Is the American Dream Officially Dead? A Conversation with Ben Shapiro

You missed turn of trouble a long time. There has now been created in the United States a permission structure for uselessness.
This sort of idea that you can take all the right actions and that there is no correlation between that and success is such a lie and it's a malicious lie. My plan is to not retire.
Are you allowed to say that? I said that one time I got just excoriated by people. So I wasn't saying that you can never retire.
That you have to be a nine-year-old working in a salt mine.

Ben hates old people. My wife hates it when this happens during a home argument, by the way.
She'll

be like, we're not in a YouTube video. You need to stop this right now.
Yeah, how do you argue

with Ben Shapiro at home? This does make me angry. I think politicians on all sides of the aisle have

an interest in lying to the American people. It kind of goes with this whole idea of that the

American dream is dead. This hopelessness that is pervading out there.
Do you think we're done? Ben Shapiro, I'm proud of you. You are blowing up, man.
Thank you so much. You are owning it.
You're a breath of fresh air in the talk radio world. I get to skim the cream, right? I go down to Florida and I hang out with my very small team over there and Jeremy and Caleb do the hard work of running the daily business.
And then I ask hard questions. And they get angry at me because I'm not the one who's actually doing it.
And that's kind of how the company operates. And so far, so good.
You come in and flip the table. Just continually upsetting Jeremy and Caleb.
That might be a good hobby. That might be good.
Their friends are wonderful. It's a wonderful company.
We're glad to have them in the Nashville community. We share ideas back and forth and concerns back and forth.
We had a great discussion about cancel culture one time. All of us got together and learned some things from each other on how to protect and how to do that stuff.
But before we dive into some subjects that you've been talking about and that we share in common, we share something else in common. I learned from Jeremy, confirmed it with you later,

that Rabbi Daniel Lappin, my good friend, I met him because I read his book, Thou Shall Prosper. For those of you who don't know, he's an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, and this is one of my favorite books on money and economics, and definitely the top 10 of books I've ever read on the subject.
And it's why Jewish people have an inordinate statistical tendency to prosper above the population. But anyway, aside from that, Rabbi Lappin plays a big part in your personal story.
Yeah. So Rabbi Lappin was the rabbi of a shul.
It was called the shul on Venice Beach, a synagogue on Venice Beach. My parents had become, you know, slightly more orthodox, and then they were kind of getting drawn more to orthodoxyy.
And they really became Orthodox with Rabbi Lappin. They would drive down to Venice every weekend, every Shabbat.
You're not supposed to drive, but that's the synagogue they would go to. And he would talk.
He's a very charismatic guy, Rabbi Lappin. And the community really started to grow.
And they ended up, because of that, moving into a Jewish community that was closer to where we lived. And I would say that he played a very heavy role in my parents becoming Orthodox in the first place.
For those of you to translate, my interpretation of that would be that they were more culturally Jewish before and Orthodox is as they became much more dialed in on the book. Well, really the practice.
Keeping kosher and other things as well, but also more serious about their walk with God. Yeah, for sure.
I mean, when you become Orthodox, it really is about the practice. So Judaism is very Aristotelian.
Judaism is sort of the idea that the more things you do, the closer you get to God. So it's a very act-based religion.
And Rabbi Lappin talks about this a lot, that the way that you become a virtuous person, as Aristotle suggests, is you do virtuous things. That's how you kind of cultivate virtue in yourself.
And Judaism really believes that the mitzvot, the commandments, that's what God gave those to us for, right? It's not that they have some sort of magical impact on the universe. There's some mystics who think that, but the real kind of hard-nosed work of doing the thing every day is a reminder not only that you're subject to God's rules, but also cultivate virtue in your life.
And so what you're doing when you say a blessing, like I just had some water and you can see me kind of mutter to myself, I'm saying a blessing before I have the water. That's to remind me that, you know, God is the one who gives the water.
And so, you know, gratitude. That's how you cultivate the virtue of gratitude.
And that kind of stuff is happening all the time. We have hundreds of commandments that we keep.
Those aren't incumbents on people who are not Jewish. But when you become Orthodox, what you do is you accept a system where you basically say, there's a bunch of rules that aren't set by me and that make my life better and my community better and that draw me closer to those virtues, draw me closer to God through my behavior and recognizing that there's a system of success in the world that God has created.
That, I mean, God's pretty clear in the Old Testament that there is a correlation between you following the commandments and you experiencing success in your life. And if you're Christian, obviously many of those commandments are no longer obligatory on you because of the New Testament.
If you're Jewish, they still are according to us anyway. And so what that means is that it's not prosperity gospel.
It's not if you do everything right, money will descend upon you. But as a general rule, if you do things right, there's a much better chance that you're going to have success.
Exactly. Cause and effect.
If you do these things, you'll be blessed. You do these things, you'll be cursed.
Exactly. The speech that God gave through Moses right before the children cross the Jordan.
These are the blessings. These are the cursings.
You do this, and some of them are things that we talk about. Borrowing is an example.
If you want to be cursed, you'll be a borrower. If you want to be blessed, you'll be a lender.
And those, and those things fit right into that. So very, very cool.
I'm curious. I'm just curious, growing up in California, what was money like in your house growing up? Did your parents, you know, were they wealthy? Was it like, hey, we're starting from ground zero here? So my parents were, I would say, very middle class.
So I grew up in a... That's kind of popular to say right now.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
But you actually asked me that question. So you didn't ask me about inflation.
Then I started talking about high middle class. I grew up in a middle class house.
Yeah, exactly. We grew up in a two bedroom, 1,100 square foot house in Burbank, California.
I had three sisters. So I shared a room with all of my siblings until I was 11.
We had one bathroom for six people. You know, fairly small house.
My mom was a secretary at a TV company. My dad was a composer, which means that, you know, he was playing piano in a restaurant because that's how it works in California.
If you're not actually, you know, a successful film composer, then just like everybody in California who has a script, you end up a barista. If you are, my dad is a really, really good jazz pianist.
He's playing clubs from the time he was 14 years old. And so he was playing in a restaurant on Mondays and Tuesday nights.
So a lot of my childhood, I remember sitting at the restaurant, watching him play piano at the restaurant and be excited when somebody dropped like a $10 bill in the tip jar. And, you know, as we got older, we moved into a slightly bigger house.
We ended up in 2,400 square foot house with four bedrooms when I was 11. And that's where my parents were up until we all moved to Florida a few years ago.
So we kind of went from, I'd say, lower middle class to middle class to upper middle class. Certainly, we were never rich.
Your law degree is from Harvard. Yes.
Did you get a free ride? No. I paid that one.
Wow. Yeah.
I was already writing by that point. So I'd already written some books.
I'd already written some articles. You had the ability of cash flow.
Yeah, I had some cash flow. You you were 20 years old when you were at Harvard Law.
Yeah, I started when I was 20, yeah. Wow.
Because I started UCLA when I was 16. So when I went to Harvard, I mean, the truth is that that's a good bet for a loan officer, right? You're giving a loan to somebody who's going to Harvard Law, chance of high income from Harvard Law, very good, right? I mean, educational loan business is a scam, but not if you're getting a degree from Harvard Law where everybody's going to go work for a big law firm for the first couple of years.
I worked at a big law firm for about eight months, decided I hated it and quit. And it was actually really funny.
So you knew that you wanted to lean into that kind of media side at a young age? Yeah, I was a nationally syndicated columnist when I was 17. So when I went to college when I was 16, I thought that I was going to double major in music and genetic science because I was a virtuosic violinist at the time.
And you can find videos on YouTube of me playing when I'm 11 years old at big banquets and stuff like that. I was a much cuter kid.
And then I go to UCLA. I pick up the UCLA Daily Bruin.
There's an article in there comparing Ariel Sharon, then the prime minister of Israel, to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi. And I walked into the office and I said, can I write a counter to that? And they said, sure.
And that morphed into a regular column there. I then applied cold to creator syndicate, which was a syndicator for a bunch of different columnists left and right.
And they didn't know my age. And they said, sure.
They picked me up. My parents had to sign the contract because I wasn't of legal age.
You were a minor at that point. I was a minor.
And so I started writing a syndicated column when I was 17. My first book came out when I was 20, when I was graduating from UCLA.
It was called Brainwashed, How Universities Indoctrinated America's Youth. My second book came out while I was at Harvard Law, and it was titled Porn Generation, How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future.
That was 2005. You missed turn up trouble a long time.
Yeah, I've been in this for a while. I mean, I'm 40, but I've been in this for, you know, 23 years.
So I've been doing this for quite a while. So when I went to Harvard Law, you know, that was a good bet, even though I knew the chances of me practicing law long term were pretty bad.
And the truth is, that's also true of pretty much everybody at Harvard Law. 50% of people in my Harvard Law class aren't in law at all.
Most of them went on to start businesses, you know, become investors and that sort of thing. Very cool.
So I'm 64. My plan is to not retire.
I plan to stay on the microphone. Are you allowed to say that? I said that one time.
I got excoriated by people. That's what I wanted to bring up.
That's what I wanted to bring up. You said it's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the U.S.
I think there's two parts to this argument. There's a Social Security math problem of the arbitrary age 65 thing, but there's also then the philosophy of what is retirement and why did we create this idea that we work at something we hate long enough and hard enough that we don't have to do anything.
And that seems to be counterproductive. It doesn't seem to be a good spiritual walk to me.
It doesn't seem to be good emotionally balanced to me. I can't find retirement in the Bible, and I'm not condemning someone who is retiring, but philosophically, I want to talk about retirement, or we do.
And also, I want to talk about this idea.

The end of that quote from you is it's not fiscally sustainable to quit at 65 when you've got a pretty good likelihood if you make it to 65. Statistically, you're probably going to be 90.
So those numbers start to be screwy with Social Security. Yep.
I mean, so as you say, there's two arguments there. The one I think I got hit more on was the virtue argument that you were making about the virtue of work and how it's not good to have a mentality at 65 that you're basically going to.
And when I said retirement, what I meant was like actual retirement, like go sit on a beach somewhere, move down to the villages, drink at 3 p.m., you know, like that sort of thing. I wasn't talking about people who decide that, you know, their back is broken from having worked a job for 30 years.
And now what they want to do is work in their community. And what they want to do is work a part time job, go teach at the local school, do charity work.
That's not retirement to me. When I'm thinking of retirement, I'm talking about like retirement, retirement.
And I do think that income is a good incentive for people to continue to work because, I mean, I've worked with enough people in the charity sphere that it turns out that working for little or no recompense is difficult to sustain over time.

There are certain people who will work for free because they're just that community-minded. But the truth is that people want to feel some sort of fiscal and financial reward for the work that they're doing, even if it's not the kind of pay they could be making full-time in the private sector for-profit industry.
And so on the virtue point, what I see is an increasingly depressed America because people don't value work in the way that I think that work ought to be valued. And a country that has set up an expectation that work itself is somehow bad and unfulfilling.
And that's a weird thing, particularly in an age when you're not working at a loom, right? You're not working in the coal mines typically. I mean, there are people who obviously are, but the reality is the vast majority of people who are aching for retirement are sitting at a keyboard right now, or at least a huge number of them are.
I wouldn't say the vast majority, a huge number of them are. And so this idea that what you're really straining for is 25 years of sitting on a beach, I just don't know where the virtue is in that.
Vacation's great, I love it, but there's a reason vacation ain't a full-time job. And, you know, lack of involvement in your community, lack of involvement in your family life.
And, again, jobs don't have to be, you know, going to work in a home life. Making the human race better.
Yes, exactly. Engage in something.
My sister is a stay-at-home mom. She's making the human race better by sitting home and homeschooling her kids and making sure that everything's – my wife, the doctor, right, after she had the last baby, she dropped out of the workforce and is taking care of the baby.
And eventually she'll probably go back in part-time. you know that everything's my wife the doctor right after she had the last baby she dropped out of the workforce and is taking care of the baby and eventually she'll probably go back in part-time now that she's working right that's it that is a form of work the point that i was making is that we as a society have degraded work and when you have government programs that are designed to grade work that basically say work hard and then we'll take care of you the rest of your life and you never have to work again that's seeing work in i think a perverse way and then obviously you have the fiscally unsustainable reality that is social security a giant pyramid scheme with an aging population where everyone knows and every

politician lies about it they all lie everyone knows we're going to have to radically increase

taxes or radically reduce benefits in the next few years everyone knows radically increased debt

yes right i mean and they keep saying they're going to grow their way out of it but there's

a rat and snake mathematically yes there really is that's scary so what are you what are your

Thank you. Everyone knows this is going to happen.
Or radically increased debt. Yes.
Right. I mean, and they keep saying they're going to grow their way out of it, but I just don't say that works.
There is a rat and a snake mathematically. Yes.
There really is. That's scary.
So what are your thoughts about the extreme side of that, the financial independent retire early, the people who say, hey, at 45, I want to be work optional and I'm going to have enough money piled up that I can leave this job that I hate. I mean, saying you want to leave a job you hate for another thing, I think is fine.
I mean, if you hate your job and you want to find a better job or you want to find a better thing to do with your life, that's fine. But I'll tell you, I have a lot of friends who are billionaires, and many of them became billionaires in the tech world at the age of 35, 40, right? They sold their companies, they made a ton of money, and then they quote unquote retired.
And they are just itching. You can see them itching.
They want to start a new thing. Yeah, I mean, they go and they start new things, whether it's charity work or whether it's starting a new business.
People have an urge to create, and creators particularly have an urge to create. I think when God says at the beginning of Genesis that we're made in his image, one of the things that makes us like God is our creative capacity, right? The only thing that God's done in the Bible to that point is create everything.
So when it says that humans are made in God's image, we're the only creature really, it has the ability to independently create. And so when you stop that creative process, when you stop creating, which is really a form of building, then you lose something in yourself.
And I think that's a real negative for the soul. You know, Rabbi taught me something else on that that was interesting, that the Hebrew word for worship is very similar or almost exactly the same word for work-ship.
To work is a form of worship. And in the New Testament, we would say to do your work as unto the Lord.
But it's this idea that working in something that you were designed, the way you were designed to do, the way you were knit in your mother's womb, the way you were trained up a child in the way he should go.

And when he's old, he'll not depart from it. And the way he is bent, the old King James says, and the way the child is bent.

Train up a child the way they're designed and let them go in that.

That is a form of worship.

I remember I was just in Scotland at St. Andrews where they shot the scene, the opening scene from Chariots of Fire.

And one of the lines in there was he said, when I run, I feel God's pleasure. Yeah, it's a form of work can be a form of worship when you, and it's not workaholism.
It's not some kind of weird spiritual thing. By the way, we worked in the garden, right? I mean, like the actual verse that talks about what Adam is tasked with doing in the garden, it uses the verb is lavode, right? It's to work.
It says that you have to actually avode, you have to work, and then it says, and to guard, right? So you're there to work and you're to guard. What kind of work is there to do in the garden, right? It's the Garden of Eden.
Everything is perfect. Everything's wonderful, right? You got trees with fruit.
You got animals you can name. Everything is awesome.
And the idea is that even in the Garden of Eden, it's not going to be a Garden of Eden unless you have a task. People have to have a thing to do.
And we're a bored society, and you can see us tearing ourselves apart because we don't have a thing to do. I think it increases anxiety and all the other things as well.
I think we saw some of that during the pandemic. We told people they weren't essential.
It creates a different kind of mental illness then because there's this idea that I'm not worthy to worship. I'm not worthy to do those things.
And, you know, I raised a couple daughters and a son that are all married off now. And we had old dad jokes for the raising the teenage girls.
It's like, you know, before Adam got a woman, he got work. So if you're going to come date my daughter, you need to be talking about having a job or having a career.
I just saw Professor Scott Galloway mention that what women are looking for in a man is the ability to provide in the future. Psychologically, that's what they're actually looking for.
And I think what we're seeing is a lot of people who are living at home in their 30s who don't have a job they love to do and their growth is stunted because of that. And it seems to be hurting culture all around.
There's probably a deeper problem when it starts with education. We tell people, get good grades, do the homework, go to college, get a degree, then do a job for 40 years.
Do you think that's part of the issue? Well, I think that we are all in this sort of post-50s mindset where we think of the way that work was in the 50s. And we think that that is sort of the ideal of how work ought to be, which is very weird because the truth is that many of the jobs in the 50s are jobs that nobody would want to do.
We talk about the idea that you worked at like GM at a factory for 30 years and then got a gold watch doing rivets. How many people do you see in the modern world who want to stand over a machine doing rivets? That's not a thing.
The 1950s are an outlier in human history. They're an outlier because basically the rest of the world had been completely destroyed and the only industrial superpower on earth that had not been completely destroyed was the United States, which meant that we could essentially have one person in the house, one person who was working full time, making great wage, doing a repetitive mechanical task.
And that ended up collapsing in the 1960s and 70s, which is why you see America's debt problems start to explode in the 1960s and the 1970s. But if you go back before that, the reality is that everybody was a cooperative unit in the family in terms of work.
I mean, you go back far enough and you go back to a farm and everybody's working all the time, right? If you go back to Proverbs, there's an entire section of Proverbs where it describes the ideal woman. We sing it every Friday night.
It's called Esh Eschayal, right? It's the woman of valor. And that whole section of Proverbs is all about what the woman does.
It talks about her starting a business. It talks about her it's like it sounds like she started a corporation is what it sounds like the woman of valor and so i think that you know that that vision of of what life is is that like you just go into the job and you stay at the job for 30 years that's not how the market really historically worked and it's not how the market works right now and and i think our educational system is not designed for that it was designed to churn out people who are supposed to fit in sort of particular tasks.
I see with my son, and my son is sort of heterodox thinker. He's eight years old.
He is good at math. He can't sit still because he's an eight-year-old boy.
And what I see is that the stuff that he's really interested in, he's really interested in. And what a good educational system would do, and this is what we try and do at home with him, is dig into the stuff he's really interested in and use that as a gateway to learn the things that he's going to need to do in the world.
In the way he's bent. Exactly.
And instead, what we try to do is bend the kid to fit the hole in the market. And that seems – it enervates.
It makes people feel uncomfortable and angry because they feel as though they're being turned away from the thing they want to do in favor of the thing that, quote-unquotequote society wants them to do. And that's, I don't think it's necessary.
Yeah, I've got three kids that are very distinctly different, and they needed to go into three distinctly different things. And I'm already watching for that in the grandkids.
You know, it's amazing how fast this is going to do that. I can see it.
I can already see it. It's crazy.
Otherwise, they're going to be miserable, and they're going to suck at whatever they do that is outside their gifting set. Well, I mean, so much of this is based on the false premise that human beings are a blank slate.
You have a kid, and the kid's a blank slate. Now you can sort of imprint on every blank slate what it is.
Have you ever met a child? You know this is not true. It's amazing how many things are reliant on people never meeting a child.
The idea that children are inherently good. Children are not inherently good.
Are you kidding me? Have you ever met a child? Children are inherently really, really bad, actually. They're innocent, but they're certainly not good.
And they require civilization. And they have predilections.
They have things they like to do. They have things they're interested in.
My daughter is a humanities kid. I can see she's a humanities kid.
My son is going to be an engineer. You can see it right now.
All he cares about is rockets. My four-year-old is a drama queen, you can see it.
She's adorable, and she's also a drama queen.

And so we're going to have to see

how that manifests.

She'll be a YouTuber in no time.

Yeah, exactly.

God forbid.

God forbid.

But, you know,

She'll be on the microphone

debating her father.

Yeah.

Like my daughter.

Oh, well.

That's what you have to look forward to, Ben.

Exactly.

Well, it's interesting,

but, you know,

there's a very kind of

villainized view of family

and kids and even marriage.

I'm seeing it

in the comments section everywhere. People are so cynical toward that level of commitment.
They see marriage as this, well, she's going to take me for everything I'm worth. And why would I want to bring a kid into this world? It's so much responsibility.
It's so expensive. How do you combat that cynicism toward family? I mean, I think the first thing to recognize is that if you date for that, that's what you're going to get.
People do dating all wrong. People ask how I met my wife.
The answer is that my sister fixed us up. We dated for two and a half, three months.
We got engaged, and then we got married, and that was it. And that's because on our first date, we discussed how many kids we wanted to have.
We discussed what kind of values we want to promulgate in our household, what educational level, what observance level. In the Jewish community, there's a bunch of different observance levels even within orthodoxodoxy, like how orthodox you want to be.
Some women, for example, wear what's called a shetal, they cover their hair, my wife doesn't, like those are conversations you have on like date number one. Okay.
And so- Those are deal breakers. Yes.
I mean, depending on, you kind of figure out what are your deal breakers. If those are violated, you say, okay, this is not for me because you're setting up a partnership for life.
And so if you date based on passionate love, based on, as opposed to values that are going to lead to deeper companionate love. Romeo and Juliet, which by the way, neither one of them got out of that alive.
Exactly. This idea that there's some kind of a pulp fiction novel.
Well, it's all based and you can see it in the pop culture. You can see it like everything now.
It's amazing how the only area of music right now where you hear songs sung about family is country music, which is more traditional in many ways. But all music now, if you go back to the 40s and you listen to a lot of big band music, they're talking about getting married, right? Marriage is actually part of the formula.
There are songs about kids from the big band here. Like, you don't hear that now.
You turn on pop, and it's all just about sex. Let me tell you that that's not going to last you all that long in terms of building a cohesive and coherent relationship for the long run.
Eventually, you're all going to be old and wrinkly, so you better have something beyond that to actually tie things together. And it's the most wonderful thing.
You're building a unit. You're building like almost a phalanx of your own.
I jokingly call my kids the army of the children and they think of themselves that way. But that is what it is.
I mean, you're creating what Edmund Burke called the little platoons of society. You get to create your own platoon.
That's a really cool thing. That's awesome.
But you have to all be oriented in the same direction. And what that really means is you have to discuss at the very beginning, what are the shared values of this unit that you are building? And if you don't do that, you're going to fall into an unworkable partnership, an unworkable marriage that falls apart at the first sign of stress.
Yeah. Proverbs talks about having your quiver full of arrows, meaning your kids.
And I feel like I spent a lot of time straightening those arrows so that they would fly and leave at some point. I wanted to release the string at some point.
What's your line about turkeys, Dave? Oh, yeah. A turkey that doesn't leave the...
Or an eagle that doesn't leave the nest eventually is known as a turkey, yeah. We got a lot of those today.
It kind of goes... That hopelessness on marriage, George, it kind of goes with this whole idea of the thing that we've been running into and pushing back against in the wealth-building side, this idea that the American dream is dead, this hopelessness that is pervading out there.

What do you see about the American dream?

What's your feeling about that?

Because you're doing a whole lot of politics right now.

That's what you do, obviously.

But, I mean, at this moment when we're taping this, you're traveling, stumping, going state to state, working with the politicians out there. You think we're done? No, and I don't think we're remotely done.
I think that the ingratitude that it demonstrates to suggest that the American dream is dead in a time of unique prosperity in human history, where the poorest people in our society have the best technologies available to them, literally in human history, where you have a magic machine in your pocket that you dial, you hit a button, and a good arrives at your door for a cheap price inside of 24 hours. And you're sitting there going, the dream is dead.
I mean, we have these things that are time machines, they're called airplanes, fly to other places on earth, and spend like five minutes there. And you realize just how much the American dream is not dead.
And I think that politicians on all sides of the aisle, this does make me angry. I think politicians on all sides of the aisle have an interest in lying to the American people about this because there's this mentality that if I tell you that the American dream is dead, then only I can save you.
Only I have the ability to come in and rescue you from this crisis that has been created for you. When the reality is the steps towards success in a free society are the same as they always were.
Take responsible action. Go get an education.
Go get a job. Make smart financial decisions.
Make a smart decision about your family. You know, the entire entertainment arena is geared towards stories of people overcoming obstacles that are very often made by them.
You know, the reality is, you know, when people say, what's your life story? My life story is that i had the ultimate privilege two amazing parents and then i made a series of what i think are rational calculated decisions and it worked out well that's my life there's not all that much that's like super fascinating about that there are obstacles you have to overcome along the way things that you don't expect but this sort of idea that you can take all the right actions and that there is no correlation between that and success is such a lie. And it's a malicious lie.
And it teaches people not to take the actions. It enervates them.
It makes them feel like if I do all the right things, there's no point to it. So what's the point of doing? Because doing the right thing is actually harder than doing the wrong thing.
And I think politicians lie about this all the damn time. I think it's ugly.
I think it's hideous. I think that it kills the American spirit.
The American people are a people of pioneers. That's what we are.
That's why we all like Westerns, right? We're a pioneering people. We're a bunch of people who came from Europe or from Asia or from wherever, but at the very beginning from Europe.
To get away from restrictions. To get away from restrictions into a place that was far less secure, right? Into a continent that was totally uncultivated and where you had the chance of being killed by disease or the environment or the natives at any moment.
And then that wasn't enough. They started crossing mountains to go to more of these uncultivated places and facing more hardships and more stresses.
And then you have new waves of immigrants who are coming from more secure places where there is a guarantee of you being able to grow up where your parents grew up and going to a place where you don't speak the language, where you don't know anything. And I think that's the story of virtually everybody who's in the United States right now, or at least huge percentages of it, like parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who at some point abandoned the place where they were more secure to come to a place where they were far less secure for the opportunity.
Are you telling me that my kids have less opportunity in America today in 2024 than And my great grandparents did when they showed up in like 1907, not speaking a word of English and get off the boat? And by the way, no real welfare programs, no giant social safety net. And the idea was you learn English and you do the work and then you will get ahead.
This arrogance that we are the most victimized generation. Like what the, what are you even saying? What are you talking about? By what metric are you the most victimized generation? That sounds harsh because people kind of cherish that sense of victimization because it throws the responsibility on somebody else.
But, you know, first law of good management is look in the mirror, not through the window, right? First law is if there's a problem and you look through the window at the thing that is responsible for the thing that's making you miserable, you're not going to solve the problem. If you look in the mirror, even if it's true that you can't solve it, if you look in the mirror, you better take the steps to at least try to solve it first.
Control the controllable. Exactly.
Yeah, that's what I've seen. And most people are focusing on all the things they can't control.
And that's why they're so desperate for that politician to fix their life. And also the gap between surviving and thriving has changed.
The spectrum has changed. Back in our parents' and grandparents' days, it was literally survive.
Put a roof over your head, food on the table. Now we have a different problem where they go, well, I want the American dream today in my own way, and I want to shortcut it.
I want a house now. I want a car now.
I want to have all my dreams now. Is that part of the problem? Is that we've shortcut it with debt and other bad solutions? That for sure is true.
And it's also the fascinating statistic about how many Americans have moved. And the number of Americans who are moving now is lower than at any time in modern American history.
Americans are basically staying where they were, even though moving is actually much easier than it was 40, 50 years ago. And my parents were transplants to a couple of different locations, right? They started off in Chicago, they moved to Boston to go to college, and then they end up in Los Angeles, and now they're in Florida, right? I spent my entire life in LA, came to a point where it was not sustainable anymore.
We moved our company to Nashville, and we moved to Florida, right? This sort of idea, it's not just, I want a house and I want a car, it's I want a house and I want a car in precisely the area I want the house and the car, and if I can't get that- And the size of house. I mean, we can go back to your parents' story that they stayed in 2,400 square feet until just a couple years ago.
Yes. And it started with you in 1,100 feet.
Yes. I started in 1,100 feet.
Now, I'm older than you by 25 years. But still, I mean, and that was California real estate, so super expensive because they were in L.A.
at the time. But still, this idea that 1,100 square feet, you've got to be kidding me.

Under what planet should I live there? I'm 21 years old. Why would I live in 1,100 feet? My parents bought a house for eight, and I'm like, go look at that house.
You don't want to live there. You boomers don't understand.
You bought your houses for a basket of strawberries. Exactly.
You don't understand. You don't grasp what's really going on.
So I think our expectations and standards have shifted to be impossible. I think that also because people have a brain quirk that makes them think that if something is what it is today, it was always like that.
They look at people who live in giant houses and they think that person was always rich. I get this crap all the time.
It's like, oh my God, you must have grown up rich. I mean, you're very wealthy now, which means you grew up – right, you're a trust fund baby.
And I think to myself, no, where are you possibly getting that? That doesn't even, like what? In fact, I'll tell you the number of people who are truly like generationally wealthy that I know, the number of them who are trust fund babies is vanishingly small. Like the richest people that I know, literally, and I know the richest people, right? I mean like Elon, you're talking about people, you know, in Silicon Valley.
These, virtually none of them grew up trust fund babies. Right.
A huge number of them grew up actually really poor or at least at the very least middle class. And then they made a bunch of good decisions.
I mean, again, for us, we all have these stories, right? When I got started in my career and I was writing, I was writing for free. I'd write for free just to get my stuff out there.
And my wife and I remember driving to like the local Republican club in Orange County to find a bunch of 80-year-old women. And by a bunch, I mean like 15 and then sell books out of the back of my car at 20 bucks a pop.
And if we came away with $200, that was like an amazing day. And everyone has those stories.
That's exactly what we did. That's why we have the trunk of a car out here in the lobby with books in it, because that's how it started.
And the psalm over it, don't despise small beginnings. And we know from the largest research that we did, the largest research project on millionaires ever done in North America, over 10,000 of them we studied that 89% of America's millionaires, it's about 21 million of them right now, are not millionaires.
This is data. It's not a feeling.
It's a fact. Are not millionaires because of inherited money.
89%. That's nine out of 10.
That should give everyone hearing that number every time I put it out, great hope that the American dream is not over. And by the way, you can see it in the stats.
I mean, one of the things that Thomas Sowell likes to point out is he says, and whenever he's talking about disparities and income, he says, you know what the greatest disparity in wealth is between older people and younger people? Because you get wealthier as you get older if you do it right. Right.
I mean, this is, those things that that you know if you make smart financial decisions meaning don't day trade then you can actually get wealthy by making solid financial decisions and then just sticking with those positions over the long haul compound growth your income goes up i'm the only i'm the only rapper in the history of rap who put the magic of compound interest in a in a top charting rap song i did i did insist on that that was like my insistence eminem's been real quiet since he dropped that track tom mcdonald was like what you write your set of lyrics i was like okay the only thing i want i insist i actually wanted ebitda in there also but but i actually ended up only with uh with the magic of compound interest that's amazing i'm curious how how has your view of wealth changed as you've actually built built it? There's a view of wealth we have when we're young and we're striving. Has it changed for you now that you're kind of in a different phase? Maybe in some ways.
Listen, I was always ambitious to make more money. I mean, I'm not going to make any bones about this.
I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that I didn't get into the business I was in in order to make money.
You don't go into the political commentary business because you think you're just going to be loaded at the end of the day. In fact, every time I tried to make money in a way that was not my passion, it ended up failing, which I think is another thing that folks don't realize about people who tend to make a lot of money is the reason they got into the business that they're in typically is not for the money.
It's because that's where their creative capacity was. So, for example, I mentioned I went to law school at Harvard Law.
You come out, you have a trajectory now, you're going to make a lot of money because you go to Harvard Law, the chances you end up poor are pretty low. So I go, I work at a firm called Goodwin Proctor.
And I'm like, you know, first of all, I had the worst interview record in the history of Harvard Law, because I was conservative and that didn't work out well with the law firm. But after I took my books off my resume, I got a job, and I ended up working in real estate law.

So I'm sitting at this beautiful office in Century City and looking out over the hills toward the ocean, and it's 2007, and so there's no work.

It's the end of 2007.

The real estate market has collapsed.

You're sitting there doing nothing all day, and I am absolutely miserable.

And I was making what was great money coming out of law school.

It was like $180,000.

Coming out of law school, that's a lot of money, and it's still a lot of money. I was dating my wife at the time, we'd gotten engaged.
And she saw your she's like, you're absolutely miserable. You're losing weight, you're miserable, you hate this, you should quit.
And I said, Okay, I mean, I'm gonna make a you know, I don't have a job. And she said, Well, don't worry, like, I have faith that you'll you'll be able to get a job because you have a degree, you're a smart person, You'll figure it out.
And if we have to live on a lot less, we'll live on a lot less so you don't have to be miserable. And so I ended up quitting.
We had just bought a condo, which was a great move. I took a job for one-third the pay working at a place called Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for a bunch of nationally syndicated radios.
And the deal that I made with the head of the company, Mark Masters, was that I would do corporate legal like half the time. I'd be kind of the secondary attorney there.
They had a primary. I'd be an associate about four hours a day.
And the other four hours, I told him, I'm only going to do this if I get to learn the basics of production. I want to sit in the room.
I want to cut audio. I want to see how the monologues are done.
I want to see how everything in this industry works.. And so I got like really in the guts of it.
From that trajectory came everything else,

right? I had to take a step, a couple of steps back financially in order to take steps forward because I was learning the thing, getting expert at the thing that I want to be expert at. And

then you try and you fail and you try and you fail and you try and then you hit. And I think

that's the story for a lot of people who get, you know, really, really, you know, wealthy is that

you got to fail a lot. Absolutely.
And I think you're right that the politicians stating

I'm old. I've seen both parties in office.
Neither party has sent me money. Neither one of them have caused me to be successful.
I've done stupid things under both of them. I've done really smart things under both of them.
And the results of the stupid things or smart things that I did are what I inherited. Bill Clinton didn't send me any money.

He didn't curse me. He didn't bring my life to an end or anything else.
And George W. didn't.
And Ronald Reagan didn't. And neither one of these two will.
That's why it drives me up a wall when you hear politicians say, I created this number of jobs. No, you didn't.
By what standard? What business did you start that you created that number of jobs? And if you did create jobs in the public sector, how much money did you have to steal from people in the private sector in order to redirect it to people that you think are now going to vote for you? You know, I actually just told President Trump that in the interview the other day. I said, when you tell people, when politicians tell people they created jobs, it pisses people like me off because we know we create the jobs.
So since small business is the backbone of the American economy, 54% of the gross domestic product, then what are you going to do to unleash small businesses to create jobs? Because that's who most people work for. That was my question to him.
And he kind of chuckled and went, well, you know, that's right. It's like, you know, I think there's something in the American soul that's been enervated and put down for a long time.
And the way that we discuss wealth and the way we discuss money in this country has been wrong for a long time. This idea that the wealthy are, quote-unquote, the privileged or the lucky.
I mean, yes, obviously there's an element of luck. Obviously, we all have the privilege of living in the greatest country in the history of the world.
Some of us have more privileges than others in the sense that we were born smarter or born more handsome or, you know, we're born more athletic. But the reality is that that's the part you can't control.
And so when we talk about wealth that way, what we're doing is talking about all the stupid things that you can't control. The thing that you can control is how you approach the world.
And there's a saying that we have at our company that we kind of started trafficking in early on and we started hiring employees, which is you can't teach hungry. I can teach you all sorts of skills.
I can make you better at your job, but I cannot teach you if you're not hungry. And Americans, I feel like, have lost hungry, or at least they've forgotten how to be hungry.
But I think that deep in the American soul, there is a desire, again, to be pioneers. There's a desire to be entrepreneurial.
There's a desire to actually go out there and conquer. And that's a good thing.
We've gotten away from this sort of aggressive language with regards to how to approach the world. But that language is good.
I think you have a duty to succeed. I think that this idea that it's a matter of, you know, moral apathy, whether you make the decisions that lead to success or not, is really terrible.
You have a duty to at least try to succeed. You have a duty to make the good decisions.
And you have to take that burden on yourself. And when you do, you'll be freer because you'll be in the flow.
You'll feel the thing. You'll feel like you have a pathway to success.
There's something about putting that harness on and leaning into it that stimulates you. It really does.
And we've got about 1,100 team members and well over 400 of them are Gen Z. And for the people watching this, I'm greatly encouraged about hungry because in Gen Z, there is a group of them that are tremendously hungry.
They are missional. They'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol.
And then there's a group of them that are useless, completely useless, right? And there's kind of no middle ground. Like baby boomers, we would at least lie and say we were useful.

But they won't even lie.

They'll just look at you and say, I'm useless.

Or they'll say, let me in.

Put me in, coach.

Put me in, coach.

By the way, I think that that last point is really important is that what that says, there has now been created in the United States a permission structure for uselessness. It used to be that if you were lazy and want to do the work, you at least had to pretend that you weren't lazy and that you didn't want to do the work.
And now there's been a permission structure that's been created by politics. Quiet quitting and – Yeah.
I mean every time people talk about, well, is it really that good that you're committed so much to your work? Is it good that you're spending so much time at work? Now, listen, if you have a bad work-life balance, meaning first of all, I don't even like the term work-life balance because work is part of your life. But if the idea is you're spending so much time at work, you're not spending the proper amount of time with your family, that's a real concern you need to rejigger your life.
I mean, I have to make conscious decisions about when to stop working to spend time with my kids. But that's not what people are talking about.
What they really mean by work-life balance is that work is something terrible. It's a burden that you take upon yourself.
And if only the markets were nice and friendly, then you'd just get everything you want handed to you. If we just had the Star Trek replicator machine, we just hand you everything that you want.
And that's really the natural state of things. And it's like that is not even remotely the natural state of things.
The natural state of things is people dying at the age of 30 from some terrible disease while living in the outdoors. Right.
That's the natural state of things. That'll make you grateful.
Yeah. Americans, very few Americans have spent a lot of time in, you know, other places of the world that are a lot poorer by the way you don't have to go that far they don't have to be that much poorer you go to places in in latin america where the corruption is endemic i mean truly endemic you just walk off the plane my wife and i went to panama recently and literally we got off the tour guide had to bribe a cop like at the airport i mean that sort of stuff is is really really common you should be grateful to live in a country where if you try to bribe a cop, you're probably going to get arrested.
The level of honesty in America is extraordinary. The level of consistency and application of rules, yes, there are problems, but compared to other countries is astonishing.
If you can't succeed in America, where precisely are you going to succeed? And what does success look like to you? Yeah, I spent 16 days in December in Egypt, and I just got back from 14 days in Turkey. And both of those have less than a $6,000 annual average income.
And yeah, we got it good. We can download an app and go drive Uber and make that in a few months.
Yeah, make that in a month if you stay in your car enough. Yeah, that's pretty incredible.
So you're on the campaign trail. I'm curious because it sounds like what you guys are talking about is the job of the politician and the government is to create an environment where people can thrive and businesses can thrive.
So what do you think politicians need to do? If your people get an office, what are the steps that we need to take to create that environment? Well, I mean, massive deregulation. And I think that this is something President Trump certainly understands cutting the red tape that has to be done at local, state and federal level.
It is so much harder to start a business now than it was to start a business a few decades ago. And if you want to build a house now, then the number of hoops that you have to jump through doing environmental impact statements and, and applying to things.
Now, again, it's way better here than

it is in other countries. I'm very familiar with the legal system in Israel.
The legal system in Israel, to build a new building in Israel, just to get the permits approved is like 270 days. To do it in the state of Florida, where I am, is like three hours.
But with that said, there's too much regulation. That regulation makes it very, very difficult.
You need to stop confiscating people's wealth. When people make money, let them make their money and then reinvest their money in new things.

We need to get ridating people's wealth. When people make money, let them make their money and then reinvest their money in new things.
We need to get rid of the systemic burden on the American economy that requires that drawdown, which is these giant welfare programs. These giant welfare programs are eating the American economy alive.
And none of these politicians will take it on because when you have a concentrated benefit and a diffuse cost, then it's very hard for politicians to actually make the case

for getting rid of the program, right?

When 10 people are really benefiting a lot,

but 1,000 people are paying one cent,

it's much easier to just say to those 10 people,

hey, you're getting your money.

You know, everything's great for you.

And all you, you're just paying one cent.

But the reality is you take one cent many, many, many times,

which is what the government is doing,

eventually end up bankrupting everything.

And politicians on both sides are running,

screaming away from this sort of stuff because the American people are not prepared to hear it and frankly i don't put it on the politicians i i really think that when it comes to the politicians i i deeply believe in thomas soul's statement about this it's not about electing the right people it's about creating incentives so the wrong people do the right things and in the end that's on us right we're the voters we're the ones who get to decide whether we hold politicians accountable for lying to us about social security or Medicare or Medicaid or the welfare programs that are eating the budget. And the American people seem to be willing to walk right off that cliff.
I can't blame the politicians for taking advantage. I blame them for lying.
I blame them for not telling the truth. But that's what you and I are here for is to tell the truth also.
I mean, I think that I've spoken with a lot of Congress people, senators, presidents. And one of the things that I constantly say to the politicians is your job is not my job and my job is not your job.
Your job is to go get 80 percent of the loaf. And my job is to define what the loaf looks like.
And what I see from the politicians is them trying to do our job and us trying to do their job, meaning we are afraid to tick off our audiences by saying the thing that might be unpopular because not enough people are willing to agree with the idea that they're free to succeed in America. You might piss somebody off.
And so there's audience capture in the commentariat. And then for politicians, they want to pretend that the 80% they're getting is 100% because that's how you win.
You pretend that actually you cut the single best deal in the history of humankind, even when you only got 50% of the loaf. And so what you'll do is you'll pretend, well, sure, I didn't touch welfare, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, but I solved all our budget problems and we're going to soar into the future.
It's like, no, now you're lying. So I think both the commentariat and the political sphere have to stop lying.
I think both of them are lying. I think the very first time I saw you was some YouTube clips of you taking questions on woke subjects from college kids.
And that's probably, gosh, you and I have been friends for almost 10 years. So that's probably 10 or 15 years ago, some of those clips the first time I saw them.
And I think it was Rachel was at the lake house. She said, you got to see this Ben Shapiro, man.
Look at what he's doing. Ben Shapiro, Rick, destroys.
He's destroyed. But one of the things that struck me with that, and I think one of the things that's appealing about those clips and even about your show, and sometimes we get it on our stuff, but we're a little different take on it, is this sense that it's like your pulse rate doesn't change on these things.
You know, there's this thing of you're, I want to say not afraid, but that's not it. You don't get amped up at all.
It's almost as if when you're debating someone, you're toying with them. You're a chess master and you've seen four moves ahead and they're done.
So we're going to go ahead and enjoy the ride. You know, that kind of a thing is the way it feels.
Have you always been that way or did you develop that confidence as you did it more? I think some of both. I think you get better at it the more you do it.
And there are times where you still have to remind yourself to stay calm, depending on how inflammatory the topic you're taking on is. I remember just this year when I went to Oxford University in the aftermath of October 7th.
And obviously, you know, I know people whose family members are kidnapped in the Gaza Strip. I know multiple families who have lost family or soldiers in Gaza.
I know many people right now who are serving in Lebanon. So I have, you know, a pretty close stake in that particular conflict and in October 7th and all the rest.
And I was, you know, facing down students who actively were calling for the destruction of the state of Israel and defending Hamas and Hezbollah and all this.

Going in, I kind of had to say to myself, listen, just stay calm. Just stay calm.
Just don't get angry. Just stay calm.
That's fairly rare. I tend to be more analytic.
There's sort of a mode that I go into. And this is the part that's kind of natural.
I'm not sure why it occurred. Maybe it's from being bullied as a kid.
but we're almost i can see myself almost in third person doing the thing

where it's like okay well now we're in analysis mode and this person's making an argument is it a good argument is it a bad argument let's try and kind of figure out what the what the puzzle pieces are here force them to define terms try and maybe i agree with them what exactly is it they're doing here my wife hates it when this happens during a home argument by the way way. She'll be like, we're not in a YouTube video.
You need to stop this right now. Yeah.
How do you argue with Ben Shapiro at home? That feels like, is it even worth it? No. I mean, so- Do you ever let her win just for fun? Well, I mean, if I'm smart, I let her win all the time, right? I mean, that's the smart move.
But yeah, the truth is my wife is really good about this sort of stuff, meaning that I'm by nature a very analytic person. And so I've said this before.
When I'm talking to my wife, and I will now generalize this to many women, many women, when they present a problem, they don't want an answer. They want sympathy.
And this is a mistake I made for many years at the beginning of my marriage where my wife would come to me with a problem and be like, right, so you should do this and this and this,'ll be solved and she's like get angry like what why are you like why are you telling me that and so i actually said to her i you know i need to know at the outside of the conversation is this solving this thing problem or is this a you just want me to hear you conversation like which one which one of these is it and she's she's nice enough to actually like be honest about that let me know good marriage technique and i've heard she's one of the nicest people in the world. So opposites do attract, apparently.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
No, she, yeah. Everyone loves my wife.
My wife is a sweetheart. So are you, in that same vein, a lot of your brand has been built around controversy.
You're stepping into extremely controversial things or sometimes you create it. Is this intentional or is it just a value? This is something I value and I need to

go there. And if controversy happens, so be it.
It's more the latter. I really try not to say

uncalibrated things for the sake of just drawing fire. Everything that I say, I feel like I could

say in a more inflammatory fashion just to get clicks. I really try to calibrate my language to

make sure that if there's a hill that I'm going to die on, I want to die on a hill of my own choosing.

And what that means is that if there is a position that finds itself in controversy, then I want to state it as clearly and succinctly as I can. A boy is not a girl, right? I mean, these are things that didn't used to be controversial, but now are very, very controversial.
Or disparities are not evidence of discrimination, right? You have to show me evidence of discrimination. Otherwise, you know, there might be a confound in what you're talking about.
That has now become a controversial statement. But I really try not to just initiate firefights for the sake of initiating firefights.
I try to be pretty careful about the language that I use. And frankly, I find it irritating when people are deliberately vague when they use semantic overload in order to do that.
You'll see people do this, again, criticizing my own industry, but you'll see people do this. They'll say something that is perceived by, say, our side of the aisle as perfectly obvious, and it's perceived by the other side of the aisle as the most controversial thing ever.
And if they had just said it in the way that they actually meant it, it wouldn't be controversial at all. So instead of talking about, say, to take just a random example, a pretty famous commentator on the right at one point was suggesting that immigration was making our country dirty.
And this was perceived by the right as, OK, there are people who are coming across our border who come from cultures where they don't clean the streets as often. And that means there's more trash on the street sometimes.
And that's that's a bad thing. And then people on the left are like, he's talking about racially dirty.
If you're on the right, you read that semantic overload. It's a term that can be interpreted a variety of ways.
If the commentator just said, what I mean is the first thing. What I mean is when people come here and they come from a culture where there isn't regular trash pickup, they sometimes leave their garbage on the lawn and that makes the neighborhood dirtier.
And that has severe social consequences for everybody else who lives in the neighborhood. Now it's not even controversial, right? You know exactly what the person's saying.
And I think there's a certain amount of deliberate vagueness that very often contributes to controversy that I don't particularly like because it's not, it doesn't aim at solving the problem. You know, sometimes I think it's deliberate and sometimes I think it's almost mental laziness.
Instead of taking the time to get to the point in a concise way, in a clear way, with courage and say, this is what I mean. And if you don't like that, that's okay.
Right. But this is what I mean.

And that requires some extra mental gymnastics and it requires an extra level of backbone

to step in and go be very, very clear.

If you're going to be mad at me,

let's be mad at me about the right reason.

Exactly.

This is one of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall

is when people will,

they'll use words like they without an antecedent.

They're out to get you.

So, well, I need to know who they is.

Yeah, we get that in the financial world. They said and I heard.
Right. It's a horrible financial planning firm.
And you see this all the time in politics. Well, they're doing X.
They're doing Y. Can we even know who they are? If you tell me who they are, I can verify it.
I can say whether it's false, whether I think that it's true. You see this about, say, election 2020.
And people will say the election was rigged. Okay, I need specifics.
What are you talking about specifically when you say the election was rigged do you mean that members of the legacy media hid the hunter biden laptop story in the lead up to the election in order to help joe biden totally agree if that's what you mean by rigged 100 agree if by rigged you mean then middle of the night in fulton county there were people who bring in u-hauls full of ballots and then just shoving them through the machines i need some evidence of that right but people will use rigged and they'll just mean all those things to all those people. And then if you say, well, I don't think, I don't agree with you the way you're talking about them, it's like, well, that's because you're on the other side.
It's a way of creating artificial division rather than clarity and that I find pretty reprehensible. It's where we've devolved from arguing about ideas and instead we argue about hyperbole.
That's what it comes down to. Have you found that with the onset of Instagram reels and TikTok and shorts, it exacerbates it? It's kind of like when you just see the headline and snap judgment, start commenting, and there's no context for the full hour-long piece you did on the subject versus this 30-second clip you saw.
And that also means that it's very easy to deliberately mischaracterize other people's viewpoints. And so that happens all the time, where somebody will claim that you said a thing that you clearly did not say.
In fact, you may have said precisely the opposite, or you clarified it in a particular way in the middle of a 15-minute segment or an hour segment, and they'll pick out one sentence, and then because people have an attention span of 7.3 seconds or whatever it is, people will see that, and then they'll just think that's your view from now on. I mean, the comments that we started with about retirement are a perfect example of this.
I wasn't saying that you can never retire. You have to be a nine-year-old working in a salt mine.
Ben hates old people. Right, exactly.
For like two weeks, that was the narrative. The narrative was, I remember they did the same thing during COVID, right? During COVID, I was saying that just on an insurance basis, we should treat years lost of life as one of the stats that we use in measuring the impact of COVID.
Meaning that if you're talking about who to protect and who to shield, we should be shielding the elderly. That's the number one job.
But we should be tranching people who are younger back into the workforce because those people are not really going to get sick and they're really not going to die. They're going to be fine.
If you're talking about past pandemics, this pandemic compared to other pandemics is targeting, particularly not kids, not people who are young and healthy. It's particularly targeting people who are older and have multiple preexisting conditions, which means that it's a less damaging pandemic than past pandemics in certain ways, right? Not in terms of every human life is valuable, but if you're just talking about like cost of years lost, then you're talking about people who are 85, who are dying at 85 as opposed to 86.
That's horrible. It's a tragedy.
It's awful. It's also not the same thing as a nine-year-old child dying.
And we all know that, right? If millions of nine-year-old children have been dying of COVID, then people would have been willing to undertake pretty much any measure in order to quote unquote, slow the spread, right? But it, so I said that, and the takeaway from media was Shapiro fine with dead old people. And it's like, that's not what I'm saying at all.
I'm saying what is a perfectly obvious point. But if you can boil things down into their most controversial and stupid form, people like being pissed.
People like the feeling of getting passionate on the internet. And it'll get views and clicks at the end of the day.
Yeah, I've noticed a lot of people have made a really good living off of doing that off of my stuff, right? Making a solid secondary living off of- Just reacting to things that you should say.

Reacting to things that I say.

I'm really good for clicks.

Exactly.

For things I didn't say.

So last thing, you and Caleb and Jeremy are running Daily Wire.

For those of you who don't know, that's the two co-presidents of-

Yeah, they're the ones who actually do the work.

Of the Daily Wire.

And so you're running a media company.

We're running a media company.

We're watching the landscape change pretty quickly out there in the media world.

What do you see for the next five years?

So a lot of it's going to be dependent on the new dissemination of social media and what's allowed.

I think that you're going to start to see a lot of onshoring, to use an analogy, people who want to use your app or use our app because that's the only place they can safely get the information. And it's uncancellable.
Right, exactly. And we're all building, you know, kind of our data silos so that if God forbid, Amazon Web Services decides that they're going to go woke, then we have to figure out exactly what to do.
There is a bit of a pushback in the social media world. You're seeing it from Zuckerberg right now, actually.
You saw it from Musk. That is going to possibly open up the informational ecosystem again.
That's my hope. There's a big push against it because the more information is available from non-approved sources, the more people get afraid.
That's on the one hand. On the other hand, I think that the response of the right to the left shrinking the Overton window so much was to completely blow up the Overton window.
And so the left basically said, the only things you're allowed to say are things that agree with Hillary Clinton. And then the rest of us were like, well, I guess we're all out here in the cornfield together.
And instead of us then saying, okay, well, I think that the Overton window should be a hell of a lot broader than that, but I'm not sure that it should include neo-Nazis. I don't mean they should be deplatformed or anything, but I think that that's not like in the realm of normalcy.
Instead, the right had a was like all it was almost a moral relativistic reaction it's like all views should be taken with equal seriousness and and i think that's that's a negative for sure uh again not calling for anybody to have their account canceled or anything like that but i think that's been used then as justification by the left to then shut down speech right then they'll say oh well there's too many neo-nazis shut down the speech it like this reactionary ping pong ball that's moving back and forth. And the only people I think who are going to succeed in the coming environment are people who are authentic and who tell the truth and who have the capacity to build their own ships.
Because I don't know what's going to come next. The seas are really choppy.
But what I do know is that if people want your stuff or want our stuff, we have to provide a home for them. And I think that as people become more and more dissatisfied with the informational environment, there are going to be more and more people who are looking to go there.
Yeah. Cancel culture had an unintended consequence because of people in our business, the way we're reacting to it.
We're building ships. We're still playing with the third-party apps.
We're still very popular on all of them. We love them.
They're fine. But I never know what they're going to deem next that I said.
And I'm a fairly innocuous character compared to you guys. You know, and – And we're fairly innocuous compared to others.
I mean – Yeah, I agree. It's pretty wild that the standard does change radically and quickly.
I talked to a lot of the heads of these tech companies, and the truth is they're not in control. I mean, there are a lot of middle management employees who are making specific decisions on what exactly gets approved and what does not.
And then you have to go through the entire framework. And then they pretend it's the algorithm.
And it's not the algorithm. It's actually just some schmuck 21-year-old with a click.
With an axe to grind. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Cool stuff. Well, proud of you guys.
Again, we said at the opening and we're proud of you to have you as friends and neighbors. And we love watching your success and watching your talent and all the good things you're doing.
Very well done. And I appreciate you taking time to sit down with us on Longform here.
It's always great to see it. It's a blast.
Ben Shapiro, ladies and gentlemen. Ben Shapiro.
Thanks, Ben. This is The Ramsey Show.
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