Can The Daily Wire Destroy Mainstream Media? - Jeremy Boreing

Jeremy Boreing is the co-founder, and CEO of The Daily Wire. Independent media is having a moment. YouTube numbers dominate mainstream TV and podcasts wipe the floor with radio. But is it possible for movies, TV, and children's programming to tumble next? Expect to learn about the origins of the Daily Wire, the common pitfalls of new success, what the right gets wrong and what we can also learn from the left, the relationship between media and culture, the lessons Jeremy learned from producing Lady Ballers, what comes next after Peak woke, and much more... 00:00 When People Ask What Jeremy Does 01:22 The Original of Daily Wire 06:57 Advice For People Behind & In Front of the Camera 10:38 Treat Your Pursuit Like an Athlete Would 17:27 Common Pitfalls of New Success 19:58 Is Daily Wire the Reactionary Right? 25:19 What the Right is Getting Wrong 31:19 Getting the Best Out of Daily Wire Hosts 34:28 Learning From the Left 38:22 Relationship Between Media & Culture 42:49 Lessons From Producing Lady Ballers 45:30 What Comes After Peak Woke? 51:45 Jeremy’s Favourite Creators 55:39 What’s Next for Daily Wire? 59:36 Where to Watch Lady Ballers - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you say when people ask you what you do?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  I say that I am just a lowly shampoo, razor and chocolate mogul.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I've only been saying that for about a week, though.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a new, a new industry for you.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  It is a terrifying question when people ask you what you do when you're an entrepreneur, because you never quite know what to lead with, and whatever you lead with will be the box that people put you in. So I, I, I try never to answer the question very honestly. When I was a teenager, I had, I was the first person I knew with a cellphone, other than, you know, bankers who I didn't know. But I was, I was an early adopter of the, of the flip phone. In my first voicemail, I said, I was probably 17, and I said, Jeremy Boreing, writer, producer and shameless self promoter.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  Ah, very nice. Yeah, I, I feel that myself as well. You know, what, what, what do you say about who you are? You know, you, what you do very largely determines the way that people see you. And yeah, if you've got a lot of different things, you're interested in lots of different things. That being said, the word entrepreneur is the most wanky title that anybody could bestow on themselves, second only to thought leader.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I certainly never identify myself as either of those two things.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  Can you give me the origin story of the Daily Wire from your perspective? I'd be very interested to hear this.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, a long time ago, a boy loved a girl. 1979? No. The, the real truth is the Daily Wire, it is one of those kinds of stories. So many sundry paths that were all seemingly leading in different directions brought us to this moment where the Daily Wire was formed. You have Ben Shapiro, who, you know, wonderkin, child prodigy violinist, who wanted to be the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, who became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist as a teenager, his first bestselling book, as a teenager who, you know, went to Harvard Law and imagined a future for himself working in law and then politics, but who

• 2:08Speaker 01

  found himself being the fastest talker, talking person in an industry known for slow talking. You've got me, who You know, kind of the classic go west, young man, small town, big aspirations guy, moves to Hollywood to be an actor and sort of quickly encounters the reality that he doesn't have what it takes to succeed in that business. In phases came to that realization. You have Caleb Robinson, our co-founder and co-CEO, who, you know, very, got married very early, had his first kid as a teenager and his first business as well as a teenager, putting in docks underwater in lakes in Texas.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Like, we just all had this background that in no way seemed like it was pointed toward running a major media company. But, you know, the shorter window version of it is that I met Ben Shapiro at a coffee bean on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. And I recognized pretty quickly that Ben was a once in a generation talent. And a lot of the things that people thought were liabilities, for example, how quickly he speaks, I thought could be real assets if deployed in the right areas. And I was in a low moment, sort of in my Hollywood aspiration.

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  How old were you at this point?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Hmm, no, I think it's probably 12 years ago, 14 years ago, something like that.

• 3:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  So I was not young, I was 30. But I saw something in Ben and I thought it was worth taking a detour, taking a break from the things that I'd been working on to help Ben. And Ben saw something in me, you know, Ben wanted to be in business and he prides himself on creating opportunities for his friends and he does a great job of that. So Ben started creating these tiny opportunities for me to like make videos for the internet and make a little money. You know, and when I say a little money, I mean like $5,000 kind of gigs, you know? And then I started seeing opportunities for Ben to really become prominent and started pursuing those with the influence that I had at that time, largely influenced with conservative, wealthy people in Hollywood who contributed to various 501(c)(3) on the right where I

• 4:16Speaker 01

  thought I could find openings for Ben. And together, we just sort of helped each other along this path towards success.

• 4:22Chris Williamson?

  I heard Ben talk about a time where you were more front-facing in terms of talent and Ben was more operator in terms of behind the scenes. And then at some point, that seemed to flip a little bit. What's the, what went on there?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think Ben may be selling himself a little bit short there. You know, he was doing a lot of front-facing work, but he was a Harvard-trained attorney. And when we met, he was general counsel for a media company. So he was working more operationally in those early days. And I was just trying to be, you know, a writer and producer within the Hollywood system. So in that sense, perhaps I was a bit more front-facing. But the real thing that happened was Piers Morgan. You know, Ben had a very famous encounter with Piers Morgan over gun control in the wake of a terrible school shooting.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I believe it was Parkland. And Ben just brought all of the things that make Ben Shapiro such a special talent to bear in that interview. And I realized in that moment, you know, there was a real change happening away from sort of corporate brand media toward individual influencer media. I don't think we were really using the term influencer at that time, but at that time I called it talent-based as opposed to company-based. And I said to Ben, you know, we need to make you famous. The right way to change the culture, the right way to impact the political conversation isn't really through company-forming right now. It's through personality-forming. So let's work together on that.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, people don't follow things, they follow people. You look at Cristiano Ronaldo, 50 million followers. Real Madrid, 25 million followers. Elon Musk, 200 million followers. I don't know what Tesla or SpaceX or anything else has, but it's not going to be as much. People relate to people. And there's something as well, kind of this ick that people have around corporatism and the overly polished persona that is a pretend version of a person. Someone said to me over dinner the other night, they referred to it as trying to speed hack authenticity or growth hack authenticity. And it's not, that's not really a thing. Like authenticity is emergent.

• 6:39Chris Williamson?

  It naturally comes out of doing the thing. So I understand that. One of the interesting takeaways from that, you know, there may be a lot of people listening who are in business or content creation or whatever, who think, well, I can do the front-facing stuff, but I'm also not a bad operator.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  What insights or advice have you got for people who ambivert when it comes to their behind-the-scenes, in-front-of-the-scenes skill set?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of people become famous. I mean, we live in an era where it's easier to become famous than it's ever been before. But to actually have a career over time in the, whatever we want to call it, the influence space, you know, to be a voice that people trust, to be someone who people believe lives authentically, believes will tell them the truth, believe has something to say that's worth listening to, you actually have to be one of those things. I think that, I think one of the challenges that a lot of emerging voices have right now is they, they do figure out how to use the system to maximize their opportunity to put together an audience in the short term. But if you, if you have nothing to offer, if you have nothing to say, you're not going to succeed. One thing

• 7:51Speaker 01

  I'm proud of at The Daily Wire is just how intelligent our hosts are. You sneeze when you lie, and God knew that Michael Knowles is not that talented. He's not that smart. No, you know, I'll actually brag on Michael, because I never do. When we gave Michael his first show, obviously an intelligent guy, but he felt outmatched. And he started reading. And when I say reading, I mean, Michael would read two books a week. And the two books weren't like the 40 hour, or the four hour work week, you know, they were like, he was reading philosophers, and he was reading, you know, church fathers,

• 8:32Speaker 01

  and he was reading the Western canon. At a rate of two books a week, he had a full-time job working for us, and then a full-time job reading. And he maintained that pace for probably four years. So you can imagine just how much, over 100 important works a year, 400 important works in his first four years. And that's why he has a voice that's lasted for as long as he has. It's not just that he's a hot take guy. It's not just that he figured out, you know, how to ride whatever current cultural wave there might be. There's a business aspect of that, too, which is you can make a lot of money really quickly on the internet. But- Money doesn't stack very well. You know, we live in a moment right now in particular where there's almost no yield anywhere.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  If I had achieved the success that I've achieved in the last four years financially, four years earlier, I would own a huge real estate portfolio, it would all be cash flowing. I'd be championing the 1% rule and the 50% rule and away we would go. But today, those things don't work, those systems don't work. The market doesn't work. And so, the only way that you can actually have sustained financial success is through, not, not, this is a loaded term, but I'm going to use it a little bit differently than other people use it. Wealth creation. And people will say that owning real estate is wealth creation, but it really isn't. It's growing wealth that you already encountered.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  Wealth perpetuation.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  It's wealth perpetuation. Wealth creation is finding market opportunities and creating value. And that's harder than having a hot take that gets a lot of clicks on the internet. So I think that the voices who are going to be around a decade from now are the voices who don't pander to their audience, who don't just say exactly what they think people want to hear, who tell the truth as they see it while also representing their audience authentically and with respect, and who create real value opportunities for that audience. You know, you see it with a lot of companies who are trying to release products now, which we also do at The Daily Wire. I don't know exactly what it will be over time, but I think it's going to be the people who are finding those opportunities to create value that are going to succeed long term.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what's interesting about that Michael story is so few people in the world of content creation, as far as I can see, but really in any industry that isn't sport or maybe classical music, treat their pursuit like an athlete does or like a professional. And this is something, I came across an essay from a friend, David Perel, three or four years ago. And he said, "Treat yourself like an athlete," was the title of it. Now, the actual, in classic Twitter style, I didn't read the essay for 18 months, but I loved what I'd interpreted the essay as. The essay that he wrote wasn't what I created in my own mind, but it really got me thinking.

• 11:19Chris Williamson?

  I'd read Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and then Turning Pro. And I thought, wow, like imagine what would happen. If you treated the pursuit of my chosen career, which is podcasting, like an athlete, what happens if I get a comedy coach and an improv coach, an addiction coach? What happens if I work out the different ways that sleep or hydration or breath work or cold exposure impact the way that I feel and how quick my mind works? What happens if I start doing on all of these different things? Because an athlete does mindset training and they'll

• 11:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:53Chris Williamson?

  do preseason conditioning and they'll run drills and they'll look at game tape and they'll spend time with people that have got growth mindsets and they'll be with this coach and that coach and the other coach and they'll think about hydration and nutrition and supplementation, all this stuff. It's like, well, you know, if you say that this is your thing, why leave more capacity on the table than fully going for it? And it's cool to hear, you know, someone like Michael that steps out and has, is able to discuss philosophical works, but to realize that there was a trajectory even to that. And I think that this is one of the beautiful things and one of the inspiring things about YouTube and this more fourth wall breaking world that we're a part of, because it helps

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  normal people that haven't yet got there, which is what all, every single person was at the beginning of their journey, think, oh, wow, I can go back to episode one of whatever the hell thing it is that I love now and realize just how shit it was. And maybe it's even shitter than what I do on my first episode. Oh, my God, like I could be, you know? So, yeah, I really love that idea.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  You know, people ask me sometimes, when are you going to have a show? And I jokingly say, well, jokingly and not jokingly, they're all my shows. But the truth is, one reason I don't have a show is because I know that it takes work to be good at it. And I don't have, it takes a lot of work to do what I do. And you can't do everything. There's a, there's a great, there's a line that I stole from an episode of Star Trek or something where the character says, no one can live all the lives that they would choose, or no, no one can live all the lives that they desire. A choice has to be made and that's true. There are a lot of things we could be, but you can only be great at a handful of things and you have to, you have to make those choices along the way. So I, I don't have a full-time podcast, not because I don't have the opportunity.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  I could launch a podcast today and it would be, within some reason, a top podcast, just because I have the power of a huge company behind me that knows how, exactly how to do it, exactly how to market it. But. I don't have something to say every day. That's not the world that I occupy. I occupy the world of creating the opportunities for my hosts to be able to thrive at what they do.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 14:10Chris Williamson?

  Very difficult realization. One of my friends, Alex, talks about, you've seen The Matrix and there's that sandbox tutorial where Neo is being led by Morpheus through a busy street and there's a woman in a red dress and he's watching the woman in a red dress. And then he says, Neo, were you watching me or the woman in the red dress? And the point is that attractive opportunities are distracting, even when you should be focused on other things. But one of the challenges that you encounter as you begin to develop a little bit more is it's not a hypothetical 10, it's 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s. And your ability to say no needs to continue to scale along with your skill set. And that is something, you know, I'm really, really feeling at the moment.

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  The last 18 months for me has been a pretty big change, pretty big step change in terms of a lot of stuff. And it's a skill set no one teaches you. No one teaches you how to say no more effectively to things that you would have begged to say yes to only six months ago. And that's, I suppose that's one of the, there's definitely a degree of envy I have for some of the guys that work under yourself, because there is infrastructure and guidance and just a little bit less figuring it out on your ownness, which must be nice and it probably helped them to just focus on making the content rather than being in the engine room, working out whether or not this decision or that decision is the right one to make structurally.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, you're also dealing with, at the point that you are in your career right now, you're dealing with the three, I talk about this a lot, but the three most corrosive elements that exist in the world, fame, wealth and power. And you're beginning to have a measure of each of those as your channel grows and as your brand grows. And

• 15:56Speaker 01

  You know, they're not to be handled lightly. Each one of them comes with a whole range of temptations. One of the temptations is to try to protect the thing that you've built. And your ability, all the things that allowed you to attain it, start to seem like liabilities when you start trying to figure out how to preserve it. And it's a real challenge.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  How so? Give me an example.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Well, for example, it takes risk taking to create wealth. But preserving wealth tends to be, people's natural tendency is to become more risk averse as they go because they don't want to lose the thing that they've made. And so in time, especially in this kind of space, you become almost the opposite of what you were. The very, the very thing that helped you to succeed becomes something that you fear will cause you to fail. And all of that is because when you have something, you want to keep having it.

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  Something to lose now.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  You have something to lose. So I think that it's incredibly difficult. You know, I've spent a lot of time in my life helping people who are at various stages of a journey towards success. And, you know, I didn't know that that was going to be my life. But really, from the time that I was 21 to today, I've, I've been more Merlin than King Arthur. You know, I've been the guy over the shoulder of the guy many, many times in various capacities. But I've seen them all go through what I kind of consider the, the almost predictable patterns of success. There are just things that everyone goes through along that journey.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  What are the, what are the most common pitfalls that you see?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  You know, one of them is that convenience starts to become more and more and more important to you. And understandably so, because, you know, inconveniences cost you time and mental and emotional energy, and you have less and less of that to offer. But the downside of that, the positive is you start maximizing your time over target. You know, the more time you spend folding your laundry, the less time that you're spending reading the book. And so Michael Knowles has to make a choice in a limited number of hours in the day, do I spend it folding laundry or do I spend it reading the book? He's gonna get much more value long-term out of reading the book. So the inconvenience of folding the laundry is something that he needs to replace. He needs someone else. You know, better that he spend money paying someone to do something that you could go,

• 18:17Speaker 01

  well, anybody can fold their own laundry. What a stupid thing for someone not to do. And that's true, but if, if that same hour could be spent accruing value to yourself, you should spend it accruing the value and the person whose job is to fold laundry also benefits because that's how they accrue value. But the negative side of it is, you do reach a point where if your best friend had a flat tire three blocks from your house, you would send a tow truck. And when you reach that stage of avoiding being inconvenienced, you've now, you've now accepted yourself out of kind of common humanity. You see this with successful people all the time. They, they become, on one hand, more human

• 18:58Speaker 01

  and on the other hand, less human. And the goal is to become more without becoming less. Not easy.

• 19:05Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting. You know, there was a, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant is a book written by my friend Eric Jorgensen. It came out about five years ago. I think it's the most highlighted per word book on Kindle ever. I think that's a record that it holds. It's very, very dense, very easy to read, but dense as in it was all aphorisms and maxims pieced together into a narrative. And as soon as that book came out, everybody in my world started talking about leverage, right? That was the sexy word. Leverage through code, leverage through media, leverage through capital, leverage through labor. And I, I get it. People outsource, busy people outsource things and they do other things instead. But there are certain things.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  But you can't outsource your humanity.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  There are certain things that you should keep a hold of. And there are certain things even within the business that you should keep a hold of as well. So you mentioned before about this kind of, almost this balance between content that gets plays and avoiding audience capture or avoiding just sort of tossing red meat to the mob in a very predictable kind of way and ensuring that the, playing it safe or just simply saying what people want to hear is something that you don't do. I do think that this is a criticism that gets lobbied, lobbed an awful lot toward the right because the content by its nature tends to be a bit more reactionary. How do you think, how do you think about this, this balance? And what's your, what's your insight around the reactionary right kind of accusation?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the right is reactionary. There's no question. It always has been throughout all of, of history. A, a healthy society needs a healthy left because you need a group of people who are questioning the status quo. You need a group of people who are creative and trying to create the next thing in the future. But you, you need to balance against that with a healthy right, a healthy conservatism. I would suggest that in a truly ascendant culture, a truly healthy culture, you're always going to have more people trying to hang on than you are people trying to critique. But you do have to have people critiquing because the status quo is flawed. People are flawed, therefore the status quo is flawed. There are people who get left behind in the, in the systems that exist. You need people challenging those systems.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  And so it is the nature of the right to say to the people who want to make change, hey, hold on, wait just a minute. And that's, that's a perfectly good thing. Where it becomes bad is in these, is in a system like ours today where the left has become ascendant, where the left has cultural and political and economic hegemony across our culture. In that situation, you have more people trying to undermine the system than you have trying to preserve the system. And in those moments, the reactionary nature of the right becomes, you could say on one hand, it becomes more important, and that's true. It's probably more important than it's ever been. On the other side, you could say it becomes. Almost completely a deconstruction of its own. Which is to say that at a certain point, the right isn't actually trying to preserve.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  The right has become revolutionary and is trying to create, but what they're trying to create runs the risk of being retrograde. And that is incredibly, that is the incredibly difficult moment that we find ourselves in on the right in the West today. That we are, we are in the name of conservatism. We're not actually trying to conserve at all. We're trying to build. And truly, there are some things that need to be built. There are structures on the left now that need to be torn down. But when the right becomes revolutionary historically, it usually has somewhat dark implications because the right is trying to, is trying to build something that constrains a lot of the good that's done by the left.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  How do you, how do you battle the worst instincts of the left without embracing the worst instincts of the right? And while America has done an amazing job of that historically, it's very hard now because the right is in truly defeat across all the, all of the most powerful institutions in the country. So how do you do it? Well, part of how you do it is with what I, I call lowercase r republicanism. And that's in opposition or in contrast to populism. Populism says, you know, give the people what the people want. But that isn't really what populism believes. I mean, for one, in America and in the West generally, the people disagree really with

• 23:28Speaker 01

  the fundamental, the core propositions of the right. We like to say in America, we the people on the right. We like to say they've, they've lost touch with we the people, but the problem is they've actually become the people. You know, there are more of them. They win every popular presidential election, every popular national election. And so it's not, it's not actually what populism purports to give the people what they want. What it really means is to give a certain group of people what they think they want. What republicanism, lowercase r, says is, no, our job is to represent the values and interests of our audience, of our constituency, but also to lead them, also to be a check against some of their worst instincts, also to point out to them where sometimes what

• 24:10Speaker 01

  they think they want isn't what they really actually want in the moment, no different than any other group of people. I mean, I often think that what I want is some ice cream, and that is true in the moment, but it's not what I actually want over time. It's not the thing that I actually want to build. And it's always been the case that a healthy society has to have leadership that both responds and represents the people, but also, to some degree, challenges the worst impulses of the people. Now, on the other side of that, you have tyranny. So on one hand, you have the tyranny of the people, populism, and on the other hand, you have the tyranny of the elite. Let's call that authoritarianism. And there is no perfect way to say, well, what is the system that balances between those two? Because people aren't perfect, and the world

• 24:52Speaker 01

  isn't perfectable. But it is, in its own messy way, I think, lowercase r, republicanism. It's a dedication to the belief that both things are possible, and that while there's tension between the two, we have to endeavor to find a way to navigate that tension. And so The Daily Wire challenges our audience, but we don't betray our audience. That makes us, I think, somewhat unique in the space.

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. What do you think the right is getting wrong mostly at the moment?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, I think that the right has, in most cases, the right has accurately arrived at a diagnosis of the problem. But quite often, it's wrong in its prescriptions. And it's wrong in its prescriptions for a variety of reasons. One, because we're so beat up for so long, particularly since the ascendancy of Barack Obama in 2008, when the instruments of government, particularly in America, started being turned directly against us. And we were being crushed, deliberately crushed by the system, targeted and destroyed by the system. And that makes you less thoughtful. It makes you even more reactionary. Sometimes

• 26:02Speaker 01

  we're wrong just because things aren't always the obvious. And so, for example, lots of people have given me financial advice in my life, and a lot of them are people I really look up to, parents and grandparents and other kinds of mentors. But none of them had any money.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And so, most of the advice that I've got, and I think this is true for most people. Most of the wisdom that we've got, most of the advice we've gotten about money is from people who never had two cents to rub together. And so, it turns out, a lot of the things that they say that seem almost axiomatic are just false. The one that I always like to tell people is, "My parents told me, probably your parents told you, money doesn't grow on trees." What a lie, money does grow on trees. Money is there just to be created. Wealth and value are actually created. But most of our parents were incredibly hardworking, blue collar people who worked for a wage. And in their life, in their experience, money doesn't grow on trees. Money isn't created, it's earned. And so, that's the best advice they can give us, but it's wrong advice.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And in the final analysis, it's wrong advice. And so, I think that a lot of the places where the right goes wrong is when it embraces ideas that seem axiomatic, but that ultimately aren't enough. The world is complex, the world has fallen, people are messy, answers are often nuanced. And then, both left and right are often looking for a prescription that can't exist. And I would call that the ultimate prescription. And this is where we get into realisms. So, people, you know, at the worst extreme, you have antisemitism emerging left and right in a major way right now, where people have rightly identified that the elites in our

• 27:45Speaker 01

  society have accumulated too much power unto themselves, they've betrayed the people, and we've become kind of conspiratorial in our answer to that. And so, we start looking for a way to destroy the elites, and we start trying to label the elites and find commonality among the elites. And that leads us into things like antisemitism or radical populism, which wants to overthrow even the concept of elites. But of course, it wants to overthrow the concept of elites while ascending new elites. The other place where I think that the right makes mistakes is what I call cultism. You know, a cult leader always wins your trust by telling you something, by telling you a forbidden truth. And it's just in the mind of a man when someone points out to you that you've been lied

• 28:26Speaker 01

  to and those blinders are lifted and you see the light for the first time, your first thought is gratitude and amazement. Your second thought should be skepticism about other things that you believe and other people who tell you things. But it is in the mind of a man instead that your second instinct is to now believe anything else that the person who just revealed you the hidden truth tells you. And in the era of the internet, internet where we ascend, voices, particularly on the right, on the basis of them speaking one forbidden truth. And, and now we just can't, now we just believe anything that that person tells us.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You see this with, you see this with actors like Andrew Tate or someone else who do point out something that is true and that we have not really been allowed to see. And if we did see it, we weren't allowed to say it. But then people put all their trust in Andrew Tate because he revealed that truth to them. And they don't realize that he's leading them down a lot of really dark paths. And that, I think that that's a tendency that's really evident on the right. I mean, that's a tendency left and right, but we're dealing with it much more on the right today.

• 29:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's so, that's so interesting that saying something which many people feel is true or say in the privacy of their own homes, no matter what side of the political spectrum they're on, gives a kind of cult leader type clairvoyance to the person, like they're speaking truth to power, like they're able to say the things. And then the temptation of that actor to then be like, well, you know, they, they were interested in what I had to say about the Middle East. So why shouldn't my epidemiology be taken seriously? Why, why is it, why shouldn't I weigh in on the trans athletes in sports discussion?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Well, but also, also because of the corrosive power of wealth, fame and money, that when people start giving us those things, we start looking for ways to hang on to it or accumulate more of it. We start wielding it for, for different reasons than, we start saying things for different reasons than the reason we said the first things that we said. That's something that anyone in the position that you're in or the position that I'm in, has to really guard against at all times. Are you saying things that are true? Are you saying things because you believe that the saying of them is in service of the good? And it's, and the audience needs to be aware, when they're listening to someone, yes, this person revealed to you a forbidden truth, but is what they're saying now true?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  And shouldn't it be the case that when someone shows you you've been lied to? Shouldn't your first instinct to be, be to say, oh, I am too trusting, not, oh, I should trust this new person to tell me?

• 31:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a, it's just a replacement for the last god is a, is a new god that comes in. Yeah, that's so, that dynamic's so, so very interesting. How do you think, do you, do you guys have a, a strategy internally? Or do you speak to your talent in a way to kind of help them not get out over their skis to ensure that what they're talking about is within the domain of competence that they have?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it's tough. When, when people talk for a living, they often say things before they've thoughtfully considered them. I think that we have a far above average, or I think we have a really good batting average on this, I think I should say. One of the great things that we have in our company, and you, you said that you have a certain kind of envy for some of our guys because of the business infrastructure. And I understand that we provide a lot of, of support for our team in that. But there is something that we provide at a more human level, and it, it really is camaraderie. That, you know, we really do sit down and have a, have a cigar. I don't really smoke cigars anymore, although I did just launch a great cigar company called Mayflower.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  But I've basically stopped smoking. But we just sit down with cigars or whiskey or sit down by the fireplace or, and have friendships and talk about these things and challenge each other.

• 32:26Chris Williamson?

  Without, without the cameras on all the time?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Without the cameras on.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

  I think the fundamental principle, what you're talking about here is if you're doing something, regardless of what it is, personal growth, changing from one

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Type of thinking or group of friends or industry or place that you live, whatever. When you're moving from that to something else, there are going to be pitfalls and temptations and uncertainty and self doubt. And it's important to have other people who are on that journey and ideally a little bit further ahead of you on that journey so that you can just fact check whether or not this was true. I always, I may make this analogy because I was an only child. So it was always team parent was always right because there was two of them and only one of me. And I was never able to go to someone else and say, hey, what do you, do you think dad was right when he said that thing? So I kind of just accept, you know, you were talking about axiomatically.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it's just this wave of things. Like, well, no one else has said that it's not, I have this sense that it might not be right, but I, who am I to say, no, they're the parents, you're the child, right? And it's kind of a little bit like that relationship with the world, you know, his, his, I have this sense that I might be right about this. Some people in the world, maybe most people in the world seem to say that I'm not, I really feel this and without someone that you can speak to, ideally a group of people that you can speak to go, no, dude, like, trust yourself. I, I think you're right here. I think that you've got, I think there's some there that that's super, super important.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  We're smashing ideas into, into other ideas here all the time, both publicly, which is our job, but much, much more importantly, I think privately, which is where we, where I think our, our, hopefully our character is going to be more formed by that aspect of what we do. Does that mean that we all come to the same conclusions on, say, a political issue? No, but it certainly means that we've explored our political beliefs in a crucible. And it certainly means that we've explored our moral beliefs in even more of a crucible.

• 34:24Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that the left is getting right? Is there something that you wish the right would do more like the left is? Are there any lessons that you wish that you guys could take away?

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Well, absolutely. I mean, the left is admirable, especially the, when the left is healthy. It's, it's admirable in its care for the people who are left behind by the system. The left is admirable in its recognition that, that the greater good isn't the, isn't good for everyone. The left is creative in ways that the right is historically not creative. Creating things is a fundamentally liberal proposition.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  And so, one of the challenges that we have, and we're trying to answer it at The Daily Wire, is to be creatives for conservatism. That's why we're putting out this movie Lady Ballers. That's why we're putting out The Pendragon Cycle. It's why we put out documentaries like What is a Woman? It's why we sell razors and chocolates. We're constantly trying to build. You know, we don't want to just be critics of the culture. We want to be creators of the culture. We don't want to be critics of business. We want to be creators of business. We don't want to just be voices. We want to be not just talkers, but doers. And I think that there is some of that, of course, on the right, and there's more and more of it every day. I'm not holding us out as somehow the only people doing it. But there are precious few of us.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And if we want, I guess what I would say is, if we want to build the future for the country, we better get pretty good at building. And we better have a future that people want to aspire to, that people want to live in. I think far too often, the right speaks in absolutes that alienate people. So here's a great example.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  The Daily Wire is, you know, if there's one issue that every person at The Daily Wire agrees about, it's divorce. Divorce is bad. Divorce destroys society. Divorce destroys children. We talk about it all the time. And we talk about it in very practical ways. The consequences of divorce, the damage that divorce does to children, the damage that divorce does to the soul. But there's a lot of divorced people out there. Sometimes they hear us talk about these things, and they'll write in to me, and they'll say, you know, "Cool, I get it. Divorce is bad, but I did get a divorce. Now what?" Or, "Cool, I get it. Finishing high school is a..." You know, Ben talks about the sort of predictive ways of knowing if you'll be a success in life. "Cool, don't do drugs, but I did. Cool, don't get arrested, but I did. Cool, don't get your girlfriend pregnant, but I did.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Now what do you... Now what?" And I think that the right isn't always good at having an answer to the "now what", because we're so busy fighting for sort of even the idea of foundational truth. That we forget that most people's lives have not neatly adhered to that. And most people aren't starting, they're not starting their journey with our ideas at the beginning as clean slates. They're starting it having already lived in the messy world that is. The left's very good at that and we're, we're not particularly good at it.

• 37:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is, it is alienating and it's also very uninspiring to just be a critic all the time. You know, if all that you're doing is being cynical or skeptical or tearing down or whatever it might be, it's just not that inspiring, you know? Like, it's cool and I understand, in some ways, it's very easy to rapidly gain an audience by identifying mutual distaste for an out group rather than mutual love of an in group. This is one of my rubrics that I use to judge whether or not a content creator is well-meaning or not and acting in good faith. Is their audience bonded together over the mutual love of an in group or the mutual hatred of an out group? Because if it's permanently out group, out group, out group, that's just a purity spiral

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  by a different name. And you're gonna get shaved off the outside of it when you don't do something that concords with whatever their particular worldview is. So you mentioned there, obviously, this kind of intimate relationship between media and culture. And this is something that you guys are increasingly trying to contribute to. How do you think about the relationship between media and culture?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Well, for sure. Well, first I want to speak to that purity spiral you mentioned. I call it a purity death spiral whenever I refer to it. And I won't, and I won't abide being categorized in a way that I can't live up to. And so, you know, I think that especially in the conservatives, well, I shouldn't say that because the left has their own and perhaps even more totalitarian versions of this, but they're just not traditionally ethic, they're not built around traditional morality. But it is certainly the case that a big part of what we do on the right, a big part of what we do at The Daily Wire, is talk about morality and moral ideals. But foundational to my belief about the world is that I have not in any way ascended to

• 39:15Speaker 01

  a point of moral idealism, of moral ideal. You know, I'm, I'm a human being, I'm, I'm chock full of flaws. I wear, I wear many of them right out in the open and there's a whole bunch more that people don't know anything about and hopefully never do, right? Nobody, nobody wants their heart to be seen by anyone else.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  I make a point to never allow my success to come from presenting myself as the example of how a person is supposed to live their lives morally. And I make a point of not putting out content that I think pander to the audience that only wants things that are wholesome, for example. A lot of the fans of the Daily Wire who I love the most are always mad at me because when we put out a movie, it isn't wholesome. Well, first of all, I don't think they actually want wholesome movies. I think that they all watch Downton Abbey and The Office and Friends and Marvel movies. And they don't hold those movies to any kind of standard. They only want to hold us to a standard because they're not honest with themselves. Most people aren't, probably myself included. People don't know what they actually want.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  They know what they want to want. They reveal what they actually want through their economic behavior.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Clicks and clicks and kash is kash.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  That's right. I know what people really want because they watch it. I know that people don't, you know, there's not, I think a movie like I Can Only Imagine is good and it does good in the world. But I know that there are a lot fewer people, even on the right, who actually sit around and talk about how great what I Can Only Imagine is than they do spending time talking about how good Modern Family was, right? It's just the nature of it. We actually want things that are different than what we admit out loud that we want. I say all of that to say, I refuse to put out movies that pander to my audience. I will only put out movies that I think are great and that I think that hold up as entertainment and that, you know, even if they're not great, they're on the road to being great, by which

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I mean, we're becoming better and better and better as we go. But what I don't want to be is like, with all respect to companies like Pure Flix, I am not Pure Flix. I'm not saying that...

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  What's Pure Flix?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Pure Flix is owned by Sony now. It was started by Michael Scott and David A. R. White, and they made Christian movies. And they did a great job. From a business point of view, they created something really good. They found a market inefficiency and they answered that market inefficiency. But the problem with making your identity purity...

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Is what you just said. Eventually, since you are not pure, because spoiler alert, no one is, you will be destroyed by that standard that you.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  Correct. The standard, the standard that you hold others to is the standard that you will be judged by.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. What I would much rather do is hold up, uh, is hold up things that are in tension. As I said, lowercase r Republicanism involves tension, tension between representing and never betraying your constituency, but also challenging and leading your constituency away from their worst impulses. Similarly, I think in, in the realm of art, it's our job to represent our audience, but also give our audience the truth of, of what they actually want, not what they want to want. And I think in your, in the Daily Wire, our job is to talk about moral and philosophical and political ideals, but juxtapose that with talking about grace and what opportunities

• 42:37Speaker 01

  exist that meet people where they are, that help them course correct and steer the ship a little bit better, you know, in the real world where we've all made a ton of mistakes and are only going to make more as we go forward.

• 42:48Chris Williamson?

  What did you learn during the production of the new movie Lady Ballers? What was insightful or instructive or revealing during the, the process of that, either filming or, or publication?

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  One of them is how afraid people are to laugh now. You know, it's, it's even on the right, people would not associate themselves with the movie when we were trying to make it and inviting our friends to be a part of it because of absolute fear. These are people who will speak out about the issue, but they'll only speak out about it in very, very serious tones. And they'll all say, oh, mockery is a huge weapon, you know, we, the left is so good at mockery and we're so bad at it. But then they don't actually want to make any jokes and they don't want to make jokes because they're afraid of the audience and they're afraid of the audience because they have set themselves up in a relationship with the audience that requires purity of them and it requires purity from them that the audience themselves will not give. As I say, you know, an audience member who will say, you told an off color joke in Lady

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Ballers, so I'm not going to watch it, will then go home and watch reruns of Friends.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  What is that about? Well, friends never entered into the purity compact with them. And so I think we have to not enter into the purity compact with our audience either. We have to be much more thoughtful. So I was surprised at people's sort of unwillingness to have a laugh about these really sensitive arguments.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  There was a news story that I saw, and maybe it wasn't a news story, it might have been like a Reddit thread or something, that I think you guys had used extras for a particular scene, and then did people walk out? Some people didn't know that it was actually for the Daily Wire, and then that got leaked on Reddit.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:32Chris Williamson?

  How was that?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  It was pretty funny, you know, some guys who came in to be extras stormed the basketball court, saying Ben Shapiro is a Nazi, which I think that they should look up Ben Shapiro, and then they should look up Nazi. I mean, I think there are a lot of problems with their assertion, but, you know, the argument that we didn't disclose to the extras exactly what the movie was about could be made by any extra who was ever on any movie. That's not how that works. So it hurts some people's feelings, I suppose, but...

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  It's funny, man.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I'm not in the hurting people's feelings business, I guess.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting. It's interesting for me to think about what the future of culture/culture wars is. It feels to me, I don't know whether you'd agree with this, but I think a number of people have made this point, and it seems right to me that we're past peak woke, that peak woke was kind of summer 2020-ish, back end of then. And I wonder what comes next? What do you think? This must be something you think about strategically very closely.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  I think that it is true that peak woke may have been the summer of 2020. It's true that the left has suffered some cultural losses, really for the first time in my lifetime, and therefore, conversely, the right has scored some cultural victories. But we're still losing in the areas that matter the most. I mean, we're still losing our freedom every day to this regulatory bureaucracy.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  That has essentially gained, ascended to almost absolute power in the country. And Congress doesn't legislate anything to speak of. So we, we live in an incredibly dangerous time. And what, what I worry is that if we don't have better leadership on the right, we're going to end up into a very European style conflict between the worst aspects of the left and the worst aspects of the right. And in that kind of a conflict, there's not really any winning for the good guys in the short term.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Uh, that's the thing that I'm the most fearful of. I want to contribute to the existence of a healthy American right. Because I believe that a healthy American right is the immune system that can clean up all the problems from wokeism on the one hand, to bureaucratic tyranny on the other, to, you know, uh, loss of national identity, all of it. You know, loss of economic power and stagnation and inflation. All of that can be solved by having a healthy right in this country. And so, you know, it's a real challenge. It's a challenge that understandably, when people get punched in the nose over and over and over again, they just want somebody who will punch back.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  And, but, but what we need is somebody who has a, and I'm not trying to make this about presidential politics, I think it's far bigger. What we need as a movement is leadership that teaches us both, yes, to fight, but also what to fight for, to fight for the right things. And that's, that's tough when you've been getting clobbered in the face for a decade.

• 47:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's very, it's very strange to think about how people respond and how they're seduced by particular types of, of talking points. I think I said this to Jordan Peterson, he was on the show a couple of weeks ago. I think in part, the ascendancy of someone like Andrew Tate can be laid at the feet of Jordan's moving on from the conversation to young men. Jordan's moved on, he's doing these things with ARC, he's now thinking about God a lot more, he's got this new book, We Who Wrestle With God, he's doing 12 part series on the Daily Wire about Genesis or the Book of Exodus or something else, right? Like he's, he's moved on from that conversation and, um,

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  People will step into that vacuum.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  And they will step into that vacuum in every different subset, all the way down. You mentioned there again about, kind of, I've heard you talk, I think it was with Megyn Kelly, about how politics is dominated by old people. But content creation and the movement of culture, at least on the ground at the moment, from the way that I see it, it's dominated by young people. Younger people, certainly younger people than the incumbent that typically would have been the gatekeepers with whatever was going on.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  How, what's the, what's the future of that look like? How, how can it be the case that politics is still this like old guard? And yet, culture moving seems to be a much younger, more finger on the pulse guard.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Well, sadly, I think that that's, that's somewhat representative of what Europe looked like before the First World War, that you had an elite that had lost touch with the people, an elite that had accumulated too much power unto itself. The whole continent was being run by people who were far out of touch from an age and demographic point of view. You know, people, you had a very, very old leadership in Europe at that time, and young people felt left behind, and were, and were, in many ways, left behind. The danger that we have now, well, listen, there's enormous opportunity in the creator economy. I mean, you know, 20-year-olds can have a voice in a way with no gatekeepers. And that, that, there is a lot of good that will come from that. There's bad that comes with it, too.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  One thing that you lose when you lose the gatekeepers is you lose any filtering mechanism and any wisdom, any sense of wisdom. Young people don't have any wisdom, they have ideas. And, and so, in the tension between the good that comes from that and the bad that comes from it, we have to find a way to navigate toward the good and away from the bad. It's good that we have more voices. It's good that there aren't gatekeepers who can keep out ideas, good ideas that they oppose.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  The negative is there's also no gatekeepers to keep out the bad ideas that we should all oppose.

• 50:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and there's things that can limbically hijack, which are not worthy of the attention that our brains want to give them.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I talk about this a lot, that technology is like a, technology represents a hardware change. And when hardware changes, software has to change. And we're not developing the software fast enough to deal with all the change that's happened in the system in our lifetime. We haven't, we've barely dealt with the printing press. And now we're trying to deal with, you know, the internet and AI and, and you name it. And so many of our problems today, it may be the case that all of our problems today in the West are just not yet understanding what to do with the internet and mass communication.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  I think downstream from that is, there's an awful lot to be laid at the feet of it. Jonathan Haidt's just released his, or announced his new, new book,

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  which is coming out in March of next year, and I'm very interested to speak to him about that because

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  so much of, so much, and then there's almost like an excuse that people can just throw. It's like, ah, it's social media and technology again. I do think that it gets both overused and underused for things. People forget about it axiomatically, or like the thermodynamics of the system. And then they use it as a scapegoat, boogeyman to explain things which are actually, well, no, that's just agency or sovereignty or individual integrity that someone hasn't decided to, to deploy. Here's one question I had for you. Who, who are some of your favorite content creators outside of the guys that are at DW? Cause you must get delayed flights, you get stuck in airports and stuff. You've got to watch something to distract you. Who do you turn to?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Who do I listen to? You know, I, it's funny, I went through a big phase of listening to Gary Vee. And I was listening to Gary Vee because Gary Vee is not like me in any way. I don't even understand, like fully one third of the words that come out of Gary Vaynerchuk's mouth. I do not know what they are. It's some music reference to a genre that I don't know, some sports reference that I will never understand. It's something about wine that I don't get. He's, he's from a completely different world than I am, but he is always interesting. He's always challenging. He's always pushing himself. He's always thinking. And I get a kick out of that because it's, because I'm, it's not me. It's not what I'm. Like, I like to listen to NPR offerings,

• 52:42Speaker 01

  even though I disagree with almost everything, all of their presumptions. But there's such a quality to their, to their approach that it always hooks me and it inspires me to want to bring more quality of that kind to the work that we, that we do. Of late, I've listened to, it's funny to say, I listen to a lot of Jordan Peterson now. And I did not listen to Jordan Peterson even six months ago to speak of. I mean, I read his book and was familiar with him, knew he'd be a great asset to The Daily Wire. But I find myself more and more listening to Jordan. And the person who we produce, who I now listen to every week, even though I've been friends with him and been producing him for a decade, I've never listened routinely to his show.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  But I think Andrew Clavain's show is incredibly important. I'm not listening to it as the producer of it to make notes on it. I'm actually listening to it because of the wisdom that it contains and, and the insights that he has. I've always loved Steven Crowder. I think that he's absolutely hilarious. I don't love him anymore. I have some fairly, some fairly public disagreement with Steven at the moment. But I still think that he's one of the most talented, funny guys out there. And especially in our space, no one, there's not that much that is funny. So it's so refreshing to, to hear Steven's approach in that regard. I think Glenn Beck's the greatest living broadcaster. I think Dennis Prager's one of the greatest. And, and sort of in a weird way, least recognized in the age of the internet.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  He is very recognized in radio. But I think that, I think that if you just took the library of things that Dennis has said and started chopping them up for Instagram, he'd be one of the biggest influencers in the world's in very short.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  Get the content, get the content spun up, guys. Come on. Can I make a, can I make a suggestion for someone that I think you should acquire?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Oh, please, yeah.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  I think that Daily Wire needs to put an offer on the table and take Douglas Murray. I think that if you got Douglas Murray and used the correct engine to make him sufficiently media engine savvy, I think that that could be beyond huge.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  I do, I agree with that absolutely.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  He's just, I've been friends with him for four years or so now.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  Every time that I get to catch up with him, there's another level to something that we talk about that I find particularly interesting or particularly charming. I don't agree with, it's tons and tons of things that I don't agree with him on, but he is.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Important.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and also, I really think that we need to start to add a little bit of the Anglicized British across into what it is that you're talking about. So I'm Team Murray for you to bring across the Daily Wire.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I'll have him kick back 10% to you if we make him an offer.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  Ah, fantastic. Where should people go? You've got this new Lady Ballers thing that's out now. You've got Pen Dragon Series.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  The Pen Dragon Cycle, yeah.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Yep, that's it. That's coming out. What else have you got? There's something else that you announced recently. It's no why.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  We just announced our new show with Adam Carolla, our first animated comedy series called Bercham, which I think people will really get a kick out of. It's Carolla and Patrick Warburton and Roseanne Barr and tons of great comic actors voicing these animated characters. And it's a real throwback to like politically incorrect 90s animated shows. I think it'll be a real breath of fresh air for people. And we've got our Ben Key app now, which is not for the adults, but for kids. It's a separate entity from Daily Wire for all the reasons. But something that we're very proud of and that I think if we cultivate it well, I think it could be

• 56:28Speaker 01

  our actual legacy in the world because giving children a place in this culture to actually be children, I think is maybe the great calling of our time.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  That's something kind of strangely revolutionary and not. I haven't seen any of your children's content yet, although I would be interested to have a look at it. It's like, it's so strange to just try and make presumably children's content about children's stuff that doesn't really have any crazy agenda that comes along for the ride. You know, it's really, really strange to me.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  That there isn't even more parents pushing back. There's this thing in Idaho at the moment, and Penguin Random House just yesterday announced that they would be counter suing the state of Idaho or something.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  I haven't heard the story.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, let me, let me pull this up really quickly for you.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  That'd be embarrassing when you pull it up on the Daily Wire.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  Ah, how funny. Penguin Random House sue Idaho. Let me see here. Penguin Random House and bestselling authors Iowa, Idaho. This shows, I've been a O1 visa recipient of your great nation for two years, and I don't know the difference between Idaho and Iowa. Penguin Random House and bestselling authors sue Iowa over school book banning law. The publishing giant and four authors, including John Green and Jody Pico, joined several teachers, a student, and the state's teachers' union in filing federal lawsuit. The nation's largest publisher and several bestselling authors have filed Thursday challenging Iowa's new law that bans public school libraries and classrooms from having practically any book that depicts sexual activity. So Random House, they posted it on their Instagram, which was where I saw

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  it yesterday. And yeah, I don't know, that's, their position was, we're pro First Amendment. We are, this is like an imposition on the world of publishing in some way. I don't know.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  The First Amendment is sacred. Kids don't have unlimited free speech rights because they're kids. The idea that you have the right to say anything you want to a child was nowhere in the imagination of the founders of this country. And the idea that we should be arguing whether, over whether or not it's a violation of the rights of a publisher to sell sexually explicit content to kids is just proof that we've just completely jumped the shark as a society. Yeah, go check out Ben Key. It's a, I'm very, very proud of it. We have 18 shows there now, a lot of it licensed, but four Daily Wire originals. And of those four, all four of which I'm proud.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Two of them are truly Daily Wire creations. An animated show called Chip Chilla and a live action show called Mabel McClay. And I think we have the opportunity over time to build something meaningful, beautiful, that is not, you know, it's not about partisan politics. It's about values. It's about imagination. It's about wonder and creativity and all the things that sort of undergird a society, the things that you're supposed to learn in the childhood that you're supposed to have.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  Jeremy Boreing, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out Lady Ballers, the new movie, where should they go? Have you got any codes? Is there codes happening at the moment?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  No codes at the moment. Go to DailyWirePlus.com and you have to be a subscriber. But I think we're running the biggest discount on subscriptions that we'll, that we run all year right now as we speak.

• 59:53Chris Williamson?

  There it is. Jeremy, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Man, thank you for the time.