Ep. 2484 - Capitalism Is Under Attack. Here’s Why.

Summary

The Ben Shapiro Show, Ep. 2484 – "Capitalism Is Under Attack. Here’s Why."

Date: August 12, 2026
Host: Ben Shapiro | Guests: Patrick Bet-David (PBD Podcast), Florida AG James Uthmeyer

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Episode Overview

Main Theme:
Ben Shapiro delivers a forceful defense of capitalism amid what he calls an "all-out assault" against free markets from both the political left and an emergent anti-capitalist faction on the right. The episode unpacks key anti-capitalist arguments, rebuts contemporary critics, discusses perceptions among younger generations, and features in-depth interviews with entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeyer, touching also on anti-Americanism and current political controversies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Capitalism Under Siege: Diagnosing the Attack

• Historical Context: Ben highlights how capitalism has exponentially improved global wealth and living standards.

• Quote:

  “Everybody was dirt poor, literally dirt poor. Then we did private property rights and free markets. And now everyone is by any stretch exponentially richer.” — Ben Shapiro (02:30)

• Arguments Against Capitalism:

  • Argument #1 – Inequality: Critics claim capitalism causes unequal wealth distribution, citing figures like Bernie Sanders and Tucker Carlson, and suggesting capitalism is fundamentally unfair.
  • Argument #2 – Spiritually Unfulfilling: Ben notes a rising argument that capitalism empties society of meaning and damages families and spirituality—an angle taken by Carlson and likened historically to anti-capitalist rhetoric from various ideological groups.

• Rebuttal: Ben counters both on factual and philosophical grounds, using historical data and moral reasoning.

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2. Analysis of Anti-Capitalist Narratives

• Popular Criticisms:
  • Bernie Sanders, Zara Mamdani, and other Progressive Voices: Focus on greed, environmental harm, and corporate power (04:45–06:10)
  • Tucker Carlson (from the right): Warns that "an economic system in which the overwhelming majority of the rewards go to an ever shrinking number... is doomed...” (08:00)
• Ben's Response:
  • Points out hypocrisy (e.g., Bernie’s personal wealth).
  • Explains why lower capital gains taxes are not an endorsement of greed, but a matter of double taxation.
  • Ridicules the spiritual emptiness argument by comparing it to fundamentalist rhetoric from various historical sources.

  “Sounds a lot like Tucker Carlson, but actually it is Hassan Albana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.” — Ben Shapiro (11:45)

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3. Sources of Anti-Capitalist Sentiment

• Media and Cultural Messaging: Academic and popular media misinform/underinform younger generations about the realities of socialism, communism, and capitalism (18:50).
• Short Memory & Ignorance: Many young Americans are unfamiliar with the failures of non-capitalist models or conflate state intervention/cronyism with true free markets.

4. Conflating Capitalism with Cronyism/Statism

• Mislabeling Economies:
  • Many critics conflate government-manipulated economies with true capitalism (e.g., Russia described as “hyper capitalist” by some DSA leaders—16:00).
  • Ben and guests dissect examples: U.S. government bailouts, Trump administration’s stock interventions, and monopoly arguments.

5. What’s Needed to Defend Free Markets?

• Factual Advocacy:
  • Point out the historical and contemporary failures of anti-capitalist systems.
  • Remind audiences “capitalism kicks ass” (23:20), celebrating innovation and individual success stories (Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey).
  • Foster gumption and individual responsibility ("tough love"), not just policy tweaks.
• Communication Strategy:
  • Sell capitalism not just on logic, but emotionally, conveying the American Dream as agency and possibility, not just possessions.

  “We are selling it too logically and we got to go back and sell it emotionally in a way where they say, why would I want any other system?” — Patrick Bet-David (40:01)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

The Most Important Chart in History

• [02:00]

  "This right here is probably the most important chart in human history. ... People had zero GDP per capita ... then free markets happen and then exponential explosion." — Ben Shapiro

Spiritually Unfulfilled Capitalism

• [10:45]

  “Market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. ... Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having.” — Tucker Carlson (quoted by Ben)

Youth Attitudes and Policy Pitch (Patrick Bet-David Interview)

• [28:39]

  “There’s a guy that comes and talks to you for three hours … the government can save your problems. … Even though we say [socialism doesn’t work], the socialists are offering a solution.” — Patrick Bet-David

• [30:45]

  “Anybody under the age of 30, pay 0 federal income taxes whatsoever, go make your money prior to 30. … That idea gets people to go a little bit faster.” — Patrick Bet-David

The ‘Conversion’ Analogy

• [48:38]

  “There’s always going to be ungrateful people who lack perspective… It is very important for those of us that are loving America that we keep the fight, that we keep selling, that we’re out there constantly talking about the beautiful part about this incredible country.” — Patrick Bet-David

The American Dream Defined

• [41:07]

  “When we talk about the American dream … that’s not actually the American Dream. The American dream is that if I pursue with vigor and determination and make the right decisions in my life, I have a shot of reaching those goals.” — Ben Shapiro

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Interview Highlights

Patrick Bet-David (PBD Podcast Host, Entrepreneur) [27:48–48:38]

• Explains why anti-capitalist voices win over young people—they offer an emotionally satisfying explanation and a government-driven solution.
• Critiques both progressive and right-wing populist attacks on capitalism as emotionally manipulative but ultimately vacuous.
• Proposes bold, solution-oriented policies (e.g., no federal taxes for under 30s) to reframe GOP messaging.
• Advocates for selling the promise and optimism of capitalism, focusing on dreams and self-empowerment, not just cold facts.
• Discusses the need for leaders to listen and emotionally connect with young constituents.
• Personal anecdotes about the transformative power of American opportunity.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeyer [63:41–69:35]

• Discusses pursuit of legal accountability regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era decisions.
• Details ongoing subpoena, possible avenues for criminal and civil charges, and the cooperation with other states.
• Argues that, despite a federal pardon, state-level prosecution is possible if personal gain or dishonesty is demonstrated.

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Timelines for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic / Quote / Interview | |--------------------|---------------------------------------------------------| | 00:50 – 05:15 | Introduction to episode theme, history of capitalism, main data points and central chart | | 05:15 – 14:52 | Critique of anti-capitalist rhetoric (from left & right); breakdown of unfairness and "spiritual" arguments | | 14:52 – 22:10 | Crony capitalism vs. true capitalism; government market intervention | | 22:10 – 26:15 | Case study: Amazon and the subcontractor debate; defense of business innovation | | 26:15 – 27:48 | Labor force statistics, "tough love," and job opportunities | | 27:48 – 48:38 | Patrick Bet-David extended interview: youth attitudes, policy ideas, effective communication for capitalism, immigrant success story, American dream | | 63:41 – 69:35 | James Uthmeyer interview: Legal efforts against Fauci, state vs. federal prosecution, COVID response accountability | | 55:35 – 58:21 | Anti-Americanism in politics and culture, contemporary examples from Democratic Party figures & media | | 59:30 – 63:18 | Update on Iran crisis, US administration’s response, presidential security maneuvering |

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Closing Thoughts and Recommendations

Attribution & Tone:
Ben’s tone throughout is direct, brash, and unapologetically pro-capitalist. He uses sarcasm, rapid-fire data, and potent one-liners, while guests bring personal and strategic perspectives rooted in business and practical policy.

Key Takeaways:

• The debate over capitalism vs. alternatives is as much about emotion and narrative as it is about numbers or history.
• Defenders of free markets need to make a compelling, relatable, and emotionally resonant case, especially to younger Americans who have only known (imperfect) capitalistic societies.
• Maintaining, defending, and improving capitalism requires both policy innovation and a savvier messaging strategy—one that sells not just facts, but the broader dream.
• Anti-capitalist sentiment is tied, at times, to broader anti-American sentiment and misunderstanding of global and historical realities.

Memorable Closing:

“Capitalism kicks ass. Capitalism is great. Free markets rock.” — Ben Shapiro (23:20)

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Additional Noteworthy Quotes

• “If you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? ... That is not what you’re saying.” — Ben Shapiro (06:40)
• “The new red, green, brown anti-capitalist party believes ... the collective vision of man is paramount. Private property and free markets cut against that vision.” — Ben Shapiro (12:50)
• “Most people living in the west right now have never spent time in truly poor places...” — Ben Shapiro (13:15)
• “We’re selling the dream very logically today, not emotionally. And I think we can do a better job in that.” — Patrick Bet-David (41:07)

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode:
This in-depth breakdown provides the logic, emotion, and primary arguments made by both Shapiro and his guests—giving you a full sense of the conservative defense of capitalism, the messaging battle facing the right, and the ongoing debates over America’s economic and cultural future.

Transcript

[Ben Shapiro]

We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, you know, 20 years ago, man, a lot has happened in my life. I was 22 years old. I was not yet married. And now just think back over the past 20 years. Wife, five kids, big business, all of it. Well, 20 years, a long time. SimpliSafe is now celebrating 20 years again. Most companies don't make it that long unless they're actually solving a real problem. When you're picking a security system for your home, what you're looking for is peace of mind. The goal is not to obsess over your security. The goal is to never have to think about it again. And that's what I like about Simplisafe. Most home security systems are designed for after something goes wrong. After the window breaks, after someone gets inside, after your phone buzzes. Simplisafe's approach is different. It's designed to help stop a break in before it happens. Their AI powered outdoor cameras detect suspicious activity around your home. Alert live US based agents. Those agents can actually speak through the camera to scare off trespassers and if necessary, request 911 dispatch. Prevention beats reaction. SimpliSafe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60% on your new SimpliSafe system at SimpliSafe.com Shapiro that's 60% off at SimpliSafe.com Shapiro plus, when you order right in our show, name in the how did you hear about us Survey to let them know we sent you. There is no safe like SimpliSafe. Woke one. That was AOC's term for the woke nightmare that we experienced over the past decade or so. It argued that racism is the key motivating factor in American life. Woke one fell apart because most Americans innately understood after a while that it was total crap, that America is not racist and that most Americans are not racist. So now we've moved on to Woke2. The revenge. Woke2 posits that capitalism is the problem. Free markets, you see, create imperialism and colonialism and racism and exploitation. All your problems are the fault of free markets. Destroy those markets, hand power to your best friends in the government and all will be well. Capitalism is under heavy fire. Today we are going to defend capitalism and we'll explain the problem and we'll talk about how to solve the crusade against capitalism. We will also be joined by Patrick Bet David of the PBD podcast. Plus Florida AG James Uthmeyer stops by to explain his plans for prosecuting Anthony Fauci. And we'll get to the continuing anti Americanism of Woke 22 Woke Too Furious. This is the Ben Shapiro show. So it is perfectly obvious that we are at this point in the middle of an all out assault on free markets. It's coming predominantly from the left, but not just from the left. Large segment of the right is very anti free markets at this point as well. So before we get to that assault, I need to show you a chart. This right here is probably the most important chart in human history. This is a chart of global average GDP per capita over the long run, right? Meaning global gross domestic product per capita starting at about 1600 forward through 2025. And what does this chart show? Well, for those who are not watching, basically it shows that people had zero GDP per capita essentially all the way through the early 19th century. And then free markets happen and then exponential explosion of GDP per capita. That is the actual, that is the actual chart. Exponential growth right from close to zero to verging on $25,000. Global average GDP per capita over the long run. And pretty astonishing, right? So easy story. Everybody was dirt poor, literally dirt poor. Then we did private property rights and free markets. And now everyone is by any stretch exponentially richer. Now that is not because of government centralization of resources that was done for all of human history. It's not because of vast thickets of bureaucratic regulations that was done for a long time too. It's because of a very simple proposition. You own your own labor and the product of your labor, you own your own innovation and the products of that innovation, and you should be free to sell, rent or trade them. Period. That's the whole thing. So capitalism, big success. The chart should end the debate. But of course it does not. There are now a variety of arguments being leveled against capitalism. They come down to basically two arguments in the end argument, number one, capitalism creates inequality, right? So you might say to yourself, well, hold up, if capitalism creates inequality but everybody's wealthier, isn't that still better than the alternative? Doesn't, doesn't inequality in wealth beat equality and absolute poverty? The answer is yes, but not according to Bernie Sanders. Bernie in his book it's okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, which again, the whole book is there are so many things wrong with Earth and I don't like any of those things. And so capitalism's bad. So he writes, the economic system, with its excessive corporate greed and concentration of ownership and power destroys anything that gets in its way of the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment, it destroys our health it destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought. Says the millionaire with the lake house. And of course, it is not just Bernie Sanders. It's all about the inequality. The inequality, the greed. Here is Zara Momdani doing this routine in front of a United Colors of Benetton ad and George Washington's desk, which was backwards and from the New York City mayor's office on July 3rd in an insult to America and George Washington. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world's

[Patrick Bet-David]

first trillionaire who hungers for more.

[Ben Shapiro]

We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused dirt streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone. And we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead. And the soft hands. Ah, we don't need to hear the rest of it. It's just nonsense. Okay, right again. It's all about the the poor versus the rich. It's inequality and it's cruelty and monopoly. And of course, this is not just from Zoramdani. It's also from Tucker Carlson, who does not understand how economics work and doesn't care to understand how economics works. Shut up, Ben Shapiro. But he says it's unfair that people in finance make more than wage earners, putting aside the fact that people in finance are the ones who actually undertake the risk, and wage earners earn a wage that is guaranteed by someone else. So if you have a tax code, for example, just to name one example, if you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? Well, you're saying it's twice as virtuous to invest money or to inherit money and keep it in the markets as it is to go to work in the morning. Really? Of course, that's what you're saying. No, that is not what you're saying. Because any tax penalizes the impious acts, the bad things, the vices. Cigarettes cost $18 a pack because we're against smoking. So if being an ordinary wage earner driving in from the suburbs to make 80 grand a year, if that's taxed at twice the rate of being a private equity baron, what are we saying? That it's twice as Virtuous to be a private equity baron and to inherit money or 2000. What is that you have to do with tax rates? No. Wrong. Okay, stop him. Okay, so again, stop this nonsense. Okay, so again, that's just stupid. Okay, there, there are plenty of taxes that you pay that are not a tax on, on vice. He's naming a vice tax, right, which is cigarettes. There are taxes on property. Is it, is it a vice to own property in the United States? There's a tax on death, right? There's an estate tax that presumably he's in favor of. Is it, is it a, is it a vice to die like that? That's wrong. The reason why capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, for example, than wages, is because they've mostly already been taxed, right? You take your money from your wage and then you invest that money in the markets, and then the gain from that is what is taxed as a capital gain. That would be the reason. But he doesn't care to understand. He doesn't care to understand because it's unfair. Everything's unfair. And of course, Tucker believes that capitalism is also evil because, you know, capitalism somehow empties you of your soul. This is what he told the New York Times. It cuts against families capitalism, as opposed to communism, which literally destroys families, or economic fascism, which also destroys families. Capitalism is to blame. Any economic system in which, you know, the overwhelming majority of the rewards go to an ever shrinking number of people or, or proportion of people is a doomed system because it makes people revolutionary. I saw this in Venezuela, which I

[Patrick Bet-David]

visited as a child.

[Ben Shapiro]

It was a prosperous kind of first world country, beautiful country actually. And then it, of course, it proceeded along the path we're on and the resentment built. And you had this very volatile combination of electoral politics, a democracy, and, you know, an economic oligarchy. And those two don't work well together. And you had a, A left wing populist takeover. So his story about Venezuela is that there was too much capitalism. Now that's his story about Venezuela. That caused inequality and all the rest. Man, you should try some government interventionism in Venezuela, see how that works. Okay, so that's argument one. Capitalism causes inequality. Now again, every system causes inequality unless everyone is equally poor. It turns out that the Soviet Union was really unequal. Stalin had a very nice life, and most people were dirt poor and. Or starving. In just one second, we'll get to another argument made by the anti capitalists that your soul is robbed by those who promote free markets. Well, that's stupid. But I'll tell you what is not in fact stupid. Paying less for your same cell phone coverage, right? Your wireless bill shows up every month, you pay it. Eventually you just start accepting that you have to pay too much. But that's not true. Why are you paying this much? Why? Especially when switching doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing the things that you actually care about. Well, that's what caught my attention about Pure Talk in the first place. In a recent industry survey, PureTalk was the only wireless company to earn five stars in every single category. Coverage, support, value and data. When you actually need help, they have a dedicated US based customer service team. So you're dealing with an actual person instead of spending half your afternoon shouting representative at an automated phone system that is apparently determined to break your actual soul. Then there's the math. The average family of four saves over a thousand bucks a year compared with the big wireless companies. A thousand bucks. That's real money. And if the only reason you're not saving it is, well, I've had the same carrier forever, that that's a bad reason. Right now you can switch to Pure Talk and get any plan, including Unlimited, for just 15 bucks a month for your first three months. No contract required. Simply head on over to PureTalk.com Shapiro to claim the offer. Again, that's PureTalk.com Shapiro. But argument number two is that capitalism is not spiritually fulfilling. It's not providing you your meaning in life. It's not providing you your meaning in life. Here is Tucker in 2019 doing this routine. But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society. Again, the idea that capitalism weakens and destroys families and undermines religion and all this kind of stuff. Tucker's not the only one who has said this historically. Here is a quote. I'm going to read you the quote and then I will give you the source. Okay? Quote. The Western way of life, founded in effect on practical and technical knowledge, discovery, invention, and the flooding of world markets with mechanical products, has remained incapable of offering two men's minds a flicker of light, a ray of hope, a grain of faith, or of providing anxious persons the smallest path toward rest. And Tranquility. Man is not simply an instrument among others. Naturally he has become tired of purely materialistic conditions and desires some spiritual comfort. But the materialistic life of the west could only offer him as reassurance a new materialism of sin, passion, drink, women, noisy gatherings and showy attractions which he has come to enjoy. Sounds a lot like Tucker Carlson, but actually it is Hassan Albana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who called for an international armed struggle against colonial rule by Muslims and argued for like full scale jihad. So again, this is sort of where we are right now. A gigantic coalition of people who despise capitalism, people who find it spiritually unfulfilling, who claims that it rob, who claim that it robs us of our individuality or say that it it is the thing that creates inequality. They are all uniting. They are their own uni party. Everyone from communists to post liberal integralists to quasi fascists to radical Muslims. Why? Well, because in essence, capitalism makes two arguments. One, you are an individual created in the image of God with individual desires, wants, needs and capabilities. And two, so long as those desires, wants, needs and capabilities do not harm anyone else and do not violate basic morality, they ought to remain in your control. Now this kind of new red, green, brown anti capitalist party believes that's not true. They really kind of believe the same thing that the French revolutionaries believe, that the collective vision of man is paramount. Private property and free markets cut against that vision. And these folks can't build utopia without destroying that vision. They promise utopia by the way. Either a communist utopia with government owned grocery stores like Zoran Mamdani, the warmth of collectivism, or an Islamic utopia with the caliphate at the head, or the agrarian utopia run by kind hearted feudal lords. It's all crap. So why are people believing it? There are a few reasons. First, ingratitude. Human life in its natural state is nasty, brutish and short on a material level. Pretty much everything sucked for all of human history until property rights, contract law and credit were invented and turn large swaths of the world, including places difficult to live, into semi bearable places for the first time ever. But here's the truth. Most people living in the west right now have never spent time in truly poor places that don't have any of the things that we think of as vital. When you start thinking that human life in its natural state is a microwave, a central AC, a car, two TVs, a cell phone, a furnished apartment or a house, you start comparing yourself to what could be in utopia. This is why when you hear Gavin Newsom, a very, very wealthy man say capitalism does not, doesn't work Like I don't believe you, sir. I don't believe you believe this even.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Something's fundamentally broken here and that wealth

[Ben Shapiro]

is creating power, power locking in rules

[Patrick Bet-David]

and regulations, locking everybody else out. You can't play in the margins anymore. We can't fail more efficiently.

[Ben Shapiro]

Certainly nostalgia is not working. I would argue socialism not going to work.

[Patrick Bet-David]

But capitalism as we know it doesn't work either.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, capitalism as you know it, meaning, you know, corporatism, that might be a problem. That's not capitalism. Right. Which is the second point. A lot of people think that what's happening right now economically is the result of capitalism, but it's not actually capitalism. It's cronyism or it is markets being dictated to by the government. What we used to call economic fascism. So for example, here's a Colorado DSA Dem nominee named Malak Kirosh. She's running for Congress saying that capitalism is about monopolies. When folks think of capitalism, I think they think of free markets and competition and, you know, innovation.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And what do you think of?

[Ben Shapiro]

I think of monopolies, I think of. But that's not capitalism if it's a monopoly. Well, and that's the question, right? Because in an unfettered capitalism, it does

[Patrick Bet-David]

end up leading to monopolies though, if there's no government intervention.

[Ben Shapiro]

I mean, that's nonsense. It's just nonsense. The number of natural monopolies is extraordinarily low. Natural monopolies, meaning one company owns everything in the space and competitors cannot enter. Vanishingly low. It's usually government interventionism that creates monopoly. And listen, when you have DSA co chair Megan Romer calling Russia hyper capitalist, I mean, these people don't know what they're talking about. Russia is an oligarchy run by Vladimir Putin for the benefit of his friends. We do not believe in pouring US money, military weapons into anything. We don't think it makes it better anywhere. But obviously Russia is this oligarchic dictatorship which is hyper capitalist. And Putin is this crazy right wing oligarch. Of course he is going to to

[James Uthmeyer]

make horrific human life ending decisions.

[Ben Shapiro]

Russia is hyper capitalist. I mean, you have to be a moron to believe this. But this is also what happens when people purportedly of the right get involved in statist interventions. So I have been very, very much opposed to the government taking stock in private companies. This has happened some 30 times under the Trump administration. Here's President Trump bragging about buying intel stocks with Government money. That is not, in fact, a capitalist thing because he is not using the products of his own labor in order to buy other things. He's using the products of your label in order to labor in order to buy other people's companies. Like that. That is. That is not capitalism. That is statism.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We had a problem with intel, and we settled the problem. They gave us 10% of the company that was worth $12 billion. And since we had the company, you saw, you've probably been watching, the stock has gone up many, many times. Just about, number one. And we made $82 billion.

[Ben Shapiro]

Do I get credit for that?

[Patrick Bet-David]

No. Did anybody say, great job?

[Ben Shapiro]

And by the way, it's for the country. It's not for me. It's for the country.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I have to be very polite about that. But no, we've made about 80. Howard is pretty close to 80 billion. A profit of $80 billion.

[Ben Shapiro]

Again, I didn't make the profit. You didn't make the profit. Where's the profit? That's not how that works. And obviously it is true that everything the government subsidizes gets more expensive. Famous chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics demonstrating overall inflation over time in particular products. Basically, the more the government is involved, the more the prices go okay. So people mix up capitalism for cronyism or statism or economic fascism. Third reason capitalism is under fire. People have incredibly short memories. There are a lot of other models that have been tried elsewhere and are still being tried and fail, but we still keep bringing them back as though these are live discussions. Why not try centralized government with price controls? Because we've done that a thousand times and it's really. It's crap. It's really bad. Why not try a religious theocracy with the wisest and best of dead? Oh, yeah, like a lot of countries did that for several centuries. And there are some places around the earth that are still trying to do it, and it's really garbage. Why not try economic fascism with the bureaucratic government that picks winners and losers? Yeah, we've tried that too, and it's not great. And finally, fourth, we have just not felt the consequences yet of all of this interventionism. We are trying a bunch of these experiments right now, and they are going to fail. We are going to crash and burn. But again, when you jump from a burning building, the. The first few stories are fine. It's the last one that's a doozy. So what should we do differently? Well, I mean, listen, it may be worth conceding that a lot of young Voters with a predilection for the DSA haven't had a positive case made to them about capitalism ever. And that many of them have been living with the political effects of the 2008 financial crash and the stagnation of Obama and the subsequent bailout and how it was perceived by the public and then Covid and all the rest. And there's a lot to be said about affordability because of COVID era and post Covid era inflation. And there's a ton to be said about the fact that young people don't remember the Soviet Union. Whatever the reason, the polling on young voters and socialism is pretty obvious. A meaningful chunk of an entire generation views socialism favorably and a rising number are identifying as part of the dsa. Right. In fact, if you look at democrats under age 50, social democracy plus 57 socialism plus 35, free market economy only plus plus 22, minus 31 for capitalism because they don't understand that that's even the same thing among Republicans. Obviously they got it better. Republicans 50 plus remember all this stuff. So plus 54 for free markets, plus 48 for capitalism, minus 45 for social democracy and minus 93 for communism. But again, we got a problem. We do. Republicans under the age of 50 are only minus 15 on social democracy, which is kind of left wing European economics. Now it's partially true that very often when people talk about these labels, they have no idea what the hell they're talking about. They don't know what they're endorsing at all. The semantic overload on socialism, communism and capitalism is through the roof. And again, people don't even know what this stuff means, which is why they're just ignorant. A lot of voters who support Medicare for all believe it can be paid for only by billionaires. Like 47% of voters believe that is definitely true and another 27% believe that it is probably true that you can fully pay for it by raising taxes on billionaires. That is not true at all. It is not remotely true. In fact, only 40% of the American public understands that Medicare for all can only be paid for by raising taxes on most taxpayers, including the middle class. So they've just been lied to over and over and over again. So what do we need to do? First we need to point out the stupidity and failure of all the anti capitalist arguments. Zor Momdani is just preying on people's idiocy. Truly like their ignorance. He put out a video where he is saying he's going to crack down on Amazon because Amazon is exploitative. Again, this is all just anti business trash. It really is special delivery. It looks like an Amazon delivery

[Patrick Bet-David]

and

[Ben Shapiro]

it drives like an Amazon delivery. And that's an Amazon delivery. Amazon is spending millions of dollars to convince you that this isn't an Amazon delivery. But all you have to do is see for yourself. My uniform says Amazon. If I don't wear this Amazon branded vest, disciplinary action will be taken against us. The workers routes and hours are set by Amazon.

[James Uthmeyer]

So why isn't Amazon responsible for these vans?

[Ben Shapiro]

Because Amazon and other corporations have built a vast network of subcontractors that shield them from responsibility. Amazon tells these subcontractors where to drive, who to hire and what hours to work. I do all the work. That's what a subcontractor is doing.

[James Uthmeyer]

All the money.

[Ben Shapiro]

This is why I'm proud to support makes you the money. You're getting a wage sponsored by council member Tiffany Kalani. Because if Amazon is delivering your packages,

[Patrick Bet-David]

they should follow the same rules of every other delivery.

[Ben Shapiro]

When injuries and worker accidents skyrocket, Amazon

[James Uthmeyer]

says they have nothing to do with it.

[Ben Shapiro]

They can't have it both ways. Well, I mean they. That's a subconscious behind these so called independent. This is so stupid. I'm sorry, I can't like you know why this is dumb? Because you're just going to put a bunch of subcontractors out of business. That's all. That's all that's going to happen. If Amazon feels its liability in directly absorbing the cost of delivery in certain areas of New York City is too high, they just won't deliver in those places. How do we know this? Because they literally pulled out of building in New York because of aoc. You're just killing subcontracting jobs. That is how I love when we pretend that we don't know what words mean. A subcontractor is a person you hire to do a task. That's what a subcontractor is. Oh my goodness. No wonder Florida is now trolling Zoran Mamdani with a Times Square billboard calling him the economic developer of the year in Florida. Yeah, that's. That's right. And calling out the stupidity is definitely a big step here. And I think that absolutely needs to be done. Second, we do need to remind people that capitalism kicks ass. Capitalism is great. Free markets rock. They're great. And the people who tend to make you all the money are incredibly creative and innovative. It is not that they are uniquely greedy, is that they are uniquely innovative. And they work their asses off Palmer Lucky, who's the founder of Anderil, talks about the fact that the people who make billions of dollars tend to be obsessed with work, not money, like doing creative things. This is true. I know a lot of billionaires, all of them, all of them were obsessed with building their company not because of the money, but because they were obsessed with their company. The money was a byproduct. What I've observed with myself and everyone else I know who's made a billion dollars is that the type of person who makes a billion dollars is not the kind of guy who can, who can imagine doing that. It's just people say, oh, you know, if I had a billion, I'd go and I'd drink my ties on the beach. My point is, but that, that's the attitude that won't get you to a billion dollars. It's very rare that the two things come together. And so in a way, it's a little bit of a curse. And I'm not trying to make it sound like I have a terrible life, I love my life. But the curse of it is that anyone who can get to a billion is probably something's wrong with their brain where no matter how much they get, they'll stop working. People also misunderstand. They think that billionaires work to make more money. Like, oh, they're just trying to make more and more. They want money. I can tell you, most billionaires, it, the sickness is not gathering dollars, it's, it's working. I mean, that is true. The motor is just built different. It is, it is. You can make your own motor work that way. By the way, again, capitalism, free markets are exp. Are inspiring because of this. Look at this image, right? Elon put up this, this picture on his Twitter of him looking at the wreckage of, of Falcon 1 from 2006. He said, Next time you feel like giving up. Because it turns out, of course now SpaceX is one of the bigger companies on planet Earth. Hey, third, we need to teach some actual gumption. I know we have to say the tough thing and I know people don't like hearing the tough thing, but we do need to say it. So here is Bill Maher saying the obvious.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Certainly any company that has a blue

[Ben Shapiro]

collar workforce is going full on.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Jim Farley told me he's got 5,000

[Ben Shapiro]

empty bays at Ford.

[Patrick Bet-David]

These are AI proof six figure jobs, right? 120,000 a year.

[Ben Shapiro]

He can't fill them.

[Patrick Bet-David]

He can't fill them. And that's.

[Ben Shapiro]

But they're out there. That's what I They're everywhere.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, there's 7 million men, able bodied men, mostly young, who are what they call nilf. NILF is not in the labor force. Not in the labor force.

[Ben Shapiro]

This is different than unemployed. Unemployment means you're looking but you can't find a job. This is not looking again. It is not hatred to push the idea that people should try to find jobs. That is tough love. If it were your kid, you would be saying the same thing. Coming up, we'll be joined by Patrick Bet David. First let us talk about healthy living. There's basically a couple of versions. One is the version you see online, you know, where you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and you exercise for two hours and then you prepare every single meal from scratch easily. And it takes you one second and your refrigerator has every single vegetable ever made. And then there's like real life. Real life is busy and you travel and you work and you have kids and some days you do everything right and other days you're not even close. That's one of the reasons I've stuck with Balance of Nature. It's simple. Their whole health system contains 47 ingredients from real fruits, veggies, spices and fiber. It's designed to give you a straightforward way to incorporate more whole food ingredients into your daily routine without turning nutrition into yet another full time job. And that's kind of the point. The best routine isn't the incredibly elaborate one you follow for four days. It's then never do again because it was horrible. It's the one simple enough to actually stick with. For me, Balance of Nature fits into that category. Make the healthy choice easier, make it repeatable and then get on with the rest of your day. Head on over to balanceofnature.com today. Subscribe to their whole health system or any of their other subscriptions and receive an additional 10% off with promo code SHAPIRO. Plus with my code Shapiro. Balance of Nature will also send you a free guiltless snack. That's balance of nature.com promo code Shapiro. Joining us online is Patrick Bet David. He's the founder of valuetainment and of course the host of the PBD podcast which is heard everywhere. Patrick, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's great to be on with you.

[Ben Shapiro]

So Patrick, obviously we had the opportunity to sit down a few days ago and the podcast that we did is, is now out publicly and I thought it was a fascinating conversation. But one of the topics that, that we didn't really get to spend a lot of Time on was what I see as really the biggest risk to the west and to America right now, and that is the threat to capitalism. We did talk about this on your podcast some. But, you know, I really want to get your opinion on it right now. We are watching as there is a full scale assault on capitalism from a wide variety of side. It's not just the sort of communistic left, but you're also seeing it from what I've called the horseshoe right communitarians, people who believe that the free markets are somehow the problem. First of all, as somebody who obviously runs a very successful business and has been extremely operative in the economic space, what do you make of the attacks that you're seeing right now on capitalism itself?

[Patrick Bet-David]

You know, Ben, I'll tell you this. The analogy I would give is a follow. Let's just say you're at a low point of your life. Affordability is pretty tough for some people. Some people are having a hard time with gas prices, income. They're worried about AI. So imagine you're stranded at a party, okay? And there's a guy in the corner that has a solution for you. He's the rich guy. He succeeded. He solved the problems, he changed his life, but he doesn't want to come talk to you. Then there's one guy that comes and talks to you, and all he says is, go find a job. But the third person that comes and talks to you for three hours at this party is the person that says, it's all the rich man's fault. The government can save your problems. We're here for you. It's not your fault they did it to you. Because the third person who is willing to come and talk to you and give you attention, you end up becoming loyal to that person, even though that person's policies are not the best for you. What do I mean by this? We both, you and I know socialism doesn't work. You and I both know communism doesn't work. You and I both know DSA policies are horrible for America. And by the way, a lot of people know this, but even though we say this, the socialists are offering a solution. What's their solution? The government can fix your problem. You know who's not offering a solution? Republicans. I think a part of it. Ben, to me, this is my challenge that I see a lot of people when I watch when they're trying to give their solutions is they'll say, you got to fix it yourself. You got to pick it up. You got to go do this. Which, by the way, all of those messages, 100% right. We found a way to read books. We found a way to go to school. We found a way to get these things done fully right. But they still need to hear a solution from us. That is not an attractive policy. I'll put my crazy, wild idea out there and let people tear it apart. Here's my idea. Ben, what if we did this? What if we said, anybody under the age of 30, pay 0 federal income taxes whatsoever, go make your money prior to 30. You're going to keep that tax revenue. I've looked at what that number is. It's roughly around $230 billion. Let's give that to the people under the age of 30 to get you started. What does this do? Maybe by the time you're 30, you got $117,000 in a bank. You saved. Maybe you got $248,000 in the bank. Maybe a parent like me would sit with his kids and say, listen, you got a run rate. You got eight more years till you hit 30. You're 21, you're 22. Let's go make that money and save that money. Maybe that idea gets people to go a little bit faster, and so they don't drink that as much, they don't party as hard. They. They take their career a little bit seriously. Maybe they end up increasing the birth rate that we have in America from 1.58 to 1.79 to 2.2. Who knows? But the reality of it is, if you remember this, you know this better than I do. You've been in this business for 25 years when you and I talked, but you said it started at 17. How magical was it that day when President Trump said, no more taxes on tips? You're like, what a simple idea. But wait, so I'm a liberal cashier, I'm a liberal waitress working at Cheesecake Factory. I hate this guy. But if he doesn't pay taxes on tips, I keep an additional $400 a month. I'll vote for Trump and not tell anybody about it. So, to me, I think we need that kind of a defining moment on the Republican Party to come out with a policy that I think could be so big that we can keep the young vote for decades if they come out with it first. So Rubio, J.D. vance, somebody on the conservative side comes out and says, if you vote for me, no taxes under the age of 30. I think that'll get the attention of a lot of the youth, because right now, socialists are winning their eyeballs.

[Ben Shapiro]

So I mean, I think that's brilliant. I love it. I mean, obviously I'd be for no taxes on anybody ever, but that's a, that's a whole different kettle. But yes, up to 30 is great because it does create that time value and the pressure. I obviously think that that's really smart. I wonder how much you think of the, of the sort of right wing anti capitalism is, is something different. I think that there's kind of two phenomena. One is the left wing anti capitalism, which says that, that capitalism itself has failed, that it's an affordability issue, that it's. That you can't keep up with the Joneses, that you're suffering and all the rest of this stuff and, and also adds on top of it that it's immoral. You're seeing from the sort of horseshoe ride, say Tucker Carlson, for example, claiming that capitalism is sort of emptying of the soul of America, that, that free markets are inherently an attack on the spirituality of human beings. What do you make of that argument? How do you combat that? He's really not making sort of a material effectiveness argument nearly as much as he's making a sort of spiritual argument.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Well, what he's doing, though, again, this is the part that we have to be careful. So I'll give you what he's doing, my opinion, and then what the leak is. And my counterargument to that, number one, at least he's offering something to the youth and he's looking like he cares. And he is no different to me than aoc. They're both sitting there saying, the rich man's the fault of the rich guy. You know, he did it and it's their fault. We got to find a way. These guys don't want to give the money. You didn't do nothing yourself. It wasn't your fault. And that's a crock of shit. Both of them are. I'm not with either one of the minds. The one place where you lose me, I can sit there and like the other day I had median here, we had a debate. Mehdi Hasan, Muslim, very different idea politically. And we went at it and you know, he is a very strong, staunch believer, what he believes in. But I said to him, I said, you know, Mehdi, you know what? I'm excited about you right now. He says, what's that? I said, how does it feel being a capitalist? He said, I'm not a capitalist. I said, no, no, you're a capitalist. You're no longer working for msnbc. You started your own media Company, you got employees now. You're not going to pay people fairly. You now have to look at the bottom line of how much money you're making. You're officially a capitalist. So you know what happens when a capitalist talks to a capitalist. You understand each other because you know the pain. You know what it's like to pay. Employees lose employees. Somebody leaves, they poach away three of your best guys and you know, somebody takes your customer. You're trying to go to sleep, you're raising capital. This is very difficult. The moment you go away from capitalism to me, you lose me. We're not on the same. So I'm trying to see where Tucker's going with his argument about capitalism. I think he had somebody on, he had some kind of a Christian pastor. I don't know who it was. Was a very good, eloquent guiding. They talked about how in the Bible, you know, most of the ideas in the Bible are about socialism. It's not about capitalism. Capitalism is bad. So we have to be very, very careful when we're going through. And I kind of watch to see what is the end in mind, what is the motive? What are we solving for? Are we trying to say where we want to take the onus of the individual? We're getting away from free enterprise? Is that what we're getting away from? So all these years of us having read Thomas Soul, Milton Friedman, all these years of us watching Milton Friedman's lectures that he gave, and we saw the old conversations about, you know, it's the rich man's fault, we're going back to that. Like we forgot what these great minds taught us. I, I, I think, I think it's playing with fire. But again, to me, if we go to motives, there's always five things I ask myself, Ben, I ask myself, like if I'm, if I'm trying to size you up, I asked myself, what do you, what do I think is Ben's concerns? What do I think are Ben's motives? What do I think are Ben's assumptions? What do I think are Ben's fears and his asks. When I sit there and ask myself, what are Tucker's motives? I don't know what Tucker's motives are. Maybe he wants to start a political party. You and I talked about it, obviously on the show. Does he want to run for office? Does he want to undermine somebody? Did somebody piss him off that this is his way of getting vengeance and revenge on them? Nobody knows the motives. You know, it's like, I'm not going to sit there and try to read the person's mind. But if we knew the motives, we would easily be able to answer all these other questions, but we don't know the motives. So to me, it's a terrible idea. If we start bashing capitalists and we blame the big, you know, the business owner, that it's their fault and the government's going to solve your problem. I think you're playing with fire and I don't, I don't agree with that mindset.

[Ben Shapiro]

You know, Patrick, one of the things that I think you've talked about here really, really well and, and you know, in our conversation, there have been some things that we talked about that I've been thinking about ever since. And one of the things that you talked to me about was sort of assumptions that I make about the world or the way that I address the world and the fact that, you know, I'm not Captain Sympathy. Right. I'm not, I'm not the guy who's going to come along and tell you about how much I care about your feelings and, and how much I feel for you and how much you're having a difficult problem and all that. I'm the guy who comes and says, you know, yeah, you need to get a job. And like, there's certain things we can do to get out of your way. But like that's, that's pretty much all we can do. And it's mostly in your hands. And how there's a shortcoming to that political approach. Obviously you're talking particularly to young people who, who are hearing from the other side, the anti capitalist side, that here we are and, and while we don't have a solution to your problem, we know who to blame. It's probably that unsympathetic guy over there who's telling you to get a job. It's probably him because he already got his and he's trying to grind you under the boot heel. Well, what I like about the proposal that you're making, this sort of like, you know, get rid of taxes for people under 30, is that you are coming with a thing that, that, that can be done as opposed to a thing that, that can't be done, but I do wonder if there's a limit to it. Right. At what point do you think that, you know, we're going to just have to deal with the fact that tough love is not just love, it's actually tough?

[Patrick Bet-David]

Yeah. I mean, look, the one guy that was able to do this better than anybody we've ever seen is Donald Trump. Donald Trump was a billionaire, a lister who acted like he was on your side, and he understood what you were going through. The poor, you know, hardworking farmer or somebody that's working at a regular job making 22 bucks an hour like this guy's for me. And I think there's a lot to be learned from that. We have to be able to connect with the audience. I don't know if, if the Republican Party is doing a good enough job with the youth of connecting with them. When we had the late Charlie Crook that was here with us, we saw the rise of the youth because he went out there and he said, I understand your pain. I understand what you're going through. I understand maybe you don't want the war. I understand that you. You don't want everything to be finance and tarp and another. And the kids were like, man, finally somebody's listening to me. I'm being hurt sometimes. You know, I read a book many, many years ago. It's called thank God, It's Monday. It was written by a psycho. This was written 40, 50, 60 years ago. It was written by a marriage counselor that after sitting down with enough husband and wives, and the husbands would come and say, thank God it's Monday. I can't wait to be away from my family because it's so much of a headache over the weekend. And those marriages would end up at a divorce. He realized the husbands that were able to make their marriages work, they followed one basic guideline, and it was every day, they gave 15 minute undivided attention to their spouse and 5 minute undivided attention to each of their kids. So what does that mean? It's just, I want to be heard. So I don't know if we're doing enough of listening to them. And instead of just lecturing them and I don't know about you, when I was 17 years old. I don't want anybody to lecture me when I was 22 years old. Don't lecture me. Don't sit there and tell me. I already know I'm doing a bunch of things wrong. I don't want to hear another lecture. I think we can do a better job delivering the message. I do agree. Facts don't care about your feelings. Maybe we need to find a way to deliver the message in a proper way. Today I had Arthur C. Brooks on you know who. Arthur C. Brooks is phenomenal. Back in the days.

[Ben Shapiro]

I'm good friends with Arthur. Yep. He's great.

[Patrick Bet-David]

I know you are. And by the way, he was said very complimentary things about you. When we were done with the interview, I told him you were here with us last week. And you know what we talked about? We talked about being better at delivering the message in a way that people want to hear it. We, we talked about, you know, selling the ideas better. Sometimes I, I don't like. I said he wrote a book many, many years ago called the Road to Freedom. I think he wrote it 16 years ago.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yep.

[Patrick Bet-David]

And I said to myself, he was in the top three guys on my list of knowing how to sell capitalism. Him, Sowell and Milton Friedman. I don't know how many people know how to sell capitalism today the proper way. I think we are selling it too logically and we got to go back and sell it emotionally in a way where they say, why would I want any other system? We naturally, Ben, we're born capitalist. We're all capitalists. We love recognition. We want to get recognition for the idea of we came up with. Or I was the one that said, let's do this. And we recognize he or she came up with the idea. Good for you. We want to celebrate our victories. We want to celebrate that we got a good grade. We want to celebrate the fact that, you know, yes, we won, but I was the MVP of the team, or I'm the one that scored the last shot. We want that individual recognition and the collective and so on the, on the Republican conservative side, I think we have, we have to get better at delivering our message and selling the dream better. We're not selling the dream better today. We are selling the dream very logically today, not emotionally. And I think we can do a better job in that.

[Ben Shapiro]

I totally agree with that. I also think, by the way, that when we sell the dream, what we've been selling is a materialist outcome of the dream, but not the dream itself. So when we talk about the American dream and you hear people say the American dream is a car and a house and a fence and a white picket fence and 2.2 kids and all, that's not actually the American Dream. The American dream is that if I pursue with vigor and determination and make the right decisions in my life, particular goals, that I have a shot of reaching those goals. That's the American dream. Because there are lots of places on earth that will give you a government guaranteed crappy apartment and a really junky car. I mean, this is what the Soviet Union did. But it doesn't actually satisfy that that's not the American dream. That's just a materialist dream. And it's the process that actually makes the man. I think that that's always what's exciting about America, is that that process should be exciting. It's what should be exciting about capitalism to young people is that you actually have all this road in front of you, a thing that you can do yourself. And you know what the studies tend to show is that you're actually not that happy when people just give the thing to you. If somebody just gives a thing to you, you're not nearly as happy about it as if you actually earned the thing. And you're right. I mean that's what people do want to earn. Patrick, I also wanted to ask you, obviously we're still in the middle of this conflict with Iran. I think there are lots of open questions to be asked about how the administration has pursued its interest in Iran, what the end game is. I think all those are perfectly logical, open, normal questions that need to be asked. The one thing that I've been finding is a number of people who just have a bizarre vision of what Iran is, what the regime actually is. I wanted to ask you because obviously you, you're born in Tehran, you grew up in, in Iran, you know, there seems to be this bizarre notion that the rulers of Iran are number one, rational actors, like extremely rational actors and thus any deal that you cut with them will be, will be predicated on some sort of decent founding and two, are no threat to anybody else. Now what do you make of these sort of pie in the sky version of Iran that seems to be building? It seems to me you can make an isol argument even without making this argument. But there's been a bleed over again by people on the left and also on the right to suggest, well is Iran really that bad? Like what's really wrong over there?

[Patrick Bet-David]

And by the way, I think this is going to be a big topic of discussion for 2028, 2027, where those running for president, what position you're going to take, you know, non interventionalists or interven. So to me what you need to know is imagine a country that is gladly willing to kill its own people and they use the threat that way to make sure you say nothing. So here they took our videos down. I don't know how many videos YouTube took down. They mentioned it the other day. Million videos on Covid they took down. Think about, they took down a million videos off of YouTube. We got plenty of them taken down. How many strikes we got, how many times we couldn't go live, how many times that happened? Ok, so now imagine let's go a level above that. What's above censorship? Killing you. That's what Iran does. They don't just censor you, they will kill you. So if you want to open your mouth and say something, we'll kill you. And then we'll publicly celebrate the fact that we took your life gladly because you gave a different opinion. Not take your voice away from you, not take your YouTube channel away from you. We're going to. That's exactly what IRGC does. You know, about two years ago, Ben, I brought the founder of Islamic Revolutionary Guard here and he sat down with me, Morteza Al Gharzi, some name like that. I had him on here. And when he came into our building, at first he's like, why does Patrick want to talk to me? And he was confused, so he sat down. I went right into it. He was the guy that was the opening voice to all the tapes that Ayatollah Khomeini would say he was the opening voice edifying Khomeini. And they would send those tapes into Iran, which caused the revolution. And eventually Iran fell, Shah's gone, Khomeini comes, and the rest is history. If you go and type in irgc, who are the founders? It's Khomeini and this man right here that was with me and I. Yes, Sagara. And so I had him on and I asked him a question. I said, hey, at the beginning, when you saw this happening, didn't you know this was bad? He says, at the beginning I didn't. He says, I thought we were off to a good mission and we were going to really what ended up happening, that changed. He said, I didn't think we're going to kill that many people. I said, you guys originally said that the Shah killed some hundred thousand people and you lied about it. He says, we did. I said, okay, how many numbers was it actually? It was actually less than 3,000. But the propaganda machine was so effective that it got everybody in Iran to believe that he was a bad guy, he was for the rich. We got rid of him. Well, from 1979 till today, what's happened to the Middle East? If you go and think about what the Middle east looked like in the 70s or the 60s, how many problems do we have with Iran? You don't have any problems with Iran. Iran wasn't causing the chaos that Iran is creating today after irgc. So the same people that sit there and say, these are not bad actors, these are not bad people, it's us that's making Iran and Islam look like they're horrible human beings. It's not us doing it. No, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's the marketing and we're scaring people. You are playing with fire. It's the same people that said communism didn't work because they had bad leadership and we can do better in America. Socialism didn't work because that bad leadership. We can do better in America. If there's a couple things, I have zero tolerance, where I'm going to, you know, sit there and say, it's okay, it's a zero tolerance for irgc, zero tolerance for them. Zero. And the only question then becomes, Ben, is the following. And here's the question where I am by. I have biases because I live there. I know these guys. I want them gone. But you know, the Americans who say, pat, we have bigger problems to solve than get rid of IRGC and that debate. Ben, you and I may differ in this. I actually think that's a fair debate for us as Americans to have because some Americans may say, you know, do we really want to spend our resources? You know, we're starting to see what's going on right now in the world. You know, where Ukraine, nobody thought Ukraine was going to embarrass Russia with their drones. Did we think Ukraine was going to be able to last this long? Nobody. And we realized warfare has changed. And Iran with their drones, the amount of headaches they're creating, thank God, this entrepreneur in America named Palmer Luckey, I don't know if you saw what he's doing, Palmer Luckey. They're creating all these drone weapons that they started recently, and I don't know what the valuation was. $100 billion, you know, drone company in America. Thank God we're doing this because warfare is going to be changing the next few years. But I think that's a fair debate. But in my position, I have the line here. If you try to cross the line to get me to think that IRGC people are good, nice people, let's negotiate with them. This is where I stand.

[Ben Shapiro]

Yeah. Now, Patrick, again, I think the place where some of these phenomena come together, the anti capitalism and also the kind of bizarrely warm feelings about Iran or say, bizarrely warm feelings about Russia or China, there is a burgeoning anti Americanism that's happening in the United States. It's become acceptable for a huge number of people in America to basically treat America as though we're the bad guy in the world. And, you know, maybe that comes from ignorance Maybe that comes from generations being taught dumb things by people in college. Maybe it comes from the fact that we don't have an existential threat on our doorstep the way that we did during the Cold War. And so there's kind of nothing to push back against. Or maybe it's just, you know, sort of all of the above or boredom or social media. But whatever it is, it does feel as though, you know, the seams are coming apart in the United States in a particular way because of that, that sort of feeling that everything that happens on a foreign front that's bad is somehow our fault, that everything that is happening wrong in the economy is. You can chalk that up to free market forces and capitalism and private entrepreneurs and Elon Musk and all the rest of this. And, you know, I wonder if you think that how long is it going to take to cure that? And what are sort of the basic building blocks for curing that anti Americanism?

[Patrick Bet-David]

It's so embarrassing when we do that. I mean, we live in the greatest country in the world that was able to do something in 250 years that other countries couldn't do for 2,000 years. I mean, imagine how much of an underdog you have to be to start with 56 different people in 1776 and say, here's going to be our idea. And by the way, we're going to go against the big bad bully UK and we're going to, you know, find a way to create our own country. And they're trying to bully us as much as they can. And they were the financial capital of the world, but we're going to take over. And don't worry about China and Iran and don't worry about Persia and ussr, don't worry about all these. And. And all of a sudden we are the most powerful country in the world and creating incredible jobs and innovation where everybody around the world wants to come here. Nobody else calls it the American dream. There's no, you know, Russian dream, there's no Chinese dream, there's no Iranian dream, there's no British dream. There's only the American dream. There's a reason for that. And unfortunately, sometimes, you know, I just finished off with my last conference of my insurance company last week in Vegas at MGM grand, and. And I sat there and I thought about a few of the guys that are super grateful. They're very wealthy now, they're living incredible lives. But there was a couple of them that weren't grateful. And it was like, wait a minute, you're now worth $15 million. When I met you, you were broke, about to file bankruptcy, and you were driving a car that would pop every time I would open a door. Now you drive Rolls Royce and all, and now you're not. You're. Because of what we're very, very quick to forget. How lucky we are here. A regular guy like me who came from Iran. And we did it the right way. We went to Germany out of refugee camp. Wait till we got our green card. We applied for our green card in 1984, did not get it till November 28 of 1990 when we left Germany to come here. We land here, regular guy. We have nothing to our name. My dad's a 99 cent store cashier at Inglewood, California, and I go to the US army and that was. I was going to do 20 years. And one of my friends called me and said, you got to get out. I think you're going to make it in the private, you know, citizen, you shouldn't be in the military. So I listened to my get out. And I wanted to be a bodybuilder. And I went into business. Then I became an advisor and then I built an insurance company and I sold it and we had a nice exit and now we run a media company. I didn't go to school to be a podcaster giving my opinion to, you know, experts like you. This just accidentally happened. I'm a regular guy who I am. I'm not even a guy that, you know, has the right certificates to do anything like this. But this country allows for that. We're living in the greatest country in the world. But here's the problem. There's always going to be ungrateful people who lack perspective, who go through seasons of being bitter towards the country. It is very important for those of us that are loving America that we keep the fight, that we keep selling, that we're out there constantly talking about the beautiful part about this incredible country. And we do it in a way that converts. Because I think I used to ask myself, what's your outcome of this message? Do I just want to say it to be right or do I want to baptize? Do I want to convert? Do I want to get non believers to become believers? Do I want to get people to say, you know, I never thought about it that way before, yeah, why not me? I want to entertain this. Like, you know, if I'm a Christian pastor, what's my job to get up there? And I remember I went to a church in Dallas one time. I won't say the church's name because it was massive. It once used to be the biggest church in Dallas. So I go to the service and the pastor is a very well known pastor. And I go and I go on the Easter service because that's when you can really judge on how they manage Easter service. And I watched Easter service and it was all about judgment, judging, judging, judging, judging, judging, judging. And I'm like, how many of these people that came, that only come to the two services per year, Christmas and Easter, how many are going to come back next Sunday? Your job is to convert them to next Sunday. Not just Easter, they'll come for Easter, but you win when they come back next Sunday and then they become members and they go to the 101 classes. You didn't convert anybody. I said, no wonder this church is dying. So I think we, we as proud conservatives, whatever our background is, we need to get back to selling the dream to convert because AOC is converting. Charlie Kirk converted. He converted a lot of you. You like I was telling you the story. Whenever I come across people that talk about you, they'll say, you know, I'm the, I became a concern because of Man Shapiro. I became a conservative. You would. You keep hearing about so many people. And there's eras in sports, right? When you were in your 20s, you were the guy then Charlie was in his 20s. Now we're in our 40s. We play a different role, but I think we need to be, we need to be very good at converting our messaging. If there's a way to score our messaging is are we just talking to the same old people? Are we reaching out to the other side and finding people to convert? We did a very Good job in 23, 24, converting, I think a lot of the last two years. And you made a very good point when you said, well, you know, anytime Republicans is in office and you know, you don't really have an enemy to go up against. So it's kind of like your numbers change, which is true. We read the New York Times article and I think it was political article that we read. But I think as long as we stay in the conversion game, we'll be fine. If we stay in the game of just talking to the same old people like the Democrats did, you know, it's going to be problematic. Socialists are going to other people. We got to, we got to continue doing that and selling the dream of America continuously. So I see a problem there. But I'm very optimistic about the future.

[Ben Shapiro]

Well, that's pvd. Patrick Bet. David, go check out the PVD podcast and of course, all of his work over values haven't. Patrick, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Anytime. Thank you.

[Ben Shapiro]

So one of the biggest questions I get is how do I prepare my kids for college? How do I make sure they don't get brainwashed in college? And the answer is you actually have to be educated. You have to know all the arguments. Well, the best way for your kids to know the arguments, or for you, if you're about to go to school to know the arguments, is of course to join us here at Daily Wire. This is why you should enter that Daily Wire back to school sale. You can literally give your kids or yourself the gift of facts and knowledge before it's too late. Their progressive professors are coming for them. So arm yourself and your family with the truth before the sale ends already. Meanwhile, speaking of the anti Americans again, the. The radical left is so ensconced with anti Americanism at this point, it really is quite astonishing. It turns out that Abdul EL Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee for Michigan, it turns out that he just hates it. Obviously he hates America, like in every way. He pulled down hundreds of videos, by the way, from YouTube. In one of those videos from July 2024, which is not long ago, he asked his YouTube viewers whether America could please find another way to celebrate the fourth of July. And he said that it was just terrible. He also argued in some of these videos that the southern border was not America was not among Americans. Five biggest concerns and floated replacing the second amendment with a constitutional right to health care. So, yeah, here he was on the sordid history of Manifest Destiny and the slave trade and how America is terrible. August 11th, you think about all the

[Patrick Bet-David]

wars that we fight abroad, all of the.

[Ben Shapiro]

The sordid history of oppressing other people in the name of this American idea, right? Whether it was, quote, Manifest Destiny and destroying Native Americans or it was the transatlantic slave trade where, you know, folks who, quote, founded this country on the backs of. Of native folks that they destroyed, then captured people, enslaved them and had them work their fields because they thought it was their right, right? And all of this, like a lot of these narratives, you kind of see

[Patrick Bet-David]

echoed in the ethos of football.

[Ben Shapiro]

Oh my God. In the ethos of football. Colonialism, imperialism. That's America. And football is bad because of it. The evils of football is one of the videos he deleted. No wonder. This is the person Democrats want to run. This America hating person who should not be here. I mean, truly, we should not have allowed his Parents in what a terrible decision by us Fail America. Okay. But of course, it's not just Abdul Al Sayyad. It's also Zoran Mandani Zormandani, who was happy to celebrate Pakistan's Independence Day. Pakistan is a radicalized Muslim country. He's happy about that. And Senator John Kennedy correctly points out that Zarmani El Sayed aoc that they want to beat up America. They just don't like America very much. I mean, yes, this would be the thing. The people now in charge of the

[Patrick Bet-David]

Democratic Party want to beat the crap out of America.

[Ben Shapiro]

So simple, yeah, you know, get rid of all the millionaires. I don't mean that literally, but tax them into oblivion.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Open the borders, open the prisons, defund

[Ben Shapiro]

the police, defund the ice. And again, he is right about that. This is just a reality. The anti American wing of the Democratic Party is live, but it's not just the anti American wing of the Democratic Party. Of course, that horseshoe is live and real. Shank Wegar on the Jerry Springer of online tv. Piers Morgan. Every time I say that, he, he. He gets very, very upset. Like, truly, truly upset. And, and here is Cenk Uyghur explaining the truth, which is that he and Hassan Piker and Tucker Carlson are basically all the same at this point.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We have Tucker Carlson and we have Hasan Piker.

[Ben Shapiro]

They don't agree on a lot of

[Patrick Bet-David]

things that I don't agree with. Tucker Carlson's LGBTQ issues. I don't agree with Hasan on the Mao comments. But we're in the anti war coalition. Let's see, stick together, let's get Israel

[Ben Shapiro]

out of our government, defund it, end

[Patrick Bet-David]

the wars, get money out of politics, and then we can go back to these nonsense fights that don't matter

[Ben Shapiro]

again. What he wants actually is the third world in American politics. So, yeah, the. The anti American wing is very live. It is very real, and it is very, very problematic. Okay, this takes us to the latest with regard to the war in Iran. Again, nobody kind of knows what the hell is happening over there. The President is tweeting all sorts of sort of different ideas. The President suggests that Iran should pay war damages, which of course is true, since they are demanding war damages from us. He's saying no, the other way around. He says it's an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran for all of the people they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs in many conflicts for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Colt and thousands of others killed in combat. Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protesters Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months. I've instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any and all future negotiations. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So one reporter asked the President, what exactly are the next steps? The President said, you'll find out. Well, I assume that at some point here we will. You said this last round of talks

[Patrick Bet-David]

was Iran's last chance before decapitation.

[Ben Shapiro]

So what now? What comes next?

[Patrick Bet-David]

You'll find out.

[James Uthmeyer]

Are you still.

[Patrick Bet-David]

Are massive escalation, Is that still on the table? Well, we have that certainly that ability if we want to do that. Yeah, you'll find it.

[Ben Shapiro]

So, you know, we will find out, I would hope. The President says that we are currently in control of the strait 100%. Obviously, Iran is still exerting tremendous control over the strait. They're attempting to hit shipping inside the Strait of Hormuz. Here's the President.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy. We have a blockade that's been infallible. It's a steel wall. And we let people in that we want to let in. And those people come in and they've been coming in and they're going out. So it's actually open now. We do not let them go into Iran. They're not admitted into the Strait to go to Iran. But it's open for others now. A little bit complex because they will, on occasion, drop a mine. And we find the mines. You know, we've mine swept the entire strait, as you probably maybe heard, maybe you didn't hear, but. But we control the Strait 100%.

[Ben Shapiro]

Again, we will find out what comes next. But something should come next year because, you know, tapping them on indefinitely, unless it, unless we believe it's going to hurt their economy badly enough for them to crumble. You know, at some point, this is going to have to come to some sort of conclusion. All right. The other big story of the day coming out of the Middle east is reporters are very, very angry because they found out that the administration claims that President Trump departed turkey on July 8th on the Old Air Force One. You remember this? He was supposed to go on the Qatari Air Force One, and then instead he went on the old Air Force One. Why? Well, because there's a pretty live Iranian threat. So In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. And then he was actually shuttled to an even smaller plane, an Air Force C32A via an airport catering truck, typically used to load meals and other supplies pre flight. So that made that Air Force want to decoy with media and some White House staff aboard. So apparently the reporters are mad. Jake tapper says the U.S. secret Service thought the threat against the President was strong enough to surreptitiously remove him from Air Force One and then proceeded to let the plane full of White House staffers and reporters take off and fly back to the U.S. well, it turns out that that's actually Secret Service's job is to protect the President. That's like their chief job. That is their chief job. So then Jake Tapper replied, obviously, the life of the President is paramount, and previous White Houses have used deception to protect the President's life. But no officials I've spoken to have ever before heard of using an Air Force One full of White House staff and journalists as a decoy during an imminent threat. Well, again, the. The focus was not on keeping them there as a decoy. The. The focus was on moving the President to a safer airplane without, you know, letting the enemy know that that would be. That would be the big thing right there. Manhattan Institute's Jesse Arm is on CNN pointing all this out. Let's not forget that the bad guys are the terrorists trying to kill the President in this equation. Yes. Which we would benefit from actually calling that out. Yes, I, I think that we, we probably. We probably would. And here is some of the tape from July 8 in Ankara.

[Patrick Bet-David]

This was the shot that took place last month. Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet leaving the NATO summit in Turkey.

[Ben Shapiro]

The Washington Post reporting because of an Iranian threat, the President was shuttled away in an airport catering truck.

[James Uthmeyer]

Those are typically used to move meals

[Patrick Bet-David]

and other supplies on board pre flight. Fox has not been able to independently confirm that the President was actually on a catering truck.

[Ben Shapiro]

But according to the Post, the President was then taken to a different, smaller

[Patrick Bet-David]

plane, an Air Force C32A.

[Ben Shapiro]

So again, did the Secret Service do anything? Again, it is their job to keep the President safe. That is their job right there. And all the complaints. Yeah. Meh, meh. Alrighty. Well, yesterday we talked at length about Anthony Fauci and the various kind of fibs and lies that he told during his tenure. Well, now the Attorney General of Florida is going after him, and he joins us online right now. James, thanks. So much for the time. Really appreciate it.

[James Uthmeyer]

Glad to be here. Thank you.

[Ben Shapiro]

So obviously a lot of focus on Anthony Fauci and him taking the Fifth before the federal government. A lot of controversy over whether he can actually do that in front of the federal government considering he received a federal pardon from Joe Biden. But a federal pardon is not free you of state charges. What are the kinds of things you're considering as Florida AG with regard to Anthony Fauci?

[James Uthmeyer]

Well, we delivered a subpoena to Anthony Fauci last week, really seeking anything and everything. We have a lot of unanswered questions. Obviously, there's been revelations over the last couple weeks that he privately questioned the safety and efficacy of the so called medical treatment that he was pushing on the American people. Central to our subpoena is looking at possible self dealing personal gain. Government officials rightly have a lot of immunities when they're doing their job. But there's evidence to suggest that Dr. Fauci was privately interested in book deals, in fortune, fame, awards with monetary prizes. That goes outside of the realm of a typical government official work and salary, and thus could be evidence that his deception, which hurt a lot of people, resulted in personal gain. So we're looking at anything civil, criminal, anything under Florida law. We are going to investigate and seek accountability.

[Ben Shapiro]

Attorney General, what did you make of Fauci taking the Fifth? Obviously his claim when he took the fifth was that he was basically trying to immunize himself from the possibility of prosecution at the state level by the fact that the state of Florida is now looking into him. Does that justify his claims at all?

[James Uthmeyer]

Well, I think you said it right that the pardon itself has questionable legal authority. Who knows what President Biden actually knew was taking place. And if there is an auto pin without proper agency, there could be issues. But you know, we were certainly alarmed by his lack of candor before Congress, his inability to answer questions. All of that occurred simultaneously with new evidence that he did doubt the very MRNA jabs that he was pushing. So the federal pardon will not give him immunity from state issues. We've got a lot of evidence to go through and collect. It's too early to talk about legal theories or violations of Florida law, but his Fifth Amendment claims certainly got our attention. What does he have to hide? We now see more and more coming out that shows that there was dishonesty. He lied to the American people. People suffered across this country, including here in Florida. And if there is liability, his federal pardon will not apply.

[Ben Shapiro]

Now, you know, you mentioned that it could take a while to go through all the materials that you guys are subpoenaing and everything else. What do you think is sort of a broad timeline for people to expect some sort of investigative results here?

[James Uthmeyer]

Again, it's hard to speculate. We've got thousands and thousands of text messages, voicemails, emails that we need to go through. We need to be thorough. We need to make sure that we're crossing our T's, dotting our I's, that we're properly building the evidence for a court of law if it gets to that point. So we're probably talking months, not days, but I've got my best attorneys on it. All hands on deck. We understand how important it is to the American people to get answers and seek accountability, so we will make it a top priority for our office.

[Ben Shapiro]

Now, putting aside, obviously, the legal questions which are going to come to light as you go through the investigation, the materials just on a sort of generic political level, you've seen a lot of revelations from his emails, from his diaries, from his texts, much of that in the public view. So of what has been put into the public view so far, what do you think Americans should be most troubled about?

[James Uthmeyer]

Well, I mean, we've only gone through a handful of texts at this point, and we've already seen evidence that he personally doubted whether or not these vaccines should be administered to pregnant women. There was evidence and concern that it could lead to miscarriages, but that concern was never made public. Women were not put on notice. There are risks for possible complications with your pregnancies, and we've seen data to suggest that miscarriages went up during this timeframe. So there's a lot of women out there that are rightfully very, very upset. Nothing is going to make them whole or perhaps bring back the baby they lost. But I think what we see is continued evidence of dishonesty. So there was clearly something wrong that happened here. Whether it rises to the evidentiary level of a crime or civil liability is a question that still has to be answered. But we are going to be diligent. We will use every tool we have. We will most certainly do everything we can to seek accountability for Americans and Floridians especially.

[Ben Shapiro]

Now. Are you aware, Attorney General, of any other similar prosecutorial efforts that are taking place in other states? Because obviously he was a national politician with national scope and effect to his decision making?

[James Uthmeyer]

Yes, I've talked to several other attorneys general. I know there's at least two or three that are already conducting their own inquiries. We will work Together with anybody that wants to prosecute this case with us. I know Dr. Fauci was, you know, he was subpoenaed and questioned in other states and other legal matters going back years. And now new evidence could show possible contradictions or impact those prior proceedings. I've only been on the job here about a year and a half, so we're still coming up to speed with everything that other states did on this topic. But most certainly this was a country wide deception, perhaps the greatest deception against the United States of America that we have ever seen. So we're going to work with any other state official, especially our great attorneys general, to get to the bottom of it.

[Ben Shapiro]

That's Attorney General James Meyer of the state of Florida. Attorney General, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it.

[James Uthmeyer]

Thank you for having me.

[Ben Shapiro]

All righty, folks. You think the show is over? Wrong. We are joined by Lyndon Blake momentarily and she's going to convince me that we should spend thousands of dollars. If you're a parent, spend thousands of dollars so your daughter can get into a southern sorority at a school. If you're not a member, now would be the time for you to join up. Become a member. Use Coach Shapiro. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.

[James Uthmeyer]

Your country is beneath contempt.

[Patrick Bet-David]

We who love and serve Allah fought

[Ben Shapiro]

back against the Americans and the Zionists

[Patrick Bet-David]

from the scourge of secularism and the lands of unbelief.

[Ben Shapiro]

Anyone gonna listen to Captain Saunders tomorrow? The retired Delta Force soldier with a new book out? He's the polar opposite of those brain dead protesters.

[James Uthmeyer]

Given the current climate, should Clay Saunders

[Ben Shapiro]

even be allowed on campus? Mr. Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman.

[James Uthmeyer]

This is a decision I cannot find.

[Patrick Bet-David]

There are three ways Islam will conquer the West. Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nations freedoms against us.

[Ben Shapiro]

Are you paying attention? Listen carefully.

[Patrick Bet-David]

The great Satan. America will fall. You are infidels.

[Ben Shapiro]

The bodies of women are not pure

[Patrick Bet-David]

and the men's souls are unclean. What makes them so dangerous? Their goals are not in this life, but the next.

[James Uthmeyer]

Anyone?

[Ben Shapiro]

I got friends here.

[James Uthmeyer]

I can't just leave.

[Ben Shapiro]

Listen to me.

[Patrick Bet-David]

In the law, we cannot run or hide from what is coming. We have to fight. I will be rewarded 10,000 times in the next life. When you die, you're nothing.

[Ben Shapiro]

Only one way to find out.

[Patrick Bet-David]

That's the American way.