Jeremy Boreing, in PBD podcast episode 819, warns about civilization-destroying forces with the earnestness of a man who has recently discovered that the leopard he's been feeding is, in fact, eating faces. The Daily Wire co-CEO breaks his silence on Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson — the internal fractures of a media empire built on the premise that other institutions are fracturing — and in the middle of it, he lands on something worth taking seriously: that the algorithm is not merely serving content but reshaping adult cognition. That grown people are being architecturally rearranged by the same systems we once worried were harming only children. He's not wrong. He's just delivering the homily from inside the cathedral he helped build, which complicates the acoustics.
But the argument deserves better than its speaker's context. Most arguments worth having do. Let me give it the rigor he didn't quite manage, then see whether it holds.
Boreing's core claim, stripped to load-bearing structure: algorithmic recommendation systems exploit attentional vulnerabilities that are not age-gated. Adults slow down on what disturbs or flatters them. The machine reads hesitation as preference. Preference accumulates into identity. Identity hardens into politics.
The feedback loop doesn't require adolescent neuroplasticity — it requires only a mammal that wants to be seen, and what mammal doesn't.
This is not, at bottom, a technological observation. It's an anthropological one wearing a USB cable. But Boreing is identifying something genuinely specific about scale and friction-removal that the anthropological version misses. In the old architecture of self-destruction — and I know the old architecture intimately, I paid rent in it for decades — there were physical costs that functioned as circuit breakers. You had to leave the house.
You had to find a bar. You had to sit on a stool long enough for the bartender to learn your name, which meant another human being was accumulating evidence of your patterns in real time. The friction didn't make anyone wise; it made the damage slow enough that you could sometimes notice it accumulating before it finished you. What the algorithm removes is not the impulse toward self-destruction but the temporal gap between impulse and identity-formation. A person at the Algonquin could spend ten years optimizing themselves into a performing machine, hollowing out in public at a pace that allowed occasional self-correction.
The same process now takes six months on YouTube, three on TikTok. The mechanism is ancient; the velocity is unprecedented. That distinction matters, and Boreing is pointing at it even when his language goes vague.
So when he says 'not just kids,' what he's actually identifying — whether he fully knows it or not — is the collapse of a comforting fiction: that maturity is a destination rather than a daily negotiation with one's own appetites. That adults are the finished product. We never were. We were simply slower about our self-destructions because the infrastructure demanded friction — physical presence, social consequence, the bartender's raised eyebrow functioning as a primitive feedback loop with a human face attached. Remove the friction and you don't reveal a stable adult underneath the scaffolding; you reveal that the adult was always the scaffolding's product, never its architect.
Where it gets structurally interesting is that Boreing makes this argument from inside a machine that is itself an algorithmic product. The Daily Wire exists because recommendation systems served conservative content to people who slowed down on it. Shapiro's rise was a triumph of watch-time optimization before it was anything else — his speed, his combativeness, his clip-friendly cadence were selected for by the same mechanism Boreing now calls civilizationally corrosive. Owens became a force because her particular frequency of provocation kept eyeballs stationary for eleven more seconds than the next video in queue. Carlson's audience was built in the same attentional exploit.
This doesn't invalidate the diagnosis — a doctor who smokes can still read an X-ray — but it does mean the prescription arrives pre-compromised. When Boreing warns about algorithmic capture, he's describing the conditions under which his own company became profitable. He's the bartender at Tony's telling me I drink too much: technically correct, structurally undermined by the fact that he poured the drink, and unlikely to result in anyone ordering water. The question becomes whether diagnosis from inside the pathology can produce anything other than more content about the problem of content — which is itself optimized for engagement, shared for its resonance, and served by the same systems it describes.
That might be the only honest position left to anyone inside the thing they're naming. I wouldn't know. I've been inside several things I was describing, and none of them let me out on good behavior.
What stays is this: the algorithm only serves you what you slowed down on, which is exactly how gin worked. You didn't choose it; you just stopped moving away from it one Tuesday and by Thursday it was your entire personality. The question is not whether adults are vulnerable — of course they are, the mechanism is older than language — but whether naming the loop changes the loop's operation, or merely makes you a more articulate participant in your own dissolution. I picked up a rubber band from my kitchen floor this morning because the floor looked better without it. That was the whole event.
No metaphor, no couplet by noon. The intervention available was that small: notice the thing, move it, don't build an identity around having moved it. That smallness is not a philosophy. It's a Tuesday. But it's the only Tuesday where the loop actually paused rather than generating commentary about pausing.
Boreing is right that it's not just kids. He's right the way a man on fire is right about combustion — credible, urgent, and structurally unable to redesign the building code while he's still burning. The useful question isn't whether he's correct. It's whether correctness, delivered at algorithmic speed to an audience selected for receptivity to exactly this message, can do anything except feed the loop it names. I don't have an answer.
I have a rubber band in a drawer and a floor that looks better. Start there.
