The Charlie Kirk Show - The Science Cartel, the College Scam, and the DOGE Defenders

00:00:00.000 Okay, everybody, welcome back to the Bitcoin.com studio to the Charlie Kirk show.

00:00:04.000 We are here live in Phoenix, Arizona with Blake.

00:00:07.000 Also, my conversation with Antonio Gracias from the White House.

00:00:11.000 Email me, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:13.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:15.000 Get involved with Turning Point USA, which is the most important organization in America, at tpusa.com.

00:00:21.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:25.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:27.000 I love hearing from you.

00:00:28.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:30.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:30.000 Here we go.

00:00:31.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:33.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:39.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:42.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:43.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:44.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:46.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:52.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:01.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:20.000 here.

00:01:29.000 We are here live in Phoenix, Arizona with Blake.

00:01:32.000 Now, Blake, welcome.

00:01:34.000 We have lots to talk about.

00:01:35.000 I do have to start this with difficult Roman trivia.

00:01:38.000 Oh dear.

00:01:39.000 Alright. Just one though.

00:01:40.000 Okay. Hit me.

00:01:40.000 Alright. I think you're going to get this though.

00:01:43.000 Alright? I'd better.

00:01:44.000 You're not allowed to get it wrong.

00:01:45.000 What Roman general was awarded the Spoila Opima, the rarest military honor in Roman tradition?

00:01:51.000 You can't look it up, Blake.

00:01:52.000 For killing an enemy king in a single combat was the only third man in Roman history to receive it.

00:01:58.000 So the original one who did it, Romulus supposedly does it.

00:02:02.000 And then...

00:02:03.000 What's the second one?

00:02:07.000 Think about it.

00:02:07.000 You have all segment to think about it.

00:02:09.000 We're all just going to have a conversation.

00:02:11.000 Blake is like jostling back and forth. 0.81

00:02:13.000 He killed a Celtic chieftain.

00:02:15.000 Is it Regulus something?

00:02:17.000 I don't fault you for getting it wrong because I can't even pronounce it.

00:02:23.000 I know what it is.

00:02:24.000 I know what he got it for.

00:02:26.000 I can't remember the guy's name.

00:02:27.000 The initials are MLC.

00:02:29.000 MLC. There's not that many possible names.

00:02:33.000 It's Crassus.

00:02:34.000 Marcus Licinius Crassus.

00:02:36.000 Marcus Licinius Crassus has it?

00:02:38.000 Unless ChatGPT is wrong.

00:02:40.000 Okay, so it might be the grandfather or something of the famous one, because the famous Marcus Licinius Crassus is just a really rich guy, and he walks 10 feet over the border with Persia.

00:02:50.000 The younger.

00:02:50.000 It says the younger.

00:02:51.000 The younger.

00:02:51.000 Okay, so this is probably a different Crassus then.

00:02:54.000 You have some homework to do.

00:02:55.000 Okay, I'll have to go polish up on the spoiler.

00:02:58.000 Just to be fair, I asked ChatGPT for the hardest PhD advanced level questions.

00:03:03.000 Really? Do you have another fun hard one?

00:03:06.000 I will.

00:03:07.000 You gotta earn it.

00:03:07.000 Alright, but speaking of which, so there's...

00:03:10.000 So Blake, I stumbled upon this about someone in D.C. I was just in D.C. recently.

00:03:13.000 I was at the White House.

00:03:14.000 And they said, Charlie, we really think you should do a segment to look into this because it deals with the college scam, the college cartel.

00:03:19.000 I never even heard about this.

00:03:20.000 I thought this was a water company, Springer Nature.

00:03:22.000 I thought this is like Dasani.

00:03:24.000 And it's all about basically academic journals effectively funded by the taxpayer.

00:03:30.000 This is a world that most people don't actually know about.

00:03:32.000 So let's first just explain the medium.

00:03:35.000 What is this whole academic journal world?

00:03:39.000 How does it exist and why does it matter?

00:03:41.000 Okay, yeah.

00:03:41.000 So since people might not really grasp this, the way science is conducted in the modern world is basically through the medium of journals.

00:03:51.000 So if you are a researcher at MIT, you'll have a lab, you'll have a study you conduct on literally anything, whether this is medicine, chemistry, computer science, and you'll do a bunch of work.

00:04:06.000 And then you'll compile it into a paper, and it could be 10 pages long, it could be 500 pages long.

00:04:12.000 You'll compile it into a paper, and then the way you make it official is basically you will submit it to a journal.

00:04:20.000 The most famous journals are Cell, that's a medicine journal, Nature, Science, but...

00:04:26.000 There are literally thousands of these journals.

00:04:29.000 So you'll have the Journal of Applied Epidemiology.

00:04:32.000 I just made that up, but I assume it exists.

00:04:34.000 And you'll have math journals and history journals and social science journals.

00:04:38.000 They'll get really specific.

00:04:39.000 I'm looking at a list, for example, that are offered by the company we're talking about today.

00:04:43.000 And they have Angiogenesis, JMST Advances, Jewish History, Mathematical programming, mathematical programming computation, mathematical sciences.

00:04:55.000 There are tons and tons and tons of these.

00:04:58.000 And getting published in these papers is essentially, it's how you suggest your work is legitimate, and it's how you get prestige.

00:05:06.000 It's a lot more prestigious if you have a paper in Nature, one of the most famous journals, than to have it in a very obscure one.

00:05:14.000 And some are more selective than others.

00:05:17.000 So there are journals that are basically open access.

00:05:19.000 You can just publish with us, and that's it, and it doesn't really accord it a lot of legitimacy.

00:05:25.000 And there are some that, because they're more prestigious and allegedly they have more strict peer review, the research is presumed to be better.

00:05:33.000 And so where the Doge taxpayer thing comes in is that there's this whole analysis about the Department of Education, where is this money going?

00:05:40.000 And you have some of these numbers here.

00:05:43.000 Springer Nature, this company, which is one of the biggest incumbent actors, is effectively funded by the Department of Education because these colleges spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these journals.

00:05:54.000 What are they even spending the money on?

00:05:55.000 Exactly. So let's lay this out.

00:05:57.000 Springer Nature is a, I think it's a joint British-German company.

00:06:00.000 It's European. 0.63

00:06:01.000 And they recently went for profit.

00:06:03.000 It's listed on a stock exchange somewhere.

00:06:05.000 And what they do is they own hundreds, thousands of these journals.

00:06:11.000 Including nature, as the name suggests.

00:06:13.000 And the main way you get access to these, you can't just freely read them, which is a problem in its own right, because we'd probably have better science.

00:06:21.000 It's all paywalled.

00:06:22.000 Yeah, it's all paywalled.

00:06:23.000 And they're huge paywalls.

00:06:24.000 And if you think tuition goes up a lot, the...

00:06:28.000 Expense to have access to these journals goes up even faster.

00:06:31.000 I haven't looked at it recently, but I've occasionally seen numbers like they'll hike it 30% in a year, the cost to get these journals.

00:06:37.000 And they'll charge this to universities.

00:06:40.000 So people might know this if they've been in a university recently.

00:06:43.000 Like, oh, if you...

00:06:44.000 I remember this actually at Dartmouth.

00:06:46.000 Since I was at Dartmouth, I could basically just read any article at any journal.

00:06:50.000 That's actually pretty helpful.

00:06:52.000 And that's very helpful if you're, you know, trying to be an academic in anything.

00:06:56.000 But normal people don't have this access.

00:06:58.000 Schools pay for this.

00:07:00.000 And the way they pay for it is they pay millions of dollars for these things.

00:07:06.000 I have Springer Nature's price list for 2025.

00:07:09.000 This is individual journals.

00:07:10.000 They're electronic only price.

00:07:12.000 Don't need to get it in paper.

00:07:13.000 Let's see.

00:07:14.000 Three biotech.

00:07:15.000 $1,171 to subscribe a year.

00:07:18.000 Abdominal radiology, $4,926 to subscribe per year.

00:07:23.000 Acoustical physics, $6,161.

00:07:26.000 And what they get you with also is they'll get you to sign up for packages of 100, 200, 500 journals, and you have to pay for all of them.

00:07:36.000 And it's tens of thousands of dollars a year.

00:07:38.000 And if you multiply that over a bunch of universities, thousands of universities in the U.S., they're all effectively taxpayer-funded through our student loans, through our grants.

00:07:47.000 And the U.S. government itself pays for these, too, because our government agencies will, like the Department of Agriculture, for example, will subscribe to every agricultural journal.

00:07:56.000 And they...

00:07:58.000 My understanding is they don't do that much negotiation for what the price on this should be.

00:08:02.000 According to what I was sent, they charge researchers upwards of $11,000 per article.

00:08:07.000 Yeah, so they also get in on the other end.

00:08:09.000 So the justification for all of this is that these places at least, they do the peer review.

00:08:16.000 They're the ones who are checking the research to make sure that it's not bogus.

00:08:19.000 But infamously, peer review is an incredibly weak process.

00:08:23.000 It's not nearly as strong as it should be.

00:08:25.000 A lot of these journals don't pay.

00:08:27.000 Scholars for doing peer review?

00:08:29.000 It's more like, oh, you pay your dues by doing the peer review on this.

00:08:34.000 And then you end up with these costs.

00:08:37.000 It can cost you thousands of dollars to publish your own scientific paper.

00:08:41.000 And there's even, last year, there was an antitrust suit brought against Springer Nature and some of the other big publishers, where allegedly they just do cartel-like behavior.

00:08:49.000 It sounds like a syndicate.

00:08:51.000 Yeah, like they agree not to, they make it so you can't submit your paper to multiple places so they might compete over it.

00:08:57.000 So if there's a really high-value paper, they could maybe bid, we want this published in our journal, but they prevent that through cartel-like behavior.

00:09:04.000 And they collude to not pay peer reviewers.

00:09:07.000 Well, for example, one of the major reasons we have large language models that are advancing, I owe you another Roman history question.

00:09:31.000 but this this is one of the the Springer nature is an example also of like why college is so bad.

00:09:40.000 I mean it's like and some of these are very poorly managed publications as well.

00:09:44.000 Yeah I mean some of these are the publications that get literally scammed where you write that fake paper that's all like you know feminist biochemistry blah blah blah and you can just trick them. 1.00

00:09:54.000 And a lot of the COVID stuff.

00:09:55.000 Like, ran through some of these journals.

00:09:57.000 Yes, that's another issue with them.

00:09:58.000 And also, they're more ideological.

00:10:00.000 You're getting nature-running articles that are just screeching at Trump, and that's part of the journal.

00:10:06.000 And, you know, ideally, that's not really related to scientific research, but they use their prestige, which we are paying for, to do this.

00:10:15.000 Did you prove ChatGPT wrong?

00:10:17.000 I think so.

00:10:17.000 Yeah, you said Marcus Licinius Crassus.

00:10:19.000 It's totally not that guy.

00:10:20.000 It's Marcus Claudius Marcellus.

00:10:23.000 He killed a Gallic chieftain.

00:10:25.000 Alright, I'm going to scold ChatGPT then.

00:10:29.000 I'm going to say you're wrong about number five.

00:10:32.000 Incorrect answer.

00:10:33.000 Yeah, it's actually correcting it.

00:10:34.000 It now says Marcus Claudius Marcellus.

00:10:38.000 Was that the answer you first gave?

00:10:39.000 It wasn't the one I gave, but I looked it up because it didn't sound right.

00:10:42.000 Got it.

00:10:43.000 So it corrected itself.

00:10:46.000 Blake correcting ChatGPT is quite a sight to be seen.

00:10:50.000 Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:10:52.000 Based on everything I'm seeing about the Springer Nature thing, I think it's time for some sort of investigation.

00:10:57.000 Why would the federal government be indirectly funding this, basically this cartel, this syndicate, from poorly managed publications and also all the COVID nonsense that's there?

00:11:07.000 Blake, I owe you another question, so stay right there.

00:11:09.000 but I think it's time for someone to look into Springer Nature.

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00:12:14.000 Alright, Blake.

00:12:15.000 What obscure Roman official often overlooked in modern discussions was tasked with investigating the moral conduct of senators and equestrians during the Republic and had the authority to expel them from their ranks?

00:12:27.000 The censor?

00:12:27.000 Yeah. That's pretty easy.

00:12:29.000 I think they only had the one censor.

00:12:32.000 Alright, then I'll ask you a different one.

00:12:33.000 What Roman law passed in 18 BCE under Augustus was designed to increase birth rates among the Roman elite by rewarding marriage and penalizing celibacy?

00:12:42.000 I don't...

00:12:43.000 It was Augustine Law.

00:12:45.000 I don't know what the name of it was.

00:12:47.000 Lex Julia De Marte.

00:12:48.000 It's Latin.

00:12:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:12:50.000 Julian Law.

00:12:51.000 Okay. He famously passed it, and then his daughter was kind of an immoral woman, and no one would tell him about this. 0.96

00:13:00.000 And then it finally came out.

00:13:01.000 If you ever watch iClaudius, which you should sometime, it's like a big scene.

00:13:04.000 I will.

00:13:05.000 So, just kind of finishing on this medical journal, not just academic journal thing.

00:13:11.000 So... Do a lot of these universities pay money because they have to to these journals?

00:13:15.000 Yeah, I mean, you have to to be an academic institution.

00:13:18.000 It really is a cartel.

00:13:19.000 If you secede from it, you are not...

00:13:23.000 You're basically telling your guys that you can't take part in the world of scientific research.

00:13:28.000 And it is true. 0.71

00:13:30.000 There are...

00:13:31.000 Informally, what a lot of people do, especially if you just want to be a scientifically engaged normal person who's not working at a university or at the government, you just pirate these things.

00:13:41.000 And there's a lot of that.

00:13:42.000 There's a ton of academic piracy out there.

00:13:46.000 But yeah, it truly is a cartel.

00:13:49.000 If you're going to be a major university, they kind of have you over the barrel.

00:13:53.000 I mean, open source would make a lot of sense.

00:13:55.000 Open source stuff, but again, there is the real concern.

00:13:57.000 You don't want fake science, and if anyone can publish anything, there will be fake science.

00:14:02.000 But ideally, a company like Spinger Nature is supposed to check the science, right?

00:14:07.000 Yes, they're supposed to do that, and one of the big attacks on them is they're clearly not doing that much of the time.

00:14:11.000 A big scandal that just happened recently, Nature, they published a very important paper on Alzheimer's about 20 years ago, and it recently came out that...

00:14:22.000 Basically, the research for this was falsified.

00:14:24.000 It was entirely falsified, and literally the last 20 years of research into Alzheimer's may have been a blind alley of completely pointless, and we could have known this all along.

00:14:35.000 And hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of research from taxpayers was directed towards this blind alley that, in theory, nature should have caught.

00:14:47.000 Yeah, I mean, and there's just example after example here of engaging in censorship, They censor stuff in China.

00:14:54.000 We don't care for that.

00:14:56.000 I don't even necessarily want to fixate on...

00:14:59.000 They were definitely involved in discouraging the lab leak hypothesis from COVID.

00:15:03.000 I don't want to bash that because it's fine to hypothesize whether it was natural or from a lab leak.

00:15:09.000 But if they were putting their finger on the scales...

00:15:12.000 Which there's evidence that they did it.

00:15:13.000 They've done stuff for the Chinese government.

00:15:16.000 Exactly. And so if they're censoring on the Chinese government, it may be very well that...

00:15:21.000 And they can also choose what articles they select.

00:15:24.000 I never knew how much power these institutions have.

00:15:28.000 Enormous amounts.

00:15:29.000 It's one of those hidden things.

00:15:30.000 We see the high cost of tuition at universities.

00:15:33.000 We see the degree cartel. 0.60

00:15:36.000 And you even see things like people know how textbooks have gotten way more expensive way faster than college itself has.

00:15:42.000 Similarly, this is one of those background ways.

00:15:46.000 There's like the college scam is even deeper than you yourself described.

00:15:50.000 I don't even talk about this in my book.

00:15:53.000 The colleges themselves are getting scammed by a super college scammer.

00:15:58.000 Like a publicly traded scammer.

00:16:01.000 There's layers of the scam.

00:16:03.000 It's like a Russian doll of scamming. 0.99

00:16:05.000 Incredible. Alright, let's finish with one more Roman history question here.

00:16:10.000 Let's see.

00:16:11.000 I almost knew this one, to be honest.

00:16:13.000 I'm not going to do this one.

00:16:14.000 I don't think that one.

00:16:15.000 Okay, hit me with a hard one.

00:16:16.000 All right, this one I think you'll get, honestly.

00:16:18.000 Which Roman emperor briefly reigned in 193 CE during the year of five emperors and was killed by the Praetorian Guard after trying to buy their loyalty?

00:16:25.000 Is that Didius Julianus?

00:16:27.000 Yeah, I knew you were going to get that.

00:16:29.000 That one I knew.

00:16:30.000 Okay, what...

00:16:31.000 Replaced by Septimius Severus.

00:16:34.000 That I did not know.

00:16:35.000 I didn't know either.

00:16:37.000 Is this posthumous?

00:16:46.000 Yes. So is that where we get the word posthumous from, looking at things posthumously?

00:16:51.000 I don't think so.

00:16:51.000 I think that's usually spelled differently.

00:16:53.000 Yeah, it is, but it would have some connective tissue there. 0.75

00:16:56.000 So of all the history stuff, is Rome the stuff you know the best?

00:17:02.000 Maybe overall, although if you think in like relative terms...

00:17:05.000 You have like bizarre Russian history.

00:17:07.000 I know a lot about Russia, but maybe not as much as I know about Rome.

00:17:10.000 Someone said to me recently that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I heard this when I was in D.C., that trying to get Vladimir Putin to approve this peace deal would be like the fastest military decision for the Russian government in like 200 years.

00:17:22.000 Yeah. They usually move incredibly bureaucratically, right?

00:17:24.000 They're bureaucratic, they're slow moving, they don't...

00:17:28.000 And they totally do have a history of sort of just being a bit evasive on these things.

00:17:34.000 It's very real, but he might be rope-a-doping Trump a little bit.

00:17:38.000 We will see.

00:17:56.000 so much.

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00:18:43.000 I want to air for you an amazing conversation I had with Antonio Gracias.

00:18:50.000 Antonio Gracias is a very smart man, dear friend of Elon.

00:18:54.000 I had it while I was at the White House, actually.

00:18:56.000 We got this done.

00:18:56.000 My conversation with Antonio Gracias from the White House.

00:19:01.000 All right, everybody.

00:19:01.000 Charlie Kirk here, live from the White House with a very interesting man, Antonio Gracias.

00:19:05.000 Antonio, great to meet you.

00:19:07.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:19:08.000 Good to meet you.

00:19:08.000 And so I first became aware of you by reading Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk, which we won't spend too much time on all the inaccuracies.

00:19:15.000 But I think it did paint a broader macro vision of, quite honestly, one of the most compelling people ever to live and the most compelling innovator of our time.

00:19:25.000 You've known Elon for quite some time.

00:19:27.000 And right now he is villain and public enemy number one of the activist left.

00:19:32.000 Tell us about your story and how you met Elon and what people should know about him.

00:19:36.000 Well, so I met Elon because of PayPal.

00:19:38.000 So I went to law school with David Sachs.

00:19:40.000 And David Sachs was the chief product officer of PayPal.

00:19:43.000 And so we invested in PayPal.

00:19:45.000 That's how I first met him.

00:19:46.000 And then invested, we're the first institutional investors in Tesla.

00:19:48.000 And we're operating guys by training where I built the company in the 90s.

00:19:52.000 So I got deep in operations at Tesla with him.

00:19:54.000 And that's really when I got to know him and developed a profound respect for his ability to go deep into the detail, to really operate, understand what's going on, and to his desire, truly genuine desire, to make the world better.

00:20:07.000 So I find that to be one of the more unique things about Elon is that he's a visionary, but also he's micro.

00:20:12.000 Yes. And it's very difficult to find the macro and the micro combined.

00:20:15.000 Yep. With drive.

00:20:17.000 I find the combination of those three things to be exceptional.

00:20:19.000 Talk about that.

00:20:21.000 His mind is very unique.

00:20:22.000 Okay, so to be able to go from the, to say the least, right, to go from the very, very top macro strength.

00:20:27.000 Go to Mars.

00:20:27.000 Yeah, go to Mars.

00:20:28.000 And then zoom all the way down to the, like, engineering detail of, you know, what the door handle on the car, why it's got to be perfect.

00:20:37.000 It's exceptionally unique.

00:20:39.000 And what he does is he's able to galvanize terrific engineers, terrific people on a mission because he actually wants to make the world better.

00:20:46.000 He wants to better humanity.

00:20:47.000 Those missions are huge.

00:20:49.000 But then he zooms all the way to detail to make them happen.

00:20:51.000 So that combination is exceptionally unique, yes.

00:20:54.000 What is his drive?

00:20:55.000 Because a lot of people are trying to ascribe motivations to him, world's wealthiest man.

00:20:59.000 What keeps him going?

00:21:01.000 Why is he only sleeping three hours a night and obviously putting some of his wealth, you know, Not in jeopardy, but just saying I don't really care.

00:21:09.000 What is his why?

00:21:11.000 I think Elon has a really big heart.

00:21:13.000 He's a really compassionate man.

00:21:15.000 And if I can just tell you one story, please.

00:21:18.000 During COVID, we were reopening the factory at Tesla.

00:21:22.000 And I was there with him reopening the factory.

00:21:24.000 And we had employees that had COVID.

00:21:26.000 And we had some of the hospital ventilators.

00:21:29.000 And he pulled me off the line one day to speak to a woman who only spoke Spanish.

00:21:33.000 Because I speak Spanish, my first language.

00:21:34.000 And our husband was in a hospital in Ventilator.

00:21:37.000 And he wanted to tell her that we were there for her.

00:21:39.000 And we were there for her family.

00:21:40.000 And we would do whatever we needed to to help her husband.

00:21:42.000 And he had me literally sit in a conference room on a Polycon and transit for him.

00:21:47.000 You know, and that is just, to see a CEO, we're back in a crisis.

00:21:50.000 We don't get the factory launched.

00:21:51.000 We're going to go bankrupt.

00:21:52.000 Yes. Right?

00:21:53.000 The local authorities, Alameda County.

00:21:56.000 They threatened to arrest him, right?

00:21:57.000 Yeah. I mean, I got there because he called me and said he was going to open the factory and they were threatening to arrest him.

00:22:01.000 I said, listen, I'm going to come with you.

00:22:02.000 They'll arrest me too.

00:22:02.000 He said, no, no, no.

00:22:04.000 Yes. Yes.

00:22:17.000 please come tell her, help me tell her that we're there for her.

00:22:21.000 And that compassion is what's driving it.

00:22:24.000 That's what this is all about.

00:22:25.000 This is about America.

00:22:27.000 It's about saving America, not just cutting costs, but saving the entitlement programs for our seniors, for all of our people.

00:22:32.000 The idea that it would be...

00:22:33.000 This has got anything to do with taking money or doing anything other than making sure people get their payments is totally absurd.

00:22:39.000 Just look at the facts.

00:22:40.000 It's BS.

00:22:41.000 I completely agree with that.

00:22:43.000 He has a huge heart for humanity, which I think really is his why.

00:22:46.000 Talk about the last five to ten years where it went from Elon, the innovator, to all of a sudden he got more and more involved in, you could say politics, but just kind of some of the cultural issues.

00:22:58.000 And I think his purchasing of Twitter, now X, will go down as one of the most monumental and courageous decisions for freedom of speech in the history of the species.

00:23:06.000 I don't think President Trump would have had the movement.

00:23:09.000 President Trump deserves all the credit, but I don't know if he would have had the movement behind him if X would not have existed.

00:23:14.000 We would not have been able to expose the COVID lies or the lockdowns or the open border if it wasn't for a free and open portion of the internet.

00:23:23.000 Did you see a moment where really a switch went on, where all of a sudden he saw a sequencing where like, if we don't win back the White House, then these other 100 things that I want to get done for humanity will not be able to happen?

00:23:34.000 Yeah, I think it was a, I'd say a progression that began with a belief in free speech, a fundamental belief in free speech.

00:23:42.000 And what Twitter had done was corrupted free speech.

00:23:45.000 Who believed it was free speech?

00:23:47.000 This is not true.

00:23:48.000 They had no constitutional standard.

00:23:49.000 I was there myself.

00:23:49.000 I asked these guys myself these questions.

00:23:52.000 There was a long time I went to law school.

00:23:53.000 I took con law.

00:23:54.000 They weren't at all worried about a constitutional standard.

00:23:57.000 They were a private corporation, and they could decide what was said and what they were suppressing and actually promoting on Twitter.

00:24:03.000 And it began with that, seeing that this was sort of the center of the woke mind virus being pushed out in the world.

00:24:09.000 That had to stop.

00:24:10.000 That's really why he did it.

00:24:12.000 I think from that point forward, his mind went, you know, it kind of goes to the biggest problems, right?

00:24:16.000 What are the biggest problems?

00:24:17.000 And from there, it went to, wait a minute.

00:24:19.000 The problem is deeper than just this one thing, Twitter.

00:24:22.000 It has now infected the government, it's infected many of our children, it's gone in many directions, and that he believed that President Trump was the right leader.

00:24:31.000 So now fast-forwarding to today, one could make the argument, I would actually make the argument, that going to Mars, having autonomous vehicles, it's going to be far easier than actually getting Congress to cut spend.

00:24:44.000 Oh, Joe, I've got to tell you, man, I was just speaking for myself.

00:24:48.000 This is the hardest thing I've ever done.

00:24:50.000 Okay. But I want to just pause you.

00:24:51.000 I mean, you have been involved in the hardest things an entrepreneur and innovator can be involved in.

00:24:56.000 I mean, just what Tesla was up against to get car output. 0.99

00:25:00.000 You guys had people short selling your stock.

00:25:02.000 I mean, you've been up against the wall multiple times.

00:25:05.000 Yes. But this is the hardest.

00:25:06.000 Hardest. I mean, look, I started my career doing serious turnarounds.

00:25:09.000 I mean, auto factories with unions, all that stuff, all the way to Tesla and then Ford, which you've seen in the book.

00:25:15.000 And this is by far the hardest.

00:25:17.000 It's the hardest because, first, it's the biggest problem, right?

00:25:20.000 You're talking about an enormous organization in the U.S. government, and I'd say there are very good people.

00:25:26.000 There are some very good people that are helping really great, and there are people that don't want help, right?

00:25:30.000 And so you've got the industry bureaucracy problem going on, and the problems are deep.

00:25:33.000 They're deep, and they're really hard to deal with.

00:25:35.000 So let's talk about that.

00:25:37.000 I just want to go back a little bit.

00:25:39.000 So Doge was born out of a spirit that our government is wildly inefficient.

00:25:42.000 There's programs that should not exist.

00:25:44.000 And if I were to kind of read into Elon, who I've had the pleasure to get to know and I have enormous respect for, I think that a switch also went off in his head where he said, hey, if bankruptcy, then no civilization.

00:25:56.000 Yes, look, we're at 130% GDP, maybe higher, depends on how you calculate numbers.

00:26:01.000 And the reality is, you know, it's a pretty simple math calculation.

00:26:05.000 We keep going.

00:26:07.000 You know, at some point, the currency gets devalued and we turn it as well.

00:26:09.000 That's what happens.

00:26:10.000 So we have to stop it.

00:26:11.000 And it's, you know, the target here is over 15% of the cost, right?

00:26:15.000 You're an entrepreneur.

00:26:16.000 You built a great business.

00:26:17.000 If I said to you, hey, Trey, look, we got to squeeze 15% of the cost of your business, you'd be like, you know what?

00:26:21.000 I can do that, right?

00:26:22.000 Anyone can do that.

00:26:22.000 And we try to do that, but if I had to...

00:26:24.000 I think it's important.

00:26:39.000 It's an important point.

00:26:40.000 The people that are screaming the loudest...

00:26:42.000 Are the fraudsters.

00:26:42.000 So why are they burning deserterships?

00:26:44.000 Why are they doing all this stuff?

00:26:45.000 Because we're taking money away from people that are committing a fraud.

00:26:48.000 Such as?

00:26:49.000 Okay, I can tell you something I've seen.

00:26:51.000 At SSA, an example.

00:26:54.000 The Social Security Administration.

00:26:55.000 Yeah, Social Security Administration as an example.

00:26:57.000 The 40% of the fraud came down the phone lines and do direct deposit.

00:27:02.000 So you could get on the dark web someone's social security number, answer six simple questions, and change the bank information from one place to another.

00:27:11.000 This was 40% of the fraud.

00:27:12.000 It was actually about a billion and a half dollars of fraud, well over a billion dollars of fraud that we know of, that we know of, okay?

00:27:18.000 So what's the implication of this?

00:27:20.000 If you're a senior like my dad, he's 84, he expects his check.

00:27:23.000 It doesn't show up for a month, maybe he notices it, maybe he doesn't, maybe it's two months, and it's all going to foreign formal syndicates taking the money.

00:27:30.000 That's the cash cost.

00:27:31.000 What we can measure and should measure is the headache to the senior.

00:27:34.000 Oh, man, it probably shortens their life expectancy.

00:27:36.000 Yeah, I mean, think about the stress, right?

00:27:37.000 These people need the money and they got to go into the office, they got to fix the problem.

00:27:41.000 They've been subject to identity theft because we didn't have basic two-factor authentication.

00:27:46.000 Every bank in America, you have two-factor authentication, right?

00:27:49.000 Why do our seniors deserve less?

00:27:51.000 They don't.

00:27:52.000 We put this in, the fraud went down.

00:27:55.000 This kind of thing is all over the place.

00:27:57.000 I can tell you, I don't think there's one thread to pull on, "Hey, let's go save a trillion dollars." It's like every business, right?

00:28:03.000 It's a game of inches.

00:28:04.000 It's a billion here and a billion.

00:28:05.000 But Elizabeth Warren-Yeah.

00:28:07.000 Or one of our friends on the other side would say, Antonio, that's just a billion dollars.

00:28:12.000 Come on.

00:28:13.000 Listen, Charlie, it's a billion dollars in American people's money, okay?

00:28:17.000 That's a lot of money.

00:28:18.000 I can tell you a crazy story.

00:28:20.000 In 2024, $800 million, quote, fell off the balance sheet of the Social Security Administration.

00:28:26.000 So what does that mean?

00:28:28.000 Gravity applies?

00:28:29.000 Gravity applies, exactly.

00:28:30.000 What do you mean fall off?

00:28:31.000 That's a question I ask.

00:28:32.000 Who did it fall to whom?

00:28:34.000 Exactly. Exactly.

00:28:35.000 Okay, so what happened was there's a $20 billion balance sheet of money owed to the Scottish administration, right?

00:28:41.000 Because during the Biden administration, they took, if we overpaid you in some way, it used to be, even going back to Obama, that the Treasury could recoup 100% of the money in, as an example, the retirement program, right?

00:28:52.000 If we overpay you, you know, it was an accident, okay, we take the money back.

00:28:56.000 They reduced this, the payment plans from, it was three years up until literally through Obama into President Trump's first term.

00:29:03.000 They took it to five years and then took it down to $10 minimum payment.

00:29:06.000 So the payment plans went out past 2047, which is the end of the system date in the computer.

00:29:13.000 What happened?

00:29:13.000 When that $800 million went past the system date, the technicians in the field had to write notes in the computer to be able to collect that money.

00:29:21.000 Those notes aren't very good.

00:29:22.000 When I met with the auditors myself and asked this question, what happened to the money?

00:29:26.000 The auditor said, it fell off the balance sheet.

00:29:28.000 I said, is that a gap term or a non-gap term?

00:29:30.000 She was like, The gap is generalized accounting principles, right?

00:29:33.000 Yes, of course.

00:29:34.000 Just for the audience.

00:29:36.000 Yes, and they said what the auditors told us was it's a $1.5 trillion program.

00:29:41.000 It's not material.

00:29:42.000 But how did they answer that question?

00:29:43.000 That's how they answered the question.

00:29:44.000 It's not material.

00:29:45.000 I said, look, it's $800 million.

00:29:47.000 Just to make sure I'm clear, so when I file my taxes in two weeks, can I just say that my...

00:29:53.000 The money fell off my tax return?

00:29:55.000 No, you were in jail.

00:29:57.000 You were in prison.

00:29:57.000 Is that an official Internal Revenue Service term?

00:30:02.000 You're absolutely right.

00:30:03.000 Fell off.

00:30:03.000 And we asked this question.

00:30:05.000 We're like, mind boggled.

00:30:06.000 $800 million is a huge amount of money.

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00:31:32.000 No, but so, I mean, I want to just drill on this one micro example.

00:31:36.000 I mean, don't we have, like, wire transfer information?

00:31:39.000 We're like ACH.

00:31:40.000 I mean, money must be sent somewhere, right?

00:31:44.000 If it's not an account, can we reverse engineer?

00:31:47.000 No. I mean, the money, this particular $800 million, I've asked this question, the notes that were taken that relate to these debts were so poor that the auditors included.

00:31:56.000 It's not our collectibles.

00:31:57.000 Sorry to interrupt, but are the auditors the U.S. government, or are we hiring, like, McKinsey?

00:32:02.000 No, it's outside auditors.

00:32:04.000 You can go look it up.

00:32:05.000 No, no, I know.

00:32:06.000 I'm just like, but like, they have to stake their entire reputation on this, right?

00:32:09.000 They have.

00:32:10.000 I mean, look, there are, if I remember correctly, about 100 weaknesses in the audit they've identified, and they still give us a clean audit opinion at Social Security Administration.

00:32:18.000 It is, I've never seen, like, I have never in my career in 30 years seen anything like it.

00:32:23.000 So if you, you're an investor, if you came across a company like this, what would be the first thing that comes to mind?

00:32:30.000 I would go home.

00:32:31.000 I'm only doing this because of the U.S. government and because I believe in America.

00:32:34.000 You would probably report that company to the Department of Justice.

00:32:36.000 I mean, most likely, yes.

00:32:38.000 I would for sure go home and then maybe call the DOJ.

00:32:41.000 So that's just the Social Security Administration in just one year of what you know of.

00:32:45.000 Yes, yes.

00:32:46.000 But your critics will say, Antonio wants to cut Social Security.

00:32:52.000 Yeah, categorically not true.

00:32:54.000 Categorically not true.

00:32:54.000 This is a complete lie.

00:32:56.000 We're trying to save it.

00:32:58.000 And the reality is it's going to run out of money anyway in 2037, no matter what.

00:33:01.000 We have to try to save it.

00:33:02.000 And I can't tell you this is a high-probability event, but it's worth fighting for.

00:33:06.000 You know, going to Mars was really hard.

00:33:09.000 It wasn't obvious 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

00:33:11.000 It was worth fighting for.

00:33:12.000 This is worth fighting for.

00:33:13.000 I mean, people have paid into the system.

00:33:16.000 They deserve their money.

00:33:17.000 And if we've got to save it $100 million at a time or $10 at a time, we're going to fight to save it $10 at a time.

00:33:22.000 We have to.

00:33:22.000 It's their money.

00:33:25.000 That's a really important point.

00:33:26.000 And I want to talk about that for a second.

00:33:27.000 Because what I find when I talk to bureaucrats, which is not very often, they don't talk to me very often.

00:33:31.000 But at least those that have, let's just say, bureaucrat worldview.

00:33:34.000 Yes. There is a disconnect of whose money is it.

00:33:37.000 If I had to distill the divide that runs this town, it's the patriots, such as yourself and Elon, look at you guys as stewards of somebody else's money that is sent into the system, whereas the permanent bureaucracy, they actually view it as the government's money, and the people just loaned it and then sent it back.

00:33:55.000 We collected what was rightfully ours.

00:33:57.000 Do you think that is a properly distilled analysis?

00:34:01.000 I would break the bureaucratic criterion, too.

00:34:04.000 Because everything we found is because people told us.

00:34:07.000 We just mapped the system.

00:34:08.000 This is whistleblowing.

00:34:09.000 Yeah, I mean, we do what we don't do.

00:34:11.000 So it's probably even worse than this.

00:34:12.000 It is probably worse than this, yes.

00:34:14.000 For sure it's worse than this.

00:34:14.000 But the reason we had the information we had is because people told us where to look.

00:34:18.000 There are very good people in these agencies all over the place.

00:34:21.000 They have been stifled.

00:34:22.000 And they are now telling us the truth.

00:34:24.000 They're telling us their truth.

00:34:25.000 They're asking us where to look.

00:34:26.000 And they're really helping us.

00:34:27.000 I mean, it is not the case that everyone is bad.

00:34:29.000 This is not true.

00:34:30.000 I mean, it's like anything, right?

00:34:32.000 There's great people and there's not great people.

00:34:33.000 There's some phenomenal civil servants.

00:34:34.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:34:35.000 And they're doing it for the right reason.

00:34:36.000 They're here to serve their fellow citizens.

00:34:37.000 They really are.

00:34:37.000 Yeah, they are.

00:34:38.000 And I want to honor them.

00:34:40.000 And I want to feel compassion for what they've gone through because they're frustrated.

00:34:43.000 Look, we went to the border.

00:34:44.000 I can just tell you the Border Protection and Border Patrol, they had the highest suicide rates they've ever experienced during the surge.

00:34:51.000 This is a human tragedy.

00:34:52.000 Yeah. So looking now, is it fair to say your...

00:34:58.000 Assigned tasks as a Social Security Administration?

00:35:00.000 Are there any others under your purview, under the kind of Doge umbrella?

00:35:04.000 Yeah, so what happened was we mapped the entire system for Social Security, from enumeration, how you get the number, all the way to the end, how you get a payment.

00:35:10.000 We went all the way to the offices.

00:35:11.000 In that process, we found this category called Enumeration Beyond Entry, and it had ramped dramatically.

00:35:17.000 So it should be for like H-1Bs, green cards, this kind of thing. 0.67

00:35:20.000 And it was like, you know, call it two to four hundred thousand people a year, every year.

00:35:24.000 And then it goes up and up and up, and it doubles every year during the Biden administration.

00:35:28.000 It ends up at about 2.1 million people.

00:35:30.000 So if you think about baseline, 4,000 to the 2.1, that really caught our eye.

00:35:34.000 One of our engineers, Peyton, actually found this, and he showed it to us because we were mapping through the whole system.

00:35:39.000 When we dug into it, we found that the asylum programs were the vast majority of the increase, and so we dug into that.

00:35:47.000 That led us to Homeland Security.

00:35:49.000 It led us all the way to the border to try and figure out what it was because it's about...

00:35:53.000 A little over 5.4 million people or so in total that came in in those years.

00:35:57.000 What we found in the data was that 1.2 million of them were marked as unknown, knowing what the status was.

00:36:03.000 1.2 were marked as general parole.

00:36:05.000 This was during Biden's presence?

00:36:07.000 This was all during Biden's presence, yes.

00:36:08.000 And by the way, it continued through the first fiscal quarter of the federal court of 25, right?

00:36:13.000 So right before President Trump came in.

00:36:15.000 And President Trump has not closed the border, so it's not happening now.

00:36:18.000 We were just trying to figure this out.

00:36:20.000 We were following the number to complete our map.

00:36:23.000 And I would say we accidentally came across this problem, which led us to the border.

00:36:27.000 And the people at the border reported, you know, I'd say some of the most disturbing behavior that I've ever heard, where we would, you know, they got so overwhelmed at times.

00:36:35.000 They provide people with, you know, I think called the notice to appear or own recognizance release.

00:36:40.000 They'd have, they'd get in the system with a court date.

00:36:42.000 Once you're in the system with a court date, if you file for asylum when you're in, you can get a form, just filing a form that allows you, once that form is filed, to get...

00:36:51.000 And this was just, I mean, it was...

00:37:07.000 and we found in a handful of states, we just sampled a handful of states, we found thousands of people on the voter rolls and many of them had voted.

00:37:16.000 And this was just, I mean, it was...

00:37:19.000 If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'm not sure I'd have believed it.

00:37:21.000 First of all, phenomenal work, because look at all the different layers you had to go through to get to that conclusion.

00:37:26.000 Yeah, the team is very tenacious.

00:37:28.000 The team we have is great.

00:37:30.000 And by the way, again, I want to point out, we wouldn't have been able to follow the breadcrumbs if people hadn't told us where to go.

00:37:35.000 That's critical.

00:37:37.000 So two thoughts on that.

00:37:38.000 Number one, someone had to be issuing the Social Security numbers.

00:37:41.000 Yes. And so that was the Biden administration knowingly just giving them out, like throwing them out like Frisbees.

00:37:46.000 Yes. To be clear, this was making illegal people legal, right?

00:37:50.000 But without any act of Congress.

00:37:52.000 Without any act of Congress, yes.

00:37:53.000 It's illegal what the government did.

00:37:55.000 The programs were there.

00:37:57.000 What they did was, I would say, abuse them.

00:37:59.000 They opened the aperture dramatically on these programs and didn't do any due diligence, proper diligence on the people coming in.

00:38:05.000 And so there is a requirement for diligence, and I would say that requirement was not met.

00:38:09.000 So the second part is something you mentioned, which I think is a great way to conclude, which is you talk about the team.

00:38:14.000 Yes. Which I've had the opportunity to meet some of these Doge super geniuses.

00:38:18.000 They're young, they're hungry, they're tenacious, they're relentless, they don't sleep.

00:38:22.000 I mean, these are the high IQ patriots that we want in this building.

00:38:27.000 They have been doxed by the Washington Post and by Wired.

00:38:30.000 They have been singled out and their names and their addresses have been shared.

00:38:35.000 Talk about this group of mostly very young super geniuses that are dedicating their life to save this nation.

00:38:44.000 Yeah, I make the joke.

00:38:45.000 I call them ninjas.

00:38:45.000 These are engineering ninjas.

00:38:47.000 And look, these guys could all go get jobs in Silicon Valley for lots of money.

00:38:50.000 A million bucks a year, minimum.

00:38:51.000 Yeah, I mean, plus equity.

00:38:52.000 They would all become very wealthy people, right?

00:38:55.000 I mean, I met young people.

00:38:56.000 One of them dropped out of college.

00:38:58.000 He was a senior Harvard dropout.

00:38:59.000 I met him, too.

00:38:59.000 He's an amazing rock star.

00:39:01.000 And by the way, there's a number of these guys, right?

00:39:04.000 The guy we're supposed to be around.

00:39:05.000 These guys are really geniuses.

00:39:06.000 They're amazing.

00:39:07.000 Yeah, they're patriots.

00:39:08.000 They believe in America, and they believe in the future, and the future is for them and our children.

00:39:12.000 And I am...

00:39:13.000 Deeply grateful and very respectful of what they're doing.

00:39:16.000 And they're really, really good.

00:39:17.000 And look, they're also, you know, Joe Gabby is walking around here.

00:39:20.000 I'm here.

00:39:21.000 There are other, Anthony, if you guys more understand, they came out.

00:39:23.000 There are other people as well, along with the young folks, right?

00:39:26.000 So we have the engineers.

00:39:27.000 Yep. And then we have kind of, I'll call it the business people are helping on as well.

00:39:31.000 We've been creating teams around this so that we can cover, I'd say, the entire spectrum of thinking.

00:39:36.000 Yeah, this is a great team.

00:39:37.000 This is almost like the Avengers got assembled to try and come help the government.

00:39:41.000 And I, okay, I credit President Trump.

00:39:42.000 I mean, really, in the end, President Trump, he had the courage for the first time ever, and foresight, okay, this is a really, really, really smart thing to do, to sign an executive order that allowed us to go across databases.

00:39:56.000 Otherwise, we could never have figured this out.

00:39:58.000 Could never transcend the spear crowd. 1.00

00:39:59.000 Yeah, they did all silos, so we had to go across.

00:40:01.000 They do that intentionally, obviously.

00:40:03.000 I mean, look, I will say it might be an artifice of like the 1970s databases they have.

00:40:08.000 I wouldn't impute intent, but I will say it's created massive holes for people to commit fraud.

00:40:14.000 And that's what we're looking for, right?

00:40:15.000 And look, we're doing it with like 2010 technologies and SQL queries because we can't use AI.

00:40:19.000 We're not using AI to do this at all.

00:40:21.000 And why?

00:40:23.000 We can't.

00:40:24.000 You're not allowed to?

00:40:25.000 I'd say it's above my policy grade.

00:40:29.000 I mean, I would love to learn the answer there.

00:40:31.000 Because, I mean, we use AI for sports ticketing.

00:40:35.000 I think it's a privacy issue, but I would say that, I think, that's my opinion.

00:40:39.000 No, I'm not trying to put you on the spot.

00:40:40.000 I just, I think that what could be more important, I mean, I think Grok could do some damage.

00:40:44.000 Let me just put it that way.

00:40:45.000 I would say if we could use AI, definitely we'd be faster and more efficient.

00:40:50.000 And just imagine what it's like for an engineer who could use AI to not use it, to use SQL queries.

00:40:55.000 Compare and compare data and try to look for it.

00:40:57.000 It's really hard, painstaking work.

00:40:59.000 So you're saying that is this just Social Security Administration or all data they're not allowed to use?

00:41:05.000 Anywhere that I know we're not using it.

00:41:07.000 I've not seen any I use now.

00:41:08.000 Zero. None.

00:41:09.000 I'd love to learn.

00:41:10.000 I ask questions on my phone sometimes like, hey, what's the law on this?

00:41:13.000 Because I keep being told it's against the law.

00:41:16.000 That's an important distinction that actually a lot of what they think is law is actually inherited presidential custom.

00:41:21.000 Correct. Article 2 is that the president has the complete vested authority of this branch.

00:41:26.000 So if the president says to use Grok, I mean, is there a law, a congressional law that says you can't use AI?

00:41:32.000 Very much doubtful, man.

00:41:33.000 Anyway, I don't want to put you on the spot.

00:41:34.000 I just, this is the type of stuff we run into.

00:41:36.000 The final thing is this, is all of this would just be, will end up as a very well-publicized Warren commission.

00:41:43.000 Okay. If you guys don't get Congress to act.

00:41:46.000 Because there's only so much the president can do.

00:41:48.000 There's only so many recisions, impoundment act, all that stuff.

00:41:51.000 If Congress does not then put forward the president's budget and act upon your discoveries, the audience is salivating to hear marching orders.

00:42:00.000 Talk about how important it is that Article I internalizes all of your findings and then acts on it in this budget.

00:42:07.000 Look, I would say this.

00:42:10.000 This is a bit above my thinking grade, right?

00:42:12.000 I'm very focused on the narrow task of fraud, waste, and abuse.

00:42:15.000 My opinion is this.

00:42:17.000 The president of the United States is elected by the people, and he has a mandate to make change.

00:42:22.000 And if the bureaucracy is resisting that change, Congress should act to help him achieve the mandate of the American people.

00:42:29.000 And that's the reality.

00:42:30.000 It doesn't matter who the president is.

00:42:31.000 The bureaucracy doesn't run this country.

00:42:32.000 The president does.

00:42:33.000 The president appoints the secretaries.

00:42:36.000 The secretaries we've dealt with have been great across the board, from VA to DHS to Social Security Administration.

00:42:41.000 They really are aligned.

00:42:43.000 And the bureaucracy does not run this government.

00:42:45.000 The President of the United States does, along with the Congress.

00:42:47.000 And if we need Congress to act to enforce that, we should.

00:42:50.000 Amen. Antonio, thank you so much for your time.

00:42:53.000 God bless you.

00:42:54.000 I speak on behalf of our listeners and our audience.

00:42:56.000 The fact that people like you that have a ton of wealth, you guys could be in Monaco or you could be in Fiji, literally, enjoying all of the blessings you guys have earned.

00:43:06.000 Instead, you are here in D.C. in these kind of dimly lit office buildings.

00:43:11.000 Go until 2 a.m. looking through spreadsheets without AI to still be attacked by the media and be doxxed is the definition of a servant government.

00:43:19.000 So thank you so much.

00:43:20.000 Thank you.

00:43:20.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:43:22.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:43:25.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 08, 2025

The Science Cartel, the College Scam, and the DOGE Defenders

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