Confronting Ben Shapiro: Cancel Culture, Getting Rich, & Going Broke

I have such sympathy for people who are poor that I want them to be rich. Here are the steps that are required to be rich. There's a difference between offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being a traditional values have become something [music] that you have to whisper to your friends about. We spend seven figures a year on my personal safety. Yeah, seven figures a year. What makes you think [music] you're so special? Everyone who's pitched you is worse at this than I am. I'm better at this than anyone on the planet. Could you see yourself at some point in the future running for a president? [music] You guys may have noticed that this podcast is always a place for open discussion where ideas are fairly considered and honestly confronted. Unfortunately, it's actually extremely difficult to find places like that in today's media landscape. I know for me, I'm always looking for unbiased media, but it seems like everywhere I go, someone's trying to shove an agenda down my throat. So, how do you know you're seeing the full story? Well, today's sponsor, Ground News, is a website and app that shows you the inherent bias in news coverage and reveals the stories that you might be missing. For every story, you get a visual breakdown of the number of sources reporting on it and where they fall on the political spectrum, giving you instant access to different perspectives. You could directly compare headlines and read the full articles to compare any bias they might be having. Like here, you could see one news article from the left that claims that Adam slams Hokll and migrant crisis, but the right says the two are at odds. Being able to see both sides of any debate is the only real way to get the full picture. There's even a feature called blind spot, which I find really cool, which shows you stories that are heavily covered by just one side of the political aisle, so then you know if a topic is avoided by one side or the other. And now, Ground News is offering 30% off their Vantage plan with their link down below in the description. This includes access to a personalized news dashboard where you can keep track of your reading habits and make sure you're not stuck in a biased media bubble. Ground News is the best way to stay on top of everything going on, get the full picture, think critically, and then come to your own conclusion. So, go to ground.news/ news/ ice to get 30% off or visit the link down below in the description. It would seriously mean a lot, guys. Thank you so much, Ground News. And onto the podcast. We're actually going to start this off with a fan question. One of your biggest fans. One of my biggest. Okay, found him. You ready? Hi, Ben. I'm a huge fan of yours. So excited to ask you a question. Um, I've seen you talking about Barbie a lot. Do you think that you are enough? Like, do do you feel enough in this matriarchal society? I'm definitely Buff. You're Ben. I'm Ben. You've been creative. I don't think that that Ken is a good role model. Ken's not a good role model. No, Ken Ken is a bad role model. What do you say to that? I liked the Barbie movie. I have to say I saw the book back to back. It was a fun, light-hearted movie. Got me laughing. Some of the jokes in there. That's You're You're allowed to You're allowed to enjoy it. You're wrong, but you're allowed. It's There's nothing against American law that forbids you from from enjoying the Barbie movie. just means that I have questions about your taste and Brett's taste and Michael Moz's taste and half the people work for me. So, you know that there there you have it. So, who was that that asked the question right there? That is Brett Cooper. And how do you know Brett? Uh, so Brett is one of our hosts. She hosts a a terrific show on YouTube with a massive following and we share a pair of eyebrows. That is that is what we're famous for. But also the tone intonations of your voice, the way you speak, you have so many mannerisms that I think are like almost identical between you two. I haven't seen that. But maybe it's one of those things where you can't see the air that you're walking around in. Like I I don't spot enough things about myself perhaps and so maybe she couldn't see it either. But we had all the comments say we thought that was like a younger sister. Yeah. Everyone thinks you guys I will say that I have three younger sisters and at least one of them looks kind of like Brett. I mean they're not they're not wildly off. That's funny. I mean, my younger sister, classically Abby, who's on who's on YouTube also, there's some resemblances to Brett. They're not like wildly desperate looking. Have you done a DNA test, though? Um, I mean, I'm I'm fairly certain there's no relation. And the reason I say I'm fairly certain is because at one point we did do like a 23 and me DNA test and it came up 100% Ashkanazic Jew. And I'm pretty sure that's not Brett Cooper's background. That would make sense. So, yeah, that's that's pretty closed, you know, ethnic ethnic loop right there. So, she's talent for your media company, The Daily Wire. Yes. Now, how did you get to the spot of owning a massive media company, The Daily Wire? Talk us through the chronological sequence of events in your life that brought you to that prestigious role. So, you fail a lot of times, right? I mean, this is true for every single person I know who is incredibly wealthy and successful, which is everybody looks at them, they're like, "Ah, they must have hit it the first time or they became wealthy and that was like when did the magic happen?" And the answer is you labor in the minds for you know a decade and then eventually you hit on the thing and you've gotten good at the thing at that time. And so yeah basically the story goes like this and I'll try to do this in in sort of as succinctive fashion as I can. So I started UCLA when I was 16. Uh I got a syndicated column on politics when I was 17. That was because I'd been writing for the UCLA Daily Breuin and I was writing sort of a point counterpoint column and that turned into a regular column and I went to my father and I said do you think that it's good enough to be in like regular newspaper? and he came up with a syndicator called Creator Syndicate, which would take columns and send them out to hundreds of papers across the country. And so they picked up the column. They didn't know how old I was, so they were kind of surprised when my parents had to sign the contracts. I was still a minor. And I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17. Pretty much every dumb column I've written, by the way, is between the ages of like 17 and 23. I would say like the vast majority of dumb things I've said were during that period, uh, of, you know, because that's usually when you say most dumb things in your life. In any case, I finish UCLA. I write a book while I'm at UCLA. I go to Harvard Law. I started there when I was 20. Uh, and I write another two books while I was at Harvard Law. By the time I leave Harvard Law, I decide I want to work at a law firm or at least give it a shot. And I really want to learn how real estate works because everybody whom I know who's rich has real estate holdings. And so I figure, okay, I'll learn that industry. The problem is I join this firm, Goodwin Proctor, which is a major national law firm. I joined them in the in September of 2007, which is probably the worst time in human history to join a real estate law firm. Uh, because that is precisely when the real estate market is collapsing, right? And that is the subprime mortgage crisis. And so I'm sitting in this beautiful office overlooking Century City every day for like 10 hours a day doing nothing. And they're getting increasingly upset because I'm not billing hours. And when they do bring me work, then I'm doing the work too fast because this is sort of one of my skill sets. I speak fast, I type fast, I write fast, I edit quickly. That is not what you want as a as a lawyer who is building hours. When you build hours, this is why I hate, you know, actually how law firms work. They bill you by the hour. So it disincentivizes efficiency. It's really bad. So, you know, I I I decided I couldn't take it. And after about 10 months, uh I had met my wife during this period. After about 10 months, uh I turned to my wife and she she turned to me and she's like, "You're miserable. You should just quit." And this is right before we were about to get married. And I was like, "Well, we just got a condo. We just got a mortgage and we're about to get married." And she's like, "Yeah, but you're miserable. You should quit." So, I quit Proctor and I took a job for one-third the pay working as a lawyer in-house counsel uh for a a company called Talk Radio Network, which was the radio syndicator for Michael Savage and Laur Ingram because I wanted to be in that industry. I mean, I've been writing column for years. I already had books at this point, but I I wanted to learn the radio industry because I grew up listening to Rush Limbbo and in LA, Larry Elder. And so, I I made a deal with the company and the the deal with the company that I was working for was I would spend half of my day doing legal work because they needed an associate in house counsel. And I would spend half of my day doing production work. I wanted to learn inside out how the industry worked. So I I would sit there and I would cut the audio clips like with the actual sound program. Probably half the clips that you heard on Michael Savage is Laura Ingram show between the years like 2009 to 2012 I cut those. Uh so or or if there's a montage I was cutting that or if there was a monologue by one of the hosts, there's a possibility I was writing talking points that that sort of thing. In the meantime, I was also ghostwriting books. So I I I cobbled together a pretty good living doing ghost writing of books because I can write quickly. So publishers would come to me and they would say, "We have three weeks for you to turn in a book from this personality who doesn't know how to write a book." And I would say, "Okay." And I would just turn out a book in 3 weeks. Uh, and so you put together a few of those a year plus, you know, whatever income I was making from my own books, plus columns, plus speaking, plus the plus the job. And it worked out to, you know, not amazing income, but like definitely a livable income. It was it was not what I had been making at the law firm, but it was 2/3 to 3/4 of what I was making at the law firm. I worked there for about three years, and then there came a point where I just couldn't see a future at that company or for that company. It it didn't seem like a direction that I that I wanted to continue moving. At that point, I went out on my own and I was basically making a living ghost writing alone and doing doing those sorts of things. And this is in 2012. I graduated UCLA in 2004. It's been 8 years uh nine years since I've known Andrew. I've known for a decade. At this point, I'm in my mid20s. I'm talking to Andrew and Andrew's like, you know, we really need an editor at large over here at Breitbart. We need to staff up. So, would you like to would you like to come work over here? So, I I joined on at Breitbart as an editor at large when I was in my mid20s and I was there for let's see 2012 to 2016. So, I was there for about four years. As always, I had multiple streams of revenue. So, this is this is sort of how I did my career until I found the thing that worked. So one of my sort of career principles especially early in your career is pursue as many opportunities as you can attempt to do well and then find the one that actually works and then put all your efforts into that. So it's a diversification strate by the way also a pretty good investment strategy. It's a diversification strategy for your time and for your career if you can do it. Uh and then you find the thing that actually works and then that's where you push. So while I was working there I I also got a job simultaneously as the uh one of the three people on an LA radio show, an LA morning show. I started doing that about a year and a half after that. I got an afternoon radio show in Seattle. So my schedule at this point and and then I also launched a website with the David Horowitz Freedom Center that was called Truth Revolt. Truth Revolt was basically the predecessor to Daily Wire. It was designed as reverse media matters. So the basic idea was that the left likes to initiate boycots against the right and get those shows canled. And so we don't like that tactic, but the only way that people are going to back off that tactic is if that is mutually assured destruction. Is if everybody understands the tactic is bad. So, we're just going to avoid that tactic. By the year 2014, my schedule went like this. I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning. I would go work. I would go do my morning show uh from 6:00 to 9:00. I would then edit at Breitbart for a couple of hours a day. And mostly by that point, I was writing just kind of these long pieces for them. So, I I would write a piece a day for Breitbart. I was editing I was editor-inchief uh with my one of my business partners at Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring. And I can explain how I met Jeremy in a second. Uh we we were running truth together. So I was editing, he was mostly doing the business side, I was doing the editorial side. So I was editing truth revolt and then I was doing an afternoon radio show for three hours a day. So I was working four jobs plus ghost writing, plus writing my own books, plus speaking. So I mean technically speaking, I was probably doing six or seven jobs over the course of a week. And via all of these mechanisms, I was now making a pretty good living, right? Because each one of these paid fairly well. So I was probably making uh at this point somewhere around $400,000 a year. That's fantastic between between all between all those jobs. No. Well, it's So here's the thing. It is a really good living. Also, my first year out of law school when I was working at the law firm, I was making 180, right? When you come out of Harvard Law and you're and you're working at a law firm, 180 without bonus was like the norm. So, like 200 was kind of your baseline. Now, listen, I I have a lot of advantages in the sense that I grew up in a two parent family with a lot of family security, not financial security, but family security. My parents are not wealthy. I grew up in I grew up in a house that I grew up in, 1100 foot house in Burbank, California with three sisters, one bathroom, two bedrooms. with all three of my sisters until I was 11 years old. So, we weren't rich by any stretch of the imagination. But my family is very solid. So, I always felt like, you know, worst case scenario, if all else fails, I still have a wonderful family. I could move back in with my parents for a little while until I get back on my feet. I had a Harvard law degree that's worth a lot of money. So, you know, I I had that kind of in my back pocket that allowed me to be more risk-seeking in the way that I approached my career. I mean, when I first when I first met my wife, I told her, I remember we were dating and she said, we were talking about kind of what what does the future look like? We were talking about finances and I said, I'm I'm going to make millions of dollars. I'm going to make a lot of money. [laughter] Was that the first time you met her? Uh, that that was not in our first date. That was probably in that was probably in like our I would say that those that was once we'd gotten a little more serious. So, for us that meant like our fifth date because we Yeah, exactly. I mean, we we had our first date on September 5th and then we were engaged December 22nd. This is 2008. So, there not a ton of time there. Um, but yeah, I mean, and I remember her laughing and thinking that was silly. In fact, one of my one of my favorite stories about that is that um, my father-in-law, so in the Jewish community when you get married, you sign a marital document that basically looks kind of like a prenup. And this is a historic document going all the way back to the tomud called the Kuba. One of the things in there is like an actual breakup fee, right? If if the marriage breaks up, then how much money do you owe to your wife? And so in most Jewish communities, it's kind of a dimminimous amount because it's basically proforma. But in the Moroccan community, this is like a point of pride is that you go to the wedding, my wife's of Moroccan extraction, and you go to the wedding and somebody reads the amount of goes, "Ooh, ah." Right? So my father-in-law sits me down one day. This is right before we're we're getting married. And he's like, "I have a very important question to ask you." And I was like, "Okay." And he's like, "How much money do you want to put in the Cuba?" And I was like, "I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. I'm not we're not getting divor. So put whatever you want." Like literally whatever you want. I don't care. And he's like, "Well, you you name the number." I'm like, "Fine, put $10 million. I don't care." And he looks at me and he starts laughing. He goes, "She's not worth $10 million. We'll put a million dollars." [laughter] And um I I frequently remind him that he is a horrible negotiator. So wait, wait, I'm confused. So if you put, let's just say, a million dollars in this, is that what's split upon a No, that's what you owe her. That's what you owe her. It's always the the guy owing the girl in that document. Yes. Even if the girls the hire earner, yes, it's that is customary. Yes. I mean, it's a historic document that goes back a couple thousand years. based off of any sort of like financial status beforehand or maybe what you're projecting? No, I mean you can negotiate it. So I'm I'm under the impression that my a brother-in-law of mine who's a little older than I actually negotiated it out. Like they cuz he's also Moroccan. So they both took it super seriously. Like I took it not seriously at all. I'm like whatever. It doesn't matter. Customary to negotiate with your future father-in-law trying to get this. Are you trying to get it down? He's trying to get it up. I mean apparently if you both take it seriously that's a thing, right? For me I didn't care. I'm very American so I was like whatever doesn't matter. Um, you know, everything's community property anyway. It's California. Like that's the way it's actually. But that of course that never entered my mind. But uh I turn to him today and I'm like, you know, that like you really jacked your daughter in this document. [laughter] You put her in a very So would that supersede then the California's commun community property in that case? It probably not. I mean it depend. So now you get into these sort of abstract issues of Jewish law and whether you inside the Orthodox Jewish community are allowed to go outside to a secular court to have adjudicated your divorce when it's a religious institution or whether you go to a secular court in order to do that. Like these are actually really interesting and complicated issues of of Jewish law versus secular law and which governs and and that sort of stuff is kind of interesting. In any case, um yeah, so you know by by this time this is right before the launch of Daily Wire. So, by we've gotten up to like 2015, I'm working like six, seven jobs. I'm cobbling together maybe $400,000 a year somewhere in that neighborhood. Um, and uh and then we make a pitch to Truth Revolt, which is the main job that both Jeremy and I have, right? That's where the bulk of my income is coming from. I'm getting, you know, 75 grand from one place, I'm getting 100 grand from another, but like the bulk of my income is coming from this. And um we had just I again just taken a mortgage. So, by this point, I've already lived in this is my third house. I I we we had a condo. We sold it to buy up. We sold that to buy up. We had just so we had just closed on a really really nice house in LA. And so we do a meeting where Jeremy has come up with a strategy and Jeremy so I can backtrack here to explain kind of my relationship with Jeremy for those who are interested because Jeremy obviously is now personality in his own right and with with Jeremy's razors and Jeremy's chocolates and the whole god cage thing and all that. So I've known Jeremy since like 2009. Uh so I've known Jeremy for for quite a while and he and I met while I was working at Talk Radio Network. We really hit it off and we started immediately talking about like what are ways we can do business together. And so I started kicking him business. I started like finding him projects that he could do for other outlets that like scricbing videos, YouTube kind of videos which kind of broadened the scope for him and created a body of work that he could then pitch outside. Well, in about 2014, he and I were talking, and I was working at Breitbart at the time, and uh he had been talking with the folks at David Horos Freedom Center, and it was his idea to get me into David Hor Freedom Center to launch Truth Revolt. So, now he and I are actual business partners. By that point, we're actual business partners. We'd proposed a few businesses before that, Various and Sunundre, not a lot of money, a couple thousand bucks a year, like but we we've been working together, close friends and all that. So, we we go to Truth Revolt. Truth of Vault is doing pretty well and Jeremy hits upon a a revelation and there are two big revelations in sort of my relationship with Jeremy. Revelation number one comes in 2013 when I did the Piers Morgan interview about what happened in San. How dare you accuse me of standing on the graves of the children that died there. How dare you? I've seen you do it repeatedly, Pierce. Like I say, how dare you? I mean, you can keep saying that, but you've done it repeatedly. Because up until that point in our partnership and our friendship, basically the assumption was I was the business guy and he was going to be the talent because he'd always wanted to be a director and and he came to LA to be an actor and he'd been in writer rooms and all of that. And I was this I went to Harvard Law School. I'd been the executive vice president of Talk Radio Network, all of this kind of stuff. In 2013, I do the interview with Piers Morgan on CNN about gun control and it goes absolutely berserk on the internet. I mean, it was like the biggest thing on the internet for a solid month. And Jeremy, I remember I talked to him beforehand and I told him what I was going to do during the interview and we had discussed and we had strategized and and that kind of stuff. And um and after the interview, he called me up and he said, "We have this completely backwards. I'm the business guy and you're the talent." So that was, you know, all credit to him on that one. I mean, that's that takes an act of humility truly to to be able to say like, "No, you need to be the you need to be the front man when you've always thought you were the front man. You need to be the front." Now it's great. Jeremy also gets to be a front man. But that but at the time that was a really big revelation. So that was revelation number one. And revelation number two comes in 2015 when Jeremy realizes that the way that we had been doing our website for a while and the way that traffic used to be done on the internet, at least on the right, is if you wanted traffic on your website, you basically needed a Drudge link. You needed a link to Mac Drudge's website. It was the like everyone knows this on the right. A link from Drudge was like the magic thing that caused your website to explode. I mean, Andrew Breitbart's breitbart.com was built on the back of the links from Matt Drudge. That's where the traffic was built from. And so you would hunt for Drudge links. You would like create a story. you'd send it to Matt or one of his editors and hope against hope that he would post it. Well, in 2014 2015, Jeremy and I are discussing this. And I turned to Jeremy and and I said what became sort of the first of our business apherisms, which is luck is not a business strategy, right? You can't rely on the kindness of strangers. We're not blanch dubis here. Like we actually need a strategy. And Jeremy said, "Well, I want to look into this." And so he he started looking into it and he he came up with this marketing strategy. And he realized that there was a real arbitrage opportunity in Facebook. that Facebook was where all the crowd was, all the eyeballs were, that the cost for advertising on Facebook was pretty affordable, and that the and that the draw from Facebook in terms of traffic was really high. So, he says, "Let's set up a meeting with the board over at David Hors Freedom Center and let's pitch them." So, we get them in the room and Jeremy starts making the pitch, which is we're going to spend, we need $1 million and if you give us $1 million, we'll generate you a money machine that lasts for all of time. and he explains the whole plan and they do not get it because everybody on the board is like 80 very nice people but they're all 80 and don't know what a computer is let alone what internet is and so Jeremy's explaining this and if you've ever met Jeremy Jeremy and my our styles are completely different in terms of how we communicate Jeremy is from Sllayton Texas he's kind of a soft Texas liilt speaks a lot slower than I do I'm like a fast talking Jewish kid from LA and normally the way this works is that I make a pitch and then Jeremy has to come in and like speak softly I used to call him the stupid whisperer because we met with a lot of Congress people and every conversation went like this. I would explain a thing, they wouldn't understand. Jeremy would reexlain the thing but slowly and in text and suddenly they would understand. In any case, this time it goes backwards. Jeremy explains the deal. They do not understand it at all. They turn to me. We've been doing this for like an hour and a half. They the board turns to me and they're like, "Can you explain this in like more simply like try to boil it down?" And at this point, I was really frustrated and pissed and I take out a napkin and a pen and I say, "Here is our business plan. dollar sign arrow Facebook arrow website arrow back to dollar sign this is our business plan I literally did that on a napkin I turned it around we're going to spend money on Facebook is going to generate traffic for our website we're going to monetize that through advertising and subscriptions back to Facebook right and we're just going to spin up that's right that's that's how that's how we're going to generate our business they fired Jeremy the next day and uh in solidarity they wanted to keep me on as sort of like a face for for the website and I quit I was like this you can't fire my friend my business partner and I'm not going to stick around for that. So now we're both jobless. We both had new mortgages. And so but this idea we know is a thing. And I know and at this point we know a few things. We know that we know that Jeremy is capable of running the business side of this cuz he did it with Truth Revolt. We know that I'm capable of editing websites. I did it with Breitbart and I did it with Truth Revolt. We know that I'm capable of drawing a crowd. I've done that multiple times. And so we we have the skill set that we've both been practicing in our various sort of arenas for a while. So we decide we're going to go out to market. We have two choices at this point. Choice number one is we mortgage our houses and just do the idea ourselves. And this was, you know, in retrospect, what we we probably should have done. Um, but at the time, you know, I let's see, this is 2015. So, at this point, I had uh one kid and a second almost there. Uh, and uh, you know, again, Jeremy had just bought himself a nice house. And so, we were like, and no income. And so, we were both a little freaked out. So, we go out to market and we find a family office and we pitch this family office on the on what we want to do. And it's the exactly this plan. It's exactly this plan. We drop a business plan. We go in, we pitch it. The pitch meeting was was really quite funny. Uh because the third person who's in the triumphvirate in terms of running Daily Wire is a guy named Caleb Robinson. So it's Jeremy, Caleb, and I are the majority owners of Daily Wire. So Caleb at this point was the person working with the family office and uh and he's the one who's really interested in the proposal. So he brings us into the room and we're talking with this family and as we're talking with the family, they they get all sorts of pitches. They're billionaires. You know, people pitch them all the time on investments. And this guy at the end of the table turns to me after I've been going for a while. And he says to me, "You know, we here we get a lot of pitches on media companies just like this one. What makes you think you're so special?" Again, I got kind of pissed. And I was like, I'm better at this than anyone on the planet. I'm better at this than anyone. Everyone who's pitched you is worse at this than I am. And for a second, there was like dead silence in the room. And then everybody started laughing. And they they put the money into the company. And so the the initial amount of money they put into the company was as an angel investor was $4.8 million. We have never taken an outside dollar at the company. We did $200 million in revenue last year. What do you think that original investment is worth today? And I mean I have ideas. I mean given the splits at the company, let's just say well into the nine figures. Unbelievable. Now, could this have done been done for less than a million dollars in hindsight of of you just like bootstrapping it with Jeremy? No. I mean, because the the amount we were cash flow positive 18 months in. Okay. So, we we had not actually, you know, tapped out the money that they gave us by that point, but we were spending heavily on marketing. I don't know the budgeting. I'd have to go back and and look at it. I know that our original expectations of what the company was going to do and where the revenue is going to come from from were totally wrong. We've been we've been looking for our uh our initial pitch for a very long time because all the places we thought the revenue was going to come from are the places it didn't come from and all the places that we thought it was not going to come from is where it ended up coming from. So like I think our original pitch had me like my podcast it suggested that after 5 years I'd have 200,000 listeners. After like a year I had 200,000 listeners and today we have like a couple of million listeners. So it was off by like an order of magnitude. Um the same thing is true with regard to subscriptions. And so in our our original subscription proposal was like if we're really lucky we'll get to like 100,000 subscribers after 5 years. We're 8 years in. We have a million subscribers. Like that was totally and meanwhile conversely we we would thought because this is the way that the markets worked at the time. And this is you just another as I say if if all of business and many parts of investment in life are about diversifying and push where you see daylight then this is it right like when we structured the business the internet was programmatic advertising on websites. This is how you made money right Dr. made money by having ads on the website. Right? Bar made money by having ads on the website. That's where the money was. Subscription businesses were still considered sort of a weird thing. I remember when Rert shifted Wall Street Journal to subscriptions. It was super controversial at the time. People were like, "What is he doing? He's going to wreck his whole audience." Uh, and so our original business proposal was advertising on the website will be the bulk of our revenue. Yeah. Now advertising on the website represents a fairly small part of our revenue. Uh, as opposed to subs, which are a large chunk of our revenue. and advertising on my podcast and the other podcasts that we have on the network which are a fairly large chunk of e-commerce which is a fairly large chunk of our revenue. How many employees do you have today? 260 to 280. Yeah. I mean we're we're constantly increasing. Yeah. And how do you just randomly get in a room with billionaires because that's those types of people are extremely tough to access. Yes. So I mean this is where knowing people who know people is really kind of important and putting yourself in position to know those people is really important. So I always recommend that people go to places where there is crossclass pollination. This is why actually church and synagogue are really good. If you go to a church, there's some very rich people there and there's some very poor people there and they have kind of the same idea together. If you if you go to school fundraisers, if you go to charity events, if you go to to, you know, colloquiums on on various kind of major issues, you're probably going to meet somebody who knows somebody. But you need to put yourself out there. You need to be in in social circumstances. So because Jeremy and I had been in circumstances at charity dinners involving ourselves in high level politics, pretty much every connection that you make is going to be a person referring a person to you. So you have that that means that the more people that you touch in your kind of inner circle that expands your network pretty radically. Then you can call them. And what people I think are also afraid of very often in business is asking people for favors. They don't understand that's actually the best way to generate actual loyalty among people is not to do things for people. It makes people feel that they are they are it makes people feel bad. If you do if you do somebody a favor, it's a weird trick of human psychology. If you do somebody a favor, they actually feel worse because if if you do them a favor, they feel like they owe you something. And people don't like owing people. Is that all the time though? I feel like some people like like I live in a household with four other guys. They're all my roommates. I'll do the dishes, someone else's dishes. And I feel like it doesn't go appreciated on occasion. Actually, quite often. If it's casual, maybe not. Maybe people just ignore it. I mean, roommates are a little more casual, but as as sort of like in business, if somebody does you a favor, you feel bad about it because now you know you have to repay the favor. Yes. I mean, that's just the way that is coming at some point. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, nothing comes for free. And so you if you put yourself in a position, it weirdly enough, it's actually a kind of cool psychological thing, but it's true. If you ask somebody in business for a favor, can you connect me with X, Y, or Z? It makes them feel good and they very often will do it. You think that be and the by the way the reason that you don't want to do it is specifically because of that right you don't want to do that because you're like ah really do I have to ask that guy for that thing now it puts me in a position of owing him yeah you have to ask the guy for the thing and you know what he'll probably he'll probably be happy you did it makes people feel powerful it makes them feel you you know useful and and all of that so you know asking people to connect you to other people it's an easy ask it's one that's easy for people to accomplish it makes it gives them a good feeling inside because they helped you and it also you know if if on sort of the darker human motivation level, it makes them feel that they at some level have something on you, right? They can call back in the favor if they need to, right? But before we go on, while we're on the topic of that, every business starts with a strong foundation. And a strong foundation does not include complicated spreadsheets and countless different softwares. So if you want to help restructure your business to be even better, but you don't know where to start, remember these three numbers from our sponsor, Netswuite. It's 36,000, 25, and 1. 36,000 because over 36,000 companies have already upgraded to Netswuite and stopped wasting time on things like manual data entry and sifting through scattered data. 25 because Netswuite has spent 25 years helping businesses drive down their costs. And one because Netswuite is an all-in-one solution that allows you to manage all of your KPIs or key performance indicators with one efficient system. Netswuite could help you reduce the mistakes of manual data entry because trust me, there's always mistakes when you're doing something manually. And they can help you scale up the business without all the busy work that comes alongside with it. So get a full picture of your business and make better decisions faster. Download Netswuite's popular KPIs checklist right now for free at netsweet.com/istic. Again, that's to get your KPIs checklist again for free. Netswuite.com/ic link down below. And now let's get back to the episode. When you meet higher level people, you must have a specific ask. This is the other thing. When you meet a billionaire and you want to make a pitch, it's got to be very specific. It has to show what they get out of the deal. People tend to pitch broad ideas and people who, you know, are being pitched don't even know what to do with that. So, I'll give I'll give you an example. There was a a time a long time ago uh where this is 2013, maybe. I was at a fundraiser for a local fundraiser for John McCain uh and for some of the members of the so-called young guns at that point. That was like Eric Hanter no longer in Congress and uh Kevin McCarthy is the only Young Gun left. It was like Paul Ryan, Eric Hanter, those were the Young Guns. In any case, there was fundraiser and this guy I knew knew Elliot Brody. Elliot was at that point the RNC chair in terms of uh fundraising. He was like the fundraising chair for for the RNC. This guy I knew, good friend of mine. He was like, "You know, you're an upandcomer. When you meet Elliot, just ask him for your wildest dream. Just ask him for your wildest dream." And I didn't know anything. I'm like, "Okay." We go to this fundraiser. It's like poolside in Beverly Hills. And I kind of like go over and he and he kind of looks at me cuz he knows I'm going to ask him for something. And I and I sit down and he's like, "So, what do you want?" And I said, "Okay, so here's here's what I want. I want like I need a million bucks because I want to go and pay for myself to be syndicated on radio. I want to turn that into a massive data operation where I have, you know, a huge number of followers and then I want to monetize that for both political and financial gain. And he's like, what's your end goal? And at the time I was like, this is 2008, so I was 24. So I was like, and then I'm going to be president. And [snorts] he and he's and he looks at me and he goes, what's wrong with you? Like what's wrong with you? that's not going to like that's not going to happen. And I walked away and I and I realized that the mistake that I had made is that like that's really kind of a vague plan. Like it's even though it sounds specific, it actually is not very specific. If I had come in and said like, "Okay, let me give you step by step by step. Here's how I'm going to do these things and I need step one." And by the way, not telescope 20 years down the line when you're saying you're going to be president, but telescope a year down the line. Sure. Then that is a much better pitch. By the way, this is also I've learned a good pitch when it comes to public markets. When it comes to public markets, the market demands a 5-year plan and nobody actually wants the 5-year plan. Because if you give them the 5-year plan, it may be too broad. And then investors are like, "Nah, you don't know how to do that. What are you talking about?" Because you want to be president is a crazy thing. You saying, "I want a million dollars because I'm going to pay these five specific radio stations to put me on the air and I'm going to monetize that to the tune of X." That that's that's a concrete thing. So that that's just, you know, things that you learn along the way. By the way, we we've completed all of those steps except for the last. So, I mean, I will say that I wasn't that far off, but it's but you know. Do you still have plans to eventually run for office? Not until I'm 70. Why not until you're 70? Because you can't be president unless you're an oxygenarian, right? I mean, that's those are the rules. It's in the constitution. Everything. I'm not even 40, man. Like this. [laughter] By the way, you know, again, you know what? The president gets paid. I'm having a better year like Babe Ruth. I'm having a better year than the president. So, true. But do you actually could you see yourself at some point in the future running for like president or do you think that you could potentially have more power and influence managing the the biggest conservative outlet? I mean I I do think the latter meaning listen the president is the most powerful person on the planet for sure but it's for a determined period of time within a constitutional structure in terms of touching people's lives and and changing how they think and all of that. think that, you know, it's it's very difficult to think that over the course of the next 20, 30 years, I couldn't have more impact doing what we're doing right now. Does the president really have that much power? Because my understanding is most of it is Congress, uh, the House and the Senate. Well, I mean, I'll say that I I tend to think that the legislature, unfortunately, has become sort of a vestigial organ of government. It doesn't do a lot other than kick omnibus packages over to the executive who really does kind of all the implementation. And that's becoming more and more of a problem, which is why you will see executive orders signed by Obama that will then be rejected by Trump, which will then be rejected again and reimposed by by by Biden. The the president has enormous global power. I would say in domestic power, it's much more limited than people think it is. Globally, the foreign policy of the United States matters an awful awful lot. Um, in terms of domestic politics, yeah, the president has some say, but there are a lot of obstacles in his way. I mean, Joe Biden would like to do a lot of things that he's not actually able to do because there are states and because there are checks and balances and because there are courts. On foreign policy, he has plenary power to do whatever he wants. Whether it's pulling out from Afghanistan or whether it's funding the war in Ukraine, you know, even though he needs a legislature to do that, pretty rare that a legislature denies a wartime president or president who declares war in wartime the the funding to do that. The only time I can remember that actively happening is probably near the end of the war in Vietnam. I got an offbeat question, but you married your wife in two and a half months, right? Or you proposed. Yeah, we got engaged. Yeah, like September 5th to December 22nd. I was 20. I was 23 when we got engaged and 24 we got married and she was 20. Okay. So, I'm 24 right now. Okay. So, get on your horse, man. There are no prospects. [laughter] I'm not seeing anybody at the moment. Like, how do you know when the person that you're seeing is the right person? You say that you can determine this in the first year, and if you can't, then there's something that's wrong. I mean, I think that you can determine if it's the wrong person in the first 10 minutes, right? All right. So, I think that that that's that's actually really easy. Determining the wrong person is like that narrows the field quite considerably. I would agree with that. Um, so the right person, so for me, you're you're talking about Yeah. Not not to reduce the romantic to business terms. I mean, there's obvious things like you have to be sexually attracted to the person, obviously, you have to find them fun to be with. These are like basic preconditions to wanting to be with the person, but those people tend to think of those as like the only conditions or as the key conditions. Those are like the get in the doorway conditions. And then there's the actual conditions for marriage, which is you're signing onto a lifelong commitment here, which is going to be much harder than you could possibly imagine because you're going to have presumably kids and they're an enormous commitment and you're going to have hardships and you're going to have tragedies and you're going to have, you know, difficulties and they're going to crop up not like some days, they're crop up most days. There will be something bad that happens on almost every day of your life. And the person who you are marrying, it's a leap of faith because the person who you've who you know now is not the person who's going to be there 15 years from now because people tend to change and people tend to, you know, develop habits or their habits get more ingrained or less ingrained. The nice thing about getting married young is that you're able to sort of shape each other a little bit which is nice when you get married older. Everybody's got their baggage. Everybody's got their established modes of life and it's kind of harder to make those mesh. her being 20 and me being 23 when we met. It's not like there were like tons of things that we were like these are the things but but the but the things that we did share were the unshakable things. This what age does that tend to be ingrained like let's say 35 40 where things people just get set in their ways? I mean no I think it's way earlier. I think I think this is a huge mistake society has made. I mean I think frankly people are getting married too late on average right now. I think it's 28 for men and 26 for women. I think it's way too late. That's way too late. I mean, how many people do you know who are who are 28 and have no ingrained, you know, habits or things that they are they're really kind of used to, ways of life, patterns of thinking? Well, when things get like fully fully ingrained when when you stop changing is really about 70. Like you're going to change all the way up to limb, but but change in your life is sort of a a reverse exponential curve, right? I mean, like you change a lot the younger you are and then it kind of diminishing returns over time. So, so the sweet spot to get married is probably as the curve is here, right? Like before you get to the full diminishing returns because you can still mold and adapt to each other and and your habits. Don't you think if you're set in your ways, you could find someone else who blends with that. You're both, you know, on the same page. I mean, it's it's definitely harder, right? The more the more set in your ways you are. Now, I I will I will say that you do want to be set in your values, right? So, the thing that you need to be identical are your values or if not identical, very close to identical, right? So, like for for my wife and for me, so my dad, and I quote this all the time, he always says that in order for people to get married, you have to make the pre-commitment in your mind that you're ready to get married. You don't meet the person that you want to marry and then decide you want to get married. You decide you want to get married and then you meet the person you want to marry because it's a different headsp space. It's a different way of thinking about the thing. It's the difference between saying, "I'm going to toss five bucks at a at a at a penny stock," and saying, "I'm going to spend $100,000 investing this portfolio." $5 in a penny stock. You just toss $5 a penny stock. Who cares? But but when you're investing like a full portfolio for a 30-year period, you better damn well be thinking about what exactly your principles are. And so, you know, in when it comes to a relationship, you ought you have to be thinking like what is life going to be like 15 years from now. So, we've been married for 15 years now and our life is four children, right? And those children rely on us to be solid and to and to show them what a good relationship looks like and to be there for them and even if we're frustrated to to keep that frustration within certain boundaries. you know, like they're relying on that and they're relying on a solid set of values that they know that they're going to get the same answer from mom and dad. You don't want your kids value shopping between mom and dad. It's a real problem. Uh so, you know, like our first So, knowing that that meant that the way that I, you know, picked my wife, I can't speak for for why she picked me because who knows, but but the way that the way that I picked my wife uh was, you know, effectively I saw a picture of her. I saw she was beautiful. Okay, we're now past like like very low bar to get in. I I met her and I knew she was really nice and my sister had also who fixed us up. She she had told me that she was a very nice person. So I knew that she was like not mean or or nasty and then of course she it turns out she's the nicest person ever. My my wife is an incredibly nice human being which is why we that's where the contrast went. Uh so the and um but like once that was true, I also knew that she was Jewish, which was huge for me because I think that religious agreement is really important in marriage. uh I knew that she was orthodox so now it's an even smaller group and then within that group it's like okay what exactly are the things that are very important to you in terms of in terms of family what are your aspirations what kind of what what do you want your life to look like are you ambitious ambitious was an important thing to me are are are you a person who's very committed to the things that you believe in that's that's really important to me are we on sort of the same religious level because even in orthodoxy there are gradations as far as like how how observant you are versus how not observant you are and those can make a really really big difference u So every minor gradation is a major question because you're picking one person out of all of humanity to spend the rest of your life with. But you can establish a lot of those things very quickly by getting a note to a question that you think is vital. I mean there there were girls who I dated where we I remember there was a a girl I went on a date with when I was in Cambridge. I go on tons of dates. There was one girl I went out with and you know we were talking and it was very clear that we had political disagreements and she was beautiful and I was like well you know it was it was really nice to meet you and no I mean like that's but there's a difference between political disagreements and value disagreements right and and which one would trump the sometimes so it's so I it depends so my wife and I for example on our first few dates she expressed that she was more pro-choice than I was she expressed that she was anti-death penalty and she expressed that she was kind of squeamish about guns now because I've been doing you know this for a long time by by that and had already been doing politics. Even when I met her, I'd been doing politics semi-professionally for like 6 years. So, I could see that these were not positions that she was like ardently committed to, right? These these were not positions where she was like, you saw some weak points in there. Were you Well, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't like she came in like strong. It was it wasn't [laughter] like I said, I'm a pro-life person and she was like, "What? How could you be a pro? That's terrible. How could you be a pro-life person?" It was more like, "Well, I'm not sure, right?" It was more like I'm not sure about that. You know, I have some questions. And that was like, "Okay, so this is not like a deeply firmly committed belief on your part." Again, she she's allowed to have her beliefs, but if it had been like a deeply firmly committed belief, that would have been very difficult to to get past. In the same way that if if we' walked into the first date and she had said, you know, I have questions about God, I'd have been like, okay, that's all right. And if she'd walked in and said, I hate religion and atheist, like there's certain things where complete opposite commitment is going to be a real problem. Um, and and so she she didn't seem particularly political. She wasn't. Uh, she she didn't know who Mitt Romney was, which she still like laughs about that on our first date, I mentioned it. She's like, "Who's Mitt Romney?" And I found that kind of charming. like I I she is not a political person. Like she and I agree very much on politics now and did pretty much as soon as she got informed she's I would say she's more pro-life than I am now. Um but which is almost impossible. She's certainly as pro-life as I am cuz I'm not sure that there's a further extreme. But she um is she's not political. She doesn't she doesn't she'll listen to the show when she has a chance. She doesn't follow the news all that much. And I didn't want that. I didn't want a political marriage. Like I love the fact that we got married before I was famous and that she still does not care that I meet senators on the regular and she doesn't like none of that stuff is particularly impressive to her and and I I find that incredibly charming and wonderful. So my concern is how my partner is going to respond in specific circumstances. So like let's say tragedy strikes or let's say she was lied to or let's say she had a family falling out or something like that. how she responds to certain circumstances I feel like is more telling about her personality and who she is than what she says she is. So, okay. So, that that's certainly true. The personality aspects are things that you're going to have to spend this is why it's very important to spend a lot of time with the person. I don't mean over a course of time. My wife and I once we started dating, when I say we dated for three and a half months or 3 months or whatever, people tend to believe that means that we went on like 12 dates, like you went on a date a week or two. It was every day, multiple hours a day. Like once once once we were once we were past like the first week, I was bringing her dinner every night. like she would be studying for for her finals or whatever. She was a junior in at UCLA and I'd bring her food and I would just and we would we were spending hours a day every day. By a month in I said we're never spending a Shabbat apart. So I would like sleep over at the at the co-op facility where she lived, this Jewish co-op. I'd sleep in some other room and then we'd spend all Shabbat together. So you're spending like lots and lots of time together. Um but and so you could see her in different circumstances and you do you see people in different circumstances and that is definitely important in terms of personality. But again, I think that the the values question is a really big one cuz you have to be thinking about how you build a household. You the blessing that you typically give at a Jewish wedding is that somebody should be z to build a ban is which which means in very ashkanaz Hebrew that you should merit to build a a faithful house in Israel. A marriage is missional. It's not just a contract. It's a mission. So what does that mission look like? What are the end goals of that mission? And then you have to orient your values toward what the end goals of that mission are. So you know there are marriages where the mission is just to have a good time and go on vacation. Okay. Okay. Well, if that's your central value, then that's your central value. For us, our central value is how do we raise Jewish, Orthodox, moral kids, okay? That means we have that's like several things in a row there, right? Jewish, which means I have to marry inside the religion. Orthodox, which means a certain level of practice, and moral, which means we have to have certain agreements on on virtue and and ethics. We went for like a it was a three-hour date. Like, we went and we started at like, I don't know, 3:00 in the afternoon, and we wrapped it up around 6:00 in the evening. And we we walked and we talked about like free will and determinism. These are like issues on on date number one. And you can ask my wife like that. Like date number two was like death penalty and gun control. Like how did you get into that? Like like you meet her. You're just like, "Hey, what are your thoughts on determinism?" Like it was more like Yeah. Weed weed them through, you know. Yeah. Exactly. You got to run them through the paces real quick. Uh no, it was it was more like, you know, you get past hobbies and it's nice to meet you and and then, you know, either the conversation flows or it doesn't and it kind of Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was it was it wasn't like I was quizzing her on it. It was more like, you know, here's some stuff that I'm I think I said I was I was writing on something. She said, "What are you writing on?" And I'm like, "Yeah, exactly. Here's what I'm writing on." And then that turned into like And then as we were getting out of the car, before before she got out of the car, before I dropped her back off, I said to her, um, I don't hold by like any of this, you know, 3-day nonsense where I'm going to, you know, make you feel was like insecure. Like, are we going on a second date? I would like to go on a second date with you. if so name me a time and date. And she and she did and the rest is history. Like from her side, it's kind of funny because yeah, I drove up. So after after law school, I was like, I'm I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer in LA. I'm going to get a car. So I got a So my first car had been a 1986 Honda Civic with no air conditioning that in my family was sort of a handme-down. It started with me. We bought it for $400. It went to my sister, eventually became known as Trusty, Rusty. And uh and and my second car was a 2006 a 2006 Mustang GT convertible uh which was a baby blue. And I drove up and the way my wife tells it, she I drove up and she's like, "Who is this asshole?" And then I got out and I was wearing like I I didn't know how to dress at all in those. I still really don't. I have people who who give me clothes to wear. Um but I I now I know I think a little bit more, but that's after years of prep at that time. Like my idea of a nice outfit was like a faded polo shirt that was at least a size too big and some like dad jeans. And so I get out and I look like a complete nerd. And if you look at pictures of me in those days, like my hair now is at least somewhat okay. But my wife saw that and she's like, "Oh no, he's just a nerd. That's good." And so like she like the girl who takes off or the guy the girl who wears the glasses, the guy just takes off the glasses. Like there you go. Yeah. Exactly. She saw that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what what she really saw is like the opposite, right? It was like they [laughter] was like, "Oh, he's driving up all cool and boss and but what a jerk. He's who drives that car." And then I get out and I'm like a super nerdy guy. And she's like, "Okay, okay. It'll be fine." Where did you budge in the relationship? How did she change you for the better? I'm famous for not having feelings. I do have feelings, but pretty much only about my family. Like, if you saw me in context with my kids, I am a I am a warm ball of mush with my kids and with my wife. Like I'm I'm a really really really committed father and husband. Like that is my thing and I go out of my way for my wife in extraordinary ways and for my kids in extraordinary ways. Um and uh so that's like I never cried in a movie before I got married. Right. Then you cry at movies and and then when you see your kids it completely changes everything. The way that I've expressed it before is that basically I think it's true for everyone but it's particularly true for me that basically your range of emotion when you're single is like 10 on the upper end and zero on the lower end. And then you get married and goes to like 20 on the upper end cuz when you're with your partner and it's really happy, it's phenomenal. And like negative 20 cuz if you're at odds or if something bad is happening to your partner, it's the worst thing in the world. And then you have kids and all limits are completely removed. Like by far the worst things that happen are are with your kids. They're like my my daughter, my my oldest daughter, for example, she had open heart surgery when she was a year and a half. Like the like horrendous. Um and like the worst things that happen, but the best things that happen are like 3 days ago, I've got all I've got all four of my kids. They're all in one room and the baby is little. He's like 2 months old and the and my three-year-old daughter is is having her hair brushed by her her older sister while my son reads who's seven is reading them a book and like that stuff. It's it's amazing. But when the kids are being jerks, it's really awful. Like this. So all limits are removed. So what what she I I would say that she also taught me that communication can be different to different people. So, I kind of knew that before, but it certainly matures you because being married means that you can't communicate to your wife in the same way that I would communicate to other people. Like, if we get in a debate, like early on in our in our marriage, if I would start like getting into an argument, she'd be like, "Stop going into debate mode. You need to stop it right now." And because you can't talk to your wife the same way that I would talk to somebody on a podcast. It's ridiculous. You can't do that. I mean, sure, I could destroy my wife with facts and logic, but like what's it like what what exactly how is that going to redound to either of our benefits? Again, my favorite phrase in marriage is would you rather be right or would you rather be happy? Because those are the choices, my friends. Like, you cannot be both right and happy all the time. Wise words. You're just going to have to you're just going to have to suck it up. When do you suck it up, though? When do you know like, hey, this is where I'm going to explain my point and here's where I'm going to suck it up. So, I I am very lucky in the fact that if I if I tell my wife that something is deeply bothering me about something that she's doing, she will she will move. Like, she she's very malleable that way. um which is an amazing quality that not a lot of people have male or female. Um but I mean there there's certain things where like to give a very common example my wife is not good with time like and not only is she not good with time she doesn't know that she's not good with time. So that means that you know if I tell her that we need to leave at a given point and it doesn't happen I now have two choices. One is I can either like be angry and get mad at her about it or I can lecture her about it and then I will be miserable and also she will be miserable or I can just know going in we're probably going to be late. I can kind of take a breath be like okay this is annoying to me and I'm sure there are things that I know there are things about me that where it's where it's the same thing for for years for her it was that if I'm reading I cannot be I cannot be bothered and I don't mean like she can't you know come and interrupt me. I mean, I literally can't hear it. If if I'm reading, my concentration is so great that people can be talking directly in my ear and I don't hear it. I didn't realize this until I had my nine-year-old daughter. My nine-year-old daughter is exactly the same way. I have to I have to call her like five times to get her to take her nose out of a book if she if she's reading. So, I'm sure that that's a point of like high irritation for my wife, but that's just the way it is. And so, she's going to, you know, like she it's annoying. It'll continue to be annoying. No, it it's it's situations like that. Yeah. little things that you let go because to not let them go would be stupid and petty like and and yeah, they're super annoying. Like again, my wife has a thousand things about me that are that I'm sure are incredibly irritating. You know, my wife loses her phone all the time. We joke all the time that as soon as you know the technology is available, I'm going to chip her like a cat. Like, we're going to put the phone in her so that she never loses her phone again. But am I going to get like ticked off every time she loses her phone? That's going to be a really bad thing. Uh, so it's it's it's more stuff like it's more if something is deeply bothering you with your spouse, then you have to sit down and have like a real conversation. You know, when when it comes to little things, you most of most of relationships is is or a lot of relationships is letting those things go, which makes you a more patient human. And it really is much more applicable with your kids than your spouse. All that stuff is way worse with your kids than your spouse. I love that quote about the range of emotions that you feel through different stages of life. I've actually quoted that before on this podcast and it just uh I looked before. I told him that before. I really hope that that does prove to be the case when I do end up finding a spouse and then end up having kids because that sounds that sounds really nice actually. It's something that sounds it's amazing and it sucks all at the same time. I mean like I I always like to present, you know, the the full paniply. I'm not going to pretend that every moment with my kids is a joy. In fact, when we had the fourth, I sat there and I calculated out the odds that all four of them were going to be good at any one time, which are one in 16, right? Uh because it's one half to the fourth power. So it's like cuz at any given time there's a 50% chance they'll be good or bad. And so all four of them being good at one time, it's like one out of 16. Now the good news is all four of them are only bad one out of 16 times, but most of the time at least one or two of them are being a problem. You know that it's really rough. I mean like when when kids are being bad, when they're being jackasses, it's really really tough. And they are I mean they're really they can be really annoying and timeconuming. And then again there's nothing better in the entire world than when your kids are giving you a hug. There's not there's nothing better than that. It is the best thing in the entire world. Now I'm curious how you prioritize and budget your time between raising a family but also running a business and going through the startup because I know what that could be like and that's completely consuming and sometimes that has to be the priority. Yeah. Quite a lot. So I will say that you know this is this is really why I think that it's important to to start young on on a lot of these things. So the the I didn't have kids until I was 30, right? So I was married at 24 but we didn't have kids for the first six years. Uh so by the time we had kids already we had launched daily we had we launched Daily Wire. Well let's see I had one kid by the time we launched Daily Wire. Um she but she was very little and my my wife was the one who really had it hard. My wife was in medical school at the time. So she she was in medical school all the way through our first two and she was still finishing residency pregnant with our third. So that was really rough for her. Like the basically for for me it was always priorities. My kids always come first. Always always always. So that means that if if there is an emergency, then my kids come first. I I'm I think it's really important, I've talked about this a lot, to have a support structure that's not just you and your wife. Really, really important. So I we we purposefully located like a mile from my parents. We lived a mile from my parents our entire marriage. You know, we we purposefully put ourselves in a situation where if we need help, we can call somebody and they can come over and my dad can come over, my mom can come over, they'll wash the kids. Uh which is really really important. This is why I say the community you choose to live is is vital. Being part of a church or a synagogue, it's great because it immediately gives you connections with other people who are capable of helping you out if you need. Um, it does take more than just you and your wife. Otherwise, it gets very overwhelming very quickly. Um, especially, you know, we're lucky we can afford a nanny, but a lot of people can't and we we didn't have one for, you know, a while. So, the, you know, I think that when it comes to the prioritization, I can tell you my schedule now and then I can tell you, you know, how we sort of did it while we were starting the company. Starting the company is a lot harder. as you say, the hours were insane. They were irregular. Uh you you work a lot of Sundays. Um that's that's very hard. The kids were very little at the time, so that made it a little easier because a 2-year-old doesn't care so much. Um I, as I said, my wife's in residency and I would literally like take just so that she could see the kids like for 15 minutes a day. I would pick I'd take them in the car. I'd drive 45 minutes to her in the car with the kids. She'd walk out, she'd eat dinner in the car while visiting with the kids. She'd go back in. I'd drive home with the kids. I'd put them to bed. My day now, my kids don't know I have a job, right? Because that was my priority. So, it remains my priority. So, the way that this basically works, I wake up, my kids wake me up every morning at like 6:00 a.m. And I get up and I make breakfast for them. I get them dressed. I get them ready for the day. Um, meanwhile, I might be like just perusing the news on my phone to see if I have to supplement for the show. I leave the house at like 7:45 because that's basically when they leave the house for school. I go into the to the show. I I film the show. I film extras. I do phone calls. I I try to work out. I try to get everything done between the window 7:45 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. which is when they get out from school. Very often I'm the one who picks them up from school. I do not work from the time I pick them up from school to the time they go to bed, which right now is about 7:30. So that 4 hour period, I'm basically at their disposal. There there are exceptions. I mean, there's times where I'll have a business call and I'll have my dad come over or the nanny watches them or my wife, you know, pick my wife doesn't have to work if she doesn't want to now, so she so she, you know, picks up a lot of that slack. But my goal is that basically between 3:30 and 7:30, I'm almost entirely at their disposal. They go to bed, I start working again, I I pick up the phone, I make a few phone calls, I do what I need to do. If there's an emergency, people can get a hold of me. But I tend to be very tur uh both on the phone and an email. So that's So I I again doing things quickly is very helpful. But segmenting the time like that means that my kids, they're not even aware that like they get when when I go on a business trip for one night, they get like upset like where are you going? or if I have work on if I don't get home from work until 5, they're like, "What's happening? Why is why is this happening right now?" I'm lucky I've been able to construct my life around that. Yeah, it wasn't always like that, but you know, is it difficult for you to outsource that? Because I feel like you're very much like you want things done, they have to be correct, they have to be in order. How is that outsourcing to other people and trusting them to do it to your satisfa with regard to the company? You mean? Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, with with regards to the company, um, so my my view on hiring and firing. So, I don't do the hiring and firing at Daily Wire, right? Jeremy really is more responsible. Caleb is really more responsible for that. I I you know, I have like a say into who's working on my show and if I think somebody's doing a crappy job, I'll I'll sound off about it. But I'm not the person who's in the interview meetings. But with with that said, my general view of hiring and firing is that the entire if you have to fire somebody, it's because it's your mistake, not theirs. almost always uh it was your mistake in in putting them in a position where they were not going to succeed. I I I think that very often employers will try to cram a a square block into a into a round hole. Uh or they'll say, you know, I wish that this person were a thing just like dating, just like any other business relationship, you got to take people for what they are. And so the the the hard part and and then you have to let them be free to do the thing. You have to give them enough authority and enough responsibility that they can do the thing and they can take care of the thing, but enough responsibility that if the thing goes wrong, they also get held accountable for that. Which means you have to give people clear metrics of success. You can't just be like do a thing. It has to be and here's what I want it to look like in kind of general outline and you have to hit this mark. If you don't hit that mark I that's fine but you need to explain to me why you didn't hit that mark. And and usually firings occur because either bad direction from above. They didn't give people metrics to hit or the metrics they gave were too vague or bad direction or micromanagement. People inserting themselves too much into the process and not letting the person take ownership of the thing because people who work all want to take ownership of of what they do. And then finally, you really have to be able to sus out. This is another one of kind of the sayings that we have at Daily Wire is that you can't teach you can't teach effort. You can't if if if people want it, they want it. And if they don't want it, they don't they don't want it. And and you can't make somebody into a person who has effort into a person who wants it. As much as there are lots of talented people and they just don't who who don't want it enough, I'd much rather have the person who's like gonna do the grunt work, who wants it, like the aggressive, I'd rather have that person who's slightly less talented than the person who's more talented and doesn't have the the gumption. We just had Papa John uh Schnutter on the podcast and he had a great quote on that. He said, "Hire for attitude and train for aptitude." I think it was I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, as long as you have like a central silk, as long as you have like the ability to be molded, that's 100% true. which is why I've advocated for a long time that I think that, you know, I I'd rather hire a bunch of kids at a high school who have 1450 SATs and no college degree than a bunch of kids with a college degree who have been told that, you know, they are owed $150,000 a year for fingerpainting. If you give me like raw talent and grit, I'd much much rather have that than than, you know, somebody who's even been working in the field for for 20 years. I'm a big fan of apprenticeships. I think first of all, virtually nobody learns how to do a job by going to school. I think virtually everybody learns how to do a job by doing the job and doing it a lot and doing it many many many times. Like my my number one piece of advice for people who want to get into my industry is do a bunch of stuff for free. That's what I always That's what we both did. That's what Jack did. So Jack sent me seven emails over the span of maybe eight months and said, "I want to come work with you. I'll do anything you want to." Followed up. No. Yeah. You don't have to pay me. I just want to work. Give me something to do. Please give me something to do. Please. Months later, it was almost a year later. I said, "Okay, fine. You want to Here's some busy work for you to do." He finished it in like 2 days and it was like 18 hours of work. He's like, "Give me more." Yeah. But that blossomed so many different things. I mean, my my mom was very much like that. My mom started off as a secretary. She had an ed degree from from Boston University and she started off as a secretary at a film and TV company because there was an opening in the paper and she ended up as as vice president of the company because that's what she would do. It was just like get in and grind. Just grind and learn how to do the thing and get good at the thing. Now, let me ask you this. What do you think of unpaid internships? I think that unpaid internships are vital. I think this nonsense about how you pay interns is garbage. I mean, I understand that's the legal standard now. And so, I I will never say anything that puts us in legal jeopardy here at Daily Wire. We comply with all legal restrictions, requirements, and obligations. With that said, unpaid internships are absolutely vital because why the hell would I pay an intern a a for a job when I can get a college graduate with a year of experience to do that job for the same pay? All you're doing is depriving people of the opportunity to actually get good at the thing. You're expecting people to start off at a level of good. It's really, really stupid. It's really stupid. I took unpaid internships over and over and over again. I was in an unpaid intern at ad firm. It was great. It taught me how to how to, you know, write ads in in pathy fashion. Again, I I took a job for one-third the pay that I normally would make because you need to get good at the thing. This is another one of my recommendations for people who are trying to, you know, break in and they they're aggressive is there is no job that is below you. You you like if you think there's a job below you that that is wrong. When this company started, it started in Jeremy Boring's pool house and on weekends I would go into the office and I would see Caleb Robinson in the back room with Jeremy Boring's brother nailing planks to a giant piece of wood and that was going to be the background of my set. Like we just got a $5 million infusion. Caleb is in the back room with a hammer and nails and wood and he's just nailing wood to wood and that that was like that's the background that you see on the first first episodes. What do you say about the argument that the opportunities go to people who can financially support themselves or have the the the background like for you for example you could afford to do that because you could live with your parents. You could also have something to fall back on versus people who need something to survive. So I mean I I think that that's true but I think that they're misreading how the markets work. I mean, and like I think that that is a good piece of compassionate talk and I think it has precisely the opposite effects of what it seeks to achieve. You're saying, "Okay, well, if if all the internships are paid, then okay, but who do you think is going to get the paid internships then? Do you think it's going to be the poor kid or do you think it's going to be the slightly richer kid?" Well, why why would it be the poor kid? is that like the the the actual answer to that is that the only way that you're going to to find a way in is by being competitive in the marketplace and it doesn't make you more competitive for them to have to pay more. I mean, this is actually the predictable side effect of minimum wage. Minimum wage has removed virtually all teen employment in the United States. The teen unemployment rate in the United States, nobody looks at it, but like the the unemployment rate at age of 16, which used to be much much much lower, is now much much much higher. Why? Because of minimum wage. Because why would you pay a 16-y old minimum wage when I can pay a 19-year-old minimum wage or a 20-y old minimum wage when you artificially raise the the the the cost of labor? People are going to artificially seek people to do those jobs who have credentials that they wouldn't necessarily need. I mean, you you'll now see people who are suggesting that you have to have a college degree to be a barista at Starbucks. Why? Cuz you're paying that person $25 an hour. Like that that's that's a serious problem. That's not going to get cured by this piece of like you can point out the problem and maybe it remains a problem with I'm not saying it's not a problem with unpaid internship. I'm just saying that the the policy recommendation that is being made to cure that, which is to mandate pay for unpaid interns, does not cure the problem. It exacerbates the problem. It means I'm just not going to have any. Why Why would I have a paid intern? Why not just hire an employee? It's a pain in the ass. Like there's it creates all sorts of legal obligations. It's it's it's really foolish. And and especially because there there is a point like we're assuming that every unpaid intern is 19 or 20 years old or 18 like you're supporting yourself. You're trying to get through college, trying to do all that stuff. I I don't know when you guys had your first kind of job or your first internship, your first apprenticeship, but I had some when I was like 13 or 14 years old. Me, too. I mean, that that that was not like amazing jobs, but I remember working an entire year at like the public middle school I went in like the student store making 25 a buck 25 an hour so that I could eventually buy a clock for my parents or something. Like I remember doing that sort of stuff. Like again this all sounds like oh you know rich people talking about things that they could never understand if they if they were poor but the reality is that every rich person not every virtually every rich person I know started off not as a rich person not as a rich person. Jeremy's family is poor or at least lower middle class. Caleb's family from what I understand was not a a Caleb was certainly Caleb is like a high school grad. Jeremy dropped out of college. Like these are these are not families that like you're talking about massive wealth. And again, even my family and the assumption is because I'm an Orthodox Jew and because I went to Harvard that I must have like tremendous family wealth or something. Again, I grew up in a in the same bedroom as my three younger sisters with one bathroom for six people until I was 11 years old. That doesn't make me poor, but certainly made me rich. So, like the the the rules that I'm saying are not about rich people not understanding. It's it's about look at the people who are rich and then ask them how they got to be that way. Right? That's the question that nobody wants to ask is how did the rich people get to be rich, not how do we, you know, do you have sympathy for the person who's poor? I have s I have such sympathy for people who are poor that I want them to be rich. Here are the steps that are required to be rich. And if you see that as as talking down to people, I I don't know how that's talking down to people as opposed to saying this is how you get here. I want everybody to be up here. What would you say the steps are if you were to simplify? Well, I mean, they're the very basic ones. You got to finish high school. You don't have babies before you get married. Uh you have to get a job. If you do those three things, you will not be permanently poor in the United States by all available metrics and evidence. That's the first step. Then to actually get rich, you have to develop a skill set. And you have to develop a skill set that people want from you. I've always said that the the that wealth in terms of like broad overview lies at the nexus of three things. And there's some pretty good business evidence to support this. Uh that that it lies at the nexus of things that you're good at, things that people want from you, and things that you're passionate about. There are a lot of things that you're good at, you're not passionate about. It's going to be hard for you to do those for long periods of time. There are a lot of things that you're passionate about that you stuck at. There's no money there. There are a lot of things that you're passionate about, you're good at, and that no one else cares about, and that's not going to make you any money either. What you need is the nexus of those three things. In that sweet spot is where is where the money is for you. And that can be in virtually anything. It really can be because this is a giant country, and it's a huge international economy. And there are niche markets in pretty much everything. I know people who are loaded as plumbers. I know people like I know people who have made an enormous amount of money, like tons of money by starting like cell phone kiosks at the at the mall. Yeah. Like ser like that's I I know one person in particular, good friend of mine. He literally sold a company for hundreds of millions of dollars. He started off by selling like cell phones at a kiosk in the mall. I mean like this you can do these things but you have to find that nexus and you have to be passionate about it and then you have to like really sacrifice for it. I'm curious on the mission statement of the Daily Wire, is the goal to hopefully change the opinions of the political adversaries, maybe the people that don't necessarily agree with your philosophies to get in more alignment with your moral standards and philosophies and political leanings and stuff like that so everyone kind of believes more so what you believe to be the ethical standard. I mean, listen, ideally, I'd love to convince everybody that I'm right. That would be wonderful. But I think that the reality of life is that uh like any market, there are the people who are impeccably opposed to you. You're not going to be able to duel with that. There are people who are apathetic. You may be able to convince some of those people to to come along. They're people who are sort of in the middle and and looking at both sides. Those are the people who I hope I'm I'm really aiming at. And then there's your base, which are people who already agree with you. So like three out of those four kind of contingents are are available to me. The people who are implacably opposed, like to the point where they think I'm Hitler or they think that I'm I'm the root of all evil in the universe. I'm not worried about convincing those people because they don't there nothing's going to change there. I'm not banging my head against a wall. I say this all the time. People ask me like what about this cousin who argues X Y and Z and it makes me so mad and I always ask them like what's the purpose of the conversation? Start with that. What are you seeking to achieve in the conversation? And again, it sounds very cold and clinical that way. But the truth is that you can think about most conversations in life that way. And if you start thinking about even personal conversations that way, sometimes it's really really useful. Now, I remember the I've told the story a thousand times, but it's it's good marriage story. You know, my wife would ask me for years, she she would come and she'd complain about a thing, and I would make the mistake of trying to solve the thing, and she'd get mad at me because she doesn't want the thing solved. What she wanted was sympathy. What she wanted was a a a kind ear to listen to the thing, which, as you might expect, is not my easiest thing. And uh and so at a certain point, I said to her, "Listen, I need you to do me a favor. I don't speak this language, so I'm going to need you to do me a favor. When you start saying a thing that's bad, is this a solutions conversation or is this a sympathy conversation? I'm just going to need to ask that not because I'm being a jerk, but because I actually want to know [laughter] so that we don't keep running into this. So, she'll tell me like she's good about this. I'll say to her like, "Do you want do you want me to like provide solutions here because I'm I'm happy to to blue sky this thing or do you want me to or do you want to talk about you know like how this makes you feel? We can we can do that too, but I just need to know which one of these things it is cuz I'm not good at reading this." And um and I feel like that that was very productive. That's true for a huge number of conversations and it's true politically as well. This is why when people will say, "Well, how do you debate?" It depends. Is it a debate? Is it a discussion? Who's the audience? What is the end goal here? And there's certain debates, like public debates, where it's not a discussion. The person isn't open-minded. It's just an attempt to establish clarity of the point of view. And that's where you get, you know, the Rex kind of moments like Ben Shapiro Rex or something. Um, but but that doesn't mean you have to be rude or mean or something. It just means that you have to, you know, go in knowing that it's going to be oppositional. That's a very different thing cuz you're not talking to this person, you're talking to these people out here, right? This is a different thing. Then there's you're talking to the crowd which is a speech and there you try to actually convince hopefully. And then there conversations with people who disagree where it's both. You're trying to clarify and convince and maybe change your own point of view. Those are the conversations I enjoy the best and those are actually the ones I do the most the most just in terms of the time spent. You know, if there's one area where I feel like uh the show and and what we do at the Daily Wire is underappreciated, it's that and we have on more guests. I personally have on more guests who disagree with me than I think anyone else in political talk probably. Um, yeah, I' I've had on people who are who are raid atheists and we have very wide ranging and I think cogent conversations. I'll have on people who are who are socialists and we'll have wide-ranging and coaching conversations like that. Like I like doing that kind of stuff, but that's a different conversation than the person who comes in ready to swing at you. It does seem as though the right in general has become a lot trendier or I I feel like social media is is beginning to steer in that direction. Why do you think that is? Cuz countercultural. So for a long time in this country the right was the culture and then the left was the counterculture and so all the kids were like ah the counter culture and now the counterculture has become the culture. Traditional values have become something that you have to whisper to your friends about right to say that for example heterosexual marriage is more society valuable than homosexual marriage which was inarguable for literally all of human history. And by the way on a utilitarian level remains inarguable today. To say that sort of stuff everybody cringes everybody cring except for all the people who don't who are like that actually is true and I can't believe that people are saying that. And when you're like 15, 16 years old, there's something very attractive about people saying things that's true, especially if you've been told that you're not allowed to say it. Now, it's easy to mix that up, and this is one of the problems that you see on the right sometimes. It's easy to mix that up with just being oppositional for the sake of being oppositional. So, there's a difference between saying things are I've said this before, there's a difference between offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being a jerk. That's not quite the same thing. And I think that the right I think everybody has a tendency because human beings are reactionary to be like, "Oh, it pisses it pisses those guys off. it must be amazing. And so it makes it difficult to distinguish between people who are saying things that are untrue but piss that side off and people who are saying things that are true and well thought out and piss that side off. But if you you know I I try to be good enough at my job and and moral enough as a human being to not say things just to piss people off. What I say what I say may may tick people off may it does. I mean but and and some of it is is trollery. I mean like burning Barbies is trollery obviously. Um but but by by the like I don't make a habit of it. Although I was asked that that YouTube video made a lot of money actually and I was asked by um some people at the company what we were going to do with that money and I said well you know just like any other business proposition you keep doubling down. We're gonna buy 800 more Barbies and we're gonna burn them. For me it was very um memorable seeing you imagery. It's this is the part that every get oh my god I can't believe you did that. Okay you guys you spent like $400 million to make a movie about giant dolls and you're like how much money did you spend to burn four Barbies? I promise you our budgeting was perfectly in line. It was fine. How did you come up with ideas like that? Because the other one that really stood that was just a Barbenheimer idea. Honest to God, like all that was was it was it's Barbheimer. I'm holding a bomb. We throw the bomb. And when we realized we didn't have the capacity in time to make a good explosion graphic. That's all it was. We didn't have the capacity to actually like make a nuke graphic that would look really cool and and like Terminator 2 of the Barbies, right? We didn't have that. So instead, I'm holding a bomb and then I'm holding a match and then I light the match and I set them on fire. And that's like because it cost zero money and zero time. That's why because the turnaround time between when I filmed that and when it went up was one day. That's why. What about like the breakdown? Cuz that was another video that really stood out. Okay, so the W breakdown. What's so funny about that is that so there's this strange dynamic that has cropped up in the last few years where I'm I will make I will I will do something that is clearly meant to be funny. Like that is clearly a joke. And then the left will be like, "Does he even know he's joking?" It's like, "Yeah, no I know I'm joking. Of course I'm joking." I mean, I did a 15minute exposition on the dumbest song ever written. Of course I know I'm joking. But then they'll be like, "Is he really joking?" But is he? It's like, "Yeah, I am." And like the undertones though, the undertones. Oh, he's I mean, first of all, I will admit that there is an undertone to these videos of moral condemnation because yes, it is bad that we have a culture that glorifies songs that talk about the moisture state of your genitals. That's a bad thing. That's not good for kids. It's directed at It's directed at teenagers. It's directed at young girls. It's stupid. It's venal. It's It's So, yes. Am I condemnatory of that? Sure. Also, is it funny that I'm I a very white person am reading slowly and purposefully bleeping out the words to Of course that's funny. I I by the way, I've been doing that routine since like 2014. And I used to do it on on my Seattle radio show except I used to pull handles water music and I used to put it underneath like and they would play that underneath me reading rap lyrics because the whole idea is that this is a degraded culture and now I'm going to place this against some of the great pieces in the western cannon and you're going to see how stupid this is. So yeah, I mean it's it was we we had a graphic at the beginning of it. It's called deconstructing the culture. I've been doing it for years but every so often one of them will just blow up and you can have two attitudes about it. One is to be like annoying and the other is like I'm kind of delighted that people, you know, are are made so both angry and happy by by something stupid poking the bear a little bit like we certainly know button. We certainly know when we make a Barbie review. So there are certain things in culture that have become sacro sanct. You're not allowed to say them. Like Beyonce is overrated. She's overrated. Or like Barbie is an unfunny movie that is filled with feminist clap trap. It's an unfunny movie that's filled with feminist clap trap. or like Cardi B is an untalented hack who's been elevated to a position of extraordinary cultural power by the fact that she's incredibly vulgar. Everything I just said. So if you say if you say these things, you're really not supposed to say them. And so yeah, I mean there I am poking a stick in the eye because how is it that those things are unsayable? That's the thing that always gets me. I I talk about politics and morality and I say things that are really politically incorrect all the time. And every time in the last several years there's been like a massive blowup. It's not about any of those things. It's about a cultural icon that the left has erected and then I've said, "I don't like that thing. It's bad. Beyonce's overrated." And like, "No." I mean, I I said in my in my video about the follow-up to the Barbie video that the internet freed me burning the Barbies like I burned a Quran or something. I mean, like it actually was like a holy writ. This is how how seriously people take their culture. First of all, you shouldn't take culture that seriously because our culture is fundamentally unserious. I could see taking Bach that seriously. Don't that seriously. Don't tell me I have to take Nicki Minaj that seriously, please. Like, ple, like, spare me. I'm a cultural snob. I will remain a cultural snob because there are standards of beauty and good in this world and Beethoven is better than Cardi B and Brahms is better than Nicki Minaj and Shakespeare is better than both of them. And trying to pretend that all of these things are flat, you know, a flattened version of culture that all cultures equivalent is stupid and it's purile and it's deadening to the human soul. And when you post pictures of you on Twitter outside the Barbie poster holding a little We We had no idea that was going to go viral. We just I saw that and I immediately was like, "This is one of the funniest things I think I've ever seen." Right. So So it it didn't occur to us because we literally did that in the spur of the moment. So we went at like 11:00 in the morning see this dumb piece of trash and I and I I I go and I I was just wearing what I had worn on the show that day. I mean on the show that day I just worn, you know, normal people clothes like a black t-shirt and black je I How many people across the United States on a given day wear black a black t-shirt and black jeans? That that's like a pretty common outfit. Okay. That wasn't like I'm clearly making fun of the Barbie movement when I'm wearing a denim jacket and a white shirt, right? Like clearly that is like no one owns a denim jacket anymore. It's not 1985. But like a black t-shirt and black jeans is pretty much like my normal go-to wear. So in any case, we we go and I'm like taking notes in the back and my producers are are cynically slow clapping all of the America Ferrer speeches and everything and uh and then we come out and right before we leave they're like, you know, we're going to have to like push this video out and we're going to put a tweet out about it. Do you want to take a picture? Should we take a picture in front of the the giant Barbie poster? And I was like, well, I mean it, yeah, sure. I mean, we're doing memes anyway, so like why not? So, I'm like there and I'm not gonna be like smiling because I hated the movie and I'm not going to be like really grumpy cuz it didn't make me like super grumpy as much as just annoyed that I wasted two hours of my life doing this And so, I'm just kind of like slightly annoyed and I'm holding a pad of paper because I wanted to show people that yeah, I like there is something funny about the fact that I sat there and I like literally took notes. But how else do you do a review? I mean, if you're reviewing a movie, this is how you do a review. You go in with a pad of paper. You think that the reviewer at the Wall Street Journal is sitting there without a pad of paper when he's watching a movie? How's he going to review the movie? He's got to write down quotes like this. So it's So the fact that that went like super duper viral and people were very upset about it. Oh my god. He took a picture in front of the Barbie poster. Oh no. Okay, Rich, you want to talk first world problems? You being upset about me standing in front of a Barbie poster at a theater, that's that's a first world problem. You want to call me an elite? You're an elite. If you I think people knew what was coming. Of course they knew was coming. that anticipated. We said we said in the tweet that I thought it was trash. Yeah. I mean, it was like that tweet had maybe more traffic than the actual video. It probably did. I mean, do we know? I feel like it was on every single platform like tens of people were nuts about the tweet. I All I said is that it's a woke piece of crap and everyone WAS LIKE, "NO, [groaning and screaming] IT'S LIKE SLOW MOTION. NO, it's like William Defoe getting shot from behind in platoon." Like, guys, get over it. I'm allowed to think that your your beloved movie about the joys of feminism is garbage. I'm sorry it wasn't Citizen Kane. That's your problem. I didn't make it. And when you get hate million views on the picture, 5 million views 55 55 million on the on the picture. But what's crazy to me is that that picture, how many views does What does a woman have on Twitter? Cuz I saw it when it was at I think 30 40 million. I think it's like 200 million. So, the fact that one picture got a fourth of what this documentary got is I really think I mean Twitter metrics are a little bit weird. Twitter metrics are a little weird cuz people scrolling past. Also, it's easier to consume a picture than it is to consume a full movie. But it's uh but yeah, I mean of all the things that I've tweeted, do I think that that one deserves to be like far and away number one? I have serious doubts about the wisdom of the American public if that's the case. But, you know, but isn't that proof that you really have to dumb things down? For most people and most platforms, the the simpler it is to consume, the better it is. Well, the more entertaining it is to consume, the better it is. And it really isn't about dumbing down, it's about entertaining it down. And so, what I take some pride in is the fact that even when I talk about politics, I hope that it's both informative and entertaining. So, if I'm doing a full breakdown of the indictment against Trump this week, then, you know, I hope that I'm going to give you all the information you need to know from a legal point of view and from a political point of view. But I hope that there'll be a few jokes along the way and you'll find it entertaining. It's a lot easier to do that about entertainment. I mean, we did a video about me reviewing Oppenheimer. It did pretty big traffic like 2 days ago. Like people like talking about entertainment specifically because it's light. That's why the and that's why the justosition of me being kind of seriously considering the message of Barbie is inherently funny, but it actually is. So on one level it's funny because obviously it's funny me talking about like the the clear narrative implications of a movie about a doll. That's funny. But also, the entire media did make it about that. The importance of the Barbie movie. Why Why was the Why was the Barbie movie significantly more important than the latest Paddington film? Why? I mean, they're both about children's toys. So, why why is one of them an in an insanely important cultural event that that the press is going gaga over and there's big articles like I read them in advance. huge articles like Vanity Fair talking with Greg Gerwig and talking with Margot Robbie and talking about their perspectives on feminism and talking with the trans person who's in the who's in the movie and all of the rest of it because they take the politics very seriously. What they don't like is that I noticed that they take the politics very seriously and I think their politics are garbage. That's the thing they don't like. What they want is to be able to promote the propaganda without anybody pointing out that it is propaganda. And so the way they treat that is that how dare you take this seriously. Oh, it's such a joke that you take this seriously. That's why The View is doing that routine. the view did this routine like, "Oh my god, isn't it emasculating that you took this movie seriously? You took the movie seriously. I noticed that you took the movie seriously. You started it. I mean, and and as far as it being emasculating, again, the the it is amazing to me how quickly members of the cultural left will jump to such transphobic notions as emasculation. It's just it makes me very upset. How dare they? Maybe I was just in touch with my feminine side. I'm a man. I can be. Or maybe I'm a woman. Who knows? I I'm curious uh how you deal with the amount of hate that you get because you get an inordinate amount of hate. I mean, it's ridiculous. I can bring up an example. Okay, this is kind of embarrassing, but I feel a little bit of shame when I say that I love Ben Shapiro. I really do. I mean, I've I've watched you for like nine years. I saw you in high school, right? Like speaking at a a college campus. I I know your whole story and I've listened to like every podcast you've been on, but I also listen to people on the left. I love Destiny, if you know who that is. He's great. We had him on the podcast. He's super smart. I love hearing him out. But one time I was on a date, okay, and I pulled up my phone and I was searching up something on YouTube and boom, clicked on YouTube. Ben Shapiro shows up, right? Immediately like, "Oh, you listen to him?" I'm like, "Yeah, I do. I think he's got some, you know, great opinions. I like to hear him out on certain things." And boom, kaput. Entire date just absolutely ruined. I'm like, "Do you know anything about him?" Gentlemen, excellent litmus test. if you do this and the girl runs, you did the right thing. I'm just like, do you know anything about him? And she's like, she's like, I mean, know he's he's racist, you know, he's anti-semite. I'm like, oh my god, anti-semite is my favorite. Anti-semitite is definitely my favorite. I love that one. Yeah. But but how do you deal with this amount of hate? And then for the people that are ashamed to say that they enjoy to hear you out on certain things like Yeah. I mean, so for those people, listen, I I totally understand that there is cultural weight against listening to anybody on the right with any level of popularity and and and it doesn't matter, by the way, that my views are significantly more nuanced on a wide variety of topics than I think that people believe they are, right? Like if you ask people on the left, are you like a huge super Trumper? And then I tell them, I didn't vote in the 2016 election because I thought that both candidates sucked. or that when I endorsed Donald Trump in the 2020 election, if you watch my endorsement video, I talked about all of his personal failings and all of his personality flaws and then I said I like his policies better than Biden, right? Like th those sorts of things they don't know. I mean, they don't know any of this stuff. But that's because the media tend to paint and when I say the media, I really mean sort of the youtuby media. They paint a very sort of one-sided picture of Listen, we had to call up and threaten to sue the economist because in in headline, they called me an alt-right personality. The alt-right hates my guts. I've gotten death threats from the alt-right. I literally arrested some guy for trying to kill my family a few years ago. The FBI did. He went to jail for a couple of years because I was too not alt-right. Like I was the number one target of online hate in 2015. Like in all of in all of the world online anti-semitism 2015 2016 I was the number one target and it was almost entirely the alt-right. Like none of that matters because the the media have decided that we're all in these sort of reactionary boxes. That's why I take pride in the fact that we have people from the I mean so on my show if if people listen to my show they'll they'll recognize that I frequently I'd say at least once every couple weeks will tell people you should listen to my show and then you should go listen to Positive America. I literally say this on the show on a routine basis. Go listen to the other side. Listen to my side. See which one you think is more convincing. I can attest to that. This happens all the time. At some point we put together a montage of how many times I've told people to go say one of the host Pots of America went on MSNBC and said that social media should censor us and take us off the line effectively like this. It's not an even game. So I understand why people feel that way because there is a weight of that is also why you get the counter culture thing that you were asking about before because when there's that much weight against a thing people sometimes take and then when they take a look at the thing and they realize it isn't what they've been told it opens up new worlds to them. So in some ways it's really negative and really bad because it's like people think a thing about me that isn't true. But on the other hand, the minute that people engage with the content and they realize that that isn't actually what the content is, they're like, "What else am I being lied about?" Because this isn't the person that I was promised. I was promised somebody who hates black people. I was promised somebody who hates immigrants and somebody who hates Muslims or hates Jews most bizarrely or hates gay people or something. And instead, what they get is not that. They're they're really bewildered by it and they think, "Okay, so I've been lied to about a lot of So in some ways the the media's sort of universalistic homogeneity with regard to what they say I am and the contrast with what I actually am is not the world's worst thing as far as taking the incoming and taking the hate. So, back in 2017, 2018, I used to obsess about Twitter, like really obsess about it because Twitter is just a giant ego machine, especially if you're somewhat notorious, if you have a certain number of followers that the the verified stream or the reply stream before there was verified uh was like you want to feed your ego, just we all tend to think of ourselves as like the center of our own movie and the center of our own story. Well, ego Twitter fed that because there's literally people who are when you're famous. There's literally people who are talking about you every moment of every like thousands of tweets an hour just about you. And I watched, you know, my my friend Andrew Breitbart, I think Twitter basically killed Andrew. I mean, Andrew was obsessed with Twitter. Um, this is in the early days when 50,000 people was a lot to be following you on Twitter. And he had, you know, a big following at that point. And he would just obsess about what people were saying on Twitter and reply and respond and all of that. And it was really hard. If I would trend on Twitter, and I I trend on Twitter, I'd say once every 3 weeks, almost like clockwork, uh, and at least before Elon took over. Now, it's a little bit more rare because the algorithms tend to be a little bit more honest about what's happening. But for for several years, it was like once every two, once every 3 weeks, I would trend. Uh, and every day that would happen, it would like ruin my day. And finally, a few years ago, my wife said, "It's ruining your day. You have kids. You have things to do. Just take Twitter off your phone because you think everybody is watching Twitter because you're watching Twitter, but nobody is watching Twitter. If you actually just get off the phone and you walk around, there'll be a bunch of people who listen to your show and they'll say how much they enjoy your show. And if you mention to them what's going on on Twitter, they will have no idea what you are talking about. And it is 100% true. But what about going to college campuses and seeing people protest? And that I always find funny. I mean, like I always find it funny because first of all, like good for you. You feel passionately about the thing. I have no problem with you going and protesting me. You want to do that? Totally. Enjoy your first amendment. That that's fine. The things they protest me about are are some of the dumbest things ever, ever, ever. Like they my favorite one was when I spoke at Boston University and they protested me because they said I was a racist. Like 200 people outside saying I was a racist. And I gave like a 45minute disquisition on the history of race in America. That was almost entirely about the evils of white supremacy for the first, you know, 200 years of America's existence. And like going through beat by beat and they're protesting. I was like, "What in the speech do you I said this at the time. I was like, I I need you to explain to me what in the speech you disagree with or or I spoke, I think it was at Stanford, and the entire speech was just about how nasty and terrible the alt-right was." And I was getting protested as a fascist. And I was like, "I don't understand what you want exactly. Like, I'm I'm not doing this for you, and I'm fine with you being pissed at me. That's that's fine. But do you not have ears? Like the thing that I'm saying, what is the thing that I'm saying right now that you find to be so dangerous and so terrible and so insulting that you are protesting me as all of these terms racist, sexist, you know, homophobe, all all this kind like what is the thing that is scaring you so much about what I'm saying that I'm getting mislabeled those things? Like name me the comment that I said and then we can discuss whether I think that that comment is taken out of context or whether I misphrased it or whether I think it's right. like we we can we can talk about those things, but you know, it rarely goes like that. So, whenever you're walking around in public outside of the college campus protest and stuff like that, uh have you ever gotten somebody that comes up to you and actually starts saying super mean things or like slandering you because it's pretty rare. It's It's rare. It's rare. Okay. So, I've I've personally never experienced anything like that, but I've probably gotten thousands of hate comments online. Yes. But it's never happened to the point where I meet someone in person and they The internet is a giant hate machine. I mean like the the because it's anonymous. How many times have you gone up to somebody and bered them in public? Never. Ever. Even people you don't like. But I also don't leave hate comments. I understand. But like that's that's and and really neither do I. Although I'll get kind of combative on Twitter. But the uh how many people do you know who have gone up and like bered randos in public? It just doesn't happen that often. When they do, you think they're like a crazy person. So it it really does not happen nearly as much as you think it does. What you do get are like death threats in the mail. You know, you you'll get people sending crap to your house like that. That kind of stuff. Does that Does that worry you like ever for your personal course? I mean, I we spend seven figures a year on my personal safety. Yeah. Seven figures a year on personal safety. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's just the way that it goes. And then what about traveling? Do you ever fly? We travel with security. Do you travel fly private? Uh we we we do fly private. It depends where. I mean, if I'm flying abroad, it's difficult to to fly private, but um yeah, domestically we'll fly private sometimes. We'll fly commercial sometimes. depends on what we can do. Um, yeah, I mean, you try to avoid particularly public places, not really because you think that somebody's going to take a shot at you, although they might, but but more because uh there's the possibility of a um somebody coming up to you and taking a swing at you or something. And then then it's a no-win situation because if you if you take a punch and go down, then the entire then the entire like, oh my god, look, somebody punched him and oh, they punched the Nazi. And if you fight back, then you go to jail. So that's the So it's so that's why security is really security is really not there to stop me from getting killed. It's really it's really there to stop these sorts of things from happening and let people know like if this happens there will be people there to stop the thing. That's really what security is more about. One thing that you said I found extremely interesting which was the belief that everyone who has sinned is not like me and the best protection of evil is to recognize it in our own hearts. And you said I think that was on Lex Freiedman right? Can you expand on that a little bit? Because I mean I like to think that there's no real way in which I could bend my morals and and do something evil, but I've also never been presented with a opportunity maybe that was as appetizing to do so. I I don't even think it's a matter of you know presented the opportunity as as presented the pressures or incentive structure. I mean the possibility of being an active participant in something evil because you believe that the others it's usually a question of ends and means. Usually evil and sin in in the political realm at least is a matter of ends and and means where you think the ends are so important that it justifies the means. Uh and that that very often happens in politics. You'll just make excuses for somebody doing something really really bad because they're on your side. And I I I don't like that. And that that is a form of sin. And you have to be very careful of of that sort of stuff. And those sorts of sins are are, you know, pretty common in politics. And when we when we think of sin, we also tend to think of like the big sins, right? We tend to think of like ten commandments type sin like, "Oh, I'd never murder Bob." Uh, I mean that's that's true. I I assume you would never murder Bob. Um, but I'm not going to assume that you would never, you know, bear false witness against your neighbor because that's a pretty broad one. And so there there might be a situation in which you're in an awkward conversation and you just kind of like spin what he said a little bit differently for the approval of people who are looking on. And we're all performing small sins every day. Uh, but you know what is small sin? What's a big sin? That's that can sometimes be a matter of opinion. And I think that that that's the nature of what religious belief is about is that you you should constantly be looking at looking at yourself and and trying to see what you could be doing better. You also mentioned on on Lex Freedman that it's not very good advice to say be a good dad or sorry, be a good person because it's too it's too broad. It's too vague. But if you say something like be a good dad, most people intrinsically they know what that is. Yes. For me, someone that doesn't have a kid yet and I always imagine how I'm going to raise my child, but I still have no idea like when do I intervene? When do I tell them that this is good versus this is bad? or do I let them figure it out for themselves? How do you know how to be a good dad? Well, so I have models. I think you my dad is an amazing dad. Um, but I think that the the there are a few kind of quick rules to being a good dad. One is that you actually have to respect your children as though they have, you know, cognizable bushes. Uh, which sometimes can be hard cuz, you know, they're not kids are not famous for being smart. They're small. They're children. They're not supposed to be adults. But you have to actually treat them with a certain level of respect and you have to treat them as though their desires are are meaningful. Uh you also have to say no and you have to set rules and you have to be willing to stick by those rules because it's your job to craft this person into a person who's capable of being a good dad of his own. So think about what you want your kid to be like as a dad. That might actually be an interesting way of doing it. What what what would you think that if you saw your kid you're you're now a grandfather, your kid is interacting with their kid. What does that look like in a way that you approve of? because you because that you probably have some general I mean it depends who the male father figures are in your life. The truth is it's hard to see how that works without modeling, right? This is why single single motherhood has been such a dramatic failure for the United States is because boys in particular really really need father figures to model what it looks like to be a good man. And when you remove that father figure, that is not fillable by a woman. It's just not. Men and women are different. There there's no such thing as a woman who can be a father. It's not it's not the same. Um, that's not to say a woman can't be an unbelievable mother and fill gaps that exist in different ways, but she's not going to be a dad. Those are two different category things. It's a category error. Um, but yeah, I mean there there are certain so I think that there when I was saying that there's an intrinsic sort of set of things, you know, that are that are bit you know what it's like to be a bad dad. You can always start you can start with that, right? I mean like I always find so that in in in Judaism there are two types of commandments. There's uh meaning like the things that you do and then there's mitzvah like the things you can't do. And I find that in most circumstances we tend to focus on the things we can do rather than the things that we shouldn't. But it's sometimes easier to do it by process elimination. In this situation, would you smack your kid? No. In this situation, would you yell at your kid publicly? No. In this situation, would you would you lecture your kid or or you know, like there there are certain things that you just wouldn't do. And then there's a lot of gray area in there, too. It's not like there's any one like the best way to be a parent. There's there's too much action. There's too much sticking and moving. But you know what it's like to be a bad dad. And by contrast, that that does leave a fairly wide area to be a mediocre to good dad. Who does it right on the left? Um in terms of having conversations. Uh so I think that it depends who you consider to be on the left. Uh mo most of the people who I think of as as doing it right are actually more now considered centrist even though their political viewpoints are probably not. Like Joe Joe Rogan is not a right-winger. Joe Rogan is probably not even a centrist, right? I mean he said he would vote for Bernie Sanders. He's liberal on all social issues. Um he's he's kind of a socialist when it comes to economics. At least he says he is, even though I don't think in practice he really is. Uh like by any classical definition, Joe is much more on the left than he is on the right. I think Joe is really good at what he does. Um, I think that, you know, there there there are some folks like Brett Weinstein who's clearly identified as as on the left, who I think does it right. It's easier for me to to sort of check off people one by one. So, if you threw names at me, I could tell you whether I think they are or not. But, um, in terms of sort of mainstreaming at cable news, it's hard to think of people who are doing it right. There are people who do it better than others. Like I think Jake Tapper does it better than Chuck Todd for example. When it comes to uh sort of online YouTube land, Destiny would be an example of somebody who I think does it better than some of the other people who argue online. Why don't you debate Destiny? I mean I' I'd be interested in debating Destiny or conversant. He Yeah. Yeah. We had such a great conversation with him for three hours, I believe. He has a lot of depth to his beliefs, which I admire. Right. He seems like he's thought things through, which makes for an interesting conversation. Yeah. My my one rule and again the is that if people are like radically personally insulting toward me or if I feel like I'm going to be sandbagged in a debate then that's not a debate anymore. It's an insult comic contest and so I'm not super interested in that. So um that is my one proviso but I haven't watched all of Destiny's stuff. So I'm not religious although my family they're they're all Jewish and I uh I've never really been to to synagogue or I've never been to church. My father side's a little bit Christian. I'm wondering if you need to be religious or spiritual in some capacity to live life and have it be as meaningful as it possibly can be or if you can find just as much fulfillment and meaning while being u I would say like not religious. So I I I can't speak for every single human. So I'm not going to say that there are people who can't find that or it's impossible to find that. I will say that it doesn't scale. That if I'm talking to like an average person, I don't know anything about you, then I would say that yes, a religious life is going to be a better life. It leads you on a pathway toward understanding that there's more in life than you. That your moral system is not the only moral system, nor is it a moral system that is irrefutable. Uh that there is a a higher goal to life. There are certain premises I think that everybody lives based off of that are effectively religious that they refuse to acknowledge. Free will being one of them. The notion we live in an understandable universe that we are capable of actually exploring being another one of them. Uh the notion that human life is of innate value. I think that's an assumption that is based on nothing. If you're not a religious person, if you're a religious person, you say this because we're all made in the image of God. If you're not a religious person, then I don't know on a logical level why a human life would be any more valuable than an elephant life or or a or squirrel life. Um, you can make an emotional argument perhaps, but I don't think you can make a perfectly logical one because there's nothing about a human being that is any different than any other piece of meat on sort of a material level. And you can say that that meat has different properties, but why are those properties more valuable? Like why why is consciousness valuable? example like what in order to say the consciousness is valuable you have to say the consciousness is good okay how do you define good for what morally good now you're talking about an isought gap that can't be bridged by atheism or agnosticism so can you live a life on a practical level that is happy and fulfilled while not filling those gaps sure you could does it scale not remotely is that going to work for millions of people no why secular humanism is is a failure as a project it collapses pretty quickly into moral relativism moral relativism narcissism hedenism that's what we're watching as the as the birth rates in the west collapse and as people in more and more are caught up in their own internal subjective assessments of self is like the the key to all human existence. What's your biggest insecurity? This is hard for me because honestly I have a really really good life. So I mean you're asking can I ask for to drill down on the question you mean like thing I'm worried about or thing that I I look in myself and I see a flaw. You look in yourself and you see a flaw. Oh, I mean I'm quick to form opinions, so I have to try to, you know, militate against that by by, you know, actively saying, "Okay, wait a second." Like, and do the reading. Um, I'm I can be intolerant of opinions that I think are dumb. And so sometimes that comes across interpersonally. I can be too cool in my calculations to other people's emotions. Uh, you know, the facts, don't care about your feelings thing is true on a political level, but interpersonally it can't be true. And feelings certainly matter on an interpersonal level. So th those would probably be the the big ones. And I have to ask, where do you invest your money? Because you've been very diversified throughout your career income. Birch gold. Birch gold. [laughter] So where do I invest my money? Uh so as I'm sure your listeners know, there's a big difference between wealth and actual like liquid assets. Sure. So obviously I am invested very heavily in Daily Wire in the sense that I own a large chunk of Daily Wire and that's a very large business. So if you were to assess my net wealth, that is a large portion of my net wealth. However, in terms of like my actual ass liquid asset base, um I I have always thought in the same way that I think about my career that if I cannot dedicate a lot of time to a thing, I shouldn't be doing the thing. And so I have financial adviserss who essentially I told them I'm young. I have a very solid cash flow. So, I want you to take the best diversified portfolio in sort of your highest risk category. So, I'm willing to lose the money, right? Like basically there's like my solid stuff that I want. There's certain percentage of my portfolio that I think of is like very solid. It's not going away. Maybe 80%. And then there's like 15% which is in like the more high-risk category maybe maybe 30% versus 50. And then the and it's probably go like 50% is in very kind of lowrisk solid returning assets. 30% is in more of a high-risisk bundle. 20% is reserved for like go for it. Sure. Uh and uh but when when I say go for it, they don't really do that. There's there's only one investment I've only made one investment in my life where I uh where I personally quote unquote picked a stock because I don't think that you can day trade without really knowing a lot about a thing. And my strategy on investment is uh is Graham Dodd strategy. So I I Benjamin Graham and David dod so the the which is the same strategy Warren Buffett uses which is essentially you're not investing in risks. you're you're mitigating your downside risk and looking at the possibility of upside. And when you buy a piece of stock, you're not buying a piece of stock because you think the value is going to go up. You're buying a piece of stock because you want a piece of that company because the company is wellrun, has a good product, has good upside. And so I don't buy things to sell them. I buy things to hold them. Yeah. Um and and so again, I'm young and that's all you have to do, right? I mean, if you just buy things to hold them and you don't pick like the worst stocks in the entire world, you the magic of compound interest is a thing. And so for me, it's the first rule is don't lose. And then the second and then the second thing that you can do is look at potential upside. So for example, I'm now a a major stockholder and on the board of a publicly traded NASDAQ corporation that's like a biotech company. The way that I picked that stock is I happen to know the CEO um and I know that he's a very solid guy and I know that he makes good decisions and the stock was wildly undervalued. I know how much through public disclosures I knew how much cash they had on their books and I saw that the the company was trading at 1/ half of its cash and so I was like well it's trading at one half its cash from all available public indicators it doesn't and in their last few quarterly reports they don't have like significant burn so why is it trading at 1/ half of its cash that's that's an undervaluation so I bought up a bunch of that stock and and the reason it was trading under its cash is because it it had a drug it failed the phase three trial it dumped from you know 20 bucks a share to like two bucks a share and So everybody else was like they're buying it on the way up and I was like well no I'm going to wait and now now it dump but it's got a big bag of cash right here that's worth at least $4 a share. I can buy it at $2 a share. There's no risk. Yeah. What about alternative investments? Because I've noticed that's a Zenith Rolex Daytona. Yeah. Yeah. You know your watches. Yeah. That's right. Uh so yeah I do have a bit of a of a watch collection. Um mainly because they're they're pieces of art. Um but again buy to hold meaning like watches as a a as sort of a hobbyvestment are are good because depending on the brand uh and that's basically you need one of the big three or a uh or Rolex. Those are those are the ones that will actually acrew in value over time if you hold on to them long enough. Uh there are a lot of other beautiful watches. Joerger makes beautiful stuff but tends to on the gray market sell for less than its price. Um, but watches are great because you get to wear them around and then if you don't like them anymore, you can sell them and not lose any money, which is more than you can save for the vast majority of other sort of luxury assets. You buy a nice car and and within 5 seconds it's worth half of what it was when you bought it. Uh, so yeah, it's a very watch. I have the original 1969 uh the El Primero. So the same movement as that. So what I really wanted was the stainless steel version of that and then prices went nuts. So they did, but now they're coming back down because all all the Bitcoin guys had bought watches and then when Bitcoin went blast like a year and a half ago then so this is the mistake that I made. I bought a couple of paddocks and I bought them when uh like at the at the height of the like just on the other side of the height. I was like, "Oh, they're they're dropping. We're good." I didn't wait long enough. And so yeah, I I I didn't do well on those. Um but again, my view is I wasn't selling them in the next year, so what do I care? Just hold I'll give my I'll give my son. That's fine. That's the This is a Jordan Petersonesque question. And it's a nice ender to a viewer that's watching that maybe isn't just happy. They're not finding themselves like optimistic and positive when they wake up in the morning, which is a great indicator of your just overall mental well-being. How do you advise that they become happy and live a good and meaningful life? You have to do things. You really have to do things. And and it sounds vague, but it means like when Jordan says make your bed, he means it. Like actively make your bed. Like do do the small things that give you a sense of activity and purpose in the world. And that could be volunteering at a local charity if that's a thing that you want to do. Or it could mean that you need to search for a job and if you don't get a job today, it could mean that that you have to there's a great I don't know if you guys watched The Bear on FX. Phenomenal. It's a great show. And season 2 there's an episode where this guy is kind of a nerd do well and he's kind of a he's kind of a borish jerk and he is it's about a restaurant in Chicago. Um, and they're season two they're trying to build this into like a beautiful restaurant and one of the people who's sort of a holdover is a negative down guy and the the his his friend/cousin sends him to goes learn how to stage at like a fivestar restaurant with with a Michelin star. Um, and he um and the entire episode is he starts off and he's just there cleaning forks. That's all they they'll allow him to do. Like you need to clean the forks and they keep coming back and they're like there's streaks on the forks. He's like, "Why do I give a what do I care if there's a streak on the fork?" He's like, "There's a streak on the fork. You're going to clean these forks. They're all going to have no streaks on them because this is not a restaurant that that does streaks on forks." And then he's told like he and then he learns and he he sort of embibes that ethic and suddenly he's like, "Oh, I see. This is a restaurant that doesn't have streaks on forks. That means that I have to come in here in a suit. That means that I have to actually up my game. That means that I have to." So, like doing the small things leads to the bigger things. This is actually a quite it's both an arisatilian concept and a very Judeaic concept. People tend to think of of the commandments in Judaism, the mitzvot, the things that you do as like, oh, there are these weird things that you do every day, right? You get up in the morning and you wash your hands in a certain way or you get up in the morning and you pray and then you say a blessing before you eat and then you eat and then you say another blessing after you eat and it's all very formulaic and why are you doing all these things? And the answer is do the small things and do them well and it allows you a pathway to virtue. That's the difference between sort of Plato and Aristotle. Plato basically says that you you grasp the big idea and that maybe leads to virtue and Aristotle is like do all of these things and that leads you to cultivate virtue. Um, and so Judaism is very much a resetilian in that sense. It's like get up in the morning, do the This is why I think the framework of religion is super helpful for a lot of people because it gives them a thing to do every day. You're going to do the thing. You might not like doing the thing. You may not be in the mood to do the thing. In the mood is one of the worst ideas anybody ever came up with. Who cares whether you're in the mood? I'm in the mood to get up with my kids at 5:45 in the morning. No one's in the mood to do that. But doing that thing is what gives you meaning in life. In the mood is is really stupid. So like the you're depressed, you're not going to stop being depressed by being in the bed. You can either be depressed being in the bed or you can be depressed while you do a thing and then it may turn out that as you do the thing, you become less depressed. Change what you do and it may change your emotional state. I heard a great quote that was happiness and meaning is not to be pursued but it will ensue which I think I think that's right. Yeah. Sums that up. Ben, thank you so much. Hey, thanks guys. I really appreciate it. is like a monumental moment in my life and I'm just I'm just so happy that you never seen Jack so happy for a guest ever in the entire history like I think we started the podcast specifically to one day have you on it. That's awesome. I appreciate it guys. This is cool. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And with that said, you guys, until next time. Until next time. Uh before you get up,