FULL SEND PODCAST - Ben Shapiro x Nelk Boys | Ep. 70

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Ben Shapiro DESTROYS the NELK BOYS, Talks Presidential Run and Kanye! Presented by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. Find Happy Dad near you http://happydad.com/find (21+ only). Video is available on http://youtube.com/fullsendpodcast/videos. Follow Nelk Boys on Instagram http://instagram.com/nelkboys. Part of the Shots Podcast Network (shots.com). You can listen to the audio version of this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & anywhere you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We won out! We won out! We won out! What's up, Ben? Hey, what's going to know? All right. We just, we just pretty much go for it. Cool. You shaved the beard? Uh, yeah, my wife hated it. Bro, I didn't think it was a good look for you. Yeah. Yeah, I noticed you've been, I've been watching you for a long time, by the way.

I'm a big fan, been watching all your stuff for a long time. Yeah, I noticed you've been, you've been sporting the beard a little bit more recently. Yeah, it was an experiment. And I don't think the experiment went amazing. Yeah, there were some who liked, there was some who hated. My wife had has absolute veto power. Really? Yeah, I mean, there's only one person I can sleep with on planet Earth, and so she has 100% veto power on this.

That's awesome. We've been here before for the Candice Owens. We did Candice Owens here. Oh, nice. Okay. What is like the daily wire in general and like the business stuff and stuff like that? Well, I mean, so the business, I think, takes a bunch of forms. So originally it started as just a website, a news website, largely aggregation-based.

And my podcast and a couple of other podcasts. and now it's grown to include an entertainment component and a merch component. It originally started being, and when it started, it was much more advertising-based in terms of revenue. Now we have a million paid subscribers. So it's taken a bunch of forms. We're doing kids entertainment. We're launching a $100 million, kids entertainment initiative. The first shows are going to roll off the line in the middle of next year.

We've brought out some, I believe four movies under our own production studio. I have a couple more in the works. We just optioned the rights on Atlas Shrug to make an actual. good mini-series out of Atlas Shrug. We're really excited about that. We optioned the rights on an Arthurian legend, like the King Arthur Legend. So we're going to be producing that. The idea is sort of to expand into all the arenas of culture. So we've done really well in the news area, in the news commentary area. Obviously, that's still our bread and butter revenue-wise. But more and more, it's going to expand out into other areas of the culture where we feel

that conservatives are being underserved. So would you say it's almost like not like a Netflix competitor, but it is like a subscription-based model, like platform competitor? almost. Yeah, I mean, I think that that would eventually be the goal. I don't think that we're going to get to the point where we have 200 million subscribers the way Netflix does. But the nice thing for us is that we're a success at a million paid subscribers. So that's actually a number, like a million paid subscribers. Yeah, we have a million paid subscribers right now. Wow. At what monthly subscription rate? It varies. I mean, we have kind of low level subscriptions like readers pass subscriptions that are for I think five bucks a month or four bucks a month. And then we have upper range

subscriptions that, you know, go up to 20 bucks a month. But we're a $200 million a year business. I don't think people, I haven't really seen an interview of you talking about that side of stuff too much. We should talk about that before, like, we get into the meet. You said that you guys are expanding. That's interesting. Kids platforms? What does that look like? So, you know, the, we'd always been interested in the possibility of making kids content.

I have three young kids. A lot of us have young kids around here. And I'm historically an enormous Disney fan. So we were Disney annual past members. My fourth date with my wife was at Disneyland. When you moved to Florida, one of our big moves, was that we were going to get the annual Passover at Disney World. And so we love Disney.

Like Disney's a big thing in our house. And when it became clear that Disney is starting to promote messages that don't sort of accord with the traditional values worldview. And then when that tape broke via Chris Rufo of the, there was an open forum with some of the leadership of Disney talking about what they called a quote, not at all secret gay agenda to put a lot of these sorts of messages in kids programming. And that's not something that I'm interested in my kid seeing.

it became clear to us that the best way to fight that is to actually just provide an alternative. Why is Disney doing that? Because you're not a big conspiracy quote unquote guy, right? Well, I mean, they said it out loud. They said it out loud.

So that's not a conspiracy. Give us an example. But like, why? So recently. Okay, so their last couple of movies have had explicit gay relationships in the movies. Like the light of the film?

The Buzz Light Your one? The Light Your film and Strange World. Also had one. They've, in a lot of their programming, they've started to inject some more of that type of messaging with regard to gender fluidity. And they did some of the remakes also. Like the Beauty and the Beast remake, suddenly LaFu is gay.

They're doing some of this stuff, I think, because they're staffed by people who are on that side of the aisle. And that's their prerogative, but they're not in client service anymore. They're now more interested, I think, in pleasing a lot of their employee base. This is a broader corporate problem that we're seeing across the spectrum right now. what do you think they're motivated by that like to make more noise well they're oriented toward the left they actually don't think that these are controversial propositions and they don't understand there's an entire swath of human beings who disagree with them in these arenas i mean they live in l.A they traffic in particular circles and so they think to themselves well i'm not going to lose

money because everyone agrees with me and also i get to quote unquote do some good and from their perspective i get it by by pushing kids toward our particular political agenda and so we can do that as well. So where's the downside? And so you saw top-level Disney executives talking openly about I have a trans kid and a gender non-binary kid. And so I want to make sure that there's a place for them. And again, you can make that place, but that's not the place my kids are going to be watching material. Nor do I think, frankly, that that is what most people who love Disney product. That is not what they bought in for. And by the way, Disney knows this. I think secretly deep down they know this, which is why, for example, they have all sorts of warning labels. You know, they've put on all their

movies now. If you go to Disney Plus, we subscribe to Disney Plus before all of this happened. Disney Plus on Aladdin, they have like a warning label at the beginning talking about how it's culturally insensitive. On Jungle Book, they have a warning saying it's culturally insensitive. Well, I didn't see you guys take it down. You're still making money off of it. You're happy to cash the check. That's actually on like the flyers and stuff. Oh, when you first start the movie, there is a there is a warning screen that says what you're about to see is culturally insensitive and and maybe sort of archaic and contains gender or race stereotype, like that kind of stuff, they're not taking it down, right?

If we would offer to buy the rights off their hands, I highly doubt they would sell them to us. I'd be perfectly willing to put up, you know, Lady in the Tramp without a warning about stereotypical, stereotypical depictions of Italians or something. It's cutting off their nose despite their face. This is one reason, among others, that they had a very, very rough couple of years here. And it's why they fired Bob Chapeck and they brought back in Bob Iger. And they're kind of trying to figure out where they are. But the answer is that what parents want more than anything else is what they would have considered until five minutes ago in a political space for their kids. It's not that I want my kids to be watching stuff that's promoting right-wing messaging.

I just don't want to put my kids in front of a TV. And the next thing I know my kids asking me about gender fluidity. I'm not interested in explaining to my six-year-old son what gay marriage is. Like, that's just not something I'm interested in explaining my six-year-old son when he's 13, 14. I'm happy to explain to him what that is or why in my viewpoint, same-sex marriages and traditional marriages are not equivalent, but at six years old, this is not when those conversations need to be happening. But according to a lot of people on the social left, that's precisely when the conversation should be happening because we have to break free of the strictures of traditional morality and all the rest of this. So again, what we've done, we're not calling for anybody to get banned. We're not saying that Disney Plus should be taken down. We're not calling for people to boycott Disney's advertisers or anything like that. What we are suggesting is that you take your money. if you don't want your kid seeing that stuff and provide an alternative. So, you know, subscribe

and we'll make the kind of content where you can put your kid in front of TV. Is your stuff going to be like animated? Yeah. Pictures. So we have one show that's an animated show. We have a show that's just on the set a moment ago that's sort of a live action

Mr. Rogers type show. Okay. And what messages are any political messages in there? No, no politics. No politics. It's a political. It's just straight up the stuff that you were watching when you were a kid

or when I was a kid. And stuff that you were like Mr. Rogers is not political. And Sesame Street is not particularly political. Yeah. And that's the way it should be. I don't understand why my kid has to be hit with politics. And again, I have kids who are 8, 6, 2, and I have one in the womb. And, like, I don't understand why exactly it is the job of Hollywood people who lead lives

that I do not approve of to preach their version of morality to my kids. Did you go through that where when your kids saw something and they came to you? Or did you just notice it? So I'm hawkish on this stuff. My kids don't watch anything without me pre-screening it. Got it. I'm very, very hawkish on this. Like, I won't let them read books without me knowing what's in the book.

which is why they tend to read classics. My daughter's a big reader. She's eight, but she reads it. She's in third grade. She reads at probably eighth or ninth grade level. How old is your oldest kid? She's eight. And she reads it at like seventh, eighth, ninth grade level.

And so she can read sophisticated books, but there are certain books that are, you know, for eighth graders, but not for third graders in terms of the sort of ideas and concepts that are presented and not appropriate for that age category. But increasingly what you're starting to see is this bleeding over into content for very young kids. I mean, I was recently at a bookstore, and we were about to get on a flight, and there was a series that she was interested in picking up the book, and it was just a book about dragon or something, the magic books about dragons. And so I was about to buy it for her, and then I was like, you know what? I'm going to just Google this. I googled it. And sure

enough, there's like a transgender dragon. Like, what the hell? Like, seriously, what the hell? You couldn't have just written like a nice book about dragons? I have to have to explain to my eight-year-old daughter why boys can't be girls and girls can't be boys. It's just pretty wild. It's amazing how this sort of cultural moment has allowed for the infusion of a lot of these messages into content where it wasn't before. And I think the truth is that right, left or center, a lot of people, even people who agree with sort of the left-wing cultural agenda, many of those people don't want this stuff being taught to small kids. They say, okay, that's stuff for adults or that stuff for teenagers. And those are conversations we can have with more sophisticated people, which is why what we're doing with kids, I don't think is actually, I think what we're doing is a restoration of the apolitical. I think there's going to be some moderates out there who are like, well, I'm not particularly

interested in content for my kids that is preaching a political agenda. If this is apolitical, then maybe we'll take a look at it. There's probably a lot of parents out there, too, that don't even know that like this is going on, though, right? Right. So I think it's been a big wake-up call to Disney when people started realizing that that was going on. I mean, late year was a massive box office failure, like a huge box office failure. Strange World was a massive box office failure. These things just, they tank, they bombed. And I think that, you know, Disney, at a certain point is going to have to get the message, that it's not that, you know, these issues can never be discussed, but you do not have permission to discuss these issues

with my five-year-old. Sure. I'm curious at what age do you think it is appropriate for your kid to just not have to get your approval to read something or watch something? Oh, well, 18. I mean, realistically speaking, I think that kids are in their teenage years, they're obviously going to gain access to stuff that I can't control. You can't realistically control everything your kid sees.

but doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying. I don't think the kids are capable of making good decisions up until the point where they had adulthood. Was that? No, I said not an eight years old for sure. Certainly not eight, but frankly, I don't think 15-year-olds are very good at making good decisions.

In fact, they make quite shitty decisions on a regular basis. And the story of civilization is human beings making crappy decisions between the ages of 12 and 24. So, you know, I think that the, my plan is no, no smartphones for my kids. I was going to say, yeah.

from my kids until they hit well into their teenage years. How tough is it like being a parent right now? That's something I would worry about if I had kids now, it's like it's such a different game than when I was growing up or even when you were growing up. It's super tough. You have to bubble them so much more than you did when I was growing up. Is that tough though? Well, this is why we live, you know, I'm an Orthodox Jew.

We live in a religious community. So we tend to live near people who share our values. So it makes it a lot easier. But my kids also don't watch a lot of TV. And we really encourage them not to watch TV nearly at all. If they are watching TV, then it's usually an old movie that we've picked for them, Disney movie or the original Star Wars series, stuff like that. First of all, a lot of stuff is better than the stuff they make now.

But second of all, I've seen it before, so I know that I'm comfortable with my kids seeing that sort of stuff. I also have to particularly bubble my kids because I am so out there and because I am so political. And there are a lot of people who would love to, you know, harm me by harming my kids, unfortunately. And that's a thing that, like, there are no pictures of my kids online. I will not put pictures of my kids online. There are very few pictures of my wife online.

I really try to keep my family out of the public eye because they deserve to be able to live a nice, innocent life without having to deal with all the crap that I have to take. It's bad enough that we have to have 24-7 security on my house. They shouldn't have to deal with the predations of people who are coming for them on the Internet. Has that affected any of your content, like kind of your family and keeping them safe?

No, I kind of say what I want to say. It's just affected our budget for security. Right, for sure. We spent a lot of money on security. Because when you used to go to, like, colleges and stuff like that, like, people would show up and, like, protest pretty much, right? Yeah, that's, that's died down a little bit, I would say. And frankly, I think that's a smart PR move by people on the left not to come and make a big fuss. Because when they come and make a big fuss, all they're doing is drawing attention to their own intolerance for opposing viewpoints.

But, yeah, I mean, there was a time when it was pretty wild. I mean, the Berkeley example being the most obvious. What happened in that scenario? That was where I was invited by the college Republicans to speak. Young Americans Foundation to speak at Berkeley. And there was a big protest. People were very upset about it. And there were so many threats that it required, I believe,

600 police officers, something like that. 600? They call them the statees. Like, they basically, like, loaded up on the security there. And I'm like, what in the world is this? And then people are protesting out front, chanting speeches, violence. They blocked out the top half of the arena because they were afraid that people were going to,

supposedly, they were afraid that people were going to go into the top part of the arena and throw things, stuff like that. And that was one where I was wearing, they made me wear a bulletproof vest. Like, it's, you know, absurd kind of stuff. Now, I always tend to think... Did any party think it's like, yo, maybe I shouldn't go speak there? No, no, generally I think it's overkill.

Yeah. My usual reaction because I'm an idiot is like, well, you know, why I'm wearing a vest? Why do I need security? I don't need any of this crap. Like, what was somebody going to do? And my security's general take is, yeah, it's stupid overkill until the minute it's not a stupid overkill. Sure. And that's, so they have to constantly be pulling me back. Yeah, yeah. I don't, you know, it's no fun having to walk around with security all the time and as my kids are used to it and we live in a very protected gated area so they don't have it all the time right and again the jewish schools are already they go to jewish schools so the jewish schools are very staffed up in terms of securities they're kind of used to it but um yeah it's it's a

very it's a very weird moment it's it's all very strange me and kha were talking before this we haven't really heard like your story so we're talking about your kids where did you inherit like your beliefs when did you get into like all the politics all that so yeah what Why don't you start making content? Yeah, content. So I'm making content. I'm 38 now. I started making content, content when I was 17, maybe.

So I was over 20 years. On what platform? So my, so I grew up in Burbank, California. My mom was a Hollywood executive. She worked on reality TV. My dad was a composer. Are they religious? They originally, no.

So they were kind of quasi-interested in religion. They only became fully Orthodox when I was 11. Okay. So I remember reading a KFC at McDonald's, for example. Yeah. And, you know, not bad, not bad. I will say. But it was, when we were 11, that's when the family became fully orthodox.

I'd gone to public school until I was about eight or nine. And then I went to private school for a couple of years. Then I went back to public school for part of middle school. Then I was in private school, Jewish Day School for high school. And I skipped during that process, third grade and ninth grade. So I finished high school when I was 16 and went to UCLA. And when I went to UCLA, I thought that I was actually going to make, double major in music and genetic science. That's what I was interested in. At the time,

I was a concert level violinist at the time also. I'd started playing when I was five. And so I, you know, you have to make a choice at a certain point when you're 15, 16 years old. If you're going to go for it, like try to be the concert level violinist, you have to be practicing six to eight hours a day. And so do you want to basically make that your life or do you want to go do something else? My dad who is a musician and my mom who was married to a musician was like, this is a bad idea. You're going to go get a job. You're going to, you're going to go on a career path that doesn't end with you, you know, playing in a bar somewhere. And so I end up going to UCLA. I wanted to go to Johns Hopkins, actually, and my parents were like,

you're 16, you're not going anywhere. So I lived at home while I was in college. So I stepped on campus and very quickly I saw, you know, kind of how left. I never really thought of myself as super political. I mean, I knew I was political. I was interested in politics. I liked history. I like talking about political issues and current events. But it was really on campus that I was kind of faced with an alternative point of view that I really wanted to speak about. And so one of the first things that happened is I walked on campus, I picked up the UCLA student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, and there was an editorial comparing the then prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, this is 2001, to Adolf Eichmann, as in like the facilitator of the

Holocaust. And so I walked into the Daily Brun offices and I said, can I write a counter to this. I would have been 16 at the time. I said, can I write a counter to this? And they're like, yeah, sure, write a counter. So I wrote a counter. And then a couple of weeks later, they came to me and they said, we have a prospective column from somebody and you're the only person who's on the right that we've ever heard of. And so can you write the countervailing point of view? So that turned into every couple of weeks. We would do like a point, counterpoint column in the Daily Bruin. And then I applied for and got a kind of regular columnist position, just writing my own column at the Daily Bruin as the token conservative.

on the paper. It was very well read. And then after doing that for maybe a year, so I was 17, I turned to my dad. And I said, you know, you've been reading my stuff. Do you think my stuff is good enough to go in a real paper, not just a college paper? And he said, yeah, actually, I do. Let me do some research. So he looked up online as syndicator, like who puts, who places columns in papers. And so the place he came up with was creator syndicate. Creator syndicate was the syndicator at the time of people on the left like Molly Ivins and people on the right like David Limbaugh. Michelle Malkin was big at creators at the time. And so my dad gave me their address and there was sort of a form that you could just send in your columns. So I sent

my columns called. And about three weeks later they called and they didn't know really how old I was. And so they said, we want you to write. They knew I was young. They didn't know how young I was. They said, we want you to write a weekly column for us. So I was, they were going to syndicate the column, which means they're going to put it in a bunch of different papers at one time. So, you know, 10, 12. Now I think it runs in maybe 150 or 200 papers every week. So I've been writing a syndicated column since I was 17 years old. Wow.

And pretty much everything dumb. I don't say everything. I say dumb stuff fairly routinely. But most of the dumb stuff that I've said was between the age, in that column, between the ages maybe 17 and 24, which is why I say, like people make bad decisions at that time. You have more radical viewpoints. When you're younger, he tend to moderate a little bit, at least be, I wouldn't say,

moderate as much as become more realistic. about the world as you get older. But yes, I was writing a syndicated column when I was 17. My first book came out when I was 20 about left-wing bias on college campuses called Brainwash. That came out in 2003, 2004. And then I went to, I ended up going Harvard Law School. I read another couple books while I was at Harvard Law. I came out of Harvard Law when I was 23. And then I actually thought I was just going to go into law practice. I worked at a a law firm called Goodwin Proctor, which is a major law firm, corporate law firm in the real estate market. There was only one problem. I joined a real estate law firm in 2007, which is

the worst time in human history to join a real estate law firm. So the market absolutely tanks. I'm sitting in a beautiful office, overlooking, you know, century city, and then all the way down to the ocean and doing nothing all day long. And I couldn't stand it. I couldn't bear it. I hated it. Also, if you're a first year associate at a law firm, you basically sit there all day and you just read page numbers. It's like, is this paragraph properly formatted? You have to read for typos. Is the comma in the right place? I'm not that detail oriented. In fact, I'm so not detail oriented that my assistant has to text me to take out the garbage. I just delegate everything. So this is like the worst job in history for me. So about eight months in, I turned to, I'd met my wife

when I came back to Los Angeles. She was at UCLA at the time. She was a junior at UCLA. And we had been dating for, we dated for like two and a half months before we got engaged. And so we were already engaged at this point. Two and a half months? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It was, you know, you see what you like, move fast, right? Take it off the market. I like it.

Yeah, yeah. That is smart. Listen, I encourage it. I think that people dating for five, six years at a time. If you can't make your mind up within year one, I think that you probably need to move on. I think people, people date for too long. They tend to talk themselves into long term. Damn, you're going to get some trouble here now, bro.

Well, listen, whenever I meet, you know, people who are saying, how long have been dating, they'll say two years. I'm like, so what are you waiting for? Either get married or get off the pot, you know? That is true. people will scare a commitment though right yeah it's a lifelong thing after that for sure but you shouldn't but my view is different when it comes to dating than everybody else is right because i was always dating for marriage so my father had always said and i think he's right that the you only meet the person

you're going to marry when you already believe that it's time to get married people tend to make sense meet a person date a person they're like oh fall into marriage i'll just i'll sort of fall in love with them and then i'll and then i'll decide to get married wrong you decide you're going to get married then you meet the person you can fall in love with because you're thinking in a different way. When you're dating for marriage, you have a set of values that are that are in your head. What do you want your life to look like? How do you want your life to be structured? What do you want to teach your kids? What kind of community? These are really important questions because Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist, social psychologist, he talks about sort of the trajectory

of relationships and love. And what he says is that at the very beginning, this is true for every relationship. The very beginning, there's a lot of passionate love and very low levels of what he calls companionate love. Companionate love is sort of like trust and knowledge of the other person. You don't know the other person. How could you? Passionate love is like, I want to be with them all the time. A lot of sexual attraction here.

We got like the sparks are flying. And in every relationship, after a couple of years, you start to see a decline in the passionate love and an increase in the companionate love, which is why you'll see couples for 70 years old. And it's not like they're going at it 24 hours a day. It's more like they feel like they're integrated with one another. It's almost like one unit. And so when you're dating for marriage, yes, the passionate love will be there.

But you're also trying to look beyond. on what that two-year passionate love period is going to look like to what is the rest of your life going to look like? And that sets up a whole different expectation of the person you're dating and for yourself, right? Why are you actually in the room with this person? Is it because they're good looking and because they're sexy or is it because this is a person you actually want to spend serious amounts of time with and maybe commit to. Yeah. And so that sets up, like my first day with my wife was like a three-hour date where we walked, we went to a coffee bean in Santa Monica and then we walked on the beach before it was taken over by drug addicts and the mentally ill.

And we walked for three hours on the beach talking about like free will and determinism and religion. And so, I mean, my relationship's never gone that deep. I have not analyzed anything like that. Yeah, well, I mean, I think I need to. Yeah, you have to first decide whether you think it's time in your life to get serious about marriage. And if it is, then you have to ask those questions. You'll need a whole three-hour session with Ben after it's just on that topic. So, yeah, so anyway, we were to get back to the story, we were dating for two and a half months before we got.

engaged. And that was pretty funny, actually, like maybe two months in. Actually, so our first day was September 5th, and we got engaged December 22nd. Was she at all surprised? So three and a half months. She was not surprised when we got engaged. She, well, what was really funny is that, so a couple things happened. One, about mid-November, November 15th. I remember all the dates. November 15th, it was the first time I said, I love you to my wife. And she said, thank you. And I was like, oh, yeah. So that was, and that lasted for about a month. That was. And that lasted for about a month. It was a very awkward month. It was like, I'd finish every phone call. I'd be like, love you, sweetheart. Thanks. Bye. So that was real awkward. And then, but the reason she was doing that and it made sense is because of what happened next, right? December 15th. She says to me, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. I have a life too. And I said, and she knew what was going to happen. She said then the next word's out of my mouth were, okay, let's get married. Okay. And she's like, I love you. You love me. We're done. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Let's have a life together. And she goes, let's just enjoy this time. So I'm not enjoying this time. This is miserable. me. Like, what are you talking about? There's nothing for, there's nothing for, if you're a religious

person dating for marriage, the worst thing is, is the dating. Like, the dating and the engagement sucks. Then you actually get to get married. Like, if you're a religious person, then you get to get to sleep with the person, you get to sleep with the person, beloved, like, that's, all the rest of this is just delay. So she's like, why don't we enjoy this? I'm like, you don't, I'm not enjoying this at all. This sucks. Like, I want to lock this down. We'll be done. It'll be great. This will be over this period of our life. And so, she was like, well, you know, let's just think about it. A week later, we got engaged. So it took her about a week to adjust. And that was because she was 20 at the time. And so she was afraid of telling her parents, like, they didn't

expect her to get married that fast. And so she was afraid of telling her parents at the time that she was engaged or that she was going to get engaged. And she was afraid what people would say and all this kind of stuff. And actually, the most romantic thing she ever said to me, I was talking to her and it was a Shabbat. It was a Saturday. And I was staying over at this kind of co-op that she lived at and we were talking and uh and i was saying to her like this is is there a reason why we shouldn't get married really and she was like what and she finally realized that the reason that she was holding off is because she was she was afraid of what other people were going to say and how other people were going to judge her for it and so she turned to me and she said people are

so full of shit and then we got engaged and so that and so we got engaged and so anyway we we'd scheduled our wedding for July. We were married on July 8th. And when we, and during that intervening period, she could see I was becoming more and more miserable at the job, like just hated the job. So I bought a condo in preparation for us getting married and moving in. And so we took a mortgage. And then I came home one day and I just said, this is miserable. This is the worst. I hate this law firm. I don't want to be doing this. It's garbage. And she said, you should quit. And so we have a mortgage and we have costs. And she said, I don't care. You should quit. You're miserable. you should quit. And so I said, okay. And so I went in the next day and I quit. And again,

that was kind of a funny story. I walked in and the pay when you get out of Harvard Law School and you're an associate is really good. Like your first year pay is very good. You have to make up for the fact that you're hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. So the law firms pay you a not insignificant amount of money. And so I walked in and I said to the senior associate, I'm quitting. I hate this. This is the worst. I just, I can't stand it. And he starts trying to talk me out of it. calls in another senior associate to come and try and talk me out of it. This other senior associate had played some minor league baseball. And so he's sitting there and he starts telling me about how he played minor league baseball. And then he got into the law and I'm like, yeah,

but you know what I hate this. This is miserable. I don't even know what you guys do all day. Like this just seems like a terrible job. And he, this senior associate turns to the other senior associate goes, he's totally right. I hate this job. This job is terrible. And so the other senior associate had to talk both of us out of quitting. He succeeded with one of them. It did not succeed with me. I walk into the partner's office, and I tell him, like, I'm out. This is terrible. I don't want to be here. And the partner was not happy.

And he says to me, you know, I just want you to know this is the most money you're ever going to earn in your life. And I've been wanting to send him tax returns for 20, for a solid period of time. For solidly 15 to 20 years, I've been wanting to send that to some tax returns. So anyway. Yeah, but he probably motivated you too. Oh, it was great. I mean, like he was a jerk, but it was a motivating factor.

You know, motivation is not hard. for me to find. I tend to be a pretty driven. My battery, my motor runs a lot. So that was, so anyway, I ended up quitting. I picked up a job at Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for Laura Ingramman, Michael Savage at the time on radio. And the job was, I would be in-house counsel, but the deal was, I said to the owner of the company, I'll only be in-house counsel for you half the day. The other half of the day, I want to learn the production side of radio. So I would actually sit there and I'd cut the audio on the audio program. I would put together kind of a rundown for various people's shows. I would read articles for them and highlight

them, get up at 4.30 in the morning and do that sort of stuff. And in meantime, I was still writing my books and coming out with books at that time under my own name. But this is one of the things about, you know, when you see a company like the one that we've built that's become very big, people see the size of the company. They don't see the laboring and obscurity for 10 years selling books out of the back of your car. Literally, my wife remembers us going to like local Republican clubs with a box of books in the back of my car that had gotten free from the publisher. And if you sold like 10 of those in a day, you were so happy. like, oh my God, I made $200 today. That's unbelievable. So we can go to dinner. Like,

this is great. So anyway, I took that job for $60,000 a year as in-house counsel and producer, which was a massive pay cut from the law firm. And then sort of worked my way up until I was executive vice president of that company. Meanwhile, I was ghostwriting a lot of books at the time. Also, I became known as sort of the quick fix ghost writer. So famous people would need to write a book. They don't know how to write a book because they're famous. And so they would call me in to write the book and they'd give me like no time to do it. It'd be like, you have a month to churn out 60,000 words by ex-person. I went, okay.

So I was cobbling together a decent income by doing many, many jobs at one time. And so I was doing all of that. I ended up latching on doing a radio show in Los Angeles and a radio show in Seattle. I became editor at large of Breitbart when Andrew Breitbart was still alive. He and I had been friends for a long time by that point. And so basically, before we found a lot of. this company my day was i did six hours of radio day i was the editor at large bright part writing for them and doing a little bit of editing i was the editor of truth revolt i was ghost

writing books and i was writing books and doing speeches my own so i was doing like five or six jobs at one time before we ended up launching uh daily wire so and how did and how did you like what was the inception of that the daily wire daily wire so jeremy the inception is really me and my business partner jeremy boring and we have a third business partner named cable robinson and what year was this as well so the the daily wire we're was founded in 2015. I had known Jeremy since 2010, 2010 and 2011. That was because when I was working at Talk Radio Network,

there was a secret underground Hollywood conservative group called Friends of Abe. It's supposed to be a take off on Friends of Dorothy, when gay people in Hollywood weren't allowed to speak openly about being gay, they called themselves Friends of Dorothy. So Friends of Abe was like, you're an underground Hollywood person who's conservative. And so you're a friend of Abe Lincoln, right? So Friends of Abe. So Jeremy was one of the people who had,

was heading up friends of Abe, and he was making zero dollars a year and doing a lot of work for free. And I was working at Talk Radio Network, and my boss at Talk Radio Network was interested in doing movies. And so he said, you know, Ben, you should talk with Jeremy. Well, Jeremy and I hit it off, became very close friends, did a couple of kind of small-time business ventures together, and then ended up working together at Truth Revolt, which was sort of the precursor to Daily Wire. Truth Revolt was supposed to be Media Matters in reverse. So Media Matters is designed to take away advertising from right-wing shows by astro-turfing boycotts. And so what we said is we don't like that tactic.

We hate that tactic. And we're going to stop that tactic from being used by essentially creating mutually assured destruction until the left understands that this is a bad tactic. We'll do it to you and we'll see how you like it. And so we were fairly successful at doing that. Like we knocked out, probably we knocked Alec Baldwin off the RNMSNBC and Martin Mishir off the air on MSNBC. It was a part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

So Jeremy was, I ran the editorial side on Truth of Bolt, which was sort of a news website and also an activist site. And Jeremy sort of did the business side of that. And it was a subsection of a nonprofit called the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Well, we'd been working there for a couple of years. This is from like 2013 to 2015. Yeah, 2015. And there came a point where Jeremy came to me and he said, listen, I have this idea. I've really been studying marketing. I really think that the conservative movement does not know how to market. This is our big shortcoming is we do not know how to market. And I have this idea. And the idea is that we need to raise a budget and spend an awful lot of money on marketing. And so we went to the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and we tried to explain this to them. And there was this meeting. And boards of nonprofits are typically staffed by very elderly large scale donors. And so this board was people who are very wealthy and rather old. And so we're sitting there trying to explain to them tech.

And Jeremy, who is known as the stupid whisperer, because I speak very fast and I'm, you know, I'm a Jew who uses big words and speaks very quickly. And Jeremy is a southern Texan who speaks very slowly with a soft lilt. So in a meeting with one congressperson who shall remain nameless, I remember I was trying to explain something. This congressperson was just glazing over, and Jeremy said the exact same thing but slower. And this congressperson suddenly understood. And so that's how Jeremy earned the nickname, the Stupid Whisper. Anyway, Jeremy was stupid whispering the board. And he was like, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to take the money. And we're going to spend it here and here. And finally, for like an hour. And they refused to understand. And finally, one of them turned to me. And they said, what's your plan? What do you want to do? And I said, okay, here's our plan.

I was mad because it'd been like an hour of wasted time. And I took a napkin. And I wrote on the napkin, dollar sign, arrow, Facebook, arrow, website, arrow back to dollar sign. And I said, this is our business plan. We were going to spend money on Facebook. We're going to use Facebook marketing in order to jack up traffic on the website. We're going to take advertising of subscription revenue back to money,

and we're going to do it over and over again. It's going to be a money machine. That's how it's going to work. So that was our entire business plan. They fired Jeremy the next day, and I quit in solidarity. And we took that exact business plan. We walked across the street, and we found a daily wire. So we had a meeting with our initial funders.

And the initial funding for the company was about $4.7 million in angel investment. We were cash flow positive at 18 months in. and we have been operating off cash flow ever since, and we'll do $200 million in business this year. Wow. That's impressive. Thank God. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

So what was like the first thing when you started doing like more like viral YouTube stuff? How did that start about it? The big hit, actually this was a big kind of inflection point in terms of how Jeremy and I were thinking about all this stuff. The first big moment when I sort of broke loose and suddenly people started to know who I was because I've been writing a syndicated column, as I say, for a long time, like since I was 17. And I'd written several books and that meant some Fox hits. and, you know, it was a time when you'd get, like, super excited if anybody on Fox would call

you to do a hit. And then 2013 is when I had a book that was called Bullies Come Out. And I wrote a piece, a syndicated column about how Pierce Morgan was using bully tactics with regard to gun control. It was right after Sandy Hook. And Pierce saw it. And Pierce had just had on Alex Jones. And the interview between Pierce and Alex Jones is wild. If you've never watched it, it's, yeah. I mean, it's Alex Jones. Alex Jones is going full-fledged. Like, I need a gun in order to take you out, that kind of stuff. And so Pierce reaches out to me.

And he's like, you know, I saw your column. I want you to come on. And Pierce is having some big success by using the same tactic over and over, which was basically, if you're not in favor of gun control, you're in favor of kids getting killed, which is just from my perspective. And I think any sane perspective absurd, no one is in favor of children getting murdered.

Anyway, so he called me up. And I think he sort of assumed that because I'm on the right, that it was going to look like Pierce Moore, that particular, that it was going to look like Alex Jones in that particular debate. I was going to be like 7076 and the reverend. And it wasn't, right? This debate with peers. And it was such a disaster area for peers that the Washington posted like an entire write-up about what a disaster area was for peers and ended up being this incredibly viral moment where every conservative watched it like five times. And suddenly people recognized that I had this skill set that, I mean, I knew I had it because

I debated a lot of people in law school, but you don't really debate all that much. is the truth in sort of the public sphere. Was that your first, like, very public debate, though? Yeah, that's the, that's the first one that that kind of went super, yeah, that's the first one that I think went super viral. Was that before the trans women, like, threatened to beat you up? Yeah. That was before that? Yeah, the CNN headline news one was later that year, I believe. I think that was either 2013 or 2014. Yeah, there were a bunch that were sort of in succession. Or I'd be on a panel with three other people, and I would kind of, you know, have one of those viral destroys moments was that a big moment too that one because that one's like funny uh which one

like it's like five i think so yeah it's like five people and the girl's like what did she say like i'll take you outside after or something like that yeah if by the girl you mean the the dude who's earlier than i am yes yes yeah what did he or she say well so as always i preface this by saying i only use biological pronouns because they're the only ones that refer to an objective truth anyway what he said was uh if you what what happened is it was this whole debate on CNN headline news about Caitlin Jenner and was it was Caitlin Jenner been given some sort of sports woman of the year award by ESPN or something, even though Caitlin Jenner is not engaged in a sporting activity since before I was born. Anyway, Caitlin Jenner, the question was just how

much of a hero was Caitlin Jenner just like a small hero or the greatest hero? Was Caitlin Jenner like the greatest hero or like a Normandy level hero? Was Caitlin Jenner like a normity level hero or Jesus. These were the gradations of the conversation. There was no one on the other side saying what I was saying, which is Caitlin Jenner is a person who is possibly suffering from gender dysphoria and it doesn't seem like an act of heroism to suffer from a mental disorder. And so this is a funny story, actually. So they call me and they want to have me on a panel about Caitlin Jenner. Fine. All right. So I come in. The producer comes in and he's like, I just want to tell you, I want you to say whatever you want to say, man. Like, I, like, this is a hot show and we want you to say whatever you want to

say. And then he, and then he said something that should have tipped me off as to where this was going to go. He said, I used to be a producer on Jerry Springer. And, okay, fine. So, so, all right, so they sit me down. And it's a panel of, let's see, it's like five people plus Dr. Drew. It looked like a Jerry Springer type vibe. Yeah. And, and so they sent me deliberately right next to Zoe Tur, who is a transgender woman, meaning a biological male, who believes that he's a email. And so this conversation is going, and it's going for a while. And just how heroic is it like the heroism level of like the battle of the bulge or heroism level of like being dropped behind the lines in World War I? And so finally they come to me and I said, I don't really see

what we're talking about in terms of heroism. It seems like instead what we have here is society that would like to restructure itself to support a delusion. And this notion that I'm supposed to pretend that Caitlin Jenner is a woman when Caitlin Jenner is clearly a man is. is very foolish to me. And everybody, aghast, no one could say that. It's terrible to say this. And Zoe Turner turns to me and says, and I said, you know, Caitlin Jenner, you can go view the video. It's pretty funny. I said, Caitlin Jenner, you know, is a biological male. Every cell in Caitlin Jenner's body includes a Y chromosome, with ironically the exception of some of his sperm cells. Hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi.

Wagovi? Yeah, Wagovi. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor. About Wagovi. Yeah, ask for it by name.

Okay, so why did you bring me to the circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers. You know, with the chair and everything? Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit wagovi.combe.com for savings. Exclusions may apply. Right, and Zoe Tur turns to me and says, well, you know, you don't know anything about genetics, little boy. You don't know anything about science, little boy. And I, and he

just kept saying, little boy over it. And so finally I turned him and I said, well, what are your genetics, sir? And he grabs me by the back of the neck. And he says, if you say anything like that, again, I'll send you home in an ambulance. And what did you say? You're like, that seems mildly inappropriate for political. Yeah, I said, this seems mildly inappropriate for political conversation. I mean, honestly, it took me back so much. Like, you don't go on with TV, you show expecting to be physically assaulted, typically. It's not how you think your night's going to go. When I got up that morning, I'm like, yeah,

transgender woman's going to ground me by the neck and threaten me on national TV. But I saw that day going. That was so viral, though. Oh, yeah. I mean, honestly, my first thought when he said, you know, if you don't cut that out, little boy, I'm going to send you home in an ambulance. That doesn't make any sense. You don't go home in an ambulance.

You go to the hospital in ambulance. It's right. Anyway, it was, yeah, it was weird. Then he continued to, and then the entire panel was upset with me for having, quote, unquote provoked. And then afterward, on the way out, Zoe turns to me and growls at me. He's like, I'll see you in the parking lot. First of all, not very ladylike behavior. But number two, like, I'm not going to the parking lot. What are you? What? Why would I meet you in the parking lot? I'm like, go fight you? Were you intimidated? Was that you? Were you intimidated?

I was puzzled. Yeah. I don't say intimidated as much as like, this is, again, very, very weird. There are aspects of my life that are very much like a fever dream. That was definitely one of the more fever dream aspects of that was a weird one that's a weird one what do you think of kately jenner now because we've had her on the show i mean seems like a perfectly nice human being it's almost like is is a is a man who believes he is a woman i mean those are those are those are my complete thoughts was a great athlete as bruce seems like the kardashian family kind of screwed up i mean like i have fairly generic thoughts on this would you say that katelyn's like more courageous now because i think it's pretty cool how he or she speaks out on like like

she's like the only trans like Republican like she takes a lot of heat now yeah I mean listen I think that that saying saying unpopular things at at personal risk certainly takes a level of of courage and so but but the question is whether that's heroic or not I mean you know like again I agree with some of what Caitlin Jenner says I disagree with some what Caitlin Jenner says um I'm the truth is that I've tried to I've tried to avoid labeling human beings as a whole meaning that that instead of thinking people as heroes or villains, it's more like, did they do a heroic thing or did they do a villainous thing? Because the truth is that most people are kind of shaded. So I think that some of the stuff that Caitlin Jenner says is worthy of emulation.

I think some of the stuff Caitlin Jenner says is not. Just like everybody else. We got to talk about Brittany Griner. Okay. Just want to hear your thoughts on the whole, the trade just happened, obviously, right? Yeah, first WNBA trade anybody's ever noticed. Yeah. But yeah, just like your thoughts on how that went down. something too that just got posted I just saw was Nick Fuentes just said that Kanye was supposed to meet with Putin if you look I don't know if you've seen it oh no I've he was supposed

to meet this one he was supposed to meet with Putin and he was going to get he was going to get Britney Griner out and the reason that Biden did the trade was because they knew that they were going to release him yeah that seems like a lot of reliable sources speaking about really important topics. Yeah, my general thoughts on the Brittany Griner trade are severalfold. One, Brittany Griner is an American citizen. We should do everything we can to bring American citizens home. Two, when you have the White House press secretary saying it's particularly important

to bring this particular American citizen home because she is an LGBTQ woman of color, start to go, why? Seriously, why? Why does that make her specifically more important to bring home? Is it more important than Paul Whalen, more important than the 40 to 50 other people who are American citizens being held in captivity around the world? Like, I don't know what makes Brittany Griner more special than they are. She was certainly victimized by the Russian government, which was using her as a pawn.

No question. As a general rule, you shouldn't go into foreign countries holding drug apparatus. That's not a smart move. That was so stupid. I would never bring weed to fucking Russia. It's a very stupid thing to do. I mean, listen, there are plenty of places that are not even dictatorships where you're not going to bring drugs. Don't bring drugs into Japan is a good recommendation.

You'll end up in jail for a very long period of time. Yeah, I mean, it's just a dumb thing to do. That said, again, many things. things can be true. One, she's an American citizen. One, we should try to get her home. Two, she was given a sentence that was completely unjustified by the crime that she committed. Three, she's an idiot for trying to bring drugs into Russia. Four, why are you going into Russia in the first place in the middle of what is going on? I think she went in February, which was like, it was like right before the breakout of the war in Ukraine. Five, I, I understand the tendency to

want to bring American citizens home. That's a bad trade. It's on a pure GM level. Lord of war for a woman who once dunked is just a bad trade. If you're going to, if you're going to, if you're to give up the most notorious armed dealer, arms dealer ever put in prison, then you would hope to at least get back like two, or like one in a player to be named later. Like, this is just not good GMing by the Biden administration. They tried to include Whalen too, right? They did, supposedly. So there's conflicting reporting. One report from NBC News originally suggested they were given the choice of either Griner or Whalen. And then NBC News scrubbed it. And they said, oh, it was just a choice of Griner or nothing. And so depending on which version of that,

you believe, you know, the trade was what the trade was. It is, it does incentivize. I mean, just on a general level, it incentivizes people to take hostages, obviously. Yeah. So if you're a famous person, don't go to Russia right now. Is the, is the moral of this story. How do you think it should have been handled? And then do you think that there was so much pressure? Because all these celebrities start speaking out. Like, yo, we need her back. I mean, that puts pressure. Again, I'm not super blaming Biden for making the trade, actually. Like, I think that from the outside, I wasn't part of the negotiations. It seems like a very disproportionate trade in which Putin wins. Like if you're just doing this as like a straight up

sporting trade, it's a bad trade for the United States. And it really incentivizes them to take prisoners in American citizens and try to get more criminals who are useful to them out of prison. But, you know, again, I understand the tendency to try and get Griner out. The part that I really don't understand is the PR effort in the aftermath to turn this into this is a giant victory for the United States. It's a particularly important victory because of Brittany Griner's intersectional status. Listen, it's still not as bad a trade as Obama made for Bo Bergdahl. That was the worst hostage trade. That was the worst hostage trade. That was a deserter for the Taliban 5. That was a particularly bad trade. This one is like just kind of a minor bad trade. It's not

like Ernie Brolyo for Lou Brock. It's kind of, it's more like maybe like the White Soxammy Sosa trade. That's like not an amazing trade. I guess for their base, it's a good, a pretty good like political trade for them for their own political. Like, I'm sure everyone that supports Biden wanted Britney Greiner out. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like for reelection. Again, for political reasons, I totally get it. As far as his reelectoral prospects, I think that, you know, politicians tend to think in terms of days and weeks, and they're wrong if they think people are going to remember this by the election in 2024. I mean, can you remember what happened three weeks ago in politics? And it's very difficult

to remember what happened three days ago in politics. So the idea that that's going to have any sort of durable impact for Biden in the future, I think, is wrong. That's why I always find it weird when you have these sort of big celebratory events. Look how we got Brittany Griner out. Isn't that amazing? It's not super amazing. I mean, like, it's like good. I'm glad.

But there are certain things that are worth taking a victory lap on. I'm not sure that was worth such a big victory lap. Do you think that Biden will rerun? Yes. He will for sure. Yeah. I think the fact that you didn't get shellacked in 2022 means he runs in 2024. It's like before, if he had lost in 2022, there had been a lot of internal pressure saying he's a drag on the ticket.

He's creating problems for other Democrats. We need to get them out of there. But because Democrats overperformed and because Republicans raided the local homeless shelter for candidates, the Democrats did not end up being punished in 2022. And because of that, they ended up, you know, it reinvigorates his, his 2024 run. Now, is that the best candidate for them? Aside from Michelle Obama, yes, actually. Like, he's going to be a better candidate than Kamala Harris, who's the worst politician who has ever been assembled in a laboratory. You don't even hear anything about her, really.

Well, I mean, they tried not to. I mean, she's just a disaster area of a politician. She makes Hillary Clinton look smooth and authentic. She's awful at this. And then, and who's the rest of their bench, Pete Buttigieg? And the dude went on paternity leave for two months and nobody noticed. It doesn't speak well to your efficacy and how useful you are in the governmental structure. So, yeah, I think they have a very weak bench.

The kind of ace in the hole for them is if things really got bad, they probably, I still think there's a shot they bring in somebody like Michelle Obama, who's really made herself over in a pretty dramatic way and is extraordinarily popular. Yeah, for sure. So they brought her in. She'd be a heavy hitter for them, for sure. Do you think that Trump has any chance of winning? So I think, having made this mistake before, I will say he has a chance of winning. I didn't think he was going to win in 2016. I also didn't think he's going to win in 2020. He didn't think he was going to win in 2016. Like, Trump was the most surprised person in the room. Yeah. I mean, I know people who were in the

room. He was literally the most surprised person in the room in 2016 when he won. And by the way, it was hilarious. It was so funny. It was so funny. I mean, like, just the sudden vision of Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It was just, it was so funny. You're watching on TV here. Like, this is not, we went into an alternative timeline at some point right here. I don't know when it happened. But we like everything, the pandemic, Trump being elected, the riots last year.

Like, it's just like, or two years ago, like everything is just so insane. Society's just getting crazy. It feels like circa 2013. There was some breakpoint in reality. We just entered into the alternative timeline that really shouldn't exist. And that's where we are right now. But, yeah, when does Trump have a chance? Yeah, he has a chance because he is still, yeah, he still has 100% name recognition.

You can see some weird circumstance in which the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot so badly that he wins. Do I think that that chance is very strong? No. I think that he is the weakest Republican that could be fielded against Joe Biden. I think he is going to, I think the bloom is off the rose with him. I think he's tired out a lot of people. The case that he basically made in 2016 that made him popular was, I'm out here taking slings and arrows for you. I'm a member of the elite. I'm very wealthy. I had a lot of friends in Hollywood. And now

they hate my guts. And the reason they hate my guts is not because they hate me. They've known me for a long time. The reason they hate my guts is because they hate you. And so I'm out here taking the bullet for you. And so a lot of conservatives sort of resonated to that. And then for the subsequent four years, when he was attacked, they took it as like, well, they're attacking him because they really want to attack us. And then after 2020, he started making the reverse case, which is, I want you guys to take the head for me. I lost the election, but I want you guys to all go out there and I want you to say that I won the election. And I want you to make everything about election 2020. And I really want, it's all about me. It's not about you anymore. It's

about me. And I think a lot of Republicans were somewhat willing to at least abide by that until he lost a couple of Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. And then he got clocked in 2022. And I think that the real pitch for him was, again, in 2016, twofold. I'm the only one who can win. And I'm standing in for you. And when he did win in 2016, that granted him almost a magic aura for a lot of Republicans of he's the only one who can win. He's so powerful. He's so intimidating. He's so aggressive. He's the only one who can do it. And then after 2021, 2021, and him giving his campaign so far seems extremely tired. He's advocating for a suspension on the Constitution right now, right? Well, I mean, yeah, he tried to walk it back and pretend

he wasn't doing it. But yeah, I mean, he said something like that because of the Twitter banning of the Hunter Biden story, that the founders wouldn't want elections stolen. And so the Constitution wouldn't apply in these circumstances. I think it hurts his case when he's still trying to talk about his loss. Yes, of course. I think that most Republicans, even people who love Trump, right? I'm not somebody who loved Trump on a personal level, right? I didn't vote for him or Hillary in 2016.

In 2020, I voted for him, and I said, I still don't think that he's a person of high character, but I like a lot of his policies. And I like his policies better than I like Biden. And a lot of people who love him a lot more, like really love the guy. I think a lot of them look at him and they say, this is a tired routine. He has a lot of baggage. And it is tiring. I mean, the fact that he's expending all of this energy kind of fulminating over his own personal grievances, when meanwhile, if you're a conservative, Democrats feel like they're running a rough shot over a lot of the things that you actually care about.

It feels like a distraction. And that's why you're starting to see people like DeSantis really gaining ground against Trump in the primary polling. Do you think he runs? DeSantis, I'd be shocked if he doesn't. I'd be shocked if he doesn't. All the stars are aligned for him. You got to go. In politics, the worst thing you can do is Mr. Moment.

you can see this with like Elizabeth Warren and in 2016 Elizabeth Warren should run she missed her moment she ran in 2020 and said and that was not her moment 2016 was her moment. If she'd run against Hillary she might have won the nomination in 2016 and by 2020 she's tired. That's going to be so interesting if he runs because I feel like Trump hasn't

had a real rival of really rival in the Republican side right? That's going to be like pretty crazy to watch. I think that DeSantis's tactic is going to be what it's mostly been so far which is just run by ignoring Trump. And if Trump tries to bite his ankles, basically just say, listen, I don't have a bad word to say about the former presidents of the United States.

I like a lot of what he did as president, but it's time for new blood. And I like what we've done in Florida. And I think that stands up against anybody. And now what Trump says, just keep repeating that line. Because Trump is, the mistake that everybody makes with Trump is, he's like doomsday from the DC comics. Like every bit of energy you fired him, he takes in and he grows. Yeah. And so the more attention you give him, the more, the more naturally. Because people, we live in a really reactionary time where people sense, opposition. to a thing as social proof that you should support the thing. So you see this on both sides of the aisle. So if Democrats start attacking, for example, Marjorie Taylor Green, Republicans instead of saying, well, is that critique well-founded or poorly founded? They'll go, man, Democrats are attacking Marjorie Taylor Green. She must be amazing because the Democrats are attacking her.

And that is part of an after-effect of Trump. People would attack Trump and be like, oh, my God, they're attacking Trump. That means that Trump must be awesome. Everything he's doing is awesome. And you see that on the left, too, if somebody on the right attacks, you know, attacks Kamala Harris, then it'll be, oh, well, they must be attacking her because she's a racist. She must be amazing at this. Actually, she's secretly great at this. I'm like, well, no, she might be bad at this. Marjorie Taylor Green might be bad. Like, again, a little bit

of nuance goes a long way, but it's hard to do. As far as DeSantis running, and when I say the stars are aligned, I don't just mean that right now he's very popular at the base. I mean that he took a purple state where he had won by 0.4 percentage points in his last gubernatorial election, he won by 20 over Charlie Christ. The entire state is blood red now, which I'm proud to have been a part of having moved my family there. And DeSantis also has in the bank $150 million. He raised more money for his gubernatorial race than any candidate, I believe, in American history. And all that money is fungible. And his governor race? Yeah. And so when he, so if he declares for president, all of that money just goes directly into his presidential fund. So he's incredibly well

funded. He's also termed out, right? Which means that he can't run again for governor. After 2026, he's done. So he either runs now or if he ran later, he'd be running two years out of office. And the American people have a really short memory. People two years out of office don't tend to sort of recapture the magic from the moment. Also, DeSantis has the, he's much more disciplined than Trump. I mean, that's not saying a whole hell of a lot. I think most people are more disciplined than Trump in most ways. But DeSantis is a very disciplined politician.

And he also was made the face of the opposition by the media. During COVID, when they decided that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor in America. And Ron DeSantis was Ron DeSantis was Ron DeSantis. That was like the best thing for DeSantis politically. because it turns out he did a pretty good job in Florida and people like him. And so when the media hate you, that's a real, that gets Republicans in your corner like almost nothing else.

Wow. That's going to be crazy if he runs. Yeah. It's going to be crazy. I'm obsessed with this, but I just want to get your take on the whole FTX, SBF situation. It's fascinating. Yeah, it is. I keep looking into it because there's just new info every day. It gets crazier and crazier by the moment.

What do you think is like, how do you think this is going to be handled? I think he's going to go to jail for a super long time. You should go to jail. for a super long time. Yeah. It is amazing what connections and inflated valuations will do for a company. Yeah.

How do you think that represents us because he's affiliated with some of the most powerful people? He's donating a bunch of money. I saw that he actually was donating to both parties. So his deputy, I believe, donated to one of his deputies, I think donated a bunch of to Republicans. He donated like $30 to $40 million to Democrats. Yeah.

But yeah. What it says is a couple of things. one, it's not a rip on crypto. It's actually people who didn't understand the very premise of crypto who actually got ripped off here. So the premise of crypto is that it's a trustless system, right? The entire basis of crypto is I don't have to trust that my money, I don't have to trust you that my money is in your bank because I have my crypto wallet. It's owned by me. I have the code. It's in my possession. People forgot the basis of crypto and they left their money in the care of somebody else, right? They left their care in, they left their money in the care of

FTC. They left it in the exchange. By leaving it in the exchange, that made it vulnerable to being embezzled. And so it's actually not a repudiation of crypto. It's a repudiation of a system in which people assume they could trust authority figures, once again, and it turns out that they couldn't. And this is why it turns out SBF was spending an enormous amount of time cultivating politicians and appearing in public with some of the most powerful people on Earth. When you appear on panels with very powerful people, it creates a halo effect.

Everybody starts to think that you're somebody worthy of emulation, that they can trust you and then they can give you their mind. I mean, Bernie Madoff did the same thing, right? He's going to ring the bell in at the New York Stock Exchange. Like, well, that guy can't be defrauding me. He rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. And so I think that that's definitely a big part of the story. Is he just a part of him that, like, does that for protection in case something ever did go south? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's how his company sort of got started. I don't know that he was backfilling it as much as just continuing to do what he'd always done.

I mean, I think the surprise for him is that he thought, like, it seems most of these fraudsters do, that eventually there'd be something that filled in the gap that he'd created. This is Elizabeth, what's her face? At Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, at Theranos, right? You see the same thing. She kept assuming that the science would catch up with the lie. But eventually they cracked the code and suddenly all the lies she told would be justified. You see the same thing with SBF.

I think with SBF, you know, they were embezzling the money. They were using it at Alameda to buy FTT to artificially inflate the price of FTT. And then they were borrowing against the inflated price of FTT to go buy themselves really nice condos and boats and have their um polygamous polycule of weirdos uh and uh i know i i read that the other day the house in the bahamas yeah with with the polycule of like the people you at least like to sleep with on planet earth just like 10 yeah like nerdy crypto people yeah incredibly nerdy crypto people having a polyk like i mean not to a not to be judgmental but like if you're going to be this terrible and sinful at least physical beauty ought to be part of it like my goodness

people i said the same thing you can't be a billionaire and like You know what I mean? Come on. I mean, I mean, that, yeah. That was the weird. Clinical blindness. Anyway, so the, it's.

But people always think like, you know, this guy wears a. I'm not the most handsome guy, but like, come on. Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean, I agree with you. It's bad. But anyway, the, you know, SBF, you know, doing that. I think his assumption was that eventually the promise of FTT would be carried out. That eventually there would be enough users of FTT that they could basically take the money back out.

And then they could put it back into the FTCX exchange. And nobody would be. the wiser. And it turns out that it all collapsed in on them because the guy who owned the biggest exchange decided to basically cut their legs out from under them. It's just on a Machia, Machiavellian political level, you have to admire it. You have to admire the move. Yeah, from Binance. Yeah. I mean, that, it's a, it's a, it's a, if you're just watching the chess or you're watching it like a TV show, it's an amazing move. Oh, yeah. It's a completely undercut the price of FTT and that's collapsed the place from within.

How do you think this is going to affect the future of crypto? So I think that people always run to government when they think that things have gone wrong. And so you'll get some bad regulations out of this in all likelihood. Regulation, I mean, hilariously enough, some of the regulations that are pushing are stuff that SBF actually supported now. So like, oh, you know what, fix this? The regulation that SBF liked. Yeah. So I'm probably not. I think that it's, listen, the price on, I always thought that there were a couple well-established cryptocurrencies that were going to be durable and the vast majority of them were going to fall away. And it's like any innovative space, there's going to be a lot of scamsters at the very beginning who are taking

advantage of this, who launched their own Bitcoin, and it fails. And they just make a quick money grab for people horse suckers, and then it just falls apart. The FTX, obviously, the size and scope is not small. It's a very, very big one. But did it materially affect the price of, for example, Bitcoin? I haven't seen that Bitcoin has plummeted in any real way. It seems like the drop in the crypto markets happened concomitant with actually the inflation. But it seems like it's been fairly stable Bitcoin. I mean, full disclosure, I own some Bitcoin. I own some Ethereum. For the last three, four months, it seems like Bitcoin particularly has been fairly stable. So FDX didn't seem to affect a Bitcoin. And once you have mass buy-in, then there's stability. The problem is

how to achieve mass buy-in. And I think also, you know, the notion that you need crypto exchanges because there are enough durable cryptos at this point. They're just aren't enough durable cryptocurrencies to support a full crypto exchange is perhaps part of the problem here. Yeah, and they're like 200 coins on that. And how many of those are really durable? Yeah, exactly. Five, 10, maybe 10. I just love the fact that this guy, like everyone praised him because he dressed like an average Joe, drove this like old, like shitty Toyota Camry. And meanwhile, I was just buying all these cribs in Bahamas, like. Oh, it's such a parody of our trust system, right?

It actually is a case for crypto. It's like you should trust no one. The case for crypto is trust no one. And this guy like totally fulfilled that case. And they're like, oh, this is a repudiation of crypto. No, it's a repudiation of you trusting people who are jackasses. That's your repudiation is that just because you have some schmuck who's actually playing, what was you playing world of, he's playing?

video games while he's like securing his hedge funding. And you thought that was cool because you're an idiot. That's why you thought that was cool because you're stupid. Everything is run on smoke and mirrors. It's, you know, going back to kind of our business, it's one of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall. I was looking at the valuation of Twitter at one point. The valuation of Twitter, their price earnings ratio was 160. 160 was their price to earnings ratio in terms of their stock capitalization. What in the 160? Name a business that has a price earnings ratio of 160. So you got a mom and pop grocery store and earns, say, it grosses, 500 grand a year. So now you're telling me that it's supposed to be like worth times 80, $40 million?

What metric are using here? That's insane. So it's, yeah, all the metrics are out of whack. People are really oversold on a lot of the tech bubble. tend to buy into personality more than they buy into the actual underlying finance of these companies. And for companies like ours that are actually cash flow positive and generate actual revenue and actually have been in the black every year of our existence so far as I'm, you know, since month 18. That's it. That's a, it's a weirdness. Yeah, for sure. What do you think about what Elon's doing with Twitter right now? How do you think he's doing? Oh, I love it. I love it. I think what Elon's doing with Twitter's the best. First of all, I love that he came in and

fired everybody. And they, and they survived. So a lot of it can be a lot of unemployed coders learning to weld, which I think will be really, really funny. Yeah, they're really overstaffed. The trust and safety counsel was garbage. The Vijayagadhi was doing a terrible job. Yol Roth is doing a terrible job. Elon coming in. So again, because we live in a fever dream, the funniest thing in retrospect is going to be that because Elon Musk liked to read the Babylon B on Twitter, he completely restructured how free speech works in the United States. Like, that's hysterically funny. Like, that's really, really funny. And so, you know, him revealing, what was happening in Twitter, I think is good. More transparency is good. The team that he's got in there is

much smaller and much more transparent, much more reactive. And that's good. And frankly, even the stuff that people don't like what he's doing, where, for example, Musk will say, kick Yee off of Twitter. And I disagreed with that, by the way. I don't think that he should kick Yee off of Twitter. I think Ye should be as crazy and ridiculous as he wants to be on Twitter. It's a, you know, he didn't violate any law. So I'm generally not unfa. Like, even people who's views I despise, I think should be on Twitter. How do you define that line between what like that's what all the liberal people will say is like there's a difference between hate speech and free speech right but the problem is that i don't think that there's a hard and fast definition

of what they think is hate speech right so they don't get to define it because they think that i'm hate speech and i don't have enough temerity to define hate speech i mean like i have my own definition but i don't think that it's dispositive i don't think just because i think something is hate speech necessarily means that it's hate speech um or that it's an in ontological category like there's not a category that's hate speech and everyone recognizes this is hate speech or if it is, it's very, very few numbers of items. But this is what I like to tell what Musk did. Even when he kicked Yeh off, he just said, I'm making the call.

You don't like it? I'm making the call. It's me. Before Twitter was like, it's our vague algorithm. And we can't tell you why. We can't tell you quite how. But all we know is that the machines are running. The machines were not running the place.

It was being running exactly the same way that Elon is, except that Elon is actually just taking the hit. He's like, okay, the buck stops here. I don't want you hand my service. It's done. Okay, well, you know, if Twitter had sacked up in the first place and done that, at least would have given a picture of what exactly the same. service was supposed to be. So, no, I love what he's doing over there. I think it's also hysterical that the second wealthiest or wealthiest man in the world is just tweeting at Randos. I think that's

really funny. Like, people are just tweeting at him and he's tweeting back at them. And it's one of the more fun things that's happened in American public life. Yeah. I mean, you said, do you think Connie should have his platform? Yeah. Well, what do you have to say about like, even, I think yesterday two days ago, he made the Rosa Parks comments. He's, I stopped paying attention to him. I'll be honest with you. After standing for Hitler, I was like, how much further can you go? So tell me how much further could you go i missed it uh he said that rosa parks was like a plant like she was planted there in in what way like of the jews or like no like when like to create chaos yeah like the whole situation on the bus racial divide that was okay so i mean what i assume that he's garbling the actual

actually fairly cool story of rosa parks right which is that the nbacp had in fact recruited her for like in advance and they said she'll be an ideal plaintiff and they had actually said goes out on the bus in this particular place and then we'll have the lawsuit against the the bus line. So that, I mean, that's true. I don't know what he actually said. It is true that it wasn't like she spontaneously sat down on the bus and then they sued. But that doesn't take away from her story. In fact, I think it makes it a cooler story. I think it's cool that they actually were like, okay, we're going to plan this out. We're going to get a good basis for a lawsuit. Rosa Parks is an attractive phase for the plaintiff and do it. So I'm not sure what the context was.

Yeah, I don't even know. I honestly don't know the whole context. But I am curious, like, you said you stopped listening to him after the comments made about Hitler. Well, when, again, If you watch politics as a comedy, it's so good. If you watch it as a tragedy, it's so sad. But if you watch it as a comedy, it's so good. Yeah. I mean, like that episode with him and Flentes and Jones sitting there, and Jones suddenly realizing he's the least crazy person in the room.

It's one of the great things that's ever happened. I mean, like, Jones sitting there and he's like, well, I wouldn't say that about Hitler. I'm not sure I would go with that far. Like, whoa, Alex, you're the moderate in the room. Because he always, like, he hates Nazis. He thinks they're like satanic, like, devils that are being fed off for knowledge and shit. And suddenly, like, he's always the craziest person in the room.

And suddenly he walked in and he looks up. There's like a guy who's seven feet tall towering over him in terms of his crazy. You're like, wow, this is amazing. And Fentz, who actually is relatively warm toward Hitler. Flentz is also trying to cram Yeh back into the box and be like, no, don't see that. Oh my God, this is just terrible. Meanwhile, he's sitting there with his face cut. I mean, honestly, the truth is, I feel bad.

I actually do. I feel bad for yay. There are people who are bipolar in my family. Like when people are in manic episodes, which he clearly isn't a manic episode, they say things that are insane. And they think that nobody can tell them what to do. And the more insane it is,

the more people disapprove, the more they do it. And they do crazy stuff. And when he comes out of the manic episode, it's going to be really, really bad for him. Like, I just, I honestly feel bad for that way.

It's already turning pretty downhill for him. It's really, I mean, it's just, it's a dark situation. And the sort of use of him by outside forces to maximize brand power like Fuentes or Yanopolis or the attempt to, you know, gain off of him. And I think that that's true the other way, too. I think there are a lot of people who are like, okay, well, you know, since Ye had come out as pro-life, this is a great baton for us to hit pro-lifers with or something.

It's like, well, that's not real. I mean, like this guy is a troubled individual. Now, two things can be true at once. One, he's saying hateful, despicable, horrific things. He may believe, and I will say pretty obviously he does believe those hateful, despicable, horrific things. right and all the rest of it um but um also this is a person in the middle of a manic episode and i don't think that you treat people who are in the middle of a mental breakdown in the same way that you treat people who are not in the middle of a mental breakdown being orthodox jew is

no part of you think or feel like you have to respond like with your i mean i have responded i think what i think what he's saying is straight up nazism and i'd said that before he was out there talking about how hitler was a nice person uh you know that but again he he is not a well person And that's not paternalistic. He is not a well person. I don't think you can watch him and his activities over the last few weeks and think this is a normal, well, a human being. I'm not trying to pathologize evil.

What he's saying is evil. Also, I mean, he's been open about the fact that he's bipolar. I've never seen a clearer example of a public personality melting down in bipolar fashion than this. Have you? I mean, like, I'm confused that anybody would even argue with this. And I don't think many people are. I think that this is why I say that treating it without that angle to it,

I think on a personal level, there are a couple things to be said here. On a personal level, I think that it is malicious to not analyze his behavior in terms of his mental illness. On a societal level, the bigger problem for me is not what Ye is saying is the fact that it's finding a resident audience in certain quarters. That's the part that's really upsetting. And so I have a friend who's a cop in Los Angeles. He's a Jew.

And he's out on duty. And he's accosted by a guy who started shouting about the Jews to him. And he said, well, I'm Jewish. And he says, well, Yeh says that the Jews run everything. Like, that kind of stuff is really dangerous. The fact that there have been an extraordinary number of attacks on Jews in Williamsburg and in New York, like, that stuff is really dangerous. And it's a real problem.

Now, again, I try to draw very distinct lines between Yee saying, go beat up a Jew and people actually beating up Jews. But Ye does get blamed for raising the temperature really dramatically and also broadening the Overton window in what is now considered acceptable discourse. I mean, I just find, I do agree with you. I think he's definitely bipolar as a mental illness. But don't you think kind of, it is a little similar with Disney, how they promote whatever they're promoting,

and then giving Yee Twitter, because there are kids on Twitter, like you just said, who might just see that and take that. No, Disney's a platform. So there's a difference, like, I wouldn't give Yeya a show on my, on my platform, right? Because we're not an open platform. Would you debate? Would you debate with them? I won't debate with people who are mentally ill.

I mean, like that, that would be totally purposeless, totally purposeless. This is a person who is, you know, there are a few categories of people that I won't debate. I won't debate people who are mentally ill. I'm not going to debate comedians because they're not, they're a debate. They're there to make jokes. By the same token, people who are just trolls because you don't actually know what they're believing and they're not very often expressing what they actually believe. They're just kind of playing a part in order to elicit laughter from the audience. Those are groups of people that I typically won't debate. But other than that, you know, you have to make sort of business decisions. I can't debate every person

who walks into our offices, you have to decide, is this person worth your time? Does this person have a big enough following? What's the sort of reward in terms of, you know, reaching more people or is there a cost in terms of elevating views that you think are extreme? By the way, I feel the same way about people who refuse to debate me. That's fine. I remember a few years ago, I challenged Alexander Ocaser-Cortez to debate. And she suggested I was cat-calling her, which is hysterically funny. Like, if you're going to accuse people of cat-calling you, you should probably not pick the Orthodox Jew who's happily married with three kids. like that's that's the also that's typically not how you cat call she thought you were trying to get at her

well she said she's literally called a cat calling i don't know how cat calling works in new york but typically my understanding is that it's not like a woman's walking down the street and a construction workers like hey baby come on over here and let's debate the the graduated income tax like that that's typically not how it works i thought maybe i'm wrong in any case she you know but what all she had to say is i don't feel like debating you because i'm a congressperson and you're a commentator i don't feel like debating you because i so disapprove of your viewpoint that i don't think it should be platformed. Okay, I would disagree with her. I think that's bad. But, you know, her prerogative. There's no duty for anybody to debate anybody else. Is there anyone else you'd like love to debate with?

Oh, man, I'd love to debate Bernie. I'd love to debate Bernie. I'd love to see you do. I'd love it. Be so good, Bernie. Who else? It's usually politicians because those are ones who I cover the most. Yeah. So, um, yeah. Again, AOC would be fun just because I think that she speaks in slogans, and I'd like to dig down into what she actually believes. And I wonder how deeply she's thought about what she actually believes. Have you ever walked away? They should put that on like pay-per-view, you, Versa-O-C. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I'd do it for, I mean, it raised an enormous amount of charity. I mean, there's certain other, like, I've been lobbying for years to be on the view. Like, I just think that would be hysterically great TV. Yeah. It'd be the best thing.

Like, there are very few shows that I really want to appear on, but the view is one of them. So, yeah. And from what I understand, when Megan McCain was on the view, because she and our friendly she was trying to get me on and they were like no no no no which is i have to say a somewhat wise move probably on their part who's someone that you've debated with or just i don't even know but just debated with or talked with and walked away and been like impressed with or like wow i didn't expect that from them um well i mean anytime there's a civil debate i usually feel like i'm impressed that it went civilly and was interesting yeah so you know i may end up disagreeing with somebody but as long as a civil debate it's usually interesting so you know a couple years ago i debated

maybe a year ago, I'd a bit of Anna Kasparian. And it was a very nice person. She's on Young Turks. She spends half her day critiquing me over at Young Turks. That's fine. It was a really nice, cordial debate about unionization and the economy and that sort of stuff. And great. I mean, that was fine. The truth is most of the good debates that I have are not debates. They're more discussions. And those discussions are the ones that I find the most interesting. Like on my Sunday special, I'll have on people who are more on the left. You have on Larry Woolmore, you'll talk about race or you'll have on Andrew Yang and talk about the universal universal basic income like that sort of stuff people don't treat it as a debate but it kind of is

there are very few formal debates that I've actually done where it's like you're timed and you're on a clock like the people people don't like to agree to that so much um so if if there's going to be like a formal debate then I treat that differently than I'd even treat a discussion a discussion is more of a back and forth like what we're doing here but a debate you have to treat like a sports game. You have to watch tape of the person. You actually have to see what their arguments are in advance. You have to sort of game out how you're going to respond to what you think their arguments against you are going to be. And so I treat that very seriously. If I'm going to prep for debate, I prep for debate. Damn. That's funny. Yeah, that's great. I was going to ask,

what do you think about fellow Daily Wire, Candice Owens, like, supporting Kanye? So got to put you on the spot a little bit. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. One second. Candace is entitled to, you know, whatever friendships she want to have. I think that she made a moral mistake in not condemning Yeh's comments up front. I don't think it was very hard at all for her to say, I'm friends with this person and I disagree with them. Or I'm friends with this person, they said something I think is bad. I have a lot of friends who say things that I think are bad.

I don't think that would have been the end of the world. And I'm, you know, I will not pretend that I wasn't upset by that. I was upset by that. With that said, she's an independent human being. She has the ability to use her own voice in the way that she sees fit. She didn't say what Ye had said. If she had said what Ye had said, she wouldn't be working here. presumably. Now, I'm not in a position to unilaterally hire in fire here. That's not how the

company actually contrary to Ye's opinion. This is not a Jew-owned company. Actually, the vast majority of the owners of this company are Christian. But even if I had, had the ability to fire Candace, she would not have been on the chopping block for saying what she said, which was essentially a tepid defense of Yeh initially. And then as he got worse and worse, she stopped defending him. She hasn't defended him on Alex Jones, for example. She hasn't defended his Hitler comments. Do I think that she should have said more? Absolutely. Do I think she should continue to say more absolutely made disappointed? She didn't say more 100%. My favorite clips of you were watching you go out, or like college kids challenge you. I know this is kind of off topic, but when is the

last time you've like, how does that even happen? You just go speak at schools and you open up Q&As? I mean, there's no prep. There's no plans. It's just whoever wants to get up and ask a question, you can get up and ask a question. And I just, you know, I actually have a rule at the, those events because it makes for the best kind of viewing experience that if you disagree with me, you raise your hand you up to the front. And I always find that most interesting. Like you have them come walk up and face you? Well, I mean, usually there's a mic in the audience. They walk up to the mic and then usually I let them stick around for as long as the conversation seems to be going somewhere. And sometimes that's five or ten minutes. Sometimes it's like

after a minute and a half because they can't formulate the question very well. And I don't think it's going to be particularly productive. But yeah, I mean, that means I have to be on my toast. And I have to know myself because you can get asked to anything. I mean, I've been asked pretty much. I'm trying to think if there's anything I haven't been asked at this point. I've been asked about pretty much everything, you know, from climate change to tax policy, from abortion to same-sex marriage. Like, I get asked about all those things. So, you know, one of the things I spend an awful lot of time in my daily life doing is reading and thinking and writing. And like, that's the part that nobody sees kind of behind the scenes of the show. I mean, the show is only

a couple of hours because I do the hour that's the podcast. Then we do some stuff behind the paywall. But, you know, the amount of work that goes into the show, people ask how I prep for the show. And the answer is the news prep is actually fairly low because once you have sort of a bank of ideas from which to draw and sort of a deeper knowledge of the philosophies that undergoard particular ideas, then the news is sort of playing on top of the iceberg. So most of the stuff I do is reading about the full scope of the iceberg. And then the news coverage is just like I can read a headline and I've been doing this long enough that I can read a headline and basically know sort of the political ramifications just from the headline of what the story is going to be. I was going to ask, what do you think? I saw Elon said that, you know, the neuralink that they're developing? He said in six months they're going to be ready to put that in humans. What's your whole opinion on like neuralink and stuff like that?

I think that there is a moral difference that we have to be very wary of between fixing problems and sort of artificial enhancements, by which I mean, if you're talking about a neural link to help a paralyzed person feel again, obviously good. You're talking about making a blind person see again. Obviously good. If you're talking about a neural link to raise your IQ from 120 to 130, I think that you're going to get into some pretty dicey eugenic territory fairly quickly here. And I think there's some moral aspects of that that have not yet been fully thought through. I also have serious doubts as to whether it's going to be workable in six months. I'd be shocked, at least, you know, on the more, maybe on the more basic level.

the amount that we know about brain science is so small it's so small i mean the brain is still a black box my my wife the doctor you know she uh she studied neuroscience when she was in college and the the lack of understanding of how the brain works how it functions what what parts of the brain do how complex the brain is and we just don't know enough about brains to start like messing around by putting machinery in there and thinking we know everything that like we really don't i mean if you talk to anybody who if you talk to brain surgeons they will tell you that they don't know everything that's going on inside the brain. 100 years from now, they're going to look back at us like butchers,

like the same way that we look back at people who are using ice picks to do frontal lobotomies on epileptics, and they're going to be like, wow, that's insane. What in the world were you doing now? And so, you know, I think brain surgery, 100 years from now, people are going to look back at what we do now and then be like, that's insane, that's nuts, what are you doing? So the idea that we're going to be technologically advanced enough

to be able to manipulate the brain so that you, for example, can just download knowledge to your brain and suddenly it's accessible to your brain. So you don't even believe that it's going to work? No, not to that. extent. Not to that extent. I think that, again, for certain conditions, like fairly well-understood conditions like blindness, maybe it'll do some good. And they're great. I mean, that's insane if that works. Yeah, I mean, that'd be amazing. But I think, yeah, the other side is very scary because

it's like now there's a chip in everyone's brain. Like, where does that lead? Is that like a, is that like an agenda as well too? Like that's- I mean, listen, I tend to be a tech optimist, more than a tech pessimist. So I could see a world in which, you know, efficiencies in science grew to such a point that everyone had access to information at an insane rate and that would maybe allow for possible future innovation. I just don't, I have very little trust that the scientists know exactly what they're building or all the side effects of what they're building. I think there been, there have been too many things that we've seen over the course of the last 100 years where science thinks that it knows exactly what it's doing. And then 10 years down the line, you're like, oh my God,

that had some really dire side effects that we never really thought about. In general, though, do you think that like the increase in technology and like TikTok, like how do you think that's going to affect society in the future? I think it's somebody asked me the question the other day. And it's sort of an interesting thought experiment as to, if I could make the internet disappear tomorrow, would I? And as a massive beneficiary of the internet. And I don't know, man.

I mean, like, that is a tough question. I think there's a case for yes. I think there's a strong case for making the internet disappear. Not that I'm a Luddite. The internet does enormous amounts of good in terms of allowing commerce and free flow of transactions and informational flow and all that. But the amount of social chaos that it's caused is insane.

I mean, the substitution of fake relationships for real relationships, the fact that people don't have friends anymore, the fact that people are not interacting with each other, that relationships are going by the wayside, that marriage is declining, a childbearing is declining, that people are so tied to their devices that they can't even have conversations with one another, and that the conversations that they do have online tend to polarize them even more. And so you can have a crazy person in New York, find a crazy person in California, go plan an attack in Michigan. That sort of stuff is really dark. And so it has great potential. There's

nothing morally, you know, nefarious about the internet. But being that people tend to be sinful creatures, the use of such a powerful tool in an unrestricted way, and I don't mean restricted by the government, I mean, sort of restricted by common values, has had some really dire side effects. I'm not sure that the, let's put this way, the good that the internet has done, I do not think is outweigh by the, it does not outweigh the bad that the internet has done thus far. I saw also, have you guys seen the, I don't know where I saw it, but I saw like TikTok and China what they're recommending to kids is all like educational shit and they limit it. So there's like a, there's like a time barrier. Like you can only access it for a certain amount

of hours a day. And here it's like there's no rules. Right. And they made it more viral and they made it for that. Well, I mean, they're obviously running an op on us. I mean, TikTok is It's not. Yeah, I mean, TikTok has an extraordinarily... It's still owned by a Chinese company, right? Because I saw Trump was trying to make a U.S. company buy it before and stuff. Right. So now they're a bunch of... TikTok keeps claiming that they're not handing over data to the Chinese, but it's pretty obvious they are handing over data to the Chinese.

And so it's now been banned in a number of states for state employees because they're afraid that TikTok is using state employee data in order to garner information on how the government works. And so it's been banned in a variety of states. I think Texas just banned it, for example, for government workers, not for like the normal person. The normal person can still use TikTok, and now China knows everything about you. But that's the, you know, the algorithm is featuring marginal content that makes people more crazy. I mean, the stuff that's on TikTok that goes viral, some of it's very funny and some of it is, I mean, I'm not saying that TikTok creators are not producing some pretty amazing content.

Some of them are. But, you know, the, and we're a beneficiary, again, we're a beneficiary of TikTok. We're on TikTok. I probably have a million and a half followers on TikTok or something. I don't have it on my phone. I don't use it. But the version that they're trotting out to our kids to 13, 14, 15-year-olds promoting gender fluidity.

It's not what they're promoting in China. In China, they understand that that's not really great for their kids. And so they're promoting like how to do math. And so, yeah, when somebody trots out a service for their own family in one way and to you in another way, then you have to start thinking that maybe the service is preying on you. So when you say China's running an op on us, what do you mean by that? I mean, if this is a Chinese back company, they're trying to so...

They're trying to brainwash our young generation? I mean, to a certain extent, yeah. I mean, they're certainly trying to infuse values they think are damaging to our young people into the services that they have access to. Yeah, I mean, that I'd be surprised if they weren't. I mean, China's an nefarious world power. What is going on over there? Because I see a bunch of stuff, but I don't really know what to believe.

I mean, it's hard to... What's going on over there is, well, right now, obviously, the white paper revolution, what they're calling it, which, by the way, is super clever. I don't know if you guys have been following this. The white pepper revolution is because they know they're going to be censored, they hold up a piece of white paper that has nothing on it. And that's like their symbol of, we know you're going to censor us. And it doesn't say anything. So without saying anything, I'm saying something. It's actually fairly clever. I like it. But it's causing the Chinese government to back down a little bit off of its COVID-19 lockdown policies. They've engaged

these insane lockdown policies. They're still in lockdown? Oh, yeah. They went back in a lockdown. And they were welding people. This is what would spurred this latest round was they locked people in an apartment building, and then there was a fire at the apartment building, like 11 people died. And so people in China said, enough of this shit, this is insane. And so they started going out in the streets and protesting and knocking over barriers and saying, I'm going to open my business and I want to go back to regular life. Xi is in the position of all dictators and failing systems, which is he has to hold harder. He has to grip harder because if his system were successful, he wouldn't have to grip is hard, but his system is not successful. When Xi took

over, he decided that he was going to redirect from state-sponsored capitalism, essentially mercantilism. He's going to redirect from the idea that the state was going to subsidize particular businesses that are going to take part in a global economy and make money off of capitalism and that there's going to be some level of free and open trade with the rest of the world because trade tends to enricher country. He was going to stop that and he was going to pursue an economic policy that looks a lot like economic fascism or autarky. So if you look at Mussolini or Hitler, what their economic policy was is we're going to produce everything we possibly can in country. We're not going to produce anything outside, which of course the problem

is you don't have all the resources inside Germany. So what do you do? You start invading surrounding countries, right, looking for those resources. Because if you cut off your own trade, you don't have the ability to bring in resources from the outside. So that means you've got to find the resources somewhere else. So Xi has locked down his economy. It's become significantly less trade-oriented and capitalistic. He's basically said, we're going to try and produce everything in-house, which is way more expensive. Living standards have been declining, particularly for the middle class. And so what that's going to lead to is, one, domestic lockdowns and two foreign aggression. Because when you're failing internally, you have to do what Hitler did in 39.

and start invading surrounding states, or you are on the verge of collapse as Gorbachev was, which is why the Soviet Union kind of collapsed in on itself. So if you want to revitalize your rule, then it's very important that you make some aggressive moves that both shore up your domestic support and also strengthen you in terms of the resources available to you, which is why everybody's sort of sleeping on Taiwan again, but I wouldn't sleep on the possibility that China tries to blockade Taiwan, for example. You think they'll invade Taiwan? I don't know, invade, blockade, probably.

What does that mean? So blockade is basically like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse. They basically set up their boats all around Taiwan, and they say nobody's getting in and nobody's getting out until Taiwan not surrenders. What they really want Taiwan to do is provide them with the sophisticated microchips that Taiwan produces. So 92% of all sophisticated microchips on the planet are produced in Taiwan.

So everything in your phone, everything in your computer, everything in the cameras, like everything in your microwave, all of that is microchips, your cars, it's all microchips. All of those sophisticated, really good versions of the microchips, All that stuff is produced in Taiwan, 92% of it. And so China has been banned by Taiwan, because Taiwan's an enemy of China's. They've been banned from receiving those microchips from by TSMC, which is the single biggest manufacturer of sophisticated microchips.

And so China has a strong interest in trying to leverage TSM into distributing sophisticated microchips to them, especially because the area where they're really falling behind is in military tech. And they're falling behind in normal tech, but they're also falling really, really behind in military tech because we have great military tech, right? We have precision weaponry, really sophisticated. If they can't get the sophisticated microchips, then they can't compete with us in a war. How do you think the U.S. would react to that blockade?

I mean, we would have to try to break it. We'd have to try to try to break it. We'd have to try to either fly through the blockade or sail some boats through the blockade and open up Taiwan. I don't think we could stand for Taiwan to either capitulate or to remain under the thumb of China, which is why we need to be strengthening our naval forces. We're at the lowest number of ships, I believe, since World War II. So we need to really be strengthened.

In general, in like our stockhold or just over there? No, in general. And like back in 1906, 1907, during the Russo-Japanese war, the Teddy Roosevelt, actually to try and stop the conflict, he painted a bunch of ships white and sailed them through that region and basically just demonstrating American naval power. I'm not sure we have the capacity to project that far at this point. So we're going to have to rebuild our Navy pretty quickly. How about what's happening over in Russia and Ukraine?

What's your opinion on that? I mean, so I think that Vladimir Putin is an aggressive dictator. I think that the Ukrainian people have done an extraordinary job of standing up to Russian predations. It's also just an amazing example of how military tech works. So Ukraine actually has more sophisticated military tech than Russia does, because we provided it to them. Russia's military tech is like, they're using World War II era ordinance in some cases. Like Russia's military is super second rate. and their tech is really garbage.

And so they ran headlong into Ukraine thinking they're just going to run roughshod, and they didn't, obviously. As far as what a solution looks like. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday.

It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes, too. Because with regular conference, comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.caver's to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Yeah, everybody knows that a solution is not going to be all Russians lead Ukraine. That's not going to happen.

A solution is going to look much more like the Russians end up retaining parts of the Donbas, which is Lujan-esque, and retaining large swaths of Crimea. Now, you have to, the only way to get to that solution is that you have to, have to keep exerting military pressure the way the West is, but they also have to open up the possibility of negotiation on the other end. And in order for that to happen, they actually have to take some power away counterintuitively from the Ukrainians and the negotiations, which is the hard part. So Biden actually has to be the bad guy here. And I don't think he's going to do it, which is why he's going to continue interminably. What I mean is this, the incentive structure.

So when it comes to politics, it's much more important to look at incentive structures for politicians than looking at the politicians themselves. We tend to look at politicians like this guy's the be all end all. He's brave or he's cowardly. It's usually incentive structures that define who's in power and then how they act once they're in power. The incentive structure for Zelensky right now is he cannot come to the negotiating table. His people don't want him coming to the negotiating table. They don't want him giving up anything. They don't want them making any concessions. They've kicked the shit out of the Russians. And now they're like, why would we possibly give anything to them? Well, the problem is that just going to continue interminably. Right now, Putin doesn't have any incentive to come to

the negotiating table with somebody who has no interest in negotiating. So what you actually need is for Biden to go to Zelensky and say, listen, I'm going to cut a deal with Russia. I'll be the bad guy. You can go back to your own people and you can say you didn't want the deal, but I crammed it down on you. Right. And that way, you'll still be popular in house. You'll still be the hero. I'll be the villain because I'll be the guy who said, who was the bad guy and said, like, we can't go on like this forever. And then I'll go to Putin and I'll figure out what a deal looks like. And he has to do that very quietly. And then he has, when he announces it, he basically has to make it, I, Joe Biden made this deal happen. I know a lot of Ukrainians are unhappy with this deal.

And then Zelensky is going to have to yell at him a lot publicly. But that wouldn't be politically smart for him, so he won't do that. Right, exactly. So this is the problem is that the political incentives in foreign policy very often cut directly against the possibility of a good solution. And that matters more, it tends to matter a little more. It matters domestically for sure, but it matters, I think, even more in terms of foreign policy. Wow, that's interesting.

Have you ever thought about doing anything in politics? I mean, you must have thought about it. Yeah, I mean, I've thought about it. It's terrible. I mean, like, my life, despite all the security, is really wonderful. Right. Like, my kids don't know I have a job. It's great. I get up in the morning with my, my son jumps in my bed and wakes me up at like 6.15. And then I take care of him and his two sisters until like 7.30. And then I go to work. And then I pick them up from school. And I don't do any work from the time they get home from school until the time they go to bed. They go to bed like 7.15. And then I do some work after their bed. So my kids don't know I have a job. Which is ideal. It's great. I've structured my life that way. So politics is such a big life commitment. Right. Yeah. Oh, my God. Like, first of all, it's a more difficult job than what I do just on a pure level because you have to, the job of politics is to stray from principle in order to achieve

compromise. And my job is to speak about principle and to expose compromise. And sometimes, I mean, I'll say this. It's the opposite of what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. Like, I think that there's a, the good politicians will say, I am compromising on this principle to achieve a long-term goal. And so I don't think they're in direct conflict. But it's definitely easier to be the guy who's like a purist. And, you know, I try not to be when it when it comes to like actually analyzing what's going on. When a deal gets cut, it's not necessarily because everybody's a sellout coward cock, right? Maybe a deal got cut because that's the incentive structure to create a compromise and

everybody has to give a little to get something. And so I've said to politicians, like, your job is not my job and your job is tougher. The real hard part of the job, though, is the campaigning, the being on the road all the time. If you live in Washington, D.C. and you're representing Florida, for example, you have to be away from your family, which I'm not willing to do. I have young kids. I'm not willing to do it. I know, moving to Washington from Florida, that sounds like hell.

That's awful. And then you win and you have to be in Congress, which is terrible. And then you spend all your time fundraising from a bunch of people who don't know anything about politics, but think they do because they're rich. And like, it's just, it's a disaster area of a lifestyle. And what I've said to people about running for office is I'm 38 right now. The average age of our president is now 123. So I have several generations to decide whether I want to run for office.

I can sit here and do daily wire and turn it into a multibillion-dollar company. And then 40 years from now, I'll still only be 78, I'll still only be 78 younger than our current president. Do you see anyone running that could run next year that could potentially like stop such a divide in America? Like Trump, people will say Trump's good, but he's not going to unite America, no chance. So the truth is that there are certain things that are just not going to get bridged, right? There are certain divides that are very real. I think the only way that the country comes back together is with a president who is willing to move away from federal power at the top level. So this is why I like DeSantis.

I think that state solutions are going to be the ones that make the most sense. The big sort is going to continue. Families like mine are going to move from California to Florida. Families that don't like Texas are going to move from Texas to California. And what you're going to end up with is a bunch of diverse lifestyles inside the same country. But that only can happen if the federal government isn't able to cram down a California lifestyle on Texas and Florida. And Florida is not interested in cramming down a Florida lifestyle on California. And so what that really means that the federal government needs to be reduced

size and scope. The founders knew this. This is the crazy things. The founders were totally right about this. They said that the most durable form of political organization is local. The people you care about most after that are your community, very often your religious community. And the people you care about most after that are the people you share a city with. And the people you care about most after that are at the state level. And then the people you care about most after that are at the federal level. But we've reversed all of that. We've destroyed all the intermediate institutions of society. And so everything we talk about is national politics. It's all we talk about every day. And so society has basically turned into a bunch of atomized individuals who don't exist within solid family structures or within solid religious communities.

They're not embedded in a fabric, in a social fabric. And so they're just individuals. And then no intervening, mediating structures that is how historically people dealt with the world. And then the federal government sitting up here. That is an extraordinarily unhealthy thing. Because then it also means that the way that you're going to feel as though you belong is by joining a political movement that tries to control the thing up here and then cram it down on the other people down here who you don't. like. And I think that's kind of where we are. I think because I think the general population doesn't believe that the, like not the general population, but a lot of people, it's tough to

convince them that the federal government could be like tyrannical or they could be controlling. That's why I think some people, whether it's like they don't agree with the gun control thing in the constitution, they just don't believe that the government could ever be not looking out for our best interest. It's tough to convince some people. What hilariously what you've seen is that this waxes in wanes depending on who controls the federal government. Right. So when the federal government was soft on segregation, then the idea was that government can be tyrannical from people who oppose segregation because it can be tyrannical. And then it was, okay, well, now they're coming after, you know, how I school my kids. Okay, the federal government can be tyrannical.

Like, it depends who's in charge. When Trump was president, all you heard was that the federal government was a fascist state and Trump was Hitler from the left. And then Biden takes over. And all you hear from the right is the federal government is a fascist state and Biden is Hitler. And the solution to that is to minimize what the federal government can do. And again, the founders knew this. This is pure Montesquieu. I mean, it goes back further than Montesco, go back to Thomas Aquinas. People talking about localism in politics or religiously, what they would call subsidiarity.

The idea that the things you owe allegiance to most of all are what Edmund Burke called the little platoons, your family. Those are the people you care about my – there's nothing wrong with saying, I care about my family more than I care about everybody else. I do care about my family more than I care about everybody else. And everyone does. And if they say they don't, they're lying. And whenever somebody says, I'm a citizen of the world, they care about everybody equally. They're completely full of shit. That's not true at all.

And anybody who claims that in the name of their love for all of humanity, they get to run humanity as a tyrant. And so, you know, recognizing that the way to live a durable life and the things that are important is to embed yourself in these structures that are durable and good and positive, you're going to live a happier life. And I think we're leading an unhappier life because we have decided that what we really are in the end is my subjective sense of authenticity. What I am is what I want. my desires are me. Your desires are not you. What you are is your action in the world, particularly with regard to people that you care about and others. That is how you interact with the world. And when your desires are you, what that means is that the only way you live in a good world is if all of society mirrors your desires back at you. And society is not capable of

mirroring all your desires back at you, nor will that fulfill you anyway. You're just narcissists at that point. You're looking in the mirror and you're saying, this is the God that I worship. That's not the way that that works. For all of human history, it's been duties that make people feel embedded. It's been the things that you do for other people and duties that you fulfill to the world that make you feel good. The best example that I use about this is, you know, if you want to know what people think of their lives, when they sum up their lives, and what makes people fulfilled, all you have to do is go to a cemetery. Go to a cemetery and read the tombstones. If you go to a cemetery and you read the tombstones, they all say the same stuff.

They don't say, was transgender. They don't say engaged in this many sexual activities. Not yet. Not yet. They might soon, though. I don't think they ever will. I think that every, every one of them is going to say, beloved husband, beloved father, beloved mother, beloved wife, beloved, beloved sister, right? It is roles that you play in the world that are good because we were built for those roles. Evolutionarily, we're built for those roles. Human beings are incredibly adaptive, but there are certain roles that are just common to all cultures and when we take those roles and we destroy them because they make demands on us,

and we don't like demands. If you say that you have a role in the world, like to get back to the dating conversation, your role in the world is to be a good husband. That is a role in the world that you need to fulfill. People are like, I don't want to be a good husband. That's a lot of duty. Okay, but that duty is what's going to liberate you. It's going to make you actually capable of living a better life in the world and expanding

your own boundaries and your own horizons as to who you are and what you care about. It's going to make you a better person. Marriage makes you a better person. Commitment makes you a better person. Being a parent makes you a better person. It changes who you are. And more importantly, it does something for somebody else that makes you worthwhile. Otherwise, what are you?

You're a ball of meat walking around with a set of desires and then you die. Like, what exactly is the, what is the thrill of that? that. I understand the momentary thrill of it, but I don't understand the idea that there's any sort of true fulfillment or happiness. The ancients understood this. We don't understand this because we've boiled everything down to the Freudian sex impulse. But the reality is that you look at any religion, any ancient wisdom, you look at the Greeks, you look at the Romans, Cicero, you look at Aristotle, you look at Plato, you look at Judaism, you look at Christianity, Catholicism, you look at Islam. You get any serious system of thought that has abided for thousands

of years, and they all say the same thing. And what they all say is that, pursuit of temporary joy is not the same thing as happiness. And that the way that you actually reach, you know, to paraphrase Russell Crowe in Gladiare, the way that you echo into eternity is not by pursuing your personal desires, but by fulfilling your duties. And then there's, and what's beautiful about that is that there are actual swaths of freedom in how you perform those duties. That's where the choice comes in, right? I'm a good parent, which means I get to decide how I raise my kid within certain boundaries. I don't get to abuse my children. I don't get to teach them things that are overtly false, you know, I think their parents who are doing that now

by treating their kids sort of like small dogs or purses and treating them, you know, as though they don't have independent beings that you're trying to shape. But, you know, the idea that you as a parent have responsibilities, but that you have freedoms within that responsibility, where I send my kid to school, how I choose to raise my kid in terms of the values that they hold within certain specified boundaries without destroying the role itself. Like, that's where that's where the fun in life lies. There are boundaries in my marriage, but within those boundaries, I get to have all sorts of wonderful and fun experiences with my wife,

but it's the boundaries that make the marriage count. In the end, it's the boundaries that matter. And if you blur the boundaries or obliterate the boundaries, what you end up with is what Emil Durkheim, the first sociologist called enemy. Enemy is a state of essentially dispossession and confusion, chaos, internal chaos, and it's generated by too many choices, by choice paralysis.

And it leads to suicidal ideation. It leads people to despair. people need rules of the road they need things to do they need relations with other people they need a place you need to feel embedded when they don't feel embedded which is what you're seeing in american society right now the internet has really exacerbated this then what you end up with is a bunch of chaotic people who are feeling depressed or feeling suicidal or feeling disconnected from others who don't feel a purpose for their lives and then they don't know what to do and then we turn around we blame things like really oh it's intolerance it's not societal intolerance that's not the problem the problem is that you don't know

what to do when you wake up in the morning that's the problem the problem is that the problem is that you don't know what the next 10 years of your life look like. That's the problem. And when you ask young people these things, like what do you see for yourself? If you had asked me, so I think, thank God, I've led a really happy life. If you had asked me, it's funny, people say, like, do you see where you are in life? If you were 15 or 16, do you see that this day how your life would have turned out? In some ways not. I didn't know I was going to be into politics. At 17, I would have said, but once I knew kind of the career path I was going to take, I actually would have said yes. This is exactly what my life was going to look like. I was going to live in a religious

community. I was going to be married. I was going to have several children. I was going to live near my parents. I was going to live near my siblings. I was going to send my kids to a school that reflected my values. And because I work really hard, I felt like I was going to be successful business-wise also. So yeah, because I sort of knew what were the things I was supposed to do. And we removed all of the guideposts, right? One of the things that I've been writing about a lot and thinking about a lot is sort of where we get our knowledge, where we get our wisdom from. And the answer is really kind of three sources. And we've discarded at least two of them, maybe all three. One is we got our knowledge from biology by looking at the state of the world. There are

biological realities. Well, obviously, that means there are limitations on what we can do. I'm never going to be an NBA basketball player, nor should I. It's just not going to be a thing that happens. And recognizing your own limitations is a pathway to success and happiness because you're not going to end up banging your head against them. It would be a stupid thing to do. But we've rejected that because it's intolerant. If we say that I was not born to play basketball or somebody else is not born to be an engineer, this means that you're intolerant or you're bigoted. Or if you say that a man isn't a woman and a woman isn't a man, it's because you're old fashion in some way. Biology, however, happens to exist and will continue to exist. And as much as

we like to think that we in Western civilization are the be all end all, if we fail to recognize it, then our civilization will just disappear. And there will be other civilizations that take its place. So biology is one source. The other source is traditional knowledge, what we would call culture, things that have been tried and tested for thousands of years. This is a form of knowledge. What we tend to do is, a study came out of Berkeley. And the study out of Berkeley says something super counterintuitive, but I believe it because it's a study from Berkeley. Or maybe the study from Berkeley is wrong. And thousands of years of practical wisdom that you got from your parents are right. Maybe you should listen to your parents. Maybe you should listen to your grandparents.

They're not always right. But maybe the things that people have been saying for several thousand years and that have stood the test of time, maybe that's a pretty damn durable version of knowledge that you might want to take seriously before you discard it. And G.K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic theologian, he had what is my favorite metaphor. He says that the difference between you know, kind of traditional thinkers and people who are radicals is that traditional is that radicals will come along in a field and they will see a fence. They won't know why it's there and they'll immediately start uprooting the fence. And a traditional thinker or a conservative will come along, see the fence, say, I don't understand why it's there and say, I better figure out why this

fence was put here in the first place before I start uprooting the fence. Right. And so the respect for traditional wisdom, respect for accepted culture, for your parents, for your grandparents, we've lost a lot of that. People don't respect their elders. And that's a real problem. And then the third is reason, right, which is the idea of being able to, to use rationality. Now, you can't have reason that is apart from biology and traditional wisdom. Because reason unbound, you can come up with any idea and you can rationalize yourself into anything, right? Marxism, you can rationalize yourself into with the wrong premise. Naziism, you can rationalize yourself into with the wrong premise. People come up with terrible

ideas all the time. But if you have all three of those, you can have a workable and durable system of transmission of knowledge. We've been in the midst of destroying all of them. So biology we've destroyed, traditional wisdom we've destroyed, and reason we've decided is either completely liberated from biology to the sense in the sense that you can now make the case that men and women don't exist as separate categories and is liberated from traditional wisdom because all of our traditions are bad and wrong and we should explode them because I have an idea. I have an idea in my head that I got in the last five minutes and I'm a genius. Or we just don't use reason at all because reason is biased and reason is a is a hallmark

of the evils of Western civilization. It's patriarchal. Reason is just a construct and sort of Michelle Foucault postmodernism in which reason doesn't, reason is just something we came up with but isn't really real. You get rid of all three of those things and you're going to end up with the society that is no source of knowledge or wisdom. And that's a society that's ready to crumble. And it feels like we're going to have to make some pretty hard choices as a society as to which direction we go. Yeah, for sure. What do you think? Because it seems like a problem that I see kids in their late teens or early 20s,

they just seem so lost. They have no idea. Like if you ask them, what do you want to do, they have no idea. Right. So for those people, if you could sum up, like, what is your advice? Okay, so I'm going to give very, very practical advice for young people, teens, and below, which I'm going to give to my own kids. So this is advice that I'm like, you know, unlike any of the, like TikTok with China, like I'll give the same advice to my kids as I'll give to everybody else on this one. So the advice is this. If you are a young person, find an older source of wisdom and cling to that. Find a community and live within it. Okay, like find a social fabric and live within it.

So I highly recommend religious community. I think that it is the only form of durable community that has ever been created in the history of humankind, basically, that is outside of just biological tribe. Biological tribe, you can always find a place and you've got family. There's consanguinity. You share blood with them. But religious community has been the only form of community that has lasted the test of time, unless you're talking about being in the army or something. There are certain countries where, like in Israel, everybody serves in the army. It creates a certain level of social fabric. You could do that, but we don't have that here in the United States. So find a community, become a part of it. Find a duty to perform and perform it on behalf of somebody. else. And recognize that there are, there are roles that you have to prepare yourself for across

the course of life. And again, you can actually number them. I think they're like, they're very set roles in life. So prepare yourself to be a good wife or a good husband. What kind of qualities do you want in your spouse? Create those own qualities in yourself and then seek a spouse that has those qualities. Right. Do you want to have a generous spouse? Be a generous person. Do you want to be a person who's giving, be a giving person? Do you want to be a successful person? Then create the preconditions for your own career success and then find a successful person. Like tends to marry like. The great lie of rom-coms is that the homeless person marries the king. That's never how it works. The king marries the queen and the homeless person doesn't get married. That's the reality of life. So you want

you want somebody of your own level? Be the person that my friend Andrew Klebin says this. He's always saying, you know, women are asking, where's Mr. Wright? And he says, well, how do you know you're misright? So make yourself Mr. or misright. And then you can find your partner. You know, when it comes to when it comes to other roles, prepare for being a parent by actually learning about your values and what values you wish to pass on to the next generation. When it comes to the human desire to seek something higher, don't shut that out. I think that most human beings have, not most, all human beings have religious impulse and gets fulfilled one way or another. Either people find it in church and they find it in God,

or they tend to find it in political movements, which is very dangerous, or can be very dangerous, or they tend to shut it out completely and then they feel the hole in their heart that they have to find something to fill that whole with. When it comes to, one of the roles that we have is that we are creative. Human beings are inherently creative, just like animals are inherently creative at the highest levels. I mean, you'll see like actual animals demarcating their territory and human beings are also creative. We like to shape the world around us. Find a task that you're good at that serves somebody else and that makes you money. That's a creative thing. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you,

no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Find that thing. All of these things are very doable, and I think they're actually fairly practical. As soon as you start thinking of yourself as playing a role,

because the truth is that, again, we're being asked to participate in a game where we've thrown away the rules. And you can't participate in a game where you don't know the rules. And when you play chess, if you don't know how to play chess, and if you're playing, you have to know how all the pieces work.

If you don't know how all the pieces work, it's going to be a really shitty game of chess. And what ends up happening is someone gets frustrated and overturns the board. And they say, oh, we're not playing chess anymore. Well, that's kind of what we're doing societally. Or you can learn how the chess pieces work. Why do they work that way?

I don't know why they work that way. That's the way they work. And now you can participate in that game. You can have freedom within that game to play that game properly. and you can have various iterations of the game. Life becomes fun. Life becomes joyful. The rules and then the freedom within the rules

is what makes things worth doing. And the obliteration of rules has been the worst thing that's happened to civilization. It's happened all over the place. I think it's happened in music. I think that it's happened in art. I think that it's happened pretty much everywhere. There's a difference between,

to take a musical example, because I used to be a musician, there's a difference between the jazz of Oscar Peterson where he's violating certain rules because he knows what the rules are. So he's playing with the rules and he's playing around the boundaries of the rules, right? There's a difference in that jazz

and a kid who's just tooting on a horn not knowing what he's doing. That's not jazz. You don't know the rules. And so we as a society have decided we don't care about the rules and so the kid who's tooting on the horn may be producing just as much great art

as Oscar Peterson or as or as Coltrane or something. It's like no, that's not the way that this shit works. Wise words from Ben. I feel like you already have a neural link in your head. I was going to ask just back to like the whole tyrannical federal government stuff. I always wonder, like, who is, like, pushing that stuff? Like, let's say gun control, for example, right? Because some people, like, a lot of people I talk to, like, they'll just truly

believe. Like, it's not, they don't think the government's, like, tyrannical or whatever it is. Right. They just actually think that, like, yo, we shouldn't have guns. Because it's tough to convince them. Isn't that the only point of view as to why, you know, we want to be pro-gun? I mean, so they're really two points of view on why to be pro-gun. Because there are a lot of countries that are not, right? One point of view is the sort of founding era point of view, which is that you do want to be able to protect yourself against government tyranny because governments do become tyrannical. And there is history in the United States to governments being tyrannical and gun ownership being really, really important. In fact, a lot of gun control statutes in the United

States started in the segregated south as an attempt to stop black people from owning guns so white people could oppress them. So gun control has a pretty inglorious history in the United States, actually. People need protection from other people with guns. Once the guns are there, The idea that you're going to confiscate them is nonsense. There's 300 million of them in the United States. And good luck. I personally own three. So the idea that you're just going to be able to get people to turn in their guns is just

impractical. Let's say you were starting tabular razor. You're starting a society. No guns. Would you have guns? Maybe you wouldn't. But if nobody has gone, then presumably there's some other form of weaponry that they're using to achieve power.

And so then the question becomes what weaponry are using to achieve power. risks and the rewards of particular weaponry. I'm not making the case that everybody should own a nuclear missile in their backyard. I'm also not making the case that I've said before, and it's some controversy, that you know, you are barred in the United States from the purchase of a fully automatic machine gun through a federally licensed firearm dealers in most states, the National Firearms Act in 1934 prohibits it. So I think that everybody should own a fully automatic machine gun. I'm not sure that the risks outweigh the rewards there. But the notion that that you can't own a semi-automatic rifle, for example, that the danger of semi-automatic rifles

I'm going to shoot up at school, that's not remotely the same as the risk that somebody's going to attack me, and I need to use my semi-automatic rifle to defend myself. And so that's why I always find it very weird. The discussion about gun control seems to be almost disconnected from reality. There's two questions that are being asked. One is the tabularaza question. You're creating a society from scratch. Does it have guns? Does it not have guns? If I'm creating a society from scratch, we all have beautiful houses, nobody has a gun. We all live in peace and harmony, and everything's wonderful. And then there's the society that we currently live in. Then the question is, how do you get to lower levels of violence in that society? And that question is not

about gun ownership. That question is about how you lower the amount of violent activity in American society. And it's concentrated in particular areas. Vermont has tremendous levels of gun ownership and virtually no gun violence. New Hampshire, very high levels of gun ownership, virtually no gun violence. You know, it's not about the gun. The gun's a tool. The question is who's wielding the gun. And I think the easiest way of avoiding the serious social conversations about why violence crops up. And the real answer, by the way, is why violence crops up is lack of fathers in the home. The real answer is lack of social fabric. The real answer is lack of belonging. One of the answers is we don't involuntarily commit people who are seriously, mentally ill in this country.

There are a bunch of reasons that actually would be tackledable, but those reasons aren't the ones that people want to talk about. They'd rather stamp a Band-Aid on a thing and then pretend it's going to work. Again, even in Australia, people will use like the Australian gun buyback. That's a great example of gun control. Australia had virtually no gun crime before the gun buyback. And then after the gun buyback and the mandatory turn in, only one third of the guns were actually turned in. Two thirds of those guns are still out there. So what? Those are the not violent guns and the ones that were turned in were the violent guns? So you're telling me the most law-abiding people who turned in their guns were the most violent also? I highly doubt it. It doesn't make any

logical sense. So again, there is no correlation between gun law and violence per se. There's a correlation between lots of other stuff and violence. More gun control does not necessarily mean lower levels of violence. And less gun control doesn't necessarily mean lower levels of violence. Sort of depends on the society that you're talking about. So where does that motive come from the top to like get rid of the guns? I mean, I think some of it is easy solutions. I think it's first order thinking. Nobody thinks of the consequences on the second order of that. Like, how do you effectuate that? Okay, so let's say you ban the assault weapons. What happens next time there's a mass shooting? What are you going to ban next? You can ban all the handguns? Is that a thing

that you're willing to do? This is one of the areas where I wrote when I pressed Pierce Morgan back in 2013. He wasn't willing to say at the time that he just wanted a total gun ban because he knew that Americans wouldn't go for it. So he kept saying, oh, ban assault rifles. And I said, well, the rifles are responsible for something like three to, three to 400 murders a year. There's like 35,000 deaths a year from guns in the United States. I think that don't, I'm not even sure that includes suicides. So that's, so it's, you know, the vast majority of crime committed with guns, in other words, is handguns. So I just want to ban a handgun. And he didn't have an answer for that because he didn't want to say the obvious answer, which is he did want to ban hand guns.

And so at least the people who are honest will just say straight up, I want to take all the guns. That's at least an honest answer. It's also a completely impractical one. And they know it's a completely impractical answer. Interesting stuff. Anything else? I'm good. You don't want to talk about female.

What's it called? What? No, what you said before? Oh, no. I can't. I can't do that. Uh-oh. I don't want to go out.

I don't want to do anything. Go at you or knock or at your opinion. You're too high level for me. Oh, no, it's okay. You can feel free. And this will be. We have this whole plan. I was going to defend, like, we were going to go equal pay, and I was going to go super hard for women, like, to win them over for the episode.

But I don't want to go that route at all. No, women should have equal pay for equal work, and there's good news. They do. Okay. Good enough. That is the end of that story. Okay. And if they didn't, I would hire nothing but women at this company. Perfect. If I could hire women at 70 cents on the dollar to do the same work as a man, this would be an all-female company.

There it is. Unfortunately, I cannot. Unfortunately, I have to pay everybody for the work that they do. And men get paid the same as women when you remove all. of the complicating factors. There is no issue with that. No. When you're talking, if you adjust, I mean, statistically is just the truth. When you adjust four hours work, time in the workforce, degree, are they working part-time or not part-time? Did they take time off for work that put them on a different career trajectory? Men and women, on average, have different

choices. When you look at career choice itself, very different career choices between men and women, that makes up for the pay gap. In fact, coming directly out of college when everybody is single these days, women in major cities tender are more than men. the outset and then they get married they have kids they want to take more time off from the world my wife's a great example of this right my wife went to school for almost literally ever she was in school until like three years ago and um in medical school and and undergrad and all the rest of it and then she now she works two days a week because she can afford to work two days a week so she doesn't want to work full time now if you ask me what i work two days a week the answer is

no i like working i think we're you know working is good for my wife is like i'd rather spend time with the kids. I'd rather, I'd rather do a bunch of other things. I'd rather do charity work. Yeah. People will make different decisions and failing to adjust for the different decisions is how you end up with dumbass stats like women are earning 70 cents on the dollar. If I aggregate everything without regard to any of the complicating factor, simple fact, single factor analysis is always wrong. Whenever you look at a stat and people just use one single factor to make the distinction, it's always wrong. I mean, it's like saying, for example, the NBA is racist because so many of the players are black. I go,

a single factor analysis. You're just looking at race in the NBA. You're not looking at quality of the player. You're not looking at height differentials. You're not looking at time spent playing. You're not looking at skill level. You're not looking at any of the things that actually make an NBA player and an NBA player. You're just looking at the single factor. You can't do that with any analysis. Any analysis that comes down to one factor is always wrong. Always forever will be that will never change. Perfect. Thanks. Thanks. Amazing. Yeah, we appreciate having you. Thanks, awesome. Thanks, thanks. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Oh.