Who is afraid of Jordi Wild?

In this bonfire of the vanities that pre-campaign interviews have become, the final spectacle has been starred in by Jordi Wild. After Santiago Abascal dropped out of the engagement he had committed to, the youtuber had to settle for three of the candidates: Ada Colau, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and Pedro Sánchez. The astronomical consumption figures that "The Wild Project" has have become a temptation for the parties because they are a window into an audience that often lives detached from the media circuits of politics.

Jordi Wild is the digital alias of the Manresa native Jordi Carrillo de Albornoz. He started by commenting on video games on YouTube, and with the pandemic, he established this traditional long-form interview model, through which the cream of the crop and the black sheep of politics, journalism, sports, culture, the digital world, science, and whatever else fits have circulated. He does not claim to invent anything. He neither wants to be humorous nor promises any formula for entertainment. He is smart, and in his script, one can notice the self-demand to build a logical and exhaustive path, with very essential but effective questions. And he likes to show it off. He radiates the proximity of the youtubers by addressing guests with the tone of an accomplice colleague. He has skillfully built an appearance of transparency, especially with these interviews with the candidates in which he has announced the commitment contracts between the two parties as if they were a sacred ritual. With craftiness, he has even added two fact-checkers of dubious efficacy to give prestige to the show. Both his body and his recording studio are a showcase of the hyper-masculinity typical of this digital world. Tattoos, muscle, and a staging that looks like the room of a rebellious teenager.

With the candidates, he likes to introduce phrases that reinforce his boldness: “Your team is going to kill me...”, “I'm going to shoot myself...”, “You're going to put me on the Falcon but to go down...” as if what he were doing were truly wild. He needs everyone to notice it, within the exhibitionist logic of youtubers, where everything revolves around his ego. It is a game of interests where the interviewer capitalizes on the influence of their guest and vice versa. Wild keeps more tricks up his sleeve to ask and probe than some journalists. For the gallery, his superpower is his capacity for attention. He not only listens, but adds a component of theatricality that underlines it. All his body language constructs, with a certain artificiality, a sensation of maximum attention towards the other, of absolute concentration that seduces the guest. This virtue allows him to immediately detect the politician's rehearsed arguments, the use of clichés and commonplaces, and the usual strategies for escape. He does not let them get away easily. And that is surely what scared Abascal, because his discourse is based on simplifications and dramatic effects, not on the ability to argue at length, which is what tests Jordi Wild the most and where the candidates' cracks are most visible.