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Oct. 11, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:41
Jeremy Boreing | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 102
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The worst moment for our business came when the company was generating $28, $29 million that year, and we almost lost the business.
Because even success can destroy a company.
And what we were dealing with at that moment is success was destroying our company.
Well, well, it was only a matter of time before this happened.
My friend, co-founder, co-CEO, and most importantly, the god-king of The Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, moved to L.A.
as a young man with stars in his eyes 20 years ago.
And now, we are in the midst of pulling our thriving business out of this garbage state for a new home.
Before this company, Jeremy hustled around Hollywood for a long time.
He became good friends with people who'd go on to have big careers, all the while working for his own big break.
He did some acting.
He wrote and pitched movies around town.
He produced several of them at production companies he started with his buddies over the years.
He even ran the inconspicuous organization Friends of Eight, a group formed to bring together the people on the right working throughout Hollywood.
It was through this group Jeremy and I met.
We knew early on we'd do business together.
We thought we struck gold with our first venture, but that went bust when Jeremy was abruptly fired.
Which is okay, because it led us to create Daily Wire.
You'll hear the full, epic Jeremy Benn origin story here today.
who also discussed the man that moved Jeremy to conservatism and the big plans for Daily Wire when we touch down in Nashville, Tennessee.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Just 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.
Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.
You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Jeremy Boring, thanks so much for joining the show.
I mean, you literally just came down and now we're talking.
Yeah, like I own that and that and that and that.
It's good to be here.
So yeah, this is kind of weird.
I mean, it's a weird setup.
We talk literally hours a day and now we're going to talk in front of a camera.
So we can't say any of the things we would say off camera because we're on camera.
So why don't we, it's also weird because I don't know which questions to ask you since I know so many of the answers already.
So why don't we start with how did Jeremy Boring grow up?
You know, Texan boy, Slayton, Texas.
Explain the upbringing of Jeremy Boring, media mogul.
Yeah, so like all media moguls, I come from humble beginnings.
I was born in a small town in West Texas called Slayton, population of about 6,000-7,000, something like that.
And my dad's a railroader, mom's a stay-at-home mom.
You know, it's a wonderful town.
It isn't really known for much.
I mean, Peggy Sue from the Buddy Holly song, Peggy Sue, I think, was born there.
And Bobby Keys was born there.
And 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.
That'll tell you just how prominent is the town of Slayton.
It's a great town.
It's wonderful people.
There's sort of a divide in town between German Catholics and then Baptists.
That's what the town is, German Catholics and Baptists.
And we have, like all small towns, you know, it's very, very patriotic, pro-America.
It's Texas, so it's very pro-Texas.
And you know, I'm pleased to have gotten the childhood that I got.
Before the internet, I'm part of that weird generation where when I was 18 is when everything happened.
At 18, I got a computer.
At 18, I got a cell phone.
At 18, I got an email address.
What that means is I got to have an entire childhood without those things.
You'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.
I 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.
The child never has to face any kind of adversity on their own.
You never have to learn to make decisions for yourself.
You 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.
And you actually have to solve for those mistakes, even as a young person.
And so I'm pleased to be sort of that last generation, I think, where that was true.
And then how did you end up Moving from Slayton, Texas to L.A.
So you got the Hollywood bug.
How'd you get the Hollywood bug?
As much as I love my hometown, and I truly do, I hated that place when I was a teenager.
For all the good that comes from small-town living, for a guy like me, I was looking at the horizon my entire youth.
I was wondering what was on the other side.
Manifest destiny, go west, young man.
I 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.
And when I say that, you might say, how could there be a local entertainment scene in a town of 6,000?
Well, 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.
And a lot of prominent, in particular, musicians came out of Lubbock.
Buddy Holly, Natalie Maynes of the Dixie Chicks.
In 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.
And so that just afforded Todd and I a ton of opportunities.
We didn't know how lucky we were at the time.
When 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.
And when it was over, my dad was always sort of interested in introducing me to people.
And 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.
Jane Prince Jones was running the theater at that time.
And 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.
And she was frazzled and harried.
And she said, do you have any theatrical background?
I was like, no.
She goes, would you ever be interested?
I said, sure.
She said, okay.
And then she tornadoed away.
And, 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.
And 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.
And then a few years after that, Don opened a theater in Lubbock, which is a little bit bigger than the Garza.
And 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.
A 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.
I went west, Todd went east.
He'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.
So it's interesting because I actually didn't know until this moment that you had like a production background.
Yeah.
Because when you came out to Hollywood, you weren't really looking to get into production per se.
You were more looking to get into acting now.
It took moving to L.A.
and only a few months of being in L.A.
to realize that I'm not an actor.
You 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.
And so I had a lot of opportunities to act in the theater scene in Lubbock, and people were gracious with me, the other actors.
I think that what I thought at the time is that I was learning to be an actor.
What I was really learning was to be a producer.
Because 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.
And both Jane and Don really invested in me and helped me understand You know, how do you make it happen no matter what?
It's sort of the show must goes on kind of a mentality.
So I got to Hollywood, you know, stars in my eyes thinking that I could be an actor.
I had a really early break.
I 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.
So you're like this.
Uh, 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.
And so, you know, like, two o'clock in the morning, you stumble out of the strip club, you go get yourself some McNuggets.
And you try not to get shot.
You'd hear gunshots like three or four times a week, no joke.
Because, you know, I was poor and I also hadn't learned, you know, L.A., for all of its opportunities, is kind of a shabby town.
Yes.
You know?
Yes.
And at that time, I couldn't discern the levels of shabbiness.
So now, like, you know, the part of town that we're in, it's shabby, but it's like shabby chic.
But 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.
When 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.
And 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.
And day one, they've got like 150 extras out there for these battle scenes.
And 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?
Almost no one did, but Texas guy, right?
So I raised my hand.
He said, okay, so I want you to go over and work with the effects team.
And 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?
So I was like, well, this is awesome.
I got a bump to like $75 instead of $50.
So I was pretty excited.
And then lunchtime comes along.
I spent the whole morning up on this hill, you know, flashing black powder out of these, out of these muskets.
And not rifles, they were muskets.
And then lunchtime we go and you get to eat for free, which at that point was a pretty big plus for me.
And then the director came and he looked very upset and he said, does anybody here know how to pray?
I'm not making this up.
My very first job in LA, American Revolution, does anybody know how to shoot a gun?
Does anybody know how to pray?
And once again, I raised my hand and the director said, come with me.
And he said, there's keep in mind, people were just getting cell phones right at this time.
And we're way out up the five.
So we're outside of town on this production ranch.
No cell service anyway.
And he said, we we cast a guy for a role.
And he has a small scene now, which is in the middle of the film.
He has another scene where he has lines, which is earlier in the film, but gets shot later, because films are not shot chronologically.
He said, and we can't reach him.
He was supposed to be here at 6 this morning.
He's still not here.
I don't have cell service up here.
I don't know if he has a cell phone.
We've been trying to get him.
Yep, the show must go on, which was a mentality I understood.
He 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.
He 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.
So, now I have a part in a movie, right?
says 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.
Of course, there are no redcoats.
And I say a prayer.
And for that reason, now I'm taft heartlead into the Screen Actors Guild.
I didn't get paid $50 for the day.
I didn't get paid $75 for the day.
I got paid, like, $500 for the day.
And then the movie fell apart two weeks later.
The other scene was never shot, and the film never came out, because Hollywood turns every single victory into a defeat.
I mean, they were, I don't know, a million, two million, four million dollars into this film.
The whole thing collapsed.
But 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.
That and the generosity of strangers and friends is how I survived those first couple of years.
After 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.
An actor has a unique ability to live in the moment.
When people talk about it, you know, that guy has it.
He has star quality.
What they're really talking about, they may not even consciously know it.
They're talking about two things.
One is how much space you occupy.
I mean physical space.
Stars take up a lot of room.
And two, they completely live in the moment.
And you see this because we're around a lot of stars, even political stars.
You 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.
I would like to give it to you.
He'd be very happy about that.
Now we have to walk down the hall so that you can receive it.
Dennis 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.
And then he'd walk back to the hair and makeup person because he had another thought that might benefit them.
Because stars have that ability to just live perfectly here, even though the other thing.
I don't have that ability.
I'm a producer.
I'm always thinking about, how do we get Dennis Prager down the hall so that we can get the million dollars?
And 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.
And I didn't know what that was.
And I ad-libbed something and they laughed at me and I never tried to act again.
So I want to get into your sort of peripatetic Forrest Gump-like career in Hollywood in just one second.
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Alrighty, so now you're in Hollywood, you've decided that you can't be an actor, but that doesn't end the Hollywood dream for you.
On account of I suck.
Right.
But it doesn't end the Hollywood dream for you.
No, no, no.
You just end up being sort of the guy who stands next to a bunch of very famous people for a prolonged period of time.
So what is that period?
Before I left Lubbock, I had written a play with a friend of mine named Lee Higginbotham, who moved out to L.A.
with me.
I'd really enjoyed the process of writing it, and so now I'm poor and not much is going on.
I was here for one year exactly, almost to the day, and 9-11 happened.
Like everyone, I was really rocked by that event.
I went into sort of an existential crisis of identity and of religious faith.
Who am I?
What do I believe?
What do I stand for?
It lasted for two, three months after that where I really didn't leave my apartment much.
I was in probably the deepest depression of my life and I was questioning the resurrection and trying to understand the resurrection.
Why the resurrection?
I kind of understood the idea of why there needed to be a sacrifice for sin.
I couldn't quite understand, all right, so why did the sacrifice get to come back?
And I worked that question out for myself over that period of time.
When I emerged the other side of that, I really had no more desire to be an actor.
And what I had on my hand was a lot of time.
And so I thought, well, I'm going to go back to this writing idea.
And I wrote a TV pilot at that time called Elijah.
In that period of time, I met my first kind of people in LA.
I'd been here for a little over a year, maybe a year and a half.
I was starting to meet people, and a wonderful family sort of took me under their wing.
I was working with a manager at that time as an actor, and now I didn't want to act anymore.
And he had someone helping him run his management company, and she wanted to start an acting agency.
Her husband is one of the top comedic writers in town.
You think of the biggest comedies over the last 20 years, he's been one of the ringers on those shows.
From Mad About You, Frasier, all the way to 30 Rock and Modern Family.
I mean, whatever the biggest comedy at the time, it's him.
And so she asked me if I would help her, sort of as an assistant, get her agency off the ground.
And that was really good for me because, well, A, it gave me a little money, and B, it got me out of my apartment and out of this funk.
And now I was actually meeting people in L.A.
and starting to build community.
And sort of like Jane and Don had done in Lubbock.
This family really invested in me.
And when I wrote my pilot, Elijah, I gave it to my boss because I didn't know who else to give something like that to.
And she took it to her husband, which was, I mean, incredibly generous of her.
Everybody wants a guy like that to read their stuff, right?
And here I am, just some punk 22, 23-year-old kid.
And he read it, and he liked it.
And 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.
But he also liked it, and he brought me in for a series of meetings.
And that really built my confidence, I think, and helped me realize that there could be a post-acting LA life for me.
And so from that period of time, I read every script I could get.
Again, having the relationship with that family gave me access to a lot of it.
He would just send me scripts and let me read them.
And I would write.
And during that period of time, I started to meet the people who would be my LA community.
A friend of mine moved out from Lubbock, and he started attending a men's Bible study.
And it had all these, like, young, kind of up-and-coming celebrities in it.
And he would not let me go to it.
He was like, no, these are my friends.
I made it.
You didn't make it.
You'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?
I mean, I'm sitting in the driver's seat.
Yes.
He said, uh, all right, and that was it.
That 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?
I mean, yeah, it's been two weeks and I'm poor.
There are no new cars coming.
He said, you want to help me move a couch?
Now, this is one of my secrets.
Now I like to help people become successful.
One of my secrets is if you live in a big city, drive a truck.
Everyone needs help all the time.
I mean, you'll be sitting, like, in the Best Buy parking lot, and there'll be a knock on your window.
This actually happened to me twice.
And I look over, and there's just some stranger at my window who's like, uh, hey, I just bought a washing machine.
You think you could help me?
You know, I don't want to pay for the shipping.
And, you know, you do it.
And you meet people.
So I went over and helped Joel move this sofa, and he said, Hey, stick around for the Bible study.
And I mostly wanted to do it to see the look on my buddy's face when I got invited without him, you know?
And I walked in and that group of men became my community, really, for all these last I've been in L.A.
20 years now, and from that period on, that was my community.
And it was guys who had energy.
They were working.
They were all at kind of different stages in their career, but almost everyone who was there that night has gone on to have success.
And that's another great lesson for people on how to become successful is surround yourself.
People will often say, you know, surround yourself with successful people.
That'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.
Well, two.
One, I knew a little something about the New Testament, and so I was able to help lead that Bible study over time.
And two, I could write, and no one else had really stumbled into that yet.
And so both of the actors in the group who were beginning to have prominent careers gave me the opportunity to write with them.
And they could actually do something with the scripts that I couldn't do.
And 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.
It was basically a three-person film.
And at that point, I realized we had this amazing opportunity to make a feature film.
And, you know, that's a multi-year run.
So that represents four years, probably, of my life.
And to realize that the entertainment business is just a business.
And 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.
So, how did you make the move from sort of Hollywood-Hollywood to Conservative-Hollywood?
Because it's not quite the same thing as we have found out multiple times.
Well, no.
Hollywood-Hollywood pays.
Conservative-Hollywood does not.
Fact check true.
During 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.
I had become a conservative because I went to college for two years.
You 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.
They literally teach you how to play bluegrass, so they teach you how to play.
And a bunch of country stars have gone through there.
Again, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, LeAnn Womack, several others over the years.
While I was there, I had this professor who was ostensibly supposed to teach me how to play the piano.
If you've ever heard me play the piano, you know that he failed mightily at his job.
But I had this private lesson with him twice a week, and we would argue about politics and religion.
And he was very libertarian.
He 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.
I disagreed with almost all of his philosophy, and I would argue with him.
And 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.
And so, you know, in that way, he really helped me discover my beliefs.
And now I was trying to help these guys, you know, refine some of their beliefs.
And as a result, everyone knew that I was very conservative.
You 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.
You know, craft service on a film set or a TV set is amazing.
There'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.
And 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.
And 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.
She sees me coming up the stairs and she says, hey, real quick, is that your pickup that parks right behind?
And I said, yeah, yeah.
She goes, you're aware that there's a Bush Cheney bumper sticker on the back of your truck?
And I was like, yeah, yeah, I put it there.
She goes, oh, you got balls of steel, kid.
And until she said it, I honestly didn't know.
I was too naive to know that you just can't do that in this town.
And sort of like when you learn a new word, you hear the new word everywhere.
I started hearing all the bias now, all around me, all the time.
How political is a film set?
How political is a television set?
How the number one topic of conversation on film and television sets is politics.
And that may sound obvious now because in the Trump era, everything is so political.
But the world had not yet become political.
Only Hollywood was political like this at the time.
And 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.
You 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.
Several things happened during that period of time.
I had developed a TV show with that actor for Eric McCormick's production company, Big Cattle, and we took it out.
William Morris took it out for us, and we got some good traction with it, and we were in a meeting.
I won't say who it was.
It'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
executive in his company.
And 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.
And he's not listening to us a bit.
He's too good for these meetings, and he was too good for these meetings.
It was a courtesy for the actor, right?
He's flipping through our script, not even reading it.
Finally stops everything and he says, who's the babe?
What do you mean?
The babe, who you got in mind for the babe?
Uh, the actress.
Uh, you know, we're thinking about this actress.
We throw out a name.
And he said, uh, no, no, no, no, no.
I've already f***ed her.
What?
Is he being figurative?
Is he being... No, I've already f***ed her.
I need somebody that I haven't.
Uh, how about this actress?
And he threw out the name of another very prominent actor.
He goes, no.
That's somebody I'd like to f***.
And he looks over at his female comedy executive and he says, I mean, face it.
If you were a man, you'd f*** her.
You'd probably fuck her anyway.
And I thought, it was a real revelatory moment for me, right?
Then the executive says, oh yeah, I probably would anyway, and they had a laugh about it.
I thought, holy crap, if this were any other industry in the world, like if this were Walmart, tomorrow it would be called Stephanie Mart.
Like, she would own the joint, right?
But 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.
Probably has a law degree from Harvard, probably could have gone to a law firm and gotten $280,000 right out of college.
Instead, 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.
She 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.
And she's not about To cash all of that in for a $500,000 settlement from this TV studio?
A $1,000,000 settlement from this TV studio?
No way!
She 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.
And for that reason, this guy has complete impunity to treat her in any way that he wants to.
And that's when the reality of what Hollywood is really started to hit me.
And I started to kind of not know what to do with that information.
And I retreated back into myself a little bit, as I had all those years earlier after 9-11, and get lost.
I was also hungry and desperate.
I wanted to succeed.
I was starting to get resentful of my friends who were succeeding, which is a terrible sign when you can't be happy for your friends.
You've got a little bit of a cancer.
And I was confused.
I didn't know what to do.
And 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.
He goes, Commander, you've got to... He called me Commander.
He's larger. He's got it.
Takes up a lot of room, lives in the moment.
He said, Commander, you've got to come to this meeting.
You know, they think the way you think. They say the kind of stuff you say.
And we went. He was kind enough to take me to one of these things.
And he's gone on to be a huge movie star since.
And probably has evolved different political opinions than he had when he was a kid.
But I was lucky enough that the opinions he had at the kids led me to this organization.
And I met all these underground Hollywood conservatives.
This 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.
At that first meeting, Andrew Breitbart was there, Bill Whittle was there, our buddy Johnny Voight was there.
So 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.
And really because of that meeting I got to meet you.
So we'll get to that in a second, that transformational moment when finally we met.
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Okay, so now you're working for Friends of Abe, and this is pretty close to when we met.
So I believe we met in 2010, correct?
I think that's right.
I think it was 2010.
So I wasn't working for Friends of Abe at the time.
I was just attending, right?
I was just a guy looking for community and exploring my political beliefs in a more urgent way.
The election was going on in 2008.
And one of the great moments of my Hollywood life, I started having John Voight, Bill Whittle, and Andrew Breitbart.
I was living with this actor at the time, right, who was successful and was kind enough to let me lodge.
And on Thursday nights, those guys would come over to my Well, it wasn't my house, but the house in which I live.
And we would talk about ways that we could engage with politics.
And I made my first political video at that time, which was about Obama's attendance of Reverend Wright's church in Chicago.
It was called A Thousand Sundays, which was more or less the number of Sundays that he had spent listening to black liberation theology.
This is before PJTV events, before Bill Whittle has a political career.
And 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.
We'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.
There'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.
He asked for you!
And I hopped up, and I went over to the door, and it was John.
I said, John, what's going on?
He goes, oh, I wanted to bring you these materials, lad, about John McCain.
I was like, oh, thank you.
I'd love to watch them.
He gave me some DVDs.
And he looks over, and he goes, oh, you lads are working.
I didn't mean to interrupt.
Could I get you boys some sandwiches?
To my living shame to this day, I said, oh, John, that's nice.
No, we already ate.
Now, ten years later, I'm just like, why didn't you let John Voight buy you a sandwich?
Always let John Voight buy you a sandwich.
That's another important life lesson.
Let John Voight buy you a sandwich.
So 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.
The founder wanted to step away.
He 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.
But right there in the middle was that fateful day when Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring first met.
Yeah, 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.
I joined a law firm and I'm working there for 10 months.
I hate it.
I quit.
No CA mail room for you?
No, no, no.
And I am unemployed and newly married and I have a mortgage.
And 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?
So 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.
And over time, I see that Mark has Hollywood aspirations.
Like, Mark wants to make movies, and he's particularly enchanted with the folks over at Weta Workshop in New Zealand.
And 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.
And Mark said, you know, you really should talk to this guy, Jeremy Boring.
And I'll be honest, at the time I was like, okay, I'm not sure what we're talking about exactly, but sounds okay.
And 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.
And he hooks us up to talk about the possibility of movies.
And 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.
And me thinking, well that's...
A patented speech.
Right, exactly.
A speech I've heard you now give many, many times.
And me thinking, how am I supposed to go back to Mark with this, exactly?
Because Mark's big aspiration was, of course, to get into the industry.
But yeah, that was kind of my point of view.
I don't know how it was for you.
Yeah, so I actually don't remember.
I remember us meeting.
I don't remember exactly the pitch from Mark.
So like you, Andrew Breitbart came to me and said, hey, I've got this guy you should know named Mark Masters.
He runs, at that time, I think the largest private talk radio syndication company in the country up in Oregon.
And he has film aspirations.
And he said, I think it'd be good if he heard your perspective.
And so, you know, I had a couple meetings with Mark.
I really liked him.
He's a big thinker and a big dreamer, Mark, and very philosophical.
So I really enjoyed visiting with him and talking to him.
And he wanted, you know, I had been to Weta.
I 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.
And 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.
And I've tried for a couple of years now to remember what that deal was.
I don't.
But 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.
What I remember being particularly struck by was a couple things.
One, that you were the smartest guy I'd ever talked to.
Two, I'd never really been around anyone who was from, right?
I'd never been around... Not a lot of Jews in Slayton.
Yeah, not a lot of Jews in Slayton.
There was one, but he was definitely Reformed.
I'm gonna tangent for a minute and tell you about this guy.
He was my high school vice principal and his name was Bill Jolly.
He passed away very recently.
Wonderful man.
He was like Dennis Prager size, like six foot six, 300 plus pounds.
He looked for smooth stones whenever the guy came around, you know?
He 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.
And he loved life, and he loved his students, and he was Jewish, and practicing Jewish, you know, not in name only, although not Orthodox.
But he took his Judaism very seriously.
There was one synagogue in, I think, only one in Lubbock at the time, and he took me there one time.
It was my first really exposure to Judaism.
And 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.
And everybody knew it, you know.
Todd's mom knew it, because she knew the people that I was there with from the theater.
And she asked me about it, and I lied to her, you know, because I was a stupid idiot kid.
And then Bill Jolly knew it.
I'm sure you could just see it all over me, you know.
And 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.
But he listened to me plead my case for why I was still a good boy.
He gave me this great piece of advice.
He was Scottish background, a Scottish Jew.
And he said, Jeremy, I'm going to give you a great piece of advice.
He said, if you're going to drink, drink scotch.
This is my high school vice principal, right?
And I said, well, Mr. Joliot, why?
He says, well, scotch is very expensive, Jeremy.
And I know you, son.
And you will never be able to afford to be an alcoholic.
about which it turns out he was wrong.
Yeah, exactly.
Now you can actually afford all the scotch.
I can afford all the expensive scotch.
I'm essentially a teetotaler.
I mean, I probably drink three or four glasses of alcohol a year, but only the most expensive whiskey.
That's the only thing.
Exactly.
So we finally meet, yeah.
Yeah, 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.
You 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.
One 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.
You owned something, like a piece of property.
And actually talented and knowledgeable.
And 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.
I 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...
We made those videos for Encounter Break.
For 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.
You were doing these videos for Encounter Books and then you started doing videos for PragerU on the back of that.
And that became kind of a business for you.
I was working with Jonathan Hay, who became our head of production here at Daily Wire when we first started, right?
He helped kind of create the look of those Prager videos and helped create the look of those early Encounter videos.
I had one employee, essentially, right?
I had a little business, the business was me.
I 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...
I don't know, $28,000 a year.
Bill Whittle was actually getting all the money because he was the talent.
And I was making like $12,000 a year for three, four years at that time.
One of the things that actually occurs to me in this conversation is you actually you actually saw an opportunity in me first.
And it was these small opportunities to do this visual content.
And then later I started to see an opportunity for you.
But it is kind of funny.
I always think about the second part of that story because it's the one where all the success came from.
But 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.
Well, I saw talented guy and I saw that the talent, you're kind of spinning your wheels.
And 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.
I always make money for my friends.
Quoting the elderly Jewish gangster from The Godfather, who ends up very poorly.
But 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.
And this is now circa 2013.
Yeah.
Well, 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.
You 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.
I 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.
And 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.
David, former leftist, becomes conservative, and I saw a lot of commonality between you and David.
Both fighters.
Both highly intellectual, both great writers, but fundamentally fighters, not think tank guys.
Both Jewish, both part of the L.A.
scene, both with a rich interest in culture.
The difference, of course, being that he's 50 years older than you are.
And 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.
I thought, well, there isn't a better guy in the country than Ben for that job.
So 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.
And this goes on for maybe 18 months of really getting people to see that you could be the future of the Freedom Center.
And then they were working, David, behind the scenes until one day, and this is the way all good ideas are, right?
One day, it's David's idea.
Within the Freedom Center.
that 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.
Absolutely.
And we learned some really important lessons from that one.
Among 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.
Right.
And so we would try to get links from drudge and we realized that sometimes the gods were generous and sometimes they were not.
And 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.
Well, this is when you gave me my nickname, I believe, which is the stupid whisperer.
This is because...
You and I would always pitch people our ideas, and you would come in, and you would Ben Shapiro all over them.
You 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.
Soft Texas lilt.
Yeah, that Texas straw would come out real slow, sock puppets, and I would explain your ideas to them, and they'd be like, oh, yeah, yeah.
It was very frustrating.
I mean, I remember walking out being like, I don't understand.
They understand what he's saying, but they have no idea.
It was like I was speaking Swahili.
He's barely using English, and they understand him.
They don't understand anything else.
But 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.
This is when you wrote our business plan on a cocktail napkin.
This is.
Now, 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.
We need to actually use the tools at our disposal.
And you're the first person to really discover the magic of social media and how important social media was.
Because most of us were spending our days, you know, whittling away on Twitter.
But you were the first person who said, wait a second, there's a whole other world of social media.
We really need to get involved.
So at this point, you can take over the narrative.
Yeah, I mean, the idea was we should be marketing first, right?
And social media presents the opportunity to do that.
Of course, the Freedom Center and therefore Truth Revolt were a non-profit.
They 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.
And unfortunately, when you go to the same donors year after year, you have to give them something new.
So we had had a lot of success in that first year or so of Truth Revolt.
But what was the story we were going to take to donors next?
And I said, well, here's an idea.
Instead 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?
And then we're not beholden to the donors.
And now even the stupid whisperer could not talk slow enough for certain people to understand it.
And 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.
And we'd explained it about seven times already.
Oh yeah.
and Ben turns over a cocktail napkin, takes a pen, and you drew an F for Facebook.
Well, it was a dollar sign?
Dollar sign, okay.
Arrow.
Dollar sign, arrow.
F for Facebook.
F for Facebook.
Arrow, website, arrow back to dollar sign.
Right, and I said, this is our business plan.
This is our business plan.
And they fired us.
Yeah, they defunded us, they fired you, I quit in solidarity.
That's fair, they fired me.
Yeah, 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.
So instead, we took.
The funny thing is, we had both bought houses like one.
one month before this.
Well, I mean, it bodes very poorly for our booth, because literally every time in our careers we have bought houses, something cataclysmic has happened.
That's fair.
Nearly, almost immediately.
So at that point, we decide that we're going to take that business plan and go to market.
And you were really the driving force here, because you found the people who decided to actually take a flyer on us.
Well, the third part of our triad, right?
Caleb, our business partner, co-CEO of the company.
I'd been working with Caleb at that time.
He was working with a high-net-worth family out of Texas.
They're trying to get involved in culture.
Like 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.
And 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.
I said, I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment, but I think you have to go the roundabout way.
I 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.
Even if you manage to make a great film, they'll never cooperate.
They'll make it very difficult for you.
I 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.
And he got the vision right away.
Thank God, because I don't know how we were going to pay our mortgages.
You probably had some savings at that time, because you're a more rational fellow than I am.
I had a nicer car, though.
Fortunately, 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.
They committed to give us $7.5 million to start The Daily Wire.
We didn't take the money up front.
We didn't want it that way.
We wanted for them to just pay the expenses of the company month after month, up to the $7.5 million mark.
And at month 14, we were $4.7 million in and we became cash flow positive.
We never took the rest of that money and we've never gone back and taken any money since.
I mean, since then we've grown this company.
Off of that cocktail napkin business plan.
Now, 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.
It did.
And 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.
So certain places that we thought would be centers of revenue certainly are centers of revenue.
But one area that we had no idea was going to be a center of revenue was the actual podcast revenue.
That's right.
I look back at that business plan and what we had allocated for the amount of revenue from the podcast was minimal.
Compared to how successful the podcast became.
So 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?
You push where there's actual give.
You know, I responded to a tweet from Cernovich a few weeks ago.
Every now and then when he isn't posting politics, he'll actually post kind of aspirational business ideas, and they're quite good.
I can't remember exactly what he had tweeted, but it was something about success and failure in business.
And I responded with what I think is the greatest lesson I've learned in this journey that we've been on.
Which is that your success in business, ultimately, it doesn't come down to the quality of your plan.
It doesn't come down to your ability to avoid catastrophe.
It doesn't come down to your ability to systematize success.
All of those things matter, but none of them are what determine ultimately long-term success.
Long-term success in business is just your ability to fail, maneuver, and keep moving.
That's what we've really done over these last five years, I think, that have allowed us to be successful.
We have ideas, and they're good as far as they're good.
They get you moving and they get you pointed in a direction.
But 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.
They can't let go of their idea.
They can't let go of their pet project.
They can't let go of their ego.
That's what I say, you can't fall in love with your pocket pair.
I 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.
And I think that that really is, you know, as an executive, which you now are.
You went from being a production guy back when you were 17 to being an executive.
So really the job hasn't changed, just the scope of the business has changed.
One 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.
I 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.
And then, You know, there have been periods where we hit real skids.
Yes.
I 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.
And 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.
Yeah, 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.
I had a huge argument with someone very important to me one time.
We were backpacking around Europe after high school, and we got into an argument over whether having a million dollars made you rich.
Keep in mind, we're from this tiny town, right?
And she had made this point that someone she knows had basically inherited a million dollars and now they were rich.
It 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?
Like, hardly rich.
And so I argued that that wouldn't make you rich.
And it's funny that looking back when we were kids, but this became a major contentious issue.
All 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.
The worst moment for our business came when the company was generating $28, $29 million that year, and we almost lost the business.
You can say, well, how can you lose a business that's making that much money?
And it's because businesses operate on cash flow, right?
How much money is here at any given time?
And like anybody's economics, how much money are you spending?
And when you talk about margins in business, people will get upset when they're like, oh, you know, the CEO made $100 million.
There's people who work for him that are making minimum wage.
There's people who work for him who are making $50,000.
He could still make $20 million, and he could give the other $80 million to his employees.
Everyone who doesn't know anything about business or money has had that thought.
What you don't realize is, well, no, if you have 20,000 employees, like guys who are making that kind of money.
McDonald's, yeah, exactly.
Right.
That 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.
And you would have a worse executive, right?
You wouldn't be able to get a top-level executive who can keep growing the business.
The truth is that as your company grows and your expenses grow, it only takes one terrible moment.
Cash is the lubricant that keeps the gears turning.
And if you run out of cash, this thing locks up.
It doesn't matter.
If 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.
If 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.
That's why, like, when a company like, I don't know, I remember when Kmart, uh, Went through bankruptcy.
They were generating billions of dollars of revenue at that time.
Yeah, literally Remington right now is going through a bankruptcy because they cannot generate enough money to generate enough guns to sell.
Because people want to buy so many guns that they literally don't have enough money to produce the guns to sell them.
Because even success can destroy a company.
And what we were dealing with at that moment is success was destroying our company.
And it was destroying our company in a couple of different ways.
One, our expenses, you know, you spend into your growth.
You hire new people.
You build new things.
And you're kind of gambling a little bit because you're banking on the rate of growth continuing.
If it stops, it seizes up really quickly.
And one thing that happened is our growth slowed down, and it took us a minute to realize it and be able to adjust our spending.
Another thing that happens in businesses is, you know, I'd never run a business with 5 people until we had 5 people at Truth Revolt.
And I'd never run a business with 15 people until we had 15 people at The Daily Wire.
And I'd never run a business with 25 people until we had 25.
I'd never run a business with 115 people until, you know, the other day.
And you just don't know.
You don't know what's required of you.
You don't know what's required of the business.
You don't know the new regulations that come into effect.
You don't know how to manage.
So in business, you constantly have to be replacing yourself.
And 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.
But 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.
It'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.
And 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.
And I think we had the humility in that moment to promote them into roles that formerly had just been me and Caleb, essentially.
And 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.
And it's the next area of growth for us.
Now 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.
It's why we have the opportunity.
I don't want to talk about too much of it here.
It'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.
Some things that our audience and our movement will be, I think they'll be game changers.
That'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.
Then you can avail yourself of it as an opportunity.
You can see the hardship as an opportunity.
I 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.
So in a second, I'm going to ask Jeremy about what the hell we're doing in Nashville.
When are we going?
How's this working?
What are our plans?
But if you actually want to hear, Our special super-secret plans.
You have to be a super-secret top-level Daily Wire member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, click join at the top of the page.
You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
Well, Jeremy, it's good to see you.
I'll see you in five minutes when we have a meeting after this.
And thanks so much for stopping by, dude.
Thanks for watching.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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