Why Does No One Trust The Media Anymore? - Patrick Bet-David - #703

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Patrick Bet-David. He's an entrepreneur, founder of Valuetainment, a podcaster and an author. Given that the world is in chaos, we would usually turn to our institutions and news organizations to make sense of what's happening. But trust in these institutions is at an all time low. So what can we do about it? Expect to learn why it's actually important to have enemies. Patrick's thoughts on Ben shapiro's new Snow White movie, what he thinks about Dana White's life philosophy, what it takes to actually impress people, why immigrants have such a strong work ethic, who really runs the world, whether Tucker Carlson is going to break the internet and much more. This episode was very fun. Flew all the way out to Fort Lauderdale in Florida to record with Patrick and yeah, the guy is a real tour de force of capitalism and sort of lean in hard work mentality. There's an awful lot to learn from this one. Don't forget that if you are new here or a long time listener, you might be listening, but not subscribed. And that is tres bad because you will miss episodes over the next couple of weeks when I have some of the biggest guests on the planet coming on Modern Wisdom. You don't want to do that. So navigate to Apple podcasts or Spotify and press the subscribe button to support the show and make me very happy and not miss those episodes. I thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Patrick Bet-David.
You say that you're useless to the world if you're not competing, and you need enemies to drive you.

**Patrick Bet-David** (1:52)
Why? I think most people who say they don't have enemies, they probably don't want to tell others they have the enemy or they don't want to disclose it. They're great poker players. I don't know a single person that doesn't have an enemy. Everybody does. We're very good at concealing our insecurities, our emotions, our fears, our wildest desires, our enemies or comments that rub us the wrong way, that wire us. We are very good actors, incredible actors. Now, if you have a long time of talking to somebody and you kind of watch them closely, and the more they talk and then eventually you're going to find some leaks. You're like, oh, I just found one right there. Boom, I found one contradiction right there. Boom, I found one. And you're like, okay, interesting. We all have a little bit of that.
But I do think that when you study the people that do something very big, I'm not talking about small. I'm talking really, really big. We're talking about some interesting people today. You and I have somebody we both respect a lot, Robert Greene. His books. I'm sure you love his books. I love his books. 33 Strategies of War. I couldn't put it down for two years straight. I listen to that book every day in my car, straight. Every day it was on repeat for two years straight. Why though? Because I innocently got into sales and I had a good time in sales and business after I got out of the military. And I wanted to be a bodybuilder. And then I realized I'm 6'4, it's not going to work for bodybuilding to win Mr. Olympia because everybody's 5'8, 5'9, 5'10, maybe 5'11, Ronnie Coleman. But the 6'4 days are behind us. Even Luke Ferrigno didn't win at that height. Arnold did. And then when I got into sales and everybody was a fan, then I started competing, still a little bit of fan. But when I started the insurance company and then I started growing market share, really, then a lot of those people that were fans then started undermining. And I said, got it. This is how it works. You can't be this naive. You can't be this innocent. Competitions out there, if you want to kind of go out there and take market share from others and you want to get bigger, you can't expect for people to sit there and like everything you're doing. That's when I realized, you got to choose your enemies wisely.

**Chris Williamson** (4:06)
People want you to do well. They just don't want you to do better than that.

**Patrick Bet-David** (4:09)
Yes. Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (4:11)
Yeah, it's interesting. There's this story of Churchill and he's showing a young MP around the House of Lords in the UK. This is before World War II. You can imagine that they're wandering through these dusty hallways over there's the toilets and over there's where we have a cigar. Anyway, they go into the chamber, they go into the House of Lords, right? The difference, actually, the distance between the two front benches is the same distance as a long sword held out at arms length from both sides. She's a kind of a funny vestige of evidently what they were worried about in the Middle Ages, and they've just continued to update, but they've never changed the distance of the front benches. Anyway, about this young guy who's probably full of testosterone, and he's finally here with Winston Churchill. He go in and this young MP starts gesticulating at the other side. He keeps referring to them as the enemy. Churchill turns to him and he says, that's the opposition, dear boy. The enemy is behind you.