Inside the unlikely success of Patrick Bet-David

A right turn off Montauk Highway onto a leafy street in the Hamptons town of Water Mill brings you to a wooden gate, behind which sits a 12,000-square foot modernist estate that rents, with staff, for $75,000 a week. At the moment it’s the vacation home of Patrick Bet-David, an unlikely character to find in this area of New York. Over the last two years, Bet-David has improbably emerged as one of the most prominent voices in right-wing media. His prodigious influence is belied by the fact that around here, he’s more undercover heretic than acclaimed celebrity.

Such is the benefit of fame on YouTube, the Wild West of the media world: it’s lucrative enough to pay for a sprawling Hamptons home, but overlooked enough that its stars rarely make the cover of the New York Times Styles section. Bet-David, now forty-five and a bona fide media mogul with a taste for Ferragamos, has had just one mention in the Times: a fleeting one in a 2017 piece about micro-influencers who capture their daily (and often mundane) lives on camera. The consequence of this mainstream media blind spot is that Bet-David, 6’4” with a muscular build that tugs on the threads of his suits, can pull in and out of his estate in tony Water Mill undetected. It’s a convenience not enjoyed by some of his neighbors, a cohort that includes Jennifer Lopez and Anthony Scaramucci.

Bet-David’s biography makes his story even more improbable: he’s a refugee from Iran who spent his adolescence as a hard-partying club rat (and briefly bodyguard to a drug dealer) who turned his life around after signing up for the Army, the 101st Airborne to be precise, and finding God.

His audience is vast and obsessive. Ask any thirty-five-year-old guy if he knows Patrick Bet-David and he’ll look at you like you just asked who John Lennon is. Bet-David boasts nearly 8 million subscribers between two YouTube channels. In May and June of this year those channels drew 258 million views, making Bet-David the third most-watched in news media on the entire platform, behind MSNBC and Fox News but ahead of CNN and ABC.

“Disruption is here, whether we like it or not,” he told me in the airy TV room of the Water Mill house. “If Fox offered me $20 million a year, I’m not doing it.”

His two channels blend reactionary political commentary and heated debates with the more inspirational style of entrepreneur-influencers. His assessments are sprinkled with psychoanalysis; in his world, people fit neatly into archetypes. There are “fighters” and “victims,” “alphas” and “water carriers.”

His output is prodigious and the content lengthy. The YouTube world is, by design, long-winded: The longer your video, the more ad-breaks you can fit into it, the more money you make from each viewer. Bet-David’s sit-down with Tucker Carlson stretched for more than two hours. His interview with Iran’s crown prince Reza Pahlavi was just shy of three hours. His two interviews with Joe Rogan — the king of the ambling confab — combine for 363 minutes, or more than six hours. They’ve racked up millions of views.

The YouTube landscape is, like so much of modern media, hopelessly balkanized. There’s money in preaching to the choir, particularly in an era where the choir has a vast universe of commentators to choose from and the means to fund them directly. What makes Bet-David compelling is that he manages to narrowly avoid delivering the boring partisan slop so prevalent on YouTube by platforming voices of different political persuasions, whether it’s Chris Cuomo or Sam Seder, the popular progressive radio host, who recently appeared on his show for a spirited debate. Seder told me Bet-David flew him to Florida and put him up at a hotel for the lengthy and combative interview. “It was fun,” he said, though he wasn’t impressed by its intellectual rigor: “He and his crew have a pretty superficial understanding of even the things they purport to believe, so it was pretty easy for me to twist them in knots.”

Bet-David revels in conflict, and his comfort with confrontation has fueled his rise as a force of political commentary. Take his viral interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis in October 2023. Then taking on Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president, DeSantis had entered the race expecting to breeze past a disgraced Trump, only to end up facing the political equivalent of Gallipoli. The governor responded by seeking the safe space of conservative media, where he expected to be insulated from tough questions.

The interview lasted nearly an hour, but one brief moment is what made headlines: when Bet-David bluntly asked DeSantis about the rumors that he wears lifts in his cowboy boots. He pulled up a video of DeSantis sitting down, feet unnaturally crammed into a pair of cowhide Luccheses.

DeSantis approached the questioning with trepidation. “I haven’t seen that,” he said. “No, no. Those are just standard, off the rack Lucchese.”

“How tall are you, governor?” Bet-David asked.

“5’11”,” DeSantis said.

“OK,” Bet-David replied, an incredulous look on his face. “Why don’t you wear tennis shoes and dress shoes?” He proceeded to offer DeSantis a pair of Ferragamo loafers to try on, which the governor refused, supposedly because of government rules against accepting gifts. It was painful to watch.

In our conversation, Bet-David compared the DeSantis moment — unfavorably — to the time Trump was a good sport about Jimmy Fallon tousling his hair on The Tonight Show in 2016. “These were moments for Ron to show his human side, and he couldn’t do it,” Bet-David said.

Or take his interview with Bill Maher, recorded at the comedian’s Beverly Hills home — Maher sunk in a chair too big for him, the towering Bet-David bursting out from one too small for his large frame. At one point in the 103-minute chat, the guest asked his host why he liked Gavin Newsom. “He’s a winner,” Maher replied.

“What areas has Newsom won in?” Bet-David countered. “What has he done to California to say that he’s a winner?”

Maher, an unlit joint in his mouth and one hand shoved down his pocket in search of a lighter, groaned after an uncomfortably protracted pause. “Oh God. I don’t know. It’s too late — he made it rain, OK dude? I don’t know, I don’t follow the news.” When Bet-David pressed further, comparing Maher’s lack of an answer to Newsom’s own brand of shallow politics, Maher snapped back: “Shut up. This is stupid.”

“I understand why Trump would piss you off,” Bet-David said to me, reflecting on the Maher interview. “But you have to be able to find a way to give a reasonable, compelling argument for Newsom. He couldn’t do it. And so what happens? Emotions go high and he starts cursing.”

“I spoke maybe 10 percent of the podcast and he spoke the entire time. But if you can’t make an argument, the average person sits there and says, ‘Wow, he had a chance to make an argument for Newsom, he couldn’t do it.’”

Bet-David chalks his pugilistic sensibilities up to a tough upbringing. He speaks often about gangsters and applies lessons of “the street” to his career as an entrepreneur and media commentator. “I’m a guy that grew up with gangsters,” he said. “I come from the ’hood; I come from the streets; I come from the army. I’m around whites, blacks, Hispanics, who come from not a lot of money. So that’s who I relate to. That’s my background. My mother’s side, they were all communists. My dad’s side, they were imperialists.”

It was never a given that Bet-David would make it in America. He was born a Christian in Iran to parents who would marry and divorce twice as they fled the Iran-Iraq War to a refugee camp in Germany, where Bet-David would spend nearly two years of his childhood while the family waited for green cards that would allow them to immigrate to the United States. They settled in Glendale, California, where he was raised from the age of seven.

He briefly attended Santa Monica Community College, but spent much of his time partying. He was, he says, a “1.8 GPA guy.” He drank, took drugs and danced. He was a regular attendee at a Vegas bacchanal known as the “Pimp n Ho Ball.” For money, he worked at Burger King. At eighteen, realizing his life was going nowhere, he enlisted in the Army.

He kept partying. In one video on his YouTube channel — thanks to some nifty if cheesy editing, in this video Bet-David interviews himself — he recalled once getting so twisted on booze and ecstasy he thought that a tree outside a Glendale Jack in the Box was a unicorn chasing him. He tried weed and didn’t mind it. “It just slowed me down, but I don’t want to slow down.” He claims to have briefly worked as a bodyguard for one of the biggest cocaine dealers in Los Angeles. During that time, he tried the drug — “not for me.”

“That was my life,” he told me. “And then I got out.”

After leaving the Army, he returned to Los Angeles and connected with an old high school friend — a “tough guy” and a “fighter” so wild he had once done the drug PCP — who had turned his life around and was teaching math at a local community college. God, he said, had saved him. Then an atheist, Bet-David reluctantly attended Bible study with his old friend. He got hooked — and began attending every Friday night from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. “Eighteen months later I was completely changed,” said Bet-David, now a devout Christian. “I stopped going to clubs.”

The day before 9/11, a Glendale branch manager at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, impressed by Bet-David’s service in the Army and his hunger for sales, hired him as a financial advisor. He went on to work at Transamerica for nearly eight years, realizing along the way that he didn’t want to climb the corporate ladder at a bank or insurance agency. At the time he attended a megachurch in the San Fernando Valley. His pastor, Dudley Rutherford, preached the power of media, deeming it the hardest but most important “mountain to climb” in life (he placed it ahead of six others, including family.)

In 2009, Bet-David launched an insurance business, PHP (it stands for “People Helping People”), and fashioned himself as an aspirational symbol of success for his employees. He launched a YouTube channel in 2012 and posted videos about business and entrepreneurship. One published in 2015 — “The Life of an Entrepreneur in 90 Seconds” — went viral on YouTube and Facebook, drawing millions of views and demonstrating he could find success online. The short clip is an inspirational video, set to dramatic strings, with shots of Bet-David driving around in a Ferrari 458 Italia cut with scenes of rejection from early in his career. “Most people only pay attention to the final product of a successful entrepreneur,” Bet-David narrates.

In 2013 he launched Valuetainment, a media company that holds regular Tony Robbins-style conventions where thousands of aspiring Bet-Davids come to hear uplifting speeches or talks moderated by him. One from 2019, featuring Kobe Bryant, now boasts more than 5 million views on YouTube. This year’s gathering, in early September, listed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Nick Saban on its schedule.

As his audience grew, Bet-David took a hard right shift into political commentary, launching another channel, PBD Podcast, to host debates and interviews. That foray into America’s culture-war politics was a natural step for someone of Bet-David’s sensibilities. It also put him in front of a much broader and more obsessive audience. His company, which encompasses a media arm and consulting division, now boasts 115 employees. He counts the likes of Donald Trump and Piers Morgan as admirers.

“Patrick is a smart, curious, incredibly well-informed man who is the true embodiment of the American dream,” Morgan told me. “I think his remarkable success is a result of his extraordinary family back story, his experience serving in the US military, and his natural entrepreneurial zeal. He’s one of my favorite repeat guests on Piers Morgan Uncensored because he always has different and interesting takes on what’s happening in the world.”

Some in the Trump camp are less impressed. One Republican operative scoffed when I asked if Trump would be sitting down for an interview with Bet- David anytime soon. “The guy is clearly not intelligent, but the same scammy, shameless, unethical attributes that make someone a successful mortgage shyster are also great for the media industry.”

While his career as a political commentator has flourished, Bet-David still faces detractors who call into question how he made his money. One of the most fervent critics of his insurance company, PHP, is Stephen Findeisen, better known as YouTube star Coffeezilla.

“It’s a failing business model that doesn’t work unless you’re at the tippity tippity top,” said Findeisen, whose YouTube show seeks to expose business frauds. Findeisen has long been a thorn in Bet-David’s side, having accused him of running a multilevel marketing scheme. The pair duked it out a few years ago in a three-hour marathon interview, broadcast live on YouTube, with Findeisen taking Bet-David to task over filings that showed that the majority of PHP agents make almost no money.

In 2021, a TV news station in Memphis looked into PHP after a tip from viewers. They found that while the company was indeed a multilevel marketing agency it did not amount to a pyramid scheme. “We do believe that this company is operating a lawful MLM, a multi-level marketing company,” said a representative from the Better Business Bureau, which gives PHP an A+ rating.

Bet-David seems to care little about the criticism. In fact, in speaking with him I got the sense that he enjoys the spectacle of the live-streamed brawl so much he was unfazed by the underlying allegation that he was screwing over his employees. He said of Findeisen, “I think the guy’s a stud. I think that guy’s going to do something in the future. He has the ability to really investigate and get to the bottom of things. We need guys like that on YouTube today.”

Bet-David points out that a number of real estate and insurance companies operate similar recruitment-focused multilevel marketing businesses. What’s more, PHP has undoubtedly been a success. It was acquired two years ago by one of the biggest insurance providers in the United States, and Bet-David’s earnout completed just two weeks before our interview.

Bet-David tends to salt his claims of success with the bravura language of the modern internet entrepreneur. Thankfully, he’s not averse to talking about money — and how much of it he claims to have. When asked directly, Bet-David said he estimates that Lion Holdings, the parent company of his businesses, is worth more than $500 million.

Reddit prattlers may complain about the way Bet-David has made his millions, but there’s no doubting he’s made them. Home for the Bet-Davids is a $20 million five-bedroom, six-bathroom waterfront mansion in Fort Lauderdale. Winters are spent in Aspen, summers in the Hamptons. Bet-David is now looking to buy on Long Island, and fancies Sagaponack, a hamlet of potato fields converted into estates that holds the distinction of being one of the priciest ZIP codes in America.

At the house in Water Mill, Bet-David was surrounded by staff and family, including his father, his wife and his four children. His eight-year-old daughter joined our interview at one point, balancing animatedly on Bet-David’s lap. When I asked if there was anyone I could speak to for more insight into his rise, he introduced me to Tom Ellsworth.

A mild-mannered marketing executive and professor, Ellsworth was working as an executive at the telecom company Sprint when a Los Angeles pastor introduced him to Bet-David. He’s now a true believer. After nearly twenty years of friendship, he’s still awestruck by Bet-David’s story – the one where an Iranian refugee embraces America, joins the 101st Airborne, amasses a fortune as an entrepreneur and then fame as a media figure. “He was born in Iran but made in the USA,” Ellsworth said. At one point during our interview, he was moved to tears when talking about Bet-David.

“I don’t think they see how much he” — Ellsworth stopped, and we sat in silence as he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes before gathering himself — “how much this guy from Iran, who came off and served in the military, loves this country more than they do. It’s not about him. He had this vision for life insurance and now he’s got this vision for the message that comes out of Valuetainment to empower people, to educate them. And I don’t think people see that. He’s not here to be MrBeast. He’s here to help everybody be a beast in their own lives.”

One common thread in Bet-David’s content is an unwavering support for Trump. Such sympathy comes as little surprise given their backgrounds: two “fighters” who made fortunes in business before turning to careers in media.

I asked how a refugee from Iran came around to supporting Trump in the first place. One of Trump’s first acts as president was signing into law an executive order that banned all refugees and all Iranian citizens from entering the country. So I pointed out the obvious: if Trump had been in power when your family fled to America as refugees, you would not have been let in. You would not have served in the army, worked at Morgan Stanley, start- ed PHP, launched Valuetainment, become a wealthy and famous media star. You would not have this large house; you would not have met your wife and fathered your kids.

When faced with thorny questions, Bet-David has a tendency to go into podcast mode. In this case, his answer lasted more than ten minutes. He spoke of the horrors his family faced in Iran and their escape to Germany; he spoke of his aunt who worked at the United States embassy in Tehran during the events memorialized in the movie Argo; he spoke of his parents’ divorce when his family was stuck in Germany. He eventually concluded by saying that a Muslim ban might not be the worst idea.

“Let’s say you have kids. You have a choice in raising your kids in a community of 100 percent Muslims, 100 percent Scientologists, 100 percent Christians, 100 percent Jews. It’s 100 percent of whatever it is,” he said. “I’ve lived in a 99 percent Muslim environment, right? And I remember what my father and my mother went through. I never played outside in Iran.”

“So I’m not going to sit here and, you know, process the decision-making that [Trump] made, whether this or whether that,” he said. “I think we’re becoming a little bit too emotional and less statistical.” He doesn’t address the point that Trump didn’t ban just Iranian Muslims from the United States; he banned all Iranians from the United States, no matter their religion.

There is one thing Bet-David says he can relate to the Muslim community on. He gestures protectively at his daughter. “If you try to do LGBTQ with Muslim parents, good luck,” he said. “See what happens. We have a day in America called the Gay Uncle Day. We have a coming out of a closet day. We have all these weird days.”

Bet-David is also prone to the kind of conspiracy theories that have festered since Trump’s stunning ascent to the presidency in 2016. Like Trump, he believes the 2020 election was stolen. When I ask what evidence he has, he points to Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the election. That’s not stealing an election, I noted. Indeed, you could make the same case for 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign was battered by the WikiLeaks revelations stolen through an illegal Russian hack. In both cases, unfair circumstances harmed the candidates. That’s politics.

Bet-David’s case that the 2020 election was stolen is more like Tucker Carlson’s than Trump’s, which is so outlandish (and in some cases libelous) that many of his allies in the media steer clear of it. While Trump says the election was literally stolen from him through rampant fraud, Carlson and Bet-David opt for a more palatable theory — let’s call it Rigged Lite: They say the media stacked the deck against Trump. Bet-David sees himself as a counterbalance to those deck-stacking forces.

In many ways, Bet-David is following a path charted by Trump. They’re both businessmen who used media to mythologize themselves into icons of all-American success; the latest act of both their careers would be a rightward turn into politics. For Bet-David, it was a path suggested when he first left the army in his early twenties. “I wanted to be the next Arnold. You know, marry a Kennedy, be a governor, Hollywood actor, all this stuff,” he recalled.

But one difference between his course and Trump’s, Bet-David acknowledges, is that as an immigrant to the United States, the Constitution forbids him from running for president.

“I respect the Constitution,” Bet-David said, with the air of a man resolute in his duty. “So I’m just gonna go on a forty-year run in media and business.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 2024 World edition.