Why Ben Shapiro Is Rich — And Why You’re Not

An inconvenient truth.

A few weeks ago, conservative political commentator (and de facto businessman) Ben Shapiro sat down with the Iced Coffee Podcast where he explained how he built The Daily Wire from $0 to $1 billion in less than 10 years.

Since The Daily Wire is a content company and content is kind of my thing, I took a deep breath and watched the whole clip hoping to learn some tips as to how I could do the same.

Long story short, I didn’t learn how to build a $1 billion media company.

But I did learn some stuff about who gets to be rich and who does not.

And why.

Why Ben Shapiro Is Rich

Shapiro, like all rich people, likes to say that he didn’t get rich by chance — hE gOt rIch beCaUse hE woRkeD hArd.

Beyond the work itself, he acknowledged that growing up in a two-parent home certainly made that easier.

The rest is hard work. Just work hard and you too can be rich like Ben Shapiro one day. There’s nothing else to see here. Move along, please!

Obviously, this isn’t true.

Shapiro has a lot of energy. And he’s smart.

So smart in fact, that while most people struggle to get to the next grade, Shapiro skipped two of them as a kid.

He entered university at 16 and finished his undergrad Summa Cum Laude.

At 17, he wrote a nationally syndicated political column. Then he went on to study law at Harvard and graduated Summa Cum Laude again.

By 20 years old, he had written two books.

Five years later, he was married, had 6 jobs, two kids, and earned roughly $400k/year.

He woke up at 5 AM, worked the entire day, went to sleep, and repeated this routine 6 days a week without the need to take a single vacation day.

But, you know, if you do the same, you too can be rich.

RIGHT.

This isn’t something that the lambda person could replicate, and everyone, including Shapiro, knows that.

So why could he do it?

Because of two qualities he genetically inherited: intelligence and energy.

Energy

A podcast whose name I forgot once highlighted that all people who got to know a bit of success at some point in their lives weren’t necessarily smart but had a lot of energy.

It’s true.

There are people who do as well on a 5-hour night as I do on a 9-hour night because they have the genes that enable them to do so.

They’re full of energy and invest that energy in their ventures.

Throughout history, Napoleon, Theodore Roosevelt, Da Vinci, Churchill, or, more contemporarily, Donald Trump, SBF, Reinhold Würth, Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, Leonardo del Vecchio, or Richard Branson, have been highlighted for never being tired.

It’s important.

In fact, it’s pretty much one of the only factors that will determine your financial success in life.

If you go to your day job and come home tired, good luck building a company.

If you go to your day job then dedicate another 6 hours to building your side hustle, it becomes impossible to fail.

Not because your idea is brilliant, but because you have very little competition as everyone else is resting while you’re working.

Energy is everything. We call it focus, drive, libido, but these are synonyms for energy.

• You can’t work when you’re tired.
• You can’t think when you’re tired.
• You can’t lead when you’re tired.
• You can’t build when you’re tired.
• You can’t learn when you’re tired.

As strange as it is, you can become rich off energy alone. Worst-case scenario, just get a second job.

I’m sure you know a few people who had insane energy as kids.

They usually end up in either of these paths later on:

1. They become entrepreneurs and get rich.
2. They take drugs to dump this energy excess and become drug addicts.

Energy is why I don’t have a day job.

I don’t have the energy for it.

The last five years of my life were dedicated to making money while spending the minimum amount of energy possible (few things beat writing and reading as you can literally do them from your bed).

I can’t have a job because my life ends up being:

• Working for 8 hours
• Stressing out about the job and possibly getting fired
• Not sleeping well because of it
• Working again until the weekend comes
• Sleeping for Saturday and Sunday before going back to work on Monday

Thanks, but I’d rather jump out the window than do that.

If you were born without any energy like I was, I am really sorry.

Besides optimizing your diet, exercise routine, and sleep, there’s not much you can do.

Intelligence

Intelligence is defined as the capacity to solve complex problems.

The faster you solve problems and the more difficult they are, the more intelligent you are.

Simply stated, you can’t be part of the elite if you’re not intelligent.

I know they sound very dumb when they speak on TV but if you dig a little further, every intellectual, writer, philosopher, or politician you hear about rates *way* above average in terms of intelligence.

Shapiro was so intelligent that he easily got a $200k/year law firm job where he worked one or two hours a day because he was fast at doing all of the tasks.

Now, the mainstream narrative (Bill Gates and co) loves to make you believe that you don’t need intelligence to succeed because, past a certain point, intelligence cannot be acquired.

If you tell people they’ll never achieve X because they’re not smart enough, you send an entire population down anhedonia and nihilism. Not nice.

Marx mistook hope for religion when he said it was the opium of the people.

I could copy-paste a list of billionaires with their respective intellectual achievements to prove my point, but it’d be a Black Swan fallacy: it’s not because all rich people are smart that you need intelligence to be rich.

So, I’ll use logic to demonstrate my argument, in three bullet points.

• How do you get rich? -> you build a company.
• How do you build a company? -> you solve a complex problem people are ready to pay you to solve.
• How do you solve a complex problem? -> you need to be smart enough to do that.

Voila.

Ben Shapiro, obviously, is an intelligent man.

When asked by a potential investor why The Daily Wire would succeed where everyone else failed, he answered: No one in the world is better at this than I am.

He didn’t brag. In fact, he was absolutely right.

But he didn’t say why he was the best.

Conclusion

After studying this topic for 10 years, I have concluded that your financial success in life is entirely determined by the amount of energy and intelligence you have (and height).

• Lots of energy and smart? Tell me about your projects and I will invest.
• Lots of energy but dumb? You can make it if you focus on easy businesses and scale them (Eg: restaurants, bars, hotels, laundromats, taxi services, etc).
• Lots of intelligence but tired? You can probably make it (SaaS, Twitter commentary and other content, affiliate marketing, etc).
• Dumb and tired? You only have one solution: RE.

The dumbest way to get rich by far remains RE investing.

Buy a property, rent it out. Repeat. This neither needs intelligence nor energy — which is why everyone does it.

If you neither have the energy nor the intelligence to build a company, RE is your only option; your last shot at using the third resource to get rich, one we all have: time.

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