An Unfiltered Conversation With Ben Shapiro: The Trump Victory, Corruption, and Fake News

all human beings right left Center we all have an innate desire and it's a bad part of us that wants to Sher responsibility and suggest that our failures are not our own hey the truth is the vast majority of failure in life in a free country like the United States is probably because you made a bad decision the the mark of a of an economically successful individual is somebody who fails and looks in the mirror and says what did I do wrong so that I can fix that and then do better the next time this kind of wealth inequality idea is shot through with the lie that the wealthy guy got rich because you're poorer than he is that all economic growth is a factor of exploitation and that that isn't remotely true financial literacy is abysmal in America Tim Walls the current vice presidential candid on the Democratic side does not own real estate does not own stock and admitted he has no idea what venture capitalist do he needs to know that because the thing that makes the country better economically speaking is not in fact just wages being paid the thing that has changed how we live is innovation and Entrepreneurship and that's a relatively recent invention it's not that hard to make money in the United States over time which is true when it comes to individual decision- making the single most important thing you can do in your [Music] life Ben thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour I know your schedule is very busy this time of year appreciate it oh yeah thanks for having me it's always fun so what are two things that you like about KLA Harris so I do like that she has at least tially not run a racially tinged campaign I think that in the late breaking sort of aspects of the campaign she started to do some of that stuff she's made sort of overt pitches for black men by saying I'll give you $20,000 and forgivable and that's but she she hasn't done the you know I'm only going to campaign to black men or Latino men or or and and when asked about whether America is systemically racist she really has avoided that and I think that's a good thing for the country because obviously if America were systemically racist she would certainly not be the candidate for for president of of the United States I'm trying to think of a second quality that I that I like about kamla Harris um obviously a Charming laugh uh the it's it's hard because I think she's such a typical politician and I really don't like typical politicians at any level and so I'm having a a difficult time coming up with man that's that's rough that that that really is man she helps out the daily I mean you guys have good business yeah exactly I mean that's kind of a backwards way to way to put it but but sure she she's business for us I mean that that but I could say that about literally anybody on my life but in terms of you know sort of personal qualities I don't find her to be very empathetic I don't find her to be very compassionate I don't find her to be particularly intelligent or convincing so I'm I'm having loyal like these are the qualities I look for in humans are not the ones that that she tends to possess for me are there any policies that you like of hers the problem is with her policies I'm not sure what they are so it depends which policy she's talking about when she says that she wants to further fund border patrol sure I like that so I believe her not really since she's been the vice president for a while and she hasn't really attempted to close the border when she says that she's going to be you know harsh on terrorism that she's going to that she's going to fight America's enemies like she can say all that stuff and it sounds great but she hasn't done any of it so you know some of her stated policies probably are are fine and and then many of her State policies I think are are trash and then I think that in practice what she's done as vice president has been pretty negative now the truth is you can say that about a lot of politicians I mean I don't agree with everything the president Trump says I don't agree with everything the president Trump does you just have to go by sort of the bulk of what you see in terms of record and I tend to judge politicians more by revealed preference meaning the thing they do than the thing that they say one thing that's kind of I would say making its rounds right now is the Democratic machine and who's really running the US government and I know you don't really like to dip into conspiracy theories but I found it very odd how Biden was never going to step down he was always tweeting that he's going to you know run and be the Democratic candidate however he stepped down and they put Cala in there people say they put her in there who is they well I mean they would be the the top levels of the democratic party said the big Democratic donors combined with Nancy Pelosi Chuck Schumer uhe Jeff sort of the movers and shakers inside the Democratic party I mean I can name the specific days I mean you're talking about donors like Jeffrey kastenberg who are involved in in pushing out George Clooney involved in pushing him out these are specific human beings when we say the Democratic machine I don't mean that it's sort of a mmic you know cloud of democ democratic you know agenda items that that that's not really what I'm talking about it's a very specific set of people who run a very specific party and I will say the Democratic party is run professionally I mean they run it like a professional team and that means that they can snap into place very very quickly in order to achieve their goals they did this back in 2020 remember with Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders won the first couple of primaries and he was doing really well and then the entire Democratic machine was like okay Amy clavar you need to drop out P bu you need to drop out and then you need to both immediately endorse Joe Biden Jim James cabber in South Carolina was like I'm going to endorse Joe Biden and suddenly Biden went from being an also ran to being the nominee and so they actually did it in 2020 in order to overcome Bernie and they did the same thing in 2024 they looked at Biden they said he's not he's non compos menus he's not with it we need to get rid of him and so what can do to pressure him out and they had to bring significant pressure I would say the Democratic machine when when I refer to that also refers to the adjunct of the democratic machine which is the Legacy Media which which shifted into Biden mode immediately after that debate and then retained that attitude toward Biden all the way until he dropped out at which point we totally forgot about him has anyone even discussed Joe Biden recently only when he Mak some sort of big Gaff on the campaign Trail other than that we're supposed to ignore the fact that a scile person is the most powerful person on planet Earth which is kind of an amazing thing K Harris is still maintaining publicly that Joe Biden is totally with it which sort of begs the question as to why she's the nominee then the media have gone completely absent on that so for for for weeks at a time it was like Joe Biden cannot be the nominee he can't but nobody would ask the other question which so so why can he be the president exactly so they did exactly what the Democratic machine meaning the Democratic party upper echelon wanted them to do which was push Biden out of the candidacy don't push him out of the presidency because if KL were to actually become the president for example then number one who would raise questions about why she hadn't declared the 25th Amendment before but number two she immediately becomes responsible for everything going on in the country as vice president you're in this sort of weird schinger space where you're both responsible for the stuff that the that the administration does and also totally not responsible for anything because you're not the president of the United States and she's comfortable in that space she doesn't like being responsible for the Biden agenda except when it suits her to be responsible for the Biden agenda you know the reason we asked that question is because here in the S coffee hour we really do our best to be as unbiased as possible and it seems like on the internets they're always trying to shove some sort of agenda down your throat like how do you know you're actually getting the true source of information well that's where our sponsor ground news comes in they're an independent website and app that collects news from all over the world and shows you any hidden biases in the stories that you read for every article you get a visual breakdown showing you how many sources are reporting on it where they fall in the political Spectrum their credibility and whether or not they are independently owned or corporate funded they even created an entire election focused blind spot dedicated to surfacing important news missing from the right or left media bubble like the controversy sparked by what Trump allegedly said about a soldier's funeral in this case ground news found 40 sources covering this but barely any is coming from the left the left leaning sources that do cover it continue to focus on the alleged statement one Center rated Source says the soldiers own family dismissed the remarks and you can see here the daily wire owned by Ben Shapiro focuses on the fact that the solders family said Trump did nothing but show respect to my family and the fallen soldier in our last interview with Ben Shapiro a lot of people admitted that they had negative feel feelings towards them but once they watch the podcast their opinions changed and that's what ground news aims to do break Echo Chambers spark good discussions and challenge popular narratives to find common ground and with the election just days away staying informed is more important than ever so go to ground that's G n. news/ IED or scan the QR code on your screen for 50% off their top tier Vantage plan that's ground. newws slist or scan a QR code on the screen for 50% off their top your Vantage plan once again guys the link is down below in the description or you can scan the QR code they are truly an incredible resource and we feel so honored to be sponsored by them thank you so much to ground news for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast one thing that I found really interesting is we were talking with Patrick B David yesterday and he brought up that there was a study that was conducted and it said out of 130 billionaires 80 supported the Democratic ticket and then I think it was 30 or 50 I think it was 50 supported the Republican ticket why do you think it is that billionaires support the Democrats even though it has always seemed like the the billionaires were wanting the tax cuts and wanting the the I mean Republicans right so I I think that you know there has been a marked shift in the approach that you've seen from from where the billionaires come from actually makes a big difference like Tech billionaires are more likely to be in favor of kamla Harris uh sort of retail billionaires are probably more likely to be in favor of trump so not all billionaires are created equal they're they're from different sort of strata of society they have different backgrounds and people who are Tech billionaires tend to have gone to really good iers ities they tend to hang out on the coasts if you are somebody who started Walmart if you're the Walmart family or if you're the family that that owns you know a big grocery store chain or if you are you know Bernie Marquez and you own Home Depot right those people tend to go Republican actually so it it kind of depends on the kind of billionaire I wouldn't classify billionaires as kind of one class in of themselves and and so what you really have to ask is why is it that in sort of the upper echelons of places like San Francisco people are voting against their own economic interests in order to vote Democrat and I think a of that is is sort of virtue signaling I think a lot of it is status symboling that's that's why you will see this has been a big problem in America for a long time in terms of the the gap between upper income people and and not as higher income people is something that Charles Murray wrote about in a book called coming apart right so Charles Murray after being you know I think in in many ways slandered by by people saying that he was a racist for his writings and all this he wrote a book that was just about white people and the book was about the divisions between what he termed fish town which is sort of you know people who are lower income white people and and people who are from upper income areas and what he found is that people in Upper income areas preached social liberalism but didn't live it which which you see a lot you see a lot of billionaires were like yes of course I'm the most socially liberal person in the world and they're all married they all have kids they send their kids to private school not public school right they do all the same things that I do with my kids but then when they're referencing social values they want to show all of their friends how tolerant and diverse they are and so they they sort of signal all this to everybody else and they feel that they can somehow buy the love of a public that may not like them for being rich by saying well yeah sure I'm rich but look how look how generous I am I'm voting for the party that's willing to tax me at an exorbitant rate which of course is a very silly way to do that I mean if you want to give more money give more money I mean there you get a terrible write off you can you can certainly do that um so yeah I think that there are a lot of factors that sort of going into that Gap you are starting to see a reversion by the way a lot more Tech billionaires that I know are now shifting away from the Democratic party because the Democratic party has gone so far and moving back it's like in the Overton window now I think to to then subscribe to the Republican party yeah I mean well this is the big Shi for Trump in this election I think that in in 2020 if you Wen in Silicon Valley and you said I'm supporting Trump you would be socially ostracized if you say that in Silicon Valley people look a little weird but it's not quite the same thing as like you'll never get a job here again you can't come to any of the any of the parties I I think something fundamentally shifted earlier in this election cycle when Biden was the candidate and that was it became acceptable to say I can't vote for the dead guy I'm really thinking about voting for The alive guy and then after the assassination attempt on Trump I think that really kicked into high here where I was like not only can I vote for him maybe there's some qualities to this guy that people had overlooked I mean his reaction was was pretty incredible that's why he had Zuckerberg who had you know support all the Democratic candidates basically come forth and be like well you know that was pretty badass what he did and so once that break glass in case of emergency is is broken you can't Unbreak it once you say openly well that was kind of badass what Trump did you're now in the world where Trump is an acceptable candidate and once you're in that world you can't then go back to he's unacceptable unless he does something new that's unacceptable and thing about Trump is he never does anything new that's unacceptable it's all he's the same person that he's been like Donald Trump is McDonald's french fry you leave it in the car for 30 years it looks exactly the same what do you think are some of the biggest issues right now that are not being discussed um well I mean I think any of the policy issues I think the biggest issue that that really doesn't get discussed is the state of our military our military is still the the most powerful military on the planet but we have serious procurement issues in terms of new technologies we have serious holdups in terms of development of new technologies we obviously have a massive problem in terms of recruitment to the military uh these are problems that are going to require systemic overhaul inside the military enormous sums of money being wasted on weapon systems that are that are no longer relevant not nearly enough Innovation not nearly fast enough right those are things that really really matter because when you're talking about deterrent power you actually need to be thinking about the next War not about the last war and so you have you know billions and billions of dollars being spent on aircraft carriers for example when the reality is that the next war in the Taiwan stade is probably going to be fought over things like drone technology and so question is which which is lower cost but higher yield so how much investigation is is being done at the military like these are things that I think are really going to need to be you know looked at um because and that's nitty-gritty kind of stuff is there a chance though that they are developing this technology but they're keeping it so Under Wraps that most people don't know about it because they don't want it to get out there that they're investing I me sure that's that's definitely a possibility but the United States military is ruled by regulations in red tape to to procure a weapon system to to get it to get it approved is unbelievably difficult you have to run through all sorts of Hoops in order to get there there there's a book by I think his name is Edward lvac he's a a military analyst he wrote about the the Israeli way of developing military technology and basically what he says is because the Israeli military is held together with with gum and and shoestring because of that things just get bootstrapped all the time you're doing like because they're they're constantly under existential threat they're developing new weapon systems all the time and very often you have like a unit that just develops it in secret without approval of the high ups and they're like hey guys we have this thing called Iron Dome want to see it and like that that sort of stuff happens you're never going to get that in the US military you get punished for inovation in the US military yeah we also tend to think a few other areas that are frequently overlooked that are very important Food and Health oh yeah I mean the RFK has tried to elevate a lot of this great amazing I agree now I I don't agree with everything that RFK says about food and health um I think I agree with a lot of say about food particularly you know his his take on vaccines he's sort of variable on that you know sometimes he'll he'll take the sort of maximalist position that vaccination generally is dangerous sometimes he takes the more specific position which is that some vaccines are more dangerous than others and the vaccine schedule might be which I think is is a much more palatable argument um but yeah I mean his focus on the nutrition of the American people I think that that is excellent I'm glad that he has raised it it's something that really the federal government probably ought to be involved with because we have an entire set of departments that are that are dealing with with this sort of thing and so that that seems to me if you're cering Federal nutrition standards via the FDA or Department of Agriculture I mean that that's stuff that really makes a big difference and uh and good for RFK for raising all of that MH and some of the other things that we think about are that people don't care enough about the drug crisis because it seems mostly far removed from everybody yeah we have thousands and thousands and thousands of Americans dying every year because of it 116,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdose last year and there was really fentanyl poisoning I mean that that's the that's that's a huge number it's an enormous number as twice the number of people who died in the Vietnam War in in one year in the United States and and we did I mean we've covered this at Daily War I actually went over to Kensington which is sort of a suburb of Philadelphia and that place a hellscape I mean you walk over there everyone's on fentel uh they they are bent over at the waist they they've been dosing it with with animal tranquilizer to make it more potent it's it's creating like lesions on the body and eating away at the human B I mean it's really truly horrifying stuff I talked with moms of of kids who a fentanyl poisoning and these kids didn't even know they were taking feny they thought they were smoking a a joint or they thought that they were taking some sort of you know Aderall that was actually laced with fentanyl and and and the kid di I mean this this a major crisis in the United States the lacing is a huge issue too and it was interesting I was actually listening to I think it was JD Vance on Theo and Theo made an aming argument which obvious it's a little bit of a stretch but I agree with the sentiment which obvious it's being manufactured in China and it's being brought with drug mules through Mexico and if someone in Mexico is coming up into America and Sho and killing 116,000 of us every single year then we would be making a Hu I mean we would be at war with Mexico but for some reason when they're trafficking drugs and obviously fentel it just literally just kills you and it gets laced in with other drugs it's just like oh you know what it's not really that big of a deal obviously Jos that but still it is no I totally agree one of the things I think that that people don't understand about fentanyl when we say lace that really is the key word because people think a fentanyl I mean I would normally if I was just like a you know kind of casual Watcher of politics when you think drug overdose you think okay somebody took heroin stuck it in their arm and they overdosed that's not what happens with fentanyl what's happening with fentanyl is a huge percentage of the people who are dying a fentanyl overdose don't even know that they're taking fentanyl in the first place which means they're being poisoned right that's an act I mean there are certain states that are now starting to prosecute this as an act of Murder By drug dealers if they lay fentanyl into their product and and so you know again when we went down to the border and we actually like rode along with border patrol they were fullon explaining I mean it was pretty crazy I mean know we went down we rode along with border patrol we did an episode you can see it at Daily wire plus where you know I'm riding 20 miles on the border no border patrol agents anywhere uh it a it was a Native American reservation on the border with Mexico you could literally just step across into Mexico and back like there's no fence there's nothing and because it's a Native American reservation they don't want to put up fences because of tribal lands and all this kind of stuff so it's used as as a drug Runner you know outlet and and what what the and while we were there we're sitting out there with border patrol and I hear this drone in the air behind us and I look behind us and just giant drone flying right there and I turned to the border patrol I'm like that's one of ours right no no no that's that's the cartels the cartels have a have a drone on I said why don't you just shoot it he said well no no in order for us to shoot it we need to have the approval directly of the Secretary of Homeland Security and because otherwise it could theoretically be construed as an act of war or something and so instead you just to have this drone monitoring said what are they doing well they're monitoring us they're making sure where we are so they can see when we drive away that's when they move all of the fentanyl over the border so there's what what the drug cartel strategy is is they actually dri the way they make their money they drive up to the Border in trucks border patrol can see them I mean like it's it's not hard to see it's kind of an open field they drive up in a truck filled with illegal immigrants they drop them off those people walk across the other side of the Border there's actually a button on that side of the border that you can press for border patrol help the illegal immigrants push the button border patrol rushes in they immediately start processing these people because these people say the magic words which is I fear to go back to my home country which means that's an asylum claim they start processing them the vast majority of them within 72 hours are processed and and let through into the United States and they're given like a call back date with most of them never show up for and meanwhile while border patrol is doing that the drug cartels make their money the second way because they're getting paid by all these people to to move but the real money gets made when all the border patrol agents rush to deal with the illegal immigrants now you got 10 miles open border and that's when you take the dude who's got the backpack filled with fenyl and just right across the border a nobody stop you and so that that's not a staffing issue that's an allocation issue it's a it's a mess it's a disaster and and and anybody who treats the Border as anything less than a disaster as has been the case for the last four years is is just sleepwalking Now isn't the solution to that to legalize drugs because ultimately the a lot of these people are going to be buying regardless and if they're buying something from a dude that you know is selling illegal narcotics that happens to be laced with something these people are going to be buying regardless so why not legalize it and at least they're buying something that's not laced with fentanyl could be regulated to that's been the case that some people have made with regard to legalization of marijuana the problem is that that hasn't actually stopped people from buying illegally so because of the regulation and taxation of marijuana that happens just through the legal process in the same way that people buy Lucy with regard to cigarettes people will still do that with regard to marijuana particularly young people who want to cheap and the way that marijuana tends to get sold is by you know your friend went and bought five blunts from his dealer and now he has three extra Blunts and he sells them to you so it does tend to get passed hand toand I mean there there pot shops all over California that hasn't stopped illegal trafficking in marijuana in California obviously and that's also true in Colorado that's true in a wide variety of states that have attempted this and does that mean that that drug you know that that the the War on Drugs has been particularly effective I think that it's been relatively ineffective obviously but does that mean that the solution to that is fullscale legalization such that the police can't arrest somebody for dealing drugs on a street corner or something that that that doesn't make any sense to me either and the are is if you through Los Angeles right now the place is just one giant cloud of pot smoke I mean that's just what it is you're walking down the street and you're just smelling it coming from everywhere that's an externality and they they regulate smoking but not pot seems kind of weird to me um and beyond that the addictive quality of marijuana has obviously risen over the course of the last 30 years the amount of THC that was in marijuana in the 90s when I was a kid it's like three four 5% now it's like 30% it's because capitalism free markets what they do is make the product more effective and better uh and so if you have that in the drug Market what you tend to get is more powerful drugs that are available to the general public and so I think that that's a real problem also you know when when you you smoking a cigarette or taking moderate amounts of alcohol for example drinking moderate amounts of alcohol uh the the effects on the brain are not particularly dire if if you have a somewhat addictive I mean the new studies are showing actually relatively addictive um Quality to the new strains of marijuana and that's being taken disproportionately by young people and that does have some brain effects on young people I mean the human brain doesn't really stop developing until you're about 26 so if you start smoking up when you're like 14 15 years old which is what's happening with a lot of kids and then you just smoke more and more heavily until the time you're 26 that will that will have some really really dire effects on you so I don't think it's quite as easy as just legalize all this and it fixes it it seems to me that if what you're worried about is fentanyl then the first thing that you need to do is worry about the fentol and that means closing the Border you close the border and that's going to solve a lot of your problems because you know the the precursor chemicals as you mentioned are coming from China they're being manufactured now in Mexico and smuggled across the border it's a lot harder to smuggle the precursor chemicals directly into the United States a couple things that we also wanted to mention was the overwhelming Division and internal hate that our citizens have for people with varying opinions and it seems like we can't even unify over a common foreign enemy these days and on top of that declining birth rates which is finally being discussed with Elon Musk and uh of course Graham's favorite financial literacy which is what he kind of built his YouTube career on but yeah financial literacy is abysmal in America yeah I mean so we can go through each of those I mean when it comes to our inability to sort of have conversations with with one another yeah that's exacerbated by social media the truth is that when you're at a coffee shop with a bunch of people you can probably have a conversation with most of them on social media because it's Anonymous and because you're hidden behind a screen you'll say things to people on social media you would never say to anybody in person ever and people always ask me you know I'm relatively wellknown I get a lot of people who come up and and most people like well is that ever dangerous I'd say that like 99.9% of the time when somebody comes up it's because they like the show they want a picture they're super nice and and if there is somebody who disagrees they'll tend to be like yeah I disagree with you but you know I still enjoy your show or something it's it's much harder to be an in person with somebody than it is to be an online and I think that social media has really exacerbated that but it's disincentivized having the conversation in the first place because people just they just don't want to break through that Obstacle of being like labeled something or you know I think I think that the internet is not real and so what I've encouraged everybody to do is is you know touch some grass what I mean by that is that you know I'll have conversations with people who disagree with me in fact I do it I think probably more than anybody on the right I would say right have a conversation where I go on Lex Freedman I talk to Destiny for three hours or or I you know go on Barry Weiss's show and I have a conversation with Sam Harris about Trump versus versus Kamala and and that's totally fine that's totally and I'm not afraid that the audience is going to be super angry at me and if they are angry at me for having the conversation well I mean who cares like so so you're pissed that I had a conversation there are a lot of people who read the comments and like oh how could you possibly have a convers so a few years back uh there was a host on a major left-wing podcast and um I'd met him at a conference and I said you know we really should this is 2018 we really should do a crossover podcast for the election election night we should do a crossover podcast huge numbers right you're rooting for your side I'm rooting for my side it would be it would be fun kind of rock them sock them robots my people would love it he goes your people would love it my people would kill me and he's right I mean on the left there is the sense that if you even have a conversation with somebody on the right that you ought to be denied access to polite society and that that's that's a serious real problem again exacerbated by the internet in real life are there that many people like truly exercised at Sam Harris that he had a conversation with me no I guess it's like 10 people are there that many people who are super pissed that you know Anna kasparian and I are friendly and that we talk sometimes you know on online like that number is is really low they're just really really loud so that's exacerbated things it also happens to be that because of the internet you're talking with people you never talked to before and the reality is before the internet the vast majority of people that you personally talk to were people in your immediate Community obviously and so that that lent itself to a sense of community because you have to see these people every day you want to be a jackass to your grosser you have to see that guy every single day you want to be a jerk to your bank tell teller you don't want to be nasty to your next door neighbor these are people you're going to have to deal with in society it's not a one-off right when it comes to economics for example the thing that that tends to generate positive effects in capitalism is repeat business right you want repeat business which is why you don't just rip somebody off and the reason you don't rip somebody off is once you once you create that trust deficit you can never do business with them again the internet is a series of one-offs it's a series of I can say what I want to you because I'm never going to see you again I have no idea who you are that's not true in your local community that's that's why inside Church communities for example everybody is much friendlier with one another despite the despite the you know differing politics it also is true that because of the size of the country we just have less and less in common generally and then when you add to that diversity a very Hands-On federal government that has an enormous amount of power and so you feel like your the person who disagrees with you is going to grab that thing and then turn the government gone against you now politics becomes a matter of life and death if the federal government didn't have much power then nobody in be like oh my God I can't believe those jerks in Alabama what because who cares like who cares like you might have opinions about it you might you might have really deep and abiding opinions about what should happen in Alabama or vice versa but it's not like you're sitting there every day like oh my God those people in Alabama they're such a threat to me there's something that the founders knew this which is why they delegated the vast majority of powers to the states and didn't actually delegate very many powers to the federal government the growth of the federal government combined with a more disperate public in terms of its opinion combined with the viral quality of the internet has broken down all of that and the only solution to that is go touch grass go to a church group go find a social group go hang out with people in flesh human beings with a face and have conversations with those people and ignore a lot of the trash that's happening online and then on a governmental level and again I mentioned Anna kasparian I had her on the show and I said well one thing we might be able to agree on is what what and we disagree on nearly everything what if the federal government just was not that important in your life what if like you want to live in California fine live in California I used to I didn't like it I moved so what what if that and she's like okay maybe you know like what if you agreed on federalism that seems like a pretty good solution right subsidiarity seems a really good solution to that as to uh some of the other issues you mentioned you mentioned economic illiteracy obviously major major major issue and people are economically illiterate and the average person should know what an index fund is for sure they should absolutely know about that they should know what like tax advantaged accounts are 41k Roth IRA that they should know what the stock market does they don't even know what the stock market does they think of the stock market as a roulette wheel that's what they think of the stock market as if you ask most Americans how do you money on the stock market the answer is I put money in a couple of companies that I think are going to do well and then I and then at some point I sell it and if I get lucky then I make it big well the stuff that was like you know Wall Street bets and GameStop and AMC and stuff like that that was the stuff that was attention yeah and Dogecoin and stuff like that which I guess disced everybody wants to be Warren Buffett without applying any of Warren Buffett's actual investment methods right if you want to be Warren Buffett read Benjamin Graham right you actually have to be slow and steady and you have to find places where the market has not quite caught up with your knowledge of a company and then you have to stick with that investment for a very long time and then you have to diversify your investment that investment doesn't kill you you have to have you have to have a margin of safety as Benjamin Graham suggested right those are actual investment principles but nobody wants to do that the way they think of it is you know I know a dude and that dude bought Apple when Apple's at like one buck and now that dude is so rich so if I buy a $1 stock probably one day I'll be super rich and then they're all pissed off when it doesn't work out that way or they'll look at a stock broker and they'll be like what is that guy what is the stock market even for how are people making money off stocks that's not you know I'm working with my hands here making a chair I can see why I'm making money I don't see why that dude who is like figuring out which companies to invest in is what is a venture I mean Tim Walls the current vice presidential candid on the Democratic side does not own real estate does not own stock and admitted he has no idea what Venture capitalists do that's the guy who's running for vice president of the United States that's Insanity that's Insanity my next point I posted on Twitter a while ago and I got a very divisive response I called it financially illiterate not to own these things half of my responses has said that it's good that it's a good thing that he's not invested in the markets because he has no financial gain from certain policies whatsoever what are your thoughts on that I mean I think that's ignorant I mean he he certainly has Financial gains from somewhere meaning that he he earned a salary okay if you earn only a salary and you never invest you're going to have a a shallow view of how the market works because you're especially if you work as Tim Walls did for a public sector Union because you're a teacher if you're that then you have basically a salary that's been pre-negotiated with the state it is guaranteed you every week okay and so where do you think money comes from you think money comes from the state because that's who's paying you every week and when it comes to all the things that actually generate innovation in the economy you've had no relationship with those things you've had no relationship with building of wealth by getting a mortgage and making a smart decision about real estate you've had no relationship with the building of innovative companies by investing in the stock market which is really what investing in the stock market is the stock market is a giant pool of cash that is attempting to find Innovative Outlets that generate a an Roi that's what the stock market is and that's why there are stock market failures I mean for every person who is succeeding on the stock market there are a bunch of people who blew out on the stock market because the stock market is in fact a winwing mechanism for the companies that ought to survive and that that's what the stock market is but you need that pool of ready cash available so when a good idea comes along somebody's willing to invest in it that's what a a venture capitalist does he needs to know that because the thing that makes the thing that makes the country better economically speaking is not in fact just wages being paid wages been paid to human beings throughout human history literally for all of time the thing that has changed how we live is innovation and Entrepreneurship and that's a relatively recent invention that is because of property rights and that is because of inventions like the LLC which was a national invention and and it's also because you know Innovation when not punished when rewarded will continue and and people want to create and a point that I've been making when when I've been speaking to college students recently is you know you look at the world around us and you sort of don't even understand how amazing the world in which we live is every material that is in your cell phone was present on planet Earth 8,000 years ago all of it every single bit of it right why didn't they have cell phones right because nothing is CH you your suggestion is basic when people say things like well I don't live better than my parents do the hell you don't the hell you don't look at the technology in your life you have more Tech in your pocket than NASA had when they put a dude on the moon like that's that's crazy of course your life is better than your like would you trade places with with your parents in their tiny house with a unit air conditioner with a with a fridge that barely worked and with a with a TV the size of a the size of a microwave like you just the tech in your life is better okay so I don't know if that equates to Quality of life or happiness because my understanding was that that happiness was higher back then in part because we were a lot simpler well I don't think that's because we were simpler I think it's because there was more social fabric I mean what the happiness studies tend to show and this is what Arthur Brooks writes about a lot happiness tends to come from social connectedness it tends to come from a feeling that you have a role to play in society so when I say that your life is I mean economically speaking it's better because economically speaking it is better economically speaking you have a better car you have better microwave you have a better TV you have a better phone when people talk about the housing crisis and the housing shortage the reality is the average single family home you're comparing very often apples to oranges the size of a single family home right now is like 40% bigger than it was back in the 1950s if you look at houses that people were building in the 1950s they're like the size of this room we're in and tiny tiny like the kind of house that I grew up in and I grew up in like a 1400 foot house 12 I think it's actually an 11 or 12200 foot house in Burbank California with three sisters one bedroom for us one for my parents one bathroom and that that's kind of like a normal sized house that wasn't it wasn't like we were growing up impoverish like the the quity of Life economically is way in terms of Happiness economics doesn't always equate to happiness obviously I mean you know a lot of people who are not particularly Rich who are very very happy and you meet a lot of people who are very very rich I mean I know billionaires who are deeply unhappy and have screwed up their lives beyond all recognition and in fact the every time there's a study of of which countries are happiest it's fascinating to see which countries consider themselves really really happy the one that always sort of sticks out like a sore thumb is not the Nordic countries where again there's you know kind of high levels of of homogeneity uh and um and a good level of of income in Norway thanks to their Giant Gas deposits but the one that sticks out like a sore thumb is Israel where they're constantly under attack and rank in the top 10 in happiness every single time it's like that's crazy I mean if you've ever been to Israel you see Rockets I mean literally like my parents are there right now and any moment they may have to hear an alarm and then go into a safe room people in Israel are happy because they have a sense of purpose and that sense of purpose tends to come from social fabric it tends to come from the connections and roles that you play in your life that so this is one of the mistakes I think the right makes to the right will look at Social disconnectedness and they'll be like if we change our tariff policy then that would fix it if we had more tariffs and we brought manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt that would fix it like no first of all that that's not going to bring enough manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt to actually make a market difference and it's going to raise everybody's prices but more importantly the problem was not that the the jobs left the Rust Belt that's a problem the bigger problem is that the churches left the Rust Belt Tim Carney has written an entire book called alienated America where he compared economically like an area of Wisconsin with very high levels of of happiness and social connectedness within area of Ohio and the the average income in both these places are exactly the same and one was completely desolate and one is thriving and the question was why and the answer is because one has a pretty thriving Church it turns out that that sort of stuff really makes a difference in people's lives you know I hate to interrupt you on this but it got me thinking that AI 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special offer at oracle.com once again that is oracle.com IED thank you so much to oci for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast now going back to financial literacy uh it said that kamla has 800 to $1.7 million invested cash Holdings of 500,000 to a million and a house worth5 million in bruntwood and this is per her disclosures sir chance she owns a lot more than this that's in an irrevocable trust somewhere that technically she doesn't own but she has access to possible but the reality is that I wonder how much of that wealth is also held in joint with with mhof right mhof is a very high ranking entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles obviously he's pretty wealthy I mean KLA had been on a government salary pretty much her entire life from the time that she left law school so you know the the the idea that she was able to afford a $5 million house in Brentwood on a government salary little hard to to EXP explain why that would be but but mhof had some independent wealth of his own he was a partner at Major law firm so yeah and Tim Walls of course no Investments whatsoever which is just Tim Walls is a joke of a candidate and a joke of a governor and the fact that that we elect people who don't know what a venture how can you even say that I don't know what Aventure does like that I'm sorry that's crazy crazy thing if he was saying that in a literal sense I like to think that he kind of knows what a venture capitalist is it's even worse if he it's even worse if he said it in a figurative sense if says it in a literal sense I'm like okay you're just an idiot but if he says it in a figurative sense meaning like I don't even know what a venture capitalist does to earn his money that's so much worse because with that's saying is that a venture capitalist is essentially a leech on society who needs to be punished for the Venture capitalism right because the idea is I know what they do what they do is they invest in companies and sometimes the companies succeed and sometimes they fail but I don't even know what he does he builds he provides the capital that allows companies to get started that's what a venture capital if you don't understand the importance of that right if you can read it one of two ways as you say he doesn't understand what what it is or he don't understand the importance of the thing it's worse if he doesn't understand the importance of the thing I mean I think he was trying to come off as more relatable and as we discussed most people are financially illiterate so they're like I don't know what a venture capitalist is I so it kind of like works for them I agree with you I think most people see Venture Capital as leeches they see investors people that trade algorithms that's like a negatively connotated thing but if he says that he's reinforcing the idea that hey I'm just a guy like everyone else I mean I agree and I think that that's really bad I don't like politicians who Pander to the American people along the lines of ignorance I don't like it on either side I see this all the time my personal bug the I hate the most is when politicians will say they me we talked about this before they are out to get you and your own failures in your failures in your life are probably the result of some shadowy conspiracy that's out to get you okay that may be true but I'm going to need a description of what that looks like okay the truth is the vast majority of failure in life in a free country like the United States is probably because you made a bad decision that's true for all of us we all make bad decisions we all fail we've all had failures we've all had successes you hopefully you have more successes than failures you learn from the failures you can have future successes the the mark of a of an economically successful individual is somebody who fails and looks in the mirror and says what did I do wrong so that I can fix that and then do better the next time the mark of economic failure is something goes wrong and you immediately go what external factors led to me failing here what what did I do not what did I do wrong what did Society do wrong to me because the truth is in most cases it's not that Society did something and if and if it was society that did something wrong it's usually on such a grand scale that nothing that you personally do is capable of fixing that now you can take political corrective action and there are times in American history where you really needed those big sort of social movements however there is something to be said for the fact that if you want to take the biggest social movement most important social movement of all time in the United States the Civil Rights Movement deeply important deeply necessary as far as the economic trajectory of black Americans it was actually stronger before the Civil Rights Movement that's not a case against the Civil Rights Movement that's a case that the the things that make you economically successful it is more important thing you do in your daily life to make yourself economically successful even in a bad system which is an amazing thing the bad system needs to change for sure it needs to go away but black middle- class wealth was growing at a higher rate before the Civil Right why and that's because along with the Civil Rights Movement came something called the welfare state if those had been disconnected then that would have been way better if the Civil Rights Movement had come along and said we are getting rid of legal discrimination it's bad it's wrong it's violated of the 14th Amendment phenomenal and then if if it hadn't also said okay well you know but we also need to construct a welfare state that is going to pay people for for having children out of wedlock and compensate for for all of the systemic discrimination of the past that creates a system of perverse incentives I'm not saying that was on purpose but that is what it actually created again none of this for Media Matters is a case against the Civil Rights Act or against the Civil Rights Movement which is a wonderful necessary absolutely morally just thing that is a case that when it comes to individual decision- making the single most important thing you can do in your life to build wealth is to make good individual decisions and nothing you do politically is going to equate to those things in 99.99999% of cases so what do you think some of the biggest non-issues are today that are being discussed too much the wealth inequality I think wealth inequality is a horeshit issue I think it's stupid I think on his face it's stupid the reason I say that is because why do you possibly care what a rich person is worth you should only care about what the poor person is worth meaning that if a poor person is getting richer it is just it is just human jealousy that makes you look at the rich guy across the street and say yeah but he's getting richer faster that that's just Kan and abble kind of stuff this kind of wealth inequality idea is shot through with the lie that the wealthy guy got rich because you're poorer than he is that all that all economic growth is a factor of exploitation and that that isn't remotely true so I I hate the wealth inequality conversation I also think it tends to end around the the real question which is income trajectory differences why are people having a different income trajectory so when when people say wealth inequality it's a great way of baking in a bunch of systemic factors that are Beyond anybody's control so they'll say well you know you people inherited wealth from their grandparents okay the reality is that the vast majority of wealth in the United States is is not generational it passed down generation to generation the vast majority of people who are millionaires and billionaires in the United States are not Millionaires and billionaires because they inherited millions and billions from their parents right pretty much every billionaire that I know actually grew up poor to middle class uh and that's the wonderful thing about America that's the incredible thing about America but wealth inequality masks the reality which is that if you want to build generational wealth you have to have generational income and then you have to generate generational income for your company and then you have wealth in your company because you own stock in something that's creating generational income right I I care much more about income than wealth because wealth is sort of the stagnant measurement of income it's interesting because that's actually something that surprisingly for I still don't understand Graham has gotten a lot of hate for which is some of his most popular videos are if you skip out on Starbucks every day if you just put $5 into a Roth IRA or an index fund in 40 years you'll have 6 million like based off of a hundred years of data returns of the S&P 500 and he gets hate for that when he's promoting something that's like clearly just yeah when I do things to save money and they say why is he doing this to save money he's worth so much you know and they they hate on the idea that like I'd rather still make coffee at home yeah well I mean again I think that that's because what you do when you say that is it's not that hard to make money in the United States over time which is true but what does that do it throws the responsibility for making money back on the person who could put the $5 bill back in their pocket instead of shelling it out at Starbucks and that's what people don't like people get very angry when they are told that perhaps you ought to make a different decision they like it much better when they're told the system is screwing you and that's the reason why you're spending so much money at Starbucks instead of asking the question you're asking which is do you really have to spend the money at Starbucks or could you just go down to the local publ and pick up like a bag of ground beans and then just make it at home with like a French press and just do that over and over and over and save money like that's that's people all human beings right Center we all have an innate desire and it's a bad part of us that wants to shk responsibility and suggest that our failures are not our own and that's why you have to cultivate virtue this is why virtue is a very very important thing it's again I'll come back to the religious point it's the difference between the one one of the things that's happened in our society that's really really bad and dark is that the government has replaced Church in society and I mean that in terms of the economic functionality of church forget about the God of it okay forget about the religion the way that it works in my synagogue is when somebody loses their job first everybody gets together and we start a meal train we make sure that person is taken care of their kids are taken care of and all of that and then we start putting out fers to get that person a job because we know that person we know their kids but the person who's receiving all of this understands that this is actually a burden on the rest of the community right they know the person who's signing them the check and the person who's doing the mail train which requires gratitude and it also means that they don't want to take that always right they they would like to not take it actually they would like to go and get the job okay now remove that function which means they now feel a duty toward the rest of the community to go out and S and find a job and maybe even take a job they don't want to take just so that they don't have to be a burden on the community now think about it once government takes over that role government sees the person who lost the job and says here here we are we are money right you don't know us you've never met us you don't know the people who are signing the check this is why it drives me nuts when politicians of both parties say I created X jobs you didn't create my friend like Donald Trump didn't create jobs and Joe Biden didn't create jobs because none of those people are hiring using their dollar okay Donald Trump created jobs in his own private sector life but but the the idea that like the government is what's the job Creator is a lie that's not true you can create conditions that make it easier for people to hire which is maybe what they're trying to say but that's not the way that it comes off when government comes into a situation where somebody is down on their luck and then they sign a check no attendant sense of Duty then befalls the person this is why the shift from benefits to entitlements linguistically is really quite negative once somebody feels they're entitled to the thing then it's like okay well I but what do I ow to the government do do I do I ow to the government like a necessity to like go and get a job like how hard do I have to work do I have to take that job that maybe I wouldn't have taken if I if I if I weren't you know being paid by the if if if I didn't have to like that it it CH in the movie Cinderella Man you remember Russell Crow's character he he takes welfare for a while remember there's a scene where he goes back into the welfare office after he's made it as as a boxer James bradic and he carries a w of roles and he sets it back on the counter and he gives it back can you imagine anybody doing that you can't but you know what happens all the time in communities where you know the person who's giving to you that that sort of stuff happens all the time I've personally floated loans to people who can't afford their mortgage I do it all the time and you know what happens they pay me back and they feel an obligation to pay me back and they feel bad about taking the money and it's not they should feel you know guilty or terrible if you need to do it you need to do it but they but they understand that there is a cost to somebody else in in doing the thing what should the role of government be and where should it end and so I I think that it's different at different levels of government I don't think the federal government has the same function as the local government so I sort of have a basic formula which is that the more homogeneous a community is the more local government can set the rules for the community and the less it actually needs to because people tend to agree more when people tend to agree more there are fewer stated rules but more actual social rules social fabric right exactly so like in your family there not there's not a list of laws in your family in your house but everybody kind of knows what the rules are because you live in the same house and the same thing happens to hold true in your community you kind of all know informally what the rules are and it's sort of En enforced by by social sanction but if those laws were to be passed that sort of State the social sanction wouldn't make much of a difference because everyone's abiding by it anyway and I think that that's fine I think that it's good that people get to live how they want to live communally because we're not just individuals we also want to live in communities of our own making with with those rules think of an HOA right HOAs are super annoying and they're really irritating but also they make sure that all the lawns in the neighborhood are clean and so so is that should is that like a bad are HOA is bad I don't think H are bad you volunteered in you can volunteer out you you can escape the HOA if you don't want to live there so on a local level I I think that there's a case to be made that because you have a larger role in changing sort of how the government is done and because you can leave if you don't like it then then the government could do more but won't have to do as much and as you keep abstracting up the chain the government should do less and less because there's less and less agreement about doing those things and then it turns into just a game of majority cramming it down on minorities so the more heterogenous a community becomes like the United States the more you have one giant government at the top setting the rules for everyone the more people are going to Buck against that system right so ironically you could set lots of rules at the local level no push back against the system but if you set those rules at the top level you're going get tons of push back against the system and you probably should the HOA example is a really interesting one I've never thought about it like that uh one of the things that people are discussing right discussing right now is the mainstream concern that this could be the last election now I know that you talked I think with Sam Harris about this that that's complete BS and that people shouldn't be believing that because it's a dangerous thought um but I'm kind of paraphrasing Elon musk's sentiment right here he says the basic belief is based on the number of migrants that would have come in if legalized and allowed to vote would most likely vote overwhelmingly Democrat and then the United States could become California politically because democ Democratic power would remain uncontested what are your thoughts on that is that a genuine concern that that's certainly a genuine concern it is not it is not the equivalent of saying this is the last election I mean like I don't think elon's just going to go take his ball and go home if if kamla Harris wins the election I think that very few of the people who claim that it's this is the last election ever are going to quit their jobs as political commentators and just say well I guess it's over now I'm going to go home and and take the rod R Benedict option and go live on my farm like that that's not a thing that's going to happen the last contested election you know even that I hesitate to say I mean if you look at the history of the United States the Democratic party's dominance in Congress stretched from the FDR era all the way to 1994 that was like 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic dominance of the Congress of the United States and then Republicans won so that is to say that things tend to move and they tend to shift and also it depends on what level of government you're talking about like am I super worried we're in Florida right now am I worried that Florida is going to be like Harris's Precinct of fun like no I I I don't think that's the case I mean thank God for the federal structure I think it's a little harder to change the systems than K would like it to am I worried about all that stuff of course I mean I think that you know I'm I'm worried about the legalization of 20 million illegal immigrants I think that the supposition that all of those people and their children will forever vote Democrat is not true I mean that that that's been shown not to be true I mean you've seen a shift in the Hispanic vote just in my lifetime and over the course of the last couple elections so again I think it's it's very hard to project out 20 years into the future where things are going to be do I think that in the immediate term it's really really bad what Democrats are attempting to do by say saying like K has said she's going to kill the filibuster she would do that in order to presumably she says you know put Rover versus way back in place but that wouldn't be the extent of it she would do more than that because the problem with simply passing a law that says R versus weight is restored is the next time the Republicans take Congress they just unrest R versus wait and it just kicks back down but by the way even if she passed a federal law along those lines my guess is the Supreme Court strikes it down and says that the federal government does not have the power to regulate in large scale on abortion and this is a state issue which is kind of what they said actually in in the uh in the decision what I'm more worried about is systemic changes to the actual institution so I'm worried that K Harris comes in she says let's get rid of the filibuster and now let's immediately add two states and so now we have two more senators from Puerto Rico and two more senators from DC and so suddenly you have a massive imbalance in the United States Senate which is typically not the way you've added States if you look historically the United States typically added two states at a time one Democrat one Republican so this is why Alaska and Hawaii came in at the same time ironically Alaska was a democratic State and Hawaii was a Republican state at the time and again things change you've seen how that's flipped um so you know I'm worried about that I'm worried about her saying that she would add justices to the Supreme Court which would lead I assume to just an unending series of adding justices to the Supreme Court assum there's 98 judges on the Supreme Court because each party comes in and they reverse it and they're like let's add more judges to the Supreme Court and suddenly it's the Sanhedrin you have 7 law of big numbers could actually you know result in some pretty good I feel I feel like the written decisions are going to be kind of a mess but but it's uh you th those sorts of things keep me up at night and I think are really a problem I'm obviously worried as Elon is about the legalization of this many people um especially in the sort of near term immediate term without any sort of assimilative process uh but again I think that it is dangerous in a democracy to say this is the last election because the or is the next thing that comes or what or what what's the alternative so let's say let's say what are we supposed to do now if this is the last election then that starts to justify things like okay am I supposed to pick up a gun what what am what am I to do if because resistance to tyranny is pretty well ingrained in the American bloodstream if if the idea is that Donald Trump this is I think what you're seeing right now the left is saying Donald Trump is Hitler and so the question I keep asking Democrats including as Sam Harris this like okay if he's actually like a hitlerian figure doesn't K Harris have a moral responsibility not to certify the election even if he wins just to stop him when you start using this sort of language you box yourself in logically that makes sense yeah I agree it is pretty extreme language um I've I've been a super fan of Elon my entire life I think he's one of the strongest forces for good honestly on the planet right now but one of my biggest fears is that he's secretly evil and like super profit motivated like but think about how catastrophic that would be if Elon was actually like behind closed doors like that would I mean first of all great movie but also I I don't think I know possible with all the data with you know the neuralink with all of that stuff I'm just saying there there could be a different side of the token I don't believe so but it would be amazing twist ending to this movie but I love I really really do you've spent a lot of time with recently what's something about Elon that surprised you uh Elon so the thing about Elon I think you do see this publicly um he does have a sort of childlike sense of wonder about the world which I think amounts to the drive for inovation he approaches you know he approaches the world with a sense of like what can humans do and that's so inspiring and so cool I mean how can you watch what he's doing with SpaceX and just not be inspired at how awesome humans are how cool that is and Elon brings that sense of optimism to many of the things that he's doing now sometimes that man politically because again it's sort of like this almost you naive enthusiasm about things uh they sometimes it manifests in in strange ways that are sort of disquieting but I think that overall the the kind of perception of what can we do if we put our minds to it is so cool and I we don't see that nearly enough and so that that's that's the thing like when I went with uh when I went with him to to ashit and we had this uh you know we had a conversation for about an hour then we had another conversation on camera for about an hour and behind closed doors and we were having a conversation you know about about sort of the nature of and he was saying I I he he was saying I think humans are inherently good and I said I actually don't I mean we just went to aitz like it's very difficult for me to say that human beings are inherently good I think that human beings have an innate capacity for good but I think human beings also have an innate capacity for evil and he like took it in he was kind of thinking about it and it was it it was interesting to just kind of watch him process um and he I think that he comes at things with a with a uniquely open mind which also means that you know some bad ideas get in there but a lot of really good ideas come out of that because to look at things with fresh eyes well one of the things he said we were talking about the Cyber trucks my son is an enormous Elon fan like a huge he's 8 years old loves Elon loves SpaceX loves Tesla like super into it and since the time he was three Tesla was like his company and my my son started like a little golf ball business where we liveed near a golf course he picked up all the Ed golf balls we resold them and he uh and he made like four or 500 bucks he's like what what what should I do with this and I was like you should buy some stock he's like how much is Tesla stock my son does so he so he um I was telling Elon like my son loves the Cyber truck and he like well of course he loves the I I made the Cyber truck for for six-year-old kids it's cool an awful impression which like that's that's it's a terrible impression but it's but it's but like that that approach which is like what if I just make cool that people like that's awesome that's really cool and it's uniquely it's it's refreshing in need I I love that about Elon I really love it what he did with X was like massive massive what he did with X so a lot of respect to Elon what do you think his role in the government would be because he's very Pro getting rid of some of the national debt and cutting by $2 trillion do you think that's feasible and what would his involvement be well discretionary spending very difficult to to reduce that by2 trillion doll uh you're talking about you know deep cuts to Services it's not just a matter of efficiency it's a matter of which services are are in play you can't cut you know spending without there being another side of the coin which is the things that that the spending was paying for even if you're overspending so I think that just in terms of efficiency Elon the way that he runs companies is I mean you can see with a he comes in he's like I'm just going to fire everyone like if I I can't see what you're doing right now you are fired and he took down the he took down the number of employees at X by like 80% he went from from a huge number of employees to a tiny number of employees and then sort of bootstrapped it until it worked again which you can do in Private Industry much harder to do when you have public sector unions uh much much more difficult to do when they're regulatory agencies that that you're sitting on so I I think that he can make a difference in terms of allocation of contracts negotiation of contracts getting rid of some of the wasteful spending the reality is that the thing that's bankrupting the country is is typically not sort of these discretionary programs it is it is the embedded entitlement programs and discretionary and and sort of means tested welfare programs that are discretionary under the budget that are that are eating up the entire budget of the country and and those are bigger problems for the American Body public body you know politic and then just Elon sitting there with a red pen how do you solve that or is it solvable can you solve the national debt uh I think not I think that the the the high likelihood is that the United States runs directly into austerity measures in about 10 years it's the we human beings very very good at pre very very bad at prevention and very very good at adaptation just generally speaking and so we can see the problem coming and ain't nobody stopping that problem I mean this would been one of my you know big critiques of of the Republican Party under basically since since Paul Ryan left the scene a lot of people hate Paul Ryan yeah the thing that Paul Ryan said that was right is that the entitlement programs are bankrupting us they clearly are and when he suggested changing them the American people like hey hold up there a minute buddy now what's amazing is if you reverse the clock go back to 2005 George W Bush was proposing that we privatize Social Security and by privatize Social Security he didn't mean that you know Social Security go away he meant that we will take your money that you're paying into Social Security and we'll put it into an index fund and then it will pay you back when you retire can you imagine how much money people would have made if they had done that in 2005 if they took your Social Security where was the stock market where where was the Dow Jones in like 2005 I promise you it wasn't 40,000 okay so if they taken and put into an index fund like George W Bush was correct IND accounts yes individual accounts idual savings accounts right they put it into an individual they leave it there and you just leave it there you can't even access it right you're not going to sell it because we don't want you to sell it because we're afraid if you sell it you're going to be dumb about your stocks fine so you just leave it there for like 40 50 years okay they do for you what you're talking about the coffee which was George W Bush's actual proposal he was ripped up and down like no you're going to steal our social security and destroy it and all like in the end this is a a Democratic Republic and that means that if people are too dumb to understand how economics works then I guess we'll all pay the price when the austerity measures come and we have to radically increase inflation radically increase our taxes or radically decrease the benefits because those are the only three choices I did the math on this and uh if you invested in an index fund over 40 years instead of Social Security you'll have three times more money yes and it will be able to be passed on to other Generations the downside of that the other part is that with Social Security they buy us treasuries and so without that influx of capital which is a big part of who's buying us treasuries the government might have a harder time running and funding itself good you that sounds like a feature not a bug to me I mean I prefer that we buy fewer us treasuries and stop funding so many terrible government programs I think that actually that sounds great to me that sounds like more monetary stability so you okay so why don't they do privatized accounts because it would make sense to me if it was like you know a Target date index fund that just balances over time and by the time you hit 70 it's and mostly treasuries maybe 20% in equities um you know some some regular income that's coming in and you just receive 3% of that for the next 30 something years and if you run out you know you run out something like that yeah I mean it makes perfect fiscal sense but the problem is that the minute anyone politically says you're touching Social Security everybody has a bias toward the status quo in American politics this is how ObamaCare goes from I can't believe how terrible this is why is anybody touching my healthcare too why is anyone touching Obamacare this is terrible why is why is everyone touching my health whatever the status quo is people are very very nervous about messing with the status quo problem is sometimes the the status quo is fiscally sustainable over the long term yeah you got eviscerated for talking about retirement and Social Security earlier I I remember that distinctly cuz I watched that episode like when it came out and then to my surprise like I actually didn't expect that sort of Revolt to happen after well I mean again you steep on the third rail the third rail is social security is is owed to you uh that retirement is should be the goal of life and when I said retirement I wasn't talking about like you know right I mean like if you're broken down that's that's a different thing and I wasn't even talking about retirement in the sense that like you retire and then you take a part-time job teaching or you or you go work at your church I was talking about sort of the vision that I think a lot of Americans have about retirement which is at 65 you go sit on a beach somewhere for 30 years I don't think that's good for human beings I think that you have to it's not kind of what you referencing and then of course the the the way that our politics works is that all gets telescoped down into a headline which I want everybody work until they die which is like no I mean I would like you to do something meaningful in your life until you die that seems like a pretty good thing to do and meaningful doesn't have to mean working for a wage you can very often mean that you worked at a backbreaking job and now what you want to do is you want to work you know for your church Community you want to go do politics you want to you want to go and and write your book like that you have to find some sense of purpose and meaning and what you're seeing I think is and you can see this in the data is is enormous amounts of of rising depression among older Americans actually and that that that's that's a huge problem where do you see our economy headed over the next 10 to 15 years stagnation I think stagnation is upon us and I think that the the possibility of I've been less worried about inflation in the long term than stagnation uh we we're spending too much money we are over-regulated uh the the sort of innovative capacity I know there are a lot of people putting a lot of hopes in AI um and um and maybe that hope is Justified in terms of in radical increases in in productivity although they haven't really been able to make the connection between Ai and kind of General use productivity yet it's very early so we'll see how that applies to the vast majority of Industries um you hopefully it'll lead to a real productivity increase um but absent you know that sort of world changing technology it seems to me that we have not geared our economy for Success that we've we've over regulated it that we we've provided enormous amounts of of benefits to people that I think are disincentives to to innovate and and we're still the best bet on the Block but I think the entire global economy is in for a world of hurt we've taken out way too much debt all of us what about housing affordability I mean housing affordability could be solved simply by removing so many of the building regulations it's very very difficult to build in a lot of places they're they're huge to to to get a new house built in California is really really difficult like it not as difficult as in some other countries but it's it's very it's very rough uh if you if you have to create major barriers to entry for creating more housing stock it's going to be very difficult to bring down the price and the the other thing is that you know one of the things that that really hasn't happened yet but I think it's it's going to is the move away from cities I know there's a lot of talk about this during Co I think that if you want a cheaper house you're going to like people want a cheaper house where they currently live and that's not how the market works like the price of your house is what the price of your house is cu you're competing with other people to buy that house if you would like a cheaper house you might have to think about not living where you live and that's a that's a hard thing for people but one of the weirdest things about kind of the the American experiment right now is that if you look at the history of Americans moving for jobs fewer Americans right now are moving for jobs than anytime in modern American history which is super weird because it's actually way easier to move now than it was when your you know grandpy grandpappy had to get on a covered wagon and cross native am American territory and sit by a river and wait for bad to happen to them like like now if you want to move it actually is quite doable so if you want to move for a job you can I understand why people want to stay put I I mean I understand you got family nearby and all of that sort of stuff I mean these are real considerations but I think that there has set into a lot of the American mind this idea that it's owed to me I get to live where I want and the price is going to be low I get to live where I want and take the job that I want and get the pay that I want it's like you don't get to dictate to the world what the conditions are the conditions are what the conditions are and so if you want to alleviate the the h i mean you had a housing stock problem back in in major cities in the mid 19th century you know people did they got on wagons they went across a mountain and built like a Hut in the middle of like this is the way typ typically the way that housing stock problems get solved is you go to a place where the housing is cheaper more affordable you can build it yourself that's how it will be solved this time too because it certainly isn't going to solved by by rent control or by government subsidized housing yeah do you think home ownership is necessary because when I look at the price between renting and buying and I've said this a lot recently that renting is subst cheaper right now so it makes more sense in my opinion to rent over the next 10 years than buy a house and speculate on its value I mean I I think it depends where it's all locationally based I think that would I buy in Los Angeles right now no I think the prices there are wildly inflated I think there's also a real weird stickiness to the market right now because of the mortgage rates and because the mortgage rates have been so high that means that there's less housing stock available on the market because nobody wants to sell their house and then get into a mortgage that's twice what they were paying so that that's that's been a real problem um but yeah I mean listen I've always been a a a big fan of home ownership we since I got married we've never rented I I always bought because I just felt like I was flushing my money down the toilet but that's because the math worked if the math doesn't work math doesn't work and so you have to make the best decision I mean if if you'd rather take the money that you're saving on rent and put in the stock market then go for it that might pencil out for you better you know historically speaking depending on the market it may pencil out better to to buy your house than than to rent your house I also it depends how risk seeking a risk averse you are right I'm I'm I'm I tend to be relatively risk averse about my investments and so I like real estate as a risk averse investment meaning it's never going to be worth zero whatever my house is worth now if I hold on to it for long enough it will be worth more than I'm paying for the house right now uh so you know again that's a pretty risk ofe way of viewing housing um and I think for some people that's that's probably the what the right way to view it you have to ask yourself though what makes a leader stand out because it's not just about taking charge but about setting new standards and embracing bold moves and if you lead by example and live with passion then our SP sponsor the Range Rover Sport is made for you every model of the Range Rover Sport offers a unique blend Dynamic sophistication and sporting luxury it's where refined Elegance meets visceral power with focused on-road performance and 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the 12200 square feet to the 1500 I mean you said you grew up in 1100 and obviously it wasn't super comfortable but it still worked and it was conducive to a f i remember so my parents when I was 11 moved into like a 2400 foot house and I was like this place is a palace this place is enormous yeah and now we live in a place that's like three times that size a lot of developments are like 3,000 square feet and stuff like that well yeah I mean because if if you're because again upward Mobility means that people want nicer stuff all the time and they want more space they want higher ceilings for example and if you walk into a house that's built in the 50s now most people you walk into a house that's built in the you're like this place is cramped what were people 3 feet tall like what's the deal and you know that's because the market tends to push the limits of of what's available and what's possible I think it'd be interesting if there were more tax incentives for developers to create smaller square footage uh houses because it's more profitable right now for them to make the bigger houses like also land prices are so expensive that they have to build bigger to get that Roi on square footage M and then if they get incentives it's the taxpayer that's in still paying for it the money's got to come from somewhere yeah so either way the money's got to I mean there's there's a very good free market reason why they're building bigger houses and if somebody wants to try and make a a bundle off of making small single family homes again I think part of the problem is that the places where people want small single family homes are likely to be in major cities where those are way more expensive uh and and if you take that same price and then you apply to like rural Texas you can have yourself a giant Ranch so how big of a deal is national debt do you think we could just print our way out of it I don't think we can print our way out of it I mean we we can but I think that it'll be very bad for everybody if you like the inflation of the last few years then get ready for for more fun I think the idea that that at no point will anybody call in our debt I think is is a is wishful thinking financially speaking now again we are the best bet on the Block the the sort of modern monetary Theory idea that if we if we just you know keep pumping money there won't be any consequence because we'll remain the best bet on the Block is only true so long as nobody calls in the debt right it's it's easy to take money out of the bank and pour it into your business so long as the bank never ask you for the money back and and when you're talking about you us treasuries when you're talking about us debt somebody at some point is going to call for that back I mean China owns an enormous amount of US debt right now and and just as a weapon they could theoretically just offload that into the General market and totally destroy our capacity to take out new debt if they decided to sell us treasuries at a loss just to us they totally could I mean it would be and if we got into like a a serious military conflict with them you could certainly see them doing something like that figuring it would do more harm to us than it would to them and it's interesting because we're at a huge trade deficit with China right now but I know Trump wants to try to renegotiate that to try to like catch up for lost time but at the same time we technically owe them a lot of money do you think that there's going to be any issue with that um I'm not super worried about trade deficits I'm I'm more worried about the general productivity of the American economy meaning that as long again as long as you remain the best bet on the Block then you can work with trade deficits they start to collapse on you when you have nothing to sell when there's nothing for you to sell then all those you know you bought something from China China now has a bunch of they have to use the dollar somewhere the idea always was you know by classical economics that they're going to spend it back where the dollar came from they're going to spend it with you and so what are they going to buy well if you have nothing really to sell that's when you got a major problem on your hands the United States Al still has plenty of stuff to sell it's why I'm worried about overregulation it's why I'm worried about the incentive structure of innovation it's why I think that it's ridiculous that we're taking so many steps on the consumer end but nothing to actually jog the supply end of of the chain like so so much stuff is is concerned with the consumer end of the of the of the market take take Healthcare enormous amount of focus on the cost of healthcare and so see people like what what if we just cap the price of drugs what if we just do that because it's really really expensive it's like well you could do that but as you say somebody's going to have to absorb the cost of that the people who are going to absorb the cost of that are presumably all of the medical R&D companies that are actually developing those drugs if you want fewer drugs then sure I suppose that you could you could do that and to me there are other things that you could do like for example use other methods to cudgle other companies into paying the fair market price for the actual drugs rather than using their collective bargaining power to fin to screw the American Consumer humor but you know that I think that you know focusing on on sort of the the trade balance is generally a mistake you should focus more on the productivity of of your own economy and and then on lowering all of the ballast that is represented by the the Regulatory and welfare state which is which is eating up all of that entrepreneurial effort I hope Elon is able to deregulate I I hope so do now speaking of some of that the 0% income tax has been thr around recently do you think that's even possible I think very very implausible I mean dream of dreams hope of hopes Ian like when Trump was talking about his 20% tariff plan or 10% tariff plan like but then when he's like instead of the income tax like ah but now why why even throw some of these things out there because it seems like a lot of politicians are throwing out these wild pip and they're just saying whatever how ridiculous I think that's a great way to please everybody right you're saying I'm going to throw out tariff plans and that's going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the back to the you know bereft Midwest the Rust Belt and then he's like okay but that also is going to increase prices by what if I said instead of the income tax and it's like okay well then I can have all the things again that's a the truth is that that is they're solid precedent for that in American history before the income tax that is actually how the federal government generated its income was was tariffing imported goods and then there was no income tax uh and you know I'd venture to say that was probably a better system tariffs plus a gigantic income tax a pretty terrible economic system actually but but yes I mean everyone throws out these plans none of them will ever come to fruition you know similarly kamla Harris suggesting that she's going to tax unrealized capital gains is is psychotic um maybe it sounds good to her sort of Bernie Sanders Thomas petti Bas I don't think it sounded good to a lot of people well anybody who has any basic knowledge of of how businesses runu understands like that's that's it's psychotic I mean it's not like when I say I mean full scale Asylum level psychotic to to suggest that as a serious so this is purely people throwing out random things just to appe right but it means something to the American people that's the problem that I have with it is because we have a list right here of like the 0% income tax we have the wall that was talked about for ever and obviously some of it was built but now we obviously have the huge immigration problem we have homelessness which people are talking about but nothing is ever done actually today Gavin Newsome did something he put what 800 870 87 million towards homelessness so hopefully we'll have one shelter in 30 years yeah after spending $24 billion homelessness and totally failing and the wealth ta was an interesting one too student loan cancellation which is always talked about it's never passed the federal minimum wage of $725 um again these These are when you say also when you talk about economic illiteracy I mean anyone with half a second of thought about any of these programs realizes that there is no such thing as a free launch and there's a cost on the other end so okay let's get rid of the student loan debt okay so you're doing a few things one is you're now putting the burden on people who actually paid their student loans to pay off everybody else's student loans or onto their kids just adding to the the massive debt of the United States which will have long-term ramifications as we've discussed or and at the same time you're also propping up an entire educational bubble that is a giant scam for enormous number of people you're telling people they need to get a degree in order to work at a Starbucks that's ridiculous you what we actually need is a deflationary scheme inside of higher education but instead you're contributing to an inflationary scheme inside of higher education which is what that is it's a subsidy you know so some of the other ideas that are being mentioned when when Trump says tariffs is the most beautiful word in the English language you according to whom I like what are we tariffing for I understand security tariffs okay you want to protect domestic industries that are important to National Security that I totally get you don't want China being responsible for manufacturing drugs that are vital to us because they're an an opposing power I get that but the idea that like tariffs are inherently good and inherently be no they're not that's that that's that's that's economically illiterate it's not true I think my general sentiment on this and I think I share this with a lot of other citizens is that people will say anything on the campaign Trail to to gain favor not even that I'm in support of the things that it's almost always a and and they say it on behalf of a an AG grieved minority or that to which there is a concerted benefit at the expense of a dissolute uh majority right like like a terrial benefit like these 10 workers in Ohio at the expense of the entire consumer base of the United States for example but it's like one cent to every consumer but it's but it's 10 bucks to all these guys in Ohio right but as soon as they get into the office I feel like their interests are no longer in actually supporting the American people and just in supporting this like amorphous thing like Trump said on pbd this like group of people the Deep State the whatever it is it just doesn't seem like they're necessarily representing us I suppose what are your thoughts I mean again I think that you know when when people talk about sort of the swamp or or they they talk about you the the amorphous mass of government and those people have names and they have departments and we should eliminate those names and departments I mean this is I think where Elon really is useful I mean if Elon really had power what he could do is he could come in he could just say no more Department of Education right sorry like it just we're going to get rid of this like the the it's an executive branch agency you're all fired right like he he could theoretically do that like that that would be great I'm very much in favor of that and there are tons of agencies inside the federal government like that the number of overlapping welfare agencies in the in the federal government you're talking about like dozens and dozens and dozens of agencies that effectively overlap when it comes to means tested welfare programs is all that necessary in order to get people a check even if you agree with the check is all of that necessary I don't think so I think that that that's where Elon could theoretically be useful the reality is that the American government was built for gridlock it was built to do nothing this is the thing that nobody actually wants to recognize if you read the Constitution if you read The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers the the founding documents were built in order to ensure that the federal government didn't do things that you only did things so there's a widespread agreement that we ought to do the thing so you had a Congress and then that was checked by the Senate and that was checked by the presidency and both were checked by the Supreme Court and all of that was checked by the states right and so like all of these checks and balances were built for gridlock the system is built for G this is why when we say why can't the government do act because the government wasn't built to do act and then in the early 20th century thanks to the rise of an unelected bureaucracy in the administrative State and and the idea that wood Wilson put forth which is that government was actually built to do things as opposed to not do things then you you end up with kind of the worst of Both Worlds which is an embedded bureaucracy that is unelected and ever growing and that same system of gridlock that you had before which prevents you from getting big things done so you you almost get you know the worst where it's like this this Behemoth that rolls along the landscape like the like the the giant Jaa you know thing in uh in Star Wars Episode 4 it's just kind of like the sand the sand trer like just kind of going along this giant thing on its own momentum and it's very difficult to stop that because the government was not built to to do things and stopping things is a way of of do you have to do something to stop it actually let's talk about the media a little bit you had a really interesting experience with the New York Times recently you made a whole threat on this I mean I read the message that they sent you and I'm not going to lie it made my blood boil a little bit I was like who do these people think they are unable walk us through what exactly happened in this situation sure so there's a reporter from The New York Times who just texted me and it turns out texted pretty much everybody on the right and said based on Research from Media Matters which for those who don't know is a very very activist leftwing organization whose explicit desire is to essentially shut down conservative media and the way they've done this historically is to get advertisers to boycott conservative shows or boycott the advertisers the advertisers boycott conservative shows to pressure social media companies in order to shut down conservative material so the New York Times explicitly in this message says based on Research from Media Matters we have discovered that you you're one of the people who has engaged in election misinformation and so we have a question for you are you monetized on YouTube if so are you part of their monetization Pro so what this is clearly an attempt to do is write an article that is going to then cud YouTube for allowing election misinformation one week before the election to be monetized they're going to say that YouTube is at fault if Trump wins basically if Trump wins it's going to be because there was massive election misinformation and that was so YouTube could make money and that's because YouTube is corrupt so the only way that YouTube can avoid the sort of meat grinder set up by the New York Times is to demonetize people like me right or anybody else on the right now the the example that they cited of me engaging in election misinformation was not in fact election misinformation as people who regularly watch my show know even tangentially have seen my show now I think Joe Biden won the 2020 election I said that like the day after he won the election I think that the the attempts to thrash against the Box by the Trump legal team were were unjustified by the evidence that was available and I was perfectly willing to watch Trump you know do all those legal challenges but then once it gets adjudicated and the state votes are certified we none and that's how the process works and I didn't see the evidence that was that was NE that was you capable of overturning that so like coming at me with election misinformation is weird they claimed that what I had said was election misinformation was that the voting rules had been rigged in order to ensure a vast number of mailin ballots and also ballot harvesting that's true okay when I say rigged I don't mean like corrupt in the back room they like they they wrote it into the law secretly in in secret ink that can only be discovered by lemon juice or something like I mean that they passed laws that were explicitly designed to increase mail and balloting because they wanted low propensity voters to vote by mail in 2020 and they wanted ballot harvesting so the professional ballot Harvesters could go out and take advantage of that that is 100% true there's nothing nothing that is false about that statement it was reported by 538 which is own by the New York Times it was reported by CBS News and they were calling it election misinformation specifically so they could get YouTube to shut down anybody on the right side of the aisle so I mean it wasn't even a goodfaith attempt to shut down things that they thought were false it was just it was just an attempt to shut down anything that was that was to the right now one thing I find interesting when you talk about misinformation like that I've mentioned this to Jack yesterday and I've started taking screenshots of this on Reddit I've noticed it seems as though some proa posts anti musk anti-trump are getting upvoted to the extreme very quickly and I started noticing this about a week ago where I'd screenshot everything that all of a sudden got like 50,000 upvotes uh random things that would normally not get upvoted that quickly and I started screen recording them and I would show Jack every minute I would refresh another thousand up votes refresh another thousand up votes and I would sort the comments by newest and the comments were negative despite the upvotes being overwhelmingly positive for that specific thing and I have about 20 things screenshotted and I went back a day later the thread was deleted most likely I think for bot activity and I reached out to the moderators of a non-political subreddit that this was posted to and asked for a comment like have you seen any Bing going on have you noticed any of this what is your experience no responses back so the Federalist actually just reported this yesterday this exact story was the manipulation of Reddit I don't know if you saw this it's like the top headline over the Federalist yesterday yeah they had a whole thing about the manipulation of exactly this this exact thing about how there's there's obvious you know ginned up astr Turf activity on Reddit in order to increase the visibility of pro content what's interesting is that the FTC banned uh fake reviews and boded activity and fake followers from AUST yeah from businesses they didn't say anything for political parties uh the other thing I find interesting is that it's not illegal to accept donations or payment for an endorsement which I thought was wild and I I I didn't think this was going on to the extent it was but I heard that like a somewhat distant colleague was offered $10,000 to endorse a candidate and they turned it down but just the fact that they're reaching out to influencers saying hey if you say this we'll pay you $10,000 $20,000 so it's probably a little hard to make that illegal only because you can say that it's bribery for a vote it's very hard to say bribery for an opinion because that probably falls under the First Amendment just in terms of of free speech protections but obviously in terms of unethical highly unethical I mean if I if I were to contact somebody and be like here's 10 grand to support Donald Trump publicly I don't care how you vote I'll write that in the document you can vote however you want but publicly you should say that you support Donald Trump for 10 grand you know that is is very hard to prosecute deeply unethical just makes me wonder how many endorsements are paid for I mean I have no idea uh the truth is I think that most celebrities are are willing to endorse just through social pressure um you know the why Tailor Swift silence is defening and you get enough of that and then Taylor Swift suddenly is very political and she has to make a a dumb statement or something um but yeah I mean the the the the notion that Astro turfing isn't happening is is ridiculous of course it is another thing that I find really interesting is the sentiment that people should not be compelled to present voter ID what is the strongest argument that we should not require voter ID I have yet to hear a single good argument again the only argument that I've ever heard put forward along these lines and it's the one they keep trouting out is that it's difficult there's a disperate fact in terms of requiring voter ID that there are people who are poor who can't get over to a DMV to actually get the ID and we still want those people voting and if they register to vote then they should be allowed to vote and the amount of voter fraud is statistically negligible and so you know if you balance the the possibility of voter fraud against the possibility that somebody is disenfranchised more people will be disenfranchised by the requirement of voter ID than will people vote falsely in one other's name right that that's sort of the the Steel Man of the case now the the opposing case is everybody's got idea what the you're talking about like like if you if you're going to buy alcohol you got to get ID if you're going to drive a car you got to get ID to to to vote you should have to get ID and if that's a hoop to jump through well tough I mean that's how we know who you are like the number of proper electoral votes the the the prop the amount of proper voter fraud is zero right it's not that it's not that you balance the number of people who are ququ disenfranchised by having to go down to the DMV and get an ID versus the number of votes that are fraudulently counted the number of fraudulently counted votes should be zero right this sort of like the argument you hear about illegal immigration so you'll hear people on the right they'll be like the amount of crime that's coming across the border the amount the amount of of economic turmoil created by people crossing the border is really high then you the counter argument will be well yeah but but illegal immigrants who are crossing the border are committing crimes at a lower rate than than native born American citizens or they're taking welfare at you know similar rates or lower rates because they can't get Federal welfare and and the answer is right but but the amount of crime that should be committed by people who shouldn't be in the country should be zero it should be zero and so that that's an avoidance of the actual argument which is that we can stop all of it we can stop all of it and if there is an attendant cost like you have to go through the Border legally well then I guess there's an attendent cost it's incredible CU I remember a few years ago people that believed that we should require voter ID it was like a racist thing like people called you racist there has never yet been a poll of black Americans showing they oppose voter ID every single poll shows the black Americans are very much in favor of voter ID it is only a bunch of elitist idiots who think the black people are too stupid to get voter ID you have to be a racist to believe the black voters are too stupid to get voter ID that's that's it's it's asinine it's it's ridiculous on its face it's like saying black people can't pass driver test like what the what what is wrong with you seriously what's wrong with you yeah I want to talk about the business of the daily wire real quick since we we got about uh nine minutes to wrap up here how has the business of the daily wire changed in the past year and what are the main Revenue drivers of the business for example is it the documentaries the TV shows the movies the podcasts lady Ballers by the way we went to the premiere loved it thank you so you know the it all sort of goes to the same place meaning that that if I if we look at sort of the lines of business that earn US money um in terms of the actual receipts uh so advertising earns us tens of millions of dollars i' say that represents maybe 25 30% of our business uh and then I would say that we have merch and merch represents maybe another five to 10% of our business and then the rest would be subscribers and we have right now about a million subscribers on the on the website um I think more than that now um and uh and so that that subscription base is fed by all of the things that you mention when it comes to things like you know Matt's documentary which was the biggest launch day we've ever had for subscribers in the history of the company financially it's very expensive not only to make a documentary but then to get it distributed and then the revenue splits with the theaters and and the distribution mechanisms and all that kind of stuff and so the the the amount of money that you make on a on a movie in theaters right now tends to be almost zero when you when you gross out what you spent and what you get back uh and so it can be a high grossing film on on sort of paper without it actually being money in your pocket but we are making money off of mass film obviously because now it's only available to stream on a website and that means there are a lot of people who didn't see it in theaters CU it wasn't available everywhere and they're now coming to the website and subscribing for that we put a bunch of great new extras from Matt's Phil Matt explaining how he actually did all of these things like got access to all of these spaces and what we did with behind the scenes like all that kind of stuff that driv subscribers so huge number of subscribers who come in thanks to Matt's the single best subscriber day we ever had was the first day that we made his movie available for streaming yes uh so that was that was earlier this week um so you know you make money that way in terms of merch we have Jeremy rais which has been a GRS and honestly we need to put more attention on because it's grown so fast that actually outgrew our capacity to it so we need more investment dollars we need to actually SN some more money in into that and you know either fund it independently uh or pour more resources into it we haven't really turned on the monetary machine that is bent key right we made this entire Children's Network and we gave it for free to all of our daily wire subscribers at some point that will I assume be not free um or it will just become an offering in sort of an upsale of of daily wire plus uh so we haven't quite figured out you know on on B it's got a huge number of users but no actual independent Revenue at this point so that will change obviously and then obviously the shows I mean we're going to continue to grow shows like mine which thank God is very very large we're continue to grow that uh and and the big move that we are really focused on right now just companywide aside from the traditional you got to get better at marketing you got to solve every problem that comes along the Pike and there's a new one every single week aside from that the big thing that we're trying to do right now is direct people to our own platform because the big worry is exactly what the New York Times is trying to do shutting you off on YouTube right you see thaton web servic decides that Jeff Bezos one day decides that going to go full woke and just shut off you know access to to things that he doesn't like or something uh so one of the things that we've been trying to do is direct people to become subscribers not just because we make money off the subscriptions but we want people to use our website or our app in free mode we want you to watch my show on the app because if you watch my show on the app then that means you can never be deny the content number one we have to censor the show sometimes on YouTube right because I'll say something and I'm not even talking about quot election misinformation I'll say something like a boy is not a girl and YouTube might come right down on us and we have to be very careful of that sort of stuff so we'll we'll legitimately put material that is kind of like too hot for YouTube on dailywire plus and make that available to subscribers so even if you're a free user of dailywire plus you will get a different show watching my show there than you would if you were to watch the show over at Youtube it'll be slightly different so you know that that's sort of the big move that we're making as a business we really are we're upgrading our app I believe it should be out in the next few months like a really upgraded much more userfriendly a much better app we're really excited about that there's a bunch of stuff we're going to do when we launch that and the idea is to in-house as much as humanly possible on the app what was your decision behind going on Jubilee uh so that was brought to me by um our PR person uh she had had seen the kind of numbers that Jubilee was doing and she like you are you know maybe the most famous debater on the right and this is a space that is getting enormous traffic and I just think it would be like great internet one of the things that we noticed is that very often conversations like the one that we're having very often those will do better on social media than my Daily Show will because people want to see me talk with people sometimes uh people who disagree very often that even does better because there's a controversial aspect to that so I think that was one of the the aspects of Jubilee very weird experience I mean I will say that that was definitely one of the weirder experiences of my political life I mean they filmed it at like in the middle of the worst area of Los Angeles I mean by downtown right my God Warehouse I mean like no place any tourist would ever go if you wish sh hand your valuables I mean just an awful place and so we come in and and it's kind of a beat up old Warehouse I mean there's nothing there except for some cameras and um you know I walk in and I'm I'm friendly with people typically uh friendlier than I think the public perceptionist and so I'm being friendly with everybody was there anyone who is surprising off camera the only person who was the truth is that all the people who I who I you know debated in that with the exception of the trans person who was berating me for minutes at a time and I made the ious decision at that moment to be like okay there's nothing this is not an argument this is just an this is just an out Outburst of emotion I can't argue with that you know if this makes you feel better about your life I suppose you can do it um so I like okay just you know go but it's aside from that I think virtually every single person with the of the 25 people probably 20 to 22 of them came up to me afterward and like that was really enjoyable that was fun can we get a selfie uh you know like which which is normal that's fine that's good like like some of the most people the people have gone viral the most uh like the the girl with the nose ring for example you who's who's in a lot of these clips like it looks like she's you know being very confrontational with me and and the moment it is confrontational that's fine that doesn't bother me at all like I'm I'm very I'm very you know kind there there's a a Jewish prayer that you say every three times a day actually uh that says let my let my soul be as dust to to people meaning like you should be just humble let it kind of wash over you that's fine if people want to do that it really doesn't bother me all that much and so you know afterward she came up and she's like that was really nice and you know that was that was fun and like that that happened with pretty much everybody who came up afterward a lot of them like a lot of them the people who are the most RAR in to go a lot of those people came up and they were like that was you know I enjoyed that that was that you really cordial and that was really nice and can we get a selfie and that that was kind of that yeah it isn't as surprising as as I think people would think it is but it's a little surprising we know you love hypothetical so hypothetically speaking you're a manager with one position available and two candidates one is highly qualified and has a perfect record while the other is a good fit but has a minor criminal past that they've been working hard to overcome hiring the first candidate would be easier for the company but the second would have a life-changing opportunity who do you hire are they equivalent in terms of like stick toess and grit I would say so yeah so as a business person I hire a I hire the person who's going to be a bigger a bigger benefit to the company uh because with with with a a lower downside I'm I have a respon I have to sh responsibility in my company and if if there is a potential risk I have to feel that the the risk is is so justified by the qualities of the person that so I guess that's the question is the risk so justified by the qualities of the person like I I really like both of them like I really like both of them and I have faith that the person who has the criminal past or something uh that that person is not going to make the mistake again correct and it depends kind of what the crime is like how humiliating the crime is is this person like what do they call it like what what exactly are we talking about here was it like a minor drug offense I need a little more specificity because their individual people were talking about so let's say it's somebody with a who's uh who made a mistake when they were 18 years old got caught you know with minor distribution of marijuana or you know a a DUI at the age of 19 or something um and now that person is walking in at the age of 25 having worked hard you know made something of them looks gritty looks hungry um I'd probably hire that person uh and the reason is because that person has had to show additional grit in coming back from a thing if I really believe that that person is unlikely to make the mistake again that makes sense but again that's that that is the burden of proof me you do have to show if you've got something on your record that you're that you are not going to make the mistake again and you're not going to humiliate the company um if if the person comes in clean you know I'm not going to you don't get extra points for having made mistakes in the past but you might get some extra points where having to overcome the mistake in a unique way in the past and so yeah that I think I think that I think that's probably right that makes sense okay Ben thank you so much for coming on the show to end it on a nice note do you read a lot everyone knows this do you have any book recommendations for the viewers oh my gosh um so since we mentioned it Benjamin Grahams the intelligent investor is totally worth reading if you haven't read it it's it's a it's actually not a super hard read uh so that one is great uh and since you guys like Finance then you should read uh Neil Ferguson's history of Finance uh I think it's called the ascent of money uh it's it's a terrific read and Neil is a terrific Financial voice awesome really appreciate thanks so much ben appreciate it until next time