The Megyn Kelly Show - GOP's Next Move, FTX's Crash, and Men Out of Work, with Sen. Rand Paul, Jeffrey Tucker, and Nick Eberstadt

00:00:00.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.760 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.960 Later, we're going to have the latest on the Biden megadonor, crypto billionaire,

00:00:19.580 who has been exposed as a fraud. This is unbelievable. We're going to go in depth.

00:00:24.740 Plus the alarming number of men out of work permanently, it seems, and the effect it's

00:00:30.260 having on our society. But we begin with former President Trump. We are now just hours away from

00:00:35.680 his apparent announcement, expected announcement that he is running for president in 2024. Mr.

00:00:41.580 Trump truthing early this morning, quote, hopefully today will turn out to be one of the most important

00:00:47.100 days in the history of our country. His announcement comes after Carrie Lake lost her bid to become the

00:00:53.900 next governor of Arizona. Lake has yet to concede, tweeting out Arizonans no BS when they see it.

00:01:01.200 The GOP, meantime, inching closer and closer to officially gaining control of the House.

00:01:06.660 They've already been projected to win, but it's not official yet. There is still a lot of soul

00:01:11.360 searching going on regarding what went so wrong a week ago today for the party. Senator Ted Cruz

00:01:18.260 said yesterday he is, quote, so pissed he cannot even see straight. So it's going to be interesting

00:01:23.580 to hear from my next guest. Joining us now for his first interview since winning re-election,

00:01:28.780 Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Senator, welcome back to the program.

00:01:33.140 Thanks for having me, Megan.

00:01:34.460 Yeah, great to see you. So Ted Cruz is very angry. How are you feeling?

00:01:40.740 Yeah, I guess I don't get angry. I try to get even. I try to figure out how we do better in the future,

00:01:48.040 what we did wrong, and look to the next election. I try not to look backwards.

00:01:53.200 The one thing that is very clear, both in my re-election, which we won overwhelmingly,

00:01:57.800 and across the country, is we're the party of rural America. You know, I had 10 counties where

00:02:03.280 I got over 85 percent of the vote. I had another 10 counties or 15 counties where I got over 80 percent

00:02:08.140 of the vote. Throughout most of rural Kentucky, I averaged over 70 percent of the vote.

00:02:12.720 In our two big cities, I lost 60-40. Fortunately for Kentucky, our big cities don't dominate the

00:02:19.280 population. But you go to Georgia, and Atlanta basically equals the population outside of Atlanta.

00:02:26.020 So the urban equals the rural vote in Georgia. And it used to be otherwise. You know, Georgia was

00:02:31.640 Republican for a couple decades, but the rural vote outnumbered the urban vote considerably during

00:02:37.980 that period of time. And now Atlanta's grown to become even. So there are a lot of different ways

00:02:42.840 to look at it. Personally, I think one way to look at it is we have to get more African-American

00:02:46.740 vote. I think we also need to get more every sort of ethnic group, Asian-Americans as well. I think we

00:02:52.600 have great inroads there, Hispanic-Americans, but particularly African-Americans. If we can get to

00:02:57.400 where we're getting a more substantial portion of that vote, I think there is a way that where the

00:03:03.060 urban-rural divide can be broken and we can do better. I know that when you won, you won earlier

00:03:09.420 in the evening last Tuesday. You believed that you were in the middle of a red wave, as so many

00:03:15.560 had predicted. Now, it's funny to listen to some of these more left-leaning shows and anchors say,

00:03:20.460 you know, how the right was predicting a red wave. Well, that's not true. It was coming from the left

00:03:24.620 and the right. Virtually everyone, with just a couple of exceptions, believed the only question was

00:03:30.040 how big the wave would be. So you thought you were in the middle of a red wave. It didn't wind up

00:03:34.700 happening. Why do you think it didn't? You know, there are some interesting things that are going

00:03:39.940 to have to be analyzed. There are people saying that we won a significant majority of the votes

00:03:44.600 for Congress, but didn't win a significant number of new seats. Some of that has to do with how the

00:03:49.980 seats are districted. So gerrymandering can have something to do with it. I also think that it's very,

00:03:55.100 very hard to win a vote where the ballots are mailed to everyone. You know, when it used to

00:04:00.600 take some initiative to vote, I think that the voters tended to be people with more initiative

00:04:05.300 and people, I believe, to be probably more involved and maybe better informed about politics.

00:04:12.300 Now, like in Nevada, you know, it's very difficult to win when the franchise has become complete through

00:04:19.140 mailing the ballots to everyone. I think it's also harder to verify who these are. Now, I'm not

00:04:23.520 saying there was widespread fraud, but I am saying it's easier to verify who someone is if they show

00:04:28.620 up. And the sort of tragic comedy of Arizona, not looking at Chad's, but looking at everyone's

00:04:35.080 signature, shows that they know that there could be a problem and they're trying to prevent it.

00:04:40.480 But that problem doesn't exist when you vote in person with an ID. And so I really think that

00:04:45.920 it also, I guess, creates more doubt on the part of the voter. You know, even though I can't say,

00:04:53.180 oh, well, there was fraud, it makes me worry that I see all the candidates that I'm for winning on

00:04:57.760 the same day of the election. And then I see drip by drip by drip as the votes keep coming in over

00:05:02.400 weeks that they lose their elections. And so I think if they want to encourage, you know, the left

00:05:07.840 says they, you know, it's all about democracy for them. If they want to encourage support of

00:05:12.040 democratic voting, we'd all be more encouraged to believe the results if they all came in in a very

00:05:17.580 timely fashion or counted that day. Why a state would take early voting and not start counting them

00:05:22.920 before the day of the election. And it takes two weeks for Arizona to count. It's mail-in ballots.

00:05:28.480 For goodness sake, they should start counting them two weeks before the election's over.

00:05:32.360 So, you know, I think that there are a lot of things going on with the way the elections are

00:05:37.340 run that make a difference. The 10 states that send out ballots to everyone, nine out of 10 are

00:05:42.620 dominated by Democrats. Utah is the only exception. So I think how we run our elections is important.

00:05:48.740 And like in Kentucky, I think 95 to 98 percent of people showed up and voted in person,

00:05:54.040 which I think is a better way to run an election.

00:05:57.240 It's the way we always used to do it and worked out fine. And there wasn't a lot of election

00:06:00.360 denialism going on back in those days. What about Trump? New York Post, Wall Street Journal,

00:06:07.080 some on Fox pointing the finger at him as responsible for bad candidate quality,

00:06:13.000 making certain candidates embrace his election denialism. J.D. Vance has an op-ed out today

00:06:18.840 saying, don't blame Trump. What the GOP needs to do is build a turnout machine, get more money,

00:06:24.280 saying our party has one major asset, contra-conventional wisdom, to rally the voters we

00:06:29.660 need. President Donald Trump, now more than ever, we need his leadership to turn these voters out.

00:06:34.760 And we suffered from his absence from the stage. So which camp are you in?

00:06:40.060 I think it's easy for people to have arguments when you lose. Everybody's got an argument because

00:06:46.140 nobody wants to take responsibility. But it's probably an all of the above that there's a

00:06:50.640 little bit of everything involved in why people lose. But when you say it's candidate quality,

00:06:55.220 you know, if I were one of those candidates, I'd take offense to that. But just for example,

00:06:58.780 Dr. Oz, I think he's an intelligent, well-spoken. He was on daytime television for 10 to 15 years.

00:07:05.240 He connects with people. I've seen him do the one-on-one town halls.

00:07:08.520 He really can talk to people and listen to people. And hands down, he knew the information

00:07:13.980 better and could, you know, present himself in a debate. His opponent was and is severely impaired.

00:07:20.820 And yet the opponent won. So I think it's unfair to Dr. Oz and also not an accurate thing to say,

00:07:25.980 oh, Fetterman was the better quality candidate and Oz was lacking in quality. That's not right.

00:07:32.040 To blame it all on Trump's not right. To blame it all on McConnell's not right.

00:07:35.600 It's a combination of things, but it's also, I guess I'm not big into the blame game. I'm into

00:07:42.160 what do you have to do moving forward? For example-

00:07:45.060 That may require some blame.

00:07:47.000 Say again?

00:07:48.200 That may require some blame, right? Like if there was one major force working for evil,

00:07:54.260 you know, like some teller, like John Podoritz, I keep mentioning him because he's a

00:07:57.820 never-Trumper who really thinks Trump is to blame for all this stuff.

00:08:00.680 Then we need to know that, right? So, I mean, an honest look would require factoring in everything

00:08:05.580 and seeing whether it's real.

00:08:07.840 Yeah. And I guess, but the thing is, if I'm looking at Pennsylvania,

00:08:10.900 I'm looking at a state that they describe as Alabama in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

00:08:17.080 The rural part of Pennsylvania is probably as conservative maybe as Kentucky is,

00:08:21.720 but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia dominate. Probably together,

00:08:24.960 they're more than half of the vote would be my guess.

00:08:27.000 And so the problem really is, if you want to win Pennsylvania, you know,

00:08:32.620 instead of getting 10% of the black vote, we need to get 20% or 25%.

00:08:36.060 Now, it's easier said than done. We've been saying it forever.

00:08:38.780 But I can give you an example. In our state, our attorney general is Republican, African-American.

00:08:43.600 Our previous lieutenant governor, when we had a Republican governor, African-American.

00:08:47.160 Good friend of mine. She served in the military and also came out of the Tea Party.

00:08:51.860 And I met at some of the first Tea Party movements.

00:08:53.540 We had several other candidates that were great candidates, all African-American,

00:08:58.820 all running as Republican. You just have to keep doing that year in and year out

00:09:02.180 till the African-American public says, well, these Republicans aren't too bad. Maybe I'll consider it.

00:09:07.740 Right. This isn't like a white country club.

00:09:09.500 We weren't even being considered. Say again.

00:09:11.500 Yeah. I said that until they look at the party and say to themselves,

00:09:14.960 OK, this no longer looks like a white country club.

00:09:17.100 You know, you got people like you mentioned, Daniel Cameron.

00:09:19.000 You got Winsome Sears, Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and so on.

00:09:22.820 And the party is definitely becoming more diverse.

00:09:24.960 There's no question about it. But yeah, bigger numbers, especially now that they're losing so many

00:09:29.040 white suburban voters to the Dems.

00:09:33.360 Let me ask you this because there's I'm not that interested in this, but I should spend a minute

00:09:37.020 squabbling over leadership fight.

00:09:39.900 You know, who should be in the leadership? McConnell.

00:09:41.800 Should he be the leader of the minority now in the Senate?

00:09:44.120 Should Kevin McCarthy be the leader over in the House?

00:09:47.940 Would you support McConnell and do you support a vote before Georgia's decided?

00:09:52.900 I think it's probably better to wait on the vote.

00:09:55.040 I think that we don't know who's going to be the senator from Georgia,

00:09:58.300 but we also don't know who the senator is from Alaska.

00:10:00.980 You know, this is for the next session.

00:10:02.920 Does the current senator from Alaska?

00:10:04.480 She's probably going to win, I think, in the ranked choice.

00:10:07.180 But should she vote on the next one?

00:10:08.860 I guess she doesn't get to vote now because she hasn't been declared the senator for January.

00:10:12.740 But is that fair to her not to let her vote?

00:10:15.540 Or is it fair to Herschel Walker just to say, oh, yeah, we really want you to win,

00:10:18.680 but you don't get to vote on who the leader is.

00:10:20.960 So I don't care what you have to say.

00:10:22.820 It makes no sense to have the vote now, though.

00:10:24.740 They should definitely wait.

00:10:26.500 OK, what about Trump's going to announce tonight?

00:10:29.280 We expect he certainly has given all indications.

00:10:31.320 His tweet this morning has a picture of himself sort of leaping through the air with a Trump 2024

00:10:36.240 you know, moniker beneath it.

00:10:41.800 What do you think about Trump 2024?

00:10:43.840 Is he the party's standard bearer still?

00:10:46.720 And is this a good idea so soon in the process?

00:10:50.880 You know, I would prefer that it wait once again till after December 6th

00:10:54.340 and that we concentrate on the seat in Georgia.

00:10:56.700 And my fear is, is that by getting in now,

00:10:59.300 it will appear to some people that it's all about him and not so much about,

00:11:02.920 you know, trying to win the Senate.

00:11:04.680 So I think it would be better for him to wait till after December 6th.

00:11:09.020 As far as my decision, you know, I haven't decided whether I'm going to get involved

00:11:12.040 in the Republican primary prospects.

00:11:14.600 I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be personally involved as a candidate,

00:11:17.260 but I don't think that at this point I'm going to get involved too much

00:11:20.920 because there's so many things that, you know, I just came from a meeting.

00:11:24.420 We're talking about COVID origins.

00:11:26.360 We really want to have some investigations.

00:11:28.080 The House definitely will have it.

00:11:29.860 I'm hoping the Senate, when they see the House move forward, will say,

00:11:32.480 well, gosh, if the House is going to do it,

00:11:33.900 maybe we should try a bipartisan investigation over here.

00:11:36.740 They've stonewalled us for two years.

00:11:38.720 But like I saw your interview the other day, it was one of the best ones I did.

00:11:41.600 And I compliment you on this, on Bob Gary.

00:11:44.740 And, you know, I think the counterpart was Alina Chen.

00:11:49.040 And that was just wonderful, incredibly informative.

00:11:51.820 But the American public hasn't seen that.

00:11:54.080 And we knew we need to see this because the next virus that leaks from a lab

00:11:57.660 could be much worse.

00:11:58.640 And we have a death wish if we're going to keep doing this research without any controls on it.

00:12:04.600 And I had three doctors who came in recently, scientists, all peer-reviewed many, many journal

00:12:09.860 articles, and they all came to the same conclusion.

00:12:12.100 This type of research needs to be treated as if it were a nuclear weapon.

00:12:16.060 It needs to be controlled by an independent agency.

00:12:18.580 And tax dollars shouldn't be sent willy-nilly to communist or totalitarian countries

00:12:22.900 to do this type of research.

00:12:24.480 I'm, I'm, that's my biggest disappointment in seeing the GOP not take control of the Senate

00:12:29.680 is I really wanted to see you run those hearings.

00:12:32.160 I mean, it could still happen, as you point out, but could it happen in the House alone?

00:12:37.340 I feel less confident about how that will go, but could it?

00:12:41.640 It's going to happen in the House.

00:12:43.500 You know, the, the leaders over there are very much into it.

00:12:46.540 And I know the two that will be prominent in this will be, uh, Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer

00:12:52.380 from my state.

00:12:53.660 Uh, one, uh, Jim Jordan will be chairman of the judiciary and Jamie Comer will be chairman

00:12:58.400 of oversight.

00:12:59.680 And, uh, I know they're very interested in this investigation.

00:13:02.920 They want to get to the truth, you know, one, because we care about this happening again.

00:13:07.560 It isn't so much, you know, I think blame goes where it goes, but to me, this isn't so much

00:13:12.340 the blame game, it's looking forward to saying the virus COVID-19 killed 0.3%, but that was

00:13:19.160 still about a million people.

00:13:20.920 But if we had a virus that killed 20%, that'd be 60 million people in our country.

00:13:25.700 And there are viruses that they're experimenting on that can kill 20, maybe even 50% of the

00:13:30.820 people.

00:13:31.460 And this is a, this is a death wish for, for civilization.

00:13:35.620 That's why one of the scientists put this a death wish for civilization.

00:13:39.080 And it absolutely has to come.

00:13:41.200 And I, I am still trying with my Democrat colleagues here to get them to agree to a

00:13:45.260 bipartisan, uh, investigation and it's not completely out of the question and maybe they'll

00:13:50.480 see it going on in the house and say, well, gosh, we don't want just the Republicans to

00:13:54.120 investigate it.

00:13:54.660 Maybe we will have a bipartisan investigation in the, in the Senate.

00:13:58.120 What, what are they so afraid of?

00:13:59.680 Why on earth wouldn't they do it?

00:14:01.720 Um, lastly, I know you're short on time, but I have to ask you about Nancy Pelosi, whose

00:14:06.660 husband was attacked, uh, a few weeks ago.

00:14:08.920 She came out and spoke about it for the first time on the Sunday shows and really took aim

00:14:13.400 at disrespectful Republicans because she did not like the way some were speaking about

00:14:18.840 the attack.

00:14:19.460 Here's a little bit of that.

00:14:20.540 Sot three.

00:14:20.900 But it wasn't just the attack.

00:14:24.780 It was the Republican reaction to it, which was disgraceful.

00:14:29.440 But that trauma is intensified by the ridiculous, disrespectful attitude that the Republicans and

00:14:37.740 there's no, nobody disassociating themselves from the horrible response that they gave to

00:14:43.900 it.

00:14:44.120 Well, you would think that there would be some level of responsibility, but what, what you

00:14:50.160 see, what the reaction is on the other side to this, to make a joke of it.

00:14:54.020 So she didn't much appreciate people saying anything other than I'm so, so sorry for what

00:14:59.620 happened to your husband.

00:15:00.820 I know you were on the receiving end of a vicious attack that punctured your lung.

00:15:06.200 You had six ribs broken when somebody, a neighbor ran down a hill and slammed into you.

00:15:12.320 You had your earbuds and you didn't see him.

00:15:14.380 You didn't hear him coming.

00:15:16.020 And, um, I wonder if you received above board treatment of the kind she's demanding from Nancy

00:15:21.640 Pelosi's own family at the time.

00:15:24.700 You know, I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything, but on this, I do.

00:15:28.720 I think some of the accounts of her husband were despicable and, uh, I had a great deal

00:15:33.980 of sympathy for him and his injuries.

00:15:36.040 I was struck once in the back so hard that six ribs were broken.

00:15:40.160 Three of them were completely separated.

00:15:41.740 We're not talking about cracked ribs.

00:15:42.740 We're talking about broken in half where the ends rubbed upon each other until they could

00:15:46.760 finally heal months later.

00:15:48.720 Um, lung was damaged.

00:15:50.400 I coughed up blood for a year and a half.

00:15:52.400 I finally had part of my lung removed.

00:15:54.900 And so, uh, the left-wing media thought was hilarious, including Nancy Pelosi's daughter,

00:15:59.640 who basically tweeted out that my neighbor was her hero.

00:16:03.540 My political opponent this time around, we crushed him in the election.

00:16:07.860 Um, but I wouldn't debate him because he actually put an ad out mocking it and celebrating the

00:16:13.040 attack on me.

00:16:13.660 So no, the left-wing MSNB, uh, MSNBC anchors laughed on air and said it was the funniest

00:16:20.180 story of the year for them.

00:16:21.440 And so, no, I, I went through a terrible amount of pain.

00:16:24.420 I still have health issues related to this and no sympathy, not only no sympathy, but

00:16:29.820 mocking and still to this day, people who worked for my opponent call calling the person

00:16:35.540 who attacked me, their hero every day online this.

00:16:38.380 So I don't like what they did to Paul Pelosi, but I think Nancy needs to talk to her daughter.

00:16:42.860 I mean, her daughter's part of the same kind of crazy left-wing anger.

00:16:46.760 And there's crazy right-wing anger and, uh, Paul, Paul Pelosi deserves nothing but our

00:16:51.460 sympathy.

00:16:51.900 He's just an innocent man who was, uh, uh, attacked.

00:16:54.840 And I think we should have nothing but sympathy or empathy for that.

00:16:58.140 Yes.

00:16:58.780 And you've said that before.

00:16:59.880 It's crazy.

00:17:00.360 Even now, uh, and in Navarro over on the view sends out some message suggesting, oh, some

00:17:06.740 GOPers like McConnell and Romney condemned the attack on Paul Pelosi.

00:17:09.840 Most remain silent.

00:17:10.800 Others made jokes.

00:17:11.600 Others suggested the attacker be released.

00:17:13.120 And then others tried to score points by comparing to Rand Paul getting decked by his

00:17:19.480 neighbor.

00:17:20.340 This from the party of Christian values.

00:17:23.800 I know your wife, Kelly, of whom I am a fan, uh, tweeted out what exactly this felon did

00:17:29.700 when he attacked you and said, um, this guy had violent anti-Trump social media, yet you

00:17:35.300 belittle his violence because you don't like Rand.

00:17:38.400 I mean, the double standard is pretty galling.

00:17:41.300 It's got to hurt in a few different ways for you and your family.

00:17:45.800 Yeah.

00:17:46.460 Um, Anna Navarro is, uh, you know, she's, she's a comedy and, uh, nothing, nothing about

00:17:52.340 her is serious or should be taken seriously.

00:17:54.620 She's, uh, not a Republican, not a conservative, and it's just a farce to have her on the air

00:18:00.140 claiming to represent that she's in any way Republican, but, uh, she's not very insightful

00:18:05.060 either.

00:18:05.720 She, uh, we were on one time with the show and we were talking about my book, the case

00:18:09.780 against socialism that our wife and I wrote together.

00:18:12.160 And in the book, one of the themes is basically that there isn't a kinder, gentler, nice sort

00:18:18.540 of socialism that they tend to go hand in hand with state sponsored violence.

00:18:21.980 And I was talking about Maduro and Chavez in Venezuela.

00:18:25.720 And, uh, she's yelling at me on the couch saying, I was saying that they were socialists

00:18:30.320 and she was like, no, no, they're murderers and thugs.

00:18:32.340 And I said, precisely there are socialists and murderers and thugs.

00:18:35.980 That's the theme of the book.

00:18:36.980 You just don't get it, but she wants them to be just evil people.

00:18:40.680 So people want Hitler to be evil, what he was, but they don't want to acknowledge that

00:18:45.360 he was a socialist or they want to say, well, yeah, Stalin was evil, but they don't want

00:18:49.260 to acknowledge that he was a socialist or Pol Pot or Mao.

00:18:52.600 So the consistent theme with all these people is evil, but it's also socialism.

00:18:56.440 And, uh, this is the kind of subtlety that Anna Navarro is not capable of, but, uh, you

00:19:02.780 know, I think her, her form of buffoonery, I guess it appropriately is on a show featuring

00:19:08.520 buffoonery.

00:19:10.660 Senator Paul, always a pleasure talking to you.

00:19:12.660 We'll definitely be watching what your next move is and, uh, what your, your colleagues

00:19:16.600 over there in the house are going to do when, and if they do take control of the gavel, all

00:19:20.580 the best.

00:19:21.980 Thanks, Megan.

00:19:22.620 Coming up, a deep dive into the crazy FTX story.

00:19:26.860 Do you understand it?

00:19:27.580 We're going to help you understand it.

00:19:28.780 And we're going to explain exactly why it has such far reaching implications into the

00:19:32.820 democratic party.

00:19:33.840 Think they're giving the money back.

00:19:38.800 If you have not heard the name Sam Bankman free before or SBF, you're about to learn a

00:19:44.460 whole lot more about him, whether you listen to this program or you don't, because his name

00:19:48.060 is everywhere and it's going to be for quite some time.

00:19:50.840 He is a multi-billionaire at just 30 years old, reportedly, thanks to cryptocurrency.

00:19:57.760 And he has been a mega donor for the Democrats, a funder of left-leaning media outlets and

00:20:03.120 the major lobbyist in DC for the industry he represents.

00:20:07.220 And now over the past week, it all came crashing down.

00:20:11.980 And there are major questions to be answered about how this happened.

00:20:15.880 Jeffrey Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and knows the

00:20:20.400 crypto industry very well.

00:20:22.400 He joins me now.

00:20:23.240 Jeffrey, welcome to the show.

00:20:24.700 It's so nice to see you, Megan.

00:20:25.840 Thank you so much for having me.

00:20:26.960 And I hope you're right that this becomes a big source of controversy.

00:20:30.180 I'm not very optimistic based on the New York Times article this morning, but.

00:20:33.920 Well, right.

00:20:34.560 We'll get to that, too.

00:20:35.680 But it's going to be tough because, I mean, it's just such a colossal failure and implosion

00:20:40.740 that it's going to be tough to ignore, at least the financial papers, but beyond.

00:20:44.020 And OK, so this guy, SBF, he's 30 years old and he starts he went to MIT.

00:20:50.880 He's the son of two Stanford professors.

00:20:55.080 He goes to MIT, gets out of MIT.

00:20:57.420 He works for a traditional firm, as I understand it, for four years or so, and then decides at

00:21:02.500 the age of 26 he's going to get into the crypto business.

00:21:05.420 And and what is his crypto business and what made it different from the other crypto businesses?

00:21:09.780 Well, there were many exchanges in the U.S. now.

00:21:13.060 I mean, there's Gemini, there's Coinbase, there's very, very many legitimate crypto exchanges

00:21:17.340 out there.

00:21:17.860 But he decided that he was smarter and fancier than the rest of them.

00:21:21.580 And he would he would take on the industry in 2019 and started FTX.

00:21:28.260 And just strangely, out of nowhere, he he kind of rocketed up and passed up the market capitalization

00:21:35.020 of all of his competitors.

00:21:36.140 And it's just something very funny about it.

00:21:38.120 And he did all the fashionable things, right?

00:21:40.620 He talked a different game from, say, the Winklevoss twins or, you know, the head of Coinbase

00:21:47.800 or the rest of the industry.

00:21:49.140 He was all about marketing himself as a socially conscious business person, so to speak.

00:21:55.760 So it was all about ESG and DEI or what he called effective altruism.

00:22:01.240 And also playing well with the regulators.

00:22:05.160 So he became a big Washington presence and then pushed all the other buttons, right?

00:22:09.480 It was big advertising.

00:22:11.060 He bought a stadium, the FTX stadium in Miami, you know, hired fancy stars, you know, Katy Perry,

00:22:20.740 you know, advertised the Super Bowl with Tom Brady and Larry David.

00:22:26.660 So, you know, you had all these buttons being pushed.

00:22:29.760 I tell you, there's other funny things about him.

00:22:33.400 He became a sort of a cartoon style caricature of these sort of youthful seeming geniuses that

00:22:40.980 have become to come to be valorized over the last 10 years, almost just inhabiting an archetype,

00:22:48.060 you know, with the leg twitch and the disheveled look and unwilling to wear anything but cargo

00:22:55.060 shorts and T-shirts and sneakers and, you know, had the look of somebody who just guzzled sodas

00:23:01.960 all day.

00:23:02.480 You know, he had that, you know, and the MIT thing and, you know, this sort of, this structured

00:23:09.600 really to get rid of incredulity that would normally affect venture capitalists.

00:23:14.540 He pushed all the buttons and so celebrated as the next JP Morgan, the world's first trillionaire

00:23:21.340 and adoring media interviews saying, tell us about, tell us about your philosophy.

00:23:27.760 What, why is it that you want to be so rich?

00:23:31.160 And he says, well, you know, my philosophy.

00:23:34.860 Just as great as we think you are, explain why you're even greater.

00:23:37.700 My philosophy is that you should become rich so that you can give your money away to good

00:23:46.420 causes.

00:23:48.180 Really?

00:23:48.720 That's amazing.

00:23:49.440 You don't need the money.

00:23:50.600 Oh, not for me, you know.

00:23:52.480 Well, you don't drive a Lamborghini.

00:23:54.300 Oh, no, no, no.

00:23:54.960 I drive a Camry.

00:23:56.400 It's right over here.

00:23:57.280 Have a look at it.

00:23:58.080 Of course, they didn't.

00:23:59.800 Off camera was his $40 million, you know, estate in the Bahamas, you know.

00:24:04.760 I know, I think I know the place that he was staying in the Bahamas because I recognize

00:24:09.120 the building from the television.

00:24:11.460 We've we've gone vacation on vacation there.

00:24:13.980 I think it's the Albany Resort down in the Bahamas.

00:24:16.760 And it's a very swanky place that Tiger Woods and others have invested in.

00:24:21.020 And we've never stayed in that place that he's in because it's ridiculously expensive.

00:24:25.160 Like we we could never afford to be there.

00:24:27.740 It's right in the marina looking at all the yachts.

00:24:30.180 And so, yeah, his little humble Toyota Camry story is a lie, too.

00:24:33.840 So but let me just back up for people who don't follow it like I don't.

00:24:38.100 The exchange, when you say he started the FTX exchange, that's that's a place where people

00:24:43.320 who want to buy and trade in crypto can do it.

00:24:47.340 You can do it on an exchange.

00:24:48.940 So if you want to invest in, you know, Bitcoin, you might buy it on his FTX exchange, correct?

00:24:57.540 Yeah, that's right.

00:24:58.160 So the crypto ecosystem is self-contained.

00:25:01.180 You know, once you get on the blockchain, you can move money here.

00:25:04.260 All these coins are fungible with each other.

00:25:05.980 You can do it all from your cell phone or store all your assets in a in a in a in a cold

00:25:12.680 wallet, you know, on a treasure wallet.

00:25:14.640 You know, you don't need this exchange is where you need them is for the on ramps and the off

00:25:19.600 ramps.

00:25:19.940 So if you're moving dollars to crypto, you need somebody to make the exchange for you.

00:25:24.200 And if you want to convert your crypto back into dollars, you need somebody to do that

00:25:28.400 too.

00:25:29.860 So exchanges have always been part of the industry.

00:25:33.700 Back before 2013, there were anybody could run an exchange, you know, because it was kind

00:25:38.940 of a wild west.

00:25:39.900 I actually liked it better.

00:25:41.060 But then the U.S.

00:25:41.840 Treasury said, if you're going to run an exchange, you have to register as a money exchange, same

00:25:46.760 as any any business.

00:25:48.020 And that means registering in every state, which means you're going to spend six figures

00:25:52.140 and comply with thousands of pages of stuff and so on.

00:25:56.820 So the industry actually became just a few dominant players, you know, after that, they're

00:26:02.900 good people and they are running a legitimate business, you know, from Coinbase to Gemini.

00:26:08.060 I mean, you need these services to to buy.

00:26:10.560 And what you do with the exchange, you just link them up to your bank account and buy and

00:26:14.260 sell crypto as you see fit.

00:26:16.200 And a lot of people use them to custody their assets and and play play games, right?

00:26:22.920 Trading this, trading that.

00:26:25.560 And you know how it is the same as with the stock market.

00:26:28.440 When the market's going up, everybody's a genius, you know?

00:26:31.320 Yeah, that's right.

00:26:32.720 And that's right.

00:26:34.160 So he not only had FTX the exchange, but he had FTT.

00:26:38.280 He created his own Bitcoin or like sort of cryptocurrency FTT.

00:26:42.980 So he's like, this is great.

00:26:43.800 I'll run the exchange and I'll have my own coin, too, that people can buy.

00:26:47.600 And then he had this company, Alameda, I guess, which is more it's like the is it like

00:26:53.940 a J.P. Morgan?

00:26:54.800 Is it like a Goldman Sachs?

00:26:56.120 Is it like a hey, Megan, you want to invest in crypto?

00:26:59.020 We'll advise you.

00:27:00.080 We'll do it for you.

00:27:01.240 We'll probably use the FTX exchange and buy the FTT coin.

00:27:04.620 But we're just going to take this hassle off your hands.

00:27:08.580 And they engaged a lot of mergers and acquisitions.

00:27:11.780 So Alameda research was used for a lot of purposes and receiving funds and manipulating

00:27:16.340 funds, moving them in or out of the industry, holding a gigantic portion of FTT.

00:27:24.000 And, you know, you should be clear about these tokens.

00:27:27.200 You know, anybody can create a token of any name in about 20 seconds.

00:27:30.940 I can make it I can make a Megyn Kelly while I'm talking to you right now, you know, and

00:27:35.000 and so but the value is zero until I market it.

00:27:38.440 Right.

00:27:38.680 So until I can create a market for it.

00:27:42.700 So Alameda research is considered to be a market maker in Wall Street terms.

00:27:47.280 But I mean, what that meant was just a sort of a way to pump up the value of FTT.

00:27:53.260 So a lot of the danger of these institutions, they become these strange sort of perpetual motion

00:27:58.180 machines.

00:27:58.620 You know, well, my company is backed by my token.

00:28:00.900 Well, what backs your token?

00:28:02.260 Well, my company.

00:28:03.740 Yeah, right.

00:28:04.280 It's all very incestuous.

00:28:06.340 And he had this band of, you know, very sketchy characters helping him run these these corporations

00:28:12.460 and these entities out of this Bahamian resort.

00:28:16.220 They all looked like they were about 14.

00:28:19.480 His ex-girlfriend, I guess, ran.

00:28:21.500 One of them was bragging about how she she's not good at math.

00:28:25.040 She didn't know what she was doing.

00:28:26.140 There was no stop loss program and all of this is coming home to roost now.

00:28:30.120 So while while the goose was looking good, everybody said they're all brilliant.

00:28:33.680 This is amazing.

00:28:34.360 They sleep on beanbags.

00:28:35.700 How cool.

00:28:36.740 And now the blooms coming off the rose as we realize what's really going on.

00:28:40.300 So so how so OK, so he starts FTX.

00:28:43.860 He's he's good at sort of creating this weird image.

00:28:46.580 As you said, he's sort of like he's right at a central casting for who the media loves

00:28:50.660 to pump up.

00:28:51.420 Like he's a little I don't know if he's on the spectrum or what, but they like that.

00:28:56.020 They promote that the way he dresses to his little verbal and physical tics.

00:29:00.680 And since he'd come from MIT, I was at a legitimate bank for a while.

00:29:05.360 I was like, oh, OK, he's got credentials, kind of like Madoff, Madoff, too.

00:29:08.920 Right.

00:29:09.060 He had good a good resume.

00:29:11.700 And so during the height of crypto, I guess he must have had some value to the company

00:29:16.900 and started to parlay that into dazzling things like having FTX in the name of the Miami Heat

00:29:23.000 Stadium and partnering with Tom Brady, all these things.

00:29:26.060 And then more money came in, more money came in, and then we'll get to the collapse in

00:29:30.580 a second.

00:29:30.960 But then the media came in, too, and the media had a big role in creating this guy's image.

00:29:37.460 How so?

00:29:39.700 Well, it was the adoring interviews and and and and and the fact that he sort of expressed

00:29:44.420 all the fashionable values of woke ideology.

00:29:47.680 You know, I mean, he was a really a piece of work and acting.

00:29:51.480 And it's funny because, you know, you can be these days woke ideology.

00:29:55.700 You can find and it's like it's like a can you open up and dump it out of the table,

00:30:01.900 pick through it.

00:30:02.600 Right.

00:30:02.860 So it's climate change, pandemic planning, socially conscious investing, giving away all

00:30:11.260 your money.

00:30:11.820 I mean, it's all these sort of buzzwords they use.

00:30:14.160 None of it's really serious.

00:30:15.580 But he really set out to say, look, I'm one of you.

00:30:19.220 And then he backed it up with with lots of donations to the Democratic Party.

00:30:22.960 So that so one of the things that's funny about the crypto world is every new token has

00:30:27.500 to have a stick, you know, a marketing gimmick.

00:30:30.120 Well, his his value added to the crypto world was basically woke ideology and all the fashionable

00:30:36.220 causes associated with him, you know, among which was this this backing of of Ukraine and

00:30:46.160 and the war with Russia, which we can get to in a minute.

00:30:49.020 Right.

00:30:49.160 That's that's a strange thing.

00:30:50.780 But that was his his value added.

00:30:52.540 And then the media loving media interviews.

00:30:56.160 And and you would think that, as you mentioned earlier, that, you know, the the CEO of Alameda

00:31:02.420 Research, for example, says, oh, you don't need anything other than elementary school math,

00:31:06.500 you know, to run this company.

00:31:07.860 She actually said this.

00:31:09.200 Right.

00:31:09.420 And but it just it's so funny, isn't it?

00:31:13.800 How dope.

00:31:14.480 It's it's funny, horrifying.

00:31:16.340 So wait, a couple of soundbites that I want to get in here first.

00:31:18.720 Here's a soundbite with credit to Jesse Waters, who turned me on to this as I watched his opening

00:31:22.440 monologue last night.

00:31:24.580 This has got a little bit from a YouTube profile that was done on this guy, Sam, saying, like,

00:31:30.760 who is he?

00:31:31.500 And here's just to color in the lines on this image that we've created for the audience.

00:31:36.060 Here's a clip.

00:31:39.420 Okay, the guy you see next to me is the most generous billionaire in the world.

00:31:47.180 And I found him.

00:31:48.920 Hi, my name is Sam.

00:31:49.980 And this is my story.

00:31:51.560 Sam has crazy hair.

00:31:53.720 Sam is vegan.

00:31:55.500 Sam sleeps five hours a night.

00:31:58.320 Sam lives in the Bahamas with 10 roommates.

00:32:02.240 Sam is 29 years old only.

00:32:04.940 But Sam has 22 billion dollars.

00:32:08.880 And he wants to donate all of it to charity.

00:32:14.000 Okay, so you can see where it's going.

00:32:15.840 But now here now watches this next clip of Sam talking about how he wants to fund Democrats.

00:32:21.700 And you can see the leg twitch and the press building him up and why they fell in love with

00:32:27.980 him because his messaging, as weird as the guy seems, was spot on.

00:32:31.620 And I think it's sought eight.

00:32:34.360 In the end, I want to do what's right for the country.

00:32:36.200 You think every money you spend in politics should be disclosed publicly?

00:32:39.780 Are you comfortable with that?

00:32:40.680 If there was a norm where every dollar that everyone donated in politics was to be disclosed

00:32:45.600 publicly, I would have a lot of sympathy for that.

00:32:49.740 I think I might support it.

00:32:50.540 I haven't thought carefully about it enough to know.

00:32:52.500 But it sounds like what you're saying is maybe there's some donations that you have

00:32:55.840 made that you wouldn't make if you knew they were going to be immediately public.

00:32:58.720 So I think I don't I don't generally think about it that way.

00:33:02.540 OK, so the more he says he's going to donate, although he's like and I want more and more

00:33:09.900 disclosure, although I'm going to keep my company in the Bahamas where I don't have to

00:33:12.920 follow all the same rules.

00:33:14.020 Right.

00:33:14.200 That's basically how it was going.

00:33:16.100 But the numbers that he actually wound up giving to Democrats were staggering, have been

00:33:21.260 I mean, up until last week, have been absolutely staggering.

00:33:25.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:26.420 And and and one of his rackets was, you know, arguing for this regulation, the transparency and

00:33:32.160 all this kind of stuff, I mean, you know, and then buying off all the people who would

00:33:36.440 be investigating him and otherwise looking carefully at his at his business operations.

00:33:42.040 So I read somebody said a couple of days ago, it's a great line that he hoped to become

00:33:48.120 too big to jail, which I thought was a very interesting phrase.

00:33:52.560 I mean, it's sort of paying protection money for his his little racket.

00:33:56.940 And the more money he gave away and and the more he engaged in the sort of marionette, you

00:34:03.200 know, child genius routine, the less incredulous people were.

00:34:08.280 And the more people are celebrating him as the world's most generous, enlightened soul,

00:34:15.220 you know, who understands things about crypto.

00:34:16.820 So none of us understand is just making this this empire that's going to fund all, you know,

00:34:23.140 D&C friendly charities, you know, all over the country.

00:34:26.780 And, you know, his brother even established a pandemic.

00:34:30.920 It's called something like Fund Against Pandemics or Pandemic Planning Fund or something like

00:34:35.820 that solely for the purpose of receiving some of the 30 billion dollars of the Biden administration

00:34:42.900 and scheduled for to fund pandemic planning.

00:34:47.480 So every time you see Sam out there going on about the importance of preventing the next

00:34:51.700 pandemic, you know, he's basically shilling for his for his brother.

00:34:55.120 And then then you have his his mother, you know, who herself was a co-founder of Mind the

00:35:01.300 Gap PAC, one of the largest Democratic PAC.

00:35:04.040 So you you could see how he surrounded himself with with all this protection, all these these

00:35:10.920 protection rackets.

00:35:12.460 And you mentioned the fact he was in the Bahamas.

00:35:14.340 Now, that is a fascinating thing to me.

00:35:17.360 Why would you be in the Bahamas as a crypto exchange?

00:35:21.460 There are some regulations in the US that you don't like and you would like to get rid

00:35:25.760 of some regulations, some costs of doing business, some taxes.

00:35:28.860 That's why you're in the Bahamas.

00:35:30.160 I do find it really interesting that all the champions of all these hyper regulations of

00:35:35.820 the crypto industry suddenly became adoring worshipers of Sam Bankman Freed, you know,

00:35:44.260 even though he's in the Bahamas for a reason.

00:35:47.020 I mean, why didn't Bill Clinton, you know, why didn't something go off in his head?

00:35:50.440 This guy may not be entirely on the up and up here.

00:35:53.780 Right.

00:35:54.040 He's operating out of the Bahamas.

00:35:55.780 What?

00:35:57.040 What's he trying to avoid?

00:35:58.900 No, but they kept saying, no, this is entirely normal.

00:36:01.700 Oh, lots of great business people see the Bahamas as a friendly place because, you know,

00:36:07.480 the ocean views and fancy houses and that sort of thing.

00:36:10.780 I mean, you know, you had every reason to suspect this guy was running a racket.

00:36:17.820 Every reason.

00:36:19.260 Three years to go from nothing to one of the dominant crypto exchanges in the world, Larry

00:36:26.140 David chilling for you and buying stadiums in Miami kept giving me a break.

00:36:30.120 I mean, looking back and I have to tell you, Megan, like within the community of Bitcoin

00:36:39.060 and related currencies and Ethereum and all these crypto world, people were very suspicious

00:36:45.960 of this guy.

00:36:47.100 And let's not forget, you know, the company that finally brought him down with a series

00:36:51.920 of tweets was the CEO of Binance because they were involved with a deal.

00:36:58.100 Either, you know, Binance was going to buy FTX or FTX was going to buy Binance.

00:37:04.260 It would actually reverse the order.

00:37:05.980 And once they started doing due diligence, the CEO of Binance said, you know, I'm highly

00:37:11.320 suspicious of this guy.

00:37:12.640 I don't think that the numbers are really adding up.

00:37:15.460 If I were you, I mean, the subtext is I were you, I would watch your money carefully,

00:37:21.440 have a look.

00:37:22.020 Well, it turned out, of course, that his suspicions were exactly right.

00:37:26.960 Sam had been using depositors money in his exchange to subsidize his mergers and acquisitions

00:37:35.460 and activity that were being run by Alameda Research.

00:37:37.900 So there was this deep relationship.

00:37:39.180 Wait, wait, I'll get to that one second.

00:37:40.900 Hold on one second because I'm going to set that up for the audience.

00:37:43.740 But before I go there, I just want to give some of the numbers.

00:37:48.080 He gave well, he said that he expected to give north of one hundred million in the next

00:37:53.280 presidential election and that he had a soft ceiling of one billion with the spending likely

00:37:59.320 to be on the higher end if Trump runs again.

00:38:02.680 He gave 10 million plus to back President Joe Biden in 2020.

00:38:08.060 He has hired a network of political operatives and spent tens of millions more shaping Democratic

00:38:14.580 House primaries.

00:38:15.780 So I'm sure, you know, Tuesday was a complicated day for him because his company was being exposed

00:38:21.280 as a fraud.

00:38:22.480 And yet all of these people who he had backed were winning elections and he was ready to

00:38:27.700 do it again.

00:38:28.200 He had also backed a bunch of media companies through the brother.

00:38:32.720 And the pandemic thing was a huge thing.

00:38:34.480 Thanks to the brother, Gabe, who was going to run all that.

00:38:36.920 But he was also putting a bunch of dough into companies like Vox, The Intercept, ProPublica,

00:38:44.700 the Law and Justice Journalism Project, and most recently, Semaphore, which is that's that's

00:38:51.700 the Ben Smith organization.

00:38:52.940 Right.

00:38:54.340 In any event, from the formerly of The New York Times.

00:38:56.440 So he put a bunch of money in all these left leaning, you know, some would take issue with

00:39:03.740 that.

00:39:03.960 But yeah, organizations and many of them then went on to cover him very favorably or got

00:39:10.300 the money right after they did a favorable piece on him.

00:39:12.960 So you can see how the influence game works.

00:39:17.360 You sure can.

00:39:18.140 And I do find the timing interesting.

00:39:20.200 Right.

00:39:20.380 So we went right through the midterms.

00:39:22.060 And, you know, what is it, 48 hours later, just a just a few days later, the the whole

00:39:28.720 funding machinery of the of the Democratic Party and all the associated media companies

00:39:35.440 that have been engaged in censorship and partisanship, you know, all along the whole thing just falls

00:39:41.680 apart, you know, just very conveniently, a few days after the midterms that he basically

00:39:46.160 funded through his magic bean company in the Bahamas.

00:39:49.940 I mean, there's there's a lot of very strange things going on here, I would say.

00:39:54.020 Maybe it's just a complete coincidence of the timing.

00:39:57.680 But, you know, you've got major distortions of political decisions that the American people

00:40:06.700 are engaged in, you know, use with thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars of fake money

00:40:13.720 and phony companies and fraudulent activities and Ponzi schemes.

00:40:18.540 It you know, you think about it, how much how much trouble did Trump go through on the Russian

00:40:23.820 investigation to find out how much interference was there?

00:40:26.460 Well, we should have at least that much, you know, sort of focus and intrepid concern for

00:40:32.760 what happened and the relationship here between FTX and the midterm elections that just took

00:40:38.000 place and the entire machinery behind it.

00:40:40.020 You know, I don't know what's going to happen with that 10 million dollars.

00:40:42.800 Is Joe Biden going to give that back?

00:40:44.340 His campaign used it.

00:40:45.440 He won the presidency.

00:40:46.920 Now you've got a lot of investors who are going to be hurt as a result of this guy not

00:40:50.060 having the actual money.

00:40:51.620 So does he give it back or do these Democratic politicians give back the money?

00:40:55.620 I'm clearly not.

00:40:56.320 Right.

00:40:56.600 I mean, it's already spent.

00:40:57.720 I mean, they're busy paying off their debts and so on.

00:41:00.680 So the money's the money's been banked.

00:41:03.700 And I don't know, you know, one really does wonder.

00:41:06.300 And so I hope we get some investigations.

00:41:08.720 You know, close.

00:41:09.420 Look, I'm sure the books are a mess if there are any.

00:41:13.980 By the math scholar.

00:41:15.880 Right.

00:41:16.400 Yeah, right.

00:41:17.400 And the elementary school education, you know, of the CEO there.

00:41:22.120 So maybe there were no books at all.

00:41:23.860 And maybe the whole thing was just intended to come and go in three years.

00:41:26.840 I don't know.

00:41:27.320 You know, I have no proof of that statement.

00:41:30.160 But but, you know, the FTX was founded just right after Biden declared in 2019 and in three

00:41:36.280 years.

00:41:36.600 And I have I have people who have been in this industry a very long time.

00:41:40.880 They work very hard to build a company.

00:41:43.480 They they keep clean books.

00:41:45.160 They comply with all the regulations.

00:41:47.060 They're serving their customers very faithfully.

00:41:49.940 They do a proper marketing.

00:41:51.320 They you know, they they have a good relationship with their customers.

00:41:56.040 And this punk shows up out of nowhere with all the right connections.

00:42:00.320 And loving media coverage of his eventual trillionaire status, the new Warren Buffett, the J.P.

00:42:07.800 Morgan, a gun knows what else they called him.

00:42:10.160 And he gives it all, you know, gives away vast amounts of money.

00:42:13.260 I mean, second only to Soros, to the to the Democratic Party and and the media covering

00:42:19.600 the elections.

00:42:21.260 It's all really interesting.

00:42:23.140 And Megan, I'm sure you have seen this before, but it shows you just how how dopey people can

00:42:30.400 become when when they believe that there's a magic money tree out there and that they're

00:42:34.860 going to be able to pluck the leaves off of it at will.

00:42:37.940 And that's that's why he got a free pass instead of using his MIT education and his obviously

00:42:43.940 brilliant mind to create something that was actually a value.

00:42:47.080 He used it to pay off the relevant people who would expose his fraud.

00:42:51.600 I mean, that's that's how he used his brilliance.

00:42:53.680 And it was a smart move.

00:42:55.600 The party in power, which he had a hand in putting in power, the media who would expose

00:42:59.960 and cover him.

00:43:00.800 And they went along like lapdogs.

00:43:02.860 I mean, even today, I know this is one of the things that's concerning you.

00:43:06.060 Even today, today, post the Chapter 11 filing, which was Friday, and he's now been exposed

00:43:12.360 as you know, there's nothing there.

00:43:13.720 People bought a pig in a poke there.

00:43:15.960 They did a fawning piece on him in The New York Times, which The Times is critics are talking

00:43:19.800 about as if they wrote something to the equivalent of Bernie Madoff.

00:43:23.020 Well, he made a couple of bad investments, but his heart was in the right place.

00:43:28.240 That was what the story said.

00:43:29.680 I read it this morning.

00:43:30.660 I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that.

00:43:32.440 How can you do this?

00:43:33.680 Did you cover Elizabeth Holmes this way?

00:43:35.300 Bernie Madoff?

00:43:36.420 I mean, come on.

00:43:37.000 This is a scam.

00:43:38.560 This guy was running a Ponzi scheme and robbing people all over the place.

00:43:42.720 Instead, The New York Times says, well, it's been a tough time in the crypto world.

00:43:46.700 And his company was so successful.

00:43:50.020 It's almost like it got ahead of him.

00:43:52.440 Nobody expects that kind of success that fast.

00:43:54.860 And maybe he just wasn't quite ready for it.

00:43:56.740 But fortunately for him, he's getting a lot of sleep and thinking through things.

00:44:01.320 Guys, are you serious?

00:44:02.900 This is The New York Times.

00:44:04.080 You know, it's unbelievable.

00:44:06.380 It's unbelievable.

00:44:07.520 Now, and you know this, and I do too.

00:44:10.540 The New York Times is a foreshadowing.

00:44:12.960 It's like a messaging system for a whole network of media.

00:44:17.240 This is how we're going to speak about this issue, people.

00:44:21.720 You want a career in journalism?

00:44:23.120 Do what we do.

00:44:26.640 And so it's a signal to the whole media now to cover the FTX scandal, which is a scandal

00:44:34.400 for our age.

00:44:35.200 And it may just be beginning, by the way.

00:44:37.560 I mean, this could just, you know, the failure of FTX, it could be the Lehman Brothers of our

00:44:43.160 time, you know, as it was in 2008.

00:44:45.040 I mean, there could be a lot of things that are going to unravel from this.

00:44:47.660 We can talk about that too.

00:44:49.380 Yeah.

00:44:49.580 So the media needs to be all over this.

00:44:51.940 And this is a scandal for the ages, you know?

00:44:54.080 This is like, you can't ignore Bernie Madoff.

00:44:56.520 You can't ignore Bernie Madoff.

00:44:57.540 It's a story whether you like it or not, whether you covered it right in the first instance or

00:45:01.360 not.

00:45:01.920 Everyone needs to get on board and correct their past sins.

00:45:04.900 Yes.

00:45:05.120 I want to go over how the implosion took place with Alameda and how that like, because it

00:45:09.160 relates to what's happened in the crypto market over the past year and and just how bad it

00:45:14.060 is, because I heard Charles Payne on Fox News say yesterday, this is Enron times two.

00:45:19.280 Enron times two is a phrase nobody wants to hear.

00:45:21.720 You know what I mean?

00:45:21.960 That was such a colossal implosion.

00:45:23.960 They brought down Arthur Anderson, one of the top six accounting firms in the world when

00:45:28.700 they went down because they weren't looking over the books.

00:45:30.960 I don't know whether anybody looks over the books in crypto, but all things that I want

00:45:34.760 to get to.

00:45:35.220 Could you stay over?

00:45:36.440 Could I could I hold you over?

00:45:37.800 Yeah, sure.

00:45:38.600 Sure.

00:45:38.920 All right.

00:45:39.160 We need to talk about this.

00:45:40.780 Yeah.

00:45:41.080 I feel like we only booked you until like right now, but I need you to stay a little longer

00:45:45.140 and we'll do that.

00:45:46.800 We'll keep Jeffrey here and we'll we'll pick it up on the opposite side of this break.

00:45:50.520 Such a pleasure talking with Jeffrey Tucker.

00:45:52.620 And don't forget, folks, that you can find this show, the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius

00:45:56.740 XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing

00:46:02.660 to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly.

00:46:07.020 If you prefer your your news via audio, like an audio podcast, you can go ahead and follow

00:46:12.640 us at download Apple, Spotify, Pandora Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast.

00:46:16.220 There you find our full archives with more than four hundred and thirty shows.

00:46:19.260 And in the meantime, if you're a podcast lover, you should know that I not only am I no longer

00:46:24.920 the only podcaster in the family.

00:46:27.340 I don't I don't think I'm even in the number one spot.

00:46:29.420 Doug Brunt, my husband, is on fire with his new podcast.

00:46:33.360 I'm getting so many nice compliments from his fans on it.

00:46:36.560 I want to share it with you.

00:46:37.320 It's called Dedicated, Dedicated with Doug Brunt.

00:46:40.240 He opens up the cocktail.

00:46:42.060 He sits down with these well-known authors and he talks about their writing process, their

00:46:46.580 biggest busts, how they came up with the ideas, their book to movie rights.

00:46:50.740 He asked Lee Child, who he had in mind when he wrote Jack Reacher.

00:46:54.640 It was not Tom Cruise.

00:46:56.400 So you'll find out who it was.

00:46:58.120 All sorts of fun things.

00:46:59.160 He has Jess Walter just out.

00:47:00.760 And that is he wrote Beautiful Ruins, among many others.

00:47:04.240 One of the great things about I'm loving about the podcast is writers are great with words

00:47:08.060 and you listen to Jess Walters talk about something as simple as how he loves his favorite

00:47:12.100 cocktail.

00:47:12.860 And suddenly you're transported to a better place.

00:47:15.240 Anyway, you'll love it.

00:47:15.920 Check it out.

00:47:16.640 Dedicated with Doug Brunt.

00:47:20.740 Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute is still with me talking FTX and its founder

00:47:26.520 SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy who is the son of two Stanford professors who are totally

00:47:34.240 donated to left-wing causes, as it turns out, is their son.

00:47:38.900 And he pumped some $40 million into this election cycle, not counting the $10 million he gave to

00:47:45.220 Joe Biden in 2020 and the rest.

00:47:47.720 And as I told you, he was aiming to do between $100 million and $1 billion in the coming election.

00:47:53.420 So that's the guy who has now fallen, totally imploded as a fawning media and industry experts

00:48:01.100 just continue to look the other way, just continue to look the other way.

00:48:05.460 Now, we mentioned Madoff.

00:48:07.000 And this does feel very much like a Ponzi scheme.

00:48:09.340 Our producer, our executive producer, found a clip of Sam speaking in front.

00:48:15.120 Let's see.

00:48:15.560 Is this?

00:48:16.240 I don't know who he's talking to, but he's he's speaking to CNN in July and he's talking

00:48:22.420 about Ponzi schemes.

00:48:24.400 This very man.

00:48:25.380 Listen to Sot 11.

00:48:26.120 Because I think that when you have something which is basically an empty product, which

00:48:30.400 I do think is true of some places, some assets in crypto, that is something where there's

00:48:37.700 certainly real crash potential from it and where there's a lot less utility being brought

00:48:43.100 by it.

00:48:43.980 And so I think that's a much less healthy piece of the ecosystem, whatever you want

00:48:48.880 to call it.

00:48:49.460 Yeah, a real crash could be possible.

00:48:53.080 And that's what he just went through.

00:48:54.540 So let's just let's talk about how it was exposed and how it came crumbling down.

00:48:59.800 You mentioned a rival of his called Binance.

00:49:03.660 And as I understand it, he, Sam, FTX, was thinking about buying Binance, which is very

00:49:09.680 that's ballsy.

00:49:11.560 And then as it turns out, he didn't have the money to do that.

00:49:14.920 And then Binance, which was a rival, too, was looking at buying FTX.

00:49:19.460 And this is where things started to fall apart for FTX.

00:49:22.540 How so?

00:49:24.120 Well, so let's just be clear that this scam could have gone on forever if the prices had

00:49:30.180 just risen and risen and risen, right?

00:49:31.900 I mean, this is just like the Madoff thing.

00:49:33.380 If there's ever more money pouring into the Ponzi scheme, it can go on in perpetuity.

00:49:37.500 And in fact, Madoff lasted for, what, two decades or something like that.

00:49:41.780 The housing crash that brought Madoff down.

00:49:45.400 Yeah.

00:49:45.620 So FTX faced a lot of pressure this year in 2022 when the crypto sector began to kind

00:49:55.220 of fall apart in light of Jerome Powell's dramatic changes in the federal funds rate, right?

00:50:03.000 So we're tightening money.

00:50:04.120 We're trying to crush this inflation thing.

00:50:05.860 And what people didn't really entirely understand, which is now more and more obvious, is that

00:50:10.640 we've been living in an era for 14 years of relatively cheap money, right?

00:50:15.060 I mean, so we've had zero interest rate policies.

00:50:17.960 When inflation came along, interest rates turned dramatically negative.

00:50:22.420 That means that you can't make money by saving in the old-fashioned way.

00:50:26.960 Instead, you have a lot of money chasing return anywhere and everywhere.

00:50:31.180 Over 14 years, that's included a lot of things, you know, financial markets, of course.

00:50:36.480 Big tech companies got levered up.

00:50:38.980 Students took on, you know, tons of student debt to get their credentials.

00:50:44.480 They could get, you know, cushy six-figure jobs, all of which are being eliminated now from many

00:50:50.100 companies.

00:50:50.960 But one of the sectors to really benefit from this era of cheap money was the crypto sector,

00:50:56.080 right?

00:50:56.800 And we like to think that crypto somehow had an immaculate conception in 2009 and lived

00:51:04.700 exogenously from financial markets.

00:51:06.900 And that may have been true for the first, you know, three, four, five years.

00:51:11.200 But in the meantime, once it became fashionable, it just became yet another place to dump a lot

00:51:15.840 of money that benefited from the cheap money policies that Ben Bernanke started in 2008.

00:51:20.940 So when Jerome Powell started tightening rates and he wants to get them into the positive

00:51:26.760 care, well, let me just back up slightly.

00:51:28.960 After the pandemic hit, the Fed was always trying to tighten.

00:51:33.840 But then he got talked into, once again, going to the floor and zero interest rates policy

00:51:41.560 starting in the middle of March 2020.

00:51:43.940 That worked fine for about the first year until the inevitable inflation began, because unlike

00:51:51.540 Bernanke, who put all the fresh, you know, money into the vaults of the Fed, the policy

00:51:57.620 of the U.S. Congress was to distribute it widely as if from a helicopter, right?

00:52:02.040 So we had some $6 trillion printed over the course of, you know, 18 months that just was dropped

00:52:07.700 into everybody's bank accounts as well.

00:52:09.380 Well, remember, well, that fueled inflation, got very high, really started squeezing business

00:52:15.900 margins and really lowering real wages and creating a very close to being a crisis kind

00:52:22.860 of situation.

00:52:23.880 Jerome Powell did not want his legacy to go down as creating the greatest inflation in America

00:52:29.080 in 40 years and destroying the domestic value of the dollar in terms of goods and services.

00:52:33.540 would rather be known as the only truly heroic Fed governor in the post-war period, which

00:52:42.420 is Paul Volcker.

00:52:43.280 So he set out to crush this inflation by tightening money and getting to a terminal rate of interest

00:52:50.340 that's positive and restoring some sanity to the system.

00:52:55.120 So but that with that came the end this year of this sort of wild scramble for return.

00:53:01.800 Is this one of the reasons why if I bought Bitcoin a year ago, it was at something like

00:53:08.980 $54,000 for one, and now I'm told it's more like $14,000 a year later?

00:53:16.080 Yeah, it's experienced a 75% crash in value, which we've seen before in this space, you know,

00:53:22.500 and everybody in it should be aware that that's how volatile it is.

00:53:25.820 But I think what's important here is that we've seen crypto really benefit from the loose

00:53:30.840 money, especially in 2020, is not a coincidence that we peaked at $65,000, you know, which

00:53:36.480 proved to be utterly unsustainable.

00:53:38.180 And now we're in the $15,000 range.

00:53:41.020 And everybody's panicked about a return to $10,000 and lower.

00:53:46.980 And that's in what is the most reputable token.

00:53:51.540 But, you know, you've got 20,000 listed tokens out there.

00:53:54.520 Wow.

00:53:54.660 And most of them are just going to vanish into the same area.

00:53:58.420 And this is one of them.

00:53:59.240 So FTT is his token, and it trades on FTX, his exchange, and it's helped along by his market

00:54:07.840 maker, Alameda.

00:54:09.920 And they, like everybody else, were affected by this dynamic that you're just discussing.

00:54:14.940 It's been a very rough year for crypto, all crypto.

00:54:17.400 Oh, that's right.

00:54:17.920 It's been a rough year for everybody in this industry.

00:54:19.860 Yeah, but he was seen as sort of a golden boy still in this time.

00:54:23.840 And he started buying up distressed firms that were going down left and right during

00:54:27.800 the past 12 months.

00:54:28.980 But let's advance the discussion, because I want to get to a couple other points before

00:54:32.220 I have to let you go.

00:54:33.400 So he gets into this thing with Binance.

00:54:35.920 Turns out Binance starts kicking his tires.

00:54:38.080 All right, maybe I'll buy you.

00:54:39.320 Let me take a look.

00:54:40.400 It doesn't go well.

00:54:41.940 And then the head of Binance takes to Twitter.

00:54:44.320 And why?

00:54:45.320 Why did he do it?

00:54:45.940 Does he hate SPF?

00:54:47.400 Like, why did he do that?

00:54:48.340 Well, there certainly are competitors.

00:54:50.700 But, you know, when you've got a whole industry that lives off confidence, it's devastating

00:54:55.300 to undermine it.

00:54:56.380 So you got, you know, FTX got tested with some withdrawals, the crypto equivalent of

00:55:02.040 the bank run, which we've seen time and again.

00:55:04.360 And once that starts, it's hard to stop.

00:55:06.980 It's just like it's a wonderful life, you know, in the famous scene.

00:55:10.360 People panic.

00:55:10.940 I want my money back, right?

00:55:12.160 Yeah, the guy from Binance saying bad things about STX, whatever, this company, and I want

00:55:16.540 my coin.

00:55:17.140 I want my money.

00:55:17.700 Right.

00:55:18.380 Which would be fine if he had kept full reserves like any reputable crypto exchange

00:55:24.660 would do.

00:55:25.440 In fact, all the exchanges have sent out, you know, big notes to all the customers.

00:55:29.140 Just to be clear, we're keeping full reserves around here.

00:55:31.480 We have your money.

00:55:32.480 We're the custodian of your money.

00:55:33.740 If you want it back, we'll give it back to you.

00:55:35.040 We hope you don't.

00:55:35.880 But, you know, if you withdraw your funds, it's not going to make us illiquid.

00:55:39.020 It's not going to make us go under, okay?

00:55:40.760 We're a full reserve bank exchange.

00:55:43.540 Well, he was using deposit of money and converting it to FTTs, shoving it over to Alameda Research,

00:55:51.080 which served two purposes.

00:55:52.160 One was to pump up the value of FTT and move it in a way that was sort of surreptitious or

00:55:58.400 whatever.

00:55:58.540 And then Alameda Research was able to get this.

00:56:02.220 This is where it gets really weird.

00:56:03.800 You shouldn't have 29-year-olds in this kind of world.

00:56:06.600 It's just crazy.

00:56:08.080 What they started doing, once these exchanges around the country and the world were starting

00:56:12.300 to fail in light of the lower prices for the crypto market in general, he thought the

00:56:19.320 way to fix this was to buy up a bunch of companies, which he did with Alameda Research.

00:56:24.080 He kept acquiring more and more companies.

00:56:25.920 Now, initially, that looked like, wow, this genius, my goodness, he's just gobbling up

00:56:31.540 companies left and right.

00:56:32.640 You know, this guy is just liquid, like you can't believe.

00:56:36.420 And then he gave interviews about that.

00:56:38.020 Why are you doing this, Stan?

00:56:39.800 Well, I'm doing it because I feel a moral obligation to this community.

00:56:44.740 You know, we just can't abandon our friends in times of need.

00:56:48.560 So this is, for me, another example of my effective altruism at work.

00:56:55.500 Oh, wow.

00:56:56.340 You just amaze us with your virtues.

00:56:58.340 It just never, never, there's no end to the depth of your virtue and your socially conscious

00:57:03.020 investing.

00:57:03.640 That's great.

00:57:04.020 Well, what he was actually doing was trying to, first of all, the inevitable, right?

00:57:08.020 He was trying to perpetuate the con game in light of the tighter money and the collapse

00:57:14.680 of the industry in general.

00:57:16.060 Yeah, you got to keep the balls in the air.

00:57:18.800 Maybe he was trying to put it off to the end of the midterms.

00:57:20.940 I don't know.

00:57:21.820 What was he doing?

00:57:22.600 Look, the end was nigh already months ago, six months ago.

00:57:25.840 So he just wanted to squander as much money as possible and get it out there and keep

00:57:31.180 the con going as long as possible.

00:57:32.600 And he didn't have the pot of money.

00:57:33.160 Like he, when there was a run on the bank, effectively, he did not have the pot of money

00:57:36.780 to give to the investors.

00:57:38.020 He'd been spending it over at Alameda to keep that afloat.

00:57:41.220 And this is a no-no.

00:57:42.320 This is a hard and fast legal no-no.

00:57:44.980 Like you're going to go to jail for doing that kind of shit.

00:57:47.760 No-no.

00:57:48.760 And this is what he's dealing with right now, where he absolutely could be facing some very

00:57:52.600 serious criminal charges.

00:57:53.700 It's well beyond the collapse of his company at this point.

00:57:57.040 Yeah, we'll see.

00:57:57.680 I'm actually skeptical of this.

00:57:59.380 The New York Times article this morning really rattled me because I'm afraid that his too-big-to-jail

00:58:04.100 scheme might actually work.

00:58:06.300 So, you know, I'm glad you're on the case.

00:58:08.540 There are a lot of people that are on the case.

00:58:09.860 A lot of independent journalists on Twitter are on the case and are discussing the details

00:58:14.620 of this because God knows you can't depend on the mainstream media at this point.

00:58:17.720 I'm so sorry to say that.

00:58:19.100 The Wall Street Journal actually has run some pretty good stuff.

00:58:21.520 But the New York Times, if that's the signal of how we're going to treat this situation,

00:58:25.960 it's going to be like child genius, you know, business gets ahead of them.

00:58:31.000 Sometimes people are too successful.

00:58:34.260 Too successful.

00:58:35.140 You know, sometimes people are too smart for this world.

00:58:38.740 But the media has a couple of reasons to do this.

00:58:40.520 Not only did they cover for him and not ask the right questions when he was growing weirdly

00:58:45.300 quickly, they love him because he's this altruistic guy, in their view, who's helping a bunch of

00:58:51.300 Democrats get elected in this midterm cycle and Joe Biden last time around and clearly

00:58:54.880 hates Trump checking all boxes.

00:58:57.880 But on top of that, there appears to be some sort of relationship with Ukraine that you

00:59:02.880 referenced 20 minutes ago that they would also approve of.

00:59:06.380 And now I've looked at this six different ways.

00:59:09.100 And this is how I short formed it for myself.

00:59:13.260 Right.

00:59:13.520 OK.

00:59:14.240 The United States gives money to Ukraine.

00:59:16.700 Check.

00:59:17.900 Ukraine then invest money in FTX.

00:59:22.040 They have a crypto donations partnership with FTX.

00:59:25.980 I mean, of all the companies and all the things that you can invest in, Ukraine has chosen

00:59:30.320 FTX, this huge Democrat donor.

00:59:33.000 Then FTX, as I mentioned, gives a bunch of money, 40 million this past cycle to Democrats.

00:59:40.620 Where did that money originate from?

00:59:42.400 Well, yes, money's fungible.

00:59:44.060 But I'm just saying, like, originally, it seems like a lot of that Ukrainian money came from us,

00:59:48.460 went through FTX and wound up in the pocket of these Democrats who then vote for more aid

00:59:53.500 to go to Ukraine and who then gets more money from us again.

00:59:59.380 And round and round and round it goes, which, you know, most of the media is very pro this

01:00:05.140 intervention in Ukraine.

01:00:06.780 And this is yet another reason why they may very well want to look the other way.

01:00:11.000 Have I I realize I've gone down 101 on the Ukraine relationship, but have I summarized

01:00:16.060 correctly what's being done?

01:00:18.860 I listen to you very carefully, Megan.

01:00:20.440 As far as I know, everything you said is true.

01:00:22.800 And the only question is, you know, was this purely a coincidence, purely an accident, or

01:00:29.600 was it a well thought out money laundering scheme?

01:00:34.680 And that, I think, is the critical question.

01:00:37.700 We've seen this in the past.

01:00:39.100 You know, I'm I'm old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, which,

01:00:43.880 you know, was under investigation for nearly two years because the right administration

01:00:49.020 wanted to get money to the Contras and this was the Congress wouldn't allocate it.

01:00:53.080 So this is the way they did it.

01:00:54.300 All right.

01:00:54.580 So that's it was it was messy and it was scandalous.

01:00:57.480 But this.

01:00:58.880 Is it next level stuff?

01:01:01.560 You know, if you're you're going to be giving aid to Ukraine, Ukraine deposits the money in

01:01:06.260 FTX of all the places in the world.

01:01:08.500 And then FTX gives the money back again to media sources that support the Democrats and

01:01:15.500 direct candidates with with that are that are favored by the DNC and the Democrats and that

01:01:22.140 whole the whole machinery.

01:01:23.600 It all looks really, really weird.

01:01:28.200 And, you know, you talk about election interference.

01:01:32.040 You know, I mean, presumably we care about that stuff.

01:01:35.520 We need some very careful looks into this.

01:01:39.700 I was very pleased that.

01:01:41.420 And by the way, again, that's why I listen to you very carefully.

01:01:45.280 Nothing you said is a conspiracy theory.

01:01:48.160 Everything you said was true.

01:01:50.620 So money is.

01:01:52.540 Yeah.

01:01:53.560 And money is fungible.

01:01:55.360 Right.

01:01:55.840 I mean.

01:01:57.380 So by that, I mean, the dollar here is a dollar there.

01:02:00.580 So the Ukrainian government's getting money that are deposited with FTX.

01:02:03.500 FTX feeds it to Democratic candidates and causes, you know, among which, as we mentioned

01:02:10.900 earlier, his brother with the pandemic fund, which itself had been endorsed by many Democratic

01:02:16.060 candidates and they brag about it on their site.

01:02:18.160 So, you know, we're talking about a real money machine here.

01:02:21.600 And would they?

01:02:23.080 I don't know.

01:02:23.740 It's just bizarre.

01:02:24.900 Would they have resorted to something this sketchy, this shady?

01:02:29.420 Well.

01:02:30.800 The stakes are pretty high, you know?

01:02:32.840 Well, I'll tell you, one of the independent journalists you mentioned, I think, is Alex

01:02:36.840 Berenson.

01:02:37.300 He's coming on the show tomorrow.

01:02:39.260 He used to write for The New York Times and now they hate him because he pushed back on

01:02:43.040 all the COVID overreaches.

01:02:44.900 But he tweeted out the following.

01:02:46.660 Everyone should understand already that Sam Bankman Freed was far more dangerous than Bernie

01:02:52.020 Madoff.

01:02:53.040 Madoff mostly avoided small investors and picked up marks through word of mouth.

01:02:56.620 S.B.F.'s company ran a Super Bowl ad.

01:03:00.180 The definition of chasing retail money.

01:03:03.200 Sam Bankman Freed is about to become a litmus test for the elite media.

01:03:06.760 Will they investigate him half as hard as they chase Bernie Madoff?

01:03:10.100 Parenthetical.

01:03:10.880 I was on The New York Times team on Madoff.

01:03:13.080 I know we went hard.

01:03:14.100 Or will S.B.F.'s story, like the lab leak, become too ugly to Democrats to be pursued?

01:03:23.060 Berenson is so insightful and he's a good one to follow because he has a nose for these

01:03:30.640 things and he has a tendency to tell the truth as far as he knows it.

01:03:35.240 I'm so grateful that we live in a time where people like him can have a platform because

01:03:39.280 God knows at this point we can't trust The New York Times to run this down.

01:03:44.200 Yeah, well, what about that comment about the Madoff comparison?

01:03:46.920 Madoff made it so that people would come to him begging to invest their pension fund.

01:03:51.840 But this individual investor thing, this, you know, using Tom Brady, using Larry David at the

01:03:57.220 Super Bowl, these kinds of ways of getting into the pockets of small investors who tend to be

01:04:03.100 younger investors, sometimes in crypto.

01:04:04.820 I don't know exactly who the victims are, but what about that?

01:04:08.140 That's right.

01:04:08.420 I think it's a really interesting distinction because there is a lot of winking and nudging

01:04:12.600 going on with the Madoff thing for years, you know, 20 years.

01:04:15.480 People knew that.

01:04:16.340 Well, it's a little strange that he's guaranteed a 9% return whether the markets are up or down,

01:04:21.220 but, you know, he seems to know what he's doing.

01:04:23.360 He's well-connected.

01:04:24.300 He's a former SEC chairman.

01:04:26.340 You know, he's well-connected in the industry.

01:04:28.220 He surely knows what he's doing.

01:04:29.280 But yeah, he didn't pick on small investors.

01:04:30.960 You couldn't get in to Madoff's stuff without, you know, millions to throw around.

01:04:34.920 Okay, so it's bad.

01:04:37.380 It's criminal.

01:04:37.980 It's rotten.

01:04:39.060 But you're right.

01:04:39.600 There wasn't anybody, no normal person suspected that FTX was a scam.

01:04:46.240 They didn't suspect that it was a racket.

01:04:48.160 And it's made everybody in the industry, you know, have a lot of scrupulous people, legitimate businesses

01:04:55.800 that are doing legitimate work trying to reach customers, custody of their money, provide services to people.

01:05:01.640 This scam artist came along and marketed it to so many people in these populist ways with easy interfaces.

01:05:09.560 Oh, just put your bank account in here, buy a bunch of crypto, get it back anytime, watch it go up and up and up forever.

01:05:15.340 So he's a real robber, a real scam artist.

01:05:21.760 And, you know, you have to, but we should also be angry.

01:05:24.680 You know, look at all the VC investors I noticed this morning that they're all talking about suing him.

01:05:28.660 Well, look, for what?

01:05:31.980 I mean, why didn't you recognize that this inarticulate silly man, you know, you had no standards whatsoever?

01:05:40.540 I mean, people would get on Zoom calls with a guy and he would babble a bunch of inanities.

01:05:46.560 And it's about that as a great man.

01:05:48.940 Let's just sign over a lot of VC funding to that company.

01:05:52.460 I will say this is where the media comes in, too.

01:05:54.820 This is where the media comes in.

01:05:56.500 Usually these people get exposed because some savvy media journalist who follows the industry, like Theranos, hello, this is what happened there,

01:06:03.960 gets a hold of the story, starts digging deeper and has the freedom to do an expose, which raises the alarm.

01:06:10.580 But the media fell down on this one.

01:06:12.040 All the pieces about this guy are fawning about his stupid car and his beanbag.

01:06:17.460 So, you know, in their defense, everyone should have been paying more attention.

01:06:20.700 It's such, it discredits in many ways, I would say just the left in general, because, you know, is it really enough just to virtue signal?

01:06:34.440 And to just say the word climate change over and over again and pandemic planning and socially conscious investing and effective altruism.

01:06:42.760 You just mutter a bunch of cliches, be connected with the right crowd, just send a bunch of signals, and then you can depend on a vast machinery out there to cover for you and to apologize for you and to celebrate you, you know, and to valorize you.

01:07:00.460 Is that really how disconnected we've become from reality?

01:07:04.400 Is it all these days entirely about symbolism?

01:07:07.640 And I guess that gets back to my point about the cheap money.

01:07:09.680 In an age of cheap money, you know, 0% interest rates for 14 years, that's the habit we got into in this country.

01:07:15.220 Instead of looking at values, you know, real economic value, at profit and loss, at return, open books.

01:07:24.380 So old-fashioned, Jeffrey.

01:07:26.400 Such an old-fashioned concept.

01:07:29.280 All right, listen, I've got to wrap it up.

01:07:30.260 But I think you raise a good point about what now?

01:07:33.340 This is such a big force in the crypto market.

01:07:35.360 Where does it go?

01:07:36.120 And only time's going to tell they aren't.

01:07:37.660 Will there be criminal charges?

01:07:38.680 Will the media do its job?

01:07:41.180 And how many others are going to follow if this has a domino effect on the industry?

01:07:45.780 All questions we will take up as the story unfolds.

01:07:48.800 Jeffrey Tucker, thank you so much.

01:07:51.120 It's a pleasure to be with you, Megan.

01:07:52.260 Thank you.

01:07:52.920 Likewise.

01:07:54.000 All right, coming up next, a deep dive into the decline of men in the workforce with some alarming numbers.

01:08:00.920 Now we're switching gears and turning to a topic that desperately needs more attention.

01:08:08.020 It's a topic our friend Mike Rowe discussed with us last time he was on the show.

01:08:11.340 The disappearance of men from the workforce in America.

01:08:16.300 Today, over 7 million men of prime working age are neither working nor looking for work.

01:08:23.460 This is bad for those individual men and for us as a society.

01:08:28.860 Here to discuss it is the author of Men Without Work, Nick Eberstadt.

01:08:33.940 Nick, welcome to the show.

01:08:35.540 Hey, thanks so much for inviting me.

01:08:37.420 Yeah, thanks for being here.

01:08:38.520 So, define how bad the problem is right now.

01:08:41.880 Well, look at it this way.

01:08:43.720 We can do a work rate, an employment rate for the prime age men.

01:08:47.920 If you take a look at last month's numbers, they're lower than they were in 1940 at the tail end of the Great Depression.

01:08:55.440 So, we really do have a depression scale problem for work for men in the United States.

01:09:01.740 If you look at the 21st century as a whole, the work rate for prime age men is actually substantially lower than it was in 1940.

01:09:13.340 So, we've basically got a 1937 scale work crisis for men in America.

01:09:20.700 And we're missing it because we only look at the unemployment rate and at the number of people employed.

01:09:27.900 We forget to look at the numbers for people who are neither working nor looking for work.

01:09:33.580 For every guy who is out of work and looking for a job these days, there are over four who are neither working nor looking for work.

01:09:42.880 So, if you track the unemployment happy talk, you are missing four-fifths of the problem.

01:09:49.720 Were they working at one point?

01:09:51.340 Some of them were, but many of them are long-term dropouts from the workforce.

01:09:59.400 What you see if you look over the history of the post-war era is a series of declining trajectories, almost like failing rockets.

01:10:10.960 Each younger group works less at any given age, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, than the group before them.

01:10:21.500 It's almost like rings on a tree.

01:10:23.920 And so, now you have a very large number of men who are basically long-timers out of the workforce altogether.

01:10:32.640 Hmm.

01:10:33.600 So, why aren't they working?

01:10:35.220 Well, one reason that doesn't fly is that we can't say they're at home taking care of other people.

01:10:44.540 There is an enormous care chasm between guys who are out of the workforce and women who are out of the workforce.

01:10:51.380 It's like an order of magnitude different.

01:10:53.840 If you ask these guys, and we do in these different labor surveys, you know, why aren't you at work?

01:11:00.200 Only a tiny fraction of them say that it's not because there are any jobs for them.

01:11:04.360 And today, that would be kind of implausible if you look at the peacetime, you know, labor shortage that we've got going on.

01:11:14.960 Some of them say that it's because of health problems.

01:11:17.660 Some of them say that it's because of other problems.

01:11:20.180 But it's not because of a lack of work, and it's not because of things that they're doing at home.

01:11:25.420 When did the problems start in earnest, like these big numbers?

01:11:29.100 That's a really interesting question.

01:11:30.740 For the first two decades of the post-war era, there was no sign of this problem at all.

01:11:36.960 Then starting around 1965, a flight from work by men started to become evident in these numbers.

01:11:46.080 And the really weird thing about this flight from work is that it's almost like a straight line from the 1960s to today.

01:11:53.960 I mean, you know, people are a little bit disorderly and, you know, irregular.

01:11:59.020 But if you look at the numbers themselves, it's almost tracking a straight line from through the 60s and 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, the 2010s.

01:12:10.960 It's been going on with almost, you know, kind of geophysical regularity now for almost 60 years.

01:12:19.120 I don't get it.

01:12:21.580 If it were pandemic related, I would get it.

01:12:24.600 They got paid by the government to stay at home.

01:12:26.600 They liked it.

01:12:27.880 The pandemic induced a lot of stress, anxiety, depression in people that they're struggling to get over to this day.

01:12:33.300 I don't get 50 years of men leaving the workforce more and more and more.

01:12:37.720 Like, I don't.

01:12:38.880 What is that?

01:12:39.480 Well, it's clearly unnatural because for, what, 10,000 generations, 50,000 generations in Homo sapiens in our species, men are kind of like a natural provider force.

01:12:53.200 And now you have an enormous contingent of men in modern America who are cast into this unnatural role as dependence upon society.

01:13:02.860 You couldn't have something like this happening if we weren't as fantastically prosperous as we are today.

01:13:08.540 You go through the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, up to the present, and you can come up with different kind of explanations that kind of work in part.

01:13:20.600 One of the things that is said about rich countries in general is that they've been affected by what economists call structural and economic transformation, decline of manufacturing, outsourcing.

01:13:37.000 China enters the WTO.

01:13:38.440 I mean, there's some truth to that in depressing work rates and labor force participation for men all around the world, but it doesn't really explain what you see in our country.

01:13:51.820 I mean, you wouldn't have a straight line out of the workforce if this was a consequence of the business cycle, right?

01:14:00.000 You'd see something that was kind of wavy.

01:14:01.380 You'd see the China shock when China entered the WTO.

01:14:05.940 You don't see that at all.

01:14:07.560 Is it related to women entering the workforce in greater numbers?

01:14:11.140 I mean, are these like, you know, is it a role reversal where these guys are staying home and the wives are bringing home the bacon?

01:14:17.360 Well, you know, there are some people who argue that.

01:14:20.380 I'm not so persuaded, and I'll tell you why.

01:14:22.920 I mean, women obviously have always worked.

01:14:25.100 It's just since the end of World War II that they got paid for it in the labor force.

01:14:28.860 But there was this huge influx of women into the labor force after World War II, and if they were displacing men, you know, the participation rates would have flatlined.

01:14:41.740 Instead, what we saw is that the participation rates went way up for like 50 years, from 1950 to, you know, the end of the century.

01:14:50.740 And that means that women were kind of supplementing men.

01:14:53.160 Since 2000, the participation rates for both men and women have been going down, so they've both been feeling the same pain.

01:15:02.780 There's also something that I mention in this book, which we might want to keep our eye on.

01:15:10.740 I'm not sure that it's a four-alarm fire yet, but it's, let's say, a yellow flashing light.

01:15:16.460 This is the women without work problem for prime-age women who are out of the workforce and don't have kids at home and aren't currently married.

01:15:27.660 There are about three million of them, and some of the patterns that they're reporting about their own lives, what they do with their own time, their drug use, are looking a little bit too close for comfort to what I show in this book about the guys.

01:15:42.400 What's prime-age? What is the prime age? What's the range?

01:15:49.560 Oh, prime-prime age is 25 to 54.

01:15:52.700 Oh, same as in the television key demo that we use to base our advertisement rates on, 25 to 54. That's the money spot.

01:16:00.300 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I didn't come up with this. I wasn't smart enough to come up with this demographic, but it's kind of self-evident.

01:16:06.800 You know, prime working age is 25 to 54, but it's not just all dollars and cents. I mean, this is also a key group for raising, you know, raising children, starting families.

01:16:18.980 It's got a tremendously important social component to it, too. And a lot of the dropouts, a lot of the male dropouts, they're disproportionately unmarried, don't have kids at home.

01:16:31.320 I mean, you drop out of the workforce, you're also dropping out of family, you're dropping out of community.

01:16:37.080 One of the things which I think is really kind of spooky that you see from looking at some of these numbers is how the workforce dropout guys say that they're spending their time.

01:16:50.100 What do they do between waking up and going to sleep, right?

01:16:54.740 Yeah.

01:16:54.920 I want to get to that one second, like how they're spending their time.

01:16:58.460 But before we get to that, like if you said this, this began in like even the 90s, I would get it.

01:17:03.140 Opioid crisis hits. People are, you know, they're pulled into this darkness.

01:17:07.320 And then sometimes it's hard to find a job, right?

01:17:10.780 Like if you're an active addict or even a non-using addict, you have a criminal record.

01:17:16.680 All this makes re-entering the workforce much tougher, right? Much tougher.

01:17:21.740 So that I would get starting back 30 years before that.

01:17:26.000 My God, I'm so confused.

01:17:27.580 If you said this started in 2007, the advent of the iPhone, I'd say I get it.

01:17:32.560 People, it's addictive. You spend all day. You can't pull yourself away.

01:17:36.560 You said COVID, right? Like this is a much bigger problem.

01:17:39.880 It's been going on for decades.

01:17:41.660 And against it is the genetic gravitational pull of hunter-gatherer, support, family, be the man.

01:17:50.300 You know, like it's the same reason why, you know, women like me who work can't deny that for most of us, there is this biological pull to be with our children.

01:17:58.180 And like that, that's why we wrestle so much when we're not all day.

01:18:01.320 Anyway, I'm so confused, Nick.

01:18:03.700 I don't, I still don't get it, but I do think those events I mentioned probably exacerbated it.

01:18:08.240 No?

01:18:09.240 Sure. Absolutely.

01:18:10.580 Let me mention a couple more.

01:18:11.840 The decline in the post-war era of the previous family system, you know, the two-parent family norm, guys who are not in the workforce are way more likely not to be in families either.

01:18:27.460 The rise of the modern welfare state, our European cousins tell us that we're terribly stingy, but in 1965, we were even stingier.

01:18:40.140 The welfare state was still a twinkle in Lyndon Johnson's eye back then.

01:18:43.980 And one of the things which we have seen over the last half century, I think, is how terribly destructive the whole disability archipelago of benefit payments for being out of work because you're said to be not able to work has been.

01:19:03.640 Another thing is crime and punishment.

01:19:05.660 We had this incredible long-term crime wave that was followed by this explosion of punishment.

01:19:12.360 We've got tens of millions of adult ex-cons in the United States today as well.

01:19:18.280 We don't track them very well, but it's clear that they're disproportionately overrepresented in this men without work problem.

01:19:26.100 Yeah, because they can't work if they have to check the box on whether they committed a crime.

01:19:28.700 Who's going to hire a guy who committed a crime if they've got, in today's day and age, four other applicants who didn't commit a crime?

01:19:35.140 Or, you know, they just do a background check on you if you, depending on the job you're applying for, it makes it almost impossible for people who are ex-cons to find work, which is a problem for all of us.

01:19:44.780 I'm not, it's not a bleeding heart thing.

01:19:46.340 It's a, this is a problem for society.

01:19:48.220 It's not good to have ex-cons sitting there out of work doing absolutely nothing.

01:19:51.640 Guess what happens?

01:19:52.460 More crime.

01:19:52.940 Yeah, and you could, and certainly there are millions and millions of ex-cons who can be rehabilitated, who can re-enter work, re-enter family, re-enter society.

01:20:04.280 We've got this strange thing in the United States.

01:20:06.600 We're basically a data-oriented country, but we've cloaked all of the ex-cons in statistical invisibility.

01:20:12.900 For some reason, Uncle Sam has no interest in coming up with information about their circumstances.

01:20:18.980 Now, that means, among other things, that we can't have evidence-based policies in the United States for getting them back to work because we don't have the evidence.

01:20:29.200 How big a factor was COVID, right, when we started literally paying people to sit on their couch?

01:20:35.120 Even people who didn't need the check were getting the check of, how much was it?

01:20:40.820 Yeah, 600 a month, then 300, I mean, a week.

01:20:44.240 600 a week, then 300 a week for 18 months.

01:20:47.700 Well, I mean, obviously, COVID was a catastrophe.

01:20:50.040 It killed a million people.

01:20:52.040 But most of the people, the overwhelming number of people who died from COVID were older than labor force age.

01:21:00.160 There are still some people who are at home sick with long COVID who say they can't work because of long COVID.

01:21:06.800 But that's, in the scheme of things, a pretty small number.

01:21:09.760 We're talking about hundreds of thousands.

01:21:12.600 We're about 4 million short of where we would have been on pre-COVID trends in terms of workforce total numbers,

01:21:21.360 which coincidentally is about the increase in unfilled jobs in the United States since before COVID.

01:21:30.160 This isn't all men, this isn't all these prime age guys we've been talking about.

01:21:34.120 We've got a new face to the flight from work in modern America.

01:21:39.020 Most of that gap is older former workers, men and women 55 and older,

01:21:46.680 who were the kind of sole ray of sunshine in the pre-pandemic, you know, kind of tableau,

01:21:52.940 because their work rates had been going up for a generation.

01:21:55.660 Also, we're seeing more of the younger women, I think, in this labor force dropout population for the time being.

01:22:06.140 Who is paying their bills?

01:22:08.240 Not to dumb it down, but like, you know, it takes money to live.

01:22:12.180 You've got to pay your rent.

01:22:13.000 You've got to buy your groceries.

01:22:13.920 Well, Megan, your listeners, of course, you and I and your listeners are paying.

01:22:19.620 Uncle Sam, which is either us right now or our children and unborn grandchildren in deferred debt payments, right?

01:22:28.920 We had this extraordinary thing that happened during the pandemic crisis.

01:22:33.560 Pandemic crisis is the only time in history that I'm aware of when disposable income for a population actually increased during a national economic crisis.

01:22:47.180 This was because of the fire hose of money, borrowed money, that was shot at households with the $600 a week and the $300 a week and other interventions, right?

01:22:57.480 During the years 2020 and 2021, the national savings rate more than doubled, which is to say that households had more money than they could spend from these transfers.

01:23:11.460 And a nest egg of over $2.5 trillion was put aside just from these transfers.

01:23:18.020 That's apart from other wealth effects, you know, the zero interest rate that your previous guest was talking about.

01:23:24.300 And, you know, $2.5 trillion is a lot of money.

01:23:29.780 And an awful lot of people use this either to supplement their earnings or to substitute for their earnings.

01:23:36.600 And I think what we're seeing right now is a certain amount of, you know, being out of the workforce on premature or maybe premature and unsustainable retirement.

01:23:46.680 I mean, they better realize, like, those checks, maybe they still have dough in the bank, but that doesn't last very long.

01:23:51.860 You know, even if it's $1,200 a month or $2,400 a month, that does not last, get you very far.

01:23:58.200 We're about at the point where that money should be running out.

01:24:01.240 But again, pre-existing problem.

01:24:03.800 So now to the question of what they are doing all day.

01:24:06.760 We would like to fantasize that they are doing like what my mom used to do when she was a little younger.

01:24:12.860 Or in her free time, she would drive the other ladies who are elderly to church on Sundays.

01:24:18.680 And I've got a big friend who's into meals on wheels and so on.

01:24:22.620 So that's not really how they're spending their time.

01:24:26.660 So shortly after the end of the Stone Age, I was taught economics.

01:24:31.960 And back in those days, as a kind of a mental tick, economists would say you were either working or you had leisure.

01:24:40.620 Now, that is a wrong way of looking at it because leisure is a very special way of using your free time.

01:24:46.740 It's a way of using your free time to restore yourself or to elevate yourself.

01:24:51.660 It's also possible to use free time in a way that degrades you or degrades you and others.

01:24:57.600 And unfortunately, that's what we see in the self-reported time uses for male dropouts from the workforce.

01:25:07.920 They say that they do almost no civil society stuff of the type your mom used to do.

01:25:14.360 They say almost no religion worship, almost no charitable or volunteering activities.

01:25:21.940 They got an awful lot of time on their hands.

01:25:23.880 But they say they do very little, strangely little, help around the house, either with chores and housework or with looking after people in the home.

01:25:36.020 What they say that they do is watch screens.

01:25:40.920 The surveys don't tell us what they're looking at or what type of screens.

01:25:44.300 But like 2,000 hours a year on average of looking at screens, I mean, that's as much as a full-time job for a lot of people.

01:25:54.140 And some of these surveys ask the poignant question, do you use pain medication?

01:26:01.360 One of the pre-COVID surveys showed that almost half of the dropouts are reported using pain pills or pain medication every day.

01:26:14.980 So it's not just sitting at home playing Call of Duty or whatever.

01:26:19.400 It's playing Call of Duty stoned.

01:26:22.000 And need I say, this is not a springboard for getting you back into the labor market.

01:26:27.760 It's much more likely to be a kind of a pathway towards deaths of despair.

01:26:32.600 It's kind of a portrait of misery.

01:26:35.360 Right.

01:26:35.740 These people, they need mental health services.

01:26:39.260 These people sound depressed to me.

01:26:41.400 It doesn't sound like they're like, you love my existence on the government dime.

01:26:46.220 They sound down and in need of assistance.

01:26:49.880 To me, it's like yet another reinforcement that we need more readily available mental health assistance in this country, whether it's via Zoom or just cheaper and better, by the way, because too often cheaper means crappy.

01:27:00.640 It needs to be cheap and good.

01:27:02.660 No, it's a portrait of suffering and misery and anomie and loneliness and disconnection.

01:27:12.320 I mean, you can play video games while, you know, you can watch television, you can do all sorts of things to entertain yourself a little bit.

01:27:20.020 But if you substitute those things for like your real life, you're going to be in a in a pretty tough place.

01:27:27.940 Yeah, you need to look at another person's flesh and bones face and body and have eye contact in person.

01:27:37.260 Life is not the same without that stuff.

01:27:39.380 To jump back to something else you mentioned, the long COVID.

01:27:41.860 I feel like you wrote something I must have been from the book.

01:27:46.880 I can't remember, but it was something about how the long COVID numbers don't add up with the actual COVID that went around.

01:27:52.660 Like there's some question about whether these people really have long COVID.

01:27:55.860 Is that from you?

01:27:56.740 I'm trying to remember where I got that.

01:27:57.860 I only made the distinction between numbers of people who reported having long COVID and happened to be out of the workforce and numbers of people who said they were out of the workforce because of long COVID.

01:28:11.860 So kind of accidentally, two of those groups overlap a lot.

01:28:17.300 But when you ask people, are you out of the workforce because you have long COVID, you've got a surprisingly small number about right now, about 400,000 persons.

01:28:27.860 Remember, I said the gap was about 4 million.

01:28:30.220 400,000 is a lot of people, but it doesn't account for the majority of that gap.

01:28:34.460 I mean, COVID obviously is like such a disruptor, but I do think that and I do believe in long COVID.

01:28:41.500 I think that's actually a thing.

01:28:42.640 I don't I don't dismiss that, that some people are suffering with that.

01:28:45.760 Who the hell knows?

01:28:46.620 It's such a pernicious virus.

01:28:48.680 However, I also think there are people who just say they have it because it's something that's accepted.

01:28:55.040 It's it'll get you out of work.

01:28:56.940 It'll get you out of judgment from a lot of people in terms of your wanting to stay at home on your couch and watch TV all day.

01:29:04.340 And that's not OK either.

01:29:06.180 I don't maybe like maybe we need the return of some stigma for those who just don't work.

01:29:12.120 You know, I'm so glad that you mentioned the word stigma because we seem to have veered into this kind of value free, judgment free, you know, kind of environmental space.

01:29:25.020 And that's pernicious.

01:29:26.580 That ends up hurting people more.

01:29:30.460 Stigma is the kinder, gentler version of enforcing social norms, kinder and gentler than the police state.

01:29:41.040 Right. It's a way of kind of helping people, you know, straighten up and and fly right.

01:29:47.540 And one thing which is self-evident to those of us who, you know, have long lives in the workforce is that work isn't just dollars and cents.

01:29:59.380 And work is a service to other people that helps you complete yourself.

01:30:03.700 It helps you it helps you self-attain.

01:30:09.080 It helps you, you know, kind of earn your own kind of success, no matter what your station is.

01:30:14.420 And being attached to the world through the workforce, like being attached through family or being attached through community.

01:30:23.280 You know, it's good for us in ways that go way beyond dollars and cents.

01:30:28.160 There was that old funny Greek guy, Aristotle, who said that human beings are social creatures and we are social creatures and we suffer if we're not in society.

01:30:40.260 Yeah, it's like you think working is so important, I think, just gives you a purpose and makes you feel like you matter.

01:30:46.860 It could be any job, but especially if you manage to line it up with something that thrills you or excites you.

01:30:52.240 So, I don't know.

01:30:55.580 And I think the contrary is also true.

01:30:57.040 If you don't work and you think you're just going to be sitting around, you're going to be doing your favorite things, you're going to be whatever, gardening, or you're going to be reading, you're going to be, I don't know.

01:31:05.100 I think the odds are higher that you're going to be searching the screen.

01:31:07.920 After a while, you're going to be on that damn screen all day doing something that probably depresses you.

01:31:12.140 It's just the least amount of effort for the highest return, but it's not good for you.

01:31:17.280 It's just not good for you.

01:31:18.420 So, what do we do about this, Nick?

01:31:20.600 I mean, I wouldn't even know where to begin if we're going to solve this problem.

01:31:24.880 Well, I mean, every one of us, I think, can do a little bit on this.

01:31:29.120 We can start by committing truth in public.

01:31:31.560 I mean, you've been kind of doing this.

01:31:33.740 You know, you say that work is important.

01:31:37.040 It's important for all sorts of reasons that go beyond the dollars and cents.

01:31:41.480 I mean, we have these conversations around the kitchen table or around the public square.

01:31:45.440 I mean, being able to tell the truth on this kind of matters to begin with.

01:31:50.800 There are things which we can do in our social conventions, which I think matter a lot.

01:31:57.460 During my lifetime, I have seen the death of the summer job.

01:32:01.580 And when I was a kid, you know, when I was a teen, it was a thing.

01:32:05.960 You know, boys and girls, teens all got summer jobs.

01:32:10.400 Ten years put, you know, postponing work for ten years has no good consequences for society.

01:32:17.040 Government can do some things, and it can also avoid doing some things, and those might help.

01:32:22.960 More skills, vocational skills.

01:32:26.220 It's kind of a scandal that the educational establishment has omerted the word vocational.

01:32:32.180 That kind of tells you a little bit about the problem.

01:32:35.880 I think we need to turn the disability insurance system, the government disability system, on its head and flip it from being subsidizing and encouraging dependence and helplessness to a kind of a work-first principle.

01:32:51.980 We had a great welfare reform in the 1990s for single moms that did very well.

01:32:57.820 I think we could do something here.

01:32:59.740 Also, I'd kind of like to see more information about the ex-felons.

01:33:05.460 I mean, I'd like to see us at least take them out of the statistical darkness.

01:33:11.740 They shouldn't be untouchables.

01:33:13.820 There's some things which we can't do.

01:33:15.940 I mean, I don't have the magic wand to fix the family in America.

01:33:19.320 I don't have the magic wand to get us back to 1965 value systems.

01:33:25.160 But if we know what we're missing, we can kind of grope towards solutions, I think.

01:33:30.860 So I've painted a pretty sobering picture, but I don't think that this is one that we give up hope on because it's been a very bad bet for people who've bet against the United States of America for about 250 years.

01:33:46.360 Hmm. Well said. Wow. Thank you for calling attention to it, for writing the book, for sharing your expertise with us.

01:33:53.440 Really, really appreciate it. And it's just scary. All this is very scary.

01:33:58.100 All the best to you, Nick. We'll see you soon.

01:34:00.180 Thanks so much.

01:34:02.160 Oh, so interesting. Ron DeSantis weighing in just now.

01:34:05.420 One of the things I've learned in this job is when you're leading, when you're getting things done, you take incoming fire.

01:34:11.460 That's just the nature of it. Oh, shots fired.

01:34:13.660 Oh, we'll hear what President Trump has to say tonight.

01:34:19.460 I have my alarm set. My team and I are going to be on a group text.

01:34:22.700 And we're very much looking forward to discussing it all with you tomorrow, starting at noon, live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111.

01:34:30.720 And we will dive into the announcement with those in the GOP who are happy to see Trump in the 24 race and those who are not.

01:34:37.820 Plus, we'll have Alex Berenson here with us.

01:34:40.180 In the meantime, go to MeganKelley.com.

01:34:44.720 Sign up for the American News Minute.

01:34:46.420 It's such a fun correspondence with a bunch of highlights of the week's news and highlights from the show.

01:34:52.040 And what you see Mr. Strudwick doing this week will shock you more than any other thing you've ever seen before.

01:34:58.480 Thanks for listening, you guys.

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01:35:08.760 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - November 15, 2022

GOP's Next Move, FTX's Crash, and Men Out of Work, with Sen. Rand Paul, Jeffrey Tucker, and Nick Eberstadt ｜ Ep. 435

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