The Megyn Kelly Show - Elon's Free Speech Quest, and Vaccine Mandate Reality, with Vivek Ramaswamy, Ken Mauer, and Jason Phillips

00:00:00.620 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.740 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Happy Monday. I have to tell you, I had a great weekend. I really did. I had my birthday on Friday, spent the day with my kids and Doug, and it was exactly what I wanted to do.

00:00:24.160 You know, we played charades, we hung around. It was super fun. You know, nothing big. And honestly, I recommend nothing big. You know, I recommend just spending your day with your family. I couldn't have asked for better.

00:00:35.320 And then we did something new. We're traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, and so we had what we were calling Fakesgiving, where we had my mom and my sister's kids come, and we had sort of a pre-Thanksgiving.

00:00:50.180 And it was wonderful. If you can't be with your family on the actual day, I highly recommend this. We got ahead of the game. We didn't have to deal with quite the amount of travel.

00:00:58.560 We got our family time together, and we played football outside. I actually caught a pass. Abby would have been really proud of me. I know. Who is this person?

00:01:07.800 Anyway, awesome, awesome stuff. And I think it's a new tradition for us, because we've been tending to travel a little bit more on the Thanksgiving holiday.

00:01:13.860 Anyway, so here's to time with family and friends in a week that all of us usually look forward to, right?

00:01:19.360 Let's kick it off with some news. Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump on Twitter. How about that?

00:01:26.260 So far, crickets. President Trump has not tweeted again. Will he ever? We'll tell you what he's saying.

00:01:32.580 Plus, President Joe Biden allows MBS, the Saudi leader, to escape accountability in the death of a Washington Post journalist.

00:01:40.460 And how? And even the left now, including the left-wing press, is freaking out on Biden, saying not even Trump did anything this controversial when it comes to this case.

00:01:49.720 Disgraced Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to prison. And wow, did you see her sentence?

00:01:56.400 We talked about this in Kelly's court on Friday. Some now accusing her of getting pregnant so that she would seem more sympathetic to the judge.

00:02:05.180 That didn't work. So what what happens now to her baby? I mean, this is like a nightmare.

00:02:11.200 And then last but not least, there's been a major shakeup at Disney.

00:02:15.100 Go woke and go broke. Something that our guest today has been writing a lot about.

00:02:20.180 And by the way, later on in the show, we're going to get to the first long form interview with a pair of former NBA referees.

00:02:25.480 These guys are stars in the NBA who are now suing the league over its COVID vaccine mandate.

00:02:30.500 Wait till you find out how the NBA treated these guys. It's absolutely disgusting.

00:02:34.240 Absolutely no loyalty over this stupid vaccine, which does not prevent the spread.

00:02:38.740 OK, you want to get it? Good. I got it, too. But it doesn't prevent the spread.

00:02:42.360 And people are still pretending that it does.

00:02:44.700 We are also following before we get to our first guest.

00:02:47.460 What happened late Saturday night in Colorado Springs where a gunman shot and killed five people

00:02:52.260 and injured another 25 others at an LGBTQ nightclub in just minutes?

00:02:57.860 Police are looking into the 22-year-old suspect's history and whether or not the attack would qualify as a hate crime.

00:03:04.960 Local reports say the suspect may have been known to law enforcement, as is so often the case in these tragedies.

00:03:11.920 A man with the same name was involved in a bomb threat last year.

00:03:16.200 He reportedly threatened his mother with, quote, a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition.

00:03:21.760 That led to a standoff. No explosives were found.

00:03:25.740 But his mother reportedly said that he did have firearms.

00:03:29.260 According to the Gazette newspaper, the case was sealed and no formal charges were pursued.

00:03:33.860 So there are still many unknowns right now.

00:03:36.500 We're going to be following this case. We'll bring you the very latest as it unfolds.

00:03:39.900 And now we'll get back to our business headlines with our first guest.

00:03:44.180 Vivek Ramaswamy is founder and executive chairman of Strive Asset Management.

00:03:49.120 He's also an entrepreneur and a New York Times bestselling author and a graduate of Yale Law School, Harvard undergrad.

00:03:56.880 So those become relevant in some of today's discussions.

00:04:00.660 Vivek, great to see you. How are you?

00:04:02.360 Good to see you, Megan. How are you?

00:04:03.880 Very well. Thank you.

00:04:05.300 So can we start with Disney? Because I think that's fascinating.

00:04:07.480 The woke chief of Disney is out and Bob Iger, Bob Iger has been brought back in.

00:04:14.640 The guy who, you know, I don't know how long he was CEO for, but everybody loved Bob Iger.

00:04:18.800 He was very well respected. He retired. He walked off into the sunset.

00:04:22.120 And then the new chief, who seemed really weak, didn't stand up to any of the woke warriors inside, is out after they just signed him to, I think, a three-year contract.

00:04:33.680 And four months into it, he's out.

00:04:37.020 Does this have to do with Ron DeSantis? Is this just about cord cutting and Disney suffering?

00:04:41.880 Like, what do you think is going on here?

00:04:45.580 So look, the facts are still early, and I'm a big fan of not, you know, over-speculating, Megan.

00:04:49.060 But there's a couple of key observations that stick out to me.

00:04:52.080 And I come from the vantage point of having authored actually a letter to Disney's board of directors and to Bob Jappic earlier this year,

00:04:57.800 questioning certain of their business decisions from a shareholder perspective.

00:05:01.740 I think what happens here is less the fact that Jappic was somehow the woke CEO and Bob Iger was not.

00:05:08.360 To the contrary, Bob Iger was actually a big proponent of meddling in social issues and using Disney as a platform to do it.

00:05:15.620 But I think the difference was the fortitude with which they did it.

00:05:18.120 See, Bob Iger at least made that a coherent part of the company's perspective.

00:05:22.060 That was his line, and he was sticking to it.

00:05:24.320 And for better or worse, I think for worse, but for better or worse, built a brand name around it.

00:05:29.120 You know, Georgia was thinking about passing an anti-abortion statute a few years ago.

00:05:32.900 Disney comes out and says they can't shoot films in the state of Georgia

00:05:35.880 if they consider passing the equivalent of a heartbeat bill,

00:05:39.360 even as they go to the Shenzhen province of China to shoot Milan over there.

00:05:42.780 So that's the Bob Iger view of the world.

00:05:45.340 I think the issue with Bob Jappic was that he was really half-hearted about his commitment to those so-called politicized agendas.

00:05:53.340 In fact, earlier this year, when employees first pressured him to take a stand on the Florida Parental Rights and Education Act,

00:05:59.500 I will not call it the Don't Say Gay Bill, the Parental Rights and Education Act,

00:06:02.300 he actually said that he didn't want to get involved, but he made the worst move of all.

00:06:06.080 He ended up in the worst of all worlds, where within just a matter of days later,

00:06:09.620 he bent the knee and buckled to that pressure anyway,

00:06:12.300 showing that he was a flag that would wave in whatever direction the wind was blowing,

00:06:16.500 too flimsy for the leadership of a company that, you know,

00:06:19.140 I would say that if you had to make the choice between somebody who was committed to excellence at the company

00:06:23.760 and their mission versus somebody who was committed to progressive values,

00:06:26.820 I would take the first over the second every day.

00:06:28.920 But there's an argument to be made that at least if you're going to do the second,

00:06:31.600 you might as well do it clearly and unapologetically.

00:06:33.960 And that's the category that Bob Iger falls into.

00:06:35.880 So I think that's really what's going on here.

00:06:37.580 So there's not going to be a change in their approach to, you know,

00:06:40.900 they didn't read Woke Inc. and change their minds.

00:06:44.640 Well, so the key is whether or not he appoints a successor.

00:06:47.520 I think as long as Bob Iger stays in that seat, I don't think there's going to be a change.

00:06:51.260 However, the key thing to watch for is whether or not he actually appoints a successor

00:06:54.180 and uses this as an opportunity to effectively pivot, but without admitting it and putting

00:06:59.140 someone else in that role.

00:07:00.440 That's what I would like to see from a value creation standpoint.

00:07:03.080 I'd love to see that happen, but I will reserve judgment until that happens, Megan,

00:07:06.660 before I tell you that's actually what's happening.

00:07:08.440 Until then, I wouldn't expect it.

00:07:08.860 As I understand it, that's part of the deal.

00:07:10.240 He takes over for two years and grooms the successor and passes the baton.

00:07:13.400 But the other guy, Chappick, is out and not going to be returning.

00:07:16.800 Um, so, okay, let's keep going because the Elon Musk situation caught fire and people

00:07:23.380 are saying that Twitter is going to close, that it's going to shut down.

00:07:26.060 And I don't know whether that's true.

00:07:27.540 Like, I don't, I don't know whether that's just hyperbole.

00:07:29.720 I guess it might, but, um, you tell me, here's what happened.

00:07:32.680 Just to bring the audience up to speed on Wednesday, Musk sent an email to employees

00:07:36.620 entitled a fork in the road.

00:07:38.200 Uh, according to ABC, the email read reads going forward to build a breakthrough Twitter

00:07:42.740 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world.

00:07:46.080 We will need to be extremely hardcore.

00:07:48.260 This will mean working long hours at high intensity.

00:07:51.060 Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.

00:07:54.700 Then he said, click here.

00:07:56.620 If you agree to this, if you don't agree, you're going to get three months of severance.

00:08:00.220 Let me know by 5 PM on Thursday.

00:08:02.940 Then the next day, RIP Twitter was the top trend worldwide.

00:08:07.680 As we got all these virtue signaling Twitter employees, like doing a salute emoji, like goodbye.

00:08:12.960 Bye, bye, bye.

00:08:13.760 I'm not going to, I'm not going hardcore to help the world's richest man become richer.

00:08:18.160 F you, Elon Musk.

00:08:20.060 Um, and then, but I don't know what the numbers are.

00:08:23.080 Gizmodo says hundreds of Twitter employees resigned.

00:08:26.060 Reuters says more than 600.

00:08:28.340 Washington Post says could be between a thousand and $1,500, a 1500.

00:08:31.840 I have no idea.

00:08:33.100 Elon tweets out the best people are staying.

00:08:34.900 So I'm not super worried.

00:08:36.600 But at the same time, he softens his stance on remote work.

00:08:39.460 He had earlier said, get back into the office or you're out.

00:08:41.240 Now he's like, as long as your manager says you're doing fine, I won't bother you.

00:08:44.800 So he does seem to be slightly worried, notwithstanding what he's tweeting publicly.

00:08:49.680 And, um, it's gotten to the, and then he tweeted out this, but like, how do you make a small

00:08:54.300 fortune in social media?

00:08:55.720 How do you make a small fortune in social media?

00:08:58.540 Answer, start out with a large one.

00:09:01.980 Doesn't seem like it's going well so far.

00:09:03.760 Well, look, I think there's a couple of different issues going on here, Megan.

00:09:07.780 Each of them deserve discussion.

00:09:09.220 First of all, on the hard work issue.

00:09:10.680 Look, I founded multi-billion dollar companies.

00:09:12.880 Elon Musk has founded collectively multi-trillion dollar companies.

00:09:15.540 So I'm going to offer my wisdom here with humility.

00:09:17.740 But one of the experiences I had in leading a biotech company was we actually had a program

00:09:21.400 several months in that I instituted, which said that, you know what?

00:09:24.820 We will effectively pay you to leave, give you a good deal to leave if you don't want

00:09:29.220 to opt in to the culture, which includes hard work and dedication.

00:09:33.140 And it's a great way of pruning out people who don't want to be there.

00:09:35.620 So from a management perspective, I actually like the way he's handled it.

00:09:38.400 First, take an ax to just cut as many employees as you can to save the cost structure while

00:09:42.320 leaving the essential employees intact.

00:09:44.200 And then further allow for some self-selection to be really clear about expectations going

00:09:48.100 forward.

00:09:48.840 What you don't want is misaligned expectations for a workforce to say, here's what the owner

00:09:52.620 is going to expect of you.

00:09:53.720 If you're misaligned with that, you shouldn't stay at the company.

00:09:56.260 I think that was transparent and clear.

00:09:57.760 I think where it becomes a little bit muddled is that many of those employees have ideological

00:10:02.160 disagreements with Elon Musk and are using their laziness, but justifying it with their

00:10:07.140 ideological disagreements to sort of veil, to sort of masquerade in the morality of the

00:10:12.780 ideological disagreements when in fact it was just laziness all the way down.

00:10:16.800 And so as I frequently joke around, in part, it's our cultures of success, Silicon Valley's

00:10:21.220 culture of success that bred this culture of entitlement among workers at Twitter and other

00:10:26.660 companies in Silicon Valley, that entitlement then inevitably breeds laziness.

00:10:31.060 And this victimhood morality complex fits laziness like a glove.

00:10:35.500 That's really what's going on on the management side, where I don't have any disagreements with

00:10:39.160 the way Elon Musk is handling it.

00:10:40.900 That is distinct, Megan, from where I do have a different point of view on what appears to

00:10:45.080 be his vacillations on what it means to actually run a free speech platform.

00:10:50.440 And here, this actually ties to even our discussion about Bob Chapik, about actually having a clear

00:10:54.780 North Star and sticking to it, as opposed to going down the slippery slope of wavering

00:11:00.140 based on what external demands put pressure on you to do.

00:11:03.040 That's actually what I'm more worried about than the operational considerations, where Elon

00:11:06.280 has great expertise, knows how to run an operation, knows how to drive a hard-charging culture,

00:11:11.320 who to keep, who not to keep.

00:11:12.240 I trust him with that, probably better than most anyone on the planet.

00:11:15.880 But I do worry a little bit on his lack of a clear definition of what it means to operate

00:11:21.680 a free speech platform.

00:11:23.300 Some days, it sounds like he means it's just a centrist model of censorship.

00:11:26.740 Some of his recent statements definitely seem to suggest as much after pressure from advertisers

00:11:31.080 and civil rights groups.

00:11:32.520 But I don't think that's the right way to do this.

00:11:34.460 You and I have talked about this before.

00:11:35.980 There are clear rules of the road for the way you operate a free speech platform without

00:11:39.500 making those decisions centrally.

00:11:41.620 And so that's where my concern is more.

00:11:43.820 See, I totally get what you're saying.

00:11:45.440 He's so he's let back on Trump, though Trump hasn't tweeted.

00:11:47.660 And Trump is now stating, quote, he sees no reason to return to Twitter, though he's

00:11:52.920 got some between 70 and 80 million followers, which is far lower than he used to have.

00:11:57.360 I don't know whether people voluntarily left or they did a cleansing.

00:11:59.780 Who knows with Twitter?

00:12:01.000 In any event, he says he sees no reason to return because he's got his own social network

00:12:04.560 now, Truth Social.

00:12:05.920 So he let Trump back on.

00:12:07.020 He let Kathy Griffin back on.

00:12:08.580 He let on Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee, the latter of whom were suspended, both of

00:12:12.840 them for questioning the transgender, you know, ideology pronouncements like you can't.

00:12:20.000 They said, like, Rachel Levine is a man.

00:12:22.900 They said that and they got booted.

00:12:25.200 Ellen Pompeo in Jordan Peterson's case.

00:12:27.880 In any event, he won't let back on Alex Jones.

00:12:32.000 And honestly, I'm OK with that decision.

00:12:34.580 I've spoken a lot about Alex Jones in my past shows.

00:12:37.220 But here's why I think that made sense.

00:12:39.080 He should have just been quiet because his justification on Alex Jones is basically you

00:12:43.800 do anything involving children and I you get no pardon from me.

00:12:47.880 Well, that, as you just point out, sounds like sort of centrist censorship.

00:12:53.560 To me, the reason why I've never been on Alex Jones's side is because Alex Jones fell

00:13:00.460 outside of the free speech parameters.

00:13:02.900 Alex Jones, his speech was unlawful.

00:13:05.820 There is a sliver category of speech that is unlawful.

00:13:09.080 That the law will penalize you for and repeatedly singling out individuals and making up lies

00:13:15.280 about them, pernicious lies like you fabricated the death of your child.

00:13:20.000 There's no one in his grave.

00:13:21.940 You said you held him in a body bag and it was a lie.

00:13:25.360 That's unlawful speech.

00:13:27.180 It's not protected.

00:13:28.680 You can be sued for defamation for that kind of speech.

00:13:31.440 That's what happened to Alex Jones.

00:13:32.820 That's why the jury's found against him repeatedly.

00:13:35.520 That's why he's in such legal trouble.

00:13:37.260 And if I ran a social media platform where I had that kind of level of irresponsibility

00:13:41.840 when it comes to the law and specific targeting of individuals to the point where the individuals

00:13:47.220 are getting death threats and you're ruining these grieving families lives, I would never

00:13:53.320 allow him to speak on my platform either.

00:13:55.720 So, Megan, let's agree on that.

00:13:58.640 But irresponsibility and illegality are two different things.

00:14:01.540 So let's call that case precisely by what it was.

00:14:03.900 Illegality.

00:14:04.480 It was not First Amendment protected speech.

00:14:05.980 It's made its way through the court system.

00:14:07.640 My view, though, is there are clear rules of the road for how you operate a free speech

00:14:11.600 platform.

00:14:12.500 No viewpoint based discrimination, period.

00:14:15.880 No government coordination on censorship, period.

00:14:18.700 If you are, this relates to the Alex Jones case now, if you're going to remove false speech,

00:14:23.640 the company bears the burden of proof of demonstrating such speech was false.

00:14:28.300 And yes, a court order is dispositive evidence that such evidence was false.

00:14:32.500 Such speech was false.

00:14:33.640 And then lastly, when in doubt, give the choice back to the users.

00:14:38.040 Let the users decide what they do and don't get to see by opting into censorship protocols

00:14:42.360 if they do want to see them.

00:14:44.240 That's what solves the dilemma here because the converse problem is actually the harder one,

00:14:47.620 Meg.

00:14:48.020 There's a lot of lawfully protected speech under the First Amendment, spam, porn, at

00:14:52.960 least soft core porn.

00:14:53.960 Much of that is protected under First Amendment doctrines, yet most people don't want that

00:14:58.120 in their Twitter experience.

00:14:59.740 Well, that's what gives the user the ability to opt out of it.

00:15:03.120 And by the way, that isn't a viewpoint anyway, so no viewpoint based discrimination as a first

00:15:06.820 pillar effectively takes care of that.

00:15:09.460 So I think there are some clear principles.

00:15:11.200 I'm not saying that's easy, but it's not as hard as you might think either.

00:15:14.120 I've written about this extensively in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

00:15:16.460 That's what it means to operate a free speech platform.

00:15:18.680 That is different than taking a poll and saying that, hey, do people think that Donald Trump

00:15:22.980 should be allowed or not?

00:15:24.120 And then it's 60, 40 or whatever the result is and say that people have spoken or to make

00:15:28.320 declarations that say, you know, 10 percent of extremists on the right and 10 percent of

00:15:32.620 extremists on the left aren't going to be happy.

00:15:34.800 And this is his quote.

00:15:35.660 Maybe we don't even want them to me.

00:15:37.480 I think it may be a step forward incrementally to say that you're going to bring Elon Musk

00:15:41.880 centrist rules of the road to decide who gets censored or not, but do it centrally as opposed

00:15:46.380 to one sided progressive rules.

00:15:47.760 But that's only a tiny step forward on principle.

00:15:50.240 I think that what he really needs to do, Megan, is to have clear first principles for what it

00:15:55.240 means to operate a public town square in the private sector.

00:15:59.480 There's an there's, I think, a historic opportunity to do it.

00:16:02.200 And I worry that Elon's skill set is so well suited for the operation and even building

00:16:07.080 the business model and the monetization of this platform, if it's successful, that

00:16:11.020 he's, if I may say it bluntly, not thinking clear headedly enough about how to stick to

00:16:15.520 his own vision of operating this as a free speech platform.

00:16:18.600 But the problem is doing that well, doing that unapologetically and clearly is actually

00:16:23.820 the path to business success, because that was the thesis for the acquisition in the first

00:16:27.920 place.

00:16:28.220 This idea of bending the knee to advertisers or to civil rights advocates, that is a one

00:16:34.120 way slippery slope.

00:16:35.880 It seems like a siren song that's appealing.

00:16:38.360 In the end, it's a one way slide down.

00:16:40.660 And I worry that Elon's getting buffeted by those wins a little bit.

00:16:43.440 Not dissimilar to our friend Bob Chappick, who we talked about earlier, of course, in a

00:16:47.080 very different context here.

00:16:48.040 But there's a parallel between the two.

00:16:50.000 And I think that first principles need to win here.

00:16:52.700 I'm not sure that's what I actually see happening, but I do hope that Elon comes around to that

00:16:56.500 because I think the business success is predicated on first having those clear rules of the road

00:17:01.400 for what it means to be a free speech platform.

00:17:03.860 Not quite seen yet.

00:17:04.920 He's in a pickle because the advertisers that are on Twitter, right?

00:17:07.340 It's like, I mean, when I launched this show, I intentionally said to my team, don't give

00:17:10.640 me any weak need advertisers who are going to run at the first sign of trouble.

00:17:14.400 This is one of the reasons why I love my advertisers.

00:17:16.280 And I am proud to work with them and to sell their brands, right?

00:17:20.920 Because he's he's bought a far left platform that has been patronized by advertisers who

00:17:26.700 are used to the far right or far left messages being promoted and the right messages on the

00:17:31.980 right, the conservative messages being stifled.

00:17:33.800 And half of them are running.

00:17:35.180 Now they're running because the mainstream narrative about Twitter is it's gone all right.

00:17:39.760 The Nazis have taken over.

00:17:41.300 And, you know, if you care at all about your brand, you'll get off.

00:17:43.940 So I want to talk about about CBS News next.

00:17:47.160 But just a quick correction.

00:17:48.180 I said Ellen Pompeo before I meant to say Ellen Page, now Elliot Page.

00:17:52.020 Ellen Pompeo is in my head because she's leaving Grey's Anatomy.

00:17:54.800 OK, so CBS News, CBS News, the former home of Mike Wallace.

00:18:03.600 I mean, this is a guy I completely admire, not exactly as a family man, but as a professional.

00:18:09.620 Ed Bradley, you know, I mean, they used to call it Murderer's Row in 60 Minutes because

00:18:13.100 they were just so fearless they would confront the Ayatollah, confront the head of the KKK.

00:18:18.120 Nobody put fear in them.

00:18:20.640 CBS News on Friday said, in light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution,

00:18:26.620 CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform.

00:18:32.940 It was concerned about about whether it was a safe place.

00:18:38.720 CBS News, they got mocked mercilessly.

00:18:43.300 And with 48 hours, oh, their concerns were satisfied, even though absolutely nothing had

00:18:47.360 changed on Twitter.

00:18:48.340 I think I can't.

00:18:50.660 So, Megan, I mean, of course, that's laughable and hypocritical.

00:18:52.880 But I think I think there's a deeper philosophical question here and a different kind of fork in

00:18:56.660 the road for Elon Musk, not the one that he talked about with his employees working hard.

00:18:59.700 I'm with him on that one, but a different fork in the road.

00:19:02.980 And I think that the philosophy here for me is I think fear is contagious in our culture.

00:19:06.860 If the last three, four or five years have taught us anything, it is that fear is contagious

00:19:10.120 with a very low activation energy.

00:19:11.620 It does not take a lot to start a domino effect of fear in our corporate culture.

00:19:16.180 But I think courage can be contagious, too.

00:19:19.280 It just has, as I frequently argue, a higher activation energy.

00:19:23.200 Elon Musk has an opportunity to trigger that cascade of courage.

00:19:26.700 I think everyone is looking to the left and looking to the right, to the civil rights

00:19:30.040 group, to what the other companies are doing, uncertain as to how they're supposed to treat

00:19:33.800 this moment.

00:19:34.820 I think Elon Musk has taken the Mark Zuckerberg playbook right now.

00:19:37.940 Go on the listening tour.

00:19:39.420 Ask people what really extremism means.

00:19:41.840 Build the platform for the 60 percent of Americans who are in the middle, whatever the middle might

00:19:46.300 mean.

00:19:47.000 It presupposes a one axis ideological spectrum, which I reject anyway.

00:19:51.800 That's the road he's going down.

00:19:52.940 I think that is a failed, that is doomed for failure, Megan, versus actually leading

00:19:57.760 the way and saying that, you know what, we may disagree with what you have to say, but

00:20:02.180 part of what it means to be American is that you have a right to express it as long as it's

00:20:06.420 a viewpoint.

00:20:07.060 That doesn't mean spam.

00:20:08.340 That doesn't mean porn.

00:20:09.520 That doesn't mean libelous speech that has been proven as such in courts.

00:20:12.780 But generally, viewpoints that are protected under the First Amendment, you get to say it.

00:20:17.100 But you also have a right to say that I don't want to see it if I don't want to.

00:20:19.740 I'm a user.

00:20:20.300 I get to opt in or out of those protocols.

00:20:21.960 I think that's something that, if framed in the right way, I'm not sure those advertisers

00:20:26.900 would quite flee in the way that they are now, which is instead going to be a steady

00:20:31.060 one-way decline about a debate about whether or not something counts as centrist.

00:20:34.620 That's where the Donald Trump piece comes in, where if you're going to actually take

00:20:38.000 this centrist approach to censorship, some people will say that is an extremist that you're

00:20:42.220 allowing on the platform.

00:20:43.380 And you get back into this tug of war about what it means to be an extremist versus what

00:20:47.160 it means to be a centrist.

00:20:48.280 That is not what the debate about free speech is about.

00:20:50.280 It should be content agnostic with respect to viewpoints that are First Amendment protected.

00:20:55.380 That's just not the direction he's going, Megan.

00:20:57.380 And it pains me, as you probably can tell, to watch this.

00:21:00.560 You know, I'm writhing a little bit because I just don't think that I think he has the

00:21:05.020 motivations in the right place.

00:21:06.220 I don't know that his skill set lies in seeing this level of clarity on that normative question,

00:21:11.380 even though he has a skill set that causes that makes anyone else's pale in comparison

00:21:15.300 to what it actually means to run a hard charging operation.

00:21:18.580 And he's going to need both.

00:21:20.000 In fact, the clear vision on the content moderation question first in order to actually make this

00:21:24.540 work.

00:21:25.280 That's what I'm worried about.

00:21:25.880 How can we get?

00:21:26.300 How can we?

00:21:27.000 Are you connected to him?

00:21:28.120 He needs to be listening to you.

00:21:29.300 He's smart.

00:21:29.780 He'll recognize you've got the skills like David Sachs is helping him.

00:21:32.400 Are you connected with these guys?

00:21:34.320 So I've connected with a number of investors in the deal and people who are close to Elon.

00:21:37.940 I actually haven't spoken to Elon directly myself.

00:21:40.380 My sense, limited from the people who are in the situation, is that he's focusing first

00:21:45.100 on the business questions, right?

00:21:46.640 He's got a revenue problem.

00:21:47.960 Revenue is potentially falling off the cliff.

00:21:49.900 He's picking up the pieces with respect to firing employees.

00:21:52.120 I'm sympathetic to all of that.

00:21:53.880 And I think he's taken a much more rigorous and hands-on approach with respect to those

00:21:58.280 questions at the expense of sort of punting on the content moderation question.

00:22:02.400 Yeah, maybe we'll set up this council later and so on.

00:22:05.360 I think that unfortunately that gets the case backwards a little bit.

00:22:09.080 So I've shared my perspectives with folks who are close to the situation, many of whom

00:22:12.560 don't necessarily disagree.

00:22:14.120 It's very easy to sort of call the shots from the sideline.

00:22:16.960 I've got my own day job with Strive and sympathetic to how hard it is to build an enterprise from

00:22:21.920 scratch, let alone run one the scale of Twitter.

00:22:24.440 But I think in this particular situation, because that was his thesis and vision for the platform,

00:22:28.920 he just needs to get that right and hopefully is able to use, I think, first principles

00:22:33.700 and people who can articulate those first principles to be able to not lose those advertisers.

00:22:37.960 But I think counterintuitively, that might actually be the way to keep the revenue model

00:22:41.780 through making a domino effect out of courage as opposed to the domino effect out of fear

00:22:46.220 that we're now seeing on the table.

00:22:47.720 My God.

00:22:48.000 I mean, if Twitter files for bankruptcy, if Twitter goes out of business, it would be such

00:22:53.980 a sad result of Elon's effort, which was to restore some of the free speech rights on

00:23:00.940 this platform and to give people who are being stifled, like the Babylon Bee, a favorite of

00:23:05.580 his, the right to say what they think on these controversial issues.

00:23:09.360 So I don't do you think that's likely to happen?

00:23:10.880 He said, I just feel like, is it going to go bankrupt?

00:23:13.160 I don't think it's likely to happen.

00:23:14.780 You know, I don't know how into you are, Megan, or I could probably put you to sleep.

00:23:18.940 If I'm putting you to sleep, we could switch topics.

00:23:20.760 But, you know, there's an interesting state of the world where you wonder, what is the price

00:23:24.380 that Twitter trades at out of bankruptcy?

00:23:26.200 Let's say it's that distressed and for a billion dollars, you know, Elon Musk could put up a

00:23:30.840 billion dollars to buy Twitter back out of bankruptcy debt-free, have spent $28 billion

00:23:34.600 or $27 billion on the whole platform instead of $44 billion with a whole bunch of debt.

00:23:38.720 Now, that would be, I think, a trick out of bankruptcy for the ages.

00:23:42.300 Crazier things have happened out of bankruptcy before, too.

00:23:44.740 So I don't know that bankruptcy spells the end of the road.

00:23:47.380 This has been a winding enough saga.

00:23:49.020 And Elon Musk does have a good, you know, financial engineering IQ.

00:23:52.480 So, you know, I'm not saying that's what he's planning for.

00:23:55.100 But just because there would be a bankruptcy filing, which itself I don't see as likely,

00:23:58.880 doesn't even mean that's the end of the road.

00:24:00.300 There could actually be, you know, the way bankruptcy laws work is that there's, you know,

00:24:03.340 crazy things that can happen coming out of a bankruptcy.

00:24:05.940 So I joked around about that about Twitter myself.

00:24:08.640 I think not a lot of people followed the mechanics of how that could actually work.

00:24:11.820 But anyway, I don't think bankruptcy necessarily spells the end of the road.

00:24:15.520 I also don't think it's heading there.

00:24:17.300 Okay.

00:24:17.660 Yeah.

00:24:18.040 And I mean, you know, I'm sure he says the core people have stayed who he needs.

00:24:22.080 So, you know, the coming days will tell us.

00:24:23.760 I want to get to speaking of bankruptcies, what's happening with this FTX and Sam Bankman

00:24:28.040 free.

00:24:28.300 But I'm going to table that for just one second, because first I want to hit you up on Harvard

00:24:31.700 and Yale Law School and UC Berkeley Law.

00:24:34.860 As I mentioned, you went to Yale Law School and they have unranked themselves in the treasured,

00:24:42.360 precious U.S.

00:24:43.460 News and World Report that does the annual college rankings and the annual law school rankings.

00:24:48.360 They're, at least at the law school level, no longer going to be in that publication.

00:24:53.320 They're not going to participate or cooperate.

00:24:56.420 And this has been criticized as a, quote, flight from merit and transparency at these schools.

00:25:04.500 And this is what the Yale Law Dean, Heather Gerken, has said.

00:25:07.420 I'm sorry, but Heather Gerken is the person who's been after Amy Chua in the most absurd

00:25:11.900 way for doing absolutely nothing other than being a great professor.

00:25:14.480 I remember that name.

00:25:16.360 In any event, today, she says 20% of a law school's overall ranking is median LSAT slash

00:25:22.080 GRE scores and GPAs.

00:25:24.620 Well, duh.

00:25:25.660 You mean the academic performance of those applying to your school?

00:25:29.600 Yeah, that's time in memory and been honored by most schools.

00:25:32.920 While academic scores are an important tool, they don't always capture the full measure

00:25:36.820 of an applicant.

00:25:37.920 This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students,

00:25:43.160 especially those who cannot afford expensive test prep courses.

00:25:47.360 OK, we know that.

00:25:48.760 That's we I understand that.

00:25:50.720 I think everyone's always known that.

00:25:52.800 So you look beyond the scores.

00:25:55.260 It's not the only thing you consider.

00:25:57.020 But she's basically trying to set them up to come off the grid entirely because what she

00:26:01.160 wants is for diversity to be the the chief characteristic and for grades and LSATs to go out the window

00:26:08.000 because they're not merit based anymore.

00:26:09.760 I mean, what do you make of it?

00:26:10.960 Well, let's call out the elephant in the room here.

00:26:13.400 It's the pending affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, which likely appears to

00:26:18.340 be heading for outlawing affirmative action in college and higher education admissions.

00:26:22.960 I mean, you think about this U.S.

00:26:23.820 News debate has been around for a very long time.

00:26:25.920 I mean, for those of us who have been in elite academia, it's almost boring.

00:26:29.280 It's hack night.

00:26:29.940 It's a pretty trite debate.

00:26:31.060 It's like, OK, we've done that.

00:26:32.960 Am I do I want to fetishize U.S.

00:26:34.660 News's ranking system?

00:26:35.660 I mean, this is how U.S.

00:26:36.380 News manages to run a business is by publishing this ranking thing.

00:26:39.900 It's kind of silly.

00:26:40.800 On the other hand, trying to leave it and make a big deal out of it is also kind of silly.

00:26:44.120 It's just a low stakes issue that kind of crops up every few years.

00:26:47.220 But this has been around for decades.

00:26:49.000 I think the key issue is why did it happen right now?

00:26:51.760 It was a month, weeks after the Supreme Court oral arguments, which made pretty clear that

00:26:57.360 I think affirmative action is on its way out in higher education in the United States.

00:27:01.640 And that's for the better.

00:27:02.520 If you ask me, that's going to be good for our country, good for the restoration of merit,

00:27:05.920 good for the restoration of excellence, which, by the way, Megan, happens to be part of our

00:27:09.220 national identity.

00:27:10.300 So that's a longer conversation for another day.

00:27:12.000 But that's the tail wagging the dog at Yale and Harvard, because for years, affirmative

00:27:16.980 action has been a cat and mouse game where the Supreme Court will say, well, you can't

00:27:20.020 use explicit racial quota systems, but personality scores and subjective attributes.

00:27:24.620 And one among many is something that you could consider it.

00:27:27.380 I mean, the Bakke lineage of cases.

00:27:29.560 This was, you know, I think the mistake of starting a separate slippery slope that allowed

00:27:32.860 schools to stay one step ahead by using these racial quota systems, even though they weren't

00:27:37.800 admitting that they were using racial quota systems.

00:27:39.860 Well, now, even the shadow use of racial quota systems is actually likely, I believe, to be

00:27:44.180 outlawed if you believe what the justices said in their questioning.

00:27:47.280 I think Yale Law School and Harvard Law School saw the writing on the wall as well.

00:27:50.340 So what are they doing?

00:27:51.380 They're giving themselves maximal latitude to make sure that if they do want to continue engaging

00:27:56.680 in that type of racial discrimination, and that is indeed what it is, racial discrimination,

00:28:00.560 that they're able to do it in the maximally non-transparent manner by getting themselves

00:28:05.700 off the U.S. News World Report rankings, by de-tethering themselves from test scores

00:28:09.420 and GPAs and numerical objective metrics.

00:28:12.220 That's really the essence of what's going on here.

00:28:14.280 But that doesn't exempt them from the Supreme Court ruling.

00:28:18.600 No, it just allows them to unlawfully sidestep it, which is, I think, what is effectively the...

00:28:23.060 Well, we don't know what the Supreme Court ruling is going to be for that matter, too, right?

00:28:25.780 I think if the Supreme Court comes out with one of these ham-handed three-part tests,

00:28:29.380 that's going to give these schools plenty of latitude.

00:28:32.100 That's not real jurisprudence.

00:28:33.320 That's cop-out jurisprudence.

00:28:34.700 But that's exactly what might fit like a glove, the ability of these schools to be able to

00:28:39.020 create non-numerical standards.

00:28:41.300 So I would be very disappointed in the Supreme Court if that's what came out as another three-part

00:28:44.960 test or equivalent of some sort of made-up judicial doctrine to deal with something that's

00:28:49.100 illegal, both under existing law and even under the Constitution.

00:28:52.320 That's the last thing we need.

00:28:53.260 Nonetheless, yeah, that's what they're preparing for.

00:28:56.440 That's what we have in religious freedom cases.

00:28:58.160 And it's been an absolute jurisprudential nightmare to try to follow and apply and predict the

00:29:03.860 law.

00:29:04.700 You know, the thing about the affirmative action cases up at the Supreme Court is right now

00:29:08.740 it's legal for these colleges and advanced schools to consider race as a factor in the

00:29:17.640 admissions process, as a factor.

00:29:19.200 So if the Supreme, there's a very good potential of the Supreme Court that is going to say no

00:29:23.800 longer, it cannot be considered at all.

00:29:26.060 That is not something you can allow somebody in on the basis of or deny somebody in on the

00:29:31.460 basis of race.

00:29:32.420 It's written right there in the Constitution.

00:29:34.720 But, you know, there's going to be ways around it, of course, because let's say they get rid of

00:29:38.300 the boxes on the application where you list your race.

00:29:41.140 Because there's nothing to stop any applicant from saying, oh, you know, the clubs I was in,

00:29:46.500 well, I volunteered for the NAACP, you know, and I was I spent my weekends at BLM and I,

00:29:52.660 you know, was in whatever the student affinity group is called, the DEI group of my respective

00:29:56.960 like, of course.

00:29:57.940 And these schools will continue to consider it because how could they ever let it go,

00:30:02.060 Vivek?

00:30:02.340 How could they ever say goodbye to it?

00:30:03.780 Well, I think one of the things they're betting on now is just random chance, right?

00:30:08.640 Stochasticity of, you know, if you take the test scores and the GPAs out of it, at least

00:30:12.900 we're more likely to end with a visually melanin content diverse class.

00:30:17.420 If we've taken those metrics out, maybe we can't explicitly target on the base of race,

00:30:21.620 but at least we can be random in terms of who we let in.

00:30:23.640 And randomness is likely to yield a greater, more visually diverse class than non-randomness.

00:30:28.720 I think there was a study by Espen Shade.

00:30:30.360 I think it was probably the most rigorous study that was done in the last 10 years.

00:30:33.780 That found, I think it was in the top 10 colleges.

00:30:36.120 There was a difference of over a staggering 400 points on the SAT between the scores required

00:30:42.940 of an Asian American to get in versus the scores required of a black American to get in.

00:30:47.040 Keep in mind, this is a 1600 point scale where you literally cannot score lower than 400.

00:30:51.060 I mean, this is the equivalent, Megan, of if we were, you know, if this were basketball,

00:30:54.660 we were talking about, if you were black, you'd have to make a half court shot.

00:30:57.220 And if you're an Asian, you get a ladder that takes you right up to the hoop to do a slam

00:31:00.140 dunk.

00:31:00.420 That is the equivalent of how malign I think these systems have been in anti-Asian discrimination

00:31:05.820 and to a lesser but real degree, anti-white discrimination as well.

00:31:09.780 But I think what they're doing is they're saying that if we can, you know, maybe we can't

00:31:12.960 actually use that racial quota system anymore.

00:31:15.080 But let's just say we turn into a random lottery system where we are not able to take

00:31:18.700 into account meritocratic factors at all, or at least in a much more dilute manner.

00:31:23.280 At least we're going to be more likely to achieve the higher priority goal of achieving

00:31:27.600 visual diversity, even if merit and excellence become a notable second or third priority instead.

00:31:33.080 So that's what's going on with affirmative action cases.

00:31:35.840 As you well know, that's so that's only half the battle.

00:31:39.480 If that is it, then they're going to get into the law school.

00:31:41.520 And then, you know what happens after that work and grades and assessments against your

00:31:47.080 peers.

00:31:47.380 And if you are 400 points behind the rest of your peers on your SAT or your LSAT score,

00:31:53.420 in this case that we're we kicked it off discussing, it's going to reflect.

00:31:57.280 And you know what happens when you bomb your first year of law school?

00:32:01.220 You drop out.

00:32:02.400 That's what happens.

00:32:03.300 You fail out.

00:32:04.020 Right.

00:32:04.340 If you're not a law review, if you're not whatever, all these things determine whether

00:32:07.240 you get a job.

00:32:08.180 So it's like, how are you really setting these folks up for success?

00:32:11.400 Why?

00:32:11.860 Why not let them align with the natural place they belong?

00:32:15.040 In my case, it was Albany Law School.

00:32:17.760 It was fine.

00:32:18.540 You know what?

00:32:19.200 I wound up at Jones Day, which is one of the best law firms in the country.

00:32:23.360 Everybody around me was from Harvard and Yale, and I did just fine.

00:32:26.940 You know, but I had a different way in and I had a different skill set and I didn't have

00:32:30.940 a miserable law school experience where everyone around me was smarter and doing better on the

00:32:35.120 test and I felt like crap about my performance to the contrary.

00:32:38.800 You make a great point, Megan, which is that if affirmative action actually worked to achieve

00:32:43.100 its own objectives, you would not need to use it for the exact same groups to get into

00:32:46.900 boarding school, who then are the exact same groups who needed to get into college, who

00:32:49.900 are then the exact same groups who needed to get into law school, who are then the exact

00:32:53.160 same groups who needed to get into the workforce.

00:32:55.040 You wouldn't need the double or quintuple counting if it was actually working.

00:32:58.900 And the problem is it is also a disservice to the members of those minority groups who

00:33:04.380 actually do achieve their positions on the basis of merit.

00:33:07.620 Having gone to Harvard, having gone to Yale, I can tell you some of my smartest classmates

00:33:11.280 in several of my disciplines from science to law were indeed black.

00:33:15.320 They were indeed Hispanic.

00:33:16.660 They were indeed multiracial of many different qualities.

00:33:19.420 But the problem, I think, is particularly unfair to people who actually earned their positions

00:33:23.360 on the basis of merit, be it a pilot sitting in the cockpit, be it a lawyer arguing

00:33:27.240 a case in the courtroom where they lose the right to be judged, not on the color of their

00:33:31.760 skin, but on the content of their character.

00:33:33.760 They lose their ability to be judged on the content of their skills.

00:33:37.440 Now, what does that do?

00:33:38.220 That's first order.

00:33:39.440 It spawns in a wave of the anti-white, anti-Asian racism.

00:33:43.080 What does that do?

00:33:43.840 That's what affirmative action is in the first instance, is anti-white and anti-Asian racism.

00:33:47.400 But it spawns this inevitable wave of then anti-black racism in response when you're denied

00:33:54.380 something by someone else who takes your spot, especially because of the color of their skin,

00:33:59.060 that fosters grievance.

00:34:00.960 And I think that that's actually part of what creates the new wave of racism that wouldn't

00:34:05.260 have existed but for affirmative action that over the course of the next four decades may

00:34:09.400 actually recreate the very problem that this cursed system was designed to solve in the

00:34:15.140 first place. And I hope that we don't see that Ferris wheel go one more round again.

00:34:20.360 It's in the Supreme Court's power to put it to an end, not with a ham-handed three-part test or

00:34:24.300 something vague that's a cop-out, but with a clear statement that the best way to stop

00:34:29.520 discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,

00:34:34.460 to quote John Roberts, who will be one of the justices deciding this case.

00:34:38.320 Yep. I was actually at that oral argument as a young reporter listening to that exact moment

00:34:43.020 oral argument. And I expect that the chief justice to finally have his say in the majority opinion on

00:34:48.080 this soon. I hope so.

00:34:50.500 Great, great discussion. Stand by, Vivek, because I want to get to this guy, SBF,

00:34:55.080 and what's happening over there and what the guy who took over the company, he's the guy who sort

00:34:58.320 of seized the company through the bankruptcy proceedings. He did it for Enron, now he's doing

00:35:01.460 it at FTX. What he found, he looked under the hood and issued a statement telling us what he found,

00:35:06.560 and it's horrifying. Before we get to this guy, SBF, and what the new sort of crisis CEO is saying

00:35:17.360 about what he has found, a moment on Elizabeth Holmes. You're a lawyer. She got 11 years. Wow.

00:35:25.940 Wow. I mean, I realized the prosecution was recommending 15. The third-party independent

00:35:30.920 magistrate was recommending or consultant was recommending nine. Her lawyers wanted 18 months

00:35:37.220 and she got 11. So this judge, he did not go easy on her. And the Twitter mob, I hate to agree

00:35:47.120 with the Twitter mob, but they're angry about the pregnancy, suggesting she did that. She intentionally

00:35:54.480 got, think about it, Vivek, you know that you're likely to go to prison. You know the odds of you

00:35:59.600 getting 18 months or being on house arrest are nil. No one's going to get that who committed these

00:36:05.340 crimes and got convicted of them. I just don't understand. You get pregnant anyway. And I understand

00:36:10.120 the theory that she did that for sympathy. She did it intentionally on the gamble that the judge

00:36:16.600 would say, I won't throw the book at you for the sake of your child. Now that child's going to be

00:36:20.280 without its mother for the first 11 years of his or her life. I too feel angry about it. I don't want

00:36:27.220 to presume the motives, but the whole situation is a disaster. So look, I can't get in her head.

00:36:34.200 I can't tell you what her psychology is, Megan. I know what I've seen in the documentaries and read

00:36:38.920 in the book about her bad blood. I'll say this though. I think the philosophical question that's

00:36:43.860 interesting at the heart of this is how much of a burden from a deterrence perspective she should bear

00:36:50.660 in this one case to send this signal to all the other future would-be fraudulent entrepreneurs

00:36:56.640 that they should not take that road versus just restitution for the scope of her wrong here.

00:37:03.460 And I think it's hard to argue what's baked into that sentencing is a little bit, if not more than

00:37:08.860 a little bit, at least a little bit of the former, of the idea that, okay, here's how you wronged your

00:37:13.880 own investors. And by the way, I'm just offering a contrarian perspective here, Megan, because I don't

00:37:19.320 disagree with a lot of what you said and what's been said on Twitter by others, but just to sort

00:37:22.940 of add a little bit of nuance to this conversation, I think if we're looking at that sentencing,

00:37:27.240 there is more baked into those 11 years than to say that that is exactly what someone would

00:37:31.740 have suffered for defrauding a sophisticated group of presumably accredited investors,

00:37:37.140 multimillionaire type investors in a private company, to say that this was also about sending

00:37:42.040 a societal signal. And that's always the puzzle at the heart of criminal law is how much of a role

00:37:48.160 the judge ought to play in sending that signal to actors in the future versus how much of a role

00:37:53.680 that judge ought to play in settling the merits of that particular injustice from the people who

00:37:59.440 are aggrieved in that case. And what I see in the 11-year outcome is maybe she was game playing in

00:38:04.280 terms of getting pregnant, trying to win sympathy points. Clearly that didn't work. But I think the

00:38:07.880 essence of the struggle here was this judge made, it appears to me, a decision to say that the

00:38:12.280 deterrent effect of sending that signal was worth it. And I know this is the stuff you study in criminal

00:38:17.580 law in law school. You brought up that I went to law school. You did too. Yeah, these are tough

00:38:21.260 questions. And I am at least cautious on the use of criminal law to pick one person to hang as a

00:38:29.860 sort of a figure that you nail to the cross to bear other people's sins. That's the stuff of real

00:38:36.080 religion, not the way that human beings are supposed to make other human beings do it today. So I don't

00:38:40.480 have any sympathies for Elizabeth Holmes per se, far from it. I think she did a lot of wrong. She deserves

00:38:46.720 to be punished for it. She has been punished. And I hope that something like this doesn't happen

00:38:51.240 again. We'll talk about SBF. Of course it does. It repeats itself. Well, let's get to that.

00:38:55.080 Let's get to that. I want to show you this little tweet. Look, there's a little tweet here. This is

00:38:59.220 my fancy graphic today. It's got Sam Bankman-Fried, for those of you listening at home, with a pregnant

00:39:04.400 belly, like an emoji with a pregnant belly and Sam Bankman-Fried's head on the top, because people are

00:39:09.440 saying this is what he's going to be doing to engender sympathy. In his case, he's also going to try the

00:39:15.760 pregnancy move. It's a joke. In any event, he's in a whole lot of trouble now. And his ex-girlfriend

00:39:23.200 who was running Alameda, the hedge fund that appears to have lost the money to begin with,

00:39:27.220 that he then covered from his crypto exchange, is whereabouts unknown. We don't know where this

00:39:34.680 woman is, but she's said to be considering going to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty

00:39:41.160 with the United States. So that doesn't exactly scream, I'm innocent. By the way, turns out she

00:39:46.780 is good at math, even if she didn't appear to use it here. I guess she was majoring at math at

00:39:50.480 Stanford. So she did take a math class after, at some point. In any event, it wasn't reflected in

00:39:56.180 her work product from what I read. So the interim CEO is a guy named John Ray III. He's the guy who

00:40:02.660 helped Enron through its chapter 11 case. And he filed a document in the bankruptcy chapter,

00:40:08.900 which is called the first day declaration, where you kind of explain what happened.

00:40:13.560 Quote, uh, never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls

00:40:18.720 from compromised systems, integrity, and faulty regulatory oversight abroad. They're based in

00:40:24.860 the Bahamas to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced,

00:40:29.540 unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, potentially compromised. He says,

00:40:35.140 this situation is unprecedented. Then he goes on to say, SPF, the guy running it,

00:40:41.480 Sam Banker and Freed no longer speaks for this company, uh, saying him that he can, he is continuing

00:40:48.200 to make erratic and misleading public statements, uh, and that numerous balance sheets created under

00:40:54.380 SPF's watch quote are not to be trusted. Uh, or wait, that's not a quote, but he's saying that they

00:41:00.560 are not to be trusted. So this is quite the indictment against this guy saying I opened up

00:41:05.680 the hood and it was an absolute bloodbath of a nightmare from an NC 17 movie that you would never

00:41:12.380 show a minor. I mean, this is quite an indictment. Yes, I think it is, Megan. I mean, just to sort of

00:41:18.560 call a spade a spade at the outset, I just, in fairness, have to say that that is basically what

00:41:22.900 any newly appointed CEO in a messy bankruptcy situation comes in and says, that's the thing you

00:41:28.720 want to deal with this situation is unprecedented, but he went, he went even further. So, so it's

00:41:37.280 less his statement. I'm just judging the facts on their own merits. This is wild stuff. Now the

00:41:42.520 question, the question on SPF's case, I think the moral of the story, and I worry, I can see right

00:41:47.400 now we're not learning the moral of the story is that anytime you have a captain of industry,

00:41:52.320 and that is what SPF was, that is, you know, right. Young age of 30, he was still a captain

00:41:55.700 of his industry. Anytime that captain of industry calls for responsible regulation of their own

00:42:02.020 sector, consumers and the public need to start raising their eyebrows and asking questions.

00:42:07.920 Okay. The kind of regulation he was advocating for was a catch all form of regulation that included

00:42:14.080 both centralized exchanges, like the one that he operated, as well as decentralized exchanges,

00:42:19.040 which run according to totally different kinds of technological principles. And the key distinction,

00:42:23.020 this is a little technical, Megan, but in a centralized exchange, someone else takes custody

00:42:28.140 of your assets. And so whether that's a crypto exchange or whether it's just an exchange for old

00:42:32.720 school stocks and bonds, that means that someone can steal your assets. That's exactly what SPF did

00:42:37.820 here. That's what happened in the MF global disaster about a decade ago as well. But the problem

00:42:43.200 that we're seeing, I predict we're going to see, we're already seeing early signs of it, is in the next

00:42:47.080 few months, we're going to see calls for regulation that actually mirror what SPF himself was calling

00:42:54.020 for, catch all regulations. Ironically, the very kinds of regulations that might make decentralized

00:42:59.120 exchanges, the kind that he was competing against and trying to make less competitive,

00:43:02.720 actually less competitive. And so I think that the less moral of the story is anytime you have a

00:43:07.340 self-interested actor wearing the veneer of goody two shoes, wanting to wear the veneer of virtue,

00:43:12.820 there's a good chance that they're just acting out their self-interest. And that is what he did

00:43:17.460 with his pro-regulatory lobbying. That is what he did with his donations to the Democratic Party.

00:43:22.360 That is what he did with his ESG-isms, which he's now even admitting were woke shibboleths that he said

00:43:27.440 to get people to like him. Sadly, it worked. But as a general investing public and just general

00:43:33.140 consumers, we need to wake up to the reality that it's more often than not the guys who cultivate the

00:43:39.160 good guy image. Take Winterkorn, who is actually Volkswagen's CEO, winning ESG awards before they

00:43:45.020 found that Volkswagen was tampering with their emissions monitors. We learned this lesson time

00:43:49.720 and again, and yet we don't actually act on the lessons that we learn. I hope this fraud was of

00:43:54.680 such a big scale and so notable that we might actually learn the lesson this time around.

00:43:58.740 Well, yes, because I read your tweet last week, which I thought was so right on. Sam Bankman

00:44:04.440 Fried's ESG friendly smokescreen wasn't just a matter of hypocrisy. It was an essential element

00:44:09.800 of the fraud. That's exactly it. When people are running around talking about this altruism and

00:44:15.620 they're going to give all the money away and they're saying they're checking all the right

00:44:18.060 woke boxes or DEI boxes. It's a red flag. It's it's something to be alarmed about.

00:44:24.800 It's not just hypocritical. Exactly. It is how the game works. You pretend like you care

00:44:30.280 about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more profit and power. I mean,

00:44:35.980 this was the stuff of Woke Inc. I wrote a book about it about a little over a year ago.

00:44:40.060 I did not expect to have to write a sequel. SBF actually provides the telltale story of a sequel,

00:44:45.820 but this pattern repeats itself where the problem with virtue signaling is that at some point signaling

00:44:52.020 your virtue becomes more important than the act of actually being virtuous. And it would not,

00:44:58.180 I would argue, Megan, that it would not have gotten to this point. People would not have vested

00:45:02.520 SBF with the trust and FTX with the trust that they did if it were not for the veneer of morality,

00:45:11.140 the aura, the patina of morality that he happened to cultivate. Let that be a lesson that we should

00:45:16.720 just want business leaders who are greedy, self-interested, money-grubbing actors to be greedy,

00:45:22.180 self-interested, money-grubbing actors so that we can see it clearly and trust them or not accordingly,

00:45:27.280 as opposed to the tripwire in the system. It's like sort of tampering with the smoke detector

00:45:32.200 in the airplane lavatory. I said, as I was traveling last week, and so you hear about this,

00:45:36.640 it sort of is a tripwire in the system that prevents the otherwise smoke detector from going off in

00:45:42.260 consumers' minds to say that this isn't someone that I'm going to unquestioningly trust. I hope

00:45:46.920 that this lesson at least has a positive impact on the future. Yeah. So, so much for Fortune calling

00:45:51.580 him the next Warren Buffett cover they're now defending, saying, oh, we were excited to be

00:45:56.160 there when he was, you know, at his height. You know what? A little bit more kicking of the tires

00:46:00.720 would have been appreciated. The writer's now saying, well, I asked for documents, but I guess

00:46:04.820 I should have insisted on them. Yeah. You think? Finally, before I let you go, MBS. This is the Saudi

00:46:11.080 crown prince. He, they're being sued. The Saudis are being sued by the widow or the, she was the

00:46:17.600 fiance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And he had written for the Washington Post. He'd been

00:46:21.820 critical of, um, of MBS. And now she's suing. And the Biden administration has weighed in saying,

00:46:27.620 you know what? Um, the Saudi crown prince has immunity and really shouldn't be subjected to

00:46:32.380 this. And the Washington Post and several others are attacking the statement by the Biden administration

00:46:38.800 saying, this is way out of whack. This is, this is, he's granting a license to kill to one of the

00:46:43.860 world's most egregious human rights abuser, says the Washington Post. So one of the, uh,

00:46:48.360 those involved in the case said, not even Trump did this to us. What do you make of it?

00:46:52.640 So I disagree with Biden's move. This is not a partisan question though, Megan, actually Tom

00:46:56.700 Cotton actually was also saying that he believes that Biden actually made the right decision because

00:47:00.420 it would have been out of line with precedent to deny sovereign immunity in this case, but it's out

00:47:05.180 of whack, so to speak with Biden's own stated agenda. When he was running for president,

00:47:10.880 he said that he wanted to turn MBS and Saudi Arabia into a pariah. And the real elephant in

00:47:16.120 the room here is the circumstances that energy markets have changed where Biden, the leader of

00:47:20.560 the free world will go hat in hand to beg every foreign dictator to produce more oil while refusing

00:47:26.600 to make it easier for domestic producers to do it right here at home. He has abased himself,

00:47:32.980 begging MBS to do it, ultimately actually getting shunned. That's a slap in the face,

00:47:36.860 not once, but twice, yet still now licking his feet. When in fact, President Biden should be at

00:47:42.600 least, at least feigning to play an iota of hardball with MBS. Instead, he's just buckling

00:47:48.080 at his knees. And the lesson in all of this, Megan, is you can't actually project strength abroad

00:47:53.280 when you are economically and culturally weak at home. That's exactly the circumstance that Biden has

00:47:59.720 created with respect to the U.S. energy situation, the regulations impairing the U.S. energy sector,

00:48:04.680 the refusal to allow refinery projects to proceed, land leases to proceed, increasing his reliance on

00:48:11.320 foreign actors, foreign autocrats like MBS. That's why he's licking his feet. And I think it's sorry

00:48:15.760 to see the leader of the free world obeys himself in this way, because in a certain sense, he represents

00:48:20.280 all of us when he obeys himself. Vivek Ramaswamy, always a pleasure. Thank you, sir. And hope to talk

00:48:27.120 to you again soon. Don't go away. We will be right back with an exclusive you'll see only here.

00:48:31.300 You may know the story of the NBA's vaccine push as it relates to Kyrie Irving or Jonathan Isaac,

00:48:40.560 but you likely have not heard this story before. Three former NBA officials are suing the league

00:48:47.160 for rejecting their requests for religious exemptions over the COVID vaccine mandate.

00:48:53.040 Ken Maurer was one of the longest serving referees in the NBA. Jason Phillips spent 19 years as a ref for

00:49:00.460 the NBA before he was terminated from his position as vice president of referee operations earlier this

00:49:06.900 year. They have now filed a lawsuit against the NBA and are speaking out with us for their first long

00:49:12.420 form interview. Welcome to the show, Kenny and Jason. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for

00:49:19.280 having us, Megan. No, the pleasure's all mine. I'm sorry about the circumstances. The more I read about your case,

00:49:24.380 the angrier I got. So let's start at the beginning so that we can get the audience up to speed on

00:49:29.420 exactly how this unfolded. So Kenny, as I understand it, you're a referee with the NBA for 35 years.

00:49:38.960 Well, it would have been about 37 now, Megan, but you're right. You're right on.

00:49:43.780 Wow. So you had a good relationship. I imagine I don't really know much about professional sports,

00:49:48.020 but my team tells me you're one of the refs. Everybody knows like people would,

00:49:51.800 you became sort of a celebrity. People know you, you're beloved. And had you gotten along with the

00:49:56.840 people inside the organization? Everything was fine? Well, up until recently, I think so. I mean,

00:50:01.960 again, you have your ups and downs when you've been doing it, you know, almost 40 years. But

00:50:06.060 I've always had great respect for the NBA. I love the game of basketball. I love the profession I'm in

00:50:12.060 or have been in. You know, a lot of the people I work with were were great people, coaches, you know,

00:50:17.480 GMs, players, you know, there's good and bad with every aspect of every profession. But I really enjoyed it

00:50:24.440 and just made me wonder, Megan, you know, how much didn't I know? What, you know, was I naive in my almost

00:50:32.240 40 years? Was a lot of what I'm thinking and feeling now, was it in front of me and I just never noticed it?

00:50:38.920 I don't know. There's so much that's gone, gone around in my head over the last year and a half that

00:50:44.900 I just, you know, I've, I've, I'll never accept it. But I mean, I just don't think it has to be and

00:50:53.120 I'm still trying to figure out in my head, just what's precipitating. Why is the NBA doing what

00:50:58.220 they're doing is they, you know, they say they're a company of equality and a company of, you know,

00:51:04.520 Black Lives Matter and social justice and fair play and freedom of speech and, and all that. And

00:51:11.300 well, let's just, let's just say I'm questioning all of that now, because I believe freedom in to,

00:51:19.160 you know, be able to, you know, preach or be able to take part in whatever religion you want.

00:51:23.720 I don't care if you're Presbyterian, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, it doesn't make any Jewish. I believe

00:51:30.580 I respect all types of religions. And I, I believe that everybody should be allowed to

00:51:35.040 take part in, you know, in their own religion. And so I'm wondering just where, why the NBA is

00:51:41.460 doing what they're doing, Megan. And it's, um, I understand that I said, I've said it for a while

00:51:46.300 and I said on the show last week, as somebody who was also canceled, um, I do believe that cancel

00:51:53.120 culture, though it's painful to go through, has a way of separating people from organizations that they

00:51:57.240 ought to be separated from, you know, like it wasn't meant to be in the, and their colors are

00:52:02.140 exposed and you start to understand that with the kind of people that you were working with.

00:52:06.120 So there is that somewhat silver lining, but you raise an interesting point right there when you

00:52:10.720 talk about how, okay, so you can, you can put black lives matter on your Jersey and you can put it on

00:52:17.060 the court and you can go out there and you can virtue signal all you want. Um, but when it comes to

00:52:21.280 asserting a religious belief, a religious belief, you have to be subjected to the inquisition.

00:52:28.000 You've got to sit in front of people who don't even share your religion and try to persuade them

00:52:32.940 that you're a true believer. I swear I'm a real Catholic. I really do object to abortion.

00:52:38.480 It affects my feelings about these vaccines. The absurdity of them making you prove it,

00:52:44.700 you know, just how good a Catholic are you? How deep does your objection run? It's,

00:52:48.740 it's, there's something indignant about it. It's deeply offensive that they make you jump

00:52:55.160 through those hoops to try to get an exemption.

00:52:59.560 Well, you're, you're right. I'll have Jason weigh into it. It's, first of all, it's,

00:53:04.180 it's something that should be, it's, it's very private. Your religion is very private. It's very,

00:53:08.820 my wife and I were talking the other day. I shouldn't have to explain why I've been a

00:53:13.580 Christian and a Catholic since I was baptized 60 some years ago. I shouldn't have to explain that.

00:53:17.800 And I don't get mad very often anymore. I mean, I, like I said, I have good friends like Jason and

00:53:23.020 Mark and our attorney and a lot of other people that are, there's many people, Megan, that feel

00:53:27.900 the way we do. There's millions of people that feel the way we do. They just don't have the,

00:53:32.760 they aren't lucky enough to be, you know, on a platform like you're giving us right now. And so,

00:53:37.440 but it's a private thing. It's a, how dare they? I don't have to explain my religion to anybody.

00:53:42.300 I don't have to, but yet they, they think they could interview us for 30 minutes and then they

00:53:48.480 can. And it was a Jewish lawyer that interviewed me. I mean, I give you like a Christian person who

00:53:53.320 knows the faith. Yeah. Right. The absurdity, like down on, down the line. So we're getting a little

00:53:58.060 ahead of ourselves. Cause let me take a step back. So the audience knows how we got to the point where

00:54:01.560 you're talking about exemptions. So both of you objected to the vaccine mandate. And just to be clear,

00:54:06.700 Jason, the COVID hit, uh, spring of 2020. Then we go into the 2020 to 2021 season. And we didn't even

00:54:16.180 have the vaccine for the first part of that season. So that year, what was happening on the courts?

00:54:20.960 Were, were, was there any sort of, there couldn't have been a vaccine mandate for most of that?

00:54:26.500 No, Megan. So, uh, you know, I, I'm a little bit different from, uh, Kenny, as you stated just a

00:54:31.400 moment ago, uh, in the fall of 2019, uh, I actually, uh, retired from refereeing on the court after game

00:54:40.160 five of the finals in 2019 and in June. And then later that year, uh, took over the day-to-day

00:54:47.020 operations of the replay center based in New Jersey, uh, right there in Secaucus. And yeah,

00:54:53.060 so we started, uh, the 2019, 2020 season. Then as everyone knows in March of 2020,

00:55:00.200 the league shut down because, uh, there was a positive test and, you know, that's kind of when

00:55:06.360 everything started shutting down. Right. So we shut down for a couple of months. We came back,

00:55:11.500 uh, in the bubble down in Florida, uh, in July. And yes, for the rest of that season,

00:55:19.320 you know, everybody else, uh, for the most part, as far as I know, for the NBA worked from home,

00:55:26.580 you had the games going on down in the bubble. Uh, but as for me and my team, we had to go into

00:55:32.200 the office every day because of the technology that was involved, uh, to get replay, um, access

00:55:39.560 still for these games, we had to go in. And so, as you stated, this was pre-vaccine, uh, and we were

00:55:46.740 testing every four days, I believe it was. You had to test every four days. We would come into the

00:55:52.660 office early, uh, in an isolated room, uh, they would tickle my brain. I'd go back in the room,

00:56:00.400 wait for about 45 minutes, uh, for the result. And then they would either send you home if you

00:56:05.220 tested positive or they would allow you to go into work. And so Megan, for two seasons, both the,

00:56:11.520 the 2021 or excuse me, the 1920 and the 2021 season, that was sufficient. And then at the end of the 2021

00:56:21.340 season, uh, excuse me, the 2021 season that ended in July of 2021, uh, we were made aware, uh, basically

00:56:31.560 via email that if you were not vaccinated by, I believe the date was September 13th or September

00:56:39.520 15th of that year, you were no longer going to be allowed in the building. And, um, that was how

00:56:46.420 I became aware of it. Uh, and that is what led me, uh, you know, my wife and I, uh, became very

00:56:55.200 prayerful about it. We have been prayerful about it, about COVID in general from the time that it hit,

00:57:01.180 uh, Megan, as you know, very well, kind of being at the epicenter of COVID being in New Jersey, New York,

00:57:08.700 Connecticut. Um, you know, there was a lot of stuff going on. Right. And so, uh, we were praying for the

00:57:15.600 health and safety of, of our friends, of our family, uh, of everyone. And, uh, then when this mandate came

00:57:23.160 out, of course, uh, we became very prayerful of that and were just led to believe, uh, through our prayer

00:57:30.940 and our readings that, that that was not the right thing to do. And that's what led me to, uh, submitting

00:57:39.460 my religious exemption request. Okay. So, and before we get to that, the, just so people know, what happened

00:57:45.040 was there was a revised collective bargaining agreement for the 2021, 2022 season and the NBA

00:57:50.320 and the NBA referee union voted to mandate the vaccine. So your union sold you out. I mean,

00:57:57.920 your union said we're pro mandate. Yeah. I'll let, I'll let Ken speak on that as he, he was still a

00:58:06.520 member of that union. And, and I know I was a member of management by that time. You moved up to

00:58:11.040 management. Yeah. What about that, Kenny? Do you feel like the union sold you out?

00:58:13.780 Well, you're right. Absolutely. I'm was hoping you'd give me a chance to speak on that. Yes. I

00:58:19.840 mean, I think it's safe to say our executive board is just an extension of the NBA. I'm not privy to

00:58:24.780 many unions. I, I mean, I believe in union. I believe, I believe in, in our, our union as a

00:58:30.320 whole for years. Jason was part of it and we were on the executive board together and we believed in

00:58:34.740 trying to do what was best for the group. Well, the absurdity of our executive board is, is that

00:58:40.080 we as a group never even took a vote on whether or not we were in favor of a mandate. There was

00:58:47.400 like 73 referees on the staff that summer of 21, the Jason referred to before the 21, 22 season.

00:58:54.320 We were never, all of a sudden there was a mandate in the collective bargaining agreement.

00:58:58.840 Either you vote in the mandate, which was in the collective bargaining agreement, or there's no

00:59:03.800 collective bargaining agreement. You don't work. Wow.

00:59:06.220 So there was several referees, Megan, almost 20 that voted the contract down. And, you know,

00:59:15.000 you know, head, head, head, head of the executive board and the attorneys will tell you that, oh,

00:59:18.440 yes, we all wanted this. And this was a something that we all agreed. That's not true. None of that's

00:59:23.000 true. And again, the NBA executive board, the five members and the two referees just basically do

00:59:28.540 whatever the NBA wants them to do. That's it. They're an extension of the NBA and our referees

00:59:34.220 are weak. Our referees follow what the executive board says, thinking that the executive board is

00:59:39.540 acting in their best interest. And I, for one, never believed they were. I don't believe anybody.

00:59:44.100 I would never vote in a contract where any member of our staff was terminated as a result of a

00:59:49.400 contract. Never. I never have. I never will. So needless to say, I don't speak to too many people

00:59:55.640 in the union anymore because the 58 or 60 people that voted in the contract thought it was fine.

01:00:00.180 Let's just vote in the mandate. And if somebody loses their job as a result, so what? That's when

01:00:05.280 they offered us the religious and medical exemptions that we're going to get to next, I'm sure. But

01:00:08.600 no, I don't have any respect or time for the union. I don't have any respect or time for the

01:00:14.160 attorneys that represent our executive board because they're just going to do what's best for the NBA.

01:00:20.280 They set up an arbitration committee that I'll get to. It's just, you know, what's best for the

01:00:24.180 NBA. And again, a lot of the referees were not in favor of this, but we'll get into down the road

01:00:31.200 why they aren't doing what I'm doing. Well, but the absurdity of it is, I mean, the real absurdity

01:00:36.600 is the players did not have a mandate. So what is the point?

01:00:43.280 I came back to the executive board. And again, I don't talk to them. I don't talk to them anymore.

01:00:48.480 Not one of them has ever reached out to me in the last year while I've been going through,

01:00:53.060 it's been a little bit of a difficult year. That just shows you what they think.

01:00:56.760 But anyway, yeah, I mean, all they would have had to do, in my opinion is, well, the NFL players

01:01:03.140 aren't mandated. The NFL referees aren't mandated. Major League Baseball players aren't mandated.

01:01:08.500 Major League referees aren't mandated. So NBA players aren't mandated. All they would have to do is,

01:01:14.140 no, are the players mandated? Sorry. Our guys, we're not going to do it. Boom. What were they going

01:01:19.640 to do, Megan, a week before the season started, if all the referees said, no, we're not going to do

01:01:24.460 the mandate? You don't like it? Get your own. What were they going to do? Nothing. But our executive

01:01:29.340 board wanted to do what was best for the NBA. So they forwarded on and, you know, let's move ahead

01:01:35.320 here. Let's get this done for the NBA. And they basically forced the referees to vote in the contract

01:01:43.220 with the mandate in it. Again, there were 17 that voted it down. And then, but again,

01:01:48.560 the players, the players, Megan, never have been mandated. They've got a stronger union than we do.

01:01:52.920 Never been mandated to take the vaccine. They weren't mandated 20, 21, 22. They weren't mandated

01:01:57.620 this year. And the referees contract this year does not mandate a referee to take the vaccine,

01:02:03.880 but they said that Bauer, Ayat and Phillips have to take it in order to come back. I mean,

01:02:07.540 again, that's the, that's, I mean, that's, we're truly in crazy town now. Like the, so the current,

01:02:12.920 we didn't have the max, the vaccine mandate, 2021, because we didn't have the vaccine. And then the

01:02:16.880 later part of the season we did, but they didn't yet implement it. Then 21 to 20, then came, uh,

01:02:24.500 21 to 22. And that's when you had the VAX mandate, you wouldn't take it and you got suspended. Both of

01:02:29.540 you got suspended. Then we get to this season. They take away the mandate altogether. And meanwhile,

01:02:35.280 anybody who got the vaccine back when they, it was mandated, that vaccine is no longer good.

01:02:39.720 You have to get the booster. You know, like that vaccine is no longer good. So it's totally

01:02:43.140 irrelevant. So now they're saying you don't have to get it. None of these other guys has to get

01:02:46.740 the booster. Even though their old vaccine is dead, expired and no longer good. Don't have to get the

01:02:50.900 booster. You don't have to do anything, but those guys, we're going to punish them. If they want to

01:02:54.540 come back, they have to get a vaccine. What? And okay. So wait, so, so before we get to that,

01:03:01.420 back to the players, do you think when I hear the story to me, this is like,

01:03:05.280 classist, it feels like a class discrimination thing to say all of the guys who are going to be

01:03:11.640 running around on the court, making millions of dollars, they can rub, run into each other,

01:03:18.720 breathe on each other, rub body fluids on one another. But the one guy standing over there

01:03:24.100 who has the least contact with the players, he's got to get it. Why? Because he's a surf and we can

01:03:30.600 control him. These, these big star players who make millions, we got to, we got to cater to them.

01:03:36.020 I mean, to me, there's like a class element here. Am I wrong?

01:03:39.340 Well, you can, you can be our assistant attorney with Sheldon anytime you want a job, because you

01:03:43.740 got it because you, uh, you, you, you said it better than anybody. I mean, I don't think Jason

01:03:48.580 could say it any better. And I know I can't, um, yeah, they're going to spit on each other and

01:03:52.720 sweat on each other and bleed on each other. And they're going to rub elbows and they're going to

01:03:56.420 fight and they're going to hug. But the three referees that are sitting over there, the whistle

01:03:59.800 that go, beep, we got to get it back. We got it. We're mandated. It's absolutely absurd. I, I feel

01:04:06.260 it's discrimination. I know my, our attorney feels that way. And, um, and again, you know,

01:04:11.600 we're going to get to the vaccine. This isn't about the vaccine with Jason and I, we're not about the

01:04:15.500 vaccine. We're I'm, if you want to get the vaccine, Megan, go get it. I respect whatever wishes

01:04:21.640 people. When it comes time to their body, go ahead and do it. But, um, we didn't choose to,

01:04:26.800 and they offered us a religious and medical exemption, but they denied all of them too.

01:04:31.660 And so that's the question, Jason, like what must one prove? We went through this at our school. I,

01:04:37.600 and there's, and there's still a vaccine mandate in place at our school kicking in at 16.

01:04:41.800 Thank God my kids aren't there yet. And I'm really hoping they're going to see reason before we get

01:04:44.920 there. But it was the same thing you're going through where they say they're going to give a

01:04:48.960 religious exemption potentially, or a medical exemption potentially, but they don't. The,

01:04:53.740 the hoops you have, the only medical exemption that they'll give at our school is if you had a

01:04:58.820 negative reaction to the first shot, but you will be getting a shot of the COVID vaccine in your arm.

01:05:03.660 All right. Only then. Oh, great. So I have a lifelong, uh, blood clotting, clotting problem. Not good

01:05:10.100 enough. We have to make sure you have problem clotting after this shot. That's absurd. And on the

01:05:14.480 religious exemption, I know personally of people who there was one, one was on the cover of Catholic

01:05:19.180 magazine and they were like, Nope. Okay. Cause Catholics, they tend to be pro-life and they tend

01:05:26.040 not to be in favor of anything having to do with stem cells gotten from aborted babies. And this is

01:05:31.860 where you guys come in on your objections. I know you're Baptist Jason, but similar in everything I

01:05:36.820 just said. And so you, you are subjected to the indignity of having to sit across from two lawyers

01:05:43.180 who were not Baptists who cross-examine you without representation on your part. You don't have a

01:05:49.820 lawyer there. You don't have somebody who knows what they know in terms of like, you know, just trying

01:05:54.060 to be honest and answer the questions. And they make you try to prove just how faithful you are.

01:05:59.760 Right. Is that basically what happened?

01:06:01.100 That's exactly what happened. Uh, Megan. I mean, you know, the conversation started off with,

01:06:08.020 Hey, these questions are going to be very personal in nature. So, I mean, what, what do you expect when

01:06:15.140 the conversation starts like that? Right. Uh, so it, it was, um, you know, Megan, I, you made a comment

01:06:25.100 earlier, right? That, um, there is, there is something about being where you are now. Right. And

01:06:32.860 it was the meaning for, for lack of a better word, the, the interview, if that's what you want to call

01:06:40.900 it process. Um, and having to explain why I believe, uh, what I believe and getting questioned about,

01:06:50.460 well, you know, leaders in your religion have said that it's okay to take this vaccine.

01:06:59.320 And, you know, Megan, my belief, what I've always been taught, what I've always believed

01:07:04.540 is that's why it is called a personal relationship with God, right? Is because it's between you and God.

01:07:12.880 And I am not here to judge anybody else or anybody else's decisions. If you ask me my opinion and what

01:07:19.840 I believe the Bible says, I will offer that opinion. But at the end of the day, that's your

01:07:25.040 decision to make. And so, you know, for the first time in my life, I had to justify, I guess, what my

01:07:33.660 beliefs are. And, um, I, I will say this, that, um, you know, the Bible says God's plans are not our

01:07:41.600 plans, right? And, uh, his ways are not our ways. So, um, I, I just want to be, uh, tell you that I

01:07:51.400 agree with you, uh, of your previous statement that God takes us down paths that we don't know we're

01:07:58.680 going down sometimes, right? As you probably well know, but, uh, so thankful. Uh, and I truly believe

01:08:07.400 that we are right here at this moment, at this juncture, talking to you in our lives where we are

01:08:15.300 for a reason. And, and to me, that is to say, uh, shed some light, you know, we're, we're called to

01:08:22.440 be a light, right? And, and I think that's why we're here now. I'm glad you said that. I, I agree

01:08:28.480 with you 100%. And you guys are in a position now where you can fight for a lot of people who didn't

01:08:33.020 know what to do when this kind of thing hit, whether it was in the NBA or elsewhere. And I'm

01:08:38.060 sure there's a lot of refs on that list who are behind you and are angry that they were forced to

01:08:43.260 take the vaccine in order to keep their jobs. So you guys are heroes to those people. Um, on the

01:08:49.820 subject of the exemption, Jason, I understand both of you had to go back to your, to your minister,

01:08:56.620 to your church and actually get like a letter verifying that this is so offensive, that your

01:09:03.740 religious belief is genuine. Like I can't imagine having to go to my priest and say, will you please

01:09:10.280 write a letter that my religious beliefs are genuine? What do you do? Like, how do you figure

01:09:15.060 that out? I'm here every Sunday. Well, what does that tell you that I, I really believe maybe I'm

01:09:19.380 just here for my kids. Maybe I'm just here. Cause I like getting out of the house on Sundays.

01:09:23.120 You have no idea. How does he know? Right. It's like, and as you point out the leader of my church

01:09:30.040 to the current Pope, there's a lot of disagreements between that Pope and most Catholics. He does not

01:09:36.080 speak for his entire flock. Their relationship is with God. It's with Jesus. It's not with Pope

01:09:40.720 Francis. It's not with even your particular priest in the Baptist church, but you still had to go and

01:09:46.160 humble yourself in a way to try to get this third party to say your, your religious beliefs are

01:09:52.820 legit. What was that like for you? You know, Megan, it's funny. Um, I actually had to submit

01:10:01.020 to, uh, religious exemption, so to speak, because when I was first notified, um, via, uh, email from

01:10:10.980 the HR department, they provided a link that you can click on and submit your request. Right. So I did

01:10:19.660 that radio silence. I hear nothing back. So I follow up with the HR department and said, Hey,

01:10:27.540 we're drawing close to this date. Do I need to do anything else? No, you're good. It's all good.

01:10:34.220 Right. Well, then I received notification that it had been, I guess, quasi denied because I just,

01:10:43.460 I received another email saying, Hey, we noticed you haven't updated your vaccine status to vaccinated

01:10:51.440 yet. And you've got X amount of days before your security card doesn't work anymore. So at that

01:10:58.160 point I submitted a formal, uh, religious exemption, uh, through my attorney. And, and that's when we had

01:11:07.860 to, to, to get the pastoral letter, uh, to help support, because obviously what I did originally

01:11:14.340 was not good enough. And, you know, um, Megan, I, luckily, uh, I knew the beliefs of my pastor up front.

01:11:28.260 Um, we, we have a very, uh, pro-life, uh, group of ministers at our church.

01:11:38.720 And, um, you know, in as so much as they've adopted children. Right. Um, and, and so I, I,

01:11:47.880 I didn't have as much problem probably with that as, as probably many, many others would have had,

01:11:54.620 uh, but so thankful for the support. And, and again, in, in my beliefs, um, you know,

01:12:01.640 life begins at conception. Right. And so that is my belief. And luckily, uh, I did have the ability,

01:12:10.900 uh, to get that support from my pastor to then submit, but, um, you know, obviously it wasn't

01:12:18.580 good enough. So Kenny, the, they, um, they look at you and basically want you to be a Jehovah's

01:12:25.120 witness. That's kind of the only way to get this religious exemption. If you're willing to take any

01:12:30.080 modern medicine, they see you as not able to raise a religious exemption from what I read.

01:12:37.320 And even from our own experience, they, they kind of want to make you saying, I have an objection

01:12:41.380 to the fact that the COVID vaccines were tested using stem cells from aborted fetuses. You don't,

01:12:47.260 they're like, well, there's no aborted fetus cells in the vaccines. We know that. Okay. Even

01:12:53.360 accepting that they admit that the testing process involved stem cells from aborted fetuses. They

01:13:00.940 admit that. So that's a real problem for some Catholics and it's not a problem for others,

01:13:05.720 but for some it is. And yet they continue trying to question you in your meeting, Kenny, as I

01:13:11.560 understand it as if you're a Jehovah's witness and any admission that you've taken any sort of

01:13:19.600 drug, any prescription drug, any over the counter drug is ball game for you. Because as I read their

01:13:27.020 statements, they asked you if you had taken, they asked you about your medical history.

01:13:32.700 I mean, it's amazing. You could have had so much fun with them. You could have been like, well,

01:13:35.660 after I solved the syphilis and then the gonorrhea, it could be so fun. Okay. But anyway,

01:13:43.880 so they want to go through your medical history in detail. They quote, extracted an admission.

01:13:51.000 They feel that you took hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a prophylactic measure against COVID.

01:13:58.080 So did like half the doctors in America. Okay. Then according to their, to these lawyers who are

01:14:03.740 cross-examining you, your use of these drugs was a gotcha moment because in their view,

01:14:09.280 their use logically conflicts with your state of belief that vaccination pollutes the human body.

01:14:14.700 You see, because what they say is that it's, you do not in fact believe solely in divine healing

01:14:22.840 and in the healing abilities of the human body. So, aha, you can no longer object to the use of the

01:14:30.180 stem cell without all that. So what did you make of that whole thing? Well, there's a couple of

01:14:33.840 things in the interview, Megan, that were interesting. First of all, I recorded the

01:14:36.540 whole interview, so I still have it. That's the one, that's the wonderful thing. Um, back to one,

01:14:42.280 one thing I'd like to cover a little bit on, on what, how you were, what you were talking to Jason

01:14:46.380 about is again, I was interviewed by a Jewish attorney attorney. I've known he's been in the league

01:14:51.060 almost as long as I have. And so, um, I knew things, some questionings were, some questions

01:14:56.140 were coming because other people have been interviewed before I was. And so we had talked

01:15:00.620 and we knew some of the questions that were coming and it was just, you're right. We knew they were

01:15:03.780 all, I got you moments. They were going to try to find whatever they could to find fault, to come up

01:15:07.580 with whatever they could. So one of my conversations with, um, Neil Stern was his name. I can't wait till

01:15:13.500 he's deposed. I can't wait to listen to him on the stand because we'll have our day with him.

01:15:18.420 We won't be able to interrogate him like he interrogated Jason and I. Um, it was interesting

01:15:22.680 because I said to him, I said, Jason, I said, I said, Neil, are you Jewish? He said, yes, I am.

01:15:28.440 I said, okay. Have you ever been to Krakow? Have you ever been to Auschwitz? No, never been to Europe.

01:15:34.440 So you do know that 6 million of your Jewish compatriots were killed in World War II by the

01:15:39.800 Nazis. Well, he said, yeah, I know that, Maher. I know that. I said, well, you were aware that the

01:15:44.360 Pope in 1944 turned his back, knowing very well what happened with your Jewish people and, um,

01:15:49.920 basically turned his back. Not one church in Italy was even bombed. Are you aware of that?

01:15:54.760 There was silence. He wouldn't even, he wouldn't even give me an answer. I said,

01:15:57.280 so if you're going to ask me what my, what my take is on the Pope's current stance,

01:16:01.360 I didn't agree with the Pope back in 1944. I wasn't alive then, but I did, I wouldn't have

01:16:05.680 agreed with him then. Would you have? No, no, you wouldn't, you wouldn't give a statement.

01:16:09.680 I said, how about in the 1980s when all the children were, were molested by priests in the 1980s

01:16:15.960 by the Catholic. Now I love, I, I'm a believer, I believe in the Catholic religion, but you're

01:16:20.420 right. As you said earlier, Megan, I don't believe in a lot of what this Pope has said

01:16:23.440 or some of what the clergy has said in the past. So I said in the 1980s when all the priests were,

01:16:28.980 you know, they were all, it was proven what they had done to these, you know, these, these little,

01:16:33.220 little children, little kids. And yet not one of them was, was persecuted by the, you know,

01:16:37.800 not one of them were charged by the, by the Pope. I said, uh, Neil, I said, do you agree with that?

01:16:42.460 Am I supposed to agree with the Pope's stance on that? I said, it's a personal choice. Your

01:16:49.060 religion is a personal choice. I shouldn't have to defend my love and my faith in our Lord Jesus

01:16:56.120 Christ. I shouldn't have to defend that. Who are you, NBA, to have to defend, to make us defend that?

01:17:02.080 So you're right, Megan, you're, it was horrible and I didn't like it, but we had to do it. There was a

01:17:07.180 person from HR there. And then as far as the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, I mean, again,

01:17:12.720 hydroxychloroquine, Megan, and ivermectin don't have abortive fetal cells or mRNA in it. I don't

01:17:16.900 know if you're aware of that, but they don't, I can give you literature and send you documents. I

01:17:20.320 have more, I have a file that's eight inches thick on anything you want to know. I mean, but anyway,

01:17:25.180 so, so he was trying to ask me these questions. And again, what I should have just said was,

01:17:29.520 this isn't about the vaccine. This isn't about what I feel about the vaccine, good or bad,

01:17:36.100 or whatever. This is about my faith in God. My, my religious exemption is based on abortive

01:17:42.100 fetal cells and mRNA, which is in, well, it's in both the Pfizer and the Moderna. And I don't

01:17:48.460 believe the mRNA is in the J&J, but abortive, the testing of abortive fetal cells is. So I said,

01:17:53.780 that's, that's why I've based my religious exemption. Why are you trying to put holes in me

01:17:57.580 for, for reasons? You know, maybe it was because I filed a medical exemption too. I had already had COVID.

01:18:03.280 So I had, you know, natural immunity. And, um, but again, you know, my, my, my crux and my whole,

01:18:11.200 my, what I'm fighting is, is, is, is religious freedom and religious faith freedom in general,

01:18:15.880 but religious freedom and, and, and, and everybody, Megan, and I know where you stand and

01:18:20.880 I'm proud of you. I'm proud of so many people in this country that feel the exact same way that

01:18:24.580 we're just, you know, thrown on the streets, don't have a job. How about the 10,000 air force

01:18:30.120 guys who all followed religious exemption? They were all denied. How can 10,000 people be denied

01:18:34.740 a religious exemption? How can every person in the NBA denied a religious exemption? You mean nobody

01:18:39.720 in the, in, in the NBA has any faith? It's ridiculous. They, is it, is it true, Kenny,

01:18:45.480 that they actually asked you about how you reconcile the risk of COVID, the risk it, it poses to

01:18:52.360 unvaccinated children with your concern about the sanctity of life? I mean, yes, yes. He did ask me

01:19:03.700 that question. That is total ignorance. Exactly. I mean, I didn't really know at the time, Megan,

01:19:09.660 how to even answer the question. It was so ridiculous and absurd, but by that time in the

01:19:14.500 interview, it was so obvious as I'm sure Jason, you know, figured out and Mark and everybody else,

01:19:19.840 again, there was eight or nine other referees who followed religious exemptions. They all were

01:19:23.320 denied. Um, I don't think anybody in the entire NBA family was, was, was granted a religious medical

01:19:28.580 exemption. So, so, I mean, by that time it was just ridiculous, you know, and then he got into the

01:19:32.460 civil liberties too. I mean, you know, religious freedom, religious liberties, that's a form of

01:19:37.240 civil liberty, religious freedom. And, and again, it comes back to the same thing that keeps going

01:19:43.480 in my mind. I don't know why are they doing what they're doing, Megan, when you can come up with

01:19:48.540 that answer for us. Why pro sports, maybe more than any of them. I don't know. Why are they doing

01:19:54.520 because I don't know that it's, I don't think it's the players. I don't think it's the coaches.

01:19:58.400 I don't, is it the owners? I don't know. That's not for me. That's my attorney. Our attorney is

01:20:02.900 going to handle all that. But, um, again, why would Jason far left belief that you have to do what I

01:20:10.920 think is good for me and society? You have to, this belief encompasses so many areas besides COVID,

01:20:18.400 but COVID has been their way in. This has been the one Avenue in which they've made real progress

01:20:23.400 in getting their thumb on their fellow Americans and forcing a certain complied behavior.

01:20:29.760 And even your lawsuit, I have to give credit to your lawyers because even your lawsuit acknowledges

01:20:34.280 what we'll give the benefit of the doubt for early on in the process, when there was a mistaken,

01:20:39.400 misguided belief that the vaccines prevented the spread. All right. So even if you give them the

01:20:44.560 benefit of the doubt on that, how are we now at the point where we know, we know the CDC, Fauci,

01:20:51.800 everyone's admitting that now that they don't, they don't prevent the spread. They're still saying

01:20:56.260 not those three guys, you two and a fellow ref, those three cannot come back in unless they get

01:21:02.920 the vax. How, why that? So even if you presume good faith in the initial part of this,

01:21:08.860 it falls apart when you get to the end and, and it can only be a desire for control over the way you

01:21:16.220 live your life. I am saying, this is what's fair. We got it. You have to get it whether you want it

01:21:23.120 or not. That's the point we're at in your litigation. And well, you're right. And again,

01:21:27.740 I'm, we're going to keep coming back to, again, we're not going to argue the vaccine. We're not going

01:21:32.720 to argue medical, not saying I don't agree with you. People can have their opinion on that,

01:21:36.820 but from a religious standpoint. And again, let's come back to Megan. They offered us the

01:21:41.220 religious and medical exemption. If you had to prove, but you had to prove that you qualified.

01:21:46.800 Well, yeah, that came out almost after, but yeah, I get, well, who's going to prove that I qualify

01:21:52.300 one Jewish lawyer in the NBA office who then brings back my statement to, I don't know, whoever,

01:21:57.660 whoever made this decision. I don't know. But again, not one person has a faith in the NBA,

01:22:02.460 not one. It's very curious that not a single person got an exemption. Almost makes you think

01:22:08.520 that the policy wasn't real at all. All right. Stand by you guys. I got to squeeze in a break

01:22:12.700 much, much more with Kenny and Jason. You mentioned the arbitration where we are now.

01:22:16.600 We'll get to that in one second after this quick break.

01:22:22.080 Back with us now, former NBA referees and executives, Kenny Maurer and Jason Phillips,

01:22:27.120 who have filed a lawsuit against the NBA over its vaccine mandate that left them without their jobs.

01:22:33.580 Even once the NBA lifted the vaccine mandate, it singled them out and said, you can't come back to

01:22:40.100 work unless you get one. It's crazy. If a referee gets hired tomorrow, does he have to be vaccinated?

01:22:46.840 I do. I do keep in touch. Not not not that often with a couple of the referees.

01:22:51.960 And the contract was signed in September. To the best of my knowledge, as of yesterday,

01:22:58.420 the NBA referees weren't even given a copy of the collective bargaining agreement yet.

01:23:03.720 So that's how it works.

01:23:05.400 That's how it works. Yeah. And now they're talking about making them take more boosters and

01:23:09.980 flu shots. And they're having a conference call, I believe, today. And all this is going on. And

01:23:15.900 I don't even think they've ever well, as of yesterday, Megan, they had not received a copy of

01:23:21.000 collective bargaining agreement they supposedly voted in. But in September, they did vote in

01:23:26.060 a collective bargaining agreement that said that in their seven year contract, that in the next

01:23:29.980 seven years of their contract, there is not a mandate for a referee to be vaccinated. That's

01:23:34.380 correct. Wow. So you guys, you guys can't come back unvaccinated, but a new submission who comes

01:23:41.540 back unvaccinated can get in. And that makes a lot of sense, given your 36 years of experience as an

01:23:47.340 NBA ref, like, sure. Okay, this is personal. This feels your lawyers allege that you've been

01:23:53.200 persecuted. Is that how this feels?

01:23:56.520 Well, you know, I'm, I'm, I, I, I'm not going to admit that, you know, I'm, yeah, I mean,

01:24:01.560 you just keep fighting through it. I mean, I mean, I'm, I'm a better man because of it, I think,

01:24:07.160 you know, because of my faith. My wife is amazing. She's strong. She's, she's a Christian,

01:24:11.680 and she's, she's as strong as I am. And we're both adamant about what we're doing. We're proud

01:24:15.760 of what we're doing. And I, I get it out there. And I, I, I've spoken at churches and, and different

01:24:21.240 functions and stuff. So, you know, I won't allow myself, Megan, to be called persecuted, but at the

01:24:25.660 same time, I guess by definition, yes, discriminated against, persecuted against. They had a side letter

01:24:31.900 in the agreement with the referees that the referee executive board brought to the group.

01:24:36.640 And the side letter said that even though there's no mandate for this in the next seven years,

01:24:42.160 Maurer, Ayat, and of course it would have been Jason too. And there was one other referee that

01:24:47.240 went through arbitration have to take the vaccine in order to come back. Well, I said, I said on one

01:24:52.420 conference call, why, if there's no mandate moving forward, why as an executive board, would you allow

01:24:57.900 a side letter in there? I know you're a lawyer, Megan. Why would you allow a side letter into an

01:25:02.500 agreement like that when it only affects three people? Well, they, they couldn't answer that.

01:25:07.800 Why? Well, because the NBA wanted it, Megan, the executive board will do whatever the NBA

01:25:11.640 wants them to do. That's it. And, um, initially the collective bargaining agreement was voted down

01:25:17.380 58 to what, 13. Well, then the NBA came back and offered a couple of dollars here and a couple

01:25:23.920 dollars there to some of the people within the union. And yeah, the vote turned right around and

01:25:28.360 was 56, 13. The other way we'll vote in the contract. So again, the NBA referee staff is

01:25:33.460 weak. They're going to, they're all afraid to lose their jobs. They're all afraid to stand up to the

01:25:37.940 NBA. They're all afraid, um, to go against the executive board because maybe the executive board

01:25:42.360 will say bad things about them to the league office. Come on, you know how it works. You know,

01:25:46.240 it's a shame. That's the way executive boards and unions work. I don't have any respect for the

01:25:51.080 executive board at all with the NBA. They turned their back on me because, Oh, I got an attorney. So

01:25:55.900 therefore they don't have to talk to me. Instead of working with my attorney, not only that, you'll

01:25:59.960 be punished. You'll be punished. You'll be made an example of, so nobody else deigns to get themselves

01:26:05.500 legal representation. And I understand Jason, you, you too were not allowed a lawyer when you were

01:26:10.760 cross-examined by these two lawyers. And then you, they wanted you actually to waive your rights

01:26:15.800 before you left that meeting. Uh, Megan, the, the, what they, they didn't actually actually,

01:26:23.280 they didn't actually ask me to waive my rights in that meeting, but when it came time that they

01:26:29.660 did terminate me, um, they offered me a very small severance package, basically, you know, nothing.

01:26:39.760 And that is when they asked me to waive my rights for anything. Uh, and, uh, in, in fact,

01:26:47.440 that that was insulting, uh, when they did that, um, I would have felt better if they would have

01:26:53.780 offered me nothing, in fact. So, um, but yes, I, I mean, and, and that's, in my opinion,

01:27:00.460 that's what they're going to do. And, and I mentioned about we're called as Christians to be a light,

01:27:05.520 right? My belief is there are some people that are scared of the light. And that's why we're here today,

01:27:14.220 uh, to, to be a light and to expose, um, you know, we, we all make mistakes, right? We, we all do. Uh,

01:27:24.060 human beings make mistakes. That's just the way we are. Um, but thank goodness, um, I believe that

01:27:31.220 Christ and his son died on the cross so that we don't have to, right? So that we don't get what we

01:27:37.720 deserve. We get eternal life with, with God in heaven. And, but during that time, the Bible

01:27:46.900 calls us to be a light and shine light on darkness. And again, I mentioned earlier, we are where we are

01:27:53.360 for a reason. And I think that's why we're here. And I can't wait till we get in court, uh, because then

01:28:01.020 everything becomes public record to my knowledge. And, um, you know, I, I, I just believe we are

01:28:09.280 right here right now for a reason. You guys got suspended for a year without pay while this played

01:28:18.140 out. And I'm sure you were hoping it would resolve. They would see the light. They would,

01:28:23.280 they would see reason. Um, before I get to the ultimate phone call where they told you what their

01:28:28.700 decision was, uh, can, did anybody, you've been there almost four decades. Did anybody call you?

01:28:35.080 Did anybody reach out to you? Offer some sort of, you know, support?

01:28:41.620 Again, Megan, if you've, when you've been around as long as I have, and I've, I've, I've listened to

01:28:46.000 a lot of veteran referees. If you allow things like this to surprise you, shame on you. So anything that

01:28:51.560 the NBA does or anything, the actions of my fellow referees as weak as they have been, um, doesn't

01:28:58.140 surprise me because I, I, I won't allow it to surprise me because I've seen it happen to other

01:29:02.460 referees, not quite at this, this extent, but so no, nobody, no, there hasn't been an executive

01:29:08.100 board member that's reached out to me again. They will hide behind Megan. Oh, you got your own lawyer.

01:29:12.960 Well, no, I got my own lawyer because I didn't want to go through your arbitration process.

01:29:18.120 You know, you did that with one referee, he lost, I knew it was going to be rigged and it was,

01:29:23.140 and I, under the advisement of my lawyer, I didn't become a part of it. That doesn't mean you

01:29:27.540 shouldn't be supporting me. Well, they, they, they suspended us without pay and they were going

01:29:32.940 to take away our medical, but then they, they, they, they did allow us to have medical this last

01:29:37.200 year. I can't even get my severance package made. I'm allowed 36 years of severance. I can't get my

01:29:43.160 severance package because I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm on your show. I'm going public and I'm, I'm,

01:29:47.740 I'm suing them. So I, like, I would have had to assign what Jason was going to have to sign a release

01:29:53.300 or whatever you call it. You're more familiar with that, Megan, than I am in order to, you know,

01:29:56.600 not sue them or not come back after them. Well, naturally I wasn't going to do that. And so I

01:30:00.960 can't even get my severance. So, you know, and just, just, just a couple of weeks ago,

01:30:05.400 my actual pension was released. So, I mean, it's been a tough year financially, but you know,

01:30:11.080 you do what you have to do and you save and you, you, you know, you, you borrow and you, and you,

01:30:16.480 you know, there's been other people that have been extremely supportive of, of, to me. I never

01:30:20.360 realized there's a lot of people that don't like the NBA. There's a lot of people that don't like it.

01:30:22.880 Kyrie Irving should help you. Kyrie Irving should say, Jonathan, he, these guys should help you.

01:30:27.740 And by the way, so the audience knows the reason those players were subjected to the vaccine mandate

01:30:32.200 is just local ordinances. Like Kyrie Irving in the local stadium said, you, you've got to get the

01:30:37.120 vaccine in our town. They said, you've got to get the vaccine, but the NBA never required it of the

01:30:41.460 players, just the refs. He should cover you. He should, he should pay for your pension. He's got it

01:30:46.200 to spare. You guys are quote unquote, the little people who could use help from these guys who make

01:30:51.300 30, $40 million a year, probably more at this point. I'm proud of what he did. I'm proud of

01:30:57.620 what he did. I know. Well, I mean, honestly, good for him because he, he was in a position to stand

01:31:02.320 up to them and he did it. Can I ask you though? Cause I appreciate, I appreciate you not taking

01:31:08.420 on the persecution label, but you make a good point, which is it's not for lack of trying

01:31:12.620 on their part, but you're just, you don't see yourself as a victim, but let's be real. You just

01:31:18.080 ticked off some of the things that they're doing to you suspended without pay for a year.

01:31:21.500 Your pension's been released. Does that mean, what does it mean released? Like it's no longer

01:31:25.180 there for you to claim? No, I can now go and get it for the longest time. You know, they're real

01:31:31.140 good about you mandating that you have to do something by a certain date or else, but they

01:31:36.040 had to do something by a certain date or, well, that date came a long time ago. And, but now finally,

01:31:40.720 finally. Okay. So it took them a while. They almost took away your medical. And so you,

01:31:46.360 I just have to ask you what the toll this has taken. I'll start with you on it, Jason,

01:31:50.160 like the personal toll this kind of thing takes. Yeah, Megan, one of the, if not the most stressful

01:31:58.160 thing I've ever been through in my life. I mean, obviously I went from making a very good salary

01:32:06.920 working for the league. And I'm very thankful for that to making nothing. And so to kind of

01:32:15.920 shake your life up like that has been very stressful and not just the monetary part of it.

01:32:25.900 You know, I'm very open with my life and share with other people. It, you know, Megan and Ken,

01:32:35.340 both marriage is hard on a good day, right? This has been the stress that it has put on

01:32:44.900 my relationship with my wife is difficult. Just not that we don't love each other or love each

01:32:55.380 other any less. It's just stressful. And I don't know how to describe it better than that. Waking up

01:33:02.420 in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep. You know, you dedicate for me

01:33:09.800 over, or just short of 23 years to an organization and then six years in the minor leagues prior to

01:33:17.660 that. So just short of 30 years total, not anywhere close to what Kenny did, but you dedicate your life

01:33:24.980 to an organization. And then, you know, all of a sudden in a blink of an eye, it's, it's gone,

01:33:34.080 you know, uh, based on, I don't know, maybe one person's decision. Um, so, uh, based on what,

01:33:42.840 because during the 2021 to 2022 season, this is the one you were suspended for. You wouldn't take

01:33:49.240 the vaccine. Everyone else went and got it. Okay, great. They're safe. Now they're going to prevent

01:33:54.180 the spread of COVID of the NBA, 73 fully vaccinated referees. 65 tested positive for COVID 89% tested

01:34:04.940 positive for COVID. The vaccine did nothing to prevent the spread. They just decided to penalize

01:34:12.480 you. I only have a minute left, but same question to you, Kenny, the personal toll this has taken on

01:34:16.980 you. Well, uh, like I say, it's, it's tough. I mean, again, I'm not surprised by the way the NBA

01:34:22.320 has acted or the referees in the union. Um, shame on all of them. Um, it's okay. Um, I'm going to rise

01:34:30.160 above that tough of what tough it's been tough on my wife. It hasn't been tough on us. We're stronger

01:34:35.220 than ever. Um, our faith is stronger than ever. Um, I'm very proud of her. I'm very proud of what I'm

01:34:40.080 doing, but you know, it's just a shame, Megan. You know, I, again, nothing the NBA done has surprised me,

01:34:45.840 but this is, this is, um, they're just plain wrong. It's good versus evil and they're evil and

01:34:52.160 we're good and, um, shame on them. Evidently. I don't know if any of them have any, any faith

01:34:57.920 whatsoever, but, uh, it seems to me that they don't. And, um, I don't, it's tough to be a part

01:35:02.920 of something that, uh, has no faith. And so, um, I'm okay with our decision. I always will be.

01:35:08.300 Well, it'll play out in the courts. We reached out to them for comment. They said they don't comment

01:35:12.260 on ongoing litigation. So, you know, we'll, we'll hear from them in court and we'll see whether

01:35:17.160 you prevail, but all the best to you for telling us about the struggle, the unfairness and what

01:35:23.060 this has been like for, for you and your families. We'll be watching and rooting for you.

01:35:27.300 Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan. Thank you for what you've done. I appreciate it.

01:35:31.700 Oh yeah. I mean, right back at you, Kenny and Jason, all the best. Oh my heart. That was

01:35:36.220 love to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS,

01:35:43.820 no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 21, 2022

Elon's Free Speech Quest, and Vaccine Mandate Reality, with Vivek Ramaswamy, Ken Mauer, and Jason Phillips ｜ Ep. 439

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