Ben Shapiro sits down with Jeremy Boring, founder and CEO of The Daily Wire, to talk about his humble beginnings in a small town in Texas, how he became a media mogul, and why he founded a media empire in the first place. Plus, a look at the man who moved Jeremy to conservatism and the big plans for Daily Wire when we touch down in Nashville, Tennessee for a Sunday special with Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative radio show "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor on Fox News Channel's "The Five". He is also a host on the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and hosts the conservative think tank "The Civility Project." He's a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, and is one of the most influential conservative voices in American politics. He has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, CBS, and NPR, and many other publications, including Playboy, and has been a frequent guest on conservative radio shows on conservative talk shows such as SiriusXM. and conservative talk radio, and hosted a show on the radio show on SiriusXM's Morning Mashup with Alex Blumberg. His new show, "The Boring Show" is now available on Comedy Central, and he's a regular guest on the Tonight Show with John Rocha, CBS Radio, and other conservative radio stations across the country, including SiriusXM, and Fox News. . The Boring show is available wherever you get your favorite network shows are available, including on the airwaves, and on the internet, including the BBC Radio Network, SiriusXM and NPR Radio. in the USA, and SiriusXM Radio in the UK, and Sky TV in Canada. , and Sky Radio in Canada, Sky Radio Out in Canada and Sky Atlantic in the U.K., and the BBC in the Caribbean, and in many other major cities across the Atlantic, Europe, and the Caribbean and Latin America, and South Africa, including in Australia, Australia, Asia, and New York City, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, and Europe. This is a Sunday Special, Sunday Special with Jeremy's origin story from the Boring's hometown of Slayton, Texas, Texas and Nashville, AKA the place where he grew up in the late 1980s and early in his childhood in the early 90s in the 1960s and the early days of his early days in the 1980s in Dallas, Texas.
00:00:43.000He wrote and pitched movies around town.
00:00:45.000He produced several of them at production companies he started with his buddies over the years.
00:00:48.000He even ran the inconspicuous organization Friends of Eight, a group formed to bring together the people on the right working throughout Hollywood.
00:00:55.000It was through this group Jeremy and I met.
00:00:57.000We knew early on we'd do business together.
00:00:59.000We thought we struck gold with our first venture, but that went bust when Jeremy was abruptly fired.
00:01:04.000Which is okay, because it led us to create Daily Wire.
00:01:06.000You'll hear the full, epic Jeremy Benn origin story here today.
00:01:10.000who also discussed the man that moved Jeremy to conservatism and the big plans for Daily Wire when we touch down in Nashville, Tennessee.
00:01:29.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
00:01:31.000Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Jeremy Boring, and the only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
00:01:37.000Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.
00:01:39.000You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
00:01:44.000Jeremy Boring, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:01:46.000I mean, you literally just came down and now we're talking.
00:01:48.000Yeah, like I own that and that and that and that.
00:02:41.000And other than that, a very funny thing that happened to me is my dad called and said, you know, I was just on the Slayton Wikipedia town, and you're like a notable person.
00:02:53.000That'll tell you just how prominent is the town of Slayton.
00:03:30.000What that means is I got to have an entire childhood without those things.
00:03:34.000You'd still be gone for two or three hours a day on your bike, and your parents wouldn't know where you were, and there were other people looking after you.
00:03:41.000I think that kind of is something that's been lost now is that, you know, parents always know where their children are at all times.
00:03:47.000The child never has to face any kind of adversity on their own.
00:03:50.000You never have to learn to make decisions for yourself.
00:03:52.000You know, when you're off with your pals and you're not under the watchful eye of a parent, people get hurt, you know, and people make mistakes.
00:04:01.000And you actually have to solve for those mistakes, even as a young person.
00:04:04.000And so I'm pleased to be sort of that last generation, I think, where that was true.
00:04:08.000And then how did you end up Moving from Slayton, Texas to L.A.
00:04:35.000I had some great opportunities at a very young age when I was You know, in first grade, I met my childhood best friend, Todd, and his father ran the local entertainment scene.
00:04:47.000And when I say that, you might say, how could there be a local entertainment scene in a town of 6,000?
00:04:51.000Well, it's because we're very close to a somewhat larger town called Lubbock, Texas, you know, which was, they call it the hub city because it really is the hub of that entire part of the state.
00:05:01.000And a lot of prominent, in particular, musicians came out of Lubbock.
00:05:05.000Buddy Holly, Natalie Maynes of the Dixie Chicks.
00:05:07.000In fact, Natalie's father, Lloyd Maynes, and Todd's father, Don, had a recording studio together, where a bunch of sort of Texas country acts, Joe Ely, the Maynes brothers, those sort of people, sort of came up playing and recording their early albums in the studio that Don owned.
00:05:22.000And so that just afforded Todd and I a ton of opportunities.
00:05:25.000We didn't know how lucky we were at the time.
00:05:29.000When I was a little bit older, you know, I maybe was 11, 12, I went to see a play at a nearby regional theater called the Garza Theater to see Don's daughter, Caldwell's daughter, Cammy, in a play.
00:05:42.000And when it was over, my dad was always sort of interested in introducing me to people.
00:05:46.000And a local morning show host on the biggest country radio station in that part of the state, which of course means the biggest station in that part of the state.
00:05:54.000Jane Prince Jones was running the theater at that time.
00:05:56.000And my dad, I didn't know that he didn't know her because he just walked up to her with sheer confidence and said, Jane, I want to introduce you to my son.
00:06:14.000And, you know, I probably would have never imagined that she even remembered that that conversation happened until a few weeks later my phone rang and it was this local celebrity asking me if I wanted to come be a part of this theater and do, you know, learn how to do lights and sound and that sort of thing.
00:06:28.000And that really was sort of the next step, you know, growing up around the Caldwells and all that musical background, then getting the opportunity to engage in the theater.
00:06:36.000And then a few years after that, Don opened a theater in Lubbock, which is a little bit bigger than the Garza.
00:06:42.000And so, you know, by the time I was 16, 17, 18, Todd and I were producing You know, sizable shows, certainly for our age and for that area, you know, had the opportunity to produce and direct the Buddy Holly story for the Buddy Holly Music Festival in Lubbock, and we had a $40,000 or $50,000 budget, which you can imagine in that part of the country at that time, given the fact that I was 17 or 18 years old.
00:07:04.000A really big deal and so we both just grew up with so many opportunities to engage in the arts and we both had our eyes on the horizon.
00:07:13.000He's in Brooklyn and plays Hammond B3 for like Crosby, Stills, Nash and all these big musical artists and I came out here and just failed consistently for 20 years and then met you.
00:07:24.000So it's interesting because I actually didn't know until this moment that you had like a production background.
00:07:42.000You know, one of the beautiful things about the Lubbock art scene is it was big enough that it provided opportunity, but small enough that those opportunities were available to people like me, who were just kids and not particularly experienced.
00:07:55.000And so I had a lot of opportunities to act in the theater scene in Lubbock, and people were gracious with me, the other actors.
00:08:04.000I think that what I thought at the time is that I was learning to be an actor.
00:08:08.000What I was really learning was to be a producer.
00:08:11.000Because one thing that happens when you're doing entertainment in a low-budget environment is you're constantly having to solve problems that if you had money, money would be the solution.
00:08:22.000And both Jane and Don really invested in me and helped me understand You know, how do you make it happen no matter what?
00:08:30.000It's sort of the show must goes on kind of a mentality.
00:08:32.000So I got to Hollywood, you know, stars in my eyes thinking that I could be an actor.
00:08:40.000I did background work, which is, you know, where you're an extra and the actors up here and you're back here moving your mouth as though you're saying words, but you're not allowed to make a sound.
00:08:50.000Uh, and the very first day that I did background work when I first got to L.A., desperately poor, no money, you know, living in the worst apartment in the worst part of town where you would hear, well, I tell people, it's absolutely true, my apartment was here, there was a parking lot here where a McDonald's and a strip club called the Classy Lady shared the parking lot.
00:09:09.000And so, you know, like, two o'clock in the morning, you stumble out of the strip club, you go get yourself some McNuggets.
00:09:26.000And at that time, I couldn't discern the levels of shabbiness.
00:09:29.000So now, like, you know, the part of town that we're in, it's shabby, but it's like shabby chic.
00:09:34.000But I couldn't have told you at that time the difference between Ventura Boulevard and the part of town I was in, which I won't name.
00:09:41.000When I got my first day, total poverty, first opportunity, go be an extra and they're gonna pay like 50 bucks, you know, to stand in the background.
00:09:48.000And I got to set that morning, and you can't make this up, it was a film, I believe James Spader was starring in it, about the American Revolution.
00:09:57.000And day one, they've got like 150 extras out there for these battle scenes.
00:10:02.000And it's early in the morning, six in the morning or something, and the director walks out and he says, does anyone here have any experience shooting a gun?
00:10:10.000Almost no one did, but Texas guy, right?
00:10:14.000He said, okay, so I want you to go over and work with the effects team.
00:10:17.000And they had, you know, they had these black powder rifles and they needed us to be up in the hills to load the flash band and to shoot the rifles, you know?
00:11:45.000Yep, the show must go on, which was a mentality I understood.
00:11:48.000He said, what happens in the previous part of the film, he's the son of one of the main characters in the film, and he expresses that he is a patriot and he's gonna go fight, and his father tries to talk him out of it.
00:11:58.000He says, in this scene, he sees the lines of redcoats coming over the hill for the first time, and we're coming across the line of colonials and we stop on him and we see him react.
00:12:09.000So, now I have a part in a movie, right?
00:12:12.000says a prayer. He says, we want you to ad-lib the prayer because none of us know anything about prayer. I said, that's great. So now I have a part in a movie, right? Day one, just like something out of a fantasy, out of a novel. And sure enough, they put makeup on me and the camera comes by and it stops on me and I see the red coats coming.
00:12:59.000But it created a great opportunity for me, which is that from then on, I could do background work and make like two, three, four hundred bucks a day, which is how I survived those first couple of years.
00:13:10.000That and the generosity of strangers and friends is how I survived those first couple of years.
00:13:17.000After that, though, I got a couple auditions and very quickly realized that there are people who are good at being actors, and then there are people who suck at being actors, and I was not in the former category.
00:13:28.000An actor has a unique ability to live in the moment.
00:13:33.000When people talk about it, you know, that guy has it.
00:13:49.000And two, they completely live in the moment.
00:13:52.000And you see this because we're around a lot of stars, even political stars.
00:13:55.000You could say to Dennis Prager, who takes up half of this room, You could say to Dennis Prager, Dennis, at the end of this hallway, there is a publisher's clearinghouse-sized check for one million dollars.
00:14:13.000Now we have to walk down the hall so that you can receive it.
00:14:16.000Dennis would be incapable of getting to the end of that hall without stopping in this room and talking to the hair and makeup people, then stopping in this room and getting fully invested in the life of the animator.
00:14:28.000And then he'd walk back to the hair and makeup person because he had another thought that might benefit them.
00:14:33.000Because stars have that ability to just live perfectly here, even though the other thing.
00:14:41.000I'm always thinking about, how do we get Dennis Prager down the hall so that we can get the million dollars?
00:14:46.000And so that made me a terrible actor, which was revealed in a humiliating way when I got an audition and they asked me to do the Devo robot dance.
00:19:12.000And he shared it with his agents who were at Endeavor before the William Morris Endeavor merger, one of the big TV agents in town, somebody I had no business talking to.
00:19:23.000But he also liked it, and he brought me in for a series of meetings.
00:19:26.000And that really built my confidence, I think, and helped me realize that there could be a post-acting LA life for me.
00:19:34.000And so from that period of time, I read every script I could get.
00:19:38.000Again, having the relationship with that family gave me access to a lot of it.
00:19:43.000He would just send me scripts and let me read them.
00:20:08.000You're on your own. But one day, this young... He was over at the home of one of these people, and he asked me if I'd come give him a ride. So I went over in my little Nissan pickup, and I picked him up. And this young actor named Joel Moore came out, and he had a Treo, which was like the precursor to the BlackBerry. It was a phone with a keyboard, you know, and he was typing on it and being a Hollywood guy. And he glanced over at my pickup truck sitting in his He said hey, is that your truck?
00:20:38.000I mean, I'm sitting in the driver's seat.
00:20:41.000He said, uh, all right, and that was it.
00:20:43.000That was my kind of my first Minor celebrity interaction in LA, you know A couple weeks later, that guy calls me off at that same Trejo and he says, hey, you still got that pickup truck?
00:20:54.000I mean, yeah, it's been two weeks and I'm poor.
00:21:57.000They were all at kind of different stages in their career, but almost everyone who was there that night has gone on to have success.
00:22:03.000And that's another great lesson for people on how to become successful is surround yourself.
00:22:10.000People will often say, you know, surround yourself with successful people.
00:22:14.000That's true if you can actually think it's more important to surround yourself with people who are going to be successful by people who have have a mentality for success and appetite for success people who know things that you don't know that group of men we went through you know life and death together throughout our twenties and early thirties and everyone's gone on to do great things and and we all were invested in each other and And so I had a skill at that time.
00:22:42.000One, I knew a little something about the New Testament, and so I was able to help lead that Bible study over time.
00:22:49.000And two, I could write, and no one else had really stumbled into that yet.
00:22:52.000And so both of the actors in the group who were beginning to have prominent careers gave me the opportunity to write with them.
00:23:00.000And they could actually do something with the scripts that I couldn't do.
00:23:03.000And so in 2005, that culminated in getting to make my first feature film, which was called Spiral, starred Joel, a young actor named Zachary Levi, who's gone on to have a wonderful career, and Amber Tamblyn.
00:23:21.000And at that point, I realized we had this amazing opportunity to make a feature film.
00:23:27.000And, you know, that's a multi-year run.
00:23:28.000So that represents four years, probably, of my life.
00:23:31.000And to realize that the entertainment business is just a business.
00:23:35.000And a lot of the lessons that I learned, I think, in that period of time have borne fruit for us even here at The Daily Wire all these years later.
00:23:41.000So, how did you make the move from sort of Hollywood-Hollywood to Conservative-Hollywood?
00:23:46.000Because it's not quite the same thing as we have found out multiple times.
00:23:55.000During the George W. Bush administration, with that group of men who I was getting the opportunity to kind of come of age with, because I had this sort of pastoral role in the community, You know, I also engage with the guys on worldview, on broader worldview, and I would always sort of be arguing the conservative points of view.
00:24:15.000I had become a conservative because I went to college for two years.
00:24:19.000You know, I'm very anti-college, but I went to college for two years at a junior college in Leveland, Texas that has a commercial music program.
00:24:26.000They literally teach you how to play bluegrass, so they teach you how to play.
00:24:29.000And a bunch of country stars have gone through there.
00:24:31.000Again, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, LeAnn Womack, several others over the years.
00:24:37.000While I was there, I had this professor who was ostensibly supposed to teach me how to play the piano.
00:24:42.000If you've ever heard me play the piano, you know that he failed mightily at his job.
00:24:47.000But I had this private lesson with him twice a week, and we would argue about politics and religion.
00:24:53.000He would hand out copies of these books by Richard Mabry called Whatever Happened to Penny Candy and Whatever Happened to Justice, which are sort of easy libertarian tracts, you know.
00:25:07.000I disagreed with almost all of his philosophy, and I would argue with him.
00:25:11.000And I never realized that he was winning the arguments until I got a couple years down the road, got to LA, and realized that I was taking his position instead of the position that I had formerly had.
00:25:22.000And so, you know, in that way, he really helped me discover my beliefs.
00:25:28.000And now I was trying to help these guys, you know, refine some of their beliefs.
00:25:32.000And as a result, everyone knew that I was very conservative.
00:25:36.000You know, one of my buddies at that time was on a sitcom on ABC, which was great because the rest of us were dirt poor, and you could go over there and eat for free.
00:25:45.000You know, craft service on a film set or a TV set is amazing.
00:25:47.000There's just constant food and catered meals, so I would go over and we'd play Halo up in his dressing room, and then I would, like, hide water bottles in my pocket, in my shirt pocket, you know.
00:25:58.000And I had a Bush Cheney 2004 bumper sticker at that time on my truck, and I would park right behind his sort of supercar on the lot.
00:26:06.000And one day I'm walking up the stairs, you know, with like, I mean, peanuts and bottled water, a turkey leg, all hidden under my coat, and this wonderful actress, you know, who I had grown up watching on a show with my father and was really kind of starstruck and probably love-struck by.
00:26:23.000She sees me coming up the stairs and she says, hey, real quick, is that your pickup that parks right behind?
00:27:01.000How the number one topic of conversation on film and television sets is politics.
00:27:06.000And that may sound obvious now because in the Trump era, everything is so political.
00:27:13.000But the world had not yet become political.
00:27:14.000Only Hollywood was political like this at the time.
00:27:18.000And I realized pretty early on that that was going to create problems for me because I am just too ornery and probably too stupid to play along.
00:27:29.000You know, I've got that Texas streak in me where I say what I think and, you know, damn the torpedoes kind of a thing.
00:27:37.000Several things happened during that period of time.
00:27:39.000I had developed a TV show with that actor for Eric McCormick's production company, Big Cattle, and we took it out.
00:27:47.000William Morris took it out for us, and we got some good traction with it, and we were in a meeting.
00:27:54.000It'd be inappropriate, and I still harbor some dreams of one day you know, making a film again. So this is one of the most, five most powerful people probably in Hollywood, 10 most powerful people in Hollywood, who we got a pitch meeting with. We go into his office and over his desk is a life size photo of him with President Clinton. So you know right where you stand, right? And he's surrounded by these two female executives, you know, one of them is, you know, the comedy development exec and some other
00:28:25.000And we're doing our song and dance, you know, and then he comes down, then the talking dog, and, you know, we've got it all figured out and all of our jokes.
00:29:43.000But I realized in that moment that none of the normal rules that apply to propriety and business apply in Hollywood because, you know, this woman is probably 32, 33 years old at the time.
00:29:57.000Probably has a law degree from Harvard, probably could have gone to a law firm and gotten $280,000 right out of college.
00:30:03.000Instead, she probably went and worked in the mailroom at CAA for sub-minimum wage, was abused horribly by powerful people for five years, and she worked her way out of that.
00:30:12.000She got her first job at a network, got abused horribly again, making very little money, worked her way up, clawed and scraped, because she's on a path to actual power in the culture.
00:30:24.000And she's not about To cash all of that in for a $500,000 settlement from this TV studio?
00:30:33.000A $1,000,000 settlement from this TV studio?
00:30:35.000She didn't go through all of... She could have made $5,000,000 in her career if she had just gotten that law job right out of... She's chasing something greater.
00:30:44.000And for that reason, this guy has complete impunity to treat her in any way that he wants to.
00:30:51.000And that's when the reality of what Hollywood is really started to hit me.
00:30:54.000And I started to kind of not know what to do with that information.
00:30:57.000And I retreated back into myself a little bit, as I had all those years earlier after 9-11, and get lost.
00:31:16.000And another friend of mine who attended the home study at that time, the Bible study, Who was the heir to a very famous business family, you know, as rich and powerful as you can be, and political, invited me to this secret Hollywood meeting of conservatives called Friends of Abe.
00:31:40.000He goes, Commander, you've got to... He called me Commander.
00:31:44.000Takes up a lot of room, lives in the moment.
00:31:46.000He said, Commander, you've got to come to this meeting.
00:31:49.000You know, they think the way you think. They say the kind of stuff you say.
00:31:52.000And we went. He was kind enough to take me to one of these things.
00:31:55.000And he's gone on to be a huge movie star since.
00:31:57.000And probably has evolved different political opinions than he had when he was a kid.
00:32:04.000But I was lucky enough that the opinions he had at the kids led me to this organization.
00:32:08.000And I met all these underground Hollywood conservatives.
00:32:13.000This was getting close to 2008, and I just realized, like, I could have a voice in things that were important to me in politics that I couldn't have if I kept pursuing culture.
00:32:25.000At that first meeting, Andrew Breitbart was there, Bill Whittle was there, our buddy Johnny Voight was there.
00:32:31.000So a lot of people who became sort of my next phase of my, you know, the second half of my Hollywood life, the people who are very important to me.
00:32:38.000And really because of that meeting I got to meet you.
00:32:40.000So we'll get to that in a second, that transformational moment when finally we met.
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00:34:12.000And one of the great moments of my Hollywood life, I started having John Voight, Bill Whittle, and Andrew Breitbart.
00:34:21.000I was living with this actor at the time, right, who was successful and was kind enough to let me lodge.
00:34:27.000And on Thursday nights, those guys would come over to my Well, it wasn't my house, but the house in which I live.
00:34:35.000And we would talk about ways that we could engage with politics.
00:34:40.000And I made my first political video at that time, which was about Obama's attendance of Reverend Wright's church in Chicago.
00:34:49.000It was called A Thousand Sundays, which was more or less the number of Sundays that he had spent listening to black liberation theology.
00:34:57.000This is before PJTV events, before Bill Whittle has a political career.
00:35:01.000And one day at that time I was producing this little film and I was helping do a re-edit of the original cut of the film and we had set it up in the living room of this house on the actor's big screen TV.
00:35:14.000We'd set up this whole editing rig and I was, you know, just trying to help these guys get their film where it needed to be.
00:35:21.000There's a knock at the door and one of the young filmmakers who had made this very inexpensive but very charming little film goes and answers the door and he comes back and his eyes are like saucers and he says, John Voight is at the door.
00:36:14.000So Friends of Abe was giving me these cool opportunities, these cool experiences, and a few years after that is when they came to me and asked me if I would take it over and run it.
00:36:27.000He was doing some very important philanthropy at the time that he wanted to focus his attention on, and I got to spend the next five years leading that organization.
00:36:35.000But right there in the middle was that fateful day when Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring first met.
00:36:41.000Yeah, so again, a lot of this is attributable from my angle to Andrew Breitbart, because I end up getting a job out of law school.
00:36:48.000I joined a law firm and I'm working there for 10 months.
00:36:55.000And I am unemployed and newly married and I have a mortgage.
00:36:59.000And I talked to my friend Andrew Breitbart, who I've known since I was 16 years old, and I was at UCLA, and Andrew says, you know, there's this guy named Mark Masters, he runs a company called Talk Radio Network, and he may be looking for an in-house counsel, so why don't you go talk to him?
00:37:11.000So I talked to Mark, and I end up getting a job for one-third the pay, doing some in-house counsel work, but the deal was, I would only do law half the time, and then the other half of the time, I'd be doing production work, like literally just cutting audio for various radios, and putting together articles and highlighting parts of them, And making sure that all these hosts were prepped for the day.
00:37:30.000And over time, I see that Mark has Hollywood aspirations.
00:37:34.000Like, Mark wants to make movies, and he's particularly enchanted with the folks over at Weta Workshop in New Zealand.
00:37:39.000And one day he says to me, you know, there's this guy I know from Friends of Abe who really knows the movie industry, and I think that you should talk to him because you're writing, at that point I was writing a book called Primetime Propaganda about propaganda inside the TV industry and the leftist bias of the TV industry.
00:37:53.000And Mark said, you know, you really should talk to this guy, Jeremy Boring.
00:37:57.000And I'll be honest, at the time I was like, okay, I'm not sure what we're talking about exactly, but sounds okay.
00:38:03.000And also, you know, I'm writing a book on TV and I have a little bit of chip on my shoulder and I'm like, okay, I guess we'll talk.
00:38:09.000And he hooks us up to talk about the possibility of movies.
00:38:11.000And you're walking me through, my first recollection is you walking me through the industry and basically saying there's no money here and it's hell.
00:39:00.000He's a big thinker and a big dreamer, Mark, and very philosophical.
00:39:07.000So I really enjoyed visiting with him and talking to him.
00:39:10.000And he wanted, you know, I had been to Weta.
00:39:12.000I had been to New Zealand at that time because Joel had shot the film Avatar out there, which, because of a weird way that the world works, I got to go out for part of that.
00:39:24.000And so I remember Mark wanted us to meet, but there was some sort of actual deal that he wanted us to connect about, I feel like.
00:39:31.000And I've tried for a couple of years now to remember what that deal was.
00:39:34.000But what I remember is that you and I got together at a coffee bean on Ventura Boulevard, and we had this conversation, and I tried to dissuade you from wasting Mark's money trying to get into a traditional Hollywood deal.
00:39:49.000What I remember being particularly struck by was a couple things.
00:39:52.000One, that you were the smartest guy I'd ever talked to.
00:39:56.000Two, I'd never really been around anyone who was from, right?
00:39:59.000I'd never been around... Not a lot of Jews in Slayton.
00:40:15.000He was like Dennis Prager size, like six foot six, 300 plus pounds.
00:40:22.000He looked for smooth stones whenever the guy came around, you know?
00:40:26.000He had some sort of weird chromosomal genetic thing where he had a big bushy mustache and half of it was snow white and half of it was jet black divided right down the middle.
00:40:38.000And he loved life, and he loved his students, and he was Jewish, and practicing Jewish, you know, not in name only, although not Orthodox.
00:40:48.000But he took his Judaism very seriously.
00:40:50.000There was one synagogue in, I think, only one in Lubbock at the time, and he took me there one time.
00:40:57.000It was my first really exposure to Judaism.
00:41:00.000And he gave me, this is an absolutely true story, I had gotten drunk for the first time on some boxed red wine, which was my go-to at that time.
00:41:25.000I'm sure you could just see it all over me, you know.
00:41:27.000And he asked me about it, and I lied to him, too, as though hungover, barely getting through his day, you know, 17-year-old Jeremy was smarter than these actual humans who had lived life, you know, these actual adult humans.
00:41:43.000But he listened to me plead my case for why I was still a good boy.
00:41:48.000He gave me this great piece of advice.
00:41:49.000He was Scottish background, a Scottish Jew.
00:41:52.000And he said, Jeremy, I'm going to give you a great piece of advice.
00:41:54.000He said, if you're going to drink, drink scotch.
00:42:01.000This is my high school vice principal, right?
00:42:30.000Yeah, and I don't have a lot of memory of that, of what happened in that first couple of weeks, but I remember fairly soon after that, that I was at your condo and you were showing me production stuff that you had done on your laptop.
00:42:46.000You had made some videos, some of it you had done for Mark, some of it you had done for yourself, and it was sort of conceptual, and you handed me a couple of screenplays that you had written.
00:42:56.000One of them, they were for TV, they weren't film, and I read them and thought, I mean, Ben is very intelligent, by my standards, very successful at that time.
00:43:07.000You owned something, like a piece of property.
00:43:10.000And actually talented and knowledgeable.
00:43:12.000And I thought at that time, this guy is going to be a friend, and I think that we're going to do some stuff together.
00:43:20.000I mean, we started working together pretty quickly. I mean, we started thinking about, at that time you were doing something called Declaration Entertainment, and we started talking about, you know, kind of videos that you could produce. And we, it was mostly us talking business strategy and kind of throwing around ideas for really several years there. We did kind of little side projects. I remember...
00:43:35.000We made those videos for Encounter Break.
00:43:37.000For Encounter Books, so for people who know Encounter Books, he's a really great publisher, and one of the first things that I did is I realized Jeremy had these gifts visually and in terms of production that I didn't have, and that he really needed sort of a pitch man to put him in the room with people who needed to do those kinds of videos, because at the time you were doing Bill Whittle's videos, but I thought, okay, you can be doing more production videos for no margin at all.
00:43:59.000You were doing these videos for Encounter Books and then you started doing videos for PragerU on the back of that.
00:44:07.000And that became kind of a business for you.
00:44:11.000I was working with Jonathan Hay, who became our head of production here at Daily Wire when we first started, right?
00:44:16.000He helped kind of create the look of those Prager videos and helped create the look of those early Encounter videos.
00:44:22.000I had one employee, essentially, right?
00:44:25.000I had a little business, the business was me.
00:44:27.000I actually had two employees, because technically Bill was an employee of the company, and Jonathan, and poor Jonathan had been working on American Idol before I drug him into this and making an actual adult salary, and now he's getting paid like...
00:45:14.000But the first part of the story is central to it, which is you, out of some sort of altruism or something, wanted me to have opportunities.
00:45:21.000Well, I saw talented guy and I saw that the talent, you're kind of spinning your wheels.
00:45:24.000And so it was like I wanted to make sure, as behind the scenes I've quoted many times, for me a key principle is Hyman Roth.
00:45:35.000Quoting the elderly Jewish gangster from The Godfather, who ends up very poorly.
00:45:38.000But in any case, we started working together, and then sort of the first time that we formally worked together, where we actually formed a company together, and we actually started working together, was with Truth Revolt.
00:45:50.000Well, you had given me one of the best pieces of business advice I ever got, and at the same time, another friend of mine named Frank gave me a very similar piece of advice, and it was sort of, you know, God wanted me to hear it twice.
00:46:04.000You you said it much more colorfully than he did which as you said something along the lines of Jeremy you're You're very good at pissing, but you are very bad at knowing which way the wind blows If you if you would just turn and let reality Work for you instead of you always working against reality.
00:46:25.000I think you'd have some success and that really resonated with me I At that time, I was also realizing something about you, which was that you needed to be famous, and that you needed a platform from which to influence the political conversation.
00:46:40.000And I thought that I had discovered it, because, again, by way of Andrew Breitbart and some of our Friends of Ape connections, I'd become pals with a lot of the board members at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
00:46:52.000David, former leftist, becomes conservative, and I saw a lot of commonality between you and David.
00:47:12.000scene, both with a rich interest in culture.
00:47:17.000The difference, of course, being that he's 50 years older than you are.
00:47:20.000And I could see that there was going to come a time where David would need to step down, and he would want his legacy, the Freedom Center, to be passed on.
00:47:27.000I thought, well, there isn't a better guy in the country than Ben for that job.
00:47:32.000So behind the scenes, I started meeting with board members who are also part of Friends of Abe and planting seeds about this and getting buy-in.
00:47:38.000And this goes on for maybe 18 months of really getting people to see that you could be the future of the Freedom Center.
00:47:47.000And then they were working, David, behind the scenes until one day, and this is the way all good ideas are, right?
00:47:57.000that you could be the heir at the Freedom Center and he calls you and gives you this opportunity with Truth Revolt and you and I at that time create, yeah, to your point, we created our first company within the Freedom Center. And it actually saw some initial pretty significant success.
00:48:14.000And we learned some really important lessons from that one.
00:48:17.000Among those lessons were luck is not a business strategy because we had designed a website and very much we were hunting for drudge links at that time, which was one way that conservatives would try to generate traffic off of no budget was if you get a link from drudge it explodes your traffic.
00:48:30.000And so we would try to get links from drudge and we realized that sometimes the gods were generous and sometimes they were not.
00:48:36.000And the other thing that we learned is that you have to find You have to find an audience that is capable of understanding the business pitch.
00:48:44.000Well, this is when you gave me my nickname, I believe, which is the stupid whisperer.
00:48:51.000You and I would always pitch people our ideas, and you would come in, and you would Ben Shapiro all over them.
00:48:57.000You would use Harvard words, like, you are a podcast turned up to 2x just in regular life, you know, in terms of the speed of your... And these people would just sort of look at you with these blank, doe-eyed expressions, and then the stupid whisperer would come in.
00:49:34.000But it turned out that no matter whether it was me or whether it was the Stupid Whisperer, there are certain people who are just not capable of receiving these ideas, and we both know who we're talking about here.
00:49:42.000This is when you wrote our business plan on a cocktail napkin.
00:49:47.000Now, to be fair, you came up with the business plan, so Jeremy was the one who cracked the code of not only You know, sort of, we need to invest in making people in our movement, I mean, not just me, but generally, more famous.
00:50:00.000We need to actually use the tools at our disposal.
00:50:03.000And you're the first person to really discover the magic of social media and how important social media was.
00:50:08.000Because most of us were spending our days, you know, whittling away on Twitter.
00:50:11.000But you were the first person who said, wait a second, there's a whole other world of social media.
00:50:16.000So at this point, you can take over the narrative.
00:50:19.000Yeah, I mean, the idea was we should be marketing first, right?
00:50:21.000And social media presents the opportunity to do that.
00:50:24.000Of course, the Freedom Center and therefore Truth Revolt were a non-profit.
00:50:28.000They were always struggling to figure out how to pay for us because one of the problems in conservative nonprofits is that no matter how successful a particular initiative is, its ultimate success is determined by whether or not people will keep giving you money for it.
00:50:42.000And unfortunately, when you go to the same donors year after year, you have to give them something new.
00:50:46.000So we had had a lot of success in that first year or so of Truth Revolt.
00:50:50.000But what was the story we were going to take to donors next?
00:50:54.000Instead of taking them year after year, what if we had kind of a for-profit model within the nonprofit universe where we could use ad revenue and the enormous traffic available to us through marketing on social to pay for all of this?
00:51:06.000And then we're not beholden to the donors.
00:51:10.000And now even the stupid whisperer could not talk slow enough for certain people to understand it.
00:51:16.000And we're in this big meeting one day and this very wealthy, very elderly benefactor of conservative think tanks said, you know, essentially he said, I need you to explain this to me in even simpler terms.
00:51:29.000And we'd explained it about seven times already.
00:51:58.000Yeah, well, they still wanted me to stick around so they could pretend that I was still associated, but I had been relegated off to the gulag somewhere, wasn't actually given the death sentence, I was just sort of, and I was like, okay, that's not what we're doing.
00:52:09.000The funny thing is, we had both bought houses like one.
00:52:13.000Well, I mean, it bodes very poorly for our booth, because literally every time in our careers we have bought houses, something cataclysmic has happened.
00:52:21.000So at that point, we decide that we're going to take that business plan and go to market.
00:52:26.000And you were really the driving force here, because you found the people who decided to actually take a flyer on us.
00:52:33.000Well, the third part of our triad, right?
00:52:36.000Caleb, our business partner, co-CEO of the company.
00:52:39.000I'd been working with Caleb at that time.
00:52:40.000He was working with a high-net-worth family out of Texas.
00:52:44.000They're trying to get involved in culture.
00:52:46.000Like Mark Masters and many others before, through whatever political connections, they got connected to me, and then I tried to talk them out of spending their money on culture because I wanted them to maintain some of their money.
00:52:57.000And during this period of time, I'd really hit it off with Caleb and And when we lost that job at the Freedom Center, I called him and said, listen, I know you're trying to get involved in culture.
00:53:07.000I said, I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment, but I think you have to go the roundabout way.
00:53:15.000I think I basically gave him the same plan that I had pitched to you and then to others, which was we need a marketing mechanism, a marketing and distribution mechanism that allows us to actually put an audience on the target because Hollywood will never cooperate.
00:53:29.000Even if you manage to make a great film, they'll never cooperate.
00:53:32.000They'll make it very difficult for you.
00:53:33.000I said, I think with Ben, and with what we've been doing at Truth Revolt evolved with this cocktail napkin business plan, that we can make something that's capable of marketing whatever we produce thereafter for this particular audience.
00:54:00.000Fortunately, Caleb quickly got the vision, and he went to the high-net-worth family with whom he was working at that time, and they took a risk on us.
00:54:13.000They committed to give us $7.5 million to start The Daily Wire.
00:54:20.000We wanted for them to just pay the expenses of the company month after month, up to the $7.5 million mark.
00:54:27.000And at month 14, we were $4.7 million in and we became cash flow positive.
00:54:34.000We never took the rest of that money and we've never gone back and taken any money since.
00:54:38.000I mean, since then we've grown this company.
00:54:40.000Off of that cocktail napkin business plan.
00:54:42.000Now, it's fair to say, and I think Caleb would interrupt here if he were here, to say, it got a little bit more sophisticated than the cocktail napkin.
00:54:50.000And it's amazing when we look back at the original projections, which places we thought would be centers of revenue and which places we did not.
00:55:04.000I look back at that business plan and what we had allocated for the amount of revenue from the podcast was minimal.
00:55:10.000Compared to how successful the podcast became.
00:55:12.000So it just shows you, you know, all you can do is sort of plan for the possibility of success, and then you push where there's actual mush, right?
00:55:19.000You know, I responded to a tweet from Cernovich a few weeks ago.
00:55:24.000Every now and then when he isn't posting politics, he'll actually post kind of aspirational business ideas, and they're quite good.
00:55:30.000I can't remember exactly what he had tweeted, but it was something about success and failure in business.
00:55:35.000And I responded with what I think is the greatest lesson I've learned in this journey that we've been on.
00:55:40.000Which is that your success in business, ultimately, it doesn't come down to the quality of your plan.
00:55:45.000It doesn't come down to your ability to avoid catastrophe.
00:55:49.000It doesn't come down to your ability to systematize success.
00:55:54.000All of those things matter, but none of them are what determine ultimately long-term success.
00:55:58.000Long-term success in business is just your ability to fail, maneuver, and keep moving.
00:56:05.000That's what we've really done over these last five years, I think, that have allowed us to be successful.
00:56:09.000We have ideas, and they're good as far as they're good.
00:56:12.000They get you moving and they get you pointed in a direction.
00:56:15.000But I think we've done a great job of never falling so in love with our plans that we're unable to change and maneuver and pivot and shift and, you know, let go of things that I think people who fail in business just can't let go of.
00:56:34.000That's what I say, you can't fall in love with your pocket pair.
00:56:37.000I always say you can't fall in love with that pocket pair because you don't know what's going to be the turn of the river.
00:56:42.000And I think that that really is, you know, as an executive, which you now are.
00:56:46.000You went from being a production guy back when you were 17 to being an executive.
00:56:49.000So really the job hasn't changed, just the scope of the business has changed.
00:56:52.000One of the things that I've seen, and you know, I've told you this personally, is the amount of adaptability and growth that you've personally gone through, even in the time when you've been running this business, is pretty incredible.
00:57:01.000I mean, because we started off and it was, okay, we have this idea, and shockingly, this idea is actually working better than we thought this idea was going to.
00:57:08.000And then, You know, there have been periods where we hit real skids.
00:57:12.000I mean, there was one particular period not very long ago, you know, within the last couple of years, where we looked at each other and we thought, OK, well, we're going to have to stick and move here because things have changed pretty radically.
00:57:21.000And I thought that it was a, maybe you can talk about it, because I thought it was a real clarifying moment for you as a person and as a boss and as a person who helps, who runs a company.
00:57:33.000Yeah, so one of the things that people don't understand, there's a lot of things, and listen, I was this guy, and I grew up in a small town.
00:57:39.000I had a huge argument with someone very important to me one time.
00:57:45.000We were backpacking around Europe after high school, and we got into an argument over whether having a million dollars made you rich.
00:57:53.000Keep in mind, we're from this tiny town, right?
00:57:55.000And she had made this point that someone she knows had basically inherited a million dollars and now they were rich.
00:58:02.000It had never occurred to me before that moment that, well, if you have a million dollars and you have to live off of it for, say, the next 20 years, it's only $50,000 a year, right?
00:58:15.000And so I argued that that wouldn't make you rich.
00:58:17.000And it's funny that looking back when we were kids, but this became a major contentious issue.
00:58:23.000All that to say that until you've run a business, until you've had to make a payroll, until you've dealt with large sums of money, you have a lot of notions about what that would be that are, like any inexperienced person's notions, are probably largely untrue.
00:58:40.000The worst moment for our business came when the company was generating $28, $29 million that year, and we almost lost the business.
00:58:50.000You can say, well, how can you lose a business that's making that much money?
00:58:54.000And it's because businesses operate on cash flow, right?
00:58:59.000How much money is here at any given time?
00:59:02.000And like anybody's economics, how much money are you spending?
00:59:06.000And when you talk about margins in business, people will get upset when they're like, oh, you know, the CEO made $100 million.
00:59:15.000There's people who work for him that are making minimum wage.
00:59:17.000There's people who work for him who are making $50,000.
00:59:20.000He could still make $20 million, and he could give the other $80 million to his employees.
00:59:26.000Everyone who doesn't know anything about business or money has had that thought.
00:59:30.000What you don't realize is, well, no, if you have 20,000 employees, like guys who are making that kind of money.
00:59:39.000That amount of money, even $80 million, your employees wouldn't even notice that they had gotten any extra money when you divide it out across all those employees.
00:59:51.000And you would have a worse executive, right?
00:59:53.000You wouldn't be able to get a top-level executive who can keep growing the business.
00:59:58.000The truth is that as your company grows and your expenses grow, it only takes one terrible moment.
01:00:06.000Cash is the lubricant that keeps the gears turning.
01:00:10.000And if you run out of cash, this thing locks up.
01:00:14.000If you still have $20 million of value, it doesn't even matter if you have $20 million of revenue that would come in over the next 12 months if you kept operating.
01:00:22.000If you've run out of the cash necessary to operate, the whole thing grinds to a halt, and now you can't get to next month where the next revenue would happen, and you certainly can't get to the month after that, and you can't get to the month after that.
01:00:32.000That's why, like, when a company like, I don't know, I remember when Kmart, uh, Went through bankruptcy.
01:00:40.000They were generating billions of dollars of revenue at that time.
01:00:42.000Yeah, literally Remington right now is going through a bankruptcy because they cannot generate enough money to generate enough guns to sell.
01:00:48.000Because people want to buy so many guns that they literally don't have enough money to produce the guns to sell them.
01:00:52.000Because even success can destroy a company.
01:00:56.000And what we were dealing with at that moment is success was destroying our company.
01:00:59.000And it was destroying our company in a couple of different ways.
01:01:01.000One, our expenses, you know, you spend into your growth.
01:01:53.000So in business, you constantly have to be replacing yourself.
01:01:56.000And what you find, it seems obvious that the things you're bad at are problems for your business until you replace yourself with someone who's better at them.
01:02:04.000But the ultimate truth is that it's the things that you're best at that are the biggest threat to your business, because those are the things that you're the least likely to replace yourself at.
01:02:13.000It's like, I'm willing to hire an accountant because I know I'm not good at math, but it's very hard for me to hire the people who are good at what I'm good at.
01:02:21.000And one of the great things that happened during that period of real crisis in our company is that we had already brought on some very gifted people.
01:02:31.000And I think we had the humility in that moment to promote them into roles that formerly had just been me and Caleb, essentially.
01:02:39.000And we promoted them into the things that we thought we were good at, and they were able to take the company really to this whole next level.
01:02:45.000And it's the next area of growth for us.
01:02:47.000Now we're solving not the current problems of the business, but it's allowed us as executives to go live in the future of the business, which is why we have the opportunity to make this move that we're making.
01:03:00.000I don't want to talk about too much of it here.
01:03:02.000It's a little premature, but you and I both know that we're on the verge of doing some things that no conservative media company has yet done.
01:03:08.000Some things that our audience and our movement will be, I think they'll be game changers.
01:03:13.000That's only happening because we hit those hard times and because, like struggle and failure always are in life, even in your personal life, your business life, your spiritual life, if you have the humility to realize that struggle is meant to teach you something, it's meant to change you.
01:03:35.000Then you can avail yourself of it as an opportunity.
01:03:37.000You can see the hardship as an opportunity.
01:03:39.000I think that's what we were able to do last year and why we're in this unbelievable spot that we're in right now as a company.
01:03:44.000So in a second, I'm going to ask Jeremy about what the hell we're doing in Nashville.