Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring discuss the importance of keeping politics out of children s entertainment, the strange inversion of Hollywood from the transcendental and literary to the political, and the folly of propagandistic populism put forward at the expense of traditional values, culture, and enjoyment for your children. They also discuss the landmark launch of the Bent Key Kids platform, and Ben's new role as co-CEO of the new company, Bent Key, which is launching this new app, the first step in a three-year plan to spend $100 million over the next three years on launching a new company with four new kids shows from around the world that have all been vetted and vetted to be highly entertaining for kids, and to not betray the values Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro believe kids should find value in their work or else they could be betraying the values of the people who find their work and work in the work they do for kids who do their best to find their value in the things they do best, and not to betray those values. Today's episode features: 1. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's new series on depression and anxiety 2. The Pendragon Cycle 3. The Reimagine Disney campaign 4. The Little People 5. The Quiet Part Out Loud 6. The Woke Politics of the Now 7. What's next for Disney? 8. What s next for the Disney brand? 9. What are you waiting for? 10. What do you think? 11. What does Disney have to do with it? 12. Who are you want? 13. How do you want to see? 14. What would you like to see in the future of Disney as a kid entertainment company? 15. What is your kids entertainment company in 2020? 16. What should you want in the world? 17. What kind of media company you're going to get in the next five years? 18. What can you want for your kids? 19. Who do you have in the first place? 21. What will you want from a Disney movie or TV show? 22. How much money you're looking for in the most? And so much more? Is there a better way to get your kids to be more woke in the culture you want you to be woke and more woke? 23. What you can you give your kids more woke and feel more woke, more engaged in politics?
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with screenwriter, director, and co-founder of The Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring.
00:01:15.980We discuss yesterday's landmark launch of the Bent Key Kids platform, what children's entertainment, really cultural drama, should be trying to keep politics out of it.
00:01:29.180The strange inversion of Hollywood from the transcendental and literary to the political, and the folly of propagandistic populism put forward at the expense of traditional values, culture, enjoyment, and your children.
00:01:47.620Well, hello, Jeremy. It's good to see you.
00:01:52.860For a while, you've been, I'm in Lisbon at the moment. I arrived literally like an hour and a half ago, if that, and so, yeah, I've zipped over here to the studio so that we could talk.
00:02:02.780You had a big announcement yesterday, so let's start off our conversation.
00:02:08.120Well, first of all, why don't you tell everybody who's watching and listening what our relationship is and exactly who you are in relationship to me and so forth, and then we'll talk about last night's announcement.
00:02:18.280So I'm the co-founder and, on a good day, co-CEO of The Daily Wire. I'm actually on a leave of absence from that co-CEO role. At the moment, I'm in Eastern Europe and Croatia today, producing our first major scripted series for Daily Wire Plus called The Pendragon Cycle.
00:02:36.400But our relationship is because of my involvement with Daily Wire, where your podcast is hosted and we make a lot of projects together, which has been a real treat for me.
00:02:46.320One of the things that Ben and I, Shapiro, when we first started working together in advance of founding The Daily Wire, we really wanted to be involved in things that we thought had weight beyond just the politics of the moment.
00:02:58.860And that may sound obvious, but we're both in a very political sphere. And so it wasn't readily apparent how to get from point A to point B, how to go from talking about politics every day to talking about deeper issues and ultimately to not only criticizing culture, but to making culture, to doing something proactive in the culture.
00:03:17.900But that's what our journey has been. And in some ways, our announcement yesterday is another major step.
00:03:24.700But truly, beginning to work with you a little over a year ago was a major step in that regard as well, just to move us out of only being able to talk about today and to talk about the things that undergird today, the things that undergird the news.
00:03:38.800So that's our relationship. And I think tees up well the announcement from yesterday as well, which is that we launched our new company called Bent Key, which is our children's entertainment entity.
00:03:50.000We announced a little over a year ago that we were going to do so in the wake of those tapes that Chris Ruffo leaked from Disney, where executives were talking about their not-so-secret gay agenda and inserting queerness into their content.
00:04:03.360They were talking about the Reimagine Disney campaign, where they were going to have more than 50% of all of the talent of all of the on-screen characters in Disney content be from so-called underrepresented groups.
00:04:16.200It was just this, you know, they said the quiet part out loud, which is essentially that they were going to use this brand that has for 100 years built goodwill and trust with parents to inculcate in children the sort of woke politics of the now.
00:04:31.600We felt a real need to challenge that. We committed to spend $100 million over three years pursuing a challenge to it.
00:04:37.640And yesterday we took the first step, which is launching this new app, this new company, Bent Key, with four original shows, with over 18 licensed shows from around the world that have all been carefully vetted, to first be highly entertaining for kids, and second, not to betray the values of the kinds of people who find value in your work or in Daily Wire's work or Ben Shapiro's work,
00:04:59.640that they could trust, that they could put their kids in front of this content and not receive sort of a woke sucker punch for their trouble.
00:05:08.640Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit.
00:05:11.060So I was thinking the rejoinder to the implicit suppositions that you're bringing to bear on this conversation is something like the left's insistence that everything is political.
00:05:24.380You know, and when I, I taught this course at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, and it's online, called Maps of Meaning, and it was about, I think what it's about is the inevitable religious substrate of culture itself.
00:05:37.720And I have a reason for saying inevitably religious.
00:05:40.280And, you know, the students used to ask me, you know, why was I convinced that what I was discussing wasn't just another ideology among ideologies, which is a variant of the claim that everything is political.
00:05:54.920Now, you know, one of the things you and I have discussed, and Shapiro as well, at the Daily Wire, is our belief that everything isn't political and that there's a strata of culture that is associated with deeper narrative, let's say.
00:06:08.640Again, fairy tales would certainly fit into that category, that has to maintain its separateness from what's political, and it can.
00:06:17.280Now, you mentioned, you know, with the Daily Wire that part of the limitations of its original conceptualization was that it was of the moment.
00:06:28.980And, you know, I've seen that's a box in some ways that Shapiro has been in.
00:06:33.620And he was participating with the Exodus seminar, and I could tell that was a real pleasure for him because he got to stretch his significant intellectual abilities beyond the merely political.
00:06:46.500So what do you think you have to offer at Bent Key that isn't political?
00:06:51.260And is there a way that you can defend the claim that it's actually not political?
00:06:55.520And if it's not political, then how do you know it isn't?
00:06:58.920How do you stop it from being political?
00:07:01.240And why should people find that credible, given the political orientation of the Daily Wire?
00:07:17.920And it's perhaps a political act to launch Bent Key at all.
00:07:23.080I mean, certainly it's a reaction to what we see as the excesses of the left manifesting themselves in particularly children's entertainment.
00:07:30.720But, you know, if you look at the broader work that we've been doing over the last several years, entertainment more generally, I've learned not to refer to it as adult entertainment, although we would get more clicks probably if I did.
00:07:40.640So, it is a political action that we're taking, but that is distinct from saying, in particular with the kids' content, that the content itself will be intended to communicate politics.
00:07:53.880And I think that that's perhaps a subtle but very important distinction.
00:08:00.620I think that you can make a good argument that one of the problems in our culture is that we infantilize adults.
00:08:06.180That through the university system, for example, we now refer to 23-year-olds as college kids and expect that they would not be held accountable for anything that they do as though they're still juvenile legal standards for 23-year-olds who at any other point in human history would have been, you know, married, parents, productive in their societies, perhaps have fought in wars, perhaps be members of the clubs and institutions that used to be a major part of what held up.
00:08:35.600Sort of the culture itself, you know, church communities and other kinds of civic organizations.
00:08:44.880But then on the other hand, we take actual kids and in many ways deny them their childhoods because we instead are using them as sort of social experiments to see if it's possible to inculcate into them a set of almost anti-value values.
00:09:00.300I say anti-value because they're not anything that would have historically been considered values and they in many ways oppose the values on which civilization thus far has been built.
00:09:11.040You know, what happens if we tell little boys that they're little girls?
00:09:13.680What happens if we drug an entire generation of boys out of all of the sort of biological impulses that boys have?
00:09:21.280What happens if we have children marching in political rallies and use them as political instruments?
00:09:28.320That's what I don't want Bent Key to be.
00:09:30.560So while I'm doing something political in the launch of Bent Key, what Bent Key itself from a content point of view is endeavoring to do is say,
00:09:38.220no, you know, I don't think that adults are kids, but I think that kids by God should be, and we should provide them with the kind of content that almost all of us up until this particular moment got to have in our youth,
00:09:49.860which was content that took the values on which our civilization was built, wrapped them in a sense of imagination, wrapped them in a sense of wonder, wrapped them in a sense of joy,
00:09:59.020and gave children the opportunity to engage with them, not as lessons, but as entire worlds in which they might see themselves and project themselves into.
00:10:13.240There's a bunch of thoughts going on in my mind about how to distinguish the political from the, I think, from the eternal.
00:10:20.620And so we could say the deeper a story is, the less it's reflective of the immediate moment and the more it's reflective of the eternal.
00:10:30.500Now, the problem with that is that it gets, if it gets too reflective of the eternal, it tends to float away.
00:10:36.300Mircea Eliade, historian of religions, he called that the deus abscondus, the God who floats away, essentially.
00:10:45.320And one of the things that Eliade did that was very interesting was note that the Nietzschean death of God was actually a recurring motif in culture,
00:10:56.140that a society would be founded on a religious revelation, which was its core narrative,
00:11:00.980and that it would run in some ways till it exhausted that narrative or ran into a counter-proposition that took it out or it degenerated,
00:11:09.580you know, it degenerated into sort of a multi-headed paganism, something like that.
00:11:13.280But that it wasn't uncommon for God to disappear, and God would disappear, so to speak,
00:11:19.240when his conceptualization became so far removed from the concrete that it was as if he was,
00:11:25.960he's like the God of Einstein, just sort of an abstract cosmic force, right?
00:11:30.420Now, you want to find a great narrative.
00:11:33.640You announced the first live-action movie that you're going to produce, Snow White,
00:11:38.620which is a very interesting choice because it was the movie, of course, that Disney based his empire on,
00:11:47.160Now, a timeless fairy tale is, it's sort of halfway between the ultimately religious and the proximal and temporally bound.
00:11:58.720And we have evidence, there is evidence from historical research that some of the fairy tales that are commonly known are up to 15,000 years old.
00:12:11.560So, and the reason that's relevant is because they've demonstrated their eternal relevance merely as a consequence of being remembered that long.
00:12:20.220And so, one of the ways that, the reason I'm saying this is because what, there's a technical way to some degree that you can distinguish what's merely political from what's timeless and eternal,
00:12:31.560because what has the latter properties is so ancient and unchanging.
00:12:37.440And one of the things I learned in this Exodus seminar, and this was mostly from Jonathan Pajot,
00:12:43.660because he developed this idea most specifically and accurately,
00:12:48.560was that for a society to order itself properly, it has to order itself under a pyramidal structure.
00:12:55.960And one element of that pyramidal structure is horizontal, and that would be the Jacob's ladder leading up to heaven.