The Megyn Kelly Show - Big Tech Turns Against Free Speech and Fighting the COVID Ruling Class, with David Sacks

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.860 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.920 Today we have a fascinating guest for you who will be joining us for the full show.

00:00:20.220 David Sachs is a successful entrepreneur, a venture capitalist who runs Kraft Ventures,

00:00:25.480 and a co-host of the popular tech podcast All In.

00:00:29.000 He's a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia.

00:00:32.300 That's a group of men who founded PayPal and went on to build very successful tech companies after that.

00:00:38.980 Other members of the Mafia include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others.

00:00:43.580 And he's been called, our guest today, California Governor Gavin Newsom's loudest critic in Silicon Valley.

00:00:50.560 He's also now setting his sights on San Francisco's far-left radical district attorney Chesa Boudin.

00:00:57.820 David, so great to have you here. Thank you for coming on.

00:01:00.980 Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:01:03.340 Okay, so just help us a little bit with your background because, I mean, I think everybody knows about PayPal,

00:01:07.720 and they've heard certainly the name Elon Musk, I'm sure.

00:01:10.540 But how did you guys get connected, and how old were you, and sort of how did, you know,

00:01:14.580 this sort of powerhouse of guys come together to create a company that would then, you know,

00:01:19.500 launch careers that would be epic in the tech industry?

00:01:22.900 Well, I had gone to college with Peter Thiel. We had both graduated from Stanford.

00:01:27.020 We had actually been on the sort of conservative leading student newspaper, the Stanford Review.

00:01:32.520 We'd both been editors of that.

00:01:34.280 And so Peter recruited me to join PayPal at a very early stage.

00:01:38.560 I ended up becoming CEO of the company.

00:01:40.940 Okay. And did you, when you first started it, did you know it was going to be a blockbuster,

00:01:44.760 or was it like, oh, we'll give it a shot?

00:01:47.340 You never really know.

00:01:49.480 I mean, I thought it was a great idea, this idea that we could email money.

00:01:52.360 I thought that was sort of a killer idea, and we sort of focused on building a great product to do that.

00:01:58.440 So I always, on a certain level, I believed that it would be big, but at the same time, you never,

00:02:04.640 I didn't, did I know that it would be a, whatever, $200 billion public company today?

00:02:08.540 No, I didn't.

00:02:09.520 I couldn't expect that.

00:02:11.140 You guys were both, you were at Stanford together, and what was it like being, I guess,

00:02:15.140 what was that, late 80s, early 90s-ish?

00:02:17.980 Yeah, early 90s.

00:02:20.120 Yeah, it was sort of a time on campus when there were a lot of these sort of controversies.

00:02:25.820 This was the beginning of the culture wars, really, when at Stanford in the late 80s,

00:02:30.640 you had a protest in which the crowd chanted, hey, ho-ho, Western culture's got to go,

00:02:35.300 and they then proceeded to change the curriculum and the canon.

00:02:39.940 This is when they threw out all the so-called dead white males, and sort of,

00:02:42.960 there was really a revolution on campus.

00:02:45.420 And in a way, everything that's happening, I think, in our politics and culture today

00:02:48.680 is downstream of the change that we saw, you know, 30 years ago on these college campuses.

00:02:53.680 Mm-hmm.

00:02:54.840 So was it, it wasn't as unusual back then on a college like, on a college campus like Stanford's

00:03:00.640 for you to be a conservative, or did you know that, did you feel like an outlier even back then?

00:03:05.160 Oh, we definitely felt like outliers.

00:03:07.480 You know, they were, they called it, it wasn't called woke back then, it was called political

00:03:11.380 correctness.

00:03:12.120 But there was definitely, you know, the strong degree of trying to sort of ideologize students

00:03:18.580 and push this agenda.

00:03:21.020 And if you resisted it in any way, you were definitely considered a rebel.

00:03:24.860 Now, in the tech industry, has it been the same?

00:03:27.480 You know, on college campuses, most kids don't feel comfortable saying that they're a Republican,

00:03:31.540 or that God forbid that they supported Trump.

00:03:34.180 Is it the same in tech?

00:03:37.340 Basically.

00:03:38.040 I mean, the tech is not first and foremost concerned with ideology the way that, say,

00:03:43.920 you know, college professors are, but there's definitely a sort of a political bubble in tech.

00:03:50.520 There's a monoculture.

00:03:52.000 And I think that, you know, most people in tech would self-identify as liberal and Democrat.

00:03:57.580 And, you know, it'd be pretty unusual to find somebody who doesn't or willing to admit that

00:04:01.180 that's the case.

00:04:02.420 Now, my audience has heard this story from me, but I'll tell it to you.

00:04:05.680 A few years ago, I published my book, and Sheryl Sandberg, who's a friend of mine,

00:04:09.980 threw me a book party.

00:04:10.720 So I flew out there and I went to her house and there were, it was like a who's who in

00:04:16.300 your industry of, you know, tech people.

00:04:18.260 I mean, it was, I barely knew most of the people because it's not my thing.

00:04:21.660 But when she started listening to the companies, I was like, oh, wow, Sheryl, this is a very

00:04:25.060 nice party.

00:04:25.480 Thank you.

00:04:26.280 So we're, this is right after I had clashed with Trump and that presidential debate and

00:04:31.040 so on.

00:04:31.780 So most of the people there are just assuming I hate Trump, which I never hated Trump.

00:04:36.220 I was irritated when he kept coming after me, but I never hated Trump.

00:04:38.620 And I, of course, had worked at Fox News and understood how the right half of the country

00:04:42.440 felt, too.

00:04:43.460 So the long and the short of it is person after person would come up to me and they'd

00:04:47.100 shake my hand and they'd say, oh, you know, I love you.

00:04:48.860 I love you.

00:04:49.540 I hate Trump.

00:04:50.420 And, you know, we we kicked Peter Thiel out of Silicon Valley for supporting him.

00:04:54.840 He's done.

00:04:55.540 He doesn't get invited to any parties now.

00:04:57.620 And I'm thinking, oh, wow.

00:04:58.660 And then the other half of the group would come up to me quietly and be like, Trump,

00:05:05.040 20, 2016, like, go MAGA, right?

00:05:07.480 Like, great job on the debate and great job in covering the race.

00:05:10.700 And, you know, is he going to win?

00:05:11.840 Can he win?

00:05:12.600 Don't tell anybody I'm a Republican.

00:05:14.000 Don't tell anybody I'm a conservative.

00:05:15.560 By the end of the night, I wound up laughing and I really wanted to go to the few people

00:05:20.460 who were willing to confess that they were Republicans and say, you need to talk to that

00:05:23.920 man in the blue, that woman in the yellow, that guy with the red tie, because you are

00:05:28.020 not alone.

00:05:30.360 Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:31.180 And, you know, Peter was almost thrown off the board of Facebook for supporting Trump

00:05:35.400 in 2016.

00:05:36.860 I don't know if you remember, but Reed Hastings, who is the founder of Netflix, who was also

00:05:41.480 on the board of Facebook, really launched a broadside against Peter.

00:05:44.740 And to Zuckerberg's credit, he didn't kick Facebook, didn't kick Peter off the board back

00:05:50.100 then.

00:05:50.380 I saw the news that Peter just left a few days ago.

00:05:53.600 But yeah, absolutely.

00:05:55.180 Peter was a total outlier in Silicon Valley in supporting Trump and the Republican Party

00:06:01.360 more generally.

00:06:02.980 Do you think it's, I was going to say, has it softened at all?

00:06:06.160 Because the economy did pretty well under Trump, but then came January 6th.

00:06:11.400 No, I don't think it softened at all.

00:06:14.400 In fact, I think the opposite happened, which is to say that Silicon Valley turned its back

00:06:19.400 on a lot of the principles that it was founded with in terms of a free and open internet

00:06:24.100 because of Trump.

00:06:26.500 If you go back 10 years, say to, you know, roughly 2010, you had the CEO of Twitter then

00:06:32.460 declare that we're the free speech wing of the free speech party.

00:06:35.700 Around that time when you had, you know, the Green Revolution and the Arab Spring, you know,

00:06:41.680 Twitter and Facebook and the employees there were sort of giddy at the social change they're

00:06:45.880 bringing about, the people were sending these populist messages to their leaders.

00:06:51.640 And Silicon Valley was very proud of that.

00:06:53.420 You fast forward 10 years and almost nobody in Silicon Valley really believes in unfettered

00:06:59.500 free speech anymore.

00:07:01.440 And, you know, they believe in the sort of so-called content moderation and sort of policing

00:07:07.300 language.

00:07:08.580 And the turning point really was 2016.

00:07:10.740 You know, the American people sent a message to the establishment that big tech didn't want

00:07:16.260 to hear.

00:07:16.940 That was a little bit too much populism and democracy for them.

00:07:19.880 And so they really changed their view on free speech.

00:07:23.380 And Trump was sort of the pivot point for that.

00:07:26.880 You know, to me, it's sad.

00:07:27.780 I look at I speak at Stanford usually once a year and I look out at these minds and it's

00:07:33.280 like these are our best and brightest.

00:07:35.220 And it excites me, the intellectual firepower.

00:07:38.260 Right.

00:07:38.680 It's just thrilling to sort of see how their minds work and where they could take the

00:07:41.840 country.

00:07:42.820 And then you get to the, you know, anything that is non woke.

00:07:45.920 Right.

00:07:46.260 Like I say words are not violence.

00:07:50.160 Right.

00:07:50.560 And the look, the recoiling, you know, the shock and horror at such a crazy statement then

00:07:56.060 depresses me.

00:07:56.720 And I think, how can it be that these intellectual would be giants are so pathetically weak when

00:08:03.060 it comes to words that might upset them?

00:08:05.840 And I don't mean to pick on Stanford because they're probably better than most schools in

00:08:09.240 many ways.

00:08:09.760 But the people who lead this charge to silence people on the other side ideologically seem

00:08:15.360 incredibly weak to me.

00:08:18.160 Well, absolutely.

00:08:18.800 I mean, the reason ultimately you would censor somebody is because you're afraid of having

00:08:23.320 an honest discussion and an honest debate.

00:08:25.660 And if you feel like you can win that debate, why would you be afraid to have it?

00:08:29.580 But I do think these views have become incredibly common.

00:08:34.140 And I think it's what the Democratic political scientist Roy Tushira calls the professional

00:08:41.980 class hegemony of the Democratic Party and our institutions, where you've got this professional

00:08:47.340 class whose values are completely at odds with their self-conception.

00:08:51.720 I mean, they think that they are incredibly tolerant.

00:08:54.440 Actually, they're incredibly intolerant.

00:08:56.320 They think they're diverse.

00:08:57.060 Actually, they're incredibly conformist.

00:09:00.560 You know, they are more interested in stifling and shutting down dissenting voices than they

00:09:05.440 are in having an honest debate.

00:09:07.740 Including kicking President Trump off of Twitter and Facebook while he was still the sitting

00:09:12.460 U.S. president, which is crazy.

00:09:15.020 And it's led to a lot of discussions, as you know, in conservative circles about whether we

00:09:20.040 need to amend the law to remove the protection they get from certain lawsuits is Section 230 and sort of let people have at them.

00:09:29.560 A lot of conservatives feel very strongly that we need to change the law to make them have more skin in the game so that they stop the viewpoint discrimination.

00:09:36.440 I'd love to get your take on it on 230 and what the answer is in terms of stopping the ideological stifling that they do.

00:09:43.300 Well, I agree with the spirit behind the suggestion of amending Section 230, which is that the law basically gives immunity to these tech companies.

00:09:54.840 They treat them as distributors of content rather than publishers, even though they're engaging in editorial judgments that publishers would in deciding who to censor and who not to.

00:10:06.420 So I understand the frustration there.

00:10:09.340 What I'm afraid of is that if you just ended Section 230 altogether, the problem would actually get worse because Section 230 is a liability shield.

00:10:17.620 And if you take away that protection, simple corporate risk aversion is going to cause these large corporations to want to censor even more.

00:10:24.560 They're going to take down any speech at all that could lead to a lawsuit that could be sort of problematic for them.

00:10:30.120 So I would rather amend Section 230 than end it.

00:10:33.420 And I think the way you mended is what you said, is I think these big, powerful tech companies should not be able to engage in viewpoint discrimination.

00:10:43.580 They should be considered common carriers.

00:10:46.080 And if they want that liability shield, they should have to treat everybody fairly, which is to say they should be a common carrier of different views.

00:10:54.120 See, I love that.

00:10:54.780 And do you know Vivek Ramaswamy, because he had a great piece in The Wall Street Journal, I don't know, was it a year ago, I don't know, last summer?

00:11:03.340 And he argued that what we really just need is a declaration by a court that says effectively they are.

00:11:10.320 Effectively they're so controlled.

00:11:11.720 They're so big.

00:11:12.440 And they also respond to carrots and sticks from the federal government in a unique way that we can treat them as a government entity and subject them to First Amendment protections, which would prohibit viewpoint discrimination.

00:11:24.220 And we wouldn't have to touch 230 and you could leave that immunity in place.

00:11:29.200 I don't know whether the courts will do it or whether we need to do it legislatively somehow, you know, to sort of get them declared a common carrier.

00:11:35.860 Do you have any thoughts on that?

00:11:37.060 I think we probably have to do it legislatively.

00:11:39.680 I mean, the big problem here is that the First Amendment essentially got privatized.

00:11:45.340 You know, in the old days, when the First Amendment was written, you had a multiplicity of town squares all over the country.

00:11:50.500 It was typically on public land.

00:11:52.560 Anybody could go grab their soapbox, put it on the courthouse steps, draw a crowd and speak.

00:11:57.740 And anyone who wanted to could listen.

00:12:00.080 That's where people assembled back then.

00:12:02.240 Today, where do people assemble?

00:12:03.880 They assemble in these giant social networks that have huge network effects.

00:12:08.460 That is where people gather.

00:12:10.120 And that is where political speech, especially political speech, occurs.

00:12:14.160 The problem is that those that sort of digital town square is controlled by a handful of big tech companies and sort of oligarchs.

00:12:24.160 And so the town square has essentially been digitized, centralized and privatized in the hands of a handful of actors.

00:12:31.860 And because the First Amendment only applies to to Congress and to government, it creates this giant loophole in our in our First Amendment rights, our rights to free expression.

00:12:42.400 I think that loophole needs to be closed, but the our right to free speech needs to be extended to cyberspace.

00:12:48.700 And, you know, the crazy thing is what you hear from so many people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the media is they suddenly become, you know, very libertarian when it comes to imposing any regulation to to restore our free speech rise.

00:13:04.220 They say these are private companies to be able to do whatever they want.

00:13:07.520 Well, that's not a position that they're taking on the six bills working their way through Congress right now to regulate antitrust for these companies.

00:13:15.020 We all understand these are giant companies with, again, huge network effects.

00:13:19.780 They're basically monopolies.

00:13:22.460 We're willing to regulate them in other contexts.

00:13:24.620 But when it comes to speech, suddenly, oh, no, you know, we can't.

00:13:27.960 You know, private companies should be able to do whatever they want.

00:13:30.660 And the problem, I don't I think people realize on the right that it's annoying that it's mostly conservative thought that gets stifled by these big

00:13:37.380 platforms, but it's so much more pernicious than that.

00:13:40.500 And I really want Democrats to to hear the case, which is and I've I've seen it in your writings.

00:13:47.500 The more you stifle these opposing points of view and you think it's you know, you wouldn't necessarily call it censorship.

00:13:53.340 You would call it sort of fact checking.

00:13:55.380 You would call it responsible messaging, however you want to phrase your crackdowns on the Joe Rogans of the world and the YouTube clips you don't like and whatever groups, you know, you see on Reddit that upset you.

00:14:06.520 So the truth is, the more you stifle this kind of speech, the more pernicious it gets, the more widespread, the more the worse the sourcing that these people will turn to, the more conspiratorial they will get.

00:14:18.940 It does not help society in the way the left thinks it does.

00:14:23.520 Well, I mean, we've totally seen this with COVID and the vaccine mandates.

00:14:28.800 I mean, you've seen so much censorship over the past two years of censoring, you know, so-called misinformation, that misinformation then becomes it turns out to be true.

00:14:36.840 You had the lab leak theory.

00:14:38.160 You had, you know, first it was D&G misinformation.

00:14:41.640 Now it's become sort of the prevailing theory.

00:14:43.280 You had cloth masks.

00:14:45.960 Dan Bongino was kicked off YouTube for basically saying cloth masks don't work.

00:14:49.700 Two weeks later, the CDC comes out saying the same thing.

00:14:53.240 So we've seen over and over again that what starts as misinformation ends up being recognized as the truth.

00:14:59.360 And I think this is why, with respect to vaccines, you know, you had these so-called anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics.

00:15:07.020 I don't think that they were opposed to the science of vaccines.

00:15:11.560 At least they weren't pre-COVID.

00:15:13.380 What they really are is media skeptics.

00:15:16.040 They think the media has got an agenda.

00:15:18.720 And if the media is trying to push something on them, they're going to second guess it.

00:15:22.520 And if you don't allow them to have the conversation, if you don't allow them to ask the questions and explore the debate, then for sure they're going to think you're trying to pull one over on them.

00:15:31.700 And so I think this whole idea of censorship has totally backfired around the vaccine.

00:15:36.540 And what they should have done was allow an honest debate around vaccines.

00:15:39.780 And I think you would have gotten more buy-in from the part of the country that distrusts the media.

00:15:45.840 Why don't you and Peter Thiel just create a competitor to Facebook or, you know, the Amazons of the world?

00:15:51.740 And why isn't there a huge I realize we have rumble and, you know, whatever.

00:15:57.000 Where is that huge platform that is built by conservatives who are more committed to the free and open exchange of ideas?

00:16:04.940 Good ones, bad ones, offensive ones, all of them.

00:16:08.700 Well, I mean, it's hard to create an alternative because there are, you know, strong monopoly effects behind these companies, whether they're, you know, economies of scale like with Amazon or there's a developer network effect like with Apple or Google.

00:16:21.720 Or there's sort of giant, you know, user network effects like a Facebook or Twitter.

00:16:27.560 So it's very hard to displace these networks.

00:16:30.280 But I am trying.

00:16:31.600 I do have a platform I've created called Call-In, which is an app that basically is Talk Radio 2.0.

00:16:38.880 Anybody can go in the app, create their own podcast, and you can take questions live from callers.

00:16:45.620 You know, it's basically like Talk Radio packaged inside of an app.

00:16:49.680 And we've got, you know, I think we've done a really good job attracting the Substack crowd.

00:16:53.320 Hey, you've got Glenn Greenwald over there, right?

00:16:54.640 And Matt, too?

00:16:55.480 Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Antonio Garcia Martinez, Michael Tracy, Aaron Matei, Brianna Joy Gray, a lot of great people who you've had on your show are all doing shows on Call-In.

00:17:08.200 So, yeah, we're trying.

00:17:09.900 We're trying.

00:17:10.160 We've got to go bigger and better.

00:17:11.220 There's got to be a place, right?

00:17:12.300 Because it's like it's sort of like we need a Fox News of tech where Roger Ailes saw an opportunity.

00:17:17.940 Rupert Murdoch saw an opportunity for human to say it's like picking money up off the street.

00:17:22.040 You know, just tell the other side.

00:17:23.200 Just just expose other angles to the story that the mainstream won't do.

00:17:27.720 And, of course, Rupert Murdoch is a I don't know what he's worth.

00:17:31.160 One hundred billion.

00:17:31.740 I have no idea.

00:17:32.520 Some huge number.

00:17:33.520 And you I realize money is probably not your main incentive, but that's OK.

00:17:39.220 Your ideological incentive to America, right?

00:17:41.860 To free speech.

00:17:42.880 Yeah, that's probably more powerful.

00:17:45.480 Well, so we're trying.

00:17:46.420 And, you know, look, I think you've got sub stack for independent journalism.

00:17:49.320 You have Rumbles creating a video alternative to YouTube.

00:17:51.920 We're creating sort of a podcasting, a new podcasting platform.

00:17:55.320 So these alternatives are getting started and I think they're gaining momentum and it takes time to build them up.

00:18:01.140 And, you know, it really wasn't until the last couple of years that we realized how opposed to free speech these giant big tech companies are.

00:18:09.800 And so I think the movement is getting started.

00:18:11.820 And, you know, I think it's building, you know, in that way.

00:18:15.720 I just had a conversation with a friend of mine and she's losing friends over covid.

00:18:20.380 She wants the masks off.

00:18:21.860 She's not she's vaxxed and boosted and her kids are vaxxed, too, but she doesn't like the mandates and she's losing friends left and right.

00:18:29.520 You know, she's a liberal in New York City.

00:18:31.140 Or at least was a liberal.

00:18:34.140 And I feel like, you know, what I said to her is what I'm feeling about our country right now, which is where they really friends if they mean, if they don't want to be with you because of this.

00:18:43.720 It's like you're better off now.

00:18:45.480 You know who they are, that they prioritize their own weird ideology over human connections and the love that you've built over 25 years of friendship, whatever it is.

00:18:54.060 And I kind of feel like in a way, Trump Trump helped us do that with big tech.

00:18:59.760 You know, he brought out their most censorious instincts.

00:19:03.180 He helped us do that with the media.

00:19:04.980 He brought out their worst bias and expose them for for who they are.

00:19:10.220 And now we have to wrestle with, OK, it's sad we have this problem, but let's get solutions based because there's no point wallowing.

00:19:18.420 Yeah, I mean, I think Trump is an interesting figure in American politics who created, I think, a huge amount of realignment.

00:19:27.640 You know, my friend, Keith Raboy, who's a VC, has this motto about founders.

00:19:32.020 He says disruptive companies are created by disruptive people.

00:19:35.140 You know, you frequently have this founder type who spots a market opportunity.

00:19:39.720 They can see that so clearly where nobody else does.

00:19:43.200 And yet they can be incredibly weak in other areas.

00:19:46.140 They can not communicate in a very polished way or, you know, unnecessarily upset people or they can just be operationally not very good.

00:19:55.260 They're not necessarily very good at running these companies.

00:19:57.120 And yet they see the opportunity where nobody else does.

00:19:59.760 And I think Trump was a was a little bit like that founder personality, incredibly disruptive to American politics, but created this huge realignment where I think in the wake of Trump, really, the the Democratic Party has been revealed as this professional class party.

00:20:16.680 The sort of this woke elite party, like like to share said, this professional class of Gemini, whereas I think the Republican Party is in the process of transforming to being a working class party.

00:20:28.820 The non-college party and the more populist party.

00:20:33.200 And I think we're going to be seeing the effects of that for many years.

00:20:37.200 Oh, yeah.

00:20:37.700 I mean, I definitely want to get into politics with you.

00:20:39.700 I know you've made some predictions about November and they're interesting.

00:20:44.020 But up next, let's get into crime, because you've been very outspoken about what's happening in your town, San Francisco, about this lunatic D.A., Chesa Boudin, that the son of two terrorists.

00:20:53.860 And you're pushing the recall effort on him as well as the school board out there, which has done nothing for the kids.

00:20:59.980 They're too busy renaming schools because they find the George Washington name on some of them offensive.

00:21:05.040 We'll pick it up there and we'll get into some of the other censorship around Joe Rogan and so on in just one minute.

00:21:17.840 Let's talk about crime in your hometown, San Francisco, and the mess that it is.

00:21:23.940 We're having the same situation here in New York, so I can relate fully.

00:21:27.880 But there was a really good piece by I don't know if you saw Michael Schellenberger on Barry Weiss's Substack writing about like the mess in San Francisco.

00:21:35.280 I'm trying to find all my papers.

00:21:37.280 But he was talking about how how bad crime is, how there's basically OK, here it is.

00:21:42.540 There's basically open drug use, people shooting up.

00:21:47.900 He writes about how London Breed, when she went off on the, quote, bullshit, destroying our city, the mayor, he said,

00:21:53.080 I naively believed her, but it's not getting better.

00:21:56.700 It's gotten worse every day since she said that.

00:21:59.040 And he talks about this supervised drug consumption site at U.N.

00:22:02.300 Plaza just blocks away from City Hall and the Opera House.

00:22:06.380 And he talks about how and he's not against legalized drugs.

00:22:09.920 I mean, Michael Schellenberger did a whole book that called San Francisco, but he talked about Portugal decriminalizing drug use and how he thought that had worked.

00:22:17.620 The Netherlands with these drug consumption rooms and it was working.

00:22:21.160 But both of those condemn hard drug use and intervene when the addicts break the law in San Francisco.

00:22:26.200 Totally different story.

00:22:27.760 People are smoking fentanyl and meth that they buy from dealers right across the street.

00:22:32.160 Right. And now the taxpayers there are basically paying for these addictions.

00:22:37.840 They're paying for these folks, hot meals and shelter in exchange, he says, for nothing, nothing.

00:22:44.760 Even though the mayor has said, oh, we're going to use this to get people into treatment.

00:22:49.080 Apparently, in the 19 days, the site has been open.

00:22:51.080 Just two people went to detox so far and they're serving 220 a day.

00:22:55.920 So your thoughts on what's happening in your hometown and why?

00:22:58.540 Sure. Well, twice as many people have died from fentanyl overdoses over the last two years than COVID.

00:23:05.200 So, I mean, this is a huge problem in San Francisco and it's just one part of the problem.

00:23:09.780 Like you said, Chase Boudin came in at the beginning of 2020.

00:23:12.860 He he is committed to this platform of decarceration, which is basically he believes there's too many people in prison in the United States.

00:23:22.260 And his goal is to reduce the prison population as much as possible.

00:23:25.760 Um, I think it is true that it is sad that anybody has to go to prison, but, uh, and in that sense, sure, where the prisons are, there's too many people in prison.

00:23:37.120 We don't want to send anyone to prison, but he has this radical philosophy of de-prosecution of trying to, uh, let out as many criminals as possible.

00:23:46.720 And so from the day he took over, first of all, he fired all the veteran prosecutors in that office.

00:23:52.860 He replaced him with staff from the public defender's office.

00:23:56.200 He then emptied out the jail.

00:23:57.920 He used COVID as the excuse to do that.

00:23:59.600 And he announced that he would stop prosecuting so-called quality of life crimes, which are things like theft, shoplifting, car break-ins, uh, things like that.

00:24:09.460 And, and since then it's only gotten worse.

00:24:12.180 There's, there's no prosecution of drug offenses.

00:24:15.020 Um, and, and look, no, nobody is saying, I don't think Schellenberger is saying that you prosecute people for doing things like using drugs in their home.

00:24:23.640 But we have on the streets, people committing crimes every day to support their habit, and there's no punishment whatsoever.

00:24:31.940 So without having that as, uh, without, there's no incentive for anyone to go into treatment, uh, when you're not, uh, willing to, to basically use punishment.

00:24:43.560 And as a result, the problem just keeps metastising.

00:24:47.320 I cannot believe he was elected as DA.

00:24:50.580 I understand San Francisco's left, but that, that's like out of your mind to elect a guy like that, to be your chief law enforcement officer, basically for your city.

00:25:03.420 This result was totally predictable.

00:25:06.480 He did run on a platform of decarceration.

00:25:09.480 And I understand that could make a bleeding heart liberal cry and say, yes, we've been so bad to the poor prisoners.

00:25:15.540 But it was identifiable that this is not just a liberal, this is a radical guy.

00:25:22.600 And this leads me to, David, my own experience with his family.

00:25:28.080 Um, one of the viewers wrote in recently asking what my favorite interview was that I've ever done.

00:25:32.800 And I've said the same for years.

00:25:34.040 Uh, it was of Bill Ayers, who is a domestic terrorist, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a group that was bombing the country during the Vietnam War, ostensibly in protest of Vietnam and the war.

00:25:44.220 Um, but they hurt a lot of people and they damaged a lot of, you know, buildings that we hold, uh, up in high esteem, like the U.S. Capitol.

00:25:50.920 And, um, he hadn't, he came in the news when Barack Obama ran for president because they were friends in Chicago.

00:25:58.140 Uh, but he is a problematic figure in our country's history.

00:26:02.480 And so is his wife, Bernadine Dorn, who with him raised Chesa Boudin.

00:26:08.900 So is it Chesa or is it Chesa?

00:26:12.360 I think I, uh, Chesa's what I call him.

00:26:14.820 Chesa Boudin.

00:26:15.260 Whatever.

00:26:15.600 Okay.

00:26:15.940 We don't really care.

00:26:16.740 So he was born to two, two, two other people.

00:26:19.920 Their names are David Gilbert and Kathy, Kathy Boudin.

00:26:22.860 They couldn't raise Chesa, Chesa because they were in prison for his entire life from the time he was 14 months on because they were part of this Weather Underground.

00:26:32.100 And they participated in a Brinks robbery, robbery of an armed robbery of a Brinks truck trying to get $1.6 million.

00:26:38.200 They got caught.

00:26:39.300 Two cops were killed along with a security guard.

00:26:41.820 That's his parents.

00:26:43.540 So they both go to jail.

00:26:44.780 So does he go into the hands of some loving aunts and uncles?

00:26:48.340 No, he does not.

00:26:49.420 He goes into the hands of Bill Ayers and his wife, um, who are probably even more radical.

00:26:56.200 Bernadine Dorn.

00:26:57.060 That's Bill's wife, Bernadine.

00:26:58.740 And forgive me, I'm going to take a little walk down memory lane.

00:27:01.960 I think you'll find it interesting.

00:27:03.240 But I got, as far as I know, the only extensive long form interview with Bill Ayers that he's done with a person in television.

00:27:09.660 And it was extraordinary.

00:27:11.520 And the whole thing ran over an hour.

00:27:13.040 And we did a big special on it in the primetime of Fox.

00:27:15.780 I've boiled the following clip down to about three minutes or so.

00:27:19.020 It's well worth listening to.

00:27:20.360 And I'm going to play a little bit so people can understand.

00:27:22.920 This is the man who raised Chesa Boudin from 14 months on.

00:27:26.900 Um, and you'll hear him talk about himself, his group, and his wife, Chesa's effective adoptive mother.

00:27:32.700 Listen.

00:27:34.260 How many bombings are you responsible for?

00:27:37.440 Weather Underground, I think, took credit for just slightly over 20 in a period when there were 20,000 bombings in the United States against the war.

00:27:45.860 And how about you personally?

00:27:47.100 Oh, it might be personally.

00:27:48.660 I've never talked about it, never will.

00:27:50.600 Bernadine Dorn was not a fan of the police and referred to them typically as pigs.

00:27:55.080 Last night we destroyed the pig again.

00:27:57.440 It's two and a half weeks since Fred Hampton was murdered by the pigs who own this city.

00:28:02.280 Well, that was, again, the inflated rhetoric of the time.

00:28:04.920 That sort of rhetoric is what sort of catches people's attention when she's calling them pigs and celebrating bad things happening to the police at the same time one gets murdered.

00:28:13.940 It's true that the rhetoric was inflated.

00:28:15.660 It's also true.

00:28:16.860 You take a situation like Chicago today.

00:28:19.080 The police are a violent, out-of-control enterprise.

00:28:22.060 But I think it would be fair and balanced to also look at the violence that was and is going on, perpetrated by the government, by the official agencies and organs of the government.

00:28:32.440 Well, let me just tell you what I hear when I hear that.

00:28:34.340 I hear you saying you sound like, with respect, Osama bin Laden.

00:28:38.620 But you understand, Professor, is that what began for your group as outrage over mass killings and turned into a plan to kill hundreds of Americans.

00:28:47.300 Did you not cede the moral high ground?

00:28:49.120 Oh, absolutely.

00:28:49.620 You don't sound remorseful.

00:28:51.700 But you want me to be remorseful for something I didn't do rather than for the things I didn't do.

00:28:56.140 This is your group, Professor Ayers.

00:28:57.860 No.

00:28:58.000 This isn't some...

00:28:58.620 No, that's not true.

00:28:59.460 Yes, it is.

00:29:00.040 That's not true.

00:29:00.460 It is true.

00:29:01.020 This is the weather underground that was going to bomb military officers.

00:29:04.140 That's right.

00:29:04.560 And we criticized it then and now.

00:29:06.900 And we said it's wrong.

00:29:08.120 It was wrong.

00:29:08.980 It is wrong.

00:29:09.680 Professor, the only reason it didn't happen, the only reason it didn't happen is because the bomb blew up on those who were making it.

00:29:16.160 And while and when it blew up, your girlfriend, Diana Otten, was killed.

00:29:20.600 That's right.

00:29:20.940 And you later described her death as valiant.

00:29:23.120 While underground, you stole, you lied, you hid, right?

00:29:28.380 Any disagreement?

00:29:29.380 You stole.

00:29:31.680 Onward, yes.

00:29:32.680 You did.

00:29:33.480 You wrote about it in your book.

00:29:34.660 We stole ID.

00:29:35.880 You stole purses.

00:29:36.880 You stole wallets.

00:29:37.980 Yeah.

00:29:38.420 You stole money.

00:29:39.680 Some.

00:29:40.500 You ripped off dead babies' identities.

00:29:42.740 Right.

00:29:43.420 And yet, the violence continued.

00:29:45.800 Just because you went underground didn't mean the violence stopped.

00:29:48.080 What violence?

00:29:49.340 March 1st, 1971, you bombed the U.S. Capitol.

00:29:51.880 May 19th, 1972, you bombed the Pentagon.

00:29:54.840 January 29th, 1975, you bombed the State Department.

00:29:58.300 That's what I mean by violence.

00:29:59.500 In 1980, you and Bernadine Dorn resurfaced.

00:30:01.580 And when she turned herself in, Bernadine Dorn promised to spend her energy organizing to defeat the American Empire.

00:30:08.300 And within a year of that, October 20th, 1981, was a triple homicide.

00:30:13.980 Kathy Boudin learned some of her very criminal tactics while she was with her Weather Underground.

00:30:19.580 She was in the townhouse that exploded when that bomb went off, wasn't she?

00:30:22.700 You adopted her child.

00:30:24.060 She's a wonderful person.

00:30:25.320 Your wife, Bernadine Dorn, was asked to cooperate in that investigation.

00:30:29.120 That's right.

00:30:29.720 She refused.

00:30:30.820 Absolutely.

00:30:31.180 She spent seven months in jail because she refused to help the police in their investigation.

00:30:34.360 Well, she refused to speak to a grand jury.

00:30:36.180 That's quite different.

00:30:37.120 Why would she do that?

00:30:38.000 Nine children lost their fathers that day.

00:30:41.160 I agree with you.

00:30:41.720 Why didn't your wife help?

00:30:43.420 Grand juries are a terrible overreach of the U.S. government.

00:30:46.880 She said about the Charles Manson murders of a pregnant woman and six others.

00:30:51.460 Quote, offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives and then eating a meal in the same room.

00:30:57.440 Far out.

00:30:58.420 The Weathermen digged Charles Manson.

00:31:00.680 This is your sweetheart?

00:31:01.560 No, no, no.

00:31:01.980 This is your soulmate?

00:31:02.760 Your wife miraculously got a job teaching law or teaching at Northwestern University Law School.

00:31:07.480 And very successfully, absolutely.

00:31:08.660 Which is amazing.

00:31:09.180 Terrific law professor.

00:31:09.480 They must be offering classes in what you can learn from your future clients.

00:31:12.800 But are you surprised that you got those job offers, you and she?

00:31:16.980 Not really.

00:31:17.560 She was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list.

00:31:20.260 I know.

00:31:21.200 So was Angela Davis.

00:31:23.340 And, you know, a lot of great people have been on that list.

00:31:26.340 But what would it take to make you bomb this country again?

00:31:30.020 I can't completely say no.

00:31:31.480 I would never, ever rise up in opposition in a very militant and serious way.

00:31:36.060 I can't say I wouldn't.

00:31:37.060 I doubt it.

00:31:39.340 Unreal.

00:31:40.640 That was some great reporting.

00:31:42.500 Thank you.

00:31:43.220 That's your DA's adoptive father.

00:31:45.620 And you heard stories about his adoptive mother, Bernadine Dorn, in there.

00:31:49.180 And stories about his biological mother, Kathy Boudin.

00:31:52.740 And on and on.

00:31:53.560 How did this city elect this man?

00:31:57.840 Well, it happened in an off-year election in late 2019.

00:32:01.820 And he only won by something like 2,000 votes in a ranked choice voting election.

00:32:05.760 So I don't think that most people were paying attention.

00:32:10.020 I don't think they knew the significance that this election would have for the city.

00:32:13.440 And this is why there's a recall underway right now.

00:32:16.280 And the people of San Francisco are going to vote in June to recall Boudin.

00:32:20.840 I think that recall is likely to succeed.

00:32:23.320 Indeed, even though San Francisco is a nine-to-one Democrat city to Republican, I think that even

00:32:30.420 for most liberals in San Francisco, he has gone way too far.

00:32:34.340 And you basically heard the Bill Ayers agenda.

00:32:38.320 I think the comparison to Bin Laden was a good one in the sense that he seems to be fighting

00:32:42.520 a jihad against the American system.

00:32:45.580 And he's completely oblivious to the innocent deaths that Ayers is, to the deaths that he

00:32:51.600 and his movement have caused.

00:32:53.360 And in a similar way, that is true of Boudin as well.

00:32:56.520 He is responsible for releasing repeat offenders who've gone on to kill dozens of innocent victims

00:33:05.740 in San Francisco.

00:33:06.880 You had the case of Zion Young arrested on 11 gun charges.

00:33:10.880 Boudin pleads him down to a misdemeanor, releases him.

00:33:14.060 And a few weeks later, he kills Kelvin Chu.

00:33:17.420 And there's many, many cases like this.

00:33:19.520 I mean, I started creating a list of innocent San Franciscans who had been killed as a direct

00:33:24.040 result of Boudin releasing a repeat offender.

00:33:27.700 And I had to stop because there's so many.

00:33:30.180 You heard a piece on Troy McAllister.

00:33:31.040 Troy McAllister, absolutely.

00:33:32.640 You had, and that was the case that really brought this to my attention, that you had

00:33:38.040 two women killed on New Year's Eve 2020, Hannah Abe and Elizabeth Platt.

00:33:43.080 They were killed by Troy McAllister.

00:33:45.620 He was driving a car under the influence, a stolen car under the influence, fleeing some

00:33:51.920 other crime.

00:33:53.480 It's a hit and run.

00:33:54.520 He kills them.

00:33:55.520 He had been arrested.

00:33:56.340 First of all, he was a third strike offender who is going to spend potentially the rest of

00:34:00.480 his life in jail.

00:34:02.340 Boudin, his former lawyer as a public defender, then takes over as the DA of San Francisco

00:34:09.100 and pleads him down to time served.

00:34:11.160 Okay.

00:34:11.360 This is about six months before he kills these two women.

00:34:14.420 He's then arrested five more times after his release.

00:34:18.640 And in every single case, Boudin releases him without charges.

00:34:22.780 These were crimes like stealing cars, burglaries, drug offenses, until finally the inevitable

00:34:30.140 happens, which is he kills two people.

00:34:33.080 And it's just, that was the thing that really brought this to my attention.

00:34:37.400 And when I looked into it, what I discovered is this wasn't some isolated accident.

00:34:42.540 This wasn't even a case of negligence by the DA.

00:34:46.080 This is a result of a deliberate policy, a deliberate agenda of decarceration and de-prosecution

00:34:52.920 to release as many offenders as possible into society, regards of the impact on innocent

00:34:59.220 people.

00:35:00.440 And the one thing I want to add to it is that although Boudin is probably the most extreme

00:35:04.760 case of the sort of decarceral DAs, in the sense that I think is deeply psychological for

00:35:11.460 him.

00:35:11.760 I mean, this has been bred into him.

00:35:14.000 I mean, he is on some sort of mission, but he's not the only one.

00:35:20.480 We now have Gascon in LA imposing the same agenda.

00:35:23.980 You've got, like you mentioned, you had Alvin Bragg in New York, although I think Bragg recently

00:35:28.040 walked back some of his changes.

00:35:29.680 I think his sense of-

00:35:30.580 Very, very slightly though.

00:35:31.700 Slightly, yeah.

00:35:32.320 I think he's got a slightly better sense of self-preservation than Boudin or Gascon does.

00:35:36.580 But look, you've got these DAs who've been backed by people like Soros and Reed Hastings

00:35:41.360 of Netflix and a lot of liberal organizations more generally.

00:35:46.380 And they are really foisting this agenda of decarceration and deprosecution and defunding

00:35:52.700 the police.

00:35:53.300 It's all related on America.

00:35:55.240 I mean, the crazy thing is they are more interested in policing our language than policing our streets.

00:35:59.660 They're more interested in protecting people's psychological safety than their physical safety.

00:36:05.200 And this is why you're seeing a crime wave across America right now.

00:36:08.320 As if one is not related to the other, right?

00:36:12.660 How is your psychological safety when there are murders in the street, when you can't

00:36:16.700 cross the street without getting hit by one of the drunk drivers that he's let out without

00:36:20.820 parole, without bail?

00:36:22.580 That's his big thing.

00:36:23.380 No bail, just like we're seeing in all these Soros-funded DA cities.

00:36:26.640 This guy, his mother, his biological mother and father killed two cops and a security guard.

00:36:33.140 She now teaches at Columbia University.

00:36:37.500 The dad just got out under Andrew Cuomo, one of his final acts in office, to grant the

00:36:41.800 guy clemency.

00:36:42.500 He just got let out last October.

00:36:44.260 And his adoptive parents spent years bombing the home in which a little nine-year-old boy

00:36:49.780 was present and bombing police precincts.

00:36:52.600 Bill Ayers tried to deny that to me in his interview, but he had confessed it in his book,

00:36:56.260 which was one of my favorite moments in the interview.

00:36:58.460 I really encourage everybody to go look at it on YouTube because it's an interesting

00:37:02.520 window into that period of time and what we were allowing.

00:37:06.720 But it's in his DNA, this sort of life of crime, this disrespect for police, this hatred

00:37:12.860 of police, the very people he's supposed to be working with to stop crime as the DA.

00:37:19.080 And now I read there's a real schism between Boudin and the cops in San Francisco.

00:37:26.060 That's right.

00:37:27.620 Well, the cops recently announced that they would stop letting the DA's office be responsible

00:37:31.580 for investigations of police misconduct because they don't trust him.

00:37:36.660 And the only targets that Boudin seems interested in prosecuting are police or employers like

00:37:46.600 DoorDash because he believes they're mistreating their employees.

00:37:49.120 It's the only cases he's shown any interest in prosecuting.

00:37:52.220 And just to take an example, we had these Louis Vuitton smash and grab brazen robberies.

00:38:00.020 And the shell game that Boudin plays is to announce charges, but then there's no follow

00:38:05.620 through.

00:38:06.000 And so he had a press conference around the Louis Vuitton.

00:38:09.320 He said that, you know, don't bring this noise from out of town to our city as if noise

00:38:15.820 is his term for crime, as if these criminal gangs aren't from San Francisco.

00:38:21.980 They actually have long rap sheets from being in San Francisco.

00:38:25.960 And so he announces that felony charges are forthcoming.

00:38:29.760 The police actually make arrests.

00:38:32.240 And then when the cameras aren't rolling, well, first of all, they let them out on zero bail.

00:38:36.500 They plead the charges down to misdemeanors.

00:38:40.160 And then they've already arrested two of the offenders in the Louis Vuitton burglaries on

00:38:47.320 other crimes involving guns.

00:38:50.300 And so this is the shell game as he makes a big deal out of announcing charges.

00:38:53.540 But then nobody there's no consequences.

00:38:55.680 Actually, there's no there's no convictions.

00:38:58.480 There's no punishment.

00:39:00.020 And as the criminals know this, and this is why, I mean, effectively, Boudin has hung a sign

00:39:06.480 at the city limit saying, you know, burglars welcome.

00:39:10.920 Yeah.

00:39:11.240 Victims here.

00:39:12.580 Victims here.

00:39:13.580 Criminals welcome.

00:39:14.900 We're going to pick it back up.

00:39:15.760 There's more to discuss on him and on San Francisco, but also these other cities like New York,

00:39:21.500 which just had stunning new numbers released by the NYPD on crime.

00:39:25.920 How's it going here with our soft on crime DA?

00:39:27.900 All these things are canaries in the coal mine.

00:39:30.100 If you live in a city that's elected one of these DAs, pay attention because this is coming your way.

00:39:34.920 More with David Sachs in one second.

00:39:36.980 And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph channel

00:39:40.920 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our

00:39:46.200 YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megyn Kelly.

00:39:48.880 You should definitely go today because you can see that piece we just put together.

00:39:51.360 You don't have the full hour to watch the old Bill Bill Ayers on Fox News with me.

00:39:55.700 You can watch the four minute version we are today.

00:39:57.880 Our thanks to Fox News for that.

00:39:59.300 If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher,

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00:40:09.400 More than 255 shows.

00:40:10.980 On this subject of Chesa, just to because I want to close this out, what he is promising

00:40:23.260 as he empties the jails is new solutions and alternatives.

00:40:28.380 But you've written in a piece that really all we've seen so far is a move to empty the

00:40:32.740 jails with absolutely no plan for the aftermath.

00:40:34.720 He says he's going to create an algorithm for determining the risk to public safety posed

00:40:40.580 by an arrested suspect before granting their release in terms of no bail.

00:40:44.620 You know, he's not just going to throw him out.

00:40:45.740 He's going to use an algorithm.

00:40:46.820 Is any of that happening?

00:40:49.600 No, no.

00:40:50.820 I mean, Chase's algorithm is that basically you go free unless there's enough sufficiently

00:40:55.320 large public outcry about keeping a defendant in jail.

00:40:58.620 And that's basically the algorithm.

00:41:00.940 I mean, he and Gascon and Alvin Bragg and all these sort of progressive prosecutors, they

00:41:08.260 have set the zero bail policy across the country, even though voters in California rejected it

00:41:14.000 pretty handily in a ballot initiative in November 2020.

00:41:18.300 So this is very unpopular with the voters.

00:41:20.900 Even in a deep blue state, Democrats are very concerned.

00:41:24.180 Regular Democratic voters are very concerned about this crime wave and these policies.

00:41:31.120 It's only these sort of ivory tower intellectuals who can justify this.

00:41:35.700 Mm hmm.

00:41:36.460 Chesa praised Hugo Chavez.

00:41:38.220 He worked as a translator in Venezuela.

00:41:39.920 He brags about having visited prisons in Chile and Bolivia.

00:41:43.620 He said that he spent his childhood visiting prisons, and those are his earliest memories.

00:41:47.760 Delightful.

00:41:49.000 Said, I was immersed in the world of leftist politics and groomed to be an overachiever.

00:41:53.740 He went to Yale.

00:41:54.840 He was a Rhodes Scholar, went to Yale Law.

00:41:57.420 I lived, he says, in parallel worlds.

00:41:59.780 My family taught me radical politics from the beginning, but I also learned to prove myself

00:42:04.180 in elite institutions.

00:42:05.660 In response to this, David, all I could think was, hello, those are not parallel.

00:42:08.760 They are the same.

00:42:10.580 Leftist radical politics and elite educational institutions are one in the same.

00:42:16.060 That is who runs our elite institutions.

00:42:18.880 That's exactly right.

00:42:20.060 That's why he has three of his four criminal parents are at universities.

00:42:25.900 His wife, who shot two cops, who was involved in the killing of two cops and a security guard

00:42:31.040 at Columbia.

00:42:32.000 His adopted mom, Northwestern Law School.

00:42:35.460 Bill Ayers is, I think, University of Illinois.

00:42:37.380 And who knows what his biological dad will do?

00:42:39.400 He's probably going to wind up at Harvard.

00:42:40.520 He just got out in October.

00:42:41.500 So we'll see.

00:42:42.080 It's, it's, it's amazing.

00:42:45.460 And maybe one of the craziest things he's ever said is that all these, these policies,

00:42:49.620 the, the, the de-prosecution, the, the, basically the, the decriminalization of theft and drug

00:42:55.940 use and, and all of these other crimes, the emptying out of the jails, he claimed it would

00:42:59.520 make us safer.

00:43:00.560 Now I can understand if he were to claim that, okay, or make the argument, well, this is a

00:43:04.720 more just policy.

00:43:05.920 Uh, but to claim that I wouldn't agree with it, but I could understand him making that

00:43:10.980 argument, but to claim somehow that these policies would make us safer.

00:43:14.620 And then I saw that Alvin Bragg, when he announced on his first day that he was going to stop

00:43:18.960 prosecuting all sorts of serious crimes, he also said, this is going to make us safer.

00:43:23.500 So how does any of this make us safer?

00:43:26.440 Yeah, no, it doesn't.

00:43:27.200 And then when confronted with all these people who you said would make us safer, if you let

00:43:31.440 them out with no bail, even though they committed terrible crimes are, you know, reoffending

00:43:35.540 and they're murdering people and they're hurting people.

00:43:37.180 And you pointed out in a piece you posted, um, it's a medium article, uh, that Chess's

00:43:42.540 response was to refer to the serial reoffenders as quote prolific folks.

00:43:47.700 You're right.

00:43:48.300 As if they were akin to writers or painters working assiduously at their craft, they've

00:43:53.720 been prolific as if he's proud, which he probably is.

00:43:58.260 He cannot bring himself to name, uh, who they are and what they're doing.

00:44:04.180 This is why he refers to crime as noise.

00:44:07.100 Uh, he refers to serial repeat offenders as just prolific folks.

00:44:12.740 Uh, it's, it's, um, I mean, it's, it's basically it's misdirection.

00:44:17.660 And I mean, look, he is what he has always been at heart, a public defender.

00:44:23.040 And there is a role for that person, the public defender in our system to defend criminals.

00:44:28.480 But when you put that person in charge of prosecution, uh, it's a disaster.

00:44:35.400 And, um, you know, look, he's the most extreme case, but there's now examples of this all

00:44:39.920 over the country.

00:44:40.520 And I think until voters get serious about voting these people out about recognizing the

00:44:44.840 threat they pose, uh, this crime wave in America is going to continue.

00:44:48.280 Well, that's right.

00:44:49.180 So that brings me to New York where we're dealing with the same thing.

00:44:52.700 Now, granted, I don't, I don't know about Alvin Bragg because he, he was forced by the

00:44:56.320 New Yorkers to roll back a couple of the policies only a little bit though.

00:44:59.540 Let's be honest.

00:45:00.120 Most of it's, most of them stand.

00:45:02.060 Um, but the NYPD released the following stats, uh, on Monday.

00:45:06.600 Crime is up 60% compared to the same week last year, despite frigid temperatures here in

00:45:12.020 New York.

00:45:12.560 Uh, the cops are saying it's only going to get worse as it warms up.

00:45:15.060 Car thefts up 116%, 255 this over the last week is 118 a year earlier.

00:45:22.660 Grand larceny up 93%, 908 cases was 470 a year ago.

00:45:27.920 Reported rapes up 67%, 35 versus 21 a year ago.

00:45:32.240 Transit crimes up 89%, 34 versus 19 a year ago.

00:45:36.060 And on and on it goes.

00:45:37.900 This doesn't even touch on murders, murders of cops.

00:45:42.140 And, uh, I, uh, where we're going to take it next is your prediction that this stuff

00:45:47.300 will come back.

00:45:48.440 It will come back to haunt, not just these guys, but the Democrats at the ballot box.

00:45:54.720 Give your prediction.

00:45:55.640 We'll take a break and then we'll dissect it.

00:45:59.000 Oh, I mean, my prediction for November is a political earthquake.

00:46:01.980 It's a tsunami.

00:46:02.680 Um, I, you know, because these issues resonate with not just Republicans, but also Democrats

00:46:09.200 and independents.

00:46:10.100 I mean, I'll note that in New York, Eric Adams won as an underdog with this tough on crime

00:46:15.260 message, whether he actually delivers on that remains to be seen, but there's no question

00:46:19.540 that he won with that message, including in areas, minority areas, minority communities

00:46:25.680 are very receptive to that message.

00:46:27.440 The working class of the country does not want this crime in their communities and they

00:46:33.100 suffer the most.

00:46:33.980 That's where, that's where these policies have their greatest impact because people like

00:46:38.340 Reed Hastings live in gated communities behind high walls.

00:46:41.560 They can afford private security.

00:46:43.380 It is poor and disadvantaged communities that suffer the most.

00:46:47.120 And this is why we're seeing a huge swing to the Republican party.

00:46:50.820 And we saw it, we saw it this past November.

00:46:52.380 We're going to see more of it.

00:46:53.180 I'll pick it up there and we'll talk about more hypocrisy that we've seen on the left.

00:46:56.480 Stacey Abrams smiling in front of a room full of masked children has infuriated folks.

00:47:02.120 We'll be right back.

00:47:08.740 So, David, let's talk a bit about COVID and what we're seeing now.

00:47:12.160 You're one of the sensible people on this issue, as far as I can tell.

00:47:16.360 And in the news this week is more hypocrisy.

00:47:18.980 Of course, last week, the story was Gavin Newsom sitting at that football game where the indoor

00:47:23.620 mask mandate was his creation, and yet he wouldn't obey it.

00:47:26.720 And then when caught, he lied and said he only took off the mask because Magic Johnson asked

00:47:30.420 him for a photo, but he had it on at every other moment.

00:47:32.560 That was a lie.

00:47:33.580 He had it off before.

00:47:34.640 As he approached Magic Johnson, he had it off and he was just sitting in a seat next to

00:47:38.180 Tom Hanks.

00:47:38.740 He barely wore it.

00:47:39.700 OK, then there's Gil Garcetti.

00:47:41.880 What is it?

00:47:42.400 Yeah, it was Gil Garcetti, right?

00:47:43.680 Eric Garcetti.

00:47:44.540 Yeah.

00:47:44.940 Oh, sorry.

00:47:45.260 Eric Garcetti, who from L.A., who who said, I held my breath when I took my mask off, when

00:47:50.160 I said I did not exhale.

00:47:53.180 Right.

00:47:53.480 I did not.

00:47:54.020 That's good.

00:47:56.520 And now we have Stacey Abrams, who I'm telling you, this this photo is going to come back to

00:48:02.960 haunt her and other Democrats over and over and over again.

00:48:08.400 How stupid is her campaign?

00:48:10.640 I mean, they put this out there as though we are going to celebrate this politician

00:48:15.100 sitting in front of the littles, every single child masked, and she has nothing on her face.

00:48:23.360 And then when it immediately had a negative reaction on Twitter from people on the left

00:48:29.920 and the right, her attempt to handle it was by saying it's the Republicans are launching,

00:48:34.740 quote, a false political attack on me.

00:48:37.340 Her explanation for the photo was I posed for the pictures on the condition that everyone

00:48:44.380 else mask up.

00:48:45.440 Hello, Stacey.

00:48:46.160 Not helping.

00:48:47.360 And then she said I had to remove my mask to speak to the students so they could hear me.

00:48:52.860 Right.

00:48:53.880 We get it.

00:48:55.120 We have children.

00:48:56.780 Guess who they need to hear even more than you, Stacey?

00:48:59.940 Their teachers, their their classmates.

00:49:03.420 You know, like as if the rule of the rules of hearing change, whether Stacey Abrams is

00:49:09.360 in the room or not.

00:49:10.660 It's infuriating.

00:49:12.520 And I wonder what your thoughts are on her and the others and just their ongoing willingness

00:49:17.060 to flout the rules they create.

00:49:19.560 I mean, this is more of this mass hypocrisy where we're seeing these politicians saying,

00:49:25.240 you know, do as I say, not as I do.

00:49:27.580 And there, you know, we see the same thing when, you know, Nancy Pelosi throws a fundraiser

00:49:32.380 and all the wealthy people there are unmasked.

00:49:35.080 And then you've got this like servant class they've created who have to wear the mask.

00:49:38.180 I think it's creating huge resentment among the working class.

00:49:41.520 It's creating huge resentment among parents.

00:49:43.340 There's no reason to have these kids masking up in schools.

00:49:46.900 The kids have negligible risk.

00:49:48.220 And we've seen that schools that that don't have these requirements, there's no more spread

00:49:53.400 than those that that do.

00:49:55.000 So we're like far enough into this pandemic that we know the answers.

00:49:59.860 And, you know, the problem they're having now is that, you know, most of the country

00:50:04.980 wants to move on from COVID.

00:50:06.860 But within the Democratic Party, there's still a huge number of sort of COVID dead enders who

00:50:12.180 never want to give this stuff up.

00:50:13.860 And so the question is, you know, why are Newsom and Garcetti, you know, coming up with these

00:50:18.760 preposterous lies is because they're afraid of their own base.

00:50:22.160 They've basically programmed these people with so much fear of COVID over the last two years

00:50:27.620 that they're having trouble now deprogramming them.

00:50:30.980 Yes, that's right.

00:50:31.800 They've actually brainwashed people.

00:50:34.140 But you've got governors of blue states who they know that there's that tug of that

00:50:39.280 constituency on the left.

00:50:40.560 But they also saw what happened to Phil Murphy in New Jersey in a seat that he had.

00:50:45.380 He was running 30 points ahead to keep.

00:50:47.860 He only kept it by three points to somebody who had virtually no name recognition.

00:50:52.440 And that's why Phil Murphy was one of the Democratic governors who yesterday said, hurrah, we're

00:50:57.540 getting rid of our mask mandates.

00:50:58.940 Now, he made it five weeks away, but he did it.

00:51:01.420 Our governor, I live in Connecticut now, he did it.

00:51:05.460 He's at the end of February.

00:51:06.960 Delaware, they did it.

00:51:08.240 Even Oregon got rid of their school mask mandates yesterday, or at least announced they're going

00:51:12.740 to go away on X date.

00:51:14.400 And it's not because they're seeing the light on COVID, David.

00:51:17.900 They're worried.

00:51:18.920 They understand where the tide is.

00:51:21.980 Absolutely.

00:51:22.760 I mean, CNN declared that the science has changed.

00:51:25.040 No, the science didn't change.

00:51:26.020 The polls changed.

00:51:26.920 Somebody produced a memo inside the DNC showing apocalyptic poll numbers for Democrats in

00:51:33.180 November if they stick to these COVID restrictions that the country is sick and tired of.

00:51:38.180 And so that is why the science suddenly changed, because the politics has changed around this

00:51:42.160 issue.

00:51:43.140 And it's not like it's happening in a vacuum.

00:51:44.900 Like, everything else is awesome.

00:51:45.920 If we could just get this, get off the masks, and, you know, yay, we're beating COVID.

00:51:49.600 You've been very vocal about how, you know, this monetary theory that we could just spend

00:51:54.540 however much we wanted, and it would never come back to haunt the economy, has been proven

00:51:58.120 totally insane, completely boneheaded and wrong.

00:52:02.400 Now we've got 7% inflation that we're dealing with, and the supply chain crisis goes on, though

00:52:07.120 it doesn't make as many headlines as it used to.

00:52:10.100 And so this environment is going to prove toxic and, you know, very unfortunate for the

00:52:16.000 Democrats.

00:52:16.620 There's only so much, however, they can do about those other issues right now.

00:52:19.320 I think what we're seeing, connecting the dots between this MMT, this modern monetary

00:52:24.880 theory that basically said that debt doesn't matter, we can spend whatever we want, there'll

00:52:28.460 be no day of reckoning for that ever.

00:52:32.040 There'll be no hangover to this party.

00:52:36.540 Connecting that to COVID, what you see is a total failure of the expert class in America,

00:52:42.340 that all of these pronouncements by experts on COVID, on inflation have, and so many other

00:52:48.860 things have proven to be wrong.

00:52:50.480 And yet, the social media companies, the prestige media, they want us to censor speech based

00:52:57.520 on what the experts say.

00:52:59.560 And, you know, you would think that after so many of these pronouncements have been proven

00:53:03.660 wrong, they would have more humility than that.

00:53:06.800 Yes.

00:53:07.260 That is the thing that is so frustrating about this sort of, you know, not just mindless appeal

00:53:14.540 to experts, but this idea that we should censor based on official opinion, that keeps shifting

00:53:19.420 and changing.

00:53:20.720 Yeah, no, we need better experts.

00:53:22.080 And I want to talk to you about Joe Rogan and why he and others are such important alternatives.

00:53:27.280 But before we get to that, I think you and I are eye to eye on Fauci.

00:53:30.500 As far as I understand, you, I'll tell you, give you a compliment.

00:53:33.760 My producer, Debbie Murphy, absolutely loves your podcast and she listens to it all the time.

00:53:36.500 And she told me that you explained the Fauci compromise, how he's been compromised with

00:53:42.880 respect to gain of function and then trying to get all the scientists around him to shut

00:53:45.880 up about how they've been doing this kind of research in the Wuhan lab.

00:53:50.000 I don't know if she said better than I had, but equally as strongly.

00:53:55.040 But that's something that the mainstream media won't touch.

00:53:57.840 His hands are dirty in getting us into this pandemic.

00:54:01.420 I'm not saying he created this particular virus, but his hands are so dirty and yet we're

00:54:05.960 supposed to worship this guy like a God.

00:54:07.400 He shouldn't have had anything to do with the public health messaging on this.

00:54:13.000 Fauci wrote op-eds in 2011 and 2012 advocating gain of function research, which is basically

00:54:20.240 a fancy name for enhancing pathogens in order to study them.

00:54:25.460 And there were there was two schools of thought in the scientific community.

00:54:28.340 One led by Fauci was we should be doing this.

00:54:31.260 The other was this is just crazy and the risk, it outweighs the benefit.

00:54:36.600 And by the way, I haven't heard of any of the benefits of this type of gain of function

00:54:41.220 research.

00:54:41.900 What benefits actually materialize?

00:54:43.420 What learnings did we get from this type of science that actually helped us over the

00:54:47.960 last two years of the pandemic?

00:54:49.280 But in any event, Fauci wrote these op-eds.

00:54:52.680 He advocated for gain of function research.

00:54:54.640 These were not throwaway comments by him in front of a reporter or a congressional hearing.

00:54:59.720 He went out of his way to publish these articles and Obama, when Obama was in charge, he looked

00:55:06.240 at this issue during his administration and he banned gain of function research.

00:55:11.340 I have to imagine that that meeting in the Oval Office took like five minutes because I could

00:55:15.640 just imagine Obama saying, you want to do what?

00:55:18.820 You want to make pathogens more viral, more transmissible, more deadly in order to avoid a future

00:55:27.140 pandemic?

00:55:27.760 What if you create one?

00:55:29.280 And so Obama banned this.

00:55:30.780 And in January of 2017, Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, changed that policy during

00:55:37.980 the transition between administrations when Trump didn't have his people in place.

00:55:43.160 You can imagine during the chaos of the administration changing, the NIH repealed that ban on gain of

00:55:51.180 function research.

00:55:52.020 And then subsequent to that, they funded a group called the EcoHealth Alliance, a British

00:55:57.960 scientist named Peter Daszak.

00:56:00.480 They funded him to do this type of gain of function research.

00:56:03.680 And then Daszak funded this Wuhan lab.

00:56:06.880 And so, yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, Fauci didn't create the virus, but he advocated

00:56:12.020 for the type of research that may well have produced it.

00:56:16.400 And where is the investigation into this by the mainstream media?

00:56:21.560 This COVID is probably the most significant international event that we've had since World

00:56:26.860 War II.

00:56:27.900 And yet, anytime anybody wants to raise the issue of the origin of COVID and where it

00:56:33.120 may have come from and the mistakes that it may have led to, it's like, oh, we don't

00:56:36.960 need to know the origin of it.

00:56:38.500 That's not really important.

00:56:39.600 What matters is what we do now.

00:56:41.740 Well, I beg to differ.

00:56:42.580 If we want to avoid a future pandemic, we certainly need to know what may have led to

00:56:46.480 this one.

00:56:47.780 And then virologist after virologist, the world's top, came to him when COVID was first unleashing.

00:56:54.460 And they said, this looks like it came from a lab.

00:56:57.600 This does not look like it had an animal origin from some cave.

00:57:00.720 It's too contagious.

00:57:02.120 It's too advanced.

00:57:03.600 The viruses don't start at this level of sophistication.

00:57:06.540 They have to jump from human to human to human to human for a long time before they get

00:57:10.100 to this point.

00:57:10.520 And there was some sort of private communication.

00:57:13.640 And they all did a 180, 180 without explaining why they did.

00:57:20.500 Fauci's in control.

00:57:21.420 He controls all the grant money.

00:57:22.820 You don't have a career in science or working with the NIH or getting any sort of a grant

00:57:26.720 if Fauci doesn't like you.

00:57:28.300 He sits back there.

00:57:29.220 He collects his, you know, 350 or $380,000 a year.

00:57:33.120 It's going to be over 400, I think, when he retires.

00:57:36.220 And he's a kingmaker.

00:57:38.700 But you tell me about the vaccines because he's obsessed with them, David.

00:57:42.340 He's obsessed.

00:57:44.180 Listening to him, it's like listening to a broken record.

00:57:48.060 He says it in every answer.

00:57:50.200 We need more people vaccinated, more people vaccinated, more.

00:57:52.780 It's his answer to everything.

00:57:53.960 So why?

00:57:54.660 Yeah.

00:57:55.120 Well, let me explain one more point on Fauci and the timeline about what happened.

00:57:58.840 Because we know, based on these emails that have come out under the Freedom of Information

00:58:03.500 Act, that on February 1st of 2020, we know that Fauci and Collins had been advised by a

00:58:12.960 group of scientists that this virus likely came from a lab.

00:58:16.520 How did they know?

00:58:17.480 The exact same reasons we know now, because their genetic fingerprints, the furin sites

00:58:21.220 in the virus are not naturally occurring.

00:58:23.300 So they had been advised by scientists that this likely came from a lab.

00:58:28.220 And yet, three days later, by February 4th of 2020, the officials at the NIH had come

00:58:35.240 to the conclusion that it could not have been a lab-made virus, that it had been passed from

00:58:40.760 an animal, the so-called zoonotic theory.

00:58:43.160 And then two weeks later-

00:58:44.620 And let me just say, they were calling it fringe.

00:58:46.420 Then suddenly it was a fringe theory and a racist one.

00:58:49.720 That's right.

00:58:50.400 And two weeks later, there was a PR campaign fed to the prestige media, the New York Times,

00:58:55.880 the Washington Post.

00:58:56.760 I think it was on February 17th, where they all synchronously, at the same time, published

00:59:02.620 the same types of articles using the same types of language, describing anyone who believed

00:59:08.360 in the lab-leak theory as, again, like you said, a fringe or conspiracy theory, and endorsing

00:59:13.340 that there was no way that could have happened.

00:59:15.300 It had to be the zoonotic theory.

00:59:17.520 So they shut down the discussion.

00:59:20.040 They shut down the debate.

00:59:21.760 I mean, it'd be one thing for them to say, look, we don't know if it came from a lab,

00:59:25.580 but they didn't do that.

00:59:26.940 They went all in on this zoonotic theory, this anglin idea.

00:59:30.560 They acted like guilty men.

00:59:32.960 That's right.

00:59:33.740 I mean, this was absolutely a stifling, I guess you'd call it a cover-up, of the official

00:59:40.560 investigation.

00:59:41.260 And for a year, we weren't allowed, and then social media censored on the basis of

00:59:46.760 these officials, and we weren't allowed to ask questions about where the virus may have

00:59:50.760 come from.

00:59:51.680 It's also the case, simultaneous to this, you've got Peter Daszak, the scientist who

00:59:56.820 Fauci funded for this gain-of-functional research, wrote a letter to the Lancet, and he rounded

01:00:01.220 up a bunch of scientists making these same points, that any scientist who endorses the lab-leak

01:00:07.340 theory is a conspiracy theorist, is a fringe scientist, and that had an incredibly chilling

01:00:12.700 effect on the scientific community, and scientists who just wanted to get to the answers, who

01:00:18.780 were pursuing this question in good faith.

01:00:21.820 And so you have to ask, if there was this much cover-up, what was the crime?

01:00:26.340 Yes, Fauci and Collins smeared them.

01:00:29.780 Doctors who didn't go along with the, no way was it a lab-leak line, started to get smeared

01:00:34.560 and diminished, and all along he's done that.

01:00:37.240 You know, the great Barrington doctors, who said, let's do focused protection, where we

01:00:41.120 just prioritize the most vulnerable and not lock down society, something that we've had

01:00:45.120 studies show did absolutely nothing, did way more harm than good.

01:00:48.960 They were smeared and targeted by Fauci, too.

01:00:51.700 Right, and this brings us to the vaccines and the question you asked, why is there so much

01:00:56.340 vaccine hesitancy or skepticism?

01:00:58.860 I would argue it's because, it's not because of misinformation, it's because of distrust.

01:01:04.400 It is distrust that these officials have earned through their actions, through being repeatedly

01:01:09.160 wrong by trying to cover up the truth.

01:01:11.860 I mean, going back to the very beginning of COVID, when Fauci was initially against masks,

01:01:16.780 then he was for them.

01:01:17.900 And his own explanation of why he gave that original position is he said he lied to prevent

01:01:23.720 a run on PPE.

01:01:25.240 So, these officials have earned our distrust.

01:01:28.700 That is why people are skeptical.

01:01:31.140 It's an earned distrust.

01:01:33.900 Now, in terms of the merits of vaccines, I mean, I'm vaccinated.

01:01:37.140 I think, you know, based on what I know, I think they've helped me avoid a more serious

01:01:42.440 case of COVID.

01:01:44.080 But this should be an individual decision.

01:01:46.780 Why?

01:01:47.280 Because we know now that vaccines cannot stop the pandemic.

01:01:51.260 A year ago, I was one of the people who believed that if everyone got vaccinated, the

01:01:55.100 pandemic would end.

01:01:56.200 Then we had Delta, which sort of punched through.

01:01:59.020 And now we have Omicron, which has punched through even more.

01:02:01.260 So, it's very clear that even if everyone got vaccinated, it wouldn't stop transmission.

01:02:05.740 It might reduce severity of cases.

01:02:08.180 I believe that.

01:02:09.220 Okay?

01:02:09.460 That's why I got vaccinated.

01:02:11.560 But it cannot by itself stop the pandemic.

01:02:14.820 And that is why it is no longer a political issue of whether people get vaccinated because

01:02:20.100 all...

01:02:20.980 There's no externality.

01:02:21.860 There's no health externality.

01:02:23.540 You know, what your neighbor decides to do in terms of getting vaccinated doesn't affect

01:02:26.700 whether you're going to get the virus or not.

01:02:28.620 So, all the repercussions of getting vaccinated, one way or another, fall on the individual who

01:02:34.220 decides to do it.

01:02:35.400 And so, it's time for this idea of making this a political issue to stop, let individuals

01:02:41.380 make up their own mind.

01:02:42.460 And it's time for him to go.

01:02:45.060 He has to go.

01:02:46.080 Rochelle Walensky has to go.

01:02:47.300 We don't...

01:02:47.860 They've lost the trust of at least half the country.

01:02:51.180 You can't have a public health voice be in that position.

01:02:55.360 You know?

01:02:55.740 Even if you love Fauci, you have to see that once that's happened, he can't.

01:03:01.100 Like, he is no longer persuasive to half the country.

01:03:03.880 In fact, the very half that these Democrats who are dying to mandatorily vaccinate everybody

01:03:08.960 want to convince.

01:03:10.020 I mean, it's...

01:03:11.100 The ship has sailed, I think.

01:03:12.120 They're not going to get them.

01:03:13.460 But in the meantime, what they're doing in terms of the mistrust is then trying to silence

01:03:18.420 voices that put on alternate viewpoints, that push back on the narrative from Anthony Fauci.

01:03:24.580 You know, Joe Rogan's done it.

01:03:25.560 All of us have done it who are in independent media now.

01:03:28.700 It's just that Joe Rogan's the biggest behemoth there is in this space.

01:03:31.820 He's the biggest show that there is in...

01:03:33.960 And actually, his show is bigger than anything you see in cable.

01:03:36.360 I mean, it's huge.

01:03:37.720 So now Spotify's been trying to crack down on him this week.

01:03:40.240 There's an orchestrated campaign to get him because it's like, COVID misinformation.

01:03:43.280 Then that didn't work.

01:03:44.080 So then it's like, he's a racist.

01:03:45.320 Then we'll see.

01:03:46.040 There'll be something else next.

01:03:48.320 Neil Young, who kind of got it started over on Spotify, said, I'm pulling my music because

01:03:52.480 of his COVID misinformation.

01:03:54.440 And apparently I didn't know this.

01:03:55.300 Neil Young has been out there for years, like railing on GMOs and food and like giving

01:03:59.720 all sorts of misinformation of his own.

01:04:02.180 Why are we listening to Neil Young for anything outside of how to make music?

01:04:05.620 But he's now warning to the Spotify employees, to the workers of Spotify, I say the CEO, Daniel

01:04:12.420 Eck, is your big problem, not Joe Rogan.

01:04:14.720 Eck pulls the strings.

01:04:15.860 Get out of that place before it eats up your soul.

01:04:18.880 The only goals stated by Eck are about numbers, not art, not creativity.

01:04:23.680 Well, that's probably true.

01:04:24.580 It's probably about numbers, but what's going on, right?

01:04:28.200 What do you make of this targeted campaign against Rogan?

01:04:31.900 And so far, Spotify is pretty much standing by him.

01:04:36.740 Well, I think we've been talking about it.

01:04:38.880 I mean, I think this agenda on COVID and so many other things is so unpopular with the

01:04:43.000 country.

01:04:43.460 The only way to sustain it is to stop there from being an honest discussion about it.

01:04:48.260 It's to stop the debate.

01:04:49.580 And who has an incentive to do that?

01:04:51.380 It's the people who've made these decisions, who are in power, who are terrified of being

01:04:56.560 voted out of office.

01:04:57.540 And so there is an orchestrated campaign now to try and silence dissenting voices and anybody

01:05:04.180 who might bring to light the truth on these issues.

01:05:07.020 Yes, you actually tweeted this out.

01:05:09.200 I love this tweet.

01:05:10.320 The reason our institutions are so broken is that they police for dissent rather than incompetence.

01:05:18.240 Yes, that's that's so well said.

01:05:21.680 Right.

01:05:22.120 Exactly.

01:05:22.580 You see this on COVID.

01:05:23.800 Like you said, Fauci should be gone.

01:05:25.220 Just based on the fact that he thought gain of function research was a good idea, that alone

01:05:29.640 should be a reason for termination.

01:05:31.120 But he's been wrong so many times.

01:05:33.280 He's been behind every unnecessary COVID restriction over the last two years.

01:05:37.360 He has been the main shock caller of our COVID prison.

01:05:40.640 OK, he is the guy who's been ruling the yard, telling us what we're allowed to do, where we're

01:05:45.000 allowed to go for the past two years.

01:05:47.620 But there is no comeuppance for that.

01:05:49.720 You see this in the military.

01:05:51.940 You've got this General Milley, this botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

01:05:55.960 It was a fiasco.

01:05:57.200 And where is the comeuppance for that?

01:05:59.180 Where is the punishing of incompetence?

01:06:01.980 All you see is the punishing of any dissenting voice.

01:06:06.580 That's exactly right.

01:06:07.540 They only punished that one lieutenant colonel who spoke out against their incompetence.

01:06:10.980 He's the only one who's lost his job as a result of that debacle, which one could make

01:06:14.880 a very strong argument is what got us into this situation with Russia and one hundred

01:06:18.440 and fifty thousand troops now along the Ukraine border.

01:06:21.040 They smelled weakness and Putin smelled an opportunity, even if he never steps one boot into Ukraine

01:06:27.240 to renegotiate the terms on NATO and on whether Ukraine should be allowed to join and so on,

01:06:33.200 because he saw a weak leader over here who who actually had no capital in the bank with

01:06:38.160 the American people.

01:06:39.720 And so far, you know, he hasn't done it, but it's not getting better over in Ukraine.

01:06:43.420 It's getting worse.

01:06:44.700 And there are legitimate questions about whether he would have done this had we had a stronger

01:06:48.180 man or a woman in that office.

01:06:49.900 Yeah, I mean, I was slightly I think I think that's a good point that I think our adversaries

01:06:56.980 do perceive weakness in a note card president who's being let around by the nose by his staff

01:07:02.680 and seems frail and weak.

01:07:04.240 No, that being said, I do have a slightly different view on Ukraine.

01:07:07.780 My view is that we should be trying to defuse the situation the way that Obama did.

01:07:13.000 I mean, I think this is another area, along with the ban on gain of function, where Obama

01:07:16.940 got it right.

01:07:17.980 He basically said, listen, this is when Russia occupied Crimea.

01:07:22.900 He said, listen, that is a an area that is contiguous with their border.

01:07:28.260 They have an interest in that part of the world that is vital to them.

01:07:32.040 It's never going to be as vital to us.

01:07:34.180 Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

01:07:35.540 We do not have an obligation to come to their defense.

01:07:38.380 And I think we should be very, very careful about inserting ourselves in a new foreign war.

01:07:42.760 I mean, we've only been out of this war in Afghanistan for six months.

01:07:46.460 And we've been blundering through the Middle East for 20 years, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,

01:07:53.720 Libya.

01:07:54.120 Do we really want to now insert ourselves into the caucuses, into Russia's backyard to risk

01:08:00.340 a war with them over territorial borders that we have no obligation to defend?

01:08:05.180 I would just be very careful about deferring to the Washington establishment on this issue

01:08:09.700 because they've been wrong about so many other things, so many other foreign interventions.

01:08:14.500 It's a good point.

01:08:15.100 And honestly, like, is it really important to us to have Ukraine in NATO?

01:08:18.060 I don't I don't know that it is.

01:08:19.420 I don't think we need to have them in NATO.

01:08:20.760 Why?

01:08:21.000 Like, it doesn't seem like we have to have it.

01:08:24.120 And so if that's going to be the final deal point, I mean, why couldn't we give on it?

01:08:28.260 I realize it's right.

01:08:29.220 Exactly.

01:08:29.740 You don't give in to terrorists and the toddlers throwing the fit.

01:08:31.960 You don't give them the lollipop.

01:08:33.300 But this is a lot of layers to it.

01:08:35.640 And it's a lot more sophisticated than that.

01:08:37.400 And we don't want to see any blood and treasure of ours spilled in Ukraine.

01:08:42.400 That's not going to help Biden.

01:08:44.860 I think that's exactly right.

01:08:46.740 I mean, the fact of the matter is that admitting Ukraine to NATO would require us to come to

01:08:52.960 their defense, but it would do nothing for our to enhance our security to be drawn into

01:08:57.600 their border disputes.

01:08:58.920 And having Ukraine come to our defense doesn't do anything to improve our capabilities.

01:09:03.580 So it would be a very one-sided agreement.

01:09:06.360 And the fact of the matter is that Ukraine and Russia have border disputes going back

01:09:10.560 hundreds, if not thousands of years.

01:09:12.700 And it's not a good idea for us to involve ourselves there.

01:09:16.320 We don't want to admit Ukraine to NATO.

01:09:18.460 That has been the U.S. policy until now.

01:09:20.960 And it seems like what Putin is asking for, his main demand, is that we simply reaffirm that

01:09:26.760 we're not going to admit Ukraine to NATO.

01:09:28.820 And we said it's a non-starter.

01:09:30.280 We were like, that's a non-starter.

01:09:31.380 And I mean, it's disgust giving you that assurance.

01:09:33.620 In my view, that's like giving Putin the sleeves off our vest, because we shouldn't

01:09:36.880 want to admit Ukraine is not in our interest right now.

01:09:40.160 So why not give up on that point?

01:09:44.520 Maybe kick the can down the road, say, for a period of 10 years.

01:09:47.780 And then if Putin still invades, it'll prove that he's a liar who can't be trusted in front

01:09:51.800 of all the eyes of the world.

01:09:54.200 But it seems to me that we should try and de-escalate the situation.

01:09:58.480 Give him something that's not important to us, that's in our best interest.

01:10:01.500 Okay, but let me ask you this question.

01:10:03.000 Let me ask you one question on that.

01:10:05.440 And I don't know what the answer is.

01:10:07.340 But you know how we were talking about crime in the cities.

01:10:09.520 And these light on crime DAs are a luxury that people afforded themselves thanks to the

01:10:14.960 gift of low crime.

01:10:16.660 Like, no one even thinks about electing a soft on crime DA if they've got rampant crime in

01:10:20.800 their city that they're overwhelmed by.

01:10:22.460 So you get tough on crime prosecutors and policies in place.

01:10:26.140 The cities get better.

01:10:27.080 They get much more livable.

01:10:28.940 They make more money.

01:10:30.020 Things are doing well.

01:10:31.200 And then they say, oh, bleeding heart, bleeding heart.

01:10:33.540 Let's get the soft DAs in there.

01:10:34.760 And then crime goes back up because they do all these policies that leads to an increase.

01:10:39.420 Are we at risk of doing something similar with Russia if we do give Putin the insurances

01:10:46.420 he wants?

01:10:46.900 Are we forgetting what the Soviet Union used to be like and what Putin's dreams for Russia

01:10:55.200 and its future are about, right?

01:10:57.240 He'd love to see the USSR reestablished.

01:10:59.700 He would love to start amassing greater territory and have it all be under the same control and

01:11:03.700 so on.

01:11:04.400 So are we are we doing the same thing if we give him what he wants as these people who

01:11:10.740 elect soft on crime DAs?

01:11:12.260 Well, I think so.

01:11:14.420 You're making a point about appeasement, and I think it is a valid lesson of history from

01:11:18.500 World War Two that we should not appease dictators.

01:11:20.900 However, there are other lessons of history.

01:11:23.200 And the lesson of history from World War One is that great powers should not allow small

01:11:28.620 and minor powers to drag them into gigantic world wars.

01:11:32.200 And it is for that reason that I would not want to admit NATO or not want to admit Ukraine

01:11:38.800 into NATO.

01:11:39.400 We never have wanted to.

01:11:40.580 This is not this is not something we've done because we've realized the danger of being

01:11:45.420 drawn into border disputes in that part of the world.

01:11:48.500 And it's really mission creep by NATO.

01:11:51.140 I mean, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

01:11:53.840 Ukraine is all the way in the caucuses.

01:11:55.880 It's in a pretty much a different part of the world.

01:11:58.300 It's true.

01:11:58.780 So so I hear you on appeasement.

01:12:01.160 I just think there are other things to be worried about.

01:12:04.020 And by the way, we are coming off a foreign policy string of defeats where we've had misguided

01:12:11.320 interventions.

01:12:12.240 We spent six trillion dollars on nation building in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan,

01:12:18.340 completely failed.

01:12:19.860 We had botched interventions in Syria and Libya where, you know, in Libya replaced Gaddafi.

01:12:25.940 And now it's chaos over there.

01:12:27.620 We've made the situation worse.

01:12:29.200 We've created a vacuum when we removed Saddam for Iran.

01:12:33.660 And now they are an even bigger threat to the U.S.

01:12:36.400 So what I would just point out is a lot of I understand the point on appeasement, but

01:12:40.160 I would just say that I think a lot of our foreign interventions have backfired so badly.

01:12:43.820 And I think we need to be a lot smarter about protecting America's interests and projecting

01:12:49.960 strength.

01:12:50.600 And sometimes the way to project strength is to pick your battles carefully and not in a

01:12:57.420 knee jerk way, want to insert yourself in somebody else's problem.

01:13:01.780 Right.

01:13:01.800 Sometimes the wise move is not to play.

01:13:05.580 I'm so excited to have David Sachs here.

01:13:07.320 Isn't this a great conversation?

01:13:08.360 You're fascinating.

01:13:09.160 I'm so glad you're here.

01:13:14.980 Let's just talk for a minute about what's happening in Canada because it's extraordinary.

01:13:18.680 I mean, our neighbors to the north are not exactly known for, you know, protests in the

01:13:23.400 street and being nice.

01:13:25.260 They're sweet.

01:13:25.900 They're sweet Canadians.

01:13:27.040 But I love what they're doing.

01:13:28.720 They've had it.

01:13:29.560 You know, it's just human nature taking over started with the truckers who were protesting

01:13:34.080 in this weird rule that if they delivered goods in the United States, when they cross

01:13:38.140 back over into Canada, they basically couldn't.

01:13:40.700 You'd have to have you have to quarantine and so on and so forth.

01:13:43.540 So Monday was the 11th day in Ottawa.

01:13:48.160 There were, I think, the weekend before, 15,000 people, 3,000 trucks this past weekend, 5,000

01:13:54.540 people, 1,000 trucks.

01:13:56.180 There have been some 20 criminal arrests.

01:13:58.660 I mean, of all those thousands of people, it's not so bad.

01:14:01.780 People are being ticketed for things like excessive honking.

01:14:06.060 Too much honking.

01:14:07.060 The Canadian police are they have too much time on their hands.

01:14:11.440 And Justin Trudeau fled initially and was at an undisclosed location and finally reemerged

01:14:15.920 for some emergency session at Parliament yesterday.

01:14:19.480 And this is how he decided to characterize this freedom movement that's now been joined

01:14:25.500 not just by truckers, but regular folks from Canada and America alike.

01:14:29.880 Watch.

01:14:30.340 The people of Ottawa don't deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods.

01:14:36.600 They don't deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on

01:14:43.560 a street corner or a confederate flag or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing

01:14:52.680 a mask.

01:14:53.680 Everyone's tired of having to wear masks, having to follow public health restrictions.

01:15:00.340 Families like mine just last week that test positive, you know, have to follow public

01:15:06.040 health rules, have to isolate themselves.

01:15:08.520 Nobody wants to do that.

01:15:10.740 I don't know how many conversations parents have had to have with kids about not going

01:15:15.000 to birthday parties, but not getting to have sleepovers.

01:15:18.620 This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians.

01:15:23.680 Well, he's made it suck.

01:15:25.720 I mean, a lot of countries and a lot of states here in America chose a different way forward

01:15:30.420 and and and has they have not had worse results.

01:15:36.380 That's right.

01:15:37.140 I mean, I think we we need to distinguish between the effects of covid, the virus and the effects

01:15:45.540 of our covid policies.

01:15:46.940 The policies are manmade.

01:15:49.560 Well, the virus might be, too, but but certainly our our policies, they are decisions that were

01:15:56.340 made separate and apart and in response to the virus.

01:16:00.200 And we're acting as if these things or politicians like Trudeau are like he didn't have a choice.

01:16:06.640 Actually, we did.

01:16:07.720 And it seems to me that these Canadian truckers, they they seem to me like ordinary people who

01:16:13.860 are just sick and tired of these heavy handed government restrictions and mandates, and

01:16:19.480 they're expressing that in the form of the civil disobedience.

01:16:22.040 And for that, they've been absolutely demonized as being racist, white supremacist,

01:16:28.200 you know, homophobic.

01:16:29.740 I mean, all the usual left wing epithets have been levied at them.

01:16:34.280 And and it seems to me, yes, there's like isolated examples, like in any protest movement,

01:16:39.560 there's going to be a handful of people who are extreme.

01:16:43.020 But it seems to me that most of these people are just ordinary people.

01:16:47.240 And, you know, that one of the recurring themes that I see running through this and this

01:16:52.300 pertains to like really so many of the topics we've discussed this morning is that we have

01:16:58.140 this ruling class who is a crusading class.

01:17:01.780 They are so hellbent on imposing their will and their values and their edicts on the working

01:17:09.060 class, on on on the American people or the Canadian people.

01:17:13.520 They're even hellbent on imposing it on foreign lands with all these crazy foreign interventions.

01:17:19.880 And, you know, like I said, it's a self-conception that's their own self-conception of being these

01:17:25.860 very liberal and open minded and tolerant people is very at odds with the reality that I see.

01:17:31.880 And I think increasingly voters see, which is these people are crusaders.

01:17:37.560 They're they're fanatics.

01:17:39.980 It's really an extension of the Hillary Hillary Clinton deplorables moment.

01:17:43.640 They they really do look down on people who don't have exactly their academic pedigree or

01:17:50.080 background. They really do think that they're a bunch of dumb rubes who cannot be trusted to live

01:17:56.140 their own lives the way they see fit that Justin Trudeau knows better and the attempt to write off

01:18:01.460 these, you know, these people who are out there protesting for freedom.

01:18:04.440 That's what they want as if they're nothing and they don't matter.

01:18:08.100 And meanwhile, the movement grows.

01:18:10.180 Right. The latest reports where they spread through from Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver,

01:18:14.260 Alberta, even across overseas, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands here in the United

01:18:21.400 States. There's another group planning a similar protest.

01:18:25.340 They want to drive to the U.S.

01:18:26.280 Capitol. And here comes the censorship to two big companies.

01:18:31.160 Facebook, first of all, the co-organizer of the American trucker unit that's trying to get

01:18:36.100 that effort going. He said we were just his name is Brian Braze or Brace.

01:18:41.060 He said to Fox News, we were just shy of one hundred and forty thousand people on our Facebook

01:18:46.680 page when Facebook dropped us. We called it the convoy to D.C. and Facebook says you repeatedly

01:18:52.540 violated policies around QAnon. This guy, Brian, says that's a lie. So their their fundraising got

01:18:58.300 shut down. And then in an extraordinary move, the GoFundMe for the Canadian truckers, which everyone

01:19:06.380 donated to it had over eight million dollars in it to support these guys who've been out there night

01:19:11.300 after night, got pulled. GoFundMe said it violated GoFundMe's terms of service.

01:19:17.960 They said evidence from law enforcement shows this has now become an occupation.

01:19:22.100 No additional funds will be distributed. Donors have two weeks to request a refund.

01:19:26.280 And then we will work with the truckers to send the remaining money to other charities.

01:19:30.640 But the truckers aren't getting it here in the States. You had West Virginia AG. He threatened

01:19:36.140 to sue Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas AGs all did the same. Your pal Elon Musk called them

01:19:42.280 professional thieves. And lo and behold, they've reversed themselves now.

01:19:49.980 Well, you're right. I mean, they this is a type of class warfare in which these professional the

01:19:54.600 professional class, these elites, these experts, whether they're in government or big tech,

01:19:58.800 they think that if the other side, there are a bunch of deplorables and it's OK to cancel them,

01:20:03.780 to deny them their speech rights, to steal from them and to starve them out.

01:20:08.800 These are the tactics they're willing to use.

01:20:12.260 OK, and I'm just I just was actually I want to clarify what I said. They didn't

01:20:17.700 reopen the money like the donations. They just refunded the money to the people who donated it,

01:20:21.740 which is just disgusting. So it's like you can't get your voice heard.

01:20:25.120 You can't even listen to experts who disagree with people like Fauci.

01:20:27.780 If you try to donate money to help the people with whom you agree, you get shut down by these

01:20:32.600 lunatics. This brings me back to my other you and Elon and Peter. Elon actually responded to

01:20:39.360 somebody online the other day when they said you need to create a network with interesting idea.

01:20:44.220 And, you know, he's got more money than God, so he really could do it.

01:20:46.880 Enough with the space nonsense. Help the earthlings. Let's like we need we need you guys to do something

01:20:53.800 for good. It could be your legacy even better than PayPal.

01:20:57.480 I like Colin, but it needs to be bigger. It needs to be more comprehensive and we need to fight back

01:21:02.460 against these. Yes, professional thieves. I agree with him.

01:21:06.700 Yeah, I mean, I agree. One of the disturbing things about what's happening is that this this idea of

01:21:12.360 speech censorship is now being applied to financial platforms.

01:21:15.540 You had this example with GoFundMe earlier last year. You had PayPal starting to shut down accounts.

01:21:22.680 And so this idea you had a recent example of Michelle Malkin was denied access to an Airbnb

01:21:28.860 because she attended the wrong conference and her husband, too.

01:21:32.460 So it's like this guilt by association. Yeah.

01:21:35.000 So we're seeing more and more examples of speech censorship also being applied to financial

01:21:42.000 decisions and financial deplatforming. And if you think it's bad to deny people access to the

01:21:48.340 to online speech, it's going to be even worse if you deny them access to a livelihood, to making a

01:21:54.160 living. And if people cannot get access to payment systems and the payment rails of the new economy,

01:21:59.820 they're not going to be able to participate in the digital world economically. And I think it's a

01:22:06.320 very dangerous direction that we're headed. I mean, again, it's this this this class warfare

01:22:11.120 against deplorables is trying to effectively starve them out.

01:22:15.540 Yeah. I mean, now you're talking civil war, like if people can't get jobs and can't access money.

01:22:20.660 And I mean, that's next level. People wonder, where does all this feeling of division in our

01:22:26.820 society come from? And, you know, they can only blame the other side for it, but they cannot see

01:22:32.560 the way that their own decisions are contributing to the problem. Yeah. Well, maybe you could solve

01:22:40.640 it on a flight to space if you know Elon as well. Did you ever ask him, can I go? I want to go.

01:22:47.260 They've it's not a personal desire of mine. I like having my my feet on planet Earth. But

01:22:52.600 that is that is something that they've they've talked about is having space tours.

01:22:58.660 Oh, I let us come out there and film you if you do it. I would I will tell the whole story. I'd love

01:23:02.620 to see somebody who's actually reticent about it. Do it. It makes it more interesting.

01:23:07.260 It's got to be somebody else. So but but yeah, a lot of interesting things happening with with space.

01:23:13.480 All right. So, you know, a lot of interesting people and you've got this great podcast and

01:23:16.620 you guys were in the news recently because your colleague and friend Chamath Polyhepatea. Right.

01:23:26.220 Did I get it? Polyhepatea. Yes, you did. So he is the one that made the comment about not caring

01:23:31.940 about the Uyghurs in China. Do we have that? We must have that. Right. Yeah. OK. Just to remind

01:23:37.720 the audience, here is what he said. Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs. OK,

01:23:42.960 you bring it up because you really care. And I think it's nice that you care. The rest of us

01:23:47.380 don't care. I'm just very hard. You're saying you personally don't care. I'm telling you a very

01:23:52.420 hard, ugly truth. OK, of all the things that I care about. Yes, it is below my line. OK,

01:23:57.640 of all the things that I care about. It is below my line. Disappointing. Whereupon NBC offered him

01:24:03.860 a contributorship. Great. You're just the commentator we need. But he took all sorts of incoming for that

01:24:11.100 and wound up apologizing, you know, for the way for his phrasing and so on. He said he does have

01:24:16.320 empathy. I think he was. I don't know. You tell me what he was trying to say. Well, so, yeah, I do.

01:24:21.800 I do this podcast, The All In Pod, with a few of my my friends. We jokingly call besties. I think,

01:24:27.280 you know, what Jamath was trying to say there. And look, when when you speak hundreds of hours,

01:24:31.420 sometimes it doesn't come out quite right. What he was basically saying is, hey, I'm going to focus

01:24:35.980 on the problems that I can actually do something about. Charity starts at home. I think that was

01:24:41.240 basically the point the point he was trying to make. And it came across as sounding a bit callous

01:24:45.680 and he acknowledged that, you know, what of it, though, because we've been watching the Olympics

01:24:50.220 this week. Well, no one's really been watching it. They've suffered almost a 50 percent drop in

01:24:53.600 ratings from the last time around on NBC. But it really has been a little alarming to hear

01:24:58.980 the commentators. He said she said the problem with the genocide going on in China right now.

01:25:05.760 I mean, they talk about it like, well, there's been some allegations. No, we know it's happening.

01:25:10.760 We've seen it. We've seen the tapes with our own eyes. It's not like we're in China,

01:25:14.880 but we're at the point now where we know it's happening. We've made a decision as a country

01:25:19.400 not to do much about it. We do a couple of small things, but it's not all that impressive.

01:25:24.500 I find it alarming that we're hearing that kind of propaganda on American television.

01:25:29.980 Yeah. I mean, look, I think the Uyghurs is a very serious issue. You've got upwards of a million

01:25:36.700 people of this ethnic group who've been put in these detention camps. There are reports of mass

01:25:42.960 sterilization and rape. I mean, it sounds like there's reports of essentially ethnic cleansing

01:25:49.400 over there. So it's a very serious humanitarian issue. And it's one of a number of issues that we

01:25:54.360 have with China, along with their theft of our intellectual property, cyber espionage,

01:25:59.960 their belligerence towards their neighbors, their punishment of dissidents. And of course,

01:26:06.080 the fact and their creation of this sort of totalitarian social credit system. And then,

01:26:11.260 of course, their likely creation of COVID and their release of that upon the world. I'm assuming

01:26:17.740 accidentally, but they covered it up. I mean, we have a whole set of issues with China,

01:26:22.700 and it's a very serious problem. And I think the thing you're getting at is that people's

01:26:27.260 willingness to speak out about these issues tends to be related to how much business they have in

01:26:34.920 China. And I have no business in China, so I feel fairly unencumbered in saying what I just said.

01:26:40.220 But there are a lot of people who have business in China who just won't speak out. Everyone

01:26:44.780 understands that the quid pro quo of taking Chinese cash is that you never criticize them.

01:26:50.760 And it was very hypocritical, I thought, when the NBA put out a statement attacking and criticizing

01:26:56.980 Chamath, because what have they done? I mean, they are the most hypocritical. When Daryl Morey,

01:27:02.120 one of the GMs, spoke in defense of the protesters in Hong Kong, the NBA punished and sanctioned him.

01:27:09.200 Why? Because the CCP took NBA shows off the air in retaliation in China. So this is the game that's

01:27:17.780 now being played now, is that the CCP is essentially depriving of Americans of their

01:27:23.400 free speech rights, not in China, but on American soil, as a condition of doing business over there.

01:27:30.060 And I think that's problematic.

01:27:31.860 And we're complying. That's what's so scary. We're complying. We're doing what they want us to do.

01:27:35.940 Um, why do they call you Rain Man on the podcast?

01:27:40.140 Well, we all have, uh, nicknames and, uh, I guess that's the character in the movie who's

01:27:45.500 Yeah, I know, but do you have any of those abilities? Like, can you, cause I know you

01:27:48.240 talk about poker, but like, is, is it about cards? Can you count cards?

01:27:51.700 I can't really count cards. No, but, uh, I guess compared to Jason, who's the host, my,

01:27:57.220 I have better math skills than he does. So.

01:27:58.980 I was thinking, you know, maybe when I come out to film you going to outer space,

01:28:03.440 we could swing by Vegas and I could actually learn a thing or two maybe.

01:28:07.100 Yeah. Well, you know, we all play poker on the pod. The, uh, the, the name of the pod all in

01:28:11.420 is a, is a poker term. And the idea behind the pod is to kind of give, um, listeners a glimpse of

01:28:17.480 the kind of conversations we actually have together at the poker table. The original idea was just to

01:28:22.240 film us at the poker table playing, and then we changed it into more of the format that you see,

01:28:26.880 but it's kind of a round table discussion where the four of us bat around to issues and you get

01:28:32.220 a really interesting, I think, diversity of views. And I think one of the things that people like

01:28:36.820 about it is that the four of us can disagree while still being friends and you just never see that

01:28:43.320 format anymore. I mean, I remember the days, what is it? 20, 30 years ago of cross fire or

01:28:49.460 McLaughlin group. And you'd have a Buchanan on one side and a Michael Kinsley on the other. And I mean,

01:28:54.700 not that they were friends, but they would at least, you know, battle. And, um, and so I think

01:29:00.020 people miss that. And I think they like the camaraderie and the fact that, uh, we can still

01:29:05.020 be, you know, quote unquote besties, even when we're, uh, strongly disagreeing about issues.

01:29:09.920 What's, uh, what's your game of choice?

01:29:12.780 Uh, poker. And, uh, I guess I, I occasionally will play blackjack too.

01:29:17.020 I mean, what, what kind of poker? What are you like? A five card draw?

01:29:19.260 Yeah. We play primarily no, no limit hold'em. Okay. It's funny. Cause we, uh, we, we love poker

01:29:25.800 in my family. My mom is what we did every Thanksgiving whenever we got together with

01:29:29.520 the whole, and then my mom just loves it. And so now even my eight year old, he's been doing

01:29:32.920 this since he was five. He'll say, Hey, will you play poker with me? And some poor unsuspecting

01:29:37.820 adult will be like, sure. Okay, buddy. Yeah. Let's see. You know, let's do it. And then he gets

01:29:42.440 him sitting down and he's like, all right, Annie up, up and down the river, low spade in the hole,

01:29:46.280 splits the pot with like the cards, you know, whipping. It's great. We love it.

01:29:51.400 I think, I think, I think it's a great thing for your, your kids to do because it teaches, um, uh,

01:29:57.840 kids and players to make, uh, difficult decisions repeatedly under conditions of uncertainty. You

01:30:03.040 don't know what cards the other person is holding. And so you have to constantly evaluate,

01:30:08.420 you know, how, how do you make a good decision when you don't have all the information? And that

01:30:13.160 is really what business is all about. And that is why I think so many business people

01:30:17.740 do gravitate towards the game and really like it. Okay, good. So this is not a waste of time.

01:30:22.620 We're actually building a future entrepreneur. Last question before I let you go, need a quick

01:30:26.180 answer. Do I, or do I not buy Bitcoin or Dogecoin or any of that other stuff?

01:30:33.500 It's interesting. I mean, Bitcoin is basically, um, it's a new type of currency. It is, uh, a,

01:30:40.240 a non fiat currency. So instead of being backed by any government, it's basically backed by math.

01:30:45.760 And if you believe in the math and the cryptography, uh, and so far Bitcoin has been

01:30:50.900 around for about a dozen years and that's never been hacked. No one's been able to counterfeit

01:30:54.360 or create a fake one. If they ever do Bitcoin will be worthless overnight, but they've never

01:30:58.900 been able to do that. And so, you know, what's appealing about Bitcoin is that it's a currency

01:31:03.420 where we know that the total number, there'll never be more than 21 million Bitcoin.

01:31:07.640 And in this world of inflation and we've got governments who keep printing money, we can't

01:31:13.560 really trust them. Uh, it is nice to have, I think a currency that can't be manipulated

01:31:18.400 that way that, that, um, you know, it's, it's not backed by government. It is backed by math.

01:31:22.660 So it's highly volatile. I certainly wouldn't recommend putting all your savings in it or

01:31:27.060 anything close to it, but you know, should you put 1% of your portfolio or half a percent

01:31:33.320 of your portfolio? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what I've done. And, um, you know, I'm, I'm,

01:31:38.720 I'm a believer to, to that extent. Okay. Well, I love it. I love asking people that question

01:31:43.180 because I've, I don't understand it. It scares me and, uh, I want to know more, David. Thank

01:31:47.480 you so much. So fun talking to you. Thanks for having me. All the best. All right. Don't

01:31:52.340 miss the show tomorrow because we're going to have Ezra Levant back from Canada. Remember he came

01:31:56.780 on last week and he was so good talking about what is happening, uh, up there. He'll have all

01:32:01.820 the latest and where it's going from here. And our old pal, Ben Shapiro is back on the show.

01:32:07.060 I'm looking forward to discussing everything with Ben. He's so fun. He's like one of my favorites

01:32:11.860 and he's got something exciting to share with us. Hmm. There's a tease for you. In the meantime,

01:32:17.260 go ahead and download the Megan Kelly show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. While you're

01:32:22.360 there over on Apple would love to hear a review. If you wouldn't mind, give me five stars.

01:32:26.540 That helps us out. Would love that. Um, and go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly and subscribe

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01:32:42.940 We appreciate you being with us. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

01:32:48.440 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:32:56.540 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

The Megyn Kelly Show - February 08, 2022

Big Tech Turns Against Free Speech and Fighting the COVID Ruling Class, with David Sacks ｜ Ep. 257

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