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 in offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being a Traditional Values have become something that you have to whisper to your friends about we spend seven figures a year on my personal safety seven figures here what makes you think 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 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 can see one news article from the left that claims that Adam slams hocal and migrant crisis but the right says the tour 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 grab news is offering 30 percent 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 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 okay biggest fan one of my biggest fans okay found them 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 you feel enough in this matriarchal society I'm definitely Beneath You're benoff I'm Bena that's 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 is a bad role model what do you say first of all I liked the Barbie movie it was a fun light-hearted movie got me laughing some of the jokes in there that's yeah you're allowed to you're allowed to enjoy it you're wrong but you're allowed there's nothing against American law that forbids you from from enjoying the Barbie movie it just means that I have questions about your taste and Brett's taste and Michael moles's taste and half the people work for me so you know there 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 uh she hosts 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 intonations of your voice the way you speak you have so many mannerisms that I think you're 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 I think I don't spot enough things about myself perhaps and so yeah 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 Brad I mean they're they're not they're not wildly off that's funny I mean my younger sister classically Abby who's on YouTube also and there's some resemblances to Brett and 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 23andMe DNA test and it came with 100 ashkenazic 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 and 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 sort of a 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've been writing for the UCLA daily Bruin and I was writing sort of a point Counterpoint column and that turned into a regular column and I went to my father and I said do you think that it's good enough to be in like regular newspaper and it came up with this indicator called Creator Syndicate which would take columns and send them out to 100 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 contract so I was still a minor and I started writing a syndicated comment I was 17. pretty much every dumb column I've written by the way is between the ages of like 17 and 23. but I would say like the vast majority of dumb things I've said were during that period uh you know because that's usually when you say most dumb things in your life in any case I finish UCLA I read a book while I'm at UCLA I go to Harvard Law I started there when I was 20. and I write another two books while I was at Harvard Law by the time I leave Harvard Law I decide I want to work at a law firm or at least give it a shot and I really want to learn how real estate works because everybody 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 because that is precisely when the real estate market is collapsing right that is the subprime mortgage crisis and so I'm sitting in this beautiful office overlooking Century City every day for like 10 hours a day doing nothing and they're getting increasingly upset because I'm not billing hours and when they do bring me work then I'm doing the work too fast because this is sort of one of my skill sets I speak fast I type fast I write fast I edit quickly that is not what you want as a lawyer who's 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 decided I couldn't take it and after about 10 months I had met my wife during this period after about 10 months I turned to my wife and she turned 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 quickly win Proctor and I took a job for one-third of the pay working as a lawyer in-house counsel for a company called Talk Radio Network which is the radius indicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingram because I wanted to be in that industry but I ran column for years I already had books at this point but I wanted to learn the radio industry because I grew up listening to Rush Rush Limbaugh and in La Larry Elder and so I made a deal with the company and the deal with the company that I was working for was I would spend half of my day doing legal work because they needed an associate in-house Council and I would spend half of my day doing production work I wanted to learn inside out how the industry worked so I would sit there and I would cut the audio clips like with the actual sound program probably half the clips that you heard on Michael Savage's Laura Ingram's show between the years like 2009 to 2012. I cut those uh so or if there's Montage I was cutting that or if there was a monologue by one of the hosts there's a possibility I was writing talking points that sort of thing in the meantime I was also ghost writing books so 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'd say okay and I'll just churn out a book in three weeks and so you put together a few of those a year plus you know whatever income I was making for 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'd been making at the law firm but it was two-thirds to three quarters of what I was making at the law firm I worked there for about three years and then there came a point where I just couldn't see a future at that company or for that company it didn't seem like a direction that I 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 so it's been eight years uh nine years since I've known Andrew I've known for a decade at this point I'm in my mid-20s I'm talking to Andrew and Andrew's like you know we really need an editor at large over here at Breitbart we need to staff up so would you like to would you like to come work over here so I joined on at Breitbart as an editor at large when I was in my mid-20s and I was there for let's see 2012 to 2016. so I was there for about four years as always I had multiple streams of 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 strategy by the way also a pretty good investment strategy yeah it's a diversification strategy for your time and for your career if you can do it and then you find the thing that actually works and then that's where you push so while I was working there I also got a job simultaneously as 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 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 boycotts against the right and get those shows canceled and so we don't like that tactic but the only way that people are going to back off that tactic is if that is mutually assured destruction as 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'd wake up at 5 30 in the morning I'd go work I would go do my morning show uh from six to nine 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'd write a piece a day for Breitbart I was editing I was editor-in-chief uh with my one of my business partners is daily wire Jeremy boring and I can explain how about Jeremy in a second we were running through the world 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 in 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 relatively I grew up in I grew up in a house I grew up in 1100 square foot house in Burbank California with three sisters one bathroom two bedrooms um shared a room with all three of my sisters until I was 11 years old so we weren't Rich by any stretch of the imagination but my family is very very solid so I always felt like you know worst case scenario if all else fails I still have a wonderful family I could move back in with my parents for a little while until I get back on my feet I had a Harvard law degree that's worth a lot of money so you know I had that kind of in my back pocket that allowed me to be more risk seeking in the way that I approached my career I mean when I first when I first met my wife I told her I remember we were dating and she said you know we were talking about kind of what what does the future look like we were talking about finances and I said I'm I'm gonna make millions of dollars I'm gonna make a lot of money was it the first time you met her uh that was not in her first date that was probably in life that was probably in like our outs that was once we've gotten a little more serious so for us that meant like our fifth day because yeah exactly I mean we had our first date on September 5th and then we were engaged December 22nd and it's 2008. so there's not a ton of time there yeah um but yeah I mean when and I remember her laughing and thinking that was selling in fact one of 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 bring up and this is a historic document going on way back to the talmud called the katuba 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 de minimis amount because it's basically pro forma but in the Moroccan Community this is like a point of pride is that you go to the wedding my wife's of Moroccan extraction and you go to the wedding and somebody reads the amount over goes ooh ah all right so my father in law sits me down one day this is right before we're getting married and he's like I have a very important question to ask you I was like okay and he's like how much money do you want to put in the katuba and I was like I don't care don't matter to me I'm not we're not getting divorced so put whatever you want like literally whatever you want I don't care and he's like well you you name the number all right fine put 10 million dollars I don't care and he looks at me and he starts laughing he goes she's not worth 10 million dollars we'll put a million dollars and um I frequently remind him that he is a horrible negotiator so wait wait um but I'm confused so if you put let's just say a million dollars in this is that what's split upon no that's what you owe her that's what you owe her is the guy owing the girl yes that document yes even if the girls they hire her yes that is customary yes I mean it's 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 a brother-in-law of mine who's a little older than I am actually negotiated it out like because he's also Moroccan so they both took it super seriously like I took it not seriously at all I'm like whatever it doesn't matter customary to negotiate with your future father-in-law I mean trying to get this are you trying to get it down he's trying to get it up I mean apparently if you both take it seriously that's a thing right for me I didn't care I'm very American so I was like whatever it doesn't matter um yeah everything's community property anyway it's California like right that's it's actually but that of course that never entered my mind but I I turned him today and I'm like you know that like you really jacked your daughter in this document you put her in a Barrett so with that supersede then the California's community community problem in that case it probably not I mean so now you get into 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 you know so you know by by this time this is right before the launch of daily wire so but we've gotten up to like 2015 I'm working like six seven jobs I'm cobbling together maybe four hundred thousand dollars 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 vocal man income is coming from I'm getting you know 75 grand from one place I'm getting a 100 Grand from another but like the bulk of my income is coming from this and um we just again just taking a mortgage so by this point I've already lived in this is my third house we had a condo we sold it to buy up we sold that to buy up we had just so we had just closed out a really really nice house in L.A and so we do a meeting where Jeremy has come up with a strategy and Jeremy so I can backtrack here to explain kind of my relationship with Jeremy for those who are interested because Jeremy obviously is now personality in his own right and with Jeremy's razors and Jeremy's chocolates and the whole godcage thing and all that so I've known Jeremy since like 2009. uh so I've known Jeremy for quite a while and he and I met while I was working at talk radio network we really hit it off and we started immediately talking about like what are ways we can do business together and so I started kicking him business I started like finding him projects that he could do for other outlets that like scribing videos YouTube kind of videos which kind of broadened the scope for him and created a body of work that he could then pitch outside well in about 2014 he and I were talking and I was working at Breitbart at the time and uh he had been talking with the folks at David Horowitz Freedom Center and it was his idea to get me into David Horton's Freedom Center to launch truth Revolt so now he and I are actual business partners by that point we're actual business partners we proposed a few businesses before that very since Andre 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 Revolt is doing pretty well and Jeremy hits upon a revelation and there are two big revelations in sort of my relationship with Jeremy Revelation number one comes in 2013 when I do the Piers Morgan interview about what happened yeah you accused me of standing on the grades 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 want to be a director and and he came to LA to be an actor and he had been in writer's rooms and all of that and I was this I went to Harvard Law School I've 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 him we had strategized and that kind of stuff and um and after the interview he called me up and he said we have this completely backwards I'm the business guy and you're the talent so that was you know all credit to him on that one I mean it takes an act of humility truly 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 needed the front now 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 dredge'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 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 dredglings you'd like create a story you'd send it to Matt or one of his editors in hope against hope that he would post it well in 2014 2015 Germany and I are discussing this and I turned to Jeremy and and I said what became sort of the first of our business aphorisms which is luck is not a business strategy right you can't rely on the kindness of strangers we're not Blanche Dubois here like we actually need a strategy and Jeremy said well I want to look into this and so he he started looking into it and he came up with this marketing strategy and he realized that there was a real Arbitrage opportunity in Facebook that Facebook was where all the crowd was all the eyeballs were that the cost for advertising on Facebook was pretty affordable and that the 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 Horowitz Freedom Center and let's pitch them so you get them in the room and Jeremy starts making the pitch which is we're going to spend we need one million dollars and if you give us one million dollars we will generate you a money machine that lasts for all the 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 Slaton Texas he's got a soft Texas Lil speaks a lot slower than I do I'm like a fast talking Jewish kid from La yeah 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 Germany would re-explain the thing but slowly and in Texan and suddenly they would understand in any case this time it goes backwards Jeremy explains the deal they do not understand it at all they 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 at this point I was really frustrated and pissed and I take out a napkin and a pen 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 gonna spend money on Facebook Facebook is going to generate traffic for our website we're going to monetize that through advertising and subscriptions back to Facebook right and we're just gonna spin up yeah 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 want to keep me on a 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 gonna stick around for that so now we're both jobless we both had new mortgages and so we're 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 because he did it with truthful we know that I'm capable of editing websites I did 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 decided we're going to go out to Market we have two choices at this point Choice number one is we mortgage our houses and just do the idea ourselves and this was you know in retrospect what we probably should have done yeah 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 exactly this plan it's exactly this plan 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 triumphant in terms of running daily wear 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 about the family they get all sorts of pitches they're billionaires you know people pitch them all the time on investments and this guy at the end of the table turns to me after I've been going for a while and he says to me you know we 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 initial amount of money they put into the company it was as an angel investor was 4.8 million dollars we have never taken an outside dollar at the company we did 200 million dollars in Revenue last year what do you think that original investment is worth today and I mean I have ideas uh I mean given the splits of the company let's just say well into the nine figures unbelievable now could this have Dawn been done for less than a million dollars in a hindsight 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 actively you know tapped out the money that they gave us by that point but we were spending heavily on marketing I don't know the budgeting I'd have to go back and look at it I know that our original expectations of what the company was going to do and where the revenue was going to come from from were totally wrong 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 I think our original pitch Had Me Like My podcast it suggested that after five years I'd have 200 000 listeners after like a year I had 200 000 listeners and today we have like a couple of million listeners so it was off by like an order of magnitude um the same thing is true with regard to subscription so in our original subscription proposal was like if we're really lucky we'll get to like 100 000 subscribers after five years we're eight years in we have a million subscribers like that was totally and meanwhile conversely we would thought because this is the way that the markets worked at the time and this is just another as I say if if all of business and many parts of investment in life are about diversify and then push where you see daylight then this is it right like when we structured the business the internet was programmatic advertising on websites this is how you made money right Grudge made money by having ads on the website right by made money by having ads on the website that's where the money was subscription businesses were still considered sort of a weird thing I remember when Rupert shifted Wall Street journals and subscriptions it was super controversial at the time people were like what is he doing he's gonna 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 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 any Commerce which is a fairly large chunk of our Revenue how many employees do you have today 260 to 280 yeah I mean we're constantly increasing yeah and how do you just randomly get in a room with billionaires because that's those types of people are extremely tough to access yes so I mean this is where knowing people who know people is really kind of important and putting yourself in position to know those people is really important so I always recommend that people go to places where there is cross-class pollination this is why actually Church in 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 means that the more people 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 and businesses 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're they're 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 things all the time though 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 well I mean quite often if it's casual Maybe not maybe people just ignore it I mean roommates are a little more casual but as sort of like in business if somebody does you a favor you feel bad about it because now you know you have to repay the favor yes I mean that's just the way that it's coming it's a good point yeah exactly I mean nothing comes for free and so you you if you put yourself in a position it weirdly enough it's actually a kind of cool psychology magical 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 and by the way the reason that you don't want to do it is specifically because of that right you don't want to do that because like ah really do I have to ask that guy for that thing now puts me in a position of owing him yeah you have to ask the guy for the thing 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 useful and all of that so you know asking people to connect you to other people it's an easy ask it's one that's easy for people to accomplish it makes it gives them a good feeling inside because they helped you and it also you know 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 netsuite it's thirty six thousand twenty five and one thirty six thousand because over 36 000 companies have already upgraded to netsuite and stopped wasting time on things like manual data entry and sifting through scattered data 25 because netsui has spent 25 years helping businesses drive down their costs and one because netsui is an all-in-one solution that allows you to manage all of your kpis or key performance indicators with one efficient system netsuite can help you reduce the mistakes in manual data entry because trust me there's always mistakes when you're doing something manually and they can help you scale 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 netsuite's popular kpis checklist right now for free at netsuite.com ice again that's netsuite.com ice to get your kpis checklist again for free netsuite.com iced 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 get I'll give you an example there was a time a long time ago where this is 2013 maybe I was at a fundraiser for a local fundraiser for John McCain and for some of the members of the so-called Young Guns at that point that was a gara cancer no longer in Congress and uh Kevin McCarthy is the only Young Gun left it's like Paul Ryan Eric can't or those were the Young Guns in any case there is 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 knew good friend of mine he was like you know you're an up-and-comer when you meet Elliott 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 because he knows I'm gonna 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 said like what's your end goal and at the time I was like this is 2008 so I was 24. so I was like and then I'm gonna be president and 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 gonna like that's not gonna happen and I walked away and I realized that the mistake that I had made is that like that's really kind of a vague plan like it's even though Town specific it actually is not very specific if I'd come in and said like okay let me give you step by step by step here's how I'm gonna 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 gonna be president but telescope a year down the line sure then that is a much better pitch by the way this is also I've learned a good pitch when it comes to public markets when it comes to public markets the market demands A Five-Year Plan and nobody actually wants The Five-Year Plan because you give them The Five-Year Plan it may be too broad and then investors are like 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 gonna pay these five specific radio stations to put me on the air and I'm gonna monetize that to the tune of X that's it that's a concrete thing so that's just uh you know things that you learn along the way by the way we've completed all of those steps except for the last so I mean I will say that I wasn't that far off but it's it but you know you still have plans to run for office not until I'm 70. until you're 70. because you can't be president unless you're an oxygen area right I mean those are the rules it's in the Constitution everything I'm not even 40 man like this by the way you know again you know what the president gets paid and I'm having a better year like Babe Ruth I'm having a better year than the president so but do you actually could you see yourself at some point in the future running for a 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's 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 I 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 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 the legislature to do that pretty rare that A legislature denies a wartime president or a President Who declares a word in Wartime that 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 are you proposed yeah we got engaged yeah like September 5th to December 22nd I was 20 I was 23 when he got engaged and 24 he got married and she was 20. okay so I'm 24 right now okay so you're not your horse man there are no prospects they're 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 so I think that that's that's actually real easy determining the wrong person like that narrows the field quite considerably um so the right person so for me you're talking about yeah not to not 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 are these like basic preconditions to wanting to be with the person but those people tend to think of those as like the only conditions or is 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 gonna have hardships and you're gonna have tragedies and you're going to have you know difficulties and they're going to crop up not like some days they're gonna 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 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 match 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 things that we did share were the unshakable things now this is what age does that tend to be ingrained like let's say 35 40 were things people just get set in their ways I mean no I think it's way earlier okay 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 that's way too late that's way too late I mean how many people do you know who are who are 28 and have no ingrained you know habits or things that they are they're really kind of used to ways of life patterns of thinking when things get like fully fully angry when you stop changing is really about 70. like you're gonna change all the way up to one but but change in your life is sort of a reverse exponential curve right I mean like you changed a lot the younger you are and then it kind of diminishing returns right over time so so The Sweet Spot to get married is probably as the curve is here 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 it's harder you're both you know on the same page I mean it's definitely harder Yeah the more set in your ways you are now I will say that you do want to be set in your values right so the thing that you need to be identical are your values or if not identical very close to identical right so like for for my wife and for me so my dad and I quote this all the time he always says that in order for people to get married you have to make the pre-commitment in your mind that you're ready to get married you don't meet the person that you want to marry and then decide you want to get married you decide you want to get married and then you meet the person you want to marry because it's a different headspace it's a different way of thinking about the thing it's the difference between saying I'm going to toss five bucks at a at a penny stock and saying I'm gonna spend a hundred thousand dollars investing this portfolio five dollars in a penny stock he just toss five dollars a penny stock who cares you know 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 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 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 nasty and then of course she it turns out she's the nicest person ever my wife is an incredibly nice human being which is why we that's where the contrast one 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 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 non-observing you are and those can make a really really big difference uh 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 node to a question you think is vital I mean there there are 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 had gotten 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 I she was beautiful and I was like well you know it was really nice to meet you and yeah no I mean like that's but there's a difference between political disagreements and value disagreements right and and which one would come sometimes so it's so I 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 but by that point I'd already been doing politics even when I met her I've been doing politics semi-professionally for like six years so I could see that these were not positions that she was like ardently committed to right these are these were not positions where she was like I saw some weak points in there well I mean it wasn't it wasn't like she came in like strong it wasn't like I said I'm a pro-life person and she was like what how could you be the pro that's terrible how could you be a probably person it was more like well I'm not sure you're right it was more like I'm not sure about that you know some questions and that was like okay so this is not like a deeply firmly committed belief on your part again she's allowed to have her beliefs but if it had been like a deeply firmly committed belief that had been very difficult to get past in the same way that if we had walked into the first date and she said you know I have questions about God I've been like okay that's all right and if she walks in and said I hate religion and atheist like there's certain things where in 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 her 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 certainly as per life as I am because 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 and she has a chance she doesn't follow the news all that much and I didn't want that I didn't want a political marriage like I love the fact that we got married before I was famous and that she still does not care that I meet Senators on the regular and she doesn't like none of that stuff is particularly impressive to her and I find that incredibly charming and wonderful so my concern is how my partner is going to respond in specific circumstances so like let's say tragedy strikes or let's say she was lied to or let's say she had a family falling out or something like that how she responds to certain circumstances I feel like is more telling about her personality and who she is than what she says she 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 three months whatever people tend to believe that means that we went on like 12 dates like you went on a date 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 event and I 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 and 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 as you can see are in different circumstances 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 because you have to be thinking about how you build a household and the blessing that you typically give at a Jewish wedding is that somebody should be zoka to build a bison Israel which which means in very ashkenaz Hebrew that you should Merit to build a faithful house in Israel a marriage is missional it's not just a contract it's a mission so what does that mission look like what are the end goals of that mission and then you have to orient your values toward what the end goals of that mission are so you know their marriage is where the mission is just to have a good time and go on vacation okay well if that's your central value then that's your central value for us our Central value is how do we raise Jewish Orthodox moral kids okay that means we have that's like several things in a row there right Jewish which means I have to marry inside the religion Orthodox which means a certain level of practice and moral which means we have to have certain agreements on 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 three o'clock in the afternoon and we wrapped it up around six o'clock in the evening and we we walked and we talked about like Free Will and determinism these are like issues on date number one and you can ask my wife like that like day number two was like death penalty and gun control get into that like like you meter you're just like hey what are your thoughts on determinism yeah weed them through you know yeah exactly yeah you gotta run them through the paces it was more like you know you get past hobbies and it's nice to meet you and and then you know the conversation flows or it doesn't and it kind of 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 you 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 uh I said to her um I don't hold by like any of this you know three-day nonsense where I'm gonna you know make you feel was like insecure like are we going on a second date I would like to go on a second date with you so if so name me a time and date and she and she did and the rest is history like from her side it's kind of funny because yeah I drove up so after after law school I was like I'm a lawyer I'm a lawyer in La I'm gonna get a car so I gotta so my first car had been a 1986 Honda Civic with no air conditioning that in my family was sort of a hand-me-down it started with me we bought it for 400 it went to my sister eventually became known as trustee Rusty and uh and and my second car was a 2006 a 2006 Mustang GT convertible uh which was baby blue and I drove up and the way my wife tells it she I drove up and she's like who is this and then I got out and I was wearing like I didn't know how to dress at all and those I still really don't and I have people who give me clothes to wear um but I I no I know I think a little bit more but that's after years of prep at that time like my idea of a nice outfit was like a faded polo shirt that was at least a size too big and some like Dad jeans and so I get out and I look like a complete nerd and if you look at pictures of me in those days like my hair now is at least somewhat okay but my wife saw that and she's like oh no he's just a nerd that's good and so like she it's not like the girl who takes off or the guy the girl who wears glasses the guy just takes off the glasses like there you go yeah exactly I saw that yeah yeah what you really saw is like the opposite right it was like it was like it was like oh he's driving up all cool and boss and but what a jerky so who drives that car and then I get on him like a super nerdy guy and she's like okay okay it'll be fine we're 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'm a warm ball of mush with my kids and with my wife like I'm I'm a 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 then you get married and goes to like 20 on the upper end because when you're with your partner and it's really happy it's phenomenal and like negative 20 because if you're at odds or if something bad is happening in your partner it's the worst thing in the world and then you have kids and all limits are completely removed like by far the worst things that happen are with your kids they're like my my daughter my oldest daughter for example she had open heart surgery when she was a year and a half like though like horrendous um and it's like the worst things that happen but the best things that happen are like three days ago I've got all I've got all four of my kids they're on one room and the baby is little he's like two months old and the and my three-year-old daughter is is having her hair brushed by 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 she I I would say that she also taught me that communication can be different to different people so yeah I can knew that before but it certainly matures you because being married means that you can't communicate to your wife in the same way that I would communicate to other people like if we get into debate like early on in our in our marriage if I would start like getting into America should be like stop going into debate mode you need to stop it right now because you can't talk to your wife the same way that I would talk to somebody on a podcast it's ridiculous you can't do that I mean sure I could destroy my wife with facts and logic but like what's it like what what exactly how is that going to redound to either of our benefits like again my favorite phrase in marriages would you rather be writer would 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 gonna have to you're just gonna have to suck it up when do you suck it up though when you know like hey this is where I'm going to explain my point and here's where I'm gonna suck it up um so so 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'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 are 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 at the 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 gonna 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 in 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's that point of like high irritation for my wife but that's just the way it is and so she's gonna you know like she it's annoying it'll continue to be annoying no it's it's situations like that you know little things that you let go because to not let them go would be stupid and Petty right 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 gonna trip her like a cat like we're gonna put the phone in her so that she never loses her phone again but am I gonna get like ticked off every time she loses her phone that's going to be a really bad thing uh so you 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 it comes to little things you most of most of relationships is is a lot of relationships is letting those things go which makes you a more patient human and it really is much more applicable with your kids than your spouse all that stuff is way worse with your kids than your spouse I love that quote about the range of emotions that you feel through different stages of life I've actually quoted that before on this podcast and it just uh I just told me that before I told him that before I really hope that that does prove to be the case when I do end up finding a spouse and then end up having kids because that sounds that sounds really nice actually it's something that sounds it's amazing and it sucks all at the same time I mean like I always like to present you know the full panoply I'm not gonna 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 1 and 16 right because it's one half to the fourth power so it's like because at any given time there's a 50 shot they'll be good or bad and so all four of them being good at one time it's like one out of 16. now the good news is all four of them are only bad one out of 16 times but most of the time at least one or two of them are being a problem you know that it's really rough I mean like when kids are being bad when they're being jackasses it's really really tough and they are I mean they're really they can be really annoying and time consuming and then again there's nothing better in the entire world than when your kids are giving 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 so I will say that yeah this is this is really why I think that it's important to start Young 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 so by the time we had kids already we had launched daily we we launched daily wire let's see I had one kid by the time we launched anywhere um shoot but she was very little and my wife is the one who really had it hard my wife was in medical school at the time so she was in medical school all the way through our first two and she was still finishing residency pregnant with our third so that was really rough for her like basically for me it was always priorities my kids always come first always 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 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 watch 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 that I can tell you you know how we sort of did it well we were starting the company starting the company is a lot harder as you say the hours were insane they're 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 two-year-old doesn't care so much um I as I said my wife's in residency and I would literally like take our just so that you could see the kids like for 15 minutes a day I would pick I'd take them in the car I'd Drive 45 minutes to her in the car with the kids she'd walk out she'd eat dinner in the car while visiting with the kids she'd go back in I'd drive home with the kids I'd put them to bed my day now my kids don't know I have a job right because that was my priority so it remains my priority so the way that this basically works I wake up my kids wake me up every morning at like 6 a.m and I get up and I make breakfast for them I get them dressed I get them ready for the day 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 try to work out I try to get everything done between the Windows 7 45 AM 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 four hour period I'm basically at their disposal they're exceptions I mean there's times when I'll have a business call and I'll have my dad come over or the nanny watches them or my wife you know my wife doesn't have to work if she doesn't want to now so she so she you know picks up a lot of that slack but my goal is that basically between 3 30 and 7 30 I'm almost entirely at their disposal they go to bed I start working again I pick up the phone I make a few phone calls I do what I need to do if there's an emergency people can get a hold of me but I tend to be very terse both on the phone and an email so that's so I again doing things quickly is very helpful but segmenting the time like that means that my kids they're not even aware that like they get when I go on a business trip for one night they get like upset they where are you going or if I have work on if I don't get home from work until five they're like What's Happening why is it 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 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 yourself with regard to the company you mean well yeah yeah I mean with regard to the company um so my view on hiring and firing so I don't do the hiring and firing at Daily wire right Jeremy really is more responsible Caleb is really more responsible for that I 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 stand off about it but I'm not the person who's in the interview meetings but with that said my general view of hiring and firing is that the entire if you have to fire somebody it's because it's your mistake not theirs almost always uh it was your mistake in putting them in a position where they were not going to succeed I I think that very often employers will try to cram a square block into into a round hole uh or they'll say you know I wish that this person wore 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 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 a thing but enough responsibility if the thing goes wrong they also get held accountable for that which means you have to give people clear metrics of success you can't just be like do a thing it has to be and here's what I wanted to look like in kind of General outline and you have to hit this Mark have you noticed that Mark I that's fine but you need to explain to me why you didn't hit that Mark and usually five rings 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 suss out this is another one of kind of the sayings that we have a daily wire is that uh you you can't teach you can't teach effort you can't if if people want it they want it and if they don't want it they don't they don't want it and you can't make somebody into a person who has effort into a person who wants it as much as there are lots of talented people and they just don't 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 Schneider on the podcast and he had a great quote on that he said hire for attitude and train for aptitude I think I think that's right I think that's right 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'd rather hire a bunch of kids at a high school who have 1450 SATs and no college degree then a bunch of kids of the college degree who have been told that you know they are owed 150 000 a year for finger painting if you give me like raw talent and Grit and much much rather have that than than you know somebody who's even been working in the field for 20 years I'm a big fan of apprenticeships I think first of all virtually nobody learns how to do a job at 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 times like 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 right that's what I always say that's what we both did that's what Jack did so Jack sent me seven emails over the Span in maybe eight months and said I want to come work with you I'll do anything you want to follow it up you don't have to pay me I just want to work give me something to do please give me something to do please monthly it was almost a year later I said okay fine you want to hear some busy work for you to do you finished it in like two days yeah and it was like 18 hours of work he's like give me more yeah right awesome that's so many different things I mean my mom was very much like that my mom started off as a secretary she had an ed degree from from Boston University and she started off as a secretary at a film and TV company because there was an opening in the paper and she ended up as as vice president of the company because that's what 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 will never say anything that puts us in legal Jeopardy here's daily wire we comply with all legal restrictions requirements and obligations but with that said unpaid internships are absolutely vital because why the hell would I pay an intern for a job when I can get a college graduate with a year of experience to do that job for the same pay all you're doing is depriving people of the opportunity to actually get good at the thing you're expecting people to start off at a level of good it's really really stupid it's really stupid I took in unpaid internships over and over and over again I was in an unpaid intern to ad firm it was great it taught me how to how to you know right as an in pithy fashion again I took a job for one-third of the pay that I normally would make because you need to get good at the thing this is another one of my recommendations for people who are trying to you know break in and they're aggressive is there is no job that is below you you you like if you think there's a job below you that that is wrong when this company started starting 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 five million dollar infusion Caleb is in the back room with a hammer and nails and wood and he's just nailing wood wood and that that was like that's the background that you see on the first step of the first episode 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 yeah you could afford to do that because you could live with your parents you could have something to fall back on 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 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 would it be the poor kid is that like 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 is 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 higher why because of minimum wage because why would you pay a 16 year old minimum wage when I can pay a 19 year old minimum wage or a 20 year old minimum wage when you artificially raise the 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'll now see people who are suggesting that you have to have a college to agree to be a barista at Starbucks why because you're paying that person 25 an hour like that 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 it I'm not saying it's not a problem with unpaid internship I'm just saying that the policy recommendation that is being made to cure that which is to mandate pay for unpaid interns does not cure the problem it exacerbates the problem it means I'm just not going to have any why would I have a paid intern why don't you hire an employee it's a pain in the ass like there's a it creates all sorts of legal obligations it's it's it's really foolish 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 that you're supporting yourself you're trying to get through college try and go all that stuff I don't know when you guys had your first kind of job or your first internship your first apprenticeship but I had someone I was like 13 or 14 years old me too I mean 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 about 25 an hour so that I could eventually buy a clock from 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 Caleb was certainly Caleb is like a high school grad Jeremy dropped out of college like these are these are not families that like where you're talking about massive wealth and again even my family and the assumption is because I'm an orthodox Jew and because I went to Harvard that I must have like tremendous family wealth or something again I grew up in a in the same bedroom as my three younger sisters with one bathroom for six people until I was 11 years old that doesn't make me poor that certainly that made me Rich so like 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 do the rich people get to be rich not how do we you know do you have sympathy for the person who's poor I had so I have such sympathy for people who are poor that I want them to be rich here are the steps that are required to be rich and if you see that as talking down to people I I don't know how it's talking down to people as opposed to saying this is how you get here I want everybody to be up here what would you say the steps are if you were to simplify I mean they're they're 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 allows the next things that you are 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 gonna be hard for you to do those for long periods of time that a lot of things that you're passionate about that you suck at there's no money there there are a lot of things that you're passionate about you're good at and that no one else cares about and that's not gonna make any money either what you need is the Nexus of those three things and 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 sure like that's I I know one person a particular good friend of mine he literally sold the company for hundreds of millions of dollars he started off by selling like cell phones at a kiosk in the mall I mean like this you can do these things but you have to find that in Access 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 with your moral standards and philosophies and political leanings and stuff like that so everyone kind of believes more so what you believe to be the ethical standard I mean listen ideally I'd love to convince everybody that I'm right that would be wonderful but I think that the reality of life is that like any Market they're the people who are implacably opposed to you you're not going to be able to allow that there are people who are apathetic you may be able to convince some of those people to come along they're people who are sort of in the middle and looking at both sides those are the people who I hope I'm really aiming at and then there's your base which are people who already agree with you so like three out of those four kind of contentions are available to me the people who are implacably opposed like to the point where they think I'm Hitler or that they think that I'm the root of all evil in the universe I'm not worried about convincing those people because they don't they're 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 you know argues X Y and Z and it makes me so mad and I always ask them like what's the purpose of a 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 I remember that 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 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 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 gonna need you 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 gonna need to ask that not because I'm being jerk but because I actually want to know so that we don't keep running into this so she'll tell me like she's good about this I'll say to her like do you want do you want me to like provide Solutions here because I'm happy to to Blue Sky this thing or do you want me to or do you want to talk about you know like how this makes you feel we can we can do that too but I just need to know which one of these things it is because I'm not good at reading this and 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 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 are 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 gonna be oppositional that's a very different thing because you're not talking to this person you're talking to these people out here right this is a different thing then there's you're talking to the crowd which is a speech and there you try to actually convince hopefully uh and then there are conversations with people who disagree where it's both you're trying to clarify and convince and maybe change your own point of view those are the conversations I enjoy the best and those are actually the ones I do the most the most just in terms of the time spent if there's one area where I feel like uh the show and what we do with the daily wire is underappreciated it's that and we have on more guests I personally have one more guests who disagree with me than I think anyone else in political talk probably um yeah I've had on people who are who are rabbit atheists and we have very wide-ranging and I think coaching 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 because counter-cultural so for a long time in this country the right was the culture and then the left was The Counter Culture and so all the kids were like ah The Counter Culture and now the Counter Culture has become a culture a Traditional Values have become something that you have to whisper to your friends about right to say that for example heterosexual marriage is more societally valuable than homosexual marriage which was inarguable for literally all of human history and by the way on a utilitarian level remains inarguable today to say that sort of stuff everybody cringes everybody couldn't accept 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 true I've said this before there's a difference in offending people by saying things that are true and offending people because you're being adjourned 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 no I try to be good enough at my job and moral enough as a human being to not say things just to piss people off when I say when I say may take 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 the same 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 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 going to burn them for me it was very um memorable oh my God I can't believe you did that okay you guys you spent like 400 million dollars 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 they come up with ideas like that because the other one that really started yeah honest to God like all that was was it was it's barberheimer 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 like the Mansion I set them on fire and that's like because it costs zero money and zero time that's why because the turnaround time between when I filmed that and when it went up was one day that's why what about like the whop breakdown because that was another yeah and it really stood out okay so the watt 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 I'm of course I'm joking I mean I did a 15 minute Exposition on the dumbest song ever written of course I know I'm joking but then they'll be like is he really joking but is he is like what yeah I am and undertones but the undertones oh I mean first of all I will admit that there's 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 shade of your genitals that's a bad thing that's not good for kids it's directed it's directed at teenagers it's directed at young girls it's stupid it's venal it's it's so yes am I condemnatory of that sure also is it funny that I'm out I a very white person I'm reading slowly and purposefully bleeping out the words to of course that's funny by the way I've been doing that routine since like 2014. I used to do it on on my Seattle radio show except they used to pull handles water music and I used to put it underneath and we play that underneath me reading rap lyrics because the whole idea is that this is a degraded culture and now I'm going to place this again some of the great pieces in the western Canon and you're going to see how stupid this is so yeah I mean it's it was it 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 yeah and you can have two attitudes about it one is to be like annoying the other it's like I'm kind of delighted that people you know are are made so both angry and happy by you by something poking the bear a little bit like let me know we certainly know we certainly know when we make a Barbie review so there are certain things in culture that have become sacrosanct and 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 claptrap it's an unfunny movie that's filled with feminist claptrap 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 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 blow up 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 my Beyonce's overrated no I mean I said in my video about the follow-up to the Barbie video and the internet treated me burning the Barbies like I had burned a Quran or something I mean like it actually was like holy writ this is how seriously people take their culture first of all you shouldn't take culture that seriously because our culture is fundamentally unserious I guess he's taking Bach that seriously seriously don't tell me I have to take Nicki Minaj that seriously please like please like spare me I'm a cultural snob I will remain a cultural snob because there are standards of beauty and good in this world and Beethoven is better than cardi B and Brahms is better than 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 culture is equivalent is stupid and it's pure Isle and it's deadening to the human soul and when you post pictures of you on Twitter outside the Barbie poster holding a little we had no idea I was gonna go viral no no no no no this is one of the funniest it didn't occur to us because it we literally did that in the spur of the moment so we went at like 11 o'clock in the morning to this dumb piece of trash and I and I I go and I I was just wearing what I had worn on the show that day right I mean on the show that day I just worn you know normal people clothes like a black T-shirt and black I I how many people across the United States on a given day were black a black T-shirt and black jeans that sounds like a pretty common outfit yeah okay that wasn't like I'm clearly making fun of the Barbie movie I'm wearing a denim jacket and a white shirt right like clearly that is like no one owns a denim jacket anymore it's not 1985 but like a black T-shirt and black jeans is pretty much like my normal go-to wear so in any case we go and I'm like taking notes in the back and my producers are are cynically slow clapping all of the uh America Ferrera speeches and everything and uh and then we come out and right before we leave they're like you know we're gonna have to like push this video out and we're gonna put a tweet out about it do you want to take a picture and should we take a picture in front of 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 gonna be like really grumpy because it didn't make me like super grumpy as much as just annoyed that I wasted two hours of my life doing this 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 like there is something funny about the fact that I sat there and I like literally took notes but helps you do a review I mean if you're reviewing a movie this is how you do a review you go in with a pattern 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 gonna review the movie he's got to write down quotes like this is 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 gonna call me an elite you're gonna leave I think because people knew what was coming of course that I thought it was trash yeah I mean it was it like that tweet had maybe more traffic than the actual video it probably did I mean do we know I feel like it was cool on every single platform like tens of like people were nuts about the tweet all I said is that it's a woke piece of crap and everyone was like no it was like slow motion no it was like William Defoe getting shot from behind in platoon guys get over it I'm allowed to think that you're 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 what's crazy to me is that that picture how many views does what does a woman have on Twitter because I saw it when it was at I think 30 40 million I think 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 scrolling pass also it's easier to consume a picture than it is to Consumer 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 really something 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 will be a few jokes along the way and you'll find it entertaining it's a lot easier to do that about entertainment I mean we did a video about me reviewing Oppenheimer it did pretty big traffic like two days ago like people like talking about entertainment specifically because it's light that's why the and that's why the juxtaposition of me being kind of seriously considering the message of Barbie is inherently funny but it actually is so on one level it's funny because obviously it's funny me talking about like the the clear narrative implications of a movie about a doll that's funny but also the entire media did make it about that the importance of the Barbie why was the why was the Barbie movie significantly more important than the latest Paddington film why I mean they're they're both about children's toys so why is one of them in in in in insanely important cultural event that the Press is going Gaga over and there's big articles like I read them in advance they're huge articles like Vanity Fair talking with Greta Gerwig and talking with Margot Robbie and talking about their perspectives on feminism and talking with the Trans person who's in the who's in the movie and all the rest of it because they take the politics very seriously but 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 we're like oh my God isn't it emasculating that you took this movie seriously you took the movie seriously I noticed that you took the movie seriously you started it I mean like 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'm curious uh how you 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 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'd like to hear him out on certain things and boom kaput entire day just absolutely ruined I'm like do you know by the way about him gentlemen excellent litmus test if you do this and the girl runs you did the right thing oh my gosh sure pull it down I'm just like do you know anything about him and she's like she's like I know he's he's racist you know he's anti-semite I'm like oh I'm like anti-semite is my favorite anti-Semitism 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 yeah I mean so for those people listen I I totally understand that there is cultural weight again and listening to anybody on the right with any level of popularity 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 like those sorts of things they don't know I mean they don't know any of this stuff but that's because the media tend to paint and when I say to me I really mean sort of the YouTube media they paint a very sort of one-sided picture listen we had to call up and threaten to sue the economist because in in headline they called me an alt-right personality the all right hits my guts I've gotten death threats from the alt right they literally arrested some guy for trying to kill my family a few years ago the FBI did he went to jail for a couple of years because I was too not alright 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 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 I mean so on my show if people listen to my show they'll they'll recognize that I frequently I'd say at least once every couple weeks we'll tell people you should listen to my show and then you should go listen to positive America I literally say this on the show on a routine basis go listen to the other side listen to my side see which one you think is more convincing I can attest to that yeah this happens all the time at some point we should put together a montage of how many times I've told people to go say one of those parts of America won 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 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 promising 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 things 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 obsessed 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 that 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 every moment like thousands of tweets an hour just about you and I watched you know my friend Andrew Breitbart I think Twitter basically killed Andrew I mean Andrew was obsessed with Twitter um this is in the early days when 50 000 people was a lot to be following on Twitter and he had you know a big following at that point and he was just obsess about what people were saying on Twitter and reply and respond and all that and it was really hard if I had trend on Twitter and I trend on Twitter I would say once every three 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 172 once every three weeks out of 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 Rainier 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 Twitter they will have no idea what you are talking about and it is 100 true but what about going to college campuses and seeing people protest that I always find funny I 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 going and protesting me you want to do that total enjoy your first amendment that's fine the things they protest me about are some of the dumbest things ever ever ever like my favorite one was when I spoke at Boston University and they protested me because they said I was a racist like 200 people outside saying I was a racist and I gave like a 45 minute disquisition on the history of race in America that was almost entirely about the evils of white supremacy for the first you know 200 years of America's existence and like going through beat by beat and they're protesting is like what in the speech do you I said this at the time I was like I need you to explain to me what 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 homophobic all this kind of 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 misphed it or whether I think it's right like we can we can talk about those things but you know it really 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 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 berated them in public never ever even people you don't like but I also don't leave hate comments uh I understand but like yeah 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 in like berated randos in public it just doesn't happen that often when they do you think they're like a crazy person so it really does not happen nearly as much as you think it does what you do get are like death threats in the mail you know you'll get people sending crap to your house like that kind of stuff does that worry you like ever for your person 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 yeah and then what about traveling do you ever travel at security do you travel you probably fly private uh we we do fly private it depends where I mean if I'm flying abroad it's difficult 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 gonna 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-one situation because if you if you take a punch and go down then the entire inner and then the entire it's like oh my god look somebody punched him and oh they punch 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 Friedman right can you expand on that a little bit because I mean I like to think that there's no real way in which I could bend my morals and 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 presenting the opportunity as presented the pressures or incentive structure I mean the possibility of being an active participant in something evil because you believe that the others it's usually a question of ends and means usually evil and sin in the political realm at least is a matter of ends and 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 don't like that and that that is a form of sin and you have to be very careful of that sort of stuff and those sorts of sins are you know pretty common in politics 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 types in like oh I'd never murder Bob well I mean that's that's true 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 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 does Smalls and what's a big sin no I said that's that can sometimes be a matter of opinion but I think that that's the nature of what religious belief is about is that you 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 Friedman that it's not very good advice to say be a good dad or sorry be a good person because it's true it's too broad it's too big but if you say something like be a good dad most people intrinsically they know what that is yes for me someone that doesn't have a kid yet and I always imagine how I'm going to raise my child but I still have no idea like when do I intervene when do I tell them that this is good versus this is bad or do I let them figure it out for themselves how do you know how to be a good dad well so I have models I think my dad is an amazing dad 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 which sometimes can be hard because you know they're not kids are not famous for being smart they're small they're children they're not supposed to be adults but you have to actually treat them with a certain level of respect and you have to treat them as though their desires are are meaningful you also have to say no and you have to set rules and you have to be willing to stick by those rules because it's your job to craft this person into a person who's capable of being a good dad of his own so think about what you want your kid to be like as an ad that might actually be an interesting way of doing it what what would you think that if you saw your kid you're now a grandfather your kid is interacting with their kid what does that look like in a way that you approve of because you because that you probably have some general I mean it depends who the male father figures are in your life the truth is it's hard to see how that works without modeling 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's no such thing as a woman who can be a father it's not it's not the same um that's not say a woman can be an unbelievable mother and fill gaps that exist in different ways but she's not going to be an ad those are two different category things it's a category error um but yeah I mean there are certain so I think that they're we're not saying that there's an intrinsic sort of set of things you know that are that are a 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 Judaism there are two types of Commandments there's uh mits what I say meaning like the things that you do and then there's Mitzvah said like the things you can't do and I find that in most circumstances we tend to focus on things we can do rather than 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 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 only 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 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 Independence you consider to be on the left most of the people who I think of is doing it right are actually more now considered Centrist even though their political viewpoints are probably not they're like Joe Rogan is not a right winger Joe Rogan is probably not even a Centrist right he said he would vote for Bernie Sanders he's liberal on all the 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 they're they're some folks like Brett Weinstein who's clearly identified as on the left who I think does it right it's easier for me to to sort of check off people one by one so if you threw names with me I can 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'd be interested in debating Destiny fantastic yeah yeah we had such a great conversation with him for three hours I believe he has a lot of depth to his beliefs which I admire right he seems like he's thought things through which makes for an interesting conversation yeah and my one rule and again the is that if people are like radically personally insulting toward me or if I feel like I'm gonna 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 Destiny stuff so I'm not religious although my family they're they're all Jewish and I uh I've never really been to synagogue or I've never been to church my father's side's a little bit Christian I'm wondering if you need to be religious or spiritual in some capacity to live life and have it be as meaningful as it possibly can be or if you can find just as much fulfillment and meaning while being uh 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 higher goal to life there's certain premises I think that everybody lives based off of that are effectively religious that they refuse to acknowledge Free Will being one of them the notion would live in an understandable universe that we are capable of actually exploring being another one of them the notion that human life is of innate value I think that's an assumption that is based on nothing if you're not a religious person if you're a religious person you say this because we're all made in the image of God if you're not religious person then I don't know on a logical level why a human life would be any more valuable than an elephant life or or a squirrel life um you can make an emotional argument perhaps but I don't think that you can make a perfectly logical one because there's nothing about a human being that is any different than any other piece of meat on sort of a material Level and you can say that that meat has different properties but why are those properties more valuable like what why is consciousness valuable for 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 good for what morally good now you're talking about an Israel 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 that's why secular humanism is a failure as a project it collapses pretty quickly into moral relativism moral relativism narcissism Hedonism and that's what you're watching is 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 as like the key to all human existence what's your biggest insecurity it's hard for me because honestly I have a really really good life so I mean you're asking can I ask for uh 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 you know actively saying okay wait a second and 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 the 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 yeah it's cold virgin 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 s 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 advisors who essentially I told them I'm young I have a very solid cash flow so I want you to take the best Diversified portfolio in sort of your highest risk category so uh I'm willing to lose the money right basically there's like my solid stuff that I want there's a certain percentage of my portfolio that I think of is like very solid it's not going to be 80 yeah and then there's like 15 which is in like the more high risk category maybe maybe 30 percent versus fifty and then the and it's probably going like 50 is in very kind of low risk solid returning assets 30 is in more of a high risk bundle 20 is reserved for like go for it sure uh and uh but 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.strategy so I I Benjamin Graham and David Dodd so the the which is the same strategy Warren Buffett uses which is essentially you're not investing in risks you're mitigating your downside risk and looking at the possibility of upside and when you buy a piece of stock you're not buying a piece of stock because you think the value is going to go up you're buying a piece of stock because you want a piece of that company because the company is well run has a good product has good upside and so I don't buy things to sell them I buy things to hold them yeah 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 and the second and then the second thing that you can do is look at potential upsides so for example I'm now a major stockholder and on the board of a publicly traded NASDAQ Corporation that's like a biotech company the way that I picked that stock is I happen to know the CEO 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 one half of its cash and so I was like well it's trading one half it's cash from all available public indicators it doesn't and the last few quarterly reports they don't have like significant burn so why is it trading at one half of its cash that's it that's an undervaluation so I bought up a bunch of that stock and the reason it was trading under its cash is because it had a drug it failed to phase three trial it dumped from you know 20 bucks a share to like two bucks a share and so everybody else was like they're buying it on the way up and I was like well no I'm gonna wait and now now dump but it's got a big bag of cash right here that's worth at least four dollars a share I can buy you two dollars a share there's no risk yeah what about alternative Investments because I've noticed that's a Zenith Rolex Daytona yeah yeah you know you're watching yeah that's right uh so yeah I do have a bit of a watch collection um mainly because they're pieces of art but again buy to hold meaning like watches as a as sort of a hobby slash investment 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 the ones that will actually accrue in value over time if you hold on to them long enough uh there are a lot of other beautiful watch watches Jaeger 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 so you buy a nice car and and within five seconds it's worth half of what it was when you bought it so yeah it's a yeah I have the original 1969 uh the el primero so the same movement as that yeah so what I really wanted was a stainless steel version of that and then prices not so they did but now they're coming back down slowly all the Bitcoin guys have 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 dropping we're good I didn't weigh long enough and so yeah 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 right just hold on I'll give my son that's fine that's the this is a Jordan Peterson person-esque question 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 that 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 the thing that you want to do or it could mean that you need to search for a job if you don't get a job today it could mean that you have to there's a great episode I don't know if you guys watch the bear on FX phenomenal it's a great show and season two there's an episode where this guy is kind of a nerdy well and he's kind of a he's kind of a boorish 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 sort of hold over is a negative down guy and the the his his friend slash cousin sends him to go learn how to Stage like a five-star restaurant with a Michelin star um and he um and the entire episode is he starts off and he's just their cleaning forks that's all they'll allow them to do it like you need to clean the forks and they keep coming back and they're like they're streaks on the forks he's like why do I give it what do I care if there's a streak on the floor because like there's a streak on the fork you're gonna clean these Forks they're all gonna have no streaks on them because it's not a restaurant that does drinks on forks and then he's told like he and then he learns and he sort of imbibes that ethic and suddenly he's like oh I see this is a restaurant that doesn't have streaks on Forks that means that I have to come in here in a suit that means that I have to actually up my game that means that I have to so like doing the Small Things leads to the bigger things this is actually quite it's both an Aristotelian concept and a very judaic concept people tend to think of of The Commandments in Judaism and it's vote the things that you do it's like oh they're these weird things that you do every day right you get up in the morning 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's like do all of these things and that leads you to cultivate virtue um and so Judaism is very much a recitalian in that sense it's like get up in the morning do 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's in the mood to do that but doing that thing is what gives you meaning in life yeah in the mood is really stupid so like the the you're depressed you're not going to stop being depressed by being in the bad you can either be depressed being in the bed or you can be depressed while you do a thing and then it may turn out that as you do the thing you become less depressed change change what you do and it may change your emotional state I heard a great quote that was happiness and meaning is not to be pursued but it will ensue which I think I think that's right it 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've never seen Jack so happy for a guest ever no in the entire history 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

Channel: The Iced Coffee Hour

Views: 1,163,672

Keywords: graham stephan, graham stephan podcast, iced coffee podcast, iced coffee hour, investing podcast, investing for beginners, how to invest, how to invest in stocks, how to invest in real estate, personal finance, business podcast, investing in your 20s, how to be a millionaire, millionaire investing, best credit cards, credit score, credit score explained, how to build wealth, real estate investing, stock market investing, passive income, robinhood app, millionaire mindset

Id: 8nwzv3zrqws

Length: 106min 56sec (6416 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023