Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. And the SEC has filed civil charges against him as well. Megyn talks with Abigail Schreier, Victor Davis Hanson, and James Murphy about the latest in the case.
00:01:29.780I think that they were kind of basic, easy charges to make.
00:01:36.720Of course, everybody expected the wire fraud charge.
00:01:42.280And there are four varieties of wire fraud charged, both conspiracy and direct action by Sam alone.
00:01:51.260And that relates to basically lying to customers that he would take in their funds at FTX and hold those funds in safekeeping so that they could hold them there or trade them, trade their account should they wish to do so.
00:02:13.140Sam took that money and transferred it to this hedge fund, Alameda, which Sam owns 90 percent of.
00:02:21.760So he transferred it more or less to himself.
00:02:24.500And that Alameda acted as a piggy bank for him, essentially.
00:02:30.060And he withdrew money from Alameda periodically to fund all sorts of things, including but not limited to political contributions, which is also interestingly charged in the indictment violation of campaign finance rules.
00:02:49.360Specifically, what they focus on is that Sam used proxies in order to give money to candidates.
00:02:58.400So instead of directly contributing exclusively himself or making corporate contributions, he used proxies.
00:03:06.740They're not named, but apparently someone is cooperating with the Southern District of New York and fed them that information that he had used other people, given them the money to in turn give to candidates.
00:03:22.940And then finally, finally, there's the money laundering charge, which alleges that Sam facilitated transactions in or hiding of illicit proceeds of illegal activities.
00:03:41.880Now, we don't know what kind of activities those were, if it was, we're speculating drugs, arms shipments, evasion of sanctions.
00:03:51.200These are the things that we wouldn't be shocked to see at an unregulated offshore crypto exchange.
00:04:00.700Wow. I mean, that last one is a shocker because we hadn't heard anything about that, about him running some blatantly criminal enterprise through which he laundered its money through FTX.
00:04:12.380So I'm looking forward to hearing more about what he may have been doing down there in the Bahamas at his multi-property estate at the Albany Resort, which is very nice.
00:04:19.520He apparently owned some 17 apartments. I mean, insane amount of real estate.
00:04:24.320Right. And now we know where he was getting the dough.
00:04:27.100Yes. Do we know anything more about whether prosecutors believe this thing was a farce from the get go or whether it just started to fall apart when crypto started to hit hard times?
00:04:37.300Well, we know more today than we did yesterday. That's for sure.
00:04:41.520So the SEC complaint says that it started from the very beginning.
00:04:46.880Just to interrupt, because the SEC is now – let me just interrupt, James, and tell me, because now the SEC has filed civil charges against Bankman Freed as well as of Tuesday, accusing him of misleading investors and committing nearly $2 billion worth of fraud on their customers.
00:05:02.560So you've got the civil action by the SEC and you've got the criminal action by the federal prosecutors.
00:05:08.440Right. And the commodities regulator, the CFTC, as well, filed yesterday.
00:05:15.620So it's typical for these things to be choreographed, that an indictment is unsealed at the same time that these government regulators bring their civil actions.
00:05:29.060But it's quite clear from all of the complaints combined and from the testimony of John J. Ray yesterday before the House Financial Services Committee that they're all saying this started at the beginning.
00:05:42.360And the beginning was 2019 when they started up this FTX International Exchange that exempting Alameda from the rules around margin positions started early and that customer funds were used to back Alameda bets from the very beginning.
00:06:26.040The number of people who got pulled into this and the number of celebrities who lent their names to this.
00:06:31.320I saw an interview he gave in which he seemed to be, I can't remember whether, I think it was the Stephanopoulos one,
00:06:36.500where he tried to wiggle on whether he did have the right to use FTX customer funds to cover Alameda losses to fund those monies over to another company,
00:06:47.780you know, which we were told is a clear no, no in this type of business.
00:06:52.660And he seemed to be trying to wiggle, kind of saying, well, there were some agreements by customers.
00:06:59.540You know, he he was not ceding the point that it would be prima facie illegal for him to take money invested on his currency exchange FTX and use it to cover Alameda losses, his hedge fund.
00:07:11.640What is that going to be possible for him to argue?
00:07:15.800But my understanding was it's in writing as the policy on the FTX exchange that they will not use that money for other purposes and that that money cannot be moved around.
00:07:25.740Yeah, it's absolutely in writing, Megan, and clear writing, not confusing, not small type, very clear.
00:07:34.420The assets that FTX customers deposit on the exchange are their assets.
00:07:40.220And it explicitly says that FTX cannot use those assets itself, cannot exercise dominion over the assets,
00:07:50.160and sure as heck can't give them to an affiliated hedge fund to let them, you know, bet enormous amounts of money on margin.
00:08:00.180It's very clear that that was a violation.
00:08:03.760And not only that, you know, maybe, maybe we'll see a defense of, hey, you know what?
00:08:17.060If you receive money from someone and you know you're going to use it in a way that differs from the agreement, that is fraud.
00:08:28.960And so I think the case, the wire fraud case and the rest of it appears to be quite strong by what was unsealed yesterday in the Southern District of New York.
00:08:40.820So I don't think that tactic's going to work.
00:08:43.880But I'll tell you what, this is a very, very smart man.
00:08:48.780And he stuck to his script in many, many hours of interviews on Twitter and with Andrew Ross Sorkin and George Stephanopoulos and Forbes and the Wall Street Journal and others.
00:09:10.260I should have paid closer attention to what was going on there at FTX.
00:09:15.300And boy, if I ever had it to do over again, I certainly would have dug in deeper to learn the facts about the margin position that my own hedge fund had on my own exchange.
00:09:28.520But unfortunately, I was paying attention to other things.
00:09:32.020Distracted, distracted, not deceptive, distracted, not devious.
00:09:37.060Does that could that work legally now that if a jury were to buy that he was just distracted.
00:09:50.920It could work as a legal defense to the criminal charges, which all require intent.
00:09:57.580But it's not going to work because there are other people involved who we believe are cooperating and will say,
00:10:07.960I had a conversation with Sam, we all knew there were that he was transferring billions of dollars to back Alameda trades.
00:10:19.920And not only that, he was he was transferring customer assets to Alameda.
00:10:25.280And then he himself withdrew some of those assets in the form of loans to himself and to other insiders at FTX.
00:10:34.840He borrowed well over a billion dollars from his own hedge fund at the same time that he was transferring the assets of FTX customers to that hedge fund.
00:10:47.640And he approved a loan of over a half a billion dollars to the director of engineering at FTX.
00:10:58.200Why did that guy need a half a billion dollars?
00:11:01.840Maybe you could have given him a fifty thousand dollar bonus if he was doing such a great job.
00:11:07.140Um, and then finally, Megan, the tip off and you know this, what prosecutors love more than anything is to have evidence of an attempt to cover your tracks.
00:11:19.860That tells you everything you need to know about the mental state of the person.
00:11:24.580You don't cover your tracks if you think what you're doing is legal.
00:11:28.700You cover your tracks because you're doing bad stuff that's illegal.
00:11:33.080And so he had a special software program written for him that provided a backdoor, uh, to the accounting systems there at FTX through which he transferred assets of FTX customers to Alameda.
00:11:50.640The prosecutors are going to have plenty of evidence on his state of mind.
00:11:55.520What was this guy, you know, what's your guess as to what he was thinking that he could just make up the money?
00:12:01.720He could make up the losses, you know, withdrawals, you know, the misuse of funds on the market that crypto would turn back up and no one would be the wiser.
00:12:14.540Well, it's a great question, and it becomes harder to answer when you learn that this was part of the business plan.
00:12:22.560This is what they started with is, is having Alameda have access to customer funds at FTX.
00:12:31.040So they started when, um, you know, there was a bull market for crypto right now, uh, since the beginning of the year.
00:12:39.900So now for 11 months, we've had a crypto winter bear market, but anyway, when the market was going up, their bets were working.
00:12:48.680Um, and they were, um, and they were, this gets a little technical, but they were acting as a market maker on the FTX platform.
00:12:55.960So they were trading against customers of FTX.
00:12:59.880And we just learned recently that they were trading with an advantage, uh, and that, uh, advantage has to do with how quickly they are seeing orders being placed, uh, so that they can engage in, in rapid high frequency trading as a market maker against what is called regular or sometimes called dumb order flow from regular customers who are entering orders.
00:13:27.600So my guess is that it worked pretty well, you know, to begin with, but you need capital and they didn't have a whole lot of capital.
00:13:36.040They started, uh, with some investors, um, out in California, many of whom were active in this, um, initiative called effective altruism.
00:13:49.400Uh, and they discovered that there was this wonder boy who had made a bunch of money, uh, doing an arbitrage trade, uh, with, uh, a South Korean exchange that traded Bitcoin.
00:14:04.340So you could buy Bitcoin for cheaper in the United States and other places, and then sell it on the South Korean exchange for hire.
00:14:14.460So that's called arbitrage and they did very well with that one trade.
00:14:18.620And so, uh, once you, as a, you know, boy wonder from MIT and, and working at a famous trading shop called Jane street, once you have a track record, you can attract money.
00:14:30.820And he did, but he needed more and more and more money, uh, to, to, to bet at larger scale.
00:14:37.660And so they started using customer assets.
00:14:40.480I mean, it's amazing because you look at Madoff, at least Madoff, we think at some point was running a legitimate business.
00:14:47.800You know, what he said was that during the housing market collapse in 2008, that's when he lost enough money that he has had to start stealing from some customers in order to give other customers their withdrawn money.
00:14:58.560This guy, and now we're learning this whole thing may have been a fraud, may, may have been a design fraud from the start, um, backed by people like Giselle and Tom Brady and Larry David, who didn't of course do their homework.
00:15:11.060Uh, who's the famous tennis player, Naomi Osaka before lending their names to his brand.
00:15:16.260That's why you have to be so careful before lending your name to a brand.
00:15:21.540It's not like being the spokesperson for Timex, you know, something that's been around forever.
00:15:26.100Crypto we know is a little, like, be careful, be careful before you give it your personal endorsement so you can make money off of it.
00:15:34.380The guy who's running the bankruptcy process for his company, FTX, who's sort of the CEO now, but he's basically just trying to manage the bankruptcy, is the guy who did the Enron one.
00:16:23.500I mean, how does Sam's attorneys, his defense attorneys, deal with this guy?
00:16:32.020This guy's got access to all the files, understands them, has already been through this with another massive company and another fraud, and he's seen it all.
00:16:40.440And he's out there throwing this guy to the wolves.
00:16:58.320That's a really great fact for the prosecution.
00:17:00.840But two days before the bankruptcy was filed on November 11th, so we're talking about Wednesday, November 9th, Sam's ex-girlfriend, uh, was running Alameda.
00:17:16.420She had an all-hands meeting on Zoom, and she said at that meeting,
00:17:22.280Hey, everybody, just a heads up, we've been using, um, pros, we've been using deposits of FTX customers to fund our trading, and Sam, I knew about it, Sam knew about it, a couple other insiders, uh, knew about it.
00:17:39.700Um, so she really doesn't have a great motive for confessing to that in a public forum.
00:17:46.160The Wall Street Journal spoke to people who were on the call.
00:17:49.500Surely there's some recording of this as well.
00:17:54.440Uh, so there's a ton of evidence, uh, to show that Sam knew exactly, uh, what was happening.
00:18:01.840And so he's going to find it very difficult to, to get out of this trap that he's made for himself.
00:18:09.160Well, he seems to be, he hasn't said, is it Caroline Ellison?
01:03:08.880They're no longer they have no semblance, not just to JFK or Hubert Humphrey, but Bill Clinton's party doesn't exist.
01:03:15.800These are revolutionaries are hardcore and they're going to use any means necessary.
01:03:21.180And I think the Republican establishment has no idea what they're up against, whether it goes to balloting, absentee balloting or early voting or the use of dark money, which, you know, they are.
01:03:38.980We can't envision the revolution in our midst when we look at the border or we look at our foreign policy or we look at energy, all these issues.
01:03:46.420They have they have in store for us radical changes, radical changes, and they're willing to do almost anything to enact them because they don't have 51 percent of the public behind them.
01:03:56.700They only have these institutions that they've absorbed.
01:04:00.260This is why Ron DeSantis is so interesting to so many Republicans, because, yes, he'll he'll say these people are lunatics the way we hear Trump say.
01:04:09.420But DeSantis almost surgically tries to go after their woke temples one by one, right, whether it's the Disney thing or the the bill in the schools to stop the sexual instruction of, you know, very young children in classroom time.
01:04:25.220Now he's taking a deep dive at the Florida Supreme Court level.
01:04:27.960He wants an investigation into the drug companies and they're misleading about the covid vaccine.
01:04:32.800So so he's actually doing something about each of these things that is irritating to a lot of conservatives.
01:04:38.560You know, he's not just saying the right things.
01:06:49.540Would he go after the left in a preemptive fashion?
01:06:51.800So with the, you know, the bus trip, it was very embarrassing to the left of Martha's Vineyards, the school board stuff he did, and taking on Disney, and as you say now going to the Supreme Court, he's showing that he is every much as feisty and combative as Trump, but without the baggage.
01:07:12.360So what Trump had to do was he had to convince people that he, everybody knew he was combative, everybody knew he had a good four years, but would he stop that exhausting psychodrama, melodrama?
01:07:24.760And I don't understand why he hasn't, other than maybe it's innate to him.
01:07:31.560But what I mean by that, Megan, was he was coming out as the midterms approach in a wonderful position because he had four years to critique of his own compared to the two-year disasters of Biden.
01:07:44.820And all of these so-called conspiracies that he'd weighed in on, whether it was a Russian collusion hoax, or Hunter's laptop, or going after him on social media and Twitter, they all turned out to be absolutely true.
01:07:58.580And he was, you know, he was confirmed in all of his accusations.
01:08:03.660And then, right before the midterm, for some reason, he attacks DeSantis as his sanctimonious.
01:08:10.120He hints that he's going to run, which it was not necessary before the midterms.
01:08:14.620And then he goes after Mitch McConnell's wife in kind of a racialist fashion.
01:08:19.000And then he goes after Youngkin and says his name sounds Chinese.
01:08:23.780And then he talks about altering the Constitution.
01:08:27.280I don't think he meant it, but nevertheless, he said something to that effect to replay the 2020.
01:08:33.120Then he has his nut, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, no need to go on about him, at his house.
01:08:40.720And so the result of it is people are saying, we like what he did.
01:13:07.200All right. So you've been in on this reporting of the Twitter files and Barry's new The Free Press, which is a new media entity.
01:13:15.060And so far as I can grasp, pretty much everything Twitter has said about itself on the front of suppression and censorship has been untrue.
01:13:23.880I mean, they've been censoring and they've been lying about it for many, many years.
01:13:29.100They're essentially a censorship regime that was going on and there were two parts to it.
01:13:33.340There was the part we knew about, which was also biased against non-woke speech.
01:13:38.840And that was, you know, people who pointed out that the transgender swimmer Leah Thomas was a man and that that was the reason for the unfairness to allow Leah Thomas to compete against women in swimming.
01:13:51.260People who pointed that out on Twitter, they could get their accounts suspended and they were suspended or banned from Twitter.
01:13:56.920So that's the part we knew about. And the part that we didn't know about was a second sub-Rosa committee.
01:14:05.100This was a secret committee within Twitter to suppress non-woke speech, speech of the political right and anything that was non-woke.
01:14:14.340And it essentially deflated the tires of all non-woke speech so that it would limit the visibility and how many people could see it.
01:14:23.200Now, the names that have been specifically cited in her reporting are Dan Bongino, who's put on a surge blacklist, Charlie Kirk, Do Not Amplify, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, secretly placed on a trends blacklist, which prevented his tweets from trending.
01:14:40.000That's insane, Dr. J. I have no idea what Dr. Bhattacharya's politics are and none whatsoever.
01:14:44.500He just called for a different approach to COVID.
01:14:46.720Just calling for a different approach got him placed on this trends blacklist.
01:14:52.020Those are the three names I've heard, plus libs of TikTok.
01:14:54.540Do we know whether it goes beyond them?
01:14:59.340Hopefully there'll be more details in the story we have coming out, but also we're going to look.
01:15:05.640I'll be going back to the Twitter headquarters and others will continue to reveal what we find on things like COVID policy and gender policy.
01:15:14.180But these were markers that could be put on accounts at any time by this committee, and they really depressed the reach of political speech in a country that is very divided.
01:15:32.500And our presidential elections are very close.
01:15:34.520So this had a profound impact on the reach of a certain kind of political speech.
01:15:40.320And, you know, just depressing the visibility in an election cycle or, you know, when these issues are hotly contested can really alter the outcomes.
01:15:50.080What's infuriating to me is they blocked it.
01:16:52.360Entire users, if they were non-woke, if they were of the political right, or if they, as Dr. Bhattacharya, questioned COVID policy, they would be suppressed in a systematic way on media, you know, on Twitter.
01:17:05.180And we have every reason to believe that the other big tech companies like Google and, you know, which owns YouTube and Facebook are doing the same thing or, you know, very similar things.
01:17:15.480We know, for instance, that Google marks one, I think it's a third of all PragerU, that's the conservative site PragerU that puts out, you know, incredibly popular videos.
01:17:25.200One third of them are marked adult only for no reason, for no good reason, so that they can never be viewed in a library and children can't have access to them.
01:17:36.960That, I mean, this is, we have to continue following this.
01:17:39.640Yes, I understand we quote knew, you know, we knew it in the way you just have a feeling and you're certain, but this is the evidence of it.
01:17:47.580And it's worth paying attention to because we can figure out how they did it.
01:17:49.920We can hear, we can see the discussions, the reporting on how Trump was suppressed or kicked off Twitter was very interesting, too.
01:17:56.280It was all about how he didn't violate any policies.
01:17:58.800They were really struggling because his tweets on Jan 6th didn't violate a single Twitter policy.
01:18:04.080And you can see the communications between the Twitter execs like, oh, shit, he actually didn't cross any lines.
01:18:10.040And then the Twitter employees revolted.
01:18:14.040And they were basically saying, he's out of here or we're out of here.
01:18:17.860And Jack Dorsey bent the knee, ultimately saying, oh, the collective tweets, you know, I don't know, create an atmosphere that's unsafe, whatever.
01:18:26.480But you can, watching the sausage get made on this liberal suppression is dark and illuminating at the same time.
01:18:38.140I mean, you know, these that we've been gaslit for so long.
01:18:42.240And I think that the reason that Elon Musk called to Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi and other independent journalists was because, you know, the public no longer trusts corporate journalists in the same way that it does independent journalists.
01:18:55.940And the only reason the only way to signal to the public that Twitter would no longer be captured, which we're hoping going forward, it won't have the same censorship, though that remains to be seen.
01:19:07.340The only way to signal that to the public is to bring in journalists who weren't themselves part of in of captured organizations.
01:19:15.100I'm telling you, it's just like Willy Wonka.
01:19:17.480He could not bring in another candy maker.
01:19:21.260He had to bring in someone fresh faced and open minded.
01:19:25.160OK, the you're probably going to be in this group soon and maybe you already are.
01:19:29.540But I saw you tweeting about the fact that now that Barry and Matt Taibbi have been doing this reporting, they're being called conservatives by the mainstream press reporting on their reporting.
01:19:41.960Right. Like, oh, of course, he called some of these conservative.
01:20:06.400Twitter and big tech has long been part of a social credit system in which they announced to the world and they're having a profound effect.
01:20:14.160They're announcing to the world these people don't matter.
01:20:19.180And I think that has had reverberations across the country in schools, in school board meetings, in corporations.
01:20:26.720Where certain people are treated and certain viewpoints are treated as that they're as if they're beyond the pale and not worthy of fair treatment.
01:20:34.700And it starts with companies like Twitter.
01:20:37.500And they've been doing this for years.
01:20:39.260But the mainstream media has very much been echoing this.
01:20:42.020And the moment they don't like you, it doesn't matter how liberal, very wise or mad to EBR, they get called a conservative.
01:20:48.040It's just a way of saying, don't bother listening to those folks.
01:24:42.080And how the New York Times is actually going to take a look at the downsides of puberty blockers like that's the dawn of a new day.
01:24:50.940And the article went on to say there is emerging evidence of potential harm to these puberty blockers, talking in particular about bone density growth, flatlining.
01:25:06.120There's a heightened risk of debilitating fractures earlier than would be expected.
01:25:12.540Many physicians are prescribing these to patients even at the first stage of puberty as young as eight years old and then allowing them to progress to cross sex hormones as soon as 12.
01:25:23.120I'm reading this in the New York Times.
01:27:26.380And these were all risks that they willingly and knowingly downplayed.
01:27:29.880And the media participated in it and gave cover to them for a very long time.
01:27:34.680And then when it can no longer be denied because across Europe they are banning puberty blockers in institutes, you know, or curtailing their use in France, England, Sweden, everywhere that they have given these things an honest look.
01:27:47.640Then, you know, suddenly the New York Times, you know, allows a tiny bit of of truth to to to emerge in its pages.
01:27:57.260It's it's it's really not an honest broker in any of these conversations.
01:28:01.640And it's not doing a service to the public.
01:28:04.160And then they get shamed right out of it and try to post another thing like they have the risks of suicide if you push back at all.
01:28:10.100They do in the article, I will say, call attention to the fact that I don't think, you know, they're doing it for the reasons you and I would want them to.
01:28:17.820That the American Academy of Pediatrics says blockers can be provided any time during puberty and hormones from early adolescence onward.
01:28:44.240Well, you know, we know that the American Academy of Pediatrics is completely captured.
01:28:48.780We know that a lot of science organizations are a lot of the medical all the major medical accrediting organizations are completely captured.
01:28:55.040They are committed to woke ideology, often involving denying biology.
01:29:00.320I mean, they they really are not honest.
01:29:03.180And what I always tell parents, and this is really important, is trust yourselves, not the experts when it comes to your children.
01:29:10.120You are the only person or people who care about your child's welfare in an unself-interested way and really trust yourselves.
01:29:50.540Now they say a woman is an adult who lives and identifies as female, though they may have been said to be a different sex at birth.
01:30:03.480By the way, my my producers are telling me the Marion Webster.
01:30:08.980They added a secondary definition of female that says having a gender identity that's the opposite of male.
01:30:14.540And the CDC, the CDC says that that men are capable of breastfeeding and goes on to define chest feeding as a term used by many masculine identified trans people to describe the act of feeding their baby from their chest.
01:30:37.340I think these are really significant things.
01:30:40.580I mean, on the one hand, we read them and we think that's wacky.
01:30:42.680Everybody knows what a woman is, but they have real impact when you start discussing things like Title IX and Title VII, which enshrine women's rights.
01:30:51.100And if those rights are no longer reserved to women, if the ability to compete at high levels of sports are no longer reserved to women, you're ending those rights.
01:31:00.720You're ending those at the eligibility for those athletic scholarships that, you know, these were very hard won rights for women.
01:31:07.120So it starts out, it's this quirky sort of queer theory, you know, takeover of our language, but it has very, very tangible rights for women.
01:31:16.860And I think it's a very, very serious matter.
01:31:18.920When you wrote Irreversible Damage, this was definitely in full swing, you know, this trans craze sweeping the nation, especially with our young girls.
01:31:28.140You, Deborah So, and a few others were critical in calling attention to this and I think helping to pump the brakes a bit.
01:31:34.460Where do you think we are now going into 2023 versus where we were when you wrote Irreversible Damage?
01:31:41.140You know, I feel very good about where things ended up with Irreversible Damage.
01:31:46.200When we, when, when the book was published, no one was talking about this.
01:31:49.840There was virtually no dialogue about, in the public sphere, about what parents should do and what risks there were when a teen girl suddenly announces out of the blue that she's transgender.
01:31:59.840There was no serious discussion of the risks of the medical, of the gender medical regime, and, and they were being actively suppressed by the medical accrediting organizations.
01:32:10.860So now I think we have a real robust debate in this country, which is always as it should have been.
01:32:18.820And I think that, look, as a country, there's no problem we can't solve if we can talk about it.
01:32:23.700And that includes pediatric gender medicine.
01:32:26.120People are going to make all kinds of decisions for themselves.
01:32:28.780They absolutely have to know the facts.
01:32:32.040And, and, and, and before the book came out, I, I don't think they did.
01:32:36.360When you came on the very first time, we'll get the episode number.
01:32:39.340So the audience that you've got to go back and listen to that.
01:32:41.560Honestly, you're going on a drive pop on that first interview that we did with Abigail.
01:32:45.340Cause it was one of my favorites and so illuminating.
01:32:48.600But one of the, one of the issues was how, if you put your child in the medical community, you see he or she is like, I'm trans.
01:32:56.760It comes out of the blue because if they really have gender dysphoria, you'll know it from the time they're two, three, it doesn't pop up at 15 or 16.
01:33:03.200When they start to get a little overweight and they start to get acne and they don't feel like the most popular kid.
01:33:07.500These are all tells that this claim is based on something else.
01:33:11.040But we talked about how you bring them into the psychiatric community and they're like the American Academy of Pediatrics.
01:33:17.100Their knee jerk and their mandate is confirm, confirm, affirm, affirm, affirm.
01:33:21.740But you mentioned like Sweden and Finland, and they're now going a different route.
01:33:28.180These are very, very left-wing countries.
01:33:30.020They're now placing limits on puberty blockers and other treatments saying that we have to examine more fully, among other things, the psychiatric issues that may be going out, the mental health of the patients.
01:33:50.020I mean, we have in this country affirmative care is the standard, meaning the doctor's obligation is always to affirm or agree with the patient's self-diagnosis when it comes to gender dysphoria, the idea that someone has the condition of having a severe discomfort in one's biological sex.
01:34:06.660In this country, there are actually conversion therapy bans.
01:34:09.760And what that means is, and I last counted, there were, I think, 22 states.
01:34:14.720And what that means is that a practitioner, a mental health practitioner who doesn't agree with a young person's diagnosis that they have gender dysphoria or that they're really somehow a boy, if they don't immediately agree, they can be accused of conversion therapy, converting the person out of being transgender, even a minor, and they can lose their license.
01:34:37.900Now, this is an incredibly, you know, inappropriate incursion on free speech.
01:34:43.340And I really hope it will one day be challenged in the Supreme Court, that doctors are not allowed to freely give their opinions when it comes to gender dysphoria is really a limitation on their ability to practice.