dragon Cycle.

• 46:58Patrick Bet-David?

  The Pin Dragon Cycle.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Were you going for, like, was that your strategy to say, you know what, screw it, I'm going to go for all the marbles because if we nail this, this could be our House of Cards. This could be our, you know, this could be our show that's going to bring us from whatever, 2 million subscribers to 10 million subscribers. It could be a household name. Was that kind of your strategy?

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah. You know, if you look at the history of the films that we did during my tenure at The Daily Wire, they get bigger and bigger as we go. You take bigger and bigger risks because you can't, you can't run the same play twice. You know, the first play was to acquire a movie that we didn't make, Dallas Sonya's Run Hide Fight. Written and directed by Kyle Rankin, it's a fabulous film. We're very lucky to get it and we got it because Dallas kind of got canceled in Hollywood after having made this film and it didn't have a home. And, you know, it was Ben who actually saw the opportunity. Ben had interacted with Dallas in the past and he spoke to Dallas and heard about the challenges Dallas was dealing with, with Run Hide Fight. And he called and said, hey, you need to talk to this Dallas guy.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  I think there's, you know, this could be a movie that we could pick up and it had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture. And then immediately after that, I tried to acquire another film and it didn't move the needle for us at all. Kind of same budget range, also an acquisition, a licensing deal. Didn't move the needle for us. So now we need to, now we have to actually go into production on something and we made an overall deal with Dallas and we produced Terror on the Prairie with Gina Carano. And it did very well for us.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  But I'd sort of learned by then, well, you've got to, you've got to continue to, I sort of learned this from Elon Musk. And it's that in, in a certain kind of companies, this isn't true for every company. Like, you couldn't do this if you had an accounting firm. But in certain kinds of companies, part of what you're selling to the audience is a vision for what the future can be. The Daily Wire was saying to our audience, there is a future where conservatives aren't losing. There's a, there's a future where we have political power and cultural power. And, you know, if you look at Jeremy's Razors and some of the things we did in consumer goods, where we're also represented in, in the consumer goods space, where every single company isn't against you all the time.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  And as you sell that vision to the audience, the vision has to be ahead of where you are because it has to inspire. Elon's great at this. Elon's, you know, I'm sure you've got a deposit in on a roadster or whatever, the Tesla roadster. I've got a deposit on you. When are we going to get it? I don't know. Do you think he's going to give it to you? Yeah. Because that's the other thing you have to do. You have to deliver on those promises. So you're always making a promise that's a little further ahead than where you are. And you can keep that going as long as you come up, come along behind it and deliver. So we sold the Gina Carano movie before we made it. And then we made it. And it was good. We sold the kids platform, Benki, before we made it. And then we, and then we released it.

• 50:01Patrick Bet-David?

  And what's the model? If you want us to do this, come help us support this? Or what, what is the sequence?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Well, we never use support because we didn't think of it as, we don't want people to think of it as donations. It's a for-profit business. But it is like, come alongside us and help us build the future. Yeah. Your, your subscription gets you everything that we are now, but your subscription's also going to get you the things that we will be as a result of your subscription.

• 50:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  And so same with Pendragon. We told the audience about Pendragon, you know, when we first got, acquired the rights. We took them along on the journey with us as we made it. And yeah, it was, it was. It was bigger than anything we had ever made. It's bigger than anything any conservative media company has made in my lifetime.

• 50:40Patrick Bet-David?

  How successful was it?

• 50:41Speaker 00

  I was gone when they, I'd been gone for a year when they released it.

• 50:44Patrick Bet-David?

  It's post you.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Were you in it at all? Just so you know, I know nothing about the story. Are you in the movie or are you not in the movie?

• 50:51Speaker 00

  I directed two of the episodes and I was what you call the showrunner.

• 50:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  So I oversaw the writing room, I oversaw the set. You know, I didn't oversee the set from the point of view of like Dallas Sonya who's running the crew. But I was the, I was the lead creative on set. So I was in Eastern Europe for, I was in, not Eastern, I was in Hungary and Italy and Romania for six months. And substantially made the show, you know, with the team, made the show. But the show was released a year after I left.

• 51:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Do I think it was as successful as we had hoped it would be? No, I don't think it was successful the way that we hoped it would be. I think it was orphaned, in the same way so many other projects were orphaned. You know, when you, when the CEO and founder of the company, who was also the creator and showrunner of the project, leaves, of course, that project's going to be orphaned to a large degree. The company changed even the strategy that it was pursuing. But Pendragon made perfect sense as the next step in the strategy that we had been running for the last five years. It was the next big step. We had released content that had made the kind of money that Pendragon would have had to have made to pay for itself. So it's not as though we got so far ahead of ourselves that we would have to achieve a success unlike any other, just to break even.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  No, we would have to replicate past successes in order to break even on the show. But it was certainly a bigger bet than any that we had taken up until that time.

• 52:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think that brought unnecessary pressure on the company or no? With you being gone six months, Romania, all of that, where you're not doing the day-to-day operation at the headquarters? When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscan era. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary. Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.

• 53:03Speaker 05

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• 53:32Speaker 06

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• 54:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 54:31Speaker 07

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• 55:04Speaker 00

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• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:23Patrick Bet-David?

  What would you have done differently?

• 55:25Speaker 00

  I don't know, you know, a lot of, there are, certainly there were mistakes there.

• 55:29Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm not even talking about mistakes. To me, it's more about...

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Well, it's learning mistakes.

• 55:33Patrick Bet-David?

  No, what I'm, what I'm, I'm not trying to, that's not where I'm going. What I'm trying to find that is purely strategically, like, was it better for you to be at the home office, operating and hiring somebody else to run that show? That's what I mean.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  What I would have done differently is I would have taken my executive team with me. It's not that I would have stayed behind. Because both things are true. The company was engaged in the largest, most consequential project it had ever been engaged in. It needed all of our best talent to shepherd it. And we still had a company to run and it needed me to be there shepherding it. So what's the answer to that? Well, the answer to that is, I should have, we should have treated it as though, not that I went to Hungary with Dallas Sonnier to make a movie, but the Daily Wire went to Hungary to engage in the next huge project that we were going to engage to. And you might say, well, that's not scalable over time. But I'm not talking about over time. I'm talking about the first time.

• 56:30Patrick Bet-David?

  I have a very different opinion. To me, it was, you were, you were trying to hit a grand slam and if it goes, you're, you're a Reed Hastings Jr., you're a, you know, you guys could have gone from two to 20 million. If you're at 20 million, now everybody's coming to you saying, hey, what are we doing to 50 million dollar movie, the 100 million dollar movie? And I think you have to take a risk like that to see if it's gonna land or not. I'm telling you, I remember, we're about to go to Tuscany, Italy. I'm taking my 20 best guys. I'm renting this, you know, 17-bedroom property on the top of the hills and 20 guys, 10 couples. Let's go live on a higher chef. We're gonna have a good time. And before going there, a guy named Carl DeMoss and one other guy, they tell me, go watch House of Cards.

• 57:15Patrick Bet-David?

  I said, House of Cards? Yeah, go watch House of Cards. On what? On Netflix. What's Netflix? I literally wasn't on Netflix. So I go download Netflix. And I'm like, I can't just watch one episode. I stayed up all night watching every one of the episodes in season one. And then I get on the flight in the morning. I have no sleep. What did House of Cards do to Netflix? Take House of Cards out? House of Cards took Netflix?

• 57:37Speaker 00

  House of Cards is probably the most successful show of all time. Because if you say, "How much money did House of Cards made?"

• 57:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Two hundred billion.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Billions.

• 57:45Patrick Bet-David?

  That's right.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  It made two hundred billion.

• 57:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. So that kicked it off. So, you know, from an operator to an operator, I respect that you have the balls to take that kind of a risk. It's not easy to do. You gotta do it. But also, if it doesn't hit, you gotta take the, you know, heat with it as well, and that's kind of how this thing works. You're either gonna go, or you're not gonna go. Today, everybody's talking about SpaceX, the biggest, you know, he's a trillionaire now. Forty-four hundred people are millionaires, you know. Thirty-three, thirty-three people that are non-executives, non-directors, non-VPs, non-managers, their stock today is worth two to four hundred million dollars. Think about that, right? Two to four hundred million dollars.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:20Patrick Bet-David?

  These are not leaders. These are not people that you know, right? One guy was like, you know, just a regular job that they had. But go back and look at the first three Falcon, you know, the failures that they had, back to back to back. And so does the business model become? So if I'm going and doing a fifty million dollar project, let's just say, three projects, I'm doing fifty million. Do I have to have on the back end two hundred million dollars ready? So if two of them fail, I need the next one, and the next one, and the next one? So how much of this is fundraising? Because you gotta have the, you need a lot of money.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  You need a lot of money. You know, The Daily Wire grew completely out of cash flow for a decade. We took on four point seven million dollars of investment the day we started. And we grew to two hundred million dollar plus revenue engine over the course of a decade, completely out of cash. Now, by the time we got to Pendragon, we knew that if we were gonna make these larger entertainment plays, that's not gonna continue to work. Because the business model up until that point was most of our content, not all, most of our content, we made it.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Put it through post-production, released it, and started monetizing it in the same day.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Well, you can't do that with a movie. You know, a movie is a multi, in some cases, in the case of Pendragon, it's a multi-year project. In every case, it's a year-long project or an 18-month-long project. So your capital's getting tied up for a lot longer. Now, the subscriptions can bring you in a lot of revenue really fast once you release it, but you've tied up that capital. So we'd never really been in a business before where we were tying up capital. And that's part of what was going on in the last couple of years at The Daily Wire, was thinking differently about the structure of the business to make it possible to bring on capital in ways that we had never sought to bring on capital before. And one of the advantages of never having brought on capital in all these years is that we had freedom of action, freedom of decision. We were able to be nimble, we were able to move very, very quickly.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  One of the benefits of being able to bring on capital is the founders can get a little liquidity, and you can make things that tie up capital. You know, you can make Pendragon, you can make whatever was going to come after Pendragon. I know The Daily Wire's made at least two movies since I left. They're not out yet, but it's not as though they've pivoted out of entertainment. They've pivoted away from my sort of strategy around some of that, but they haven't pivoted out of entertainment. And all of that requires thinking differently about capital, which requires changing how some governance works and requires changing how some structure works. That's a natural consequence of some of those changes.

• 1:00:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, very interesting. You know, it'd be interesting to see who else comes in, does it how, especially with now with AI. Are we going to start seeing guys making cartoons, takes off, subscribership on the conservative side? I don't know. But, you know, to me, I do think the model of being decentralized, of smaller creators not needing to be part of a big company,

• 1:01:14Patrick Bet-David?

  may disrupt the one big gigantic conservative company we built. Maybe I'm wrong, we'll see what happens there.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Can I push back on that for?

• 1:01:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Do so, I'd love to, yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Because I don't think you're wrong. Obviously, we live in the moment of the independent content creator. My argument is that's just a moment like every other moment.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  But look what you do here. This isn't an independent content creator operation. This is a business. I mean, you've built a massive business around your brand, extending out from the business that you had already been very successful with before you started this. But ultimately, Patrick Bet-David is the... You're not Joe Rogan, making a show with one guy at your house that happens to be the biggest show in the world. You're still, right now, sit here as a businessman who has ambition way beyond the content that you create every day. And a lot of the guys who move into this space have those kinds of aspirations. But you and I both know how hard it is to do what you do. We both know how hard it is to actually build and scale, how much risk you actually have

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  to be willing to take, how many losses, how many mistakes and failures and losses you have to make and then recover from. Even just the emotional ability to recover from major losses. You know, there are people who are way better than you and me, who didn't succeed because they couldn't overcome just the emotional reality of the losses that they had to take. And you and I are kind of stupid. We slam our finger in the drawer and we go, "Well, I'm going to learn not to put my finger in the drawer." And then, three days later, you slammed a whole different finger in a whole different drawer, you know? And so, I do think that we live in the moment of the independent content creator. But in the end, business is hard.

• 1:02:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Let me ask you a crazy question. Okay, so let me flip it on you, complete opposite side. Say I go raise a few billion honors, okay? Is it worth I buy Daily Wire, Blaze, five of them and bring it all together? Is that worth it?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Certainly, I think that there's an opportunity for someone to roll up some of the online right and create a sort of digital supercompany on the right. You know, the most likely entity to do it is Fox.

• 1:03:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Right. Why do I say they're the most likely? In some ways, they're the least likely. They don't understand the online space yet.

• 1:03:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  You see them make moves in it, they don't make them very well.

• 1:03:27Patrick Bet-David?

  They just signed 10 guys that they did, but yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  But they don't really know what to do yet.

• 1:03:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  If they bought the Daily Wire, they'd know a lot more what to do. If they bought the Blaze, they'd know it, because we're digital-first companies. We've existed in this space. But I still say Fox is the most likely to do it because they've got billions of dollars of them.

• 1:03:42Patrick Bet-David?

  The market needs competition, though. To me, to me, it's...

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  But the competition often comes from the little guy.

• 1:03:50Patrick Bet-David?

  No, but that's what I'm saying. What I'm saying to you is, it's, you know, if a market like, I remember we were having a conversation, you know, a few years ago. Hey, what if we started a media company? I'm talking to a bunch of these guys. We're having a meeting after meeting after meeting every other week at my house. Vivek's there, a couple other people, are big names. These are very big names that we're having a conversation with. And this is pre the Israel, you know, it's kind of Israel, October 7th's happened, but it's not yet like at this level where everybody's openly, there's massive division Republican. That hasn't happened yet. So we're in this meeting and then a guy comes up to us and they say, hey, we're a 22 billionaire fund, big company, and we want to know if you're interested in being a CEO.

• 1:04:33Patrick Bet-David?

  If we were to go do a roll up and we buy boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, would you have any interest? Interesting. What would it look like? Well, it would look like this, this, this. I had to sit there. I'm like, okay, so why would Ben continue? Why would this person continue? Why would that person continue? You know, what would be there? So then would we do a 50/50 and put the backend equity on it? So we're all flying to go build a 400 billionaire company. So the real exit's gonna be, hey, guys, we fricking 50x and collectively, let's go, even though we disagree, let's show the world that conservatives can unite and let's go give a message. I flirted with the idea of what that would look like because, you know, it was, it was interesting.

• 1:05:16Patrick Bet-David?

  But, uh, but I, I think the opposite side may also happen. Fox at any point can go knock on anyone's door and buy up anybody. Fox has done this with Wall Street Journal, with New York Post, with God knows how many of them. There's so many companies that people don't even know Fox owns. That the only reason you don't know is because it's not public. They own a lot of, News Corp is like, it's, it's a massive company out there. Okay, so let's, let's, let's go to the conservative side. So on the conservative Republican side.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  Can I say one crazy thing?

• 1:05:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Please.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  I've never gotten to tell this story and I love it so much.

• 1:05:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Go for it.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Ben and I had a meeting with Lachlan Murdoch, early, not too early. It was probably 2019 or 2020 even. So we were, The Daily Wire was a thing.

• 1:05:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Pre-COVID.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  Must have been pre-COVID.

• 1:05:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Time becomes a little flat to me, but I'm almost certain we still lived in LA, which would mean pre-COVID.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  And we were in Lachlan's office, having a great conversation with him. He has a large office. And so, we were sitting on this sofa. And then, there's a kind of unusually large space, and then a desk. And he's at the desk. And there's a door that's sort of in the center of the room. And we're talking, and we're having a really nice conversation. It wasn't about acquisitions, it wasn't about anything like that. It was more like a meet and greet talent kind of meeting, right? And this little old man comes in that door, in the middle of the room, to see Lachlan. And because of the way the room's oriented, he doesn't even see us. He kind of comes in at this angle to us. And he says, "When are we gonna have lunch? What are you thinking about lunch?"

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  And Lachlan says, "Dad, I want you to meet Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing." And this little old man, who's wearing little old man jeans, and little old man white tennis shoes, and literally shuffling, kind of moving around like this, turns, sees us, realizes he's not alone. And it was exactly like the moment in Richard Donner's Superman, 1978, when Clark decides he's gonna tell Lois who he is, and she turns around to go find her purse or something. And he takes off the Clark Kent glasses, and his shoulders come back, and he becomes three inches taller. And he is Superman. Rupert Murdoch turns around, realizes he isn't alone, sees us, his shoulders come back, he

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  gets at least three inches taller, his eyes harden, he reaches out and gives you the most masculine handshake you've ever had in your life. And he was Superman again. He was the guy who's made almost $100 billion in his life by, basically, force of his own tenacity and his own will. And it was such an amazing thing to see it happen in real life. Like, he is old, and he is diminished.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  But you know what's still in there? The freaking guy who could do all of that.

• 1:08:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you watch his documentary?

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Pretty amazing. I haven't gotten to watch it, no.

• 1:08:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, so you gotta watch it because uh it it so the documentary, this is you're gonna flip out. You'll you'll watch it, you'll enjoy it.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  I will.

• 1:08:11Patrick Bet-David?

  It's based on the show's succession. So the family watches, the family watches the show's succession, it's like, guys, I think this is about us. We gotta get our shit together and then the documentary is based on them reacting to the show. It's it's my it's un- this is it, the dynasty, the Murdochs. It's truly worth watching because all the family, all the kids, everybody's involved. And the history of it, you know, it's it's it's a it's a great uh. So again, you watch Rupert in his 30s and his 40s and his 50s. It's a very, a guy like you won't be able to stop watching the whole thing. It's fascinating. But what a great story of of having that. So was that when you guys were almost at second base?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  No, no, no.

• 1:08:51Patrick Bet-David?

  That wasn't a case.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  We weren't even at first base.

• 1:08:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, okay, I got it. You haven't filtered up yet, you haven't done anything yet, that hasn't happened yet.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 1:08:57Patrick Bet-David?

  All right, so let's talk about the current Republican conservative side, okay?

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Were were Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro ever friends?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:09:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Or so they've always had a feud?

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  No, but they just weren't friends. You know, Tucker um.

• 1:09:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Why though?

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  Why were they not friends?

• 1:09:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah. Purely competitive?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  No, Tucker came to uh LA and appeared on Ben's show. 2018, 2019, 20 2018, I believe. And first, he was, you know, Tucker's very affable. He's he's sort of generous with his attention and with his time. He was sort of flabbergasted because this was all a lot newer back then, you know, the uh. So he hadn't really seen how small the footprint can be. He was coming out of, he was still at Fox. I mean, he had one of the biggest shows at the time, already one of the biggest shows on Fox at the time. Went on to be the biggest. So I think that he was sort of inspired, maybe too strong a word, but he was like, oh, this is possible.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  It really, you could tell he was really sort of blown away by it. And he was generous and attentive and and kind to us. But he sat in, he sat in my office and said something to me and then he went on Ben's show and said the same, some version of the same thing, which was essentially that he would be willing to lie for power.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  And it, it really shocked me. It was-

• 1:10:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you say lie for power?

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Patrick Bet-David?

  But he's joking.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:10:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Well Tucker jokes a lot.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  This was not a joke. It was not a joke. He said, you know, if I had the opportunity to outlaw autonomous- if I were the President of the United States, I would use an executive order and I would outlaw autonomous vehicles. Why? Because self-driving trucks will put truck drivers out of work. Truck driving is the number one employer in 50 out of 50 states in this country. I won't allow that kind of social disruption to happen. So 100% not on my watch gonna let that kind of social disruption happen. I would use government to, to stop autonomous vehicles. Now this, again, you've got to go back, I'm sure you've got a Tesla, I've got a Tesla, they drive us now. They didn't drive us back then. This was like looking ahead.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  And I said, but Tucker, the, on what basis would you do such a thing? You know, the President doesn't just have fiat power, he can't just do whatever he wants. And he said, oh, safety. Easy, safety. I said, yeah, but kind of the whole thing about autonomous vehicles is that if Elon cracks it, if we actually ever get to a place where the car can drive you, it will be a much safer driver than you are. And he said, well, you didn't ask me what was true, you asked me how, what, on what I would base my authority to outlaw it. And man, it blew my ears back. And then he went on Ben's show and, and basically some version of the same conversation plays out. And you can go find it, the episode still exists. And it, it deeply concerned me and Ben about Tucker.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  Not because he would lie for power. Anybody might lie for power. Anybody might lie for money. Anybody might lie for sex. These are things that human beings do because of the fallen nature of man, the frailty of man. That doesn't recommend them. You, you might cheat on your wife, you don't think you should cheat on your wife. I might say, do you think you would ever cheat on your wife? And your answer might be, well, listen, all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. But I do everything in my power. I don't put myself in compromising situations. I don't drink around women, or maybe even around men. I don't stay out late. You know, I understand the sanctity of marriage. I-

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout, or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger: Fresh for Everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details. Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side.

• 1:13:50Speaker 06

  Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Starting a business is exciting. Getting ready for clients takes work. With Base44, describe what your business needs in your own words, and build the website and software behind it. Give people a way to book, buy, sign up, or ask for more. Database login, backend, and hosting are included, so you can get to market faster and keep building as your business grows. Go to base44.com.

• 1:14:34Speaker 07

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• 1:14:48Patrick Bet-David?

  So discounts, restrictions apply. That's the interview?

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  It must be, yeah.

• 1:14:52Patrick Bet-David?

  What year is it? Eighteen, nineteen? Yeah, you're right.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Exactly that time.

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  He said, you'd say, I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I might, I might fail.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  But what Tucker was saying wasn't, I can imagine lying for power in the right circumstance. He's just saying, no, to effectuate my policy objectives, I would just say it was safety, even though it isn't safety. And it really turned me off to Tucker and it really turned Ben off to Tucker. I told people even as early as, well, the week of this interview, November twenty eighteen. I said Tucker Carlson's the most dangerous person in American politics. Like, he has the fastest growing show. He has one of the largest and what went on to be the largest audience on the largest network. And, and the guy is just willing to lie to effectuate his policy and that deeply concerns me. Now, there was a thawing. So, so I was very Tucker skeptical after that. I think Ben was Tucker skeptical after that.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  There was a thawing because there was a period of time while Tucker was at Fox when he was incredibly generous with us. He was particularly generous with Matt Walsh. You know, there were times where Fox as a network had started to treat Daily Wire like competition. They weren't letting our hosts come on. And Tucker would just override them. He would have our guys on even when we were being told by-

• 1:16:07Patrick Bet-David?

  What year is this?

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  This is probably twenty-one.

• 1:16:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, so he's like having you guys on regularly?

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say regularly. Maybe Matt was on regularly, but he would, he would, he would buck against Fox saying we couldn't be on and he would have our guys on.

• 1:16:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Including Ben?

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  Including Ben, to a lesser degree than Michael, to a lesser degree than Matt. Even me, I went on his show to talk about the razor company and was grateful for the opportunity.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  And I started during that time to think maybe I'd been wrong in my assessment of Tucker. That I judged him too harshly. We all, you know, we talk for a living, we all say some dumb crap. And I think what he said was kind of rotten, but maybe it was just a, you know- He had a little vinegar in him that day and he said something rotten. Now, I've come to believe that my assessment was right. I mean, I've come to believe from his behavior more recently that Tucker is a mal actor, but I suspect, I can't speak for Ben, but I suspect that his kind of journey and his relationship with Tucker was similar to mine, that he saw that first interaction with Tucker kind of concerned both of us. We sort of viewed that maybe we'd been wrong about Tucker as he was, because he isn't,

• 1:17:13Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, you know him far better than I. He's very affable, very generous. So we started to perceive that maybe we had been wrong. But there was a day in 2024. It was, I know, I can tell you the day. It was for January 2024. I took my entire, I had just come back from Europe. I'd only been back in the country for a week. And I took my executives to

• 1:17:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Maine?

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  No. I took my executives to the Four Seasons for an offsite, to sort of

• 1:17:43Patrick Bet-David?

  National?

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  Bring me, yeah, bring me up to speed. Where are we as a company? Because I've been on the sleeve making Pendragon. And I told them at that meeting, within 90 days, Tucker Carlson is going to say America was the bad guy in World War II. And every single one of the executives in my company looked at me like I was crazy. I said, you're out of your mind. Why do you think this? I said, because I've just been listening to him. The things that he is currently saying only trend in one direction. They only trend in the direction of saying America was the villain of World War II. He has to erase America's virtue in the 20th century in order to continue being ideologically consistent on this path that he's on now. And sure enough, within 90 or 100 days, he said his first, you know, no country that used an atomic bomb on civilians, per se, you know, you're per se not the good

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  guys, or whatever that first comment was, you know. And then subsequently, of course, has taken the journey that he's taken. I look back in time and think that I was kind of like the voice crying in the wilderness about Tucker back in 2018, but certainly, certainly was very clear to me by the end of 2023 what direction Tucker was going to break. And within a few months, he did break, which I count as one of the great I count as a greater loss for the conservative movement than Candace. Because I think Tucker is trying to effectuate a political program in the country. I don't think Candace cares one way or another about the politics of the country. Candace wants to be famous and rich. I think Tucker has a vision for the country, I just think it's a very, very bad one.

• 1:19:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Such as presidential vision, like running?

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  I don't know that he'll run for president, maybe he will, maybe he won't. But I think that he believes that the future of the country is to create a new political majority that's largely premised on left-wing economic populism, socialism, and largely premised on right-wing social populism, you know, opposition to globo homo, as he might use the term. It's not a fundamentally conservative project. It's very left-wing, both in its epistemology and in its economics. But it's very right-wing in the sense that he opposes abortion, he opposes gay marriage, he opposes, you know, he believes in the family. In that way, it's sort of like a European, mid-20th-century European, right-wing socialist

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  movement. And I think that, I think that's become a very pronounced political program for Tucker. And not only for Tucker, for some others, Steve Bannon, probably Nick Fuentes. Not that I think they're part of one movement, but I think that they're all trending in the direction of that political project. Candace doesn't give a crap about any of that, you know, so whatever Candace is.

• 1:20:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Is he the, is he the head of the, is he the top? Because you notice whoever gets close to Tucker, they flip, right? And they kind of like Megyn Kelly, spend a lot of time, boom. So Megyn is friends with Tucker, you've got Candace, got close. Do you think that Tucker's the head, or is somebody above Tucker that's influencing Tucker?

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that is a very complicated question. First, I don't think Candace became Candace because she spent time with Tucker.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  Candace chased clicks and money into her antisemitism. When Candace first started flirting with antisemitism, she wasn't an antisemite. She was an opportunist. Now, I think she's an antisemite today because when you try to wield evil, evil wields you. I think Candace made a very cynical narcissistic determination that she could wield this sort of, it was popular, she used to say, the YouTube boys. That's how she referred to like the Groypur type movement. And she would say, "I'm not going to side against the YouTube boys." And that's where she started to dabble in some of this antisemitic rhetoric. But man, when you cynically wield evil, you don't come out ahead. Evil wields you.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  So Candace now engages in like full bore antisemitism. When Candace says things like she hopes that Russia and Iran sort of rid us of the state of Israel, she didn't say the exact words, "the state of Israel," but that's the implication. You're off the reservation. She's still doing it for clicks and money, though. That's what motivates Candace. Meghan, I can't speak to why Meghan's made the change. Certainly, her proximity to Tucker influenced that. I think that Meghan obviously puts a high premium on friendship. I think that she feels that some of her friends in the movement mistreated her for not doing what they wanted her to in regard to Tucker and Candace.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  And I think during that same time, I suspect Tucker was very generous with her. And I wouldn't say that she sold her, I'm certainly not saying that she sold her vote for a little friendship. But we are human creatures, and I suspect that feeling mistreated by one group of people and feeling well-treated by another group of people has some impact on how you perceive issues.

• 1:22:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Meghan also got upset when she was interviewing Ben. And then Ben went up on stage, if I'm not mistaken, at TPUSA and blasted Meghan. Something like, you can correct me on this if I'm off with some of the dates. Yeah, something like that happened. So then Meghan's like, "What are you doing?" And then she said, "F you." And I think from there was kind of a...

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that timeline is right. Were there other things happening? Well, sure, I'm sure she was like everyone reacting to Charlie's death and...

• 1:23:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Because you know, sometimes we're kind of like, "Screw you. I'm gonna do this in spite of you." And then she goes more on the other side versus maybe a week before she was like in the middle.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. I don't know that that's the entirety of the story with Meghan, but I do suspect that that's a big part of the story with Meghan. Is there somebody above Tucker? So is Tucker very influential? Of course he's very influential, both professionally and personally. Is he the top? Well, no one's the top of evil ideologies. You know, the amount of foreign influence money that gets spent in this country right now, I suspect is one of the great, only we're just now beginning to understand stories of the first part of the 21st century, that the nature of social media, the nature of

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  anonymity on social media allows foreign governments to create the illusion of social proof. You know, if the first 20 people who respond to some post that you put up, I put up some post saying something nice about Ben, the first 20 posts call me a Jew and ask me about the USS Liberty, I don't even know if any of those 20 posts are from humans. Anonymity on the internet has made it impossible to know what's real and what isn't, but what I do know is that social proof is one of the most powerful forces that exists on the planet. If the first 20 comments are calling me a filthy Jew, it's funny, I interviewed someone yesterday who just assumed I was Jewish. I said, "On what basis would you have arrived at the idea that I'm Jewish?" And they said, "Well, just everybody on the internet says you're Jewish."

• 1:24:39Speaker 00

  Well, sure, but who is everybody on the internet? Half of its money being spent by China, half of its money being spent by Russia, the Iranians and the North Koreans spend a ton of money influencing Americans. Well, listen, the second half of the 20th century, the amount of things that Americans think today that were planted in our national conversation by the KGB is enormous.

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  The KGB laundered all kinds of their ideas into America because they understood that within the free speech system that exists in this country is an immune system weakness. You know, free speech brings a lot of robustness to a civilization, to a society. Free speech is great, but there is a weakness, and the weakness is that there's very little natural immunity against bad ideas. You know, if you, if you, the Soviets understood this well because in the First World War, the Germans smuggled, yeah, the Germans smuggled Lenin on a train into Russia because they understood this guy's got an idea and that idea can burn across Russia and weaken them fundamentally in a way that gives us advantages in the war.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  It was information warfare to unleash Lenin on Russia, and it worked. So that's part of the founding mythology of the Soviet Union. They understood you've got this open society where college professors can just say whatever they want to kids and they can't even be fired, where Hollywood can say things in movies and essentially no one cares as long as the movie's entertaining. We have Ronald Reagan essentially because of the SAG wars against literal Soviet, an attempted Soviet takeover essentially of Hollywood during the SAG wars, and Ronald Reagan opposed it and became the president of SAG and then became the governor of California and then became the president. So the idea of foreign governments exploiting free speech in America is nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity

• 1:26:33Speaker 00

  of social media, the addictivity of social media, and the anonymity of social media, and now 50% of the internet is bots. So it's, it's never been easy.

• 1:26:44Patrick Bet-David?

  You know what's crazy? You know, I just, you just made me think about something. You know who probably knows who's full of shit and not more than anybody else? Elon.

• 1:26:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Patrick Bet-David?

  You know why?

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  Because he can tell what's real and what's not.

• 1:26:57Patrick Bet-David?

  All he has to do is tell his guy, say, this guy's getting all these retweets and all these things. Can you check to see how many of the retweets are bots?

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Patrick Bet-David?

  I would, if I'm Elon, I would probably be running reports on the top 250 political influencers, left, right, center, whatever, far right, woke right, left, right, whatever you want to call it. Take all of them, 250, with a million plus followers, half a million plus followers. These are guys that have carrying weight. And then I would say, track to see how many of the retweet percentages bot to real. And then I would create a leader's bulletin from the highest being bots to the lowest being Real, percentage wise.

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Patrick Bet-David?

  And I would measure it with the likes, and then you know what else I would do? I would also measure to see what percentage of the retweets are from America versus other countries. And then based on that data, get...

• 1:27:49Patrick Bet-David?

  How likely do you think Yolanda's done something like this before? To kind of know where the country's at.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suspect he has a really good sense of it.

• 1:27:54Patrick Bet-David?

  I think he does.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  The problem is there's misaligned incentives. Because, why are the social media companies allowing all of these foreign influence operations to exist? Why do they allow bots to post on the platforms at all?

• 1:28:06Patrick Bet-David?

  No, that's a different question, though. That's profit. That's a different question. That's optics. That's, hey, you know, mine is bigger than yours. That's a different story.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  But that's part of what's being exploited.

• 1:28:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but to me, to me, if, if he were to...

• 1:28:20Speaker 00

  Guy's a trillionaire now, maybe he can afford to do it.

• 1:28:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, no, he can't afford to do it. But to me, I also think, I also think Twitter's gonna be, it won't even be in the top three most valuable companies that he owns. Because, you know, it's not like, you'd imagine like you got three stocks, and one of the stock you put so much attention to, but it's not the one that's making you wealthy. It's just kind of a lot of noise. And you have to call your stockbroker and go through your advisor. It'd be a very interesting exercise to do to see what happens. So, okay, so, so now, what, what, when you look at Ben and you look at Tucker, what, what do you think are the main issues? Go-to issues? Israel is one of them. What other issues, specific issues, differ between Ben and Tucker?

• 1:29:05Speaker 00

  Well, I don't really think Israel is like in the top three.

• 1:29:07Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think it is?

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  Israel is the divisive issue. Israel is the wedge issue. Israel is the emotional issue. Of course, Ben and Tucker don't agree about Israel. And Ben, very personally, as the most famous religious Jew maybe on the planet, objects to Tucker's characterization of Israel.

• 1:29:25Patrick Bet-David?

  He may be the most religious Jew on the planet.

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  The most famous religious Jew on the planet.

• 1:29:29Patrick Bet-David?

  You put him ahead of Adam Sandler? I mean, that's like, you know, you're...

• 1:29:31Speaker 00

  Adam Sandler's not an orthodox religious Jew. Or, yeah, Adam Sandler's a very famous Jew.

• 1:29:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm giving you a hard time. I'm giving you a hard time with this. I had to give a shout out to Adam Sandler, but...

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  I love Adam Sandler.

• 1:29:42Patrick Bet-David?

  But by the way, you ever watch the movies he does? It's always the Zohan. It's the Palestinian, you know? He always messes with people. It's phenomenal the way he does it.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

  I suspect Adam Sandler has really good politics.

• 1:29:53Patrick Bet-David?

  I do as well, but he can't touch it. I don't think he can touch it, no.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  But keep a wearing Sabbath observing kosher keeping Jews? Who's more famous than Ben in the world? So of course he cares about-

• 1:30:06Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't follow the Jewish leaders bulletin for fame. Let's just say it's Ben Shapiro.

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  Can you name another one? Can you name one other one?

• 1:30:12Patrick Bet-David?

  What I'm saying to you is fine, I'm with you. So let's just say he is.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so of course he cares about Israel. But Israel isn't even like... Tucker's a socialist.

• 1:30:23Patrick Bet-David?

  You think Tucker's a socialist?

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  Tucker says he's a socialist. Watch enough interviews with him and people will ask him and he'll say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of." They'll ask him, "Who do you think are the best people in Congress?" And he'll say, "Yeah, but you know, Thomas Massey." But then he'll also say, "Yeah, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders." Tucker is advancing a left-wing economic vision for the future of this country. Tucker, here's one that's... Here's a huge point of disagreement: America. Tucker doesn't believe that America is a force for good. Tucker thinks that what's good about America is that his parents are buried across the street from his house. He thinks that what's bad about America is literally every good thing America has ever done. He plays around with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. He plays around with the idea that demons gave us the bombs that allowed us to win the Second World War. He launders the idea by way of his guests that Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  That's no different than top link, than Antifa tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus. It's just rhetorically tearing down the statues on which this country is built, the narrative on which this country is built. If every bad thing that's ever been done to us was an inside job, he flirts with 9/11 being an inside job, the moon landing being an inside job, our greatest achievements were fake, the greatest attacks against us were fake, all the things that we did that were good were actually bad, that's not someone who loves America as it is. The America that Tucker believes in is a hypothetical America. It's America that doesn't exist. The America that exists fought the Second World War, defeated European fascists in Germany,

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  defeated Imperial Japan. The country as is landed men on the moon and returned them safely to earth. The country as it is has led the economic order that has lifted a billion people out of poverty in this world. The country as it is is the country that was attacked on 9/11 by Al Qaeda and jihadist Islam out of the Middle East. The country, that is the actual America. So- You know, this sort of blood and soil, America is just the people and the government has always been evil. Well, that's not fair. It's a government of the people. The idea that America is great, but the corporations are evil. Well, that's not fair. Corporations

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  are assembled bodies of people working toward common interest. So you can't make an argument that America is great, except for all the things that are America, which is essentially what Tucker is doing. So, yeah, I think what Ben and Tucker Carlson disagree about the most, they disagree about America the most. And, yeah, they also disagree about Israel. But Israel is just, Israel is just a tool for the dissident right to try to to break the Republican Party's relationship with, or evangelical Christians' relationship with the Republican Party, so they can use the Republican Party to effectuate this new political order that they want, which is largely left-wing economics and largely right-wing

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  social policy. That's all Israel is, as an American political issue on the right. That's all that Israel is. And, yeah, Ben disagrees with Tucker about that issue pretty profoundly.

• 1:33:25Speaker 05

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• 1:35:27Patrick Bet-David?

  I'm wondering how much of an impact this is going to have going forward, midterms, 2028. Will it have any impact? Will it not have any impact? You know, Charlie was the guy that was a unifier. Everybody else, they're fairly direct competitors. Like, when I think about Daily Wire, Tucker, you know, I don't know where Beck plays a role. Beck has got a lot of credibility. There's some people that really trust the way Beck breaks things down. He's a very good teacher. I like him a lot.

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:35:54Patrick Bet-David?

  And you got, you got a lot of other names out there. You know, we don't have Prager today. Peterson's kind of out of it today. You know, there's, Crowder's got his own name because Crowder's also got an audience. You got the Nick side, the Young, the, uh, the streamer side, Fuentes side that you're dealing with. Has it always been like this or is this the most fractured it's been going into 2028?

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  It's been fractured. It's never in my lifetime been like this.

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  And there's never been a force operating at scale on the American right in my lifetime that says anti-American and anti-American conservatism as this dissident right-wing movement that we're dealing with right now. If you look back to the You know, John Birch Society days and all of that. That's before my time. I'm aware that it existed, of course. I know the history of it a bit. But in my lifetime, it's never been like this. Is it going to bear ill fruit in the midterms? Of course. I mean, Nick Wint as is saying that he won't vote for Republicans in the midterms. Candace Owens is saying she won't vote for Republicans in the midterms.

• 1:37:04Speaker 00

  Tucker is essentially at war with the Trump administration now by name. Like, he's stopped even paying lip service to the idea that he supports Trump. He's making some of the worst accusations about the president that anyone out there is making. These guys have huge audiences. Tucker has a huge audience. Candace has an even bigger audience. Nick has a large audience, probably not as large as people assume it is, and not necessarily an audience that's likely to vote in the primaries, but an ascending audience, an audience that every day becomes more politically powerful. So, yeah, if all of them are working against Republican prospects in 2026, that's going

• 1:37:46Speaker 00

  to be a huge hurdle to try to overcome. But here's the thing about politics. Sometimes you have to lose in politics in order to win. Now, you only win by winning. Losing is not a good business model. Losing comes with enormous, very real consequences. I'm not one who would say, "We need to lose the midterms, and we need to lose the presidential so that we will root out all these bad actors on the right and so that we..." No, no, no. The stakes are too high. You have to try to win. But while you're trying to win, you are sometimes going to lose. And it is just a fact of the cycle of politics that sometimes losing does have a purifying effect on political movement.

• 1:38:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So, go to the White House and... Trump, Vance, Rubio.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Right? Tucker's son works for Vance.

• 1:38:33Speaker 00

  Did.

• 1:38:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Did. Tulsi, Vance, and Kent had a friendship, had a relationship, right? Sometimes they'll say that's the group right there. Rubio is kinda like, "Look, guys, I don't even wanna run in 2020." He keeps avoiding it. "Look, I don't wanna run, I don't wanna run, I don't wanna run." You know he's gonna run, okay? And JD, I don't know, you know, we're gonna be thinking about, "Maybe I gotta spend time with the kids." Everyone's bullshitting, saying all this stuff. They have to run. There's no way these guys are not running.

• 1:38:56Speaker 00

  You gotta run.

• 1:38:57Patrick Bet-David?

  You gotta run.

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  You reach for the ring.

• 1:38:59Patrick Bet-David?

  So, let me ask you, you know, is it fair to say that you and Ben are 90% on the same page politically? Ideology-wise?

• 1:39:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's probably no one in public life with whom I agree more on politics than Ben.

• 1:39:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, perfect. So, let's leave it at that. So, i-if that's the case, would you trust a JD for 2028?

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Not today. I-I'm not saying that I can't support JD in 28. JD plays his politics incredibly close. JD is a very peculiar figure in our, in our politics in that we don't really know exactly what he thinks about some of the most important issues happening. Not just like abstract ideological issues, but what he actually thinks about real-world things that are happening in real-time right now. Now, what does JD really think about the president's actions in Iran? Just as one example. I don't know. I can make a case both ways. And I can point you to some evidence both ways.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  I think JD is, has played it too close and lost the trust of a lot of people who he will need in order to win. Not too late to recover that. You're gonna have to give people some visibility into what you think, and it's gonna have to be the things that they need it to be. I think that JD is too online. I think he's so perpetually on X that he sometimes misreads where the movement actually is, as so many people did, say, in the Massey primary. Now, it may very well be that online is a, is a...

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  Leading indicator. I don't take from Massey's loss that Twitter isn't real life. I more take from Massey's loss that Twitter isn't real life yet. And obviously, influence takes time to actually materialize. But I think the Vice President is too perpetually online. I think he's played his politics too close and lost people whom he needs. And I think his relationship with Tucker is a massive problem for him. I don't begrudge him not turning on a friend. Friendship's an incredibly important thing. I think that J D owes a lot of his political career to Tucker making early investments in him. I think he probably likes Tucker on a personal level. I think it's a good thing not to lightly turn on your friends. But Tucker's at war with your actual administration at this point.

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  If you're still advocating for Tucker instead of opposing, you know, instead of defending the administration against the charges of someone like Tucker, then you're sort of misreading the job, in my opinion. So, can J D win? I don't think J D can win today. But the election isn't today. Will J D be able to win by 2028? Yeah, he can. It's a lot of time in politics for course correction and showing us who he... It's going to come down to, J D has to show us who he really is, and who he really is has to be able to keep together the Trump coalition or build a different coalition that's capable of victory. Right now, I don't think he's unattracted to do that. I think Marco is far more likely to keep the Trump coalition together today.

• 1:41:59Patrick Bet-David?

  How will they attack Marco? So, think like, let's be the devil's advocate.

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:42:04Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you attack Marco?

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  What you're going to say of Marco is that he's a liberal. What you're going to say of Marco is that he's squishy. What you're going to say about Marco... And you're going to say that because you want to set J D up as the real, true voice of dissident right-wing conservatism. I don't think it sticks, though, because Rubio's tenure as Secretary of State has been so masculine, has been so strong. Also, some things just come down to like, you like, you know, just like, you own part of the most storied baseball franchise in the country. So you know that, at the end of the day, there's like a...

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  Man, I lost that thought. Baseball and Rubio was a pretty good thought. Anytime you're talking about a Cuban guy.

• 1:42:55Patrick Bet-David?

  No, you said liberal. You were going liberal. They're gonna say he's a liberal, then you're gonna say last 10 years, he had an incredible record. He did so well last 10 years.

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, as with baseball, the actual history of the sport can tell us a lot. In the last 120 years, no sitting vice president has sought his party's nomination to be president, well, to be the party's nominee for president, with the endorsement of the sitting president, and failed to gain it. But twice, we've had a sitting vice president seek his party's nomination without the endorsement of the sitting president of his own party, and failed to get it. So a lot of Marco's prospects are gonna come down to, does Trump endorse J.D. Vance to be his successor? If Trump sits it out, it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a true open primary.

• 1:43:42Patrick Bet-David?

  I just understood what you just said. So, God, so who were the ones that didn't endorse the VP?

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 1:43:47Patrick Bet-David?

  I know Pence is not one, so it's not like, because you, he went directly against him, but I'm wondering who that is? Who the other, what were the VPs?

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  We'd have to look this up.

• 1:43:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Reagan supported Bush, okay?

• 1:43:59Speaker 00

  It's earlier than you and I.

• 1:44:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so these are names that maybe is not our time for us to be thinking about. Okay. It'd be interesting.

• 1:44:08Speaker 00

  And who remembers the VPs that didn't become president?

• 1:44:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Nobody does. Nobody does. You know, Hunter Biden, the others, they say, I'll be the VP, you be the president. VP's a more relaxed job, you have more fun as a VP. What do you, what do you think this Epstein story is gonna do? This book is coming out called The Regime Change, where, you know, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, you know, wrote that story is going viral inside the White House freakout over Epstein files and, you know, a conversation between Susie Wiles and Bongino's in here, where it's like, hey, why are you leaking information to the news? And Bongino's like, what are you talking about? I would bet $100,000, let's go get the reporter online right now to say that I did this. I didn't do this. And then they talk about a conversation that happened with Charlie Kirk and the president. The president says, what the hell is going on? What are you guys doing?

• 1:44:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Just leave this one alone. And then today, Turning Point USA responded. Say they remember that call. It was a 30 minute to a 60 minute call. And Charlie came and he seemed like he was a little bit, you know, uncomfortable, but he says, we're good now, moving forward. I trust my friends at the White House on the way they're going to handle Epstein. I will no longer be talking about Epstein. So they wrote this, and a lot of this stuff is like, no one on the Republican side has refuted it. No one's come out and say, well, you don't understand, this is full of shit, this is this, this is that. So how do you think this role of Epstein is going to play?

• 1:45:27Speaker 00

  You know, if you talk to college aged Americans, Epstein's one of the biggest issues for them. You know, if you talk to the dissident right, they use this term, the Epstein pedophile class. Massey uses the term, the Epstein pedophile class, as a way of sort of impugning the character of everyone in leadership of the country, and in particular, in a way of impugning, I think, the Jews, which is part of all the Epstein conspiracies. So I can't say that it doesn't have political legs. This story doesn't have political legs. I think it does. But I don't take from the story of the White House being in a kind of crisis management

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  situation, or kind of a panic about the story, to mean anything particular about the facts of the story. You know, politics isn't always about what happened, it's about how are people reacting to what they know. So the Haberman report, to me, listen, this could all be proven wrong, I don't know. I've never read the Epstein files, I've never met Jeffrey Epstein, you know, the story is, you know, I don't have any special insight into this story. But based on what we do know, I think it's not surprising that the White House was in crisis management about it, because major elements of the base and the influencer class

• 1:46:56Speaker 00

  were very incensed by the White House's handling of the Epstein files once they came into power. So that's a major political crisis for any president, no matter what's actually in the documents, that's a major political crisis.

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  My instinct about it, as someone who follows politics, is that there's not much there, there probably, with the Epstein story. That a little transparency would have gone a long way, because I don't actually think there is much of an Epstein story. I think that Epstein's a bad guy, full stop, should be obvious to anyone. But anyone who's famous, anyone who's been around famous people, anyone who's wealthy, anybody who's been around wealthy people, you encounter these characters like Epstein. And what they are is the guys who give you permission to be bad. Every guy who gets drafted into the NBA,

• 1:47:49Speaker 00

  you know, it's almost like in the 70s you had groupies for the rock stars. And if you watch like the movie Almost Famous, the great Cameron Crowe movie, you know, they're trading groupies in poker games, you know, like, this group of girls is with this band, now it's time for this band to go back home to their wives. So what happens to this group of girls? Oh, we traded them off to the Eagles for a case of beer, or whatever happens in the movie, you know. If you get drafted into the NBA, there's just a handful of these guys. And they make their living by kind of coming alongside you. They have a little bit of credibility, because they were friends with the last crop,

• 1:48:33Speaker 00

  and those guys are famous and successful now in your mind. So these guys come to you with some credibility, and they kind of can get you into the parties that you've never been invited to before. And they kind of can introduce you to the girls. You're, you know, you just got out of college, you're still nervous talking to the girls, you don't know yet that you're an NBA guy, and the girls are just gonna... And they kind of, "No, come here, buddy," you know. Eventually, they give you a little access to some drugs. And as you move up in fame, wealth, and power in the world, you kind of inherit the next crop of that group of guys. When I saw a bunch of my buddies in Hollywood start to become famous in our 20s...

• 1:49:11Speaker 00

  Some of these guys came around. And when I watched some of my friends get more famous, they kind of inherited the next level of those guys. You know, the first guys were guys who could get you into the B-list TV star parties. Then there's the group of guys who can get you into the A-list TV star parties. Then there's the guys who can get you into the B-list movie star parties. Then there's the guys who can get you to be able to play mafia with DiCaprio at the Sky Bar, or whatever's going on, right? And at every turn, you get introduced to that next level of the dark side of success by these kind of groupie-type people. And they always, they never seem to have real jobs.

• 1:49:51Patrick Bet-David?

  They're always there.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  But they're always there.

• 1:49:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Speaker 00

  And I kind of suspect that that's what Epstein was. Epstein was like the final boss of that hanger-on, celebrity-enabling group. He's the guy, when you get to be a head of state, or a hundred billionaire, he's the guy who, "I'm not going to get you to play mafia with DiCaprio. We're going to go to an island. We're going to fly on the private jets and go, you know, to whatever foreign country. Oh, the girls here, you know, they don't even get your phone number. You never have to worry about them calling your wife. You never have to worry about them getting pregnant. Oh, the drugs here are designed by some autistic guy in Silicon Valley and you don't even get a hangover." Whatever, right? I don't know, I'm not a hundred billionaire or head of state.

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  But I can only imagine that that, that kind of enabler exists at every other stage that I've ever witnessed. I think that's what Epstein was. Is he a criminal? Hundred percent. Is he a scumbag? Hundred percent. Does he deserve to be in jail? Yeah, and he was. That's where he died. Does his accomplice-

• 1:50:53Patrick Bet-David?

  There's a lot of weird things with Epstein.

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  Does his accomplice, Grisling Maxwell, deserve to be in prison? Obviously, I'm glad that she is in prison.

• 1:50:59Patrick Bet-David?

  But this is a very, very weird topic that makes a lot of people in the administration uncomfortable, and Pam Bondi- You know, this entire article, like I made it, I made a sheet of paper, I don't know if I have it here on the other side, is who in this article looks good, neutral, bad, horrible?

• 1:51:15Speaker 00

  Well, but of course, it makes the administration uncomfortable. Donald Trump is one of the people who is being enabled at various times by Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, one of the amazing things about the Epstein scandal is there's a Israeli prime minister who's implicated.

• 1:51:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Ehud Brack, yeah.

• 1:51:31Speaker 00

  There's a, a royal prince of the United Kingdom who's implicated. There's a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, who's implicated. There's a Republican president in Donald Trump who's implicated. There's people for whom we have huge conspiracies, hundred billionaires. Bill Gates is implicated. Now, what did any one of them do? I'm not making any allegation about what any one of these humans actually did with Epstein. But the fact that Epstein got to move in that class of people makes him ripe for the, of course, for the biggest conspiracies in the world. Who has access not just to an Israeli prime minister, but to presidents and a British royal and hundred billionaires and movie stars and, and, and, and, and?

• 1:52:12Speaker 00

  I mean, you're, that, that is an enormous political scandal for this White House, and they should have been more transparent about it.

• 1:52:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I, I wonder if this will be front and center in, I don't think it's going away. I think Iran kind of, uh, uh, hit the whole thing. Where people kind of got over Iran, got over Epstein, but it's back up again, and they timed it well. June 23rd, the book comes out. And it, it looks like it's going to be one of these hit pieces type of books that's going to create a lot of noise for a couple of months. Last but not least, before we wrap up, has nothing to do with any of the stuff we're talking about. Have you seen Obsession or Backrooms? Have you seen these two horror movies?

• 1:52:49Speaker 00

  I haven't seen either of these movies.

• 1:52:50Patrick Bet-David?

  You gotta go watch.

• 1:52:50Speaker 00

  Well, I am, 100%.

• 1:52:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, so my son is crazy about horror movies. Like, nobody in our family likes horror movies, except this guy. He sits and watches Exorcist by himself. He'll watch Nightmare on Elm Street by himself. He'll watch us. So we went and watched Obsession. We watched Obsession on Sunday. Was it Sunday, Humberto? What day was Sunday? And we watched Backrooms on Saturday, is what we watched. So Obsession, the guy took $750,000, turned into $150 million.

• 1:53:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Crazy. Backrooms takes ten million dollars and turns it into a hundred and fifty million dollars same. Mandalorian takes three hundred million dollars and turns it into two hundred and forty million dollars. This guy's name is, uh, uh, what is it? Caleb Barker or something like that? Curry Barker? I'm probably saying it wrong. TikTok comedian. Yeah, exactly. Is it Caleb Barker? Okay, Caleb Barker. And the other guy's name is something Parsons. Kane Parsons? Kane Parsons? So, do you think the disruption of Hollywood of independent YouTubers, TikTokers making movies is here?

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

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• 1:54:22Speaker 06

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• 1:55:34Speaker 00

  You know, I don't really know the Backroom story as well.

• 1:55:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Crazy.

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  I think that he had more Hollywood support for making his film, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:55:48Patrick Bet-David?

  He definitely more than Obsession.

• 1:55:49Speaker 00

  More than Obsession.

• 1:55:49Patrick Bet-David?

  He got 10 million bucks, yes.

• 1:55:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. What I do think is it's very encouraging to see people who are used to making vertical videos in short form be able to turn the camera to its proper orientation, to landscape orientation, and make actual art. You know, horror movies aren't always my thing, but in a way, horror movies are the definitive genre of film, because film is about creating emotion in an audience who knows that nothing that they're seeing is real. And horror movies, more than any other film, create an actual emotional reaction in real time, a heightened emotional state. So to make a successful horror film is actually quite challenging. We always think of it as like the lowest common denominator movie, but it's actually

• 1:56:34Speaker 00

  one of the most challenging films to get right. So for these guys to have done it and have done it at this level of success, huge, I couldn't be more excited about it. I'm gonna watch both of these films this week. It's encouraging, too, because I believe that the ubiquity of the internet is the most destructive, and the ubiquity of social media in particular, and particularly as it's become more... And listen, the biggest untold... The biggest untalked about story of 2026 is the changing algorithm. This is something that I've started talking about a lot in the last few weeks. The X algorithm is open source, so you can go look at it. The X algorithm isn't unique.

• 1:57:17Speaker 00

  They're doing what the industry does. So seeing X's algorithm gives you an insight into what all of the platforms are doing. And what the platforms are doing in 2026 that's distinct from what they've ever done before is that they're not taking into consideration whether or not you follow an account. So if you look at X's current algorithm, let's say you follow me and you don't follow Tom.

• 1:57:47Speaker 00

  Doesn't matter. If you engage more with Tom's content when it's in your feed, and engagement could just be slowing down the scroll, doesn't even mean clicking on it, then you're gonna start seeing all of his stuff. You're not gonna see my stuff. The algorithm is now being built to maximize the addictiveness of content. But think about what that means as a Christian. There's a battle in every man between the flesh and the spirit. The flesh is our baser instincts. The spirit requires formation. The spirit requires structure. The spirit requires governance. Up until today,

• 1:58:31Speaker 00

  your social media feed may have included good things and bad things, things that are edifying for your soul and things that are destructive for your soul. But you got to impact, the part of you that governs you got to have a say in what content you're fed. Today, that is not true anymore. Today, if you're scrolling the news and there's a girl in a bikini, almost every man, the Pope in Rome slows down on that bikini picture.

• 1:59:02Patrick Bet-David?

  You think the Pope in Rome slows down?

• 1:59:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, because all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. But you're not just your lizard brain. You're not just your meat. You're the part of you that governs against being ruled by your flesh. And you go, "Ah, no, no, I'm not gonna do that." And then you start curating your feed. You go, "Seeing too many bikini girls in my freaking feed, I'm gonna go through and make sure that I'm following Patrick Bet-David. I'm gonna go through and make sure I'm following Ben Shapiro. I'm gonna go through." And now the algorithm starts feeding you not all good stuff, but better and better stuff. Today, for the first time ever, the algorithm is only gonna serve you what you slowed down on, not what you chose to follow. You don't get a say in what you get fed.

• 1:59:48Speaker 00

  If you add to that anonymity, as we've discussed this whole time, if you add to that foreign influence, addictivity, man, I just think that the the damage that's being done, not just to kids, the damage that's being done to all of us by the ubiquity of social media right now is potentially civilization destroying. And the fact that these kids are starting in the worst place, pure engagement fodder, pure addictive clickbait. And they're moving their audience away from that to long-form narrative storytelling, which is how you edify the soul, how you grow people's perspectives, how you feed them better things over time. The fact that Gen Z is going to the movies

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  in greater numbers than millennials or Gen X or boomers. We were told that Gen Z, because of TikTok, would never go to a movie. They're going to the movies more than anyone. The fact that there's a movement away.

• 2:00:45Patrick Bet-David?

  By the way, May was a record-breaking month in movies attendance. AMC, AMC had record-breaking attendance coming in because of these guys that are making the movies. It was a...

• 2:00:54Speaker 00

  We should be so grateful and encouraged by this. It's one of the best things happening right now in the country.

• 2:00:58Patrick Bet-David?

  It's great. It's great. I did, I'm trying to see if with the intel you're trying to give, that every other tweet put a picture of a big booty to get more reaction on your Twitter. Was that what you were saying?

• 2:01:09Speaker 00

  On my Twitter? My Twitter is mostly Bible verses and pictures of cats, man.

• 2:01:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, my God. So, guys, do not slow down when the big booty shows up. It's his advice. Life-changing advice is what he's giving you. How can people find you? Where can people find you?

• 2:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the show, we launched the show 10 weeks ago. We're in all the places where shows are. The Jeremy Boreing Show on YouTube. We'll be launching a website in the next few weeks, doing amazing things with AI. There's so much opportunity in the world right now. There's so much is wrong. And it's easy when we get together to talk about the things that are wrong. But the amount of opportunity that exists right now in the world, the amount of hopefulness that I have when I see these kids making movies, when I see people engaging with AI constructively, when I see people building things. I just think that we have so much agency if we just remember that we have it. And that's kind of the message of my podcast. I just want to encourage people to do. I want to encourage people to not live in despair and fear,

• 2:02:11Speaker 00

  but get off your butt and go do some stuff.

• 2:02:13Patrick Bet-David?

  I love it. Can we put the link to all the podcasts, every show that we have in the description, folks? Go support, go subscribe. The one and only Jeremy Born. Great talking to you, man. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Take care. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscanyero. We chose true Italian craftsmanship. Each pair touched by 50 skilled hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Bright Collection.

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• 2:03:43Patrick Bet-David?

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• 2:04:12Speaker 07

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