The Iced Coffee Hour - How Ben Shapiro Runs His $200,000,000 Media Empire

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Ground News: Get 30% Off your Vantage subscription by going to our link https://ground.news/iced. Stay on top of every breaking news, compare news coverage, spot media bias and avoid algorithms. Netsuite: Take advantage of NetSuite’s FREE KPI checklist: https://www.netsuite.com/ICED NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_photography Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 WITH OUR SPONSOR PUBLIC - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham Timestamps: 00:00 - INTRO 01:51 - He Is Benough 04:39 - How Ben Got His Start 12:14 - Ben's $10,000,000 Marital Contract 15:16 - Ben's Biggest Biggest Business Partner 22:02 - How Ben Pitched Daily Wire 26:03 - Why Receiving A Favor Is Better Than Giving One 31:24 - When Ben Is Running For Office 33:19 - Why You Should Marry Young 39:15 - How Ben Rizzed Up His Wife 45:36 - How Ben's Wife Changed Him 50:23 - Having Kids Changed Ben's Life 54:58 - How Ben Deals With Hiring 58:50 - Why Unpaid Internships Are Crucial 01:05:23 - How To Debate 01:09:00 - Why The Right Has Become More Trendy 01:15:07 - Reacting To Barbenheimer 01:20:36 - Why People Can't Be Openly Right 01:29:37 - "The Best Protection Of Evil Is To Recognize It" 01:34:02 - Who Does It Right On The Left 01:35:47 - Do You Need Religion To Have Meaning 01:43:29 - How To Live A Meaningful Life MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Shure SM7B mics, cloud lifters, rodecaster pro audio interface The YouTube Creator Academy: Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF For Podcast Inquiries, please contact [e-mail] *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon presents Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen. These little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. I have such sympathy for people who are poor that I want them to be rich.

Here are the steps that are required to be rich. There's a difference in offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being in a shit. Traditional values have to become something that you have to whisper to your friends about. We spend seven figures in year on my personal safety. Seven figures of your. What makes you think you're so special? Everyone who's pitched you is worse at this than I.

I'm better at this than anyone on the planet. Could you see yourself at some point in the future running for a president? You guys may have noticed that this podcast is always a place for open discussion where ideas are fairly considered and honestly confronted. Unfortunately, it's actually extremely difficult to find places like that in today's media landscape. I know for me, I'm always looking for unbiased media, but it seems like everywhere I go, someone's trying to shove an agenda down my throat.

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the link down below in the description. It would seriously mean a lot, guys. Thank you so much, Ground News and onto the podcast. We're actually going to start this off with a fan question. One of your biggest fans, by the way, leaves. Okay. Found him. Ready? Hi, Ben. I'm a huge fan of yours. So excited to ask you a question. I've seen you talking about Barbie a lot.

Do you think that you are enough? Like, do you feel enough in this matriarchal society? I'm definitely Benoff. You're Benoff. I'm Benoff. You've been creative. I don't think that Ken is a good role model. Ken's not a good role model.

No. Ken is a bad role model. What do you say to that, Graham? I liked the Barbie movie. I know. I know. I know. It was a fun.

lighthearted movie, got me laughing, some of the jokes in there. I enjoy it. You're allowed to enjoy it. You're wrong, but you're allowed. There's nothing against American law that forbids you from enjoying the Barbie movie. It just means that I have questions about your taste. And Brett's taste and Michael Moles's taste. And half the people work for me.

So, you know, there you have it. So who was that to ask the question right there? That is Brett Cooper. And how do you know Brett? So Brett is one of our hosts. She hosts a terrific show on YouTube with a massive following. And we share a pair of eyebrows. That is what we're famous for.

But also the intonations of your voice, the way you speak, you have so many mannerisms that I think are like almost identical between you too. I haven't seen that, but maybe it's one of those things where you can't see the air that you're walking around in. I think so I don't spot enough things about myself perhaps. And so maybe I can't spot them at her. She said the same thing. She couldn't see it either.

But we had all the comments say we thought that was like a younger sister. Yeah. Everyone thinks you guys related. I mean, I will say that I have three younger sisters. and at least one of them looks kind of like Brett. I mean, they're not wildly off. That's funny. I mean, my younger sister,

classically Abby, who's on YouTube also. There's some resemblances to Brett. They're not like wildly disparate looking. Have you done a DNA test, though? I mean, I'm fairly certain there's no relation. And the reason I say I'm fairly certain is because at one point we did do like a 23 and me DNA test and it came up 100% Ashkenazik Jew. And I'm pretty sure that's not Brett Cooper's background.

Yeah, that would make sense. So, yeah, that's pretty closed. you know, ethnic, ethnic loop right there. So she's talent for your media company, The Daily Wire. Yes. Now, how did you get to the spot of owning a massive media company, The Daily Wire? Talk us through the chronological sequence of events in your life that brought you to that prestigious role. So you fail a lot of times, right?

I mean, this is true for every single person I know who is incredibly wealthy and successful, which is everybody looks at them and they must have hit it the first time, or they became wealthy and that was like, when did the magic happen? And the answer is you labor in the minds for, you know, a decade. And then eventually you hit on the thing and you've gotten good at the thing at that time. And so, yeah, basically the story goes like this. And I'll try to do this in sort of as succinctive fashion as I can. So I started UCLA when I was 16.

I got a syndicated column on politics when I was 17. That was because I'd been writing for the UCLA Daily Bruin. And I was writing sort of a point-counterpoint column. And that turned into a regular column. And I went to my father and I said, do you think that it's good enough to be in like regular newspaper? And he came up with a syndicator called creator syndicate. which would take columns and send them out to hundreds of papers across the country. And so they picked up the column.

They didn't know how old I was, so they were kind of surprised when my parents had to sign the contracts. I was still a minor. And I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17. Pretty much every dumb column I've written, by the way, is between the ages of like 17 and 23. I would say like the vast majority of dumb things I've said. We're during that period of, you know,

because that's usually when you say most dumb things in your life. In any case, I finish UCLA. I write a book while I'm at UCLA. I go to Harvard Law. I started there when I was 20, and I write another two books while I was at Harvard Law. By the time I leave Harvard Law, I decide I want to work at a law firm, or at least give it a shot.

And I really want to learn how real estate works because everybody who I know who's rich has real estate holdings. And so I figure, okay, I'll learn that industry. The problem is I join this firm, Goodwin Proctor, which is a major national law firm. I joined them in September of 2007, which is probably the worst time in human history to join a real estate law firm,

because that is precisely when the real estate market is collapsing. that is the subprime mortgage crisis. And so I'm sitting in this beautiful office overlooking Century City every day for like 10 hours a day doing nothing. And they're getting increasingly upset because I'm not billing hours. And when they do bring me work, then I'm doing the work too fast because this is sort of one of my skill sets. I speak fast. I type fast. I write fast. I edit quickly. That is not what you want as a lawyer who's billing hours. When you bill hours, this is why I hate, you know, actually how law firms work. They bill you by the hour. So it disincentivizes efficiency. It's really bad. So, you know, I,

I decided I couldn't take it. And after about 10 months, I'd met my wife during this period. After about 10 months, I turned to my wife, and she turned to me, and she's like, you're miserable. You should just quit. And this is right before we were about to get married. And I was like, well, we just got a condo. We just got a mortgage.

And we're about to get married. And she's like, yeah, but you're miserable. You should quit. So I quit Goodwin Proctor, and I took a job for one third the pay working as a lawyer in-house counsel for a company called Talk Radio Network, which was the radio syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingram. because I wanted to be in that industry. I mean, I'd be writing column for years.

I already had books at this point. But I wanted to learn the radio industry because I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and in L.A., Larry Elder. And so I made a deal with the company. And the deal with the company that I was working for was I would spend half of my day doing legal work because they needed an associate in-house counsel.

And I would spend half of my day doing production work. I wanted to learn inside out how the industry works. So I would sit there and I would cut the audio clips, like with the actual sound program. Probably half the clips that you heard on Michael Savage is a Laura Ingram's show between the years like 2000, nine to 2012, I cut those.

Or if there's a montage, I was cutting that, or if there was a monologue by one of the hosts, there's a possibility I was writing talking points, that sort of thing. In the meantime, I was also ghostwriting books. So I cobbled together a pretty good living doing ghost writing of books, because I can write quickly,

so publishers would come to me, and they would say, we have three weeks for you to turn in a book from this personality who doesn't know how to write a book, and I'd say, okay, and I would just churn out a book in three weeks. And so you put together a few of those a year, plus whatever income I was making for my own books, plus columns, plus speaking, plus the job.

And it worked out to, you know, not amazing income, but like definitely a livable income. It was not what I'd been making at the law firm, but it was two-thirds to three-quarters of what I was making at the law firm. I worked there for about three years. And then there came a point where I just couldn't see a future at that company or for that company. It didn't seem like a direction that I wanted to continue moving. At that point, I went out on my own, and I was basically making a living ghost writing alone and doing those sorts of things.

And this is in 2012. So, 2012, I've been friends with Andrew Breitbart for a really long time. So I've been in friends with Andrew since I was in college since I was 16. And now it's, you know, 2012. It's now I graduated at UCLA in 2004. So it's been eight years, nine years since I've known Andrew. I've known for a decade. At this point, I'm in my mid-20s.

I'm talking to Andrew. And Andrew's like, you know, we really need an editor at large. over here at Breitbart. We need to staff up. So would you like to come work over here? So I joined on at Brightbart as an editor at large when I was in my mid-20s. And I was there for, let's see, 2012 to 2016. So I was there for about four years. As always, I had multiple streams of revenues. So this is, this is sort of how I did my career until I found the thing that worked. So one of my sort of career principles, especially early in your career, is pursue as many opportunities as you can attempt to do well, and then find the one that actually works and then put all your efforts into that. So it's a

diversification strategy, by the way, also a pretty good investment strategy. It's a diversification strategy for your time and for your career, if you can do it. And then you find the thing that actually works, and then that's where you push. So while I was working there, I also got a job simultaneously as one of the three people on an LA radio show, an LA morning show. I started doing that. About a year and a half after that, I got an afternoon radio show in Seattle. So my schedule at this point, and then I also launched a website with the David Horowitz Freedom Center that was called Truth Revolt. Revolt was basically the predecessor to Daily Wire. It was designed as reverse media matter.

So the basic idea was that the left likes to initiate boycotts against the right and get those shows canceled. And so we don't like that tactic. But the only way that people are going to back off that tactic is if that is mutually assured destruction is if everybody understands the tactic is bad. So we're just going to avoid that tactic. By the year 2014, my schedule went like this. I would wake up at 5.30 in the morning. I would go work. I would go do my morning show from 6 to 9. I would then edit at Brightbart for a couple of hours a day, and mostly by that point I was writing just kind of these long pieces for them. So I would write a piece a day for Brightbart.

I was editing, I was editor-in-chief with one of my business partners at Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, and I can explain how I'm at Jeremy in a second. We were running Truth Revolt together, so I was editing, he was mostly doing the business side. I was doing the editorial side, so I was editing Truth Revolt, and then I was doing an afternoon radio show for three hours a day. So I was working four jobs, plus ghost writing, plus writing my own books, plus speaking. So, I mean, technically speaking, I was probably doing six or seven jobs over the course of a week.

And via all of these mechanisms, I was now making a pretty good living, right? Because each one of these paid fairly well. So I was probably making, at this point, somewhere around $400,000 a year. That's fantastic. Between all those jobs. So here's the thing. It is a really good living. Also, my first year out of law school when I was working at the law firm, I was making

180. When you come out of Harvard law and you're working in a law firm, 180 without bonus was like the norm. So, like, 200 was kind of your baseline. Now, listen, I have a lot of advantages in the sense that I grew up in a two-parent family with a lot of family security, not financial security, but family security. My parents are not wealthy. I grew up in a house. I grew up in 1,100 square foot house in Burbank, California with three sisters, one bathroom,

two bedrooms, shared a room with all three of my sisters until I was 11 years old. So we weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but my family is very, very solid. So I always felt like, you know, worst-case scenario, if all else fails, I still have a wonderful family. I could move back in with my parents for a little while until I get back on my feet. I had a Harvard law degree. That's worth a lot of money. So, you know, I had that kind of in my back pocket. That allowed me to be more risk seeking in the way that I approached my career. I mean, when I first, when I first met my wife, I told her, I remember we were dating. And she said, you know, we were talking about kind of what, what does the future look like?

We were talking about finances. And I said, I'm going to make millions of dollars. I'm going to make a lot of money. Was that the first time you met her? That was not in our first date. That was probably in like our, I would tell us that was once we'd gotten a little more Syria. So for us, that meant like our fifth date. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we had our first date on September 5th, and then we were engaged December 22nd, this 2008. So there's not a ton of time there. But yeah, I mean, and I remember her laughing and thinking that was selling. In fact, one of my favorite stories about that is that my father-in-law, so in the Jewish community, when you get married,

you sign a marital document that basically looks kind of like a pre-up. And this is a historic document going all the way back to the Talmud called the Katuba. One of the things in there is like an actual breakup fee, right? If the marriage breaks up, then how much money do you owe to your wife? There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams,

or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at atotrater.com. Canada's car marketplace. And so in most Jewish communities, it's kind of a de minimis amount because it's basically pro forma. But in the Moroccan community, this is like a point of pride, is that you go to the wedding, my wife's of Moroccan extraction, and you go to the wedding and somebody reads the amount of it goes, ooh, ah, right? So my father-in-law sits me down one day.

This is right before we're getting married. And he's like, I have a very important question to ask you. And I was like, okay. And he's like, how much money do you want to put in the Katuba? and I was like, I don't care. It doesn't matter of me. I'm not, we're not getting divorced, so put whatever you want. Like literally whatever you want.

I don't care. And he's like, well, you name the number. I'm like, fine, put $10 million. I don't care. And he looks at me and he starts laughing. He goes, she's not worth $10 million. We'll put a million dollars. And I frequently remind him that he is a horrible negotiator.

So wait, wait, but I'm confused. So if you put, let's say, a million dollars in this, is that what split upon a do? No, that's what you owe her. That's what you owe her. Is it always? The guy owing the girl in that document? Yes.

Even if the girls, they hire earners. Yes. That is customary. Yes. I mean, it's a historic document that goes back a couple thousand years. Is that based off of any sort of like financial status beforehand or maybe what you're projecting? No, I mean, you can negotiate it.

So I'm under the impression that my, I'm a brother-in-law of mine who's a little older than I'm actually negotiated it out like because he's also Moroccan. So they both took it super seriously. Like I took it not seriously at all. I'm like, whatever. It doesn't matter. Is he customary to negotiate with your future father-in-law? I mean, trying to get this.

Are you trying to get it down? He's trying to get it up? I mean, apparently, if you both take it seriously, that's a thing, right? For me, I didn't care. I'm very American. So I was like, whatever. It doesn't matter. Everything's community property anyway.

It's California. That's the way it's actually. But, of course, I never entered my mind. But I turned him today and I'm like, you know that, like, you really jacked your daughter in this document. You put her in a very. So would that supersede then the California's community property in that case? Probably not. I mean, it depends.

So now you get into this sort of abstract. issues of Jewish law and whether you inside the Orthodox Jewish community are allowed to go outside to a secular court to have adjudicated your divorce when it's a religious institution or whether you go to a secular court in order to do that. These are actually really interesting and complicated issues of Jewish law versus secular law in which governs and that sort of stuff is kind of interesting. In any case, you know, so by this time, this is right before the launch of Daily Wire. So we've gotten up to like 2015. I'm working like six, seven jobs. I'm cobbling together maybe $400,000 a year.

somewhere in that neighborhood. And then we make a pitch to Truth Revolt, which is the main job that both Jeremy and I have. That's where the bulk of my income is coming from. I'm getting, you know, 75 grand from one place. I'm getting 100 grand from another, but like the bulk of my income is coming from this. And we just, again, just taken a mortgage. So by this point, I've already lived in, this is my third house. We had a condo. We sold it to buy up. We sold that to buy up. We had just, so we had just closed on a really, really nice house in L.A. And so, We do a meeting where Jeremy has come up with a strategy. And Jeremy, so I can backtrack here to explain kind of my relationship with Jeremy,

for those who are interested. Because Jeremy obviously is now personality in his own right and with Jeremy's razors and Jeremy's chocolates and the whole Godcage stick and all that. So I've known Jeremy since like 2009. So I've known Jeremy for quite a while. And he and I met while I was working at Talk Radio Network. We really hit it off. And we started immediately talking about like, what are ways we can do business together?

And so I started kicking him business. I started like finding him projects that he could do for our. other outlets that like scribing videos, YouTube kind of videos, which kind of broadened the scope for him and created a body of work that he could then pitch outside. Well, in about 2014, he and I were talking and I was working at Breitbart at the time, and he had been talking with the folks at David Horowitz Freedom Center, and it was his idea to get me into David Horowitz Freedom Center to launch Truth Revolt. So now he and I are actual business partners. By that point, we're actual business partners. We'd proposed a few businesses before that,

Various and sundry, not a lot of money, a couple thousand bucks a year. But we'd been working together, close friends and all that. So we go to Truth Revolt. Truth of World is doing pretty well, and Jeremy hits upon a revelation. And there are two big revelations in sort of my relationship with Jeremy. Revelation number one comes in 2013 when I do the Pierce Morgan interview. About what happened in San Diego. How dare you accuse me of standing on the grades of the children that die there?

How dare you? I've seen you do it repeatedly, Pierce. Like I say, how dare you? I mean, you can keep saying that, but you've done it repeatedly. Because up until that point, in our partnership and our friendship, basically the assumption was I was the business guy and he was going to be the talent because he'd always want to be a director and he came to LA to be an actor and he'd been in writers rooms and all of that. And I was this. I went to Harvard Law School. I'd been the executive vice president of Talk Radio Network, all of this kind of stuff. In 2013, I do the interview with Pierce Morgan on CNN about gun control. And it goes absolutely berserk on the internet. I mean, it was like the biggest thing on the internet for a solid month. And Jeremy, I remember I talked to him beforehand and I told him what I was going to do during. the interview and we had discussed and we had strategized and that kind of stuff. And, um, and after the interview, he called me up and he said, we have this completely backwards. I'm the business guy and you're the

talent. So that was, you know, all credit to him on that one. I mean, that takes an act of humility, truly to be, to be, like, no, you need to be the front man when you've always thought you were the front man. You need to be the front man. Now it's great. Jeremy also gets to be a front man. But that, but at the time, that was a really big revelation. So that was revelation number one. And revelation number two comes in 2015 when Jeremy realizes that the way that we had been doing our website for a while and the way that traffic used to be done on the internet, at least on the right, is if you wanted traffic on your website, you basically needed a drudge link to Mac Drudge's website. It was the everyone knows this on the right. A link from Drudge was like the magic thing that caused your website

to explode. I mean, Andrew Brightbart's, brightbart.com was built on the back of the links from Matt Drudge. That's where the traffic was built from. And so you would hunt for Drudge Links. You'd like create a story. You'd send it to Matt or one of his editors and hope against hope that he would post it. Well, in 2014, 2015, Jeremy and I were discussing this. And I turned to Jeremy and I said what became sort of the first of our business aphorisms, which is luck is not a business strategy. You can't rely on the kindness of strangers. We're not Blanche Dubois here. Like, we actually need a strategy. And Jeremy said, well, I want to look into this. And so he started looking into it. And he came up with this marketing strategy. And he realized that there was a real arbitrage opportunity

in Facebook, that Facebook was where all the crowd was, all the eyeballs were, that the cost for advertising on Facebook was pretty affordable and that the draw from Facebook in terms of traffic was really high. So he says, let's set up a meeting with the board over at David Horwood's Freedom Center and let's pitch them. So we get them in the room and Jeremy starts making the pitch, which is we're going to spend, we need $1 million. And if you give us $1 million, we will generate you a money machine that lasts for all of time. And he explains the whole plan and they do not get it because everybody on the board is like 80. Very nice people, but they're all 80 and don't know what a computer is, let alone what internet is. And so Jeremy's

explaining this. And if you've ever met Jeremy, our styles are completely different in terms of how we communicate. Jeremy is from Slayton, Texas. He's kind of a soft Texas lilt. It speaks a lot slower than I do. I'm like a fast-talking Jewish kid from L.A. And normally the way this works is that I make a pitch and then Jeremy has to come in and like speak softly. I used to call him the stupid whisperer because we met with a lot of Congress people and every conversation went like this. I would explain a thing. They wouldn't understand. Jeremy would re-experate. explain the thing, but slowly and in Texan, and suddenly they would understand. In any case, this time it goes backwards. Jeremy explains the deal. They do not understand it at all.

They turned to me, we've been doing this for like an hour and a half. The board turns to me and they're like, can you explain this? More simply? Like, try to boil it down. And at this point, I was really frustrated and pissed. And I take out a napkin and a pen and I say, here is our business plan. Dollar sign, arrow, Facebook, arrow, website, arrow back to dollar sign. This is our business plan. I literally did that on a napkin. I turned it around. We're going to spend money on Facebook. Facebook is going to generate traffic for our website. We're going to monetize that through advertising and subscriptions back to Facebook, right? And we're just going to spin up. Yeah. That's right. That's how we're going to generate our business. They fired Jeremy the next day. And in solidarity, they wanted to keep

me on as sort of like a face for the website and I quit. I was like, you can't fire my friend, my business partner, and I'm not going to stick around for that. So now we're both jobless. We both had new mortgages. And so, but this idea we know is, a thing. And at this point, we know a few things. We know that, we know that Jeremy is capable of running the business side of this because he did it with Truth Revolt. We know that I'm capable of editing websites. I did it with Breitbart and I did it with Truth Revolt. We know that I'm capable of drawing a crowd. I've done that multiple times. And so we have the skill set that we've both been practicing in our various sort of arenas for a while. So we decide we're going to go out to

market. We have two choices at this point. Choice number one is we mortgage our houses and just do the idea ourselves. And this was, you know, in retrospect, what we probably should have done. Yeah. But at the time, you know, I, let's see, this is two thousand. So at this point, I had one kid and a second almost there. And, you know, again, Jeremy had just bought himself a nice house. And so we were like, in no income. And so we were both a little freaked out. So we go out to market. And we find a family office and we pitch this family office on what we want to do. And it's exactly this plan. It's exactly this plan. We drop a business plan. We go in, we pitch it. The pitch meeting was really quite funny because the third person who's in the triumvirate, in terms of running DailyWare, is a guy named Caleb Robinson. So Jeremy, Caleb and I are the majority owners of DailyWire. So Caleb, at this point, was the person working with the family office,

and he's the one who's really interested in the proposal. So he brings us into the room, and we're talking with this family. And as we're talking with the family, they get all sorts of pitches, they're billionaires, you know, people pitch them all the time on investments. And this guy at the end of the table turns to me after I've been going for a while. And he says to me, you know, we hear, we get a lot of pitches on media companies just like this one. what makes you think you're so special? Again, I got kind of pissed, and I was like,

I'm better at this than anyone on the planet. I'm better at this than anyone. Everyone who's pitched you is worse at this than I am. And for a second, there was like dead silence in the room, and then everybody started laughing, and they put the money into the company. And so the initial amount of money they put into the company, as an angel investor, was $4.8 million.

We have never taken an outside dollar at the company. We did $200 million in revenue last year. What do you think that original investment is worth today? And I mean, I have ideas. I mean, even the splits of the company. Let's just say well into the nine figures. Unbelievable. Now, could this have been done for less than a million dollars in hindsight of you just like bootstrapping it with Jeremy?

No, I mean, because the amount, we were a cash flow positive 18 months in. Okay. So we had not actually, you know, tapped out the money that they gave us by that point. but we were spending heavily on marketing. I don't know the budgeting. I'd have to go back and look at it. I know that our original expectations of what the company was going to do

and where the revenue is going to come from, we're totally wrong. We've been looking for our initial pitch for a very long time because all the places we thought the revenue was going to come from or the places it didn't come from and all the places that we thought it was not going to come from is where it ended up coming from.

So I think our original pitch had me like, my podcast, it suggested that after five years, I'd have 200,000 listeners. After like a year, I had 200,000 listeners, and today we have like a couple of million listeners. So it was off by like an order of magnitude. The same thing is true with regard to subscription. So our original subscription proposal was like,

if we're really lucky, we'll get to like 100,000 subscribers after five years. We're eight years in, we have a million subscribers. Like that was totally. And meanwhile, conversely, we would thought, because this is the way that the markets worked at the time. And this is just another, as I say, if all of business and many parts of investment in life are about diversify and then push where you see daylight, then this is it, right?

Like when we structured the business, the internet was programmatic advertising on websites. This is how you made money, right? Drudge made money by having ads on the website. Right, Byrd made money by having ads on the website. That's where the money was. Subscription businesses were still considered sort of a weird thing. I remember when Rupert shifted Wall Street Journal to subscriptions.

It was super controversial at the time. People were like, what is he doing? He's going to wreck his whole audience. And so our original business proposal was advertising on the website will be the bulk of our revenue. Now advertising on the website represents a fairly small part of our revenue, as opposed to subs, which are a large chunk of our revenue, and advertising on my podcast and the other podcast that we have on the network, which are a fairly large chunk

of any commerce, which is a fairly large chunk of our revenue. How many employees do you have today? 260 to 280. Yeah. I mean, we're constantly increasing. Yeah. And how do you just randomly get in a room with billionaires? Because that's, those types of people are extremely tough to access. Yes. So, I mean, this is where knowing people who know people is really kind of important. And putting yourself in position to know those people is really important. So I always recommend that people go to places where there is cross-class pollination. This is why actually church and synagogue are really good. If you go to a church, there's some very rich people there, and there's some very poor people there,

and they have kind of the same idea together. If you go to school fundraisers, if you go to charity events, if you go to, you know, colloquiums on various kind of major issues, you're probably going to meet somebody who knows somebody. But you need to put yourself out there. You need to be in social circumstances. So because Jeremy and I had been in circumstances at charity dinners, involving ourselves in high-level politics,

pretty much every connection that you make is going to be a person referring a person to you. So that means that the more people that you touch in your kind of inner circle, that expands your network pretty radically. Then you can call them. And what people, I think, are also afraid of very often in business is asking people for favors.

They don't understand that's actually the best way to generate actual loyalty among people is not to do things for people. It makes people feel that they are, they make people feel bad. If you do somebody a favor, it's a weird trick of human psychology. if you do somebody a favor, they actually feel worse. Because if you do them a favor,

they feel like they owe you something and people don't like owing people. Is that all the time though? I feel like some people like, I live in a household with four other guys, they're all my roommates, I'll do the dishes, someone else's dishes, and I feel like it doesn't go appreciate it on occasion.

Actually quite often. If it's casual, maybe not. Maybe people just ignore it. I mean, roommates are a little more casual. But as sort of like in business, if somebody does you a favor, you feel bad about it. Because now you know you have to repay the favor.

Yes. I mean, that's just the way that is coming at some point. Yeah, exactly. I mean, nothing comes for free. And so if you put yourself in a position, weirdly enough, it's actually a kind of cool psychological thing, but it's true. If you ask somebody in business for a favor, can you connect me with X, Y, or Z? It makes them feel good, and they very often will do it. You think that it'd be, and by the way, the reason that you don't want to do it is specifically because of that, right? You don't want to do it because you're like, oh, really, do I have to ask that guy for that thing? Now it puts me in a position of owing him.

Yeah, you have to ask the guy for the thing. And you know what? He'll probably, he'll probably be happy. You did. It makes people feel powerful. It makes them feel you, you know, useful and all of that. So, you know, asking people to connect you to other people, it's an easy ask. It's one that's easy for people to accomplish. It makes, it gives them a good feeling inside because they helped you. And it also, you know, on sort of the darker human motivation level, it makes them feel that they at some level have something on you, right? They can call back in the favor if they need to. Right. But before we go on, while we're on the topic of that, every business starts with a strong foundation. And a strong foundation does not include

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This is the other thing. When you meet a billionaire and you want to make a pitch, it's got to be very specific. It has to show what they get out of the deal. People tend to pitch broad ideas and people who are being pitched don't even know what to do with that. So I'll give you an example. There was a time of, a long time ago where, this is 2013 maybe, I was at a fundraiser for a local fundraiser for John. McCain and for some of the members of the so-called young guns. At that point, that was like Eric Cantor, no longer in Congress, and Kevin McCarthy is the only young gun left. It's like

Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, those were the young guns. In any case, there was a fundraiser, and this guy I knew, knew Elliot Broody. Elliot was at that point the RNC chair in terms of fundraising. He was like the fundraising chair for the RNC. This guy I knew, a good friend of mine, he was like, you know, you're an up-and-comer. When you meet Elliot, just ask him for your wildest dream. Just to ask him for your wildest dream. And I didn't know anything. I'm like, okay. we go to this fundraiser. It's like poolside in Beverly Hills. And I kind of like go over and he and he kind of looks at me because he knows I'm going to ask him for something. And I sit down and he's like, so what do you want? And I said, okay, so here's what I want. I want like, I need a million

bucks because I want to go and pay for myself to be syndicated on radio. I want to turn that into a massive data operation where I have, you know, a huge number of followers. And then I want to monetize that for both political and financial gain. And he said, like, what's your end goal? And at the time, I was like, this is 2008, so I was 24. So I was like, and then I'm going to be president. And he's, and he looks at me and he goes, what's wrong with you? Like, what's wrong with you?

That's not going to happen. And I walked away and I realized that the mistake that I had made is that like, that's really kind of a vague plan. Like it's, even though it sounds specific, it actually is not very specific. If I'd come in and said like, okay, let me give you step by step by step. Here's how I'm going to do these things. and I need step one. And by the way, not telescope 20 years down the line when you're saying you're going to be president,

but telescope a year down the line. Sure. Then that is a much better pitch. By the way, this is also, I've learned a good pitch when it comes to public markets. When it comes to public markets, the market demands a five-year plan and nobody actually wants the five-year plan. Because you give them the five year plan, it may be too broad. And then investors are like, no, you don't know how to do that.

What are you talking about? Because you want to be president is a crazy thing. You saying I want a million dollars because I'm going to pay these five specific radio stations to put me on the air and then I'm going to monetize that to the tune of X. That's it. That's a concrete thing. that's just, you know, things that you learn along the way. By the way, we've completed all of those steps except for the last. So, I mean, I will say that I wasn't that far off, but it's it, but, you know,

do you still have plans to run for office? Not until I'm 70. Why not until you're 70? Because you can't be president unless you're an octogenarian. I mean, those are the rules. It's in the Constitution, everything. I'm not even 40, man. Like this is, by the way, you know, again, you know what the president gets paid. And I'm having a better year, like Babe Ruth, I'm having a better year than the president. So. True, true. But do you actually,

could you see yourself at some point in the future running for a president? Or do you think that you can potentially have more power and influence managing the biggest conservative in the outlet?

I mean, I do think the latter. Meaning, listen, the president is the most powerful person on the planet for sure, but it's for a determined period of time within a constitutional structure. In terms of touching people's lives and changing how they think

and all of that, I think that, you know, it's very difficult to think that over the course of the next 20, 30 years, I couldn't have more impact doing what we're doing right now. Does the president really have that much power? Because my understanding is most of it is Congress, the House and the Senate. Well, I mean, I'll say that I tend to think that the legislature, unfortunately,

has become sort of a vestigial organ of government. It doesn't do a lot other than kick omnibus packages over to the executive, who really does kind of all the implementation. And that's becoming more and more of a problem, which is why you will see executive order signed by Obama that will then be rejected by Trump, which will then be rejected again and reimposed by Biden. the president has enormous global power.

I would say in domestic power, it's much more limited than people think it is. Globally, the foreign policy of the United States matters an awful, awful lot. In terms of domestic politics, yeah, the president has some say, but there are a lot of obstacles in his way. I mean, Joe Biden would like to do a lot of things

that he's not actually able to do because there are states and because there are checks and balances and because there are courts. On foreign policy, he has plenary power to do whatever he wants, whether it's pulling out from Afghanistan or whether it's funding the war in Ukraine,

even though he needs the legislature to do that, pretty rare. that a legislature denies a wartime president or a president who declares a war in wartime, the funding to do that. The only time I can remember that actively happening is probably near the end of the war in Vietnam. I got an offbeat question, but you married your wife in two and a half months, right? Are you proposed to my wife? Yeah, we got engaged.

September 5th and December 22nd. I was 23 when we got engaged and 24 we got married and she was 20. Okay, so I'm 24 right now. Okay, so you're on your horse, man. There are no prospects. I'm not seeing anybody at the moment. Like, how do you know when the person that you're saying, seeing is the right person. You say that you can determine this in the first year, and if you can't,

then there's something that's wrong. I mean, I think that you can determine if it's the wrong person in the first 10 minutes, right? So I think that that's actually really easy. Determining the wrong person is like that narrows the field quite considerably. I would agree with that. So the right person, so for me, you're talking about, yeah, not to reduce the romantic to business terms. I mean, there's obvious things. Like you have to be sexually attracted to the person, obviously. You have to find them fun to be with. These like basic preconditions to, wanting to be with the person, but those people tend to think of those as like the only conditions or as the key conditions. Those are like the get in the doorway conditions. And then there's the

actual conditions for marriage, which is you're signing onto a lifelong commitment here, which is going to be much harder than you could possibly imagine because you're going to have presumably kids. And they're an enormous commitment. And you're going to have hardships and you're going to have tragedies. You're going to have difficulties. And they're going to crop up not like some days. They're going to crop up most days. There will be something. bad that happens on almost every day of your life. And the person who you are marrying, it's a leap of faith because the person who you know now is not the person who's going to be there 15 years from now because people tend to change and people tend to develop habits or

their habits get more ingrained or less ingrained. The nice thing about getting married young is that you're able to sort of shape each other a little bit, which is nice. When you get married older, everybody's got their baggage, everybody's got their established modes of life and it's kind of harder to make those mesh. Her being 20 and me being 23 when we met, it's not like there were like tons of things that we were like, these are the things. But the, but the, but the things that we did share were the unshakable things. So that was, what age does that tend to be ingrained? Like, let's say 35, 40 were things, people just get set in their ways. I mean, no, I think it's way earlier. I think this is a huge mistake society is made. I mean, I think, frankly, people are

getting married too late on average. Right now, I think it's 28 for men and 26 for women. That's way too late. That's way too late. I mean, how many people do you know who are, who are 28 and have no ingrained, you know, habits or things that they are, they're really kind of used to, ways of life, patterns of thinking. When things get like fully, fully ingrained, when you stop changing is really about 70. Like, you're going to change all the way up to limb, but, but change in your life is sort of a reverse exponential curve, right? I mean, like, you change a lot the younger you are and then it kind of diminishing returns. Right. Over time. So, so the sweet spot to get married is probably as the curve is here.

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right, like before you get to the full diminishing returns, because you can still mold and adapt to each other and your habits. Don't you think if you're set in your ways, you could find someone else who blends with that? It's harder. You're both, you know, on the same page. I mean, it's definitely harder, right? The more set in your ways you are.

Now, I will say that you do want to be set in your values. Right. So the thing that you need to be identical are your values. Or if not identical, very close to identical. Right. So like for my wife and for me, so my dad, and I quote this all the time, he always says that in order for people to get married, you have to make the pre-commitment in your mind that you're ready to get married. You don't meet the person that you want to marry and then decide you want to get married. You decide you want to get married and then you meet the person you want to marry because it's a different headspace. It's a different way of thinking about the penny stock and saying I'm going to spend $100,000 dollars in a penny stock. He tossed $5 a penny stock. Who cares? But when you're investing like a full portfolio for a 30-year period, you better damn well be thinking about what exactly your principles are. And so,

you know, when it comes to a relationship, you have to be thinking like, what is life going to be like 15 years from now? So we've been married for 15 years now. And our life is four children, right? And those children rely on us to be solid and to show them what a good relationship looks like and to be there for them. And even if we're frustrated, to keep that frustration within certain boundaries, you know, they're relying on that.

And they're relying on a solid set of values that they know that they're going to get the same answer for mom and dad. You don't want your kids value shopping between mom and dad. It's a real problem. So, you know, like our first, so knowing that, that meant that the way that I, you know, picked my wife, I can't speak for why she picked me because, who knows. But the way that, the way that I picked my wife was, you know, effectively, I saw a picture of her.

I saw she was beautiful. Okay. We're now past like very low bar to get it. I met her and I knew she was really nice. And my sister had also, who fixed us up? She had told me that she was a very nice person. So I knew that she was like not mean or nasty. And then, of course, it turns out she's the nicest person.

ever. My wife is an incredibly nice human being, which is why we, that's where the contrast one. So the, and, but like, once that was true, I also knew that she was Jewish, which was huge for me, because I think that religious agreement is really important in marriage. I knew that she was Orthodox, so now it's an even smaller group. And then within that group, it's like, okay, what exactly are the things that are very important to you in terms of, in terms of family? What are your aspirations? What kind of, what do you want your life to look like? Are you ambitious? ambitious was an important thing to me. Are you a person who's very committed to the things that you believe in?

That's really important to me. Are we on sort of the same religious level? Because even in orthodoxy, there are gradations as far as like how observant you are versus how not observing you are, and those can make a really, really big difference. So every minor gradation is a major question because you're picking one person out of all of humanity to spend the rest of your life with. But you can establish a lot of those things very quickly by getting a note to a question that you think is vital.

I mean, there are girls who I dated where we, I remember there's a girl I went on a date with when I was in Cambridge. I had gone tons of dates. There was one girl I went out with. And, you know, we were talking. And it was very clear that we had political disagreements. And she was beautiful. And I was like, well, you know, it was really nice to meet you.

And no, I mean, like, that's. But there's a difference between political disagreements and value disagreements, right? And which one would trump the year? Sometimes. So it depends. So my wife and I, for example, on our first few dates, she expressed that she was more pro-choice than I was. She expressed that she was anti-death penalty.

and she expressed that she was kind of squeamish about guns. Now, because I've been doing, you know, this for a long time. By that point, I'd already been doing politics, even when I met her, I'd been doing politics semi-professionally for, like, six years. So I could see that these were not positions that she was, like, ardently committed to, right? These were not positions where she was like... You saw some weak points in there. Right, I mean, it wasn't like she came in, like, strong.

It wasn't like I said, I'm a pro-life person, and she was like, what? How could you be a pro-life person? It was more like, well, I'm not sure. It was more like, I'm not sure about that. You know, I had some questions. and that was like, okay, so this is not like a deeply firmly committed belief on your part. Again, she's allowed to have her beliefs, but if it had been like a deeply firmly committed belief, that had been very difficult to get past in the same way that if we'd walked into

the first date and she said, you know, I have questions about God, I've been like, okay, that's all right. And if she'd walked in and said, I hate religion and atheists, like, there's certain things where an complete opposite commitment is going to be a real problem. And so she didn't seem particularly political. She wasn't. She didn't know who Met Romney was, which she still, like, laughs about that on our first I mentioned it. She's like, who's been Romney? And I found that kind of charming. Like, I, she is not a political person. Like, she and I agree very much on politics now and did pretty much as soon as she got informed. I would say she's more pro-life than I am now, but which is almost impossible.

She's certainly as pro-life as I am, because I'm not sure that there's a further extreme, but she is, she's not political. She doesn't, she doesn't, she'll listen to the show when she has a chance. She doesn't follow the news all that much. And I didn't want that. I didn't want a political marriage. Like, I love the fact that we got married before I was famous and that she still does not care that I meet senators on the regular. And she doesn't, like, none of that stuff is particularly impressive to her. And I find that incredibly charming and wonderful. So my concern is how my partner is going to respond in specific circumstances. So like, let's say tragedy strikes or let's say she was lied to or let's say she had a family falling out or something like that. How she responds to certain

circumstances, I feel like is more telling about her personality and who she is than what she says she is. Okay, so that's certainly true. The personality aspects are things that you're going to have to spend. This is why it's very important to spend a lot of time with the person. I don't mean over a course of time. My wife and I, once we started dating, when I say we dated for three and a half months or three months or whatever, people tend to believe that means that we went on like 12 dates, like went on a date a week or two. It was every day, it was every day, once we were, once we were past like the first week, I was bringing her dinner every night. Like she would be studying for for her finals or whatever. She was a junior at UCLA then, and I'd bring her food, and I would just,

and we were spending hours a day, every day. By a month in, I said, we're never spending a Shabbat apart, so I would, like, sleep over at the, at the co-op facility where she lived, this Jewish co-op, I'd sleep in some other room, and then we'd spend all Shabbat together. So we're spending, like, lots and lots of time together. But, and so you could see her in different circumstances, and you do. You see people in different circumstances, and that is definitely important in terms of personality, but again, I think that the values question is a really big one, because you have to be thinking about how you build a household. The blessing that you typically give it a Jewish wedding

is that somebody should be Zoha to build a Baizhnam on B Israel, which means in very Ashkenaz Hebrew, that you should merit to build a faithful house in Israel. A marriage is missional. It's not just a contract. It's a mission. So what does that mission look like? What are the end goals of that mission?

And then you have to orient your values toward what the end goals of that mission are. So, you know, there are marriages where the mission is just to have a good time and go on vacation. Okay, well, if that's your central value, then that's your central value. For us, our central value is how do we raise Jewish, Orthodox, moral kids? Okay, that means we have, that's like several things in a row there, right? Jewish, which means I have to marry inside the religion. Orthodox, which means a certain level of practice and moral, which means we have to have certain agreements on virtue and ethics.

We went for like a, it was a three-hour date. Like, we went and we started at like, I don't know, three o'clock in the afternoon, and we wrapped it up around six o'clock in the evening, and we walked and we talked about like free will and determinism. These are like issues on date number one. And you can ask my wife like that. Like date number two was like death penalty and gun control. Like it is that kind of stuff.

Like you meet her. You're just like, hey, what are your thoughts on determinism? It was more like, yeah, weed them through, you know. Yeah, exactly. You got to run them through the paces real quick. It was more like, you know, you get past hobbies and it's nice to meet you. And then, you know, either conversation flows or it doesn't. And it kind of, yeah, I mean, it was, it wasn't like I was quizzing her on it.

It was more like, here's some stuff. that I'm, I think I said I was writing on something. She said, what are you writing on? And I'm like, yeah, exactly. Here's what I'm writing on. And then that turned into like it, and then as we were getting out of the car before, before she got out of the car, before I dropped her back off, I said to her, I don't hold by like any of this, you know, three day nonsense where I'm going to, you know, make you feel was like insecure. Like, are we going on a second date? I would like to go on a second date with you. So if so, name me a time and date. And she, and she did. And the rest is history. Like from her side, it's kind of funny because, yeah, I drove up. So after, after law school,

I was like, I'm, I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer in LA. I'm going to get a car. So I got to, so my first car had been a 1986 Honda Civic with no air conditioning that in my family was sort of a hand-me-down. It started with me. We bought it for $400. I went to my sister, eventually became known as Trusty Rusty. And, uh, and, and my second car was a 2006, a 2006 Mustang GT convertible, uh, which was a baby blue. And I drove up. And the way my wife tells it, I drove up and she's like, who is this asshole? And then I got out and I was wearing like, I didn't know how to dress at all.

And I still really don't. I have people who give me clothes to her. But I, now I know I think a little bit more, but that's after years of prep. At that time, like my idea of a nice outfit was like a faded polo shirt that was at least a size too big and some like dad jeans.

And so I get out and I look like a complete nerd. And if you look at pictures of me in those days, like my hair now is at least somewhat, okay? But my wife saw that and she's like, oh, no, he's just a nerd. That's good. And so like she, it's not like the girl who takes off,

or the guy, the girl who wears the glasses, the guy just takes off the glasses. Like, there you go. Yeah, exactly. I think she saw that. Yeah.

Yeah. What she really saw is like the opposite, right? It was like, it was like, oh, he's driving up all cool and boss. But what a jerk. He's, who drives that car?

And then I get out and I'm like a super nerdy guy. And she's like, okay, okay, it'll be fine. Where did you budge in the relationship? How did she change you for the better? I'm famous for not having feelings.

I do have feelings, but pretty much only about my family. Like if you saw me in context with my kids, I am a warm ball of mush with my kids and with my wife. Like I'm a really, really, really committed father and husband. Like that is my thing. And I go out of my way for my wife in extraordinary ways and for my kids in extraordinary ways.

And so that's, I never cried in a movie before I got married, right? Then you cry at movies. And then when you see your kids, it completely changes everything. The way that I've expressed it before is that basically, I think this true for everyone, but it's particularly true for me. That basically your range of emotion when you're single is like 10 on the upper end

and zero on the lower end. Then you get married and goes to like 20 on the upper end because when you're with your partner and it's really happy, it's phenomenal. And like negative 20 because if you're at odds or if something bad is happening in your partner, it's the worst thing in the world. And then you have kids and all limits are completely removed.

Like by far the worst things that happen are with your kids. They're like my daughter, my oldest daughter, for example, she had open heart surgery. when she was a year and a half. Like, though, like, horrendous. And, like, the worst things that happened, but the best things that happened are, like, three days ago. I've got all four of my kids, they're on one room,

and the baby is little. He's, like, two months old. And my three-year-old daughter is having her hair brushed by her older sister while my son reads, who seven is reading them a book. And, like, that stuff. It's amazing. But when the kids are being jerks, it's really awful. Like, so all limits are removed.

So what she, I would say that she also, taught me that communication can be different to different people. So I can knew that before, but it certainly matures you because being married means that you can't communicate to your wife in the same way that I would communicate to other people. Like if we get in a debate, like early on in our marriage, if I would start getting into an argument, you'd be like, stop going into debate mode. You need to stop it right now. Because you can't talk to your wife the same way that I would talk to somebody on a podcast. It's ridiculous. You can't do that. I mean, sure, I could destroy my wife with facts and logic, but like what's the

Like what exactly, how is that going to redound to either of our benefits? Like, again, my favorite phrase in marriage is, would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? Because those are the choices, my friends. Like, you cannot be both right and happy all the time. Wise words. You're just going to have to, you're just going to have to suck it up. When do you suck it up, though? When do you know, like, hey, this is where I'm going to explain my point and here's

where I'm going to suck it up. So I am very lucky in the fact that if I tell my wife that something is deeply bothering me about something that she's doing, she will move. Like, she's very malleable that way. which is an amazing quality that not a lot of people have male or female. But, I mean, there's certain things where, like, to give a very common example, my wife is not good with time. And not only she's not good with time, she doesn't know that she's not good with time.

So that means that, you know, if I tell her that we need to leave at a given point and it doesn't happen, I now have two choices. One is I can either, like, be angry and get mad at her about it, or I can lecture her about it, and then I will be miserable, and also she will be miserable, or I can just know going in, we're probably going to be late. I can kind of take a breath, be like, okay, this is annoying to me. And I'm sure there are things that I know there are things about me where it's the same thing.

For years, for her, it was that if I'm reading, I cannot be, I cannot be bothered. And I don't mean like she can't, you know, come and interrupt me. I mean, I literally can't hear it. If I'm reading, my concentration is so great that people can be talking directly in my ear and I don't hear it. I didn't realize this until I had my nine-year-old daughter. My nine-year-old daughter is exactly the same way. I have to call her like five times to get her to take her nose out of a book if she's reading. So I'm sure that that's a point of like high irritation for my wife, but they're just the way it is.

And so she's going to, you know, like she, it's annoying. It'll continue to be annoying. It's situations like that. Little things that you let go because to not let them go would be stupid and petty. And yeah, they're super annoying. Again, my wife has a thousand things about me that are, that I'm sure are incredibly irritating. You know, my wife loses her phone all the time. I mean, we joke all the time that as soon as, you know, the technology is available,

I'm going to chip her like a cat. Like, we're going to put the phone in her so that she never loses her phone again. But am I going to get, like, ticked off every time she loses her phone? That's going to be a really bad thing. So it's more stuff like, it's more stuff like, if something is deeply bothering you with your spouse, then you have to sit down and have like a real conversation. You know, when it comes to little things, you, most of, most of relationships is, a lot of relationships is letting those things go, which makes you a more patient human.

And it really is much more applicable with your kids than your spouse. All that stuff is way worse with your kids than your spouse. I love that quote about the range of emotions that you feel through different stages of life. I've actually quoted that before on this podcast. And it's just, I've told me that before. I told him that before. I really hope that that does prove to be the case when I do end up finding a spouse and then end up having kids. Because that sounds, that sounds really nice, actually.

It's something that sounds. It's amazing and it sucks all at the same time. I mean, like, I always like to present, you know, the full panoply. I'm not going to present that every moment with my kids a joy. In fact, when we had the fourth, I sat there and I calculated out the odds that all four of them were going to be good at any one time, which are one and 16, right? Because it's one half to the fourth hour. So it's like, because at any given time,

there's a 50% shot, they'll be good or bad. And so all four of them being good at one time, it's like one out of 16. Now the good news is all four of them are only bad one out of 16 times, but most of the time at least one or two of them are being a problem. You know, it's really rough.

I mean, like when kids are being bad, when they're being jackasses, it's really, really tough. And they are. I mean, they're really, they can be really annoying and time-consuming. And then again, there's nothing better in the entire world

than when your kids are giving you a, hug. There's nothing better than that. It is the best thing in the entire world. Now, I'm curious how you prioritize and budget your time between raising a family, but also running a business, and going through the startup, because I know what that could be like, and that's completely consuming, and sometimes that has to be the priority. Yeah. So I will say that, yeah, this is really why I think that it's important to start young on a lot of these things. So I didn't have kids until I was 30, right? So I was married to 24, but we didn't have kids for the first six years. So by the time we had kids, already we had launched daily, we launched daily wire.

Let's see, I had one kid by the time we launched daily war. But she was very little. And my wife is the one who really had it hard. My wife was in medical school at the time. So she was in medical school all the way through our first two, and she was still finishing residency pregnant with our third. So that was really rough for her. Like basically, for me was always priorities.

My kids always, always, always, always. So that means that if there is an emergency, then my kids come first. I think it's really important. I've talked about this a lot to have a support structure that's not just you and your wife. Really, really important.

So we purposefully located like a mile from my parents. We lived a mile from my parents, our entire marriage. You know, we purposefully put ourselves in a situation where if we need help, we can call somebody and they can come over, and my dad can come over, my mom can come over and they'll watch the kids, which is really, really important.

This is why I say, the community you choose to live is vital. Being part of a church or a synagogue, it's great because it immediately gives you connections with other people who are capable of helping you out if you need. It does take more than just you and your wife. Otherwise, it gets very overwhelming very quickly. Especially, you know, we're lucky we can afford a nanny, but a lot of people can't. And we didn't have one for, you know, a while. So the, you know, I think that when it comes to the

prioritization, I can tell you my schedule now that I can tell you, you know, how we sort of did it well. We're starting the company. Starting the company is a lot harder. As you say, the hours were insane. They're irregular. You work a lot of Sundays. that's that's very hard the kids were very little at the time so that made it a little easier because a two-year-old doesn't care so much um as i say my wife's in residency and i would literally like take our just so that you could see the kids like for 15 minutes a day i would pick i'd take them in the car i'd drive 45 minutes to her in the car with the kids she'd walk out she'd eat dinner in the car while visiting with the kids she'd go back in i'd drive home with the kids i'd put them to bed my day now

my kids don't know i have a job right because that was my priority so it remains my priority so the way that this basically works. I wake up. My kids wake me up every morning at like 6 a.m. And I get up and I make breakfast for them. I get them dressed. I get them ready for the day. Meanwhile, I might be like just perusing the news on my phone to see if I have to supplement for the show. I leave the house at like 745 because that's basically when they leave the house for school. I go into the show. I film the show. I film extras. I do phone calls. I try to work out. I try to get everything done between the window 7.45 a.m. and 3.30 p.m., which is when they get out from school. Very often, I'm the one who picks them up from school. I do

not work from the time I pick them up from school to the time they go to bed, which right now is about 730. So about a four hour period, I'm basically at their disposal. They're their exceptions. I mean, there's times when I'll have a business call and I'll have my dad come over or the nanny watches them or my wife, you know, my wife doesn't have to work if she doesn't want to now. So she, so she, you know, picks up a lot of that slack. But my goal is that basically between 330 and 730, I'm almost entirely at their disposal. They go to bed. I start working again. I pick up the phone. I make a few phone calls. I do what I need to do. If there's an emergency people can get a hold of me, but I tend to be very terse, both on the phone and an email.

So that's, so I, again, doing things quickly is very helpful. But segmenting the time like that means that my kids, they're not even aware that, like, they get, when I go on a business trip for one night, they get, like, upset. Where are you going? Or if I have work on, if I don't get home from work until five, what's happening? Why is this happening right now? I'm lucky. I've been able to construct my life around that.

It wasn't always like that, but, you know. Is it difficult for you to outsource that? Because I feel like you're very much like, you want. things done. They have to be correct. They have to be in order. How is that outsourcing to other people and trusting them to do it to your satisfaction? With regard to the company, I mean? Yeah. I mean, with regard to the company, so my view on hiring and firing, so I don't do the hiring and firing at Daily Wire, right? Jeremy really is more responsible. Caleb is really more responsible for that. I have like a say into who's working on my show and if I think somebody's doing

a crappy job, I'll stand off about it. But I'm not the person who's in the interview meetings. but with that said, my general view of hiring and firing is that the entire, if you have to fire somebody, it's because it's your mistake not theirs, almost always. It was your mistake in putting them in a position where they were not going to succeed. I think that very often employers will try to cram a square block into a round hole, or they'll say, you know, I wish that this person were, just like dating, just like any other business relationship, you've got to take people for what they are. And so the hard part, and then you have to let them be free to do. do the thing. You have to give them enough authority and enough responsibility that they can do the

thing and they can take care of the thing, but enough responsibility, and if the thing goes wrong, they also get held accountable for that, which means you have to give people clear metrics of success. You can't just be like, do a thing. It has to be, and here's what I wanted to look like in kind of general outline, and you have to hit this mark. Have you done that mark? That's fine, but you need to explain to me why you didn't hit that mark. And usually firings occur because either bad direction from above, they didn't give people metrics to hit, or the metrics they gave are too vague or bad direction or micromanagement, people inserting themselves too much into the process and not letting the person take ownership of the thing, because people who work all want to

take ownership of what they do. And then finally, you really have to be able to suss out, this is another one of the kind of the sayings that we have at Daily Wire is that you can't teach, you can't teach effort. You can't, if people want it, they want it. And if they don't want it, they don't want it. And you can't make somebody into a person who has effort, into a person who wants it. As much of, there are lots of talented people,

and they just don't want it enough, I'd much rather have the person who's, like, going to do the grunt work, who wants it, like the aggressive, I'd rather have that person who's slightly less talented than the person who's more talented and doesn't have the gumption. We just had Papa John Schnautter on the podcast,

and he had a great quote on that. He said, hire for attitude and train for aptitude. I think it was. I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, As long as you have like a central soul, as long as you have like the ability to be molded, that's 100% true,

which is why I've advocated for a long time that I think that, you know, I'd rather hire a bunch of kids at a high school who have 1450 SATs and no college degree than a bunch of kids with a college degree who have been told that, you know, they are owed $150,000 a year for finger painting. If you give me like raw talent and grit, I'd much, much rather have that than, you know, somebody who's even been working in the field for 20 years. I'm a big fan of apprenticeships. I think, first of all, virtually nobody learns how to do a job by going to school. I think virtually everybody learns how to do a job by doing the job and doing it a lot and doing it many, many, many times. My number one piece of advice for people who want to get into my industry is do a bunch of stuff for free. That's what I always said.

That's what we both did. That's what Jack did. So Jack sent me seven emails over the span of maybe eight months. It said, I want to come work with you. I'll do anything you want to. Follow it up. No skills. You don't have to pay me.

I just want to work. Give me something to do. Please give me something to do. Please. Monthly, it was almost a year. later, I said, okay, fine, you want to, here's some busy work for you to do. He finished it in like two days. Yeah. And it was like 18 hours of work. He's like, give me more. Yeah. Right. And so, that blossomed. That's the way to do. I mean, my mom was very much like that. My mom started off

as a secretary, she had an ed degree from, from Boston University, and she started off as a secretary at a film and TV company because there was an opening in the paper. And she ended up as, as vice president of the company, because that's what you would do. It was just like, get in and grind, just grind, and learn how to do the thing and get good at the thing. Now, let me ask you this. What do you think of unpaid internships? I think that unpaid internships are vital. I think this nonsense about how you pay interns is garbage.

I mean, I understand that's the legal standard now. And so I will never say anything that puts us in legal jeopardy here at Stanley Wire. We comply with all legal restrictions, requirements, and obligations. With that said, unpaid internships are absolutely vital. Because why the hell would I pay an intern for a job when I can get a college graduate with a year of experience to do that job for the same pay? all you're doing is depriving people of the opportunity to actually get good at the thing. You're expecting people to start off at a level of good.

It's really, really stupid. It's really stupid. I took unpaid internships over and over and over again. I was an unpaid intern to ad firm. It was great. It taught me how to write ads in pithy fashion. Again, I took a job for one third the pay that I normally would make because you need to get good at the thing. This is another one of my recommendations for people who are trying to, you know, break in and they're aggressive, is there is no job that is below you. you like if you think there's a job below you that that is wrong when this company started started

started in jeremy boring's pool house and on weekends i would go into the office and i would see Caleb robinson in the back room with Jeremy boring's brother nailing planks to a giant piece of wood and that was going to be the background of my set like we just got a $5 million infusion Caleb is in the back room with a hammer and nails and wood and he's just nailing wood wood and that that was like that's the background that you see on the first episode of my show what would you say about the argument that the opportunities go to people who can financially support themselves or have the the background like for you for example yes you could afford to do that because you could live with your parents you could have something to fall back on versus people who need something to survive so

I mean I think that that's true but I think that they're misreading how the markets work I mean like I think that that is a good piece of compassionate talk and I think it has precisely the opposite effects of what it seeks to achieve they're saying okay well if if all the internships are paid then, okay, but who do you think is going to get the paid internships then? Do you think it's going to be the poor kid or do you think it's going to be the slightly richer kid? Why would it be the poor kid? The actual answer to that is that the only way that you're going to find a way in is by being competitive in the marketplace and it doesn't make you more competitive for them to have to pay more.

I mean, this is actually the predictable side effect of minimum wage. Minimum wage has removed virtually all teen employment in the United States. unemployment rate in the United States. Nobody looks at it, but like the unemployment rate at age of 16, which used to be much, much, much, much lower is now much, much, much higher. Why? Because why would you pay a 16-year-old minimum wage when I can pay a 19-year-old minimum wage, or a 20-year-old minimum wage? When you artificially raise the cost of labor, people are going to artificially seek people to do those jobs who have credentials that they wouldn't necessarily need it. I mean, you'll now see people who are suggesting that you have to have a college to agree to be a barista at Starbucks.

Why? Because you're paying that person $25 an hour. like that's that's a serious problem that's not going to get cured by this piece of it like you can point out the problem and maybe it remains a problem with i'm not saying it's not a problem with unpaid internship i'm just saying that the policy recommendation that is being made to cure that which is to mandate pay for unpaid interns does not cure the problem it exacerbates the problem it means i'm just not going to have any why i'd have a paid intern why not just tire an employee it's a pain in the ass it creates all sorts of legal obligations it's it's really foolish and and especially because there there is a point like we're we're assuming that every unpaid intern is 19 or 20 years old or 18, like you're supporting yourself, you're trying to get through college, trying to go out of stuff. I don't know when you guys had your first kind of job, your first internship, your first apprenticeship,

but I had someone I was like 13 or 14 years old. Me too. I mean, that was not like amazing jobs, but I remember working an entire year at like the public middle school I went in like the student store making $25, or buck $25 an hour so that I could eventually buy a clock

for my parents or something. I remember doing that sort of stuff. Like, again, this all sounds like, oh, you know, rich people talking about things that they could never understand if they were poor. But the reality is that every rich person, not every, virtually every rich person I know, started off not as a rich person, not as a rich person. Jeremy's family is poor, or at least lower middle class. Caleb's family, from what I understand, was not a, Caleb was certainly,

Caleb is like a high school grad. Jeremy dropped out of college. Like these are not families that like where you're talking about massive wealth. And again, even my family, and the assumption is, because I'm an Orthodox Jew and because I went to Harvard, that I must have, like, tremendous family wealth or something. Again, I grew up in a, in the same bedroom as my three younger sisters with one bathroom for six people until I was 11 years old.

That doesn't make me poor, but certainly that made me rich. So, like, the, the rules that I'm saying are not about rich people, not understanding. It's about look at the people who are rich and then ask them how they got to be that way. That's the question that nobody wants to ask is, how did the rich people get to be rich, not how do we, you have sympathy for the person who's poor? I have such sympathy for people who are poor that I want them to be rich. Here are the steps that are required to be rich. And if you see that as talking down to people, I don't know how it's talking down to people,

as opposed to saying, this is how you get here. I want everybody to be up here. What would you say that the steps are? If you were to simplify it. They're very basic ones. You've got to finish high school. You don't have babies before you get married. You have to get a job.

If you do those three things, you will not be permanently poor in the United States by all available metrics and evidence. That's the first step. Then to actually get rich, you have to develop a skill set. And you have to develop a skill set that people want from you. I've always said that wealth in terms of broad overview lies at the nexus of three things. There's some pretty good business evidence to support this. That it lies in the nexus of things that you're good at, things that people want from you

and things that you're passionate about. There are a lot of things that you're good at you're not passionate about. It's going to be hard for you to do those for long periods of time. There are a lot of things that you're passionate about that you suck at. There's no money there. There are a lot of things that you're passionate about you're good at and that no one else cares about. And that's not going to make any money either. What you need is the nexus of those three things.

in that sweet spot is where the money is for you. And that can be in virtually anything. It really can be. Because this is a giant country, and it's a huge international economy. And there are niche markets in pretty much everything. I know people who are loaded as plumbers. I know people who have made an enormous amount of money,

like tons of money, by starting like cell phone kiosks at the, at the mall. Like, seriously, like that's, I know one person in particular, a good friend of mine. He literally sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars. He started off by selling like cell phones. at a kiosk in them all. I mean, like this, you can do these things,

but you have to find that nexus. And you have to be passionate about it, and then you have to, like, really sacrifice for it. I'm curious on the mission statement of the Daily Wire, is the goal to hopefully change the opinions of the political adversaries, maybe the people that don't necessarily agree with your philosophies, to get in more alignment with your moral standards and philosophies and political leanings and stuff like that?

So everyone kind of believes more so what you believe to be the ethical standard. I mean, listen, ideally I'd love to convince everybody that I'm right. That would be wonderful. But I think that the reality of life is that, like any market, they're the people who are implacably opposed to you. You're not going to be able to do a lot with that. There are people who are apathetic. You may be able to convince some of those people to come along. They're people who are sort of in the middle and looking at both sides. Those are the people who I hope I'm really aiming at. And then there's your base, which are people who already agree with you. So like three out of those four kind of contentions are available to me. The people who

unplacably opposed, like to the point where they think I'm Hitler or they think that I'm the root of all evil in the universe. I'm not worried about convincing those people because they don't, nothing is going to change there. I'm not banging my head against a wall. I say this all the time. People ask me like, what about this cousin who argues X, Y, and Z? And it makes me so mad. And I always ask them, like, what's the purpose of the conversation? Start with that. What are you seeking to achieve in the conversation? And again, it sounds very cold and clinical that way. But the truth is that you can think about most conversations in life that way. And if you start thinking about even personal conversations that way, sometimes it's really, really useful. And I remember that I've told the story a thousand

times, but it's good marriage story. You know, my wife would ask me for years. She would come and she'd complain about a thing. And I would make the mistake of trying to solve the thing. And she'd get mad at me because she doesn't want the thing solved. What she wanted was sympathy. What she wanted was a kind ear to listen to the thing, which as you might expect is not my easiest thing. And so at a certain point I said to her, listen, I need you do me a favor. I don't speak this language. So I'm going to need you to do me a favor. When you start saying a thing that's bad, is this a solution's conversation, or is this a sympathy conversation? I'm just going to need to ask that, not because I'm being a jerk, but because I actually want to know so that we don't keep running into this. So she'll tell me,

like, she's good about this. I'll say to her, like, do you want me to, like, provide solutions here? Because I'm happy to, to blue sky this thing. Or do you want me to, or do you want to talk about, you know, like, how this makes you feel? We can, we can do that too. But I just need to know which one of these things it is because I'm not good at reading this. And I feel like that was very productive. That's true for a huge number of conversations. And it's true politically as well. This is why when people will say, well, how do you debate? It depends. Is it a debate? Is it a discussion? Who's the audience? What is the end goal here? And there's certain debates, like public debates where it's not a discussion. The person isn't open-minded. It's just an attempt to establish clarity of the point of view. And that's

where you get the Rex kind of moments, like Ben Shapiro Rex or something. But that doesn't mean you have to be rude or mean or something. It just means that you have to, you know, go in knowing that it's going to be oppositional. That's a very different thing because you're not talking to this person. You're talking to these people out here, right? This is a different thing. Then there's, you're talking to the crowd, which is a speech, and there you try to actually convince, hopefully. And then there are conversations with people who disagree where it's both. You're trying to clarify and convince and maybe change your own point of view. Those are the conversations I enjoy the best. And those are actually the ones I do the most, the most just in terms of the time spent.

If there's one area where I feel like the show and what we do with The Daily Wires Underappreciated, it's that. I mean, we have on more guests, I personally have on more guests who disagree with me than I think anyone else in political talk, probably. Yeah, I've had on people who are rabid atheists, and we have very wide-ranging and I think cogent conversations. I'll have on people who are socialists, and we'll have wide-ranging and coaching conversations. Like, I like doing that kind of stuff, but that's a different conversation and the person who comes in ready to swing, at you. It does seem as though the right in general has become a lot trendier.

Or I feel like social media is beginning to steer in that direction. Why do you think that is? Because it's countercultural. So for a long time in this country, the right was the culture, and then the left was the counterculture. And so all the kids were like, ah, the counterculture. And now the counterculture has become the culture. Traditional values have become

something that you have to whisper to your friends about. Right? To say that, for example, heterosexual marriage is more societally valuable than homosexual marriage, which was inarguable for literally all of human history. And by the way, on a utilitarian level, remains inarguable today. To say that sort of stuff, everybody cringes, except for all the people who are like, that actually is true. And I can't believe that people are saying that. And when you're like 15, 16 years old, there's something very

attractive about people saying thing that's true, especially if you've been told that you're not allowed to say it. Now, it's easy to mix that up, and this is one of the problems that you see on the right sometimes. It's easy to mix that up with just being oppositional for the sake of being oppositional. So there's a difference between saying things are, I've said this before. There's a difference in offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being a jerk. That's not quite the same thing. And I think that the right, I think everybody has a tendency because human beings are reactionary to be like, oh, it pisses, it pisses those guys off. It must be amazing. And so it makes it difficult to distinguish between

people who are saying things that are untrue, but piss that side off and people who are saying things that are true and well thought out and piss that side off. But if you, you know, I try to be good enough at my job and moral enough as a human being to not say things just to piss people off. What I say, may tick people off. May, it does. I mean, but, and some of it is trollery. I mean, like, burning Barbies is trollery, obviously. But, but, by the same, like, I don't make a habit of it.

Although I was asked, that YouTube video made a lot of money, actually, and I was asked by some people at the company what we were going to do with that money, and I say, well, you know, just like any other business proposition, you keep doubling down, we're going to buy 800 more Barbies and we're going to burn them. For me, it was very memorable. Yeah, it's just, it's imagery. It's imagery. This is the part.

Everybody gets hit. Oh my God, I can't believe you did that. Okay, guys, you spent like $400 million to make a movie about giant dolls. And you're like, how much money did you spend to burn four Barbies? I promise you, our budgeting was perfectly in line. It was fine. How did you come up with ideas like that? Because the other one that really stood up to me.

That one is a Barbentheimer idea. Honestly God, like, all that was was, it was, it's Barbenheimer. I'm holding a bomb. We throw the bomb. And then we realized we didn't have the capacity in time to make a good explosion. graphic. That's all it was. We didn't have the capacity to actually make a nuke graphic that would look really cool and like Terminator 2 of the Barbies, right? We didn't have that. So instead, I'm holding a bomb and then I'm holding a match and then I like the match and I set them on fire.

And that's like because it costs zero money and zero time. That's why. Because the turnaround time between when I filmed that and when it went up was one day. That's why. What about like the WOP breakdown? Because that was another video that really stood out. Okay, so the Wap breakdown, what's so funny about that is that so there's this strange dynamic that has cropped up in the last few years, where I'm, I will make, I will, I will, I will do something that is clearly meant to be funny. Like, that is clearly a joke.

And then the left will be like, does he even know he's joking? It's like, yeah, no shit, I know I'm joking. I mean, I did a 15-minute exposition on the dumbest song ever written. Of course I know I'm joking. But then they'll be like, is he really joking? But is he?

Is he good? Yeah, I am. And, like, is it. But the undertones, though. But the undertones, oh, he's, well, I mean, first of all, I will admit that there is an undertone to the, videos of moral condemnation because yes it is bad that we have a culture that glorifies songs that talk about the moisture shade of your genitals that's a bad thing that's not good for kids it's directed

it's directed at teenagers it's directed at young girls it's stupid it's venal it's so yes am i condemnatory of that sure also is it funny that i'm i a very white person am reading slowly and purposefully bleeping out the words to wop of course that's funny i i by the way i've been doing that routine since like 2014 i used to do it on on my seattle radio show, except I used to pull handles water music, and I used to put it underneath. And they'd play that underneath, me reading rap lyrics. Because the whole idea is that this is a degraded culture, and now I'm going to place this again some of the great pieces in the Western canon, and you're going to see how stupid this is.

So, yeah, I mean, it was, we had a graphic at the beginning of it. It was called deconstructing the culture. I've been doing it for years. But every so often, one of them will just blow up. And you can have two attitudes about it. One is to be, like, annoying. And the other is like, I'm kind of delighted that people, you know, are made So both angry and happy by something so stupid.

Do you see this as like poking the bear a little bit? Well, I mean, we certainly know. We certainly know. And we'd make a Barbie review. So there's certain things in culture that have become sacrosanctant. You're not allowed to say them. Like Beyonce is overrated. She's overrated.

Or like Barbie is an unfunny movie that is filled with feminist clap trap. It's an unfunny movie that's filled with feminist clap trap. Or like Cardi B is an untalented hack who has been elevated to a position of extraordinary cultural power by the fact that she's in. incredibly vulgar, everything I just said. So if you say these things, you're really not supposed to say them. And so, yeah, I mean, there I am poking a stick in the eye, because how is it that those things are unsayable? That's the thing that always gets me. I talk about politics and morality, and I say things that are really politically incorrect all the time. And every time in the last

several years, there's been like a massive blowup, it's not about any of those things. It's about a cultural icon that the left has erected. And then I've said, I don't like that thing. It's bad. Beyonce's overrated. And I'm like, no. I mean, I said in my video about the follow-up to the Barbie video, and the internet treated me burning the Barbies. Like, I had burned a Quran or something. I mean, like, it actually was like a holy writ. This is how seriously people take their culture.

First of all, you shouldn't take culture that seriously because our culture is fundamentally unsurious. I could see taking Bach that seriously. Don't tell me I have to take Nikki Minaj that seriously, please. Like, spare me. I'm a cultural snob. I will remain a cultural snob because there are standards of beauty and good in this world, and Beethoven is better than Cardi B, and Brahms is better than Nikki Minaj,

and Shakespeare is better than both of them, and trying to pretend that all of these things are a flat, you know, a flattened version of culture, that all culture's equivalent is stupid, and it's puerile, and it's deadening to the human soul. And when you post pictures of you on Twitter outside the Barbie poster, holding a little...

We had no idea. I was going to go viral. We just, no, no, no. I saw that, and I immediately was like, this is one of the funniest things I think of me, too. It didn't occur to us because we literally did that in this for the moment. So we went to, like, 11 o'clock in the morning, see this dumb piece of trash. And I, and I, I was just wearing what I had

worn on the show that day. I mean, on the show that day, I just wore, you know, normal people clothes, like a black t-shirt and black jeans. How many people across the United States on a given day wore a black t-shirt and black jeans? That sounds like a pretty common outfit. Okay, that wasn't like, I'm clearly making fun of the Barbie movie when I'm wearing a denim jacket and a white shirt, right? Like, clearly that is, like, no one owns a denim jacket anymore. It's not 1985. But, like, a black t-shirt and black jeans is pretty much like my normal go-to-wear. So in any case, we go, and I'm, like, taking notes in the back, and my producers are cynically slow clapping all of the America Ferreira speeches and everything. And then we come out, and right before we leave, they're like, you know, we're going

to have to, like, push this video out, and we're going to put a tweet out about it. Do you want to take a picture? Should we take a picture in front of the giant Barbie poster? And I was like, well, I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, we're doing memes anyway. So, like, why not? So I'm, like, there. and I'm not going to be like smiling, because I hated the movie. And I'm not going to be like really grumpy because it didn't make me like super grumpy as much as just annoyed that I wasted two hours of my life doing this shit. And so I'm just kind of like slightly annoyed. And I'm holding a pat of paper because I wanted to show people that, yeah, like there is something funny about the fact that I sat there and I like literally took notes.

But how else do you do a review? I mean, if you're reviewing a movie, this is how you do a review? You go in with a pad of paper? You think that the reviewer at the Wall Street Journal is sitting there without a pat of paper when he's watching a movie? How's he going to review the movie? He's got to write down quotes. So the fact that that went like super duper viral and people were very upset about it. Oh my God.

He took a picture in front of the Barbie poster. Oh, no. Okay. Rich, you want to talk first world problems? You being upset about me standing in front of a Barbie poster at a theater. That's a first world problem. You're an elite. I think just people knew what was coming.

Of course they knew it was coming. I mean, he said to the tweet that I thought it was frash. Yeah. I mean, that tweet had maybe more traffic than the actual video. It probably did. Do we know? I feel like it was close. I went on every single platform, like tens of times.

Like people were nuts about the tweet. All I said is that it's a woke piece of crap. And everyone was like, no. It was like slow motion. No. It was like William Defoe getting shot from behind in platoon. Guys, get over it. I'm allowed to think that your beloved movie

about the joys of feminism is garbage. I'm sorry it wasn't Citizen Kane. That's your problem. I didn't make it. And when you get hate... Five million views on the picture. Five million views. 55 million on the picture.

What's crazy to me is that that picture, how many views does what does a woman have on Twitter? Because I saw it when it was at, I think, 30, 40 million views. It's like 200 million. So the fact that one picture got a fourth of what this documentary got is, I really think. I mean, Twitter metrics are a little bit weird. Twitter metrics are a little weird because people scrolling past.

Also, it's easier to consume a picture than it is to consume a full movie. But it's, but yeah, I mean, of all the things that I, have tweeted. Do I think that that one deserves to be like far in a way number one? I have serious doubts about the wisdom of the American public if that's the case. But isn't that proof that you really have to dumb things down for most people and most platforms, the simpler it is to consume the better it is? Well, the more entertaining it is to consume the better it is. It's really an about dumbing down. It's about entertaining it down. And so what I take some pride in is the fact that even when I talk about politics, I hope that it's both informative and entertaining.

So if I'm doing a full breakdown of the indictment against Trump this week, then, you know, I hope that I'm going to give you all the information you need to know from a legal point of view and from a political point of view, but I hope that there'll be a few jokes along the way and you'll find it entertaining. It's a lot easier to do that about entertainment. I mean, we did a video about me reviewing Oppenheimer. It did pretty big traffic like two days ago. Like people like talking about entertainment specifically because it's light. That's why the, and that's why the juxtaposition of me being kind of seriously considering the message of Barbie is inherently funny.

but it actually is so on one level it's funny because obviously it's funny me talking about like the the clear narrative implications of a movie about a doll that's funny but also the entire media did make it about that the importance of the Barbie movie why was the Barbie movie significantly more important than the latest Paddington film why I mean they're they're both about children's toys so why why is one of them an insanely important cultural event that the press is going Gaga over and there's big articles like I read them in advance there are huge articles like vanity fair talking with Greta Gerwig and talking with Margot Robbie and talking about their perspectives on feminism and talking with the trans person who's in the movie and all the rest of it.

Because they take the politics very seriously. What they don't like is that I notice that they take the politics very seriously and I think their politics are garbage. That's the thing they don't like. What they want is to be able to promote the propaganda without anybody pointing out that it is propaganda. And so the way they treat that is that how dare you take this seriously? Oh, it's such a joke that you take this seriously.

That's why the Vue was doing that routine. The Vue did this routine. They're like, oh my God. Isn't it emasculating that you took this movie seriously? you took the movie seriously. I noticed that you took the movie seriously. You started it. I mean, and as far as it being emasculating, again, the, it is amazing to me how quickly members of the cultural left will jump to such transphobic notions as emasculation. It just, it makes me very upset. How dare they? Maybe I was just in touch with my feminine side.

I'm a man I can be. Or maybe I'm a woman, who knows? I'm curious how you deal with the amount of hate that you get, because you get, an inordinate amount of hate. I mean, it's ridiculous. I can bring up an example. Okay, this is kind of embarrassing, but I feel a little bit of shame when I say that I love Ben Shapiro.

I really do. I mean, I've watched you for like nine years. I saw you in high school, right? Like speaking at a college campus. I know your whole story. And I've listened to like every podcast you've been on, but I also listen to people on the left. I love Destiny, if you know who that is.

He's great. We had him on the podcast. He's super smart. I love hearing him out. But one time I was on a date, okay, and I pulled up my first. phone and I was searching up something on YouTube and boom clicked on YouTube Ben Shapiro shows up right immediately like oh you listen to him I'm like yeah I do I think he's got some you know great opinions

I like to hear him out on certain things and boom kaput entire date just absolutely ruined I'm like do you know by the way about him gentlemen excellent litmus test if you do this and the girl runs you did the right thing sure bullet dodge I'm just like do you know anything about him and she's like I'm in he's racist you know he's anti-semi I'm like I'm like you know he's racist you know he's anti-semi I'm like, oh my God. Anti-Semite is my favorite. Antisemite is definitely my favorite. I love that one. Yeah. But how do you deal with this amount of hate? And then for the people that are ashamed to say that they enjoy to hear you out on certain things. Yeah. I mean, so for those people, listen, I totally understand that there is cultural weight against listening to anybody on the right with any

level of popularity. And it doesn't matter, by the way, that my views are significantly more nuanced on a wide variety of topics than I think that people believe they are. Right. Like, if you have people on the left, are you like a huge super-Trumper? And then I tell them, I didn't vote in the 2016 election because I thought that both candidates sucked. Or that when I endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 election, if you watch my endorsement video, I talked about all of his personal failings and all of his personality flaws. And then I said, I like his policies better than Biden. Like those sorts of things, they don't know. I mean, they don't know any of this stuff. But that's because the media tend to paint, and why I say the media, I really mean sort of the

YouTube media, they paint a very sort of one-sided picture. Listen, we had to call up and threatened to sue the economist because in, in headline, they called me an alt-right personality. The alt-right hates my guts. I've gotten death threats from the alt-right. They literally arrested some guy for trying to kill my family a few years ago. The FBI did. He went to jail for a couple of years because I was too not alt-right. Like, I was the number one target of online hate in 2015, like in all of the world, online anti-semitism, 2015, 2016. I was the number one target and it was almost entirely the alt-right. Like, none of that matters because the media have decided that we're all in these sort of reactionary boxes. That's why I take

pride in the fact that we have people from the, I mean, so on my show, if people listen to my show, they'll recognize that I frequently, I'd say at least once every couple weeks, we'll tell people, you should listen to my show and then you should go listen to Positive America. I literally say this on the show, on a routine basis. Go listen to the other side, listen to my side, see which one you think is more convincing. I can attest to that. This happens all the time. At some point, we should put together a montage of how many times I've told people to go say, one of the host of Positive America went on MSNBC and said that social media should censor us and take us off the line effectively. Like, it's not an even game.

So I understand why people feel that way, because there is a weight of, that is also why you get to counterculture thing that you were asking about before. Because when there's that much weight against a thing, people sometimes take, and then when they take a look at the thing and they realize it isn't what they've been told, it opens up new worlds to them. So in some ways it's really negative and really bad

because it's like people think a thing about me, that isn't true. But on the other hand, the minute that people engage with the content and they realize that that isn't actually what the content is, they're like, what else am I being lied about? Because this isn't the person that I was promised. I was promised somebody who hates black people. I was probably somebody who hates immigrants and somebody who hates Muslims

or hates Jews most bizarrely or hates gay people or something. And instead, what they get is not that. They're really bewildered by it. And they think, okay, so I've been lied to about a lot of things. So in some ways that the media's sort of universalistic homogeneity with regard to what they say I am and the contrast with what I actually am

is not the world's worst thing. As far as taking the incoming and taking the hate, so back in 2000, 17, 2018. I used to obsess about Twitter, like really obsess about it, because Twitter is just a giant ego machine, especially if you're somewhat notorious.

If you have a certain number of followers, that the verified stream or the reply stream before there was verified, was like, do you want to feed your ego? We all tend to think of ourselves as like the center of our own movie and the center of our own story. Well, Twitter fed that

because there's literally people who, when you're famous, there's literally people who are talking about you every moment of every, like thousands of tweets an hour just about you. And I watched, you know, my friend Andrew Breitbart, I think Twitter basically killed Andrew. I mean, Andrew was obsessed with Twitter. This is in the early days when 50,000 people was a lot to be following you on Twitter. And he had, you know, a big following at that point.

And he would just obsess about what people were saying on Twitter to reply and respond and all of that. And it was really hard. If I would trend on Twitter, I'd trend on Twitter, I'd say once every three weeks, almost like clockwork. And at least before Elon took over. Now it's a little bit more rare because the algorithms tend to be a little bit more honest about what's happening. but for several years. It was like once every two, once every three weeks out, trend.

And every day that would happen, it would ruin my day. And finally, a few years ago, my wife said, it's ruining your day. You have kids, you have things to do, just take Twitter off your phone. Because you think everybody is watching Twitter because you're watching Twitter,

but nobody is watching Twitter. If you actually just get off the phone and you walk around, there'll be a bunch of people who listen to your show and they'll say how much they enjoy your show. And if you mention to them what's going on on Twitter, they will have no idea what you are talking about. And it is 100% true.

But what about going to college campuses and seeing people protest? That I always find funny. I always find it funny because first of all, like, good for you. You feel passionately about the thing. I have no problem with you going and protesting me. You want to do that. Enjoy your First Amendment. That's fine.

The things they protest me about are some of the dumbest things ever, ever, ever. Like my favorite one was when I spoke at Boston University. And they protested me because they said I was a racist. Like 200 people outside saying I was a racist. And I gave like a 45-minute disquisition on the history of race in America. that was almost entirely about the evils of white supremacy for the first, you know, 200 years of America's existence. And like going through beat by beat.

And they're protesting as like, what in the speech do you? I said this at the time. I need you to explain to me what in the speech you disagree with. Or I spoke, I think it was at Stanford. And the entire speech was just about how nasty and terrible the alt-right was. And I was getting protested as a fascist. And I was like, I don't understand what you want exactly. Like, I'm not doing this for you.

And I'm fine with you being pissed at me. That's fine. but do you not have ears? Like the thing that I'm saying, what is the thing that I'm saying right now that you find to be so dangerous and so terrible and so insulting that you are protesting me as all of these terms,

racist, sexist, you know, homophobic, all this kind? Like, what is the thing that is scaring you so much about what I'm saying that I'm getting mislabeled those things? Like, name me the comment that I said, and then we can discuss whether I think that that comment is taken out of context

or whether I misphrased it or whether I think it's right. Like, we can talk about those things. But, you know, it rarely goes like that. So whenever you're walking around in public outside of the college campus protests and stuff like that, have you ever gotten somebody that comes up to you and actually start saying super mean things or like slandering you? It's pretty rare. It's rare. Okay.

So I've personally never experienced anything like that, but I've probably gotten thousands of hate comments online. Yes. But it's never happened at the point where I meet someone in person and they ever said. The internet is a giant hate machine. I mean, like the, because it's anonymous. How many times have you gone up to somebody and berated them? in public. Never, ever, even people you don't like. But I also don't leave hate comments. I understand, but like, that's, that's, that's, and, and really neither do I, although I'll get

kind of combative on Twitter, but the, uh, how many people do you know who have gone up and, like, berated randos in public? It just doesn't happen that often. When they do, you think they're, like, a crazy person. So it really does not happen nearly as much as you think it does. What you do get, like, death threats in the mail, you know, you get, you'll get people sending crap to your house, like that, that kind of stuff. Does that, does that worry you, like, ever for you? of your personal safety. We spend seven figures a year on my personal safety. Seven figures of year on personal safety. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's just the way that it goes. And then what about traveling? Do you ever fly... We travel with security. Do you travel,

fly private? We do fly private. It depends where. I mean, if I'm flying abroad, it's difficult to fly private. But yeah, domestically, we'll fly private sometimes. We'll fly commercial sometimes. It depends on what we can do. Yeah, I mean, you try to avoid particularly public places, not really because you think that somebody's going to take a shot at you, although they might, but more because there's the possibility of a somebody coming up to you and taking a swing at you or something. And then it's a no-win situation, because if you take a punch and go down,

then the entire, it's like, oh, my God, look, somebody punched him, and oh, they punched the Nazi. And if you fight back, then you go to jail. So that's the, so it's, so that's why security is really, security is really not there to stop me from getting killed. It's really, it's really there to stop these sorts of things from happening and let people know, like, if this happens, there will be people there to stop the thing. That's what security is more about.

One thing that you said I found extremely interesting, which was the belief that everyone who has sinned is not like me, and the best protection of evil is to recognize it in our own hearts. And you said, I think that was on Lex Friedman, right? Can you expand on that a little bit? Because, I mean, I like to think that there's no real way in which I could bend my morals and do something evil, but I've also never been presented with an opportunity, maybe that was as appetizing to do so.

I don't even think it's a matter of, you know, presented the opportunity, as presented the pressures or incentive structure. I mean, the possibility of being an active participant in something evil because you believe that the others, it's usually a question of ends and means. Usually evil and sin in the political realm, at least, is a matter of ends and means,

where you think the ends are so important that it justifies the means. And that very often happens in politics. You'll just make excuses for somebody doing something really, really bad because they're on your side. and I don't like that and that is a form of sin and you have to be very careful of that sort of stuff and those sorts of sins are you know pretty common in politics and when we when we think of sin we also tend to think of like the big sins right we tend to think of like 10 commandments type sin like

oh I'd never murder bob I mean that's that's true I assume you'd never murder bob but I'm not going to assume that you would never you know bear false witness against your neighbor because that's a pretty broad one and so there might be a situation in which you're in an awkward conversation and you just kind of like spin what he said a little bit differently for the approval of people who are looking on. We're all performing small sins every day. But, you know, what is small sin? What's a big sin? That can sometimes be a matter of opinion.

But I think that that's the nature of what religious belief is about is that you should constantly be looking at yourself and trying to see what you can be doing better. You also mentioned on Lex Friedman that it's not very good advice to say be a good dad. Or sorry, be a good person. Because it's too broad. It's too vague. But if you say something like be a good dad, most people intrinsically, they know what that is. Yes. For me, someone that doesn't have a kid yet.

And I always imagine how I'm going to raise my child, but I still have no idea. Like, when do I intervene? When do I tell them that this is good versus this is bad? Or do I let them figure it out for themselves? How do you know how to be a good dad? Well, so I have models. I think my dad is an amazing dad. But I think that there are a few kind of quick rules to being a good dad.

One is that you actually have to respect your children as though they have, you know, cognizable wishes. which sometimes can be hard because, you know, they're not, kids are not famous for being smart. They're small. They're children. They're not supposed to be adults. But you have to actually treat them with a certain level of respect and you have to treat them as though their desires are meaningful. You also have to say no and you have to set rules and you have to be willing to stick by those rules because it's your job to craft this person into a person who's capable of being a good dad of his own. So think about what you want your kid to be like as a dad. That might actually be an interesting way of doing it. What would you think that if you saw your kid, you're now a grandfather, your kid is interacting.

with their kid. What does that look like in a way that you approve of? Because you, because that, you probably have some general, I mean, it depends who the male father figures are in your life. The truth is, it's hard to see how that works without modeling. This is why single, single motherhood has been such a dramatic failure for the United States is because boys in particular really, really need father figures to model what it looks like to be a good man. And when you remove that father figure, that is not fillable by a woman. It's just not. Men and women are different. There's no such thing as a woman who can be a father. It's not, it's not the same. That's not to say a woman can't be an unbelievable mother and fill gaps that exist in different ways,

but she's not going to be a dad. Those are two different category things. It's a category error. But, yeah, I mean, there's certain, so I think that they're, what I was saying that there's an intrinsic sort of set of things you know that are, that are bit, you know what it's like to be a bad dad. You can always start, you can start with that, right? I mean, like, I always find that in Judaism, there are two types of commandments. There's mitzvvahece, meaning like the things that you do, and then there's mitzvot-a-a-a-a-a-say.

like the things you can't do. And I find that in most circumstances, we tend to focus on the things we can do rather than things that we shouldn't, but it's sometimes easier to do it by process of elimination. In this situation, would you smack your kid? No, in this situation,

would you yell at your kid publicly? No, in the situation, would you lecture your kid or, you know, like there's certain things that you just wouldn't do. And then there's a lot of gray area in there too. It's not like there's any one, like, the best way to be a parent. There's too much action.

There's too much sticking and moving. but you know it's like to be a bad dad. And by contrast, that does leave a fairly wide area to be mediocre to good dad. Who does it right on the left? In terms of having conversations. Hmm. So I think that it depends who you consider to be on the left. Most of the people who I think of as doing it right are actually more now considered centrist,

even though their political viewpoints are probably not. Joe Rogan is not a right winger. Joe Rogan is probably not even a centrist, right? I mean, he said he would vote for Bernie Sanders. He's liberal on all the social issues. He's kind of a socialist when it comes to economics. At least he says he is, even though I don't think in practice he really is. Like by any classical definition, Joe is much more on the left than he is on the right.

I think Joe is really good at what he does. I think that, you know, there are some folks like Brett Weinstein, who's clearly identified as on the left who I think does it right. It's easier for me to sort of check off people one by one. So if you threw names me, I can tell you whether I think they are or not. But in terms of sort of mainstreaming at cable news, it's hard to think of people who are doing it, right? There are people who do it better than others. Like, I think Jake Tapper does it better than Chuck Todd, for example.

When it comes to sort of online YouTube land, Destiny would be an example of somebody who I think does it better than some of the other people who argue online. Why don't you debate Destiny? I mean, I'd be interested in debating Destiny or own conversation. He'd be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. We had such a great conversation with him for, three hours, I believe.

He has a lot of depth to his beliefs, which I admire. Right. He seems like he's thought things through, which makes for an interesting conversation. My one rule, and, again, is that if people are, like, radically personally insulting toward me, or if I feel like I'm going to be sandbagged in a debate, then that's not a debate anymore. It's an insult comic contest. And so I'm not super interested in that.

So that is my one proviso, but I haven't watched all Destiny stuff. So I'm not religious, although my family, they're all Jewish, and I've never really been to synagogue or I've never been to church. My father's side's a little bit Christian. I'm wondering if you need to be religious or spiritual in some capacity to live life and have it be as meaningful as it possibly can be. Or if you can find just as much fulfillment and meaning while being, I would say, like, not religious.

So I can't speak for every single human. So I'm not going to say that there are people who can't find that or it's impossible to find that. I will say that it doesn't scale. That if I'm talking to like an average person, I don't know anything about you, then I would say that, yes, a religious life is going to be a better life. It leads you on a pathway toward understanding that there's more in life than you, that your moral system is not the only moral system, nor is it a moral system that is irrefutable,

that there is a higher goal to life. There's certain premises, I think, that everybody lives based off of that are effectively religious that they refuse to acknowledge. Free will being one of them, the notion would live in an understandable universe that we are capable of actually exploring being another one of them. The notion that human life is of innate value, I think that's an assumption that is based on nothing if you're not a religious person.

If you're a religious person, you say this because we're all made in the image of God. If you're not religious person, then I don't know on a logical level why a human life would be any more valuable than an elephant life or a squirrel life. You can make an emotional argument, perhaps, but I don't think that you can make a perfectly logical one

because there's nothing about a human being that is any different than any other piece of meat on sort of a material level. And you can say that that meat has different properties, but why are those properties more valuable? Why is consciousness valuable, for example? In order to say the consciousness is valuable, you have to say the consciousness is good. Okay, how do you define good?

Good for what? Morally good? Now you're talking about an is-a-gap that can't be bridged by atheism or agnosticism. So can you live a life on a practical level that is happy and fulfilled while not filling those gaps? Sure. You could. Does it scale? Not remotely.

Is that going to work for millions of people? No, this is why secular humanism is a failure as a project. It collapses pretty quickly into moral relativism, moral relativism, narcissism, hedonism. And that's what you're watching is that as the birth rate in the West collapse, and as people more and more are caught up in their own internal subjective assessments of self as like the key to all human existence. What's your biggest insecurity? It's hard for me because honestly I have a really, really good life.

So, I mean, you're asking, can I ask for, to drill down on the question? You mean, like, thing I'm worried about or a thing that I look in myself and I see a flaw? You look in yourself and you see a flaw. Oh, I mean, I'm quick to form opinions. so I have to try to, you know, militate against that by, you know, actively saying, okay, wait a second and, like, and do the reading. I'm, I can be intolerant of opinions that I think are dumb. And so sometimes that comes across interpersonally. I can be too cool in my calculations to other people's emotions. You know, the facts don't care about your feelings thing is true on a political level, but interpersonally, it can't be true. And feelings certainly matter on an interpersonal level. So those would probably be the big ones.

And I have to ask, where do you invest your money? Because you've been very diversified throughout your career and income. Where it's gold? Bert's gold. So where do I invest my money? So as I'm sure your listeners know, there's a big difference between wealth and actual liquid assets. So obviously, I am invested very heavily in daily wire in the sense that I own a large chunk

of daily wire, and that's a very large business. So if you were to assess my net wealth, that is a large portion of my net wealth. however, in terms of like my actual liquid asset base, I have always thought in the same way that I think about my career that if I cannot dedicate a lot of time to a thing, I shouldn't be doing the thing. And so I have financial advisors who essentially, I told them I'm young.

I have a very solid cash flow. So I want you to take the best diversified portfolio in sort of your highest risk category. So I'm willing to lose the money, right? Basically, there's like my solid stuff that I want. There's a certain percentage of my portfolio that I think of is like very solid. It's not going to be 80%. And then there's like 15%, which is in like the more high risk category,

maybe 30% versus 50. And then it's probably go like 50% is in very kind of low risk, solid returning assets. 30% is in more of a high risk bundle. 20% is reserved for like, go for it. Sure. And but when I say go for it, they don't really do that. There's only one investment. I've only made one investment in my life.

where I personally, quote-unquote, picked a stock, because I don't think that you can day trade without really knowing a lot about a thing. And my strategy on investment is Graham Dodd strategy. So Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, which is the same strategy Warren Buffett uses, which is essentially you're not investing in risks. You're mitigating your downside risk and looking at the possibility of upside.

And when you buy a piece of stock, you're not buying a piece of stock because you think the value is going to go up. You're buying a piece of stock because you want a piece of that company because the company is well run, has a good product, has good upside. And so I don't buy things to sell them. I buy things to hold them.

Yeah. And so, again, I'm young, and that's all you have to do, right? I mean, if you just buy things to hold them and you don't pick, like, the worst stocks in the entire world, the magic of compound interest is a thing. And so, for me, it's, the first rule is don't lose. And then the second thing that you can do is look at potential upside. So, for example, I'm now a major stockholder and on the board of a publicly traded NASDAQ corporation that's like a biotech company.

The way that I picked that stock is I happen to know the CEO, and I know that he's a very solid guy, and I know that he makes good decisions, and the stock was wildly undervalued. I know how much, through public disclosures, I knew how much cash they had on their books, and I saw that the company was trading at one half of its cash. And so I was like, well, it's trading one half of its cash from all available public indicators, it doesn't, and their last few quarterly reports, they don't have, like, significant burn. So why is it trading at one half of its cash? that's it, that's an undervaluation.

So I bought up a bunch of that stock. And the reason it was trading under its cash is because it had a drug. It failed to phase three trial. It dumped from, you know, 20 bucks a share to like two bucks a share. And so everybody else was like, they were buying it on the way up. And I was like, well, no, I'm going to wait and now it dump, but it's got a big bag of cash right here. That's worth at least $4 a share. I can buy it $2 a share.

There's no risk. Yeah. What about alternative investments? Because I've noticed that's a Zenith Rolex Daytona. Yeah, yeah. You know you're watching. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, I do have a bit of a,

of a watch collection, mainly because they're pieces of art. But again, by to hold, meaning like watches as a, as sort of a hobby slash investment are good, because depending on the brand, and that's basically you need one of the big three or a Rolex. Those are the ones that will actually accrue in value over time if you hold on to them long enough. There are a lot of other beautiful watches. Yager makes beautiful stuff, but tends to, on the great market, sell for less than its

price. But watches are great because you get to wear them around and then, if you don't like them anymore, you can sell them and not lose any money, which is more than you can save for the vast majority of other sort of luxury assets. You buy a nice car, and within five seconds, it's worth half of what it was when you bought it. So, yeah. That's a cool.

I like the watch. I have the original 1969, the El Pramaro. So it's the same movement as that. Yeah. So what I really wanted was the stainless steel version of that. And then prices went nuts. So they did. But now they're coming back down.

Slowly. All the Bitcoin guys had bought watches. And then when Bitcoin went blast, like a year. and a half ago, then, so this is the mistake that I made. I bought a couple of paddocks, and I bought them when, like, at the height of the, like, just on the other side of the height, I was like, oh, they're dropping, we're good. I didn't wait long enough. And so, yeah, I didn't do all on those. But again, my view is, I wasn't selling them in the next year, so what do I care? Right. Just told, I'll give my, I'll give my son. That's fine. That's the,

this is a Jordan Peterson-esque question. It's a nice ender to a viewer to a viewer that's watching that maybe isn't just happy. They're not finding themselves, like, optimistic and positive when they wake up in the morning, which is a great indicator of your just overall mental well-being, how do you advise that they become happy and live a good and meaningful life? You have to do things. You really have to do things. And it sounds vague, but it means, like when Jordan says, make your bed, he means it. Like, actively make your bed. Like, do the small things that give you a sense of activity and purpose in the world. And that could be volunteering at a local charity, if that's the thing that you want to do.

Or it could mean that you need to search for a job. And if you don't get a job today. It could mean that you have to, there's a great episode. I don't know if you guys watched The Bear on FX. Ph. X. Ph. Ph. Ph. Ph. Ph. Ph. It's a great show. And season two, there's an episode where this guy is kind of a near-do-well, and he's kind of a boorish jerk, and he is, it's about a restaurant in Chicago. And season two, they're trying to build this into, like, a beautiful restaurant. And one of the people who's sort of a holdover is a negative down guy.

And his friend slash cousin sends him to learn how to stash at like a five-star restaurant with a Michelin Star. and the entire episode is he starts off and he's just there cleaning forks. That's all they'll allow them to do it. Like you need to clean the forks. And they keep coming back to me like, there's streaks on the forks. He's like, why do I give it? What do I care if there's a streak on the fork? He's like, there's a streak on the fork.

You're going to clean these forks. They're all going to have no streaks on them because this is not a restaurant that does streaks on forks. And then he's told like, and then he learns and he sort of imbibes that ethic. And suddenly he's like, oh, I see, this is a restaurant that doesn't have streaks on forks. that means that I have to come in here in a suit. That means that I have to actually up my game. That means that I have to...

So, like, doing the small things leads to the bigger things. This is actually a quite... It's both an Aristotelian concept and a very Judaic concept. People tend to think of the commandments in Judaism and the Mitzvote, the things that you do. It's like, oh, these weird things that you do every day. Or you get up in the morning and you wash your hands in a certain way. Or you get up in the morning and you pray,

and then you say a blessing before you eat, and then you say another blessing after you eat, and it's all very formulaic and why you're doing all these things. And the answer is, do the small things and do them well, and it allows you a pathway to virtue. that's the difference scene sort of Plato and Aristotle. Plato basically says that you grafts the big idea and that maybe leads to virtue. And Aristotle's like, do all of these things and that leads you to cultivate virtue.

And so Judaism is very much Aristotelian in that sense. It's like, get up in the morning, do the, this is why I think the framework of religion is super helpful for a lot of people, because it gives them a thing to do every day. You're going to do the thing. You may not like doing the thing. You may not be in the mood to do the thing. In the mood is one of the worst ideas anybody ever came up with. Who cares whether you're in the mood.

You're in the mood to get up with my kids at 545 in the morning? no one's in the mood to do that. But doing that thing is what gives you meaning in life. In the mood is really stupid. So like the, you're depressed. You're not going to stop being depressed by being in the bed. You can either be depressed being in the bed or you can be depressed while you do a thing. And then it may turn out that as you do the thing, you become less depressed. Change, change what you do and it may change your emotional state. I heard a great quote that was happiness and meaning is not to be pursued, but it will ensue, which I think. I think that's right. Yeah.

sums that up. Ben, thank you so much. Hey, thanks guys. I really appreciate it. It's like a monumental moment in my life. And I'm just, I'm just so happy that you're here. I've never seen Jack so happy for a guest ever. No. I think he started the podcast specifically to one day have you on it. That's awesome. I appreciate it guys. This is cool. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And with that said, you guys, until next time. Until next time. Before you get up,