The Megyn Kelly Show - The COVID Numbers Game and the Toxicity of Big Tech with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Prof. Scott Galloway ｜ Ep. 160

00:00:00.000 Your business doesn't move in a straight line.

00:00:02.800 Some days bring growth, others bring challenges.

00:00:05.940 But what if you or a partner needs to step away?

00:00:08.820 When the unexpected happens, count on Canada Life's flexible life and health insurance

00:00:13.680 to help your business keep working, even when you can't.

00:00:17.020 Don't let life's challenges stand in the way of your success.

00:00:20.460 Protect what you've built today.

00:00:22.500 Visit canadalife.com slash business protection to learn more.

00:00:26.280 Canada Life. Insurance. Investments. Advice.

00:00:31.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.400 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:46.140 First up today, I want to discuss with you a new COVID study that virtually all of the media will likely ignore.

00:00:53.160 Why? It suggests almost half of those hospitalized with COVID, you know,

00:00:58.100 they keep trying to scare us with these hospitalization increases and look at the numbers and blah, blah, blah.

00:01:02.700 Might not be as sick as we've been led to believe and might not even be there because of COVID.

00:01:09.420 It may be one of those situations like we discussed the other day with David Zweig about hospitalized because of COVID or just with COVID, right?

00:01:20.540 Here to talk with me about it today is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

00:01:25.200 Jay is a professor of medicine at Stanford University.

00:01:27.660 He was also one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated months ago for easing lockdowns and focusing on protecting the most vulnerable.

00:01:38.000 Great to see you, Doc.

00:01:38.640 Thank you for being here with us.

00:01:39.740 So this is what they've been doing lately.

00:01:42.520 They've shifted.

00:01:43.300 I think people are on to the whole cases, cases, cases, understanding that's not a meaningful number.

00:01:49.300 You know, it's a pandemic.

00:01:50.500 It's a virus.

00:01:51.000 People are going to get the cases of COVID.

00:01:53.640 It's how bad is it and what are the hospitalizations and what is the death rate?

00:01:57.680 And this is something they've been using to scare us.

00:02:00.160 The hospitalizations are up here.

00:02:01.640 They're everywhere.

00:02:02.120 And now we learn that it's that they're overstating the numbers of people who are in hospitals right now because of COVID and overstating how sick they are.

00:02:15.840 Put it in perspective for us.

00:02:17.100 Yeah.

00:02:17.260 So actually, this is a result that goes back a ways.

00:02:19.840 There was an audit in Santa Clara County and in Alameda County of death certificates, for instance, and found that in 25 percent of cases that were coded as COVID deaths,

00:02:29.780 actually, 25 percent of the time there were other factors that were probably more important in those deaths than COVID.

00:02:36.280 COVID in hospitals have had a very strong incentive to diagnose COVID.

00:02:41.960 Going back to the CARES Act last year, some hospitals got more than $50,000 additional per COVID patient that they had.

00:02:50.600 So there's a mix of things going on here.

00:02:53.680 But I think there's a really important public health point here, which is that these cases have been used to scare the public.

00:03:00.280 Scare the public into thinking that we're running out of hospital resources or health care resources.

00:03:05.700 Scare the public into thinking that COVID is more dangerous than it is.

00:03:08.840 It is dangerous, especially for an older, vulnerable population, as we've talked about many times.

00:03:15.240 But it's not 3 percent mortality like we heard in the early days of the epidemic.

00:03:20.540 It's much closer to 0.2 percent infection fatality rate, again, unless you're older, in which case it's much higher.

00:03:26.620 So I think that's really the upshot of this study for me, is that as the media, I think, has an obligation to put the COVID numbers in perspective rather than using it to stoke fear.

00:03:41.220 And this study suggests that that's exactly a careful analysis of the data, which is what this study is trying to do to say, OK, distinguish between you have COVID and died from COVID versus it's incidental.

00:03:53.740 It's really important to start to put those numbers in perspective.

00:03:56.600 And I hope the media sort of responsibly takes this and helps people allay some of the fears they may have about COVID.

00:04:03.440 You're so cute.

00:04:04.400 You know, they're not going to do that.

00:04:05.880 But hope springs eternal.

00:04:07.540 But I mean, I got this originally from, again, David Zweig, who had been on the other day.

00:04:13.620 And and it says that the study suggests almost half of those hospitalized, almost half with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases that what we're seeing is these folks in hospital with fairly mild symptoms.

00:04:29.940 They've been admitted either for further observation on account of their comorbidities or because they reported feeling short of breath.

00:04:37.580 But they're in a lot of them are in the hospital for something totally unrelated to COVID.

00:04:42.980 So you go in for a broken leg.

00:04:45.100 They test everybody who goes in.

00:04:46.820 They find out you have COVID and they count in the hospitalization number that is used by the media to scare us all.

00:04:52.760 And I ask you, like, I didn't realize that they were getting paid.

00:04:56.180 The hospitals have a financial incentive to do this.

00:04:58.380 Yeah, that was from the care is actually at $50,000 per COVID patients.

00:05:03.440 For Medicare patients, they would get 20 percent bonus.

00:05:06.200 The hospitals get 20 percent bonus for seeing COVID patients.

00:05:09.500 So they have a very strong incentive to to to diagnose COVID, even if it's incidental.

00:05:15.540 That's crazy.

00:05:16.820 That's so crazy.

00:05:17.760 Why would we incentivize hospitals to state the or why at a minimum?

00:05:22.800 What wouldn't that be a big asterisk on every media report when we get these naked hospitalization numbers out?

00:05:29.820 Yeah, I mean, I think in the early days of the pandemic, that's when the CARES Act was passed.

00:05:33.200 The thought was, well, these hospitals are basically they're going bankrupt because people were so scared to go to the hospital for for actual things that they needed.

00:05:41.520 Cancer surgeries were canceled.

00:05:42.760 Many, many hospitals around the country essentially were empty, waiting for COVID patients to never arrive in the early days of the epidemic.

00:05:50.840 And I think partly it was it was aimed at addressing the the the the financial crisis caused by that sort of panic around around COVID.

00:05:59.820 I mean, I think that was the initial impetus behind the behind the policy.

00:06:03.160 But I think it has had this unfortunate effect of a sort of I mean, it's it's it's it's it's kind of a catastrophe, right?

00:06:08.840 Like you have you have this well-intentioned policy to keep hospitals afloat, but it results essentially in overdiagnosis and induced panic.

00:06:18.220 And I don't think people have thought through all of the downstream consequences when the policy is put in place.

00:06:23.660 Well, and two other things to note about the study.

00:06:25.380 OK, so nearly half of those hospitalized with COVID may have been admitted for another reason entirely or have had only a mild presentation of the disease.

00:06:36.480 The increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent.

00:06:43.200 So if you're keep in mind, so when you hear these hospitalization numbers, so 57 percent of those who have been vaccinated and are in the hospital with COVID had only mild or were asymptomatic entirely.

00:06:54.020 And then how about the unvaccinated?

00:06:56.880 They've been totally demonized by Biden and others.

00:06:59.800 And this study found that 45 percent of the cases with the unvaccinated were mild or totally asymptomatic since January 21st.

00:07:09.240 So it's once again, it's not as awful as they'd lead us to believe.

00:07:14.340 But how do we square that, Doc, with headlines like this one?

00:07:17.640 COVID hospitalizations hit crisis levels in southern ICUs.

00:07:22.200 This is one of the lead stories right now in The New York Times.

00:07:24.640 Hospitals in the southern U.S. are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units.

00:07:29.720 One in four hospitals now reports more than 95 percent of the ICU beds occupied, up from one in five last month.

00:07:35.520 Alabama, Texas, Florida talking about problems there.

00:07:38.480 So how do we square those those two things?

00:07:41.220 Well, I mean, I think that actually actually hospitalization numbers like in Florida with COVID are plummeting right now.

00:07:46.960 So it's it's I think the HHS actually tracks this.

00:07:51.460 You can go to a website called HHS protect and see what fraction of beds are occupied by COVID patients.

00:07:57.640 And the headlines often don't square with what HHS is reporting.

00:08:01.060 I'm not sure why the media aren't using those those those like official numbers to track it.

00:08:05.740 I think there's another sort of a problem how people think about this.

00:08:09.960 Hospitals are not single entities that operate simply by themselves.

00:08:13.600 They're part of systems. So when one hospital gets crowded or one hospital gets stressed, patients get moved to other hospitals.

00:08:21.740 They're part of a system. And the question isn't whether a particular hospital is overcrowded or stressed.

00:08:28.260 The question is whether the system as a whole has capacity to address the health needs of a population.

00:08:33.720 I think there have been times during the epidemic where some hospital systems have been pushed to the brink.

00:08:39.460 But I don't think that as a whole of the American health care system has been overwhelmed by by by COVID patients.

00:08:47.820 I think it's been stressed. And again, some some places near the brink.

00:08:52.520 And in that sense, American health care system has actually operated better than many other health care systems around the world, which have been which have been have been overwhelmed with patients.

00:09:01.240 I mean, this is a real disease. It's it for a subset of patients, it actually does result in the need for for ICU beds and and and and and hospitalization.

00:09:11.200 I do think that the I mean, there are costs that in addition to the monetary costs, there are health costs also from overdiagnosis or over reliance on hospitalizations for asymptomatic COVID patients.

00:09:21.280 Because there are, you know, those hospital beds could be used better used for other patients.

00:09:26.060 What do you make of this? We ran a soundbite earlier this week from Dr. Fauci, who was asked by Sanjay Gupta about this study out of Israel, suggesting you have much better and longer lasting immunity if you've had COVID versus if you've just had a vaccine.

00:09:42.180 And he said, you know, what are we to make of that? And Fauci basically said, oh, I don't know.

00:09:46.200 I don't really know. It's a great question, Sanjay. I don't really know what to make of it.

00:09:50.300 And it's infuriating because people don't want to lose their jobs who have had COVID who don't think they need a vaccine.

00:09:58.300 And now they're going to thanks to Biden's executive order.

00:10:01.980 And this is a question that needs to get answered. Right. As a result of that, in particular, for those who have had COVID.

00:10:07.420 So the Israeli study showed that you could hold on, I want to get my facts in front of me, that natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections.

00:10:22.460 But apparently the CDC put out its own study on natural immunity, and it suggested the opposite, that vaccinated immunity is 2.3 times better than natural immunity.

00:10:32.960 So it appears we have conflicting studies. What do we make of that?

00:10:36.180 So there isn't any conflict. So the question between the CDC study and the Israeli study is three groups, actually.

00:10:43.880 People who have recovered from COVID and then got the vaccine, people who just got the vaccine, and people who just recovered from COVID.

00:10:52.360 And the Israeli study suggests that if you just recover from COVID, you have a very, very high, sort of better protection against both infection and severe disease than people who just get the vaccine.

00:11:03.840 Now, the vaccine actually is fantastic against severe disease.

00:11:06.780 That actually is an important point. I think this is why the messaging is so messed up.

00:11:10.800 Is there people, the public health people like Dr. Fauci are afraid that if you acknowledge the fact that natural, that recovery from COVID confers very strong protection against both infection and disease, severe disease, people won't get the vaccine.

00:11:25.660 But I don't think people are like that. If you tell people the truth, which is that if you're older and you're vulnerable and you have not either been recovered from COVID or you have not got the vaccine, the vaccine is very, very important to protect you against severe disease.

00:11:38.080 So, like with this, this CDC study is comparing the, I think, the people who have recovered from COVID alone versus the people who got recovered from COVID and got the vaccine.

00:11:49.080 It's a little misleading because the vaccine-mediated immunity, there's two sort of things you should think about.

00:11:55.820 One is, does it protect you against all infections? And the other is, does it protect you against severe disease?

00:12:00.660 The vaccines protect you against severe disease for over a long period of time. There's a fantastic study of Qatar, for instance, that demonstrates this.

00:12:09.220 But it does not protect you against all infections. After about maybe three, four, five months, the protection against all infections effectively goes away.

00:12:17.540 And this is why you're seeing in many countries that are highly vaccinated, like Iceland or Israel, actually United States, you're seeing a resurgence of cases of COVID because vaccinated people can actually,

00:12:30.660 still spread COVID. The vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine that makes it so that you know you can't get infected at all.

00:12:38.640 What it does do is protect you against severe disease. So, that's why I've always been telling people to get vaccinated, especially if you're vulnerable, because that's what we really care about, right, Megan?

00:12:48.680 We don't care. It's not so much, if I take the vaccine, I can protect myself against being hospitalized, against dying from COVID.

00:12:54.820 I can worry about COVID much less. And the other thing about vaccine, about these facts is that it has implications for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates.

00:13:04.380 The vaccine protects me from when I take it. After a couple of, after a few months, it no longer protects anybody else.

00:13:11.100 The vaccine then is a private decision with private consequences and much less a public, a private decision with public consequences.

00:13:18.020 There are many fewer public consequences than people make up for the vaccine.

00:13:21.820 So, and I think that a lot of the thinking around vaccine passports and mandates is that it has some public implications.

00:13:27.060 You need me to be vaccinated to protect you. But that's not what the scientific evidence is suggesting.

00:13:31.860 Why are you saying after a few months? Because I thought that you could even, even two months out of getting your vaccines,

00:13:37.460 you could still potentially get COVID and spread COVID.

00:13:41.360 You would just always have the protection, you know, the greater level of protection against hospitalization or death.

00:13:45.940 Yeah. So like the data out of Qatar, for instance, says that about three, the peaks, the protection against all infection peaks around three months after you've got the second dose.

00:13:53.880 And it's about 70%. So it's still possible to, but there's still some protection against all infection at three months.

00:13:59.400 But by six months or five months, it's all gone. There's like, there's almost no protection against infection alone from the vaccine.

00:14:07.380 The vaccine still protects you against severe disease though. So that's, that's the, that's the, that's the basis for my recommendation to take the vaccine.

00:14:13.720 I mean, do you see us going to a place where we acknowledge this, this, you know, the reality about people who've had COVID and natural immunity and stop swooping them into all these mandates?

00:14:23.800 I'm against the mandates to begin with, but it seems to me like at least that group should be exempted.

00:14:30.620 Yeah. I mean, I think, and I think tying the, the, the, these taking the vaccine to your job, especially it's so, when it's so irrational, you've had COVID, you've recovered.

00:14:40.140 You're not, you're actually at less danger to someone who's just vaccinated alone to others.

00:14:45.740 Cause you actually have recovering from COVID actually does protect you against subsequent infection.

00:14:50.700 So for a long period of time, I think a longer than the vaccine.

00:14:53.980 So I think, I think this is one of these things where like this is a huge failure of public health.

00:14:58.960 Essentially we've demonized a large class of people.

00:15:01.380 You know, the funny thing is a lot of those folks were essential workers.

00:15:05.080 We said, okay, you guys are holding society up.

00:15:08.200 They went out, did their job, kept society together, got COVID and recovered.

00:15:13.080 And now we've turned on them because they're like rationally saying, well, why do I, do I really need the vaccine?

00:15:17.940 I mean, I, and they don't trust public health, right?

00:15:19.980 Because public health is sort of becloned itself.

00:15:22.920 And so they're rationally saying, look, do I really need the vaccine when I've already recovered from COVID?

00:15:27.400 And the, and public health basically says, oh no, no, no, there's no such thing as, as, as recover as, as immunity to COVID after you've recovered.

00:15:35.460 When public health denies basic science results, it's, it's no surprise that people start mistrusting public health.

00:15:41.780 Yeah.

00:15:43.020 Sorry, go ahead.

00:15:44.120 No, I was just going to say, you're right.

00:15:45.180 Cause these people, they've been working with patients in the hospital setting.

00:15:49.240 And the reason that people felt comfortable with that is because they knew that a lot of these folks had COVID and weren't going to get it and weren't at risk.

00:15:55.760 And now we're going to turn around and say, not only must you get this vaccine that you don't need, but if you don't, you're fired and then you'll lose your medical benefits, your paycheck.

00:16:06.780 It's like, so, okay.

00:16:07.880 So doctors and nurses now they're going to be the ones without health, without a health coverage, without a paycheck, because they actually do see the science.

00:16:15.200 And even though we trusted them for months to be in the hospital setting, taking care of patients.

00:16:19.040 Now we've just decided we trust no more.

00:16:22.300 Yeah.

00:16:22.660 I mean, I think you actually bring up a really important additional point, just to tie back to what we talked about earlier.

00:16:28.980 If a lot of nurses who basically decide, I don't want the vaccine. 0.95

00:16:33.500 So I'm going to, I'm just going to go on.

00:16:35.260 Essentially, I'm going to say, I'm not going to take it and then get fired or let go.

00:16:39.280 Well, you're going to have staffing shortages at hospitals.

00:16:41.560 It's going to actually make treating COVID patients and other patients more difficult.

00:16:44.940 I don't think this policy has been well thought through and it's going to undermine, I think it already has undermined confidence in public health and also in vaccines generally.

00:16:53.360 Because people are saying, well, if people, if they're, if they're doing this to me with this vaccine, well, what about other vaccines?

00:16:59.340 And that's really unfortunate because vaccines are probably the single most important invention, medical intervention I think I know I've ever learned about.

00:17:08.640 The MMR vaccines, the DPV vaccines is really important for health of children, of the populations at large.

00:17:14.860 And they've public confidence in vaccines, which used to be, you know, the anti-vax movement used to be this fringe movement.

00:17:20.940 That, you know, less than 1%.

00:17:22.620 Now, what, what public health has done is it's turned anti-vax movement into a mainstream movement by this denial of natural immunity, by like this coerciveness.

00:17:31.720 I think I really recommend that public health go back to sort of the more compassionate ways that it maybe once had.

00:17:38.080 Respect people, tell people the truth about what the science is actually saying.

00:17:42.360 Don't try to manipulate them.

00:17:43.440 People can sense that and you'll just get much better results.

00:17:46.180 Yeah, like they're doing in the UK, like they're doing in Israel, which is where we now have to look for real information because our government likes to lie to us, likes to mislead us and likes to treat us like we're two.

00:17:56.000 Listen, we appreciate your straight shooting right from the beginning.

00:17:59.200 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, great to see you again.

00:18:01.400 Thank you, Megan.

00:18:01.980 Nice to be on the air.

00:18:03.520 Up next, we're going to talk about big tech's censorship.

00:18:06.200 And it isn't just about COVID.

00:18:07.500 It's also about trying to silence political beliefs that don't fit the narrative.

00:18:10.920 As you well know, we have two great guests on this for you today.

00:18:14.660 One of them starts right after this break.

00:18:17.000 He's so concerned about it.

00:18:17.960 He quit the very billion dollar company he founded and built to speak out against this.

00:18:24.260 Vivek Ramaswamy is here next.

00:18:26.540 Don't miss him.

00:18:30.400 Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:18:32.660 Well, in recent weeks, we have seen a mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan during the debacle of a pullout that Biden orchestrated,

00:18:39.220 suspended from Instagram and having her Facebook page shut down for speaking out against President Biden.

00:18:46.860 And then just more recently, Chase Banks sent a letter to General Michael Flynn's wife telling her they were canceling her credit card because they consider her a, quote, reputational risk.

00:18:56.220 Both companies later backed off and did a 180 after it became public.

00:19:00.960 But how long until they don't?

00:19:03.680 Joining me now is Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke, Inc., and very successful guy, really thoughtful man.

00:19:09.840 Vivek, it's great to have you on the program.

00:19:11.660 Let's just get a little bit of your background just so people understand how you got to where you are.

00:19:15.900 So you went to Harvard undergrad.

00:19:17.940 You went to Yale Law School.

00:19:19.900 You were on Wall Street for a bit.

00:19:22.300 You're a young guy, only 36.

00:19:23.620 And then you founded a company.

00:19:25.320 Is it Rovian or Rovian?

00:19:27.740 Roivian was the company.

00:19:29.020 Roivian.

00:19:29.340 OK. 1.00

00:19:29.880 And killed it. 1.00

00:19:31.620 I mean, just crushed it. 0.53

00:19:33.140 And in like a couple of years, the company was worth billions.

00:19:36.840 And you were suddenly basking in money and thought, what to yourself about your journey as an American citizen?

00:19:43.820 Well, look, I was actually steeped in building a company for the first six years.

00:19:47.560 You're going to build something from the ground up.

00:19:48.860 You don't have much of a chance to pay attention to much else.

00:19:51.920 And by 2019, the company was running on its own two feet.

00:19:54.340 And as I sort of came up for air, I noticed a trend that really bothered me, Megan, which was all of my peers, elite investors, CEOs, et cetera, around 2019, suddenly started issuing carbon copy statements about how they were now not just going to serve their shareholders, but they were going to also serve societal interests and all stakeholders and disempowered communities.

00:20:14.600 And on the face of it, there's nothing objectionable about it.

00:20:17.300 But it smacked of a certain inauthenticity to me that really bothered me.

00:20:21.560 And Milton Friedman had criticized the same trend of stakeholder capitalism years ago, thinking that was going to make businesses run less efficiently.

00:20:28.240 But that wasn't quite the thing that bothered me.

00:20:30.400 So I spent some time reflecting on it.

00:20:32.000 The thing that really bothered me, Megan, was the idea that people like me, people who occupied seats of corporate power, were suddenly going to exercise power not just in the marketplace of products, but in the marketplace of ideas.

00:20:43.740 And to me, that was a real violation of democracy.

00:20:46.240 It belied the vision of democracy that I thought defined this country, where every person's voice and vote counted equally, whether they're my neighbor here in Ohio or whether they were my neighbor in the corner office of the suite where I used to work in my suite in Manhattan.

00:21:00.220 And I think that that principle, I think, was what was at stake that really bothered me at my core.

00:21:04.840 So I wrote one op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it.

00:21:06.960 It was supposed to be a one and done.

00:21:08.200 And that ended up getting blown out into a book.

00:21:10.780 And that led me on the journey that ultimately led me to step down as CEO this January so that I could really speak freely about these issues.

00:21:17.420 Because if there's one thing that I learned, I wasn't actually free to do that while I was the CEO of a major company.

00:21:22.180 I really needed to separate my voice as a citizen from my voice as a CEO.

00:21:26.180 OK, because there it is.

00:21:27.040 That's what I did this January ahead of writing the book.

00:21:28.900 There's the rub right there.

00:21:29.940 Because maybe you would have felt differently about stakeholder capitalism or people, you know, these companies trying to sort of take more political viewpoints.

00:21:37.900 If you'd seen a greater diversity of thought, but they've all gone one way.

00:21:42.540 And anybody who deigns to go in a more conservative direction with their viewpoints or whatever becomes a national news story, becomes the scourge of the media, whether it's the old version of Chick-fil-A or SoulCycle.

00:21:54.440 Having been outed for, you know, doing some fundraising for President Trump, the CEO, you get punished if you come out the one way and you get lauded only if you come out on the left and in support of these woke ideals.

00:22:05.860 I think that's right, Megan.

00:22:07.780 We live in a moment with not a monopoly on products in the marketplace of products, but with a monopoly on ideas.

00:22:13.340 And whether you call it a monopoly or an ideological cartel, that's where we live in corporate America.

00:22:18.500 Now, I don't want to portray myself as some kind of victim.

00:22:20.520 I've done perfectly fine for myself in the system of American capitalism.

00:22:23.760 I'm able to not have to worry about putting food on the dinner table in a way that so many others are when they're afraid of being able to speak out.

00:22:30.560 And so I felt with that privilege came some responsibility to be able to speak with candor from the inside.

00:22:36.580 And you're right.

00:22:37.320 If I was spouting out left-leaning views like CEOs like Mark Benioff tend to do, maybe that would benefit my business.

00:22:42.960 In my case, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this January, making the case against big tech censorship, making the case that they ought to be treated.

00:22:50.040 I think you were familiar with this op-ed.

00:22:51.300 They ought to be treated as state actors when they're acting in coordination with the state.

00:22:55.480 A relatively technical point that I wrote with a former law professor of mine.

00:22:59.320 Yet after I wrote that, I kid you not, Megan, in the wake of January 6th, the country was in such a heated place that three of the advisors to my company actually resigned that week on the back of me publishing that op-ed.

00:23:10.200 But to me, that was a wake-up call, telling me that actually, if I was going to speak in an uninhibited way as a citizen, even though it was completely separate from my capacity as a CEO, it risked having backlash for my business.

00:23:21.640 That's part of why I thought the responsible choice to make was to be able to separate in my own identity what I think America needs to separate in its identity.

00:23:29.140 Separate capitalism from democracy.

00:23:31.160 Separate one's commercial activities from one's civic duties.

00:23:33.880 And right now, I've taken a break, in large part a break of my commercial activities, to be able to carry out what I see as a civic duty, which is to be able to speak out with candor in an unabashed, unapologetic way about what I think of as one of the challenging issues of our time.

00:23:48.360 The way in which this new postmodern dogma has really infected one institution after another, starting in corporate America, but extending to our universities and beyond as well.

00:23:56.840 I understand it. I understand it. I feel like people like journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, yours truly, all of us who had been, I think, much more reticent about sharing opinions or sort of making cultural issues more personal, have done something similar to what you've been doing, which is to speak out in a way we normally wouldn't have, because this is the issue of our time.

00:24:20.380 I mean, this really this culture war goes to the very heart of what America is and ought to be, and it requires extraordinary action.

00:24:28.000 You've been very brave. I'm not going to embarrass you by telling everybody what you've done, but I just want them to know that privately I've seen you help a lot of people who get unfairly targeted, both with your time and with your dollars.

00:24:38.580 And so I've been your big admirer. But I think that you raise a good point about what could be done to stop what's happening with big tech, big tech and its censorship.

00:24:48.780 And so before we keep going down the woke line, I'd love to stop and just spend a minute on that January op ed, which I loved.

00:24:54.020 And we covered on this podcast was you and Jed Rubenfeld, who was your professor at Yale Law School.

00:24:58.080 He's married to Amy Chua, Tiger mom, who I love as well. They're getting unfairly targeted right now at Yale.

00:25:02.760 It's BS. But and she's fighting back, which is awesome to see. But you and he wrote this very powerful op ed about why Facebook shouldn't be allowed to censor anybody with a conservative viewpoint from Trump on down, why it's not appropriate for Amazon to kick off parlor, why we should be treating them, even though they're private actors and therefore not covered by the First Amendment, which only covers a state actor.

00:25:24.040 Why we should be treating them like they are state actors covered by the First Amendment legally and otherwise, which would remove their ability to discriminate based on viewpoint.

00:25:33.560 Can you explain what you what you wrote?

00:25:36.200 Yeah, sure. So conventional wisdom definitely says, Megan, that private actors are free to decide what does and doesn't show up on their websites when they're behaving as private actors.

00:25:44.740 But the essence of what's actually happening today is a little bit different than that. You have private actors working hand in glove with big government to determine what views can and can't be represented today is that the party in power today, the Democratic Party is effectively using a combination of threats and inducements to be able to get private companies to do through the back door what government cannot directly do through the front door under the Constitution, namely to censor political speech directly.

00:26:10.320 And so the party in power says that if you don't take down hate speech and misinformation, as we the government define it, then we're going to come after you as private companies, we're going to regulate you, we're going to break you up, we're going to make it aggressive, we're going to make it swift.

00:26:21.920 Almost all of those are exact quotes from congressional hearings over the course of the last year.

00:26:26.540 And then these big tech titans do exactly what government has threatened them to do when government also wraps around them the inducement, a special shield of immunity, Section 230 immunity, that preempts any state action at the state level against these companies through the private tort system.

00:26:41.100 So that combination of carrots and sticks, the threats and inducements, which now have taken on a new form, even over the course of the last 12 months, Megan, of direct coordination, willful participation in a joint activity between the government and private companies to be able to censor COVID misinformation as they define it, that creates state action in disguise.

00:26:59.380 And the core case we made in that op-ed, Megan, was that if it is state action in disguise, then actually the Constitution still applies.

00:27:06.660 It's that simple.

00:27:07.760 It's a relatively technical argument, draws on a lot of Supreme Court precedents in favor of finding state action when the government induces private parties to do something independently.

00:27:16.120 There's a Supreme Court case called Brentwood, which says that there's one of three bases for finding state action in the action of a private company.

00:27:22.380 It could be either threats made by the government or inducements by the government or, as the term I used before, willful participation in a joint activity.

00:27:31.940 Ironically, in the case of big tech censorship today, we have not just one of those conditions, but all three of those conditions where these companies are definitely responsive to threats.

00:27:39.020 They're definitely protected.

00:27:40.140 They're definitely working and coordinating directly with the government.

00:27:42.360 Just listen to Jen Psaki. 1.00

00:27:43.280 She boasts about it.

00:27:44.400 So I think that that is state action in disguise.

00:27:46.240 And that's the case that we made is that they ought to be treated as state actors.

00:27:48.760 Yeah.

00:27:49.100 Jen Psaki out there with that. 1.00

00:27:50.180 We know we've given the list of the disinformation dozen to all of the major social media companies and make sure that they get censored.

00:27:56.400 It's like, well, she she admitted it.

00:27:57.900 They showed their hand.

00:27:59.320 This is kind of what Trump is alleging in his lawsuit against these companies, saying that he was unfairly booted.

00:28:05.100 He didn't get it exactly right.

00:28:06.420 So I don't know.

00:28:06.920 In a sloppy way.

00:28:07.640 But yes, I think that's that's that's the spirit of what he's getting at.

00:28:10.300 I believe I have reason to believe that he might have drawn from the principles in our op-ed.

00:28:14.820 I actually wrote another op-ed under my sole name a little bit later.

00:28:17.720 You know, I wouldn't say critiquing the Trump lawsuit, but pointing out some of the ways in which it fell short, but the ways in which he still has a path to victory if he actually makes the claims in the right way.

00:28:26.540 And I think that if he does make his claims in the right way, it could be one of the defining cases of our time.

00:28:31.620 Forty-fifth president of the United States silenced.

00:28:34.140 You know, Herbert Hoover once actually said this is about consolidation in a different industry, the radio and telecommunications industry, where he said that no president should be stopped from being able to communicate to the people by a private actor who sits in between.

00:28:45.340 I mean, he is rolling over in his grave.

00:28:47.260 I believe he was the thirty third president.

00:28:49.040 Now, the forty fifth president takes his case to court.

00:28:51.100 Actually, I think it could be one of the historic cases of our time.

00:28:53.540 The asterisk to that is he actually needs to argue it with discipline in the right way.

00:28:57.340 And to me, the jury's still out on whether he's able to do that.

00:28:59.820 But but I think he has the potential to actually even make the case that Section 230 is unconstitutional as applied to protecting cases, big tech behavior in cases like that against him.

00:29:11.920 And just just explain Section 230, because not everybody knows what that is.

00:29:15.880 Yeah, sure, sure.

00:29:16.460 I apologize.

00:29:17.240 So Section 230 is basically a statute that has two parts.

00:29:20.540 I'm going to focus on the second part of it, what's called 230 C2, which effectively says that these companies have no immunity under state law, have no liability under state law for removing content.

00:29:33.600 And here's text from the statute, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

00:29:39.220 So that's Congress saying there's constitutionally protected material that we can't, as Congress, legislate out, that we, the government, can't ban, but that private companies who take down that content will be immunized in return for doing so.

00:29:52.260 That's what Section 230 C2 does.

00:29:53.980 Their vision, Megan, was actually applying that doctrine to soft core pornography, certain types of pornography that might have been constitutionally protected under the First Amendment that Congress still wanted to deputize these private companies to be unafraid in taking down.

00:30:07.180 Now you have statutes coming up in states like Florida that effectively pass non-discrimination statutes that say that actually social media companies cannot engage in political discrimination online.

00:30:17.500 And what you have is a debate that says that actually Section 230 preempts that law, that is, federal law overrides state law to say that actually the federal law wins when the two are in conflict, that that law is now actually on hold.

00:30:29.660 It's being stayed by a district court judge when big tech pushed back and said that Section 230 would preempt that statute.

00:30:35.420 Well, one of the cases I would make is that Section 230 is arguably unconstitutional if it preempts a state statute that reinforces a constitutional right.

00:30:45.300 So those are the kinds of arguments that I think President Trump could take all the way to the Supreme Court.

00:30:49.520 He could, that's under Florida law, but he could make it a part of the claim of the federal case that he's bringing against, against the big tech titans through supplemental jurisdiction.

00:30:57.740 It's so great. It's so rich. If you, if you think about what DeSantis and the Floridians did, they sort of made big tech own its bias.

00:31:04.860 It's like, no, you can't discriminate against political viewpoints. And the, and big tech was basically like, well, we want to, and we're allowed to, and we're going to continue to, because we're allowed to, thanks to 230.

00:31:14.600 I mean, that is what they're doing. It's, it's the same thing as your complaint about, you know, what you've seen. And when it comes to stakeholder capitalism, as long as your bias goes one way, you're fine.

00:31:25.820 The 230 bias that's being executed by these big tech companies is always 90% of the time one way. It stifles the conservative viewpoint, not the other.

00:31:35.780 It is. And Megan, if I may, for a second, just because it's really topical, a lot of the liberal outrage against the recent Texas abortion law was the fact that it actually deputized private actors to do through the backdoor, through the civil system, what the government could not directly do under Roe v. Wade as a doctrine.

00:31:51.820 Well, if you're on the left and you find something offensive about that, in the case of the Texas anti-abortion statute, then I think that there's no basis for you not to see the same issue in spades with what the government is actually doing with respect to restrictions on free speech.

00:32:05.560 If you think that whatever you think of Roe v. Wade, if you think it was a constitutional right to be able to get an abortion because of a, you know, I think a poorly decided case, but let's put that to one side.

00:32:14.980 You ought to agree that the first amendment of the constitution of the United States can't be evaded by the government delegating its dirty work to private actors there either.

00:32:21.120 Yet that's exactly what's happening every day.

00:32:23.020 And so it's actually a tool that could be dangerously used by both sides.

00:32:26.500 I don't think this is a liberal or a conservative issue.

00:32:28.640 We do not want to live in a society where the government is able to sidestep the constitutional constraints by deputizing private mercenaries to do its bidding instead.

00:32:36.820 And whether you're on the left or the right, I think you should see a problem with that.

00:32:39.640 And here's like getting back to the other sort of track, which is this stakeholder capitalism and how it's manifesting, because corporate America is just one of the lanes that's been taken over by the woke.

00:32:49.520 You know, we've seen it in sports. We've seen it in media. We've seen it in Hollywood.

00:32:52.120 But the surrender of corporate America to this was, I have to say, a little surprising to me.

00:32:56.140 I thought they'd have more backbone. I thought they'd be more like the Michael Jordan, you know, conservatives buy sneakers to Republicans buy sneakers to, you know, they haven't.

00:33:04.320 They've surrendered. I mean, they have taken the knee when it comes to these woke activists who try to tell them you will be anti-racist or else.

00:33:10.700 And they've gone along with it. And one of the points you make in your book, Woke Inc. is it's a lie. It's a scam.

00:33:18.460 It's a defining scam of our time, Megan.

00:33:20.560 And it's not so surprising to me when I got my first job out of college right before the 2008 financial crisis at a hedge fund in New York City.

00:33:30.060 I had a front row seat to the 2008 crisis and the aftermath. But the hedge fund I worked for was mentioned in the big short.

00:33:35.960 You know, I was kind of pretty close to what happened then and the aftermath of it.

00:33:40.360 And I'll tell you, after the 08 crisis, what happened was corporate America was really scared of the Occupy Wall Street left,

00:33:47.400 the newly nascent ascendant movement in the left that wanted to reorder economic power structures in this country,

00:33:52.960 take money from those wealthy corporations, redistribute it to poor people.

00:33:56.000 Agree or not, that is what the old left had to say. But there was this birth of this new woke left around the same time

00:34:02.940 that said, actually, the real problem wasn't economic injustice or poverty quite.

00:34:07.720 It was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and so on.

00:34:11.800 And that presented the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country to go from being possibly the bad guys

00:34:17.820 to being the good guys if they just said the right things.

00:34:21.420 Applaud diversity and inclusion. Put token minorities on your boards. 1.00

00:34:24.540 This is such a good point.

00:34:26.000 I love this. It's basically a get out of jail. It's a get out of bad person jail free card for evil CEOs.

00:34:35.180 They're like, oh, there's a new villain. We're onto it. Yes, white men. 0.91

00:34:38.080 It just blame everything on white men. And that's distinct from us, most of whom are white men who run companies 0.93

00:34:44.300 because we're going to use these companies, at least on paper, to be sort of advocates for social justice

00:34:50.240 and don't pay any attention to what we're doing behind the curtain.

00:34:52.600 Exactly. You'd rather talk about systemic racism than systemic financial risk if you're a bank after 08.

00:34:58.080 That's exactly what they ended up doing. There's a funny story I tell in the book, Megan, where

00:35:01.280 first you're Wall Street and you criticize Wall Street's lack of gender diversity,

00:35:05.620 even though you're Wall Street. And even better, you then get paid to do it.

00:35:08.760 There was a statue that showed up in front of the Wall Street Bull after, you know, in recent years,

00:35:13.060 commissioned by State Street Global Advisors.

00:35:15.120 It was called She or Fearless Girl. And the placard at the feet of Fearless Girl said S-H-E in all caps.

00:35:21.820 She makes a difference. Well, it turns out they built that statue after a number of female employees 1.00

00:35:27.440 at their firm alleged that they were being paid less than their male counterparts systematically.

00:35:32.040 So your female employees have the statue paid enough. 1.00

00:35:35.000 What's the natural thing you do? You build a statue for them.

00:35:37.440 Sure. That's going to put money on the table. That's going to put food on the table for these women. 1.00

00:35:40.400 It gets even funnier, Megan. So S-H-E stands for not just Fearless Girl. It also stands for the

00:35:47.120 ticker of the Diversity Index ETF, exchange-traded fund that State Street charges a fee on. So it's

00:35:53.100 a marketing tactic for people to buy S-H-E, which is an exchange-traded fund that they market.

00:35:58.300 And to top it off, you can't make this stuff up. The woman who actually created this,

00:36:01.880 she's a true feminist. She was a true believer. She built Fearless Girl with a mission. 0.97

00:36:05.580 She was commissioned by State Street to do it. She was so excited that she actually built three more

00:36:09.140 copies of Fearless Girl because she was really inspired by her own work. Turned out that State

00:36:13.920 Street sues her for making three unauthorized reproductions of the statue. Because like any

00:36:18.260 magic act, you can't just make the money disappear in your marketing budget. You have to bring it

00:36:22.080 back. And so that's actually one of the stories I tell in the introduction to the book. But there

00:36:25.240 are countless examples just like it where this is really just a cynical arrangement. It's not even

00:36:29.920 an arranged marriage. I call it an arranged marriage sometimes. It's not even really an arranged

00:36:33.540 marriage. It's more like mutual prostitution where the woke left and big business secretly have 0.99

00:36:37.740 disdain for one another. But they're each getting something out of the trade. And that's the state

00:36:42.000 of affairs that led to the birth of woke capitalism that allowed them to put Occupy Wall Street up for

00:36:47.040 adoption. And I'm sorry to say it worked effectively. Yeah. No, I mean, you look no further than Colin

00:36:51.600 Kaepernick, who's like capitalism, disgusting, racist system as he cashes his huge multimillion dollar 0.96

00:36:57.420 checks from Nike. Cha-ching. I actually love America. All right. Stand by, Vivek, because up next, 0.98

00:37:03.000 we're going to be discussing the news that broke today on this secret Facebook program,

00:37:07.040 just uncovering what the company did not want you to know that it knows about your children.

00:37:13.180 That's next.

00:37:16.980 Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me now is Vivek Ramaswamy, author of

00:37:21.700 Woke Inc. And he's an entrepreneur. He's a very successful guy. And he's trying to help fight back

00:37:28.180 against this bullying. I mean, it's really it's turned into corporate bullying by companies that

00:37:34.040 want you to think that they're that they have good hearts, that they're really just trying to

00:37:39.240 improve our world. But really, they've signed on to this woke ideology to protect their own bottom

00:37:43.700 line, their butts and make themselves feel like better people while behind the scenes they're

00:37:48.020 sticking the knife in. And one of the great examples in your book, Vivek, is what Amazon did.

00:37:53.060 I love this. It's it really tells the story about what it did in 2020 when it pledged to donate

00:37:58.180 $10 million to groups focused on aiding black communities. And why don't you tell us what

00:38:03.380 they were doing behind the scenes while that was happening? Well, I mean, Amazon's hypocrisy just

00:38:07.900 runs rampant, right? They had they had fired one of their one of their black employees at one of the 0.97

00:38:12.960 warehouses while calling him behind closed doors, dumb and inarticulate. Amazon also challenged Walmart 0.99

00:38:18.120 when its profitability was temporarily facing a trough to a challenge to pay its workers a minimum

00:38:24.100 dollars of 15 $15 per hour voluntarily. When of course, Amazon is one of the worst perpetrators of

00:38:29.840 having treated its workers poorly for decades. But I just think that that comes back to principle

00:38:34.560 number one, commandment number one, if you will, of the church of woke capitalism, Megan, the more

00:38:39.120 ruthless your business practices are, the more woke progressive you have to act. Raytheon and Lockheed

00:38:44.740 Martin, I put in this category, there's no woke way to make ballistic missiles that kill thousands

00:38:49.140 of people. I'm not saying they're wrong to make those missiles, but it is counterintuitive that

00:38:53.220 they would then be training their employees about white privilege rather than about the myriad other

00:38:57.400 things they could be talking about that relate to the core of their business practices.

00:39:00.660 Is that happening? I actually missed that one. Raytheon's doing that?

00:39:04.500 Oh, Raytheon's doing it and Lockheed. And the funny thing is Lockheed did it first and then

00:39:07.920 Raytheon follows. And so it's a new form of market competition, Megan, and competition in the

00:39:12.900 marketplace of ideas where you have to keep up with the Joneses. Well, once your competitor's

00:39:16.300 done it, then you have to do it too, or you're missing out on the competitive advantage of having

00:39:20.420 blown woke smoke to be able to evade accountability for your actual actions. Because if the competitor

00:39:24.880 is blowing woke smoke, that's a competitive advantages because they could get in bed with 0.93

00:39:28.780 the regulator, they could get in bed with the public. And now you have to do it too, if you're

00:39:32.640 to keep up or else you're at a competitive disadvantage. And so that's the way this game is played.

00:39:36.060 You see it play out in one sector after another.

00:39:38.500 Oh, guys, like Harvey Weinstein making donations to women's groups, which did happen.

00:39:42.900 Prior to him being outed as a sexual predator because he thinks he's going to it's paying

00:39:46.460 some sort of insurance policy so that people won't won't get you. You know, it just isn't

00:39:51.560 a side with Harvey. So he he tried to lay the foundation with me, too. I mean, he knew what

00:39:58.160 was coming for him because the articles had been circulating. The rumors of articles have

00:40:01.640 been circulating. And he tried to make nice nice with me for quite some time and even with

00:40:06.020 my husband. And I'm so gullible, Vivek. I was like, I don't know. I hadn't heard the stories

00:40:10.940 about Harvey. I'm not in Hollywood. So I'm like, I know they say he might be a bully,

00:40:14.560 but there's nothing I want to do with him professionally anyway. But my husband, Doug,

00:40:18.280 who always, always knows he's like, Meg, he's not a good guy. I'm like, oh, yes. He said

00:40:23.120 the same thing to me about Matt Lauer. I'm like, oh, he seems like a nice. He said the same

00:40:26.920 thing to me about Charlie Rose. I'm like, I don't know. He I could go on. The bottom line

00:40:31.180 is trust, Doug. Doug. Is that right? That's that's OK. You married a married a smart man

00:40:36.540 then. But he just got the whatever Shakespearean lady doth protest too much. You're trying too 0.63

00:40:42.740 hard. You're trying too hard for a reason. Right. I mean, you could I could just go on

00:40:46.720 and on about the list of Goldman Sachs last year goes to the mountaintops of Davos and

00:40:50.780 says it's not going to take a company public in the United States unless its board is sufficiently

00:40:55.260 diverse where they're the sole arbiter of diversity on skin deep attributes. Of course, right 0.65

00:41:00.120 there. That's a moment when Elizabeth Warren is the front runner of the Democratic primary

00:41:04.000 and they know they're not going to place their alumnus in the Warren administration. This

00:41:08.400 is just tithing in a new currency. It's what these guys do. It's completely not that whether

00:41:12.420 it's at the first personal level with Harvey Weinstein or whether it's at the corporate

00:41:15.980 level. It's the same thing of using a form of woke insurance. I actually like that term 0.92

00:41:20.660 a lot. You're buying an insurance policy inexpensively to buy yourself out of a catastrophe scenario

00:41:25.660 that you'd rather avoid. In most cases in corporate America, unlike in the case of

00:41:29.240 Harvey Weinstein, it's working out pretty well for most of these corporations. What I'm trying

00:41:32.820 to do in the book is to really just call out that hypocrisy for what it is, not because

00:41:36.820 I think corporations are wrong to pursue profits, but because I think our system works better

00:41:41.160 when they openly admit and even embrace that that's what they're exactly doing rather than

00:41:45.980 duping the public into forgetting about its otherwise intact system of accountability, both

00:41:52.080 market accountability and political accountability to actually hold companies accountable. That's

00:41:56.080 the reason I'm doing it. I know. I love it. And you shine a light on China, too. And I think

00:42:01.780 we've heard China. You know, people talk about China as a boogeyman. China's doing this. China's 0.97

00:42:05.760 doing that. But you kind of do a very nice job of laying out exactly how it works, how these

00:42:10.880 companies buddy up to China and China to these companies. China has the last laugh in almost 0.92

00:42:17.580 every circumstance and then winds up controlling these companies, their public messaging, the way

00:42:23.080 they speak in a really disturbing way. Could you talk about that?

00:42:27.740 Totally. So this is the first book to talk about the geopolitical implications of wokeism and woke

00:42:31.460 capitalism. And I think the China dimension is probably the most important of them all, even

00:42:35.320 though there's certain relationships to other countries, too. The way it works is effectively

00:42:39.220 China has realized that if the new international arbiters of moral justice, multinational corporations

00:42:44.400 generally based in the United States, if they relentlessly criticize the United States for alleged

00:42:49.500 social injustices like racism and transphobia, but say nothing about actual human rights atrocities

00:42:55.320 in China, like the million Uyghurs who are enslaved in concentration camps subject to forced sterilization,

00:43:00.660 communist indoctrination, and words, then that creates a false moral equivalence on the global

00:43:05.740 stage between the United States and China. That erodes our greatest asset of all. That is not our nuclear 0.92

00:43:10.620 arsenal. It is our moral standing on the global stage. And if you have any doubt about that, just listen

00:43:15.880 really carefully to what China says now in nearly every diplomatic setting. Xi Jinping did it last

00:43:20.860 year before the EU. His top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, did it in the Alaska summit this year. When they're

00:43:25.600 pressed about the Uyghur human rights crisis, the first thing Xi Jinping now says is that Black Lives

00:43:30.020 Matter shows that the United States is no better. That would be laughable if it weren't for the fact

00:43:35.020 that Nike and Disney and BlackRock and the NBA and so on legitimize their claims by consistently

00:43:41.440 criticizing racism in the United States, the suffering of Black people in the United States

00:43:45.500 without saying a peep about the Uyghur human rights crisis or other human rights atrocities in China.

00:43:50.880 Even worse, Disney films Mulan last year there in the Shenzhen province. Now, a couple of years ago,

00:43:56.020 they said they can't film in the state of Georgia if Georgia passes the equivalent of an anti-abortion

00:43:59.460 statue. But they film in Mulan in Shenzhen, and they actually thank the CCP authorities for allowing

00:44:05.580 them the privilege of filming there. And so, Megan, I think this goes to a core issue of failed U.S.

00:44:10.280 policy over the last 30 years, the flawed policy of democratic capitalism. We say stakeholder

00:44:15.400 capitalism today. We said democratic capitalism in the 1990s, where we thought we could export

00:44:20.700 Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to places like China. We thought we could use

00:44:25.740 our money to get them to be more like us. Instead, they have turned that on its head. They are now

00:44:31.620 using their money to get us to be more like them. And I think that is what progressives need to wake up

00:44:36.320 to, to get woke to, if you will. The idea that once you turn corporations into vectors to drive

00:44:41.620 progressive agendas, they become vehicles to advance any agenda. And nobody has mastered that

00:44:47.060 game better than China. They have sent back our Disney movies and Nike sneakers filled with their 1.00

00:44:52.700 values, creating that false moral equivalence between the U.S. and China. And I'm sorry to say,

00:44:57.640 thank you, LeBron James. It happens to be working out pretty well for the Chinese side of that equation.

00:45:01.540 And I think that that equation of Chinese nihilism with American idealism is probably one of the 0.99

00:45:07.180 defining geopolitical threats over the course of the next decade. I think two greatest threats to

00:45:11.320 American democracy, we've talked about both of them, are China and big tech in that order. But I think

00:45:15.420 there's a deep relationship between the two in terms of how they use corporate America as effectively

00:45:19.480 a Trojan horse to accomplish their ends. Yeah. So what do we do about it? Such a big question in such

00:45:25.540 a few words. Yeah, look, I mean, I did write a book about it. And I think there's more to say than we can

00:45:30.720 cover here in short order. But I think that there's combinations of symptomatic therapies,

00:45:35.200 legal and policy solutions. And then much more importantly, I think the cultural solutions that

00:45:39.340 we really need to be talking more about. But I think the symptomatic solutions can play a role

00:45:43.260 in creating the conditions for cultural change. I think a lot of it begins with revisiting conservative

00:45:48.120 dogmas, right? You know, Ronald Reagan did what he needed to do in his era, because in his era,

00:45:52.820 big government was the singular threat to liberty and prosperity in this country. He cut regulations,

00:45:57.260 he slashed taxes, did what he needed to do. But I think we the dogmas of 1980 do not necessarily

00:46:03.120 apply to address the unique problems in 2021. Where at least I think the biggest threat to liberty

00:46:08.000 and prosperity today is not just big government. It might have been in 1980. It's not today. It is

00:46:12.660 this new hybrid of big government and big business. That's far more powerful than either one alone,

00:46:17.240 because it can do what either one can't on its own either. And that's a new monster that's far more

00:46:22.900 powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned. It's far more powerful than what our founding fathers

00:46:26.320 envisioned. And the kinds of policy solutions we need today are ones that go back to these

00:46:30.560 businesses or this new hybrid of big business and big government to say that you can't have

00:46:33.880 it both ways. Take big tech, simple section 230 reform that says that either you behave like private

00:46:39.260 companies, and you're free to decide what doesn't doesn't show up on your websites, or you get the

00:46:43.920 special form of federal immunity, but it comes with strings attached. And if you're protected by the

00:46:48.260 federal government, then you also operate according to the same constraints as the federal government,

00:46:52.480 including the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's online behavior.

00:46:56.120 Let's talk about this political discrimination offline, where a lot of people are fired for

00:47:00.220 saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong hat. A Virginia shipyard worker was fired from his job

00:47:04.680 for wearing a Trump hat to work in 2020. I mean, the list of examples goes on. What I say is that

00:47:10.020 we need to add political belief as a protected class or political speech as a protected class

00:47:14.820 to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, to say that if you can't discriminate on the base of race

00:47:19.320 or sex or religion or national origin, or after the Bostock case last year on sexual orientation either,

00:47:23.900 then you should not be able to discriminate on the basis of one's political expression or political

00:47:28.500 beliefs either. And I don't think that's an academic issue. I think it is happening every day in this

00:47:32.660 country. If it can happen to the 45th president of the United States, I think it can happen to anybody.

00:47:37.360 To anyone.

00:47:37.900 It would change the way universities operate, K through 12 operate, and obviously corporate America

00:47:44.240 too, and big tech. Vivek, got to run. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. The book is called

00:47:48.460 Woke Inc. Well worth your time. Up next, Professor Scott Galloway. He's on the left, but calls Apple,

00:47:55.060 Facebook, and these others soul-killing, job-killing. He's next. He's fun.

00:48:07.360 Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show. Joining me now, Professor Scott Galloway.

00:48:11.620 He's a marketing professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, a tech startup veteran,

00:48:16.760 and a best-selling author, just to mention a few of his accomplishments. He's been called

00:48:20.840 Gordon Gekko with a social conscience. Love that. And he's been taking on Apple, Facebook,

00:48:26.220 Amazon, and Google for years. More importantly, been taking on Kara Swisher, which is very scary

00:48:31.280 because she is super smart and tough and pretty awesome, even though our politics look nothing 0.60

00:48:36.000 like one another's. Have so much care and love for her. Welcome, Professor Galloway. Great to have you

00:48:40.740 here. Thanks for having me, Megan. Yeah. So she's so fun. I met her, by the way, when I was at NBC.

00:48:44.580 We were doing a story on tech and Me Too and so on. And I said, you know, these guys, these CEOs,

00:48:50.520 I don't know that they're going to change. What's your message to them? And she was like,

00:48:54.160 I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. And I was like, I'm afraid for them. She will get them.

00:49:00.800 No, she's scary, but she's been a great partner and I really enjoy, you know, after working my ass off

00:49:07.940 for 30 years, I'm an overnight success because of Kara Swisher.

00:49:11.780 Well, I like as you have more, I don't know, is it fair to say working class roots? I've heard 1.00

00:49:17.020 you describe your background in different ways. Yeah. Raised by a single immigrant mother who

00:49:22.740 lived and died a secretary and, you know, was really, Megan, transformed by kind of big government,

00:49:29.640 the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regency University of California went to UCLA and

00:49:34.720 Berkeley for undergrad and grad for a total of tuition of $7,000 in the eighties. And even more

00:49:40.020 importantly, back then the acceptance rate at UCLA was 70%. I had to apply twice to get in. And now

00:49:44.600 the acceptance rate is 12%. So things have changed a lot. Well, and it was at a point where young men 0.86

00:49:50.960 were still going to college. I mean, I think, I know this is one of the things you've been pointing

00:49:53.740 out, but where are all the young men going to college now? They're, they're going another way or I

00:49:57.700 don't know what they're doing, but they're not going to college in anywhere near the same numbers as

00:50:00.560 they used to. It's a really interesting issue. I'm sure you saw the wall street journal article,

00:50:05.380 but it's now 60, 40, um, uh, women to men in college, which sounds bad, but it's even worse

00:50:11.120 when you consider that if you're, if your son shows up to college, there's 50% more women there

00:50:16.520 and seven in 10 high school valedictorians or girls. Some of this is good. Some of this is catching

00:50:21.120 up. Some of this is just warranted, uh, reward for young women and girls who are overachieving

00:50:26.960 academically, but also it signals, I think something very dangerous. And that is men are 0.88

00:50:32.380 not attaching to school. They're not attaching to work. They're more, they're more likely to be

00:50:37.160 unemployed, more likely to have opioid addiction. And also, this is a strange stat. Uh, in 2008,

00:50:45.020 uh, 8% of men under the age of 30 had reported never having had sex. And while people hear the term

00:50:50.980 in their brain fires, a bunch of different ways, just assume it's a key component of establishing a

00:50:54.600 relationship, that number as of last year is 28%. And the reason why that number is so scary is if

00:51:00.700 men aren't attaching to work, they're not attaching, or young men attaching to work, school, or a job,

00:51:06.240 they're very dangerous. Our most unstable societies have what is, uh, uh, too many of the most dangerous

00:51:11.680 person in the world. And that's a young, broken, alone male. So when we hear that men continue to

00:51:16.120 not pursue college, you know, we really do need to look at it. We're producing too many of this cohort.

00:51:20.940 Mm-hmm. Do you think it has to do any with politics at all with how, you know,

00:51:26.680 in particular, the white male has been so demonized and they know what's going to happen

00:51:30.300 on college campuses. They're at the lowest on the totem pole in terms of economic or socio,

00:51:35.280 I should say, status. And I don't know, like I'm just talking to my friends who are very worried

00:51:39.220 about their son, who's a conservative. He's a senior in high school, but he's been really attacked

00:51:43.800 and demonized by the faculty at his school. And they're thinking it's only going to get worse

00:51:47.500 when he goes to college next year. I think they'll still send him, but I wonder how much of that

00:51:52.460 plays into their unwillingness to put themselves through those four years.

00:51:57.380 I don't think it's discouraging them from going. I think other reasons discourage them from going,

00:52:01.840 but I wouldn't be surprised if it lends to more of them or disproportionate amount of them to drop

00:52:07.460 out. I do think there's an unhealthy gestalt in universities right now where just informally,

00:52:13.920 we say at freshman orientation, okay, oppressors over here and oppressed over here. And we start

00:52:21.900 from an unhealthy place of identity politics. And universities have become especially rough and

00:52:29.460 tumble places around this where people's comments are taken out of context. They've made a caricature

00:52:34.580 of it and then they're shamed. And I would argue, Megan, that it's actually their fellow students

00:52:38.040 who are less forgiving than faculty. And I've seen it happen play out in class where someone

00:52:42.980 makes one false move. And universities are generally the most progressive places in the

00:52:49.040 world. I think we've become really made a ton of progress being more accepting of people who don't

00:52:53.780 look like us. Where we have failed is we have become increasingly intolerant of people who don't

00:52:57.900 think like us. 2% of the faculty at Harvard identifies as conservative. And universities are

00:53:03.320 supposed to be a place where we debate and have provocation and welcome the dissenter's voice.

00:53:09.120 Around politics, we just don't tolerate it anymore. So I wonder if a lot of young men show up and

00:53:14.660 immediately say, all right, my freshman orientation kind of told me I was an oppressor. Maybe this

00:53:19.840 isn't the place for me. So I do think there's something there. I don't think it's discouraging

00:53:24.860 them from going to college or enrolling them. I think it might be just encouraging them to drop out.

00:53:29.980 Mm hmm. I know you've written a book on happiness or, you know, just just a short form. It's called

00:53:35.560 The Algebra of Happiness Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love and Meaning. And I do wonder,

00:53:41.020 you know, because I feel like you've written so much on big tech and it's so ubiquitous in our lives

00:53:46.080 and these companies that have all these tentacles and they're manipulating us in ways we don't even

00:53:50.060 fully understand, but we can feel it whether whether we know it's as a result of all the hours we spent

00:53:55.240 on Facebook or not. Just how big a role those big tech companies are playing in unhappiness,

00:54:01.760 whether it's of young men or in particular of young women. We'll get to a story that just came

00:54:05.640 out today from Facebook. How how meaningful do you think their role has been? I don't even think

00:54:11.960 it's meaningful. I think it's profound. My colleague at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, wrote this fantastic book

00:54:16.500 called The Coddling of the American Mind. And we have an epidemic or an emerging epidemic in

00:54:21.960 teen depression. And he identified two sources of that or two drivers. The first is our fault as

00:54:27.240 parents, Megan. I know you're a parent as well. And that is our concierge or bulldozer parenting

00:54:32.260 has led to this sort of this this approach where we use so many sanitary wipes on our children's

00:54:37.620 lives that they don't develop their own immunities. And we develop this princess in the P generation 0.99

00:54:41.620 where they show up to college and get their heart broken or get their first C and literally freak

00:54:46.120 out. The second thing, though, is that social media has been proven and even Facebook knew this

00:54:53.180 and decided to hide it to result in greater levels of depression, that levels of depression

00:54:57.680 and young men and especially young women are correlated with social media use and specifically

00:55:03.800 around Instagram. And it used to be when you and I didn't get invited to a party in high school,

00:55:09.100 it was bad. And that happens to everybody. But now you see it play out in real time on your phone.

00:55:13.040 And it's especially damaging to girls and young women because men or boys bully physically and

00:55:20.420 verbally. Women or young girls bully relationally. And we've put we've put these nuclear weapons in

00:55:27.160 their hands and we keep waiting for the better angels of these companies to show up. And it just

00:55:31.940 doesn't happen. How could how could they? I want to get to the Facebook news in one second because

00:55:36.020 it's it's confirms everything that you've been saying and we know. But how could they, you know,

00:55:40.780 because, for example, my friend John Stossel, who I love, he's a libertarian, you know, he would be

00:55:44.920 if he were here, he'd be saying they're very successful companies. There's a reason they became

00:55:49.380 so successful. The American people voted, you know, with their dollars and with their eyeballs and

00:55:53.620 with their time. And, you know, therefore, it's clearly what people want. And it's not a place for

00:55:59.180 government to step in and protect people from themselves. So what could they be doing differently

00:56:03.700 that would protect our kids more, but not totally abandon American capitalism and the way it works?

00:56:09.840 Well, I'd be in favor of age gating. I remember when my son posted a video of his handstand on 0.84

00:56:14.400 YouTube and he got a like and then all he could think about was checking back on YouTube. And then

00:56:19.040 someone made sort of a snarky comment and it really upset him. And I wonder if 12 year olds should even be 0.94

00:56:24.020 on YouTube. I think there's a capitalist argument to be made that if we, in fact, broke these companies

00:56:29.120 up and had more options than one social media network or one search engine, that it might result

00:56:34.780 in emerging players and say there are advertisers and parents who would rather have a video search

00:56:40.580 engine that doesn't radicalize young men. There are, I think we need a photo sharing app that

00:56:45.560 advertises it will not allow people under the age of 16 and it will not allow bullying or it'll come up

00:56:50.900 with some sort of affirmation that doesn't make people feel worse. So I think competition is an answer

00:56:56.340 here. I think regulation is an answer. And if your show Megan could be reverse engineered to girls 1.00

00:57:01.980 cutting themselves, I don't think this show would survive because I think there are other podcasts

00:57:06.660 and other media personalities that advertisers would rally behind. Unfortunately, in this environment

00:57:12.240 with social media and search, there are no options. So they don't have any really real incentive

00:57:16.920 to be good citizens and attract dollars. So I think the answer is a capitalist argument that your friend

00:57:21.840 was making. And that is we need more competition because there's a lot of advertisers that aren't

00:57:26.080 down with what's going on. And a lot of parents, you know, what choice do you have? I don't want

00:57:30.120 my son on YouTube, but where, where do they go? So I think, I think the capitalist argument is to

00:57:35.040 break them up and competition would solve a lot of this, but I do think we need regulation and educating.

00:57:39.740 The Facebook story out today in the wall street journal, the headline is Facebook knows Instagram.

00:57:44.260 It's the same company is toxic for teen girls. Uh, for the past three years, Facebook has been

00:57:49.600 conducting studies into how it's photo sharing app in stuff affects its millions of young,

00:57:54.760 young users. About 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U S every day, 5 million teens

00:58:00.400 log on to Facebook. And they say that they've been doing a study internally, their researchers,

00:58:05.300 and they found Instagram is, is harmful for a sizable percentage of the, of these teens,

00:58:10.260 especially the girls. 32% of teen girls said when they feel bad about their bodies,

00:58:14.560 Instagram brought them there. Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe

00:58:18.880 themselves. They make body images worse for one in three teen girls. That's their own conclusion,

00:58:23.460 make body images worse for one in three. And, um, that they're actually blaming the teens recognize

00:58:28.560 it's to blame for the increase in anxiety, depression among teens reporting suicidal thoughts.

00:58:33.240 13% of British teens said, and 66% of American users said the desire to kill themselves was rooted to

00:58:41.320 Instagram. I mean, it's bad. Yeah, it's, uh, it, it, it's just frightening. And if you talk to,

00:58:47.760 I'm involved in this wonderful nonprofit called, uh, Jed, which is committed to teen mental health.

00:58:52.500 And a lot of times, unfortunately, your kid is suffering alone. Uh, you don't know they're

00:58:57.060 suffering and they're, they're ashamed and they go into the room and on their phone and they end up

00:59:03.260 making one false move or for whatever reason, they feel bad about themselves or the mob seizes on them.

00:59:08.060 And it ends up in a level of, uh, you know, emotional anxiety in a time when kids are facing

00:59:13.960 increased anxiety from a variety of different factors. What's most disturbing here is that

00:59:18.680 Facebook knew, knew about this and they decided to, you know, the Facebook's innovation is how to

00:59:24.500 overrun government to ignore these concerns rather than saying, how do we address this?

00:59:29.400 What changes can we make? What incentives could we put in place to really try and counteract some of

00:59:35.100 these negative externalities? The majority of their efforts are around not making Instagram a

00:59:40.440 healthier thing. And there's some very good things about Instagram. It's about delay and obfuscation.

00:59:45.380 And so just as the cigarette companies were lobbying companies sitting on top of, you know,

00:59:50.000 of a consumer products company, Facebook has really become, um, an organization of delay and

00:59:55.740 obfuscation and government overrun such that they can ignore these types of issues. And this,

01:00:00.560 this just takes it to a new level. I mean, it's one thing, like I said, you know,

01:00:04.220 you have kids. I have kids. You have your world of work. You have your world of friends. You have

01:00:07.480 your world of fun. When something comes off the tracks of one of your kids, the entire universe

01:00:11.800 distills down to that kid. And the thought that this one company doesn't have this sort of empathy

01:00:16.260 or concern for our children, it's just really, it's just continued evidence that this company

01:00:20.880 is bad for the Commonwealth. And it's kind of part of what I would call the, the head of the class of

01:00:25.600 a menace economy that is arbitraging depression, circumventing minimum wage laws. It's just more than

01:00:31.220 anything, Megan. It's just really disappointing.

01:00:34.320 Mm-hmm. Head of a class of a menace economy. Yes. I I'm dealing with this right now to some

01:00:39.800 extent, because we have three kids, as you point out, I'm a mom, a boy, girl, boy, uh, almost 12,

01:00:45.960 10 and eight. And my almost 12 year old turns 12 in about two weeks. And years ago when he started

01:00:53.380 pressuring me for a phone, right. Cause you've got all these kids have phones. And when can I have a

01:00:57.440 phone, my husband and I were like, Oh, when you're 12, when you're 12. And then we learned more,

01:01:01.160 we listened more. And we were like, there's no way he's getting a phone when he returns 12. He's

01:01:05.460 not getting it. Maybe a flip phone for emergencies where you can just dial us. That's it. And now,

01:01:10.620 you know, kids remember. And he's like, guess what I want from my, from my 12th birthday.

01:01:15.400 And I had to say, you're not getting one. And he said, what do all my friends have? They have,

01:01:18.700 they all have iPhones. You know, can I please have an iPhone? And I'm like, you can't have it. You know,

01:01:22.480 I don't, I don't know what to tell you, honey, but dad and I've done more research and you're not

01:01:25.340 getting it. He's disappointed. But what do you, what do you think is a dad of two kids

01:01:29.920 who's been watching this industry very closely? Do we get our kids phones? Do we let them have

01:01:34.860 social media? Cause of course the rent, their reaction is every single one of our, my friends

01:01:39.140 has both. It's a really tough call. And the people who take a purist argument and say no screens until

01:01:45.640 they're 16 and no iPhone, that means they don't have kids because what you recognize is, I mean,

01:01:51.900 it sounds terrible, but at some point you want time for your own, your own screen time. And then

01:01:56.480 also they do get, it's balancing the very real negative impacts of kids on their phones and

01:02:04.140 specifically the social media platforms. And for some of the problems we referenced before,

01:02:07.700 it's balancing that versus them being ostracized because there are some positive things. My sons

01:02:13.140 play video games and they do a lot of their socialization that way. When they were, when we

01:02:18.160 were remote this summer and they couldn't be with their friends, one way they caught up with their

01:02:21.620 friends was on video games. And I think actually some of that's healthy. And I would argue that

01:02:25.160 video games and there's research to show this aren't as damaging on the psyche or psychological

01:02:29.360 wellbeing of kids. You know, we're struggling with this as well. What we're trying to do

01:02:34.220 is we demand their passwords and we demand to see their activity. So we're never surprised about

01:02:39.520 stuff. And we try to give them some license, even when stuff's a little bit off, off color,

01:02:44.180 if you will. And we're also just putting a certain time limit on it. And we take their phones from

01:02:49.000 them. We give them their phones for, I think it's one hour at night during the weekdays and two hours

01:02:54.400 in the mornings on weekends. And then we take them back. But if you're looking for someone who's

01:02:57.760 figured it out, you'll hear the, you know, the arguments at our house that just prove we have not

01:03:03.060 figured this out. I think every parent is struggling with this.

01:03:06.280 Well, I mean, I should say he has an iPad, but that's only, he can only use that when we're there

01:03:10.880 and he does games occasionally and he had to use it for remote schooling. But we, social media is what

01:03:16.280 we're trying to avoid and YouTube rabbit holes, right? I mean, we've done enough research on

01:03:20.100 what that does and to young girls too, what that does and pulling you into just dark places that

01:03:25.460 we, if I'm there, that's one thing. It's quite another to have it in your pocket all day long

01:03:30.080 when you're that young. And to your point earlier, the Snapchat, that, that, that's the thing that

01:03:35.860 shows you where all your friends are, Snapchat. So you can see where all your friends are. And,

01:03:39.980 and like you just said, now you can see, Oh, where's Jane? Oh, where's Donna? Oh, 0.93

01:03:44.880 where's Mary? Oh, they're all right here together. And no one's responding to my calls or my texts.

01:03:50.620 And I've been ignored. I've been excluded. It hurts.

01:03:54.440 Yeah. And the question is, uh, you know, I don't know if the answer is just to keep them off it. I

01:03:58.800 think it's, uh, some of it does fall to us to teach them good values. Um, you know, we gave our

01:04:03.900 son a phone at about 13, um, and we've demanded that he's kind and that he not take bait when people

01:04:10.560 slight him and, and, and we, we review his social, but we do give him his phone and just the utility

01:04:16.020 of it. I mean, if you want your kid to have any freedom and I was always worried that we were not

01:04:20.420 letting our kid out of the house enough, you know, I used to leave at the age of seven or eight and my

01:04:24.180 mom would say be home by 10 and that was about it. Same. Uh, and now, you know, kids like, you know,

01:04:29.920 we practically have them in armored cars, it feels like. So I think giving them their phone so they can

01:04:35.560 walk, we call it the Avenue down by Atlantic Avenue and Delray beach. I think that's liberating and

01:04:40.120 it's good for them to have independence. It's good for them to walk home in the dark every once in a

01:04:43.840 while and get a little bit scared. Um, and, you know, walk by the house with a strange mean dog. I

01:04:48.360 think some of that is actually good for the kids, but I'm, you know, we're, we're absolutely, you

01:04:54.000 know, we're absolutely struggling with the time, the notion around when and how, and I do think

01:05:00.120 parents and schools have a role here. We're in a night, a lovely school in Florida and they

01:05:05.340 basically say, you're not allowed to bring your devices, um, and you can get in trouble for them.

01:05:09.960 Uh, and they've said, and they've said also your activity on social, and I don't know if this will

01:05:14.020 stand up in court and I'm sure it'll be challenged your activity on social. If you bully another kid

01:05:18.620 or do something, then, you know, you're, we can take punitive action, uh, against you in the school.

01:05:24.240 I think everyone's trying to figure this out. This is a tough one, but it's what we have to realize

01:05:29.180 is that the company's not going to figure it out. They're, they're going to continue to

01:05:32.900 manufacture this stuff. That's the thing. They're not an ally. Wouldn't it be nice if

01:05:36.340 you knew that Mark Zuckerberg was in some way, your ally in this battle and trying to protect

01:05:41.260 young kids from the damaging effects of it. The addiction that comes from, you know, looking at

01:05:46.140 your phone 45,000 times to see if you have a like and so on. It's hard enough for an adult to resist

01:05:50.840 it. Nevermind a kid. And he's not your ally. I mean, that's really sort of the bottom line that

01:05:55.760 the social media companies are on the other side of this. Yeah, there are, there are some

01:05:59.920 companies. There's a great company called Roblox that was hugely successful. Um, uh, you know,

01:06:05.420 multi-billion dollar market capitalization, and they do have a lot of content moderators. It's a

01:06:09.000 game platform for children. You know, about half of kids under the age of 16 have been on Roblox and

01:06:14.140 they are taking, uh, this issue very seriously. I do think, I think TikTok, I don't know if you spend

01:06:20.180 much time on TikTok, Megan. It seems to me that's a little, a little less toxic or they're trying to

01:06:25.820 China gathering my child's data. Could be, could be. I don't, I personally don't see evidence of

01:06:31.700 that so far, but I think that's always a risk. You have to assume any Chinese company that the 0.89

01:06:37.020 data there is probably subject to inspection by Chinese authorities. So I don't want to pretend

01:06:42.160 that's not a, that's not a real issue. Uh, what I would say though, is that when I'm on,

01:06:47.860 when I'm on TikTok, it does feel more optimistic. It does feel a little less,

01:06:52.100 you know, you go on Facebook and you go on, uh, Twitter and it feels like the algorithms are just

01:06:59.500 constantly saying fight, fight, fight. And Twitter's, but isn't Kara, Kara's always saying

01:07:04.340 that her kids are like, Twitter's for old people, mom. Like Twitter's not really the popular venue for

01:07:09.620 the, for the youngins, but Facebook is obviously huge and Insta's enormous and not harmless. I mean,

01:07:17.440 I think people see the pretty pictures and it's like, oh yeah, influencers. And it's like, no.

01:07:21.100 And every, for every one influencer who will post something without a filter to show her actual

01:07:27.220 rear end or face, there's just millions of opposite doing, you know, doing the opposite,

01:07:32.820 right? So you get in a young girl's heads and even with a parent counter-programming, 0.86

01:07:36.540 which I'm sure you try and I try, it's hard. It's ubiquitous. All right, wait, stay with us,

01:07:40.640 Scott. Cause, um, up next, I want to ask you about Elon Musk and why you think he's a genius,

01:07:44.000 but sets a terrible example for young men. And then we want to take your calls out there.

01:07:48.660 What are your biggest fears when it comes to technology taking over our lives?

01:07:52.180 Call me at 833-44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496.

01:08:04.640 Welcome back to the Megan Kelly show in less than 20 minutes. We're going to be taking your calls.

01:08:08.260 You're starting to fire in. You can get on the queue and we will chat in moments. Back with me now,

01:08:12.600 Scott Galloway, professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, a tech startup veteran and best-selling

01:08:18.500 author. So what about Elon Musk? I read that you do think he's a genius. Is he a force for good or a

01:08:24.220 force for evil?

01:08:25.320 Mostly good. I think, um, you know, I had this moment where my son said SpaceX is going,

01:08:31.740 is launching and we went out, we live in Florida on the beach and we went out and we saw that rocket

01:08:35.580 going up. And it was one of those kind of hallmark moments with my boys. And, you know,

01:08:40.540 anyone who, who builds electric vehicles, I own a Tesla. It's an amazing product, puts people in

01:08:44.880 space. You just have to admire, uh, someone who's been able to do that. Well, the comments I made

01:08:50.540 around not being a great example for young men, when I look at the two men that have had the most

01:08:55.940 visibility over the last decade, uh, relative to previous decades, it's been Donald Trump and Elon

01:09:02.380 Musk. And I wonder what message they're sending to our boys. And the message I would get or glean from

01:09:08.400 them generally is get really rich. So you can be really coarse. And I don't think it's the right

01:09:14.320 message to send to our, to our young men. I think going on Twitter and calling a cave diver, a pedophile

01:09:21.100 is it lacks all grace. I think saying you're taking your company private at $420 a share when there was

01:09:27.120 no veracity that claim and the sec gives you a hall pass. I just don't think there's, you know, it's,

01:09:33.320 it's difficult. I want to, I want to be clear on the whole. I think Elon Musk has been good for the

01:09:37.300 world, good for the planet. And I think electrifying the auto industry has got tremendous,

01:09:41.760 tremendous benefits. I just wonder where our role models, Megan, I mean, you have a son where,

01:09:46.420 you know, kind of, who do you, who do you want your boys to look to?

01:09:50.740 Oh, this is, this is one of my problems early on with Trump was what, you know, his, the way he

01:09:55.200 talks about people, what a bully he seemed and certainly not some, someone I want my sons to model

01:10:01.100 or my daughter to model in any way when it comes to behavior. Now I could make the opposite

01:10:05.980 argument about the way he governed his policies versus, you know, I mean, Joe Biden's a perfectly

01:10:10.640 nice man, but look what happened in Afghanistan, right? It's like that argument doesn't always

01:10:14.500 work with politicians as we see. I mean, JFK wasn't exactly the best husband in the world, but

01:10:18.720 right. So we can go down the line. Um, but what is it about tech in particular that seems to attract

01:10:24.860 a bunch of assholes? Well, it's, it's our fault. I think, I think that, I mean, very going very deep 0.99

01:10:33.840 on this, uh, when it's, when a nation becomes wealthier and more educated or more educating,

01:10:39.320 it's reliance on a super being and church attendance goes down. Our brain is big enough

01:10:42.740 to ask very complicated questions, but not big enough to answer them. So into that void slips super

01:10:47.020 beings. And when we start kicking those super beings out for better or worse, we need answers and

01:10:51.700 there's nothing that feels more God-like or Jesus-like or mystical than technology. Cause I

01:10:56.280 still can't figure out how my phone is able to do what it does. Uh, if I have a very serious

01:11:01.400 question, do I ask a priest, rabbi, mentor, scholar, or boss? No, I asked Google and I trust Google's

01:11:06.300 answer more than I trust, uh, any priest or rabbi. So the new Jesus Christ of our generation are a man

01:11:13.260 who denied his own blood under oath when he was worth a quarter of a billion dollars, better known as

01:11:17.400 Steve jobs or a guy who believes it can be the CEO of two companies, Jack Dorsey. So I, we are so

01:11:23.980 there's, we suffer from an idolatry of innovators and we have issued the mother of all hall passes

01:11:28.760 for the CEOs of tech companies that we would never issue for CEOs of other industries. And the result

01:11:34.360 is they're taking advantage of it and they're doing things that we just wouldn't have tolerated from

01:11:38.860 other industries. I mean, my question is if Michael Milken committed crimes today, but he was the CEO of a

01:11:43.740 tech company, not a junk bomb firm. Would he have gone to jail for 10 years? Did Michael Milken do

01:11:48.160 anything worse than what Mark Zuckerberg is doing right now? Hmm. Do you think it all started with

01:11:52.660 Steve jobs? I mean, he obviously was the number one, like the biggest one, the biggest names and

01:11:57.360 name are probably the most important. And he was known for being such an ass as you point out, 0.99

01:12:01.780 denying his, his child and so on. The stories about him are legion about what a jerk he was at every 1.00

01:12:06.380 turn. I think it's been a slow creep of technology slowly, but surely has become such an ubiquitous 0.99

01:12:13.640 part of our life. There's such wonder and awe around technology. And quite frankly, it's made

01:12:17.760 so many people so much money that everybody has a friend who's whose daughter went to Google and got

01:12:23.720 rich. Everybody, people are just really excited about what Amazon can do in terms of delivering

01:12:29.720 their Nespresso pods within 48 hours. Netflix is a wonder. And maybe you own Amazon stock in your 401k.

01:12:36.120 So it's easy. And our, our elected officials, no one, the fastest way to look old is to start going

01:12:41.600 after big tech. It's like putting on mom jeans. It just ages you. And so a 73 year old insurance

01:12:46.260 Those are back in, by the way, mom jeans said. They are back in. That makes you look younger.

01:12:51.240 But I look, I just think we've treated these companies. There's a two class system in our

01:12:55.600 legislative branch and across our economy. It's the way we treat tech companies and the way we treat 0.86

01:12:59.500 everybody else. Again, if you know, any one of these media companies could be reverse engineered to

01:13:04.980 the kind of anti-competitive behavior or weaponizing our elections. What if you're,

01:13:09.840 what if this podcast was found out to be taking ads from the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian

01:13:14.260 government? I mean, what, what would happen to this podcast? So these guys get to play by a

01:13:18.520 different set of rules, which leads to, I think, extraordinarily bad behavior. And the reality is,

01:13:23.500 if you tell a 30 year old male, he's Jesus Christ, he's inclined to believe you and he will play by his 1.00

01:13:27.680 own rules. It's not their fault. It's ours. Can I get you to comment on Elizabeth Holmes and the whole

01:13:34.580 Theranos debacle? And she's, you know, on trial now. And I, everyone's fascinated by that story,

01:13:39.860 including yours truly. I met her one time and she gave me the deep voice and I just, I find her a

01:13:46.200 fascinating character. And I'm clearly not alone since we've had successful podcasts about her and

01:13:50.860 a successful documentary and a mini series. And what do you make of how she tried to make it in this

01:13:56.880 male dominated industry of a bunch of jerks? And was she just modeling? I mean, 1.00

01:14:01.900 was her fraud so much worse than what we've seen from, you know, when it comes to criminal behavior

01:14:06.920 from these other guys? It's a really interesting question. And like you, I'm really fascinated. And

01:14:11.160 I have a difficult time kind of wrapping my head around one specific binary view on it, because I

01:14:16.620 wonder, I mean, the line between sort of being accused of fraud and continuing to be on the cover

01:14:22.380 of Forbes is getting your next round done. And the question I was asked about Elizabeth Holmes and

01:14:27.980 Theranos is that if she had raised another billion dollars and then they had shown some progress

01:14:32.880 around Edison or whatever the name of the machine was, would she still, would she still be speaking

01:14:38.260 at Stanford's commencement? And the difference here is I'm not sure she did. The difference between

01:14:45.520 Theranos and some of these tech companies is when you start talking about something as it relates to

01:14:48.980 health, it just kind of takes it to a different level of seriousness. It's one thing when you lie about

01:14:54.640 your photo sharing app. It's another thing when you lie about your photo sharing app or you delay

01:14:58.740 or cover up depression, that takes it to a new level. But when you're talking about a blood testing

01:15:03.660 mechanism and you're making false claims or claims that at a minimum seem outrageous,

01:15:08.460 it takes it to a new level. But the correct question is a lot of Elon Musk has never met a production

01:15:15.440 target or has missed most of them. He said two years ago that within 12 months, there'd be a million

01:15:21.560 automated self-driving Tesla taxis. I don't see one. So is that fraud? So there is a real valid

01:15:31.060 argument from their defense that she wasn't doing anything a lot of CEOs don't do. The difference is

01:15:36.440 this thing collapsed before she had a chance to realize her vision. But ultimately why I do think

01:15:41.120 she's found guilty here is I think people do distinguish claims about a device that has to do

01:15:47.740 with healthcare as opposed to technology. And some of this feels really, I think one of the most

01:15:53.440 disappointing things about her defense is she's claiming abuse spouse syndrome. So the most famous

01:15:58.440 woman in technology is claiming that she was manipulated by a man and she didn't have the 1.00

01:16:02.500 self-awareness to have agency in her own domain. I don't think that's especially good for women in 0.96

01:16:08.060 tech. So I think it's fascinating. I think your podcasts on it are going to continue to draw a ton of

01:16:14.280 viewers because we all wrap our heads around it. But I would argue if you've been following the trial,

01:16:18.200 the defense is winning. The defense is saying she showed up every day. She didn't take a dollar.

01:16:23.440 She worked her ass off and she failed. That's bad, but it's not illegal. We're actually going to do a

01:16:28.780 legal segment on it soon in a couple of days. How about Jeff Bezos? Because I tell you, I mean,

01:16:34.380 I'm like, oh, my God, Amazon's taking over the world. I lived in New York for 17 years up until about

01:16:40.280 two weeks ago. And it's like all the mom and pops are out of business and damn Amazon. And then, of 0.99

01:16:45.900 course, I'm on my phone like, oh, sneakers within two days. Awesome. Yes. Thanks, Jeff Bezos. And then

01:16:50.380 I noticed it when he, you know, he got caught cheating on his wife with this young woman. And when

01:16:56.540 you watch the media cover it, it was like it was like watching Russian state television reporters

01:17:03.880 talk about Vladimir Putin. It was like you realize it's OK to criticize Jeff Bezos, right? He did a dirtbag

01:17:09.940 thing. Like it's OK to call him out. The way he's revered, people are afraid to criticize him in

01:17:15.860 the media makes me feel creeped out. Yeah. Well, again, it goes back to this notion of the idolatry

01:17:21.840 of innovators. And there's just not getting around it. To be fair, I do think Jeff Bezos is going to

01:17:26.220 go down in history. At least history to date is the most the clearest blue flame thinker. And he's

01:17:30.460 created a second largest employer. Amazon is the largest recruiter out of my class at Stern. I've owned

01:17:36.040 their stock for 13 years. I'm like you. I'm a prime member. I absolutely love their service.

01:17:41.000 You know, the question is, does power corrupt? And you're and does it corrupt media? And I think

01:17:47.900 there's two things that led to when I heard what had happened with with with Jeff Bezos and his wife

01:17:53.140 and some of the stuff with his girlfriend, I thought that's it. And can you imagine if a woman had done 1.00

01:17:57.640 the same thing? If a female CEO had been sending out those types of pictures or at least been accused of 1.00

01:18:02.300 it, I think she would have been escorted out by the board. Done. There's just a real double standard. 0.95

01:18:07.320 But it's also he bought the Washington Post, which by a lot of media players, powerful media players,

01:18:13.080 was considered sort of a national treasure. And to be fair, he's been a great steward of it.

01:18:17.460 And so I think there's this reservoir of goodwill towards him. And I think the ultimate PR jujitsu move

01:18:23.460 here was to take pictures of your your personal parts sent to your girlfriend. And this is a guy who's

01:18:29.320 interested in technology. He should have known better. Brad Stone claims there was no pictures,

01:18:33.600 but supposedly there was. And then somehow pivoted to I'm a hero. I'm going to I'm not going to take

01:18:39.360 this. I'm going to I'm going to punch the bully back. I'm the wealthiest man in the world, but I'm 1.00

01:18:43.460 being bullied. So I've never seen a PR gymnastic move like that. And I do think, as you said, it reflects

01:18:51.100 it reflects this notion of a deletory of innovators. I think Amazon reflects it's an incredible service.

01:18:56.940 I would argue it needs to be broken up that we don't know what we're missing because it's very

01:19:00.540 difficult to get an e-commerce company funded right now. And it raises a lot of issues around

01:19:05.080 whether one man or two men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, should be worth as much as 40 percent

01:19:09.600 of America. And effectively, Jeff Bezos has paid about two percent of his wealth or his increase

01:19:16.520 in wealth over the last 10 years in taxes. And there's a lot about his behavior I don't like.

01:19:20.640 I think they've abused the Commonwealth. I think this HQ2 contest was a circus.

01:19:25.000 I predicted it was either going to be D.C. or New York for the genius insight that that's where

01:19:29.760 he had homes and a guy at that age and with that kind of money doesn't need to commute. And I was

01:19:34.220 wrong. It was both of them. So, look, I think he's incredible. He's going to go down in history.

01:19:39.400 I don't begrudge his wealth. I begrudge that we don't want to tax him. And I begrudge that the media

01:19:44.340 has decided that if you're an innovator, you just get a hall pass around every single issue.

01:19:48.840 Mm hmm. I would I would take issue with your your comments about him being a good steward of the

01:19:53.600 Washington Post. I have to say, I don't I actually don't know what your politics are. I read you said

01:19:57.440 you're right of center left. I think it was a joke, but it's funny. But I mean, you don't think

01:20:02.620 let me just ask you, though, you don't think the Washington Post has become more relevant under his

01:20:06.300 ownership, whether you like their politics or not. I would argue it's become much more relevant.

01:20:09.720 I don't know. I thought it was dying until he bought it.

01:20:12.180 I'm not looking at it through that lens. I guess you're coming at it from a business angle. I'm coming at it

01:20:15.720 from a journalistic angle and the whole democracy dies in darkness was a joke. It was a joke because

01:20:21.020 let me tell you that as as disgusted as they were by some of Trump's overreaches, they were awfully

01:20:26.080 dark during the Obama years when he took out his pen and his phone and was doing a bunch of illegal

01:20:30.340 stuff that he'd already said on the record he couldn't do. You know, it's like that kind of

01:20:33.200 hypocrisy is stomach turning to me. And I don't buy their, you know, cloak of morality when Trump gets

01:20:40.220 in, which, of course, now they're a lot quieter and it's gone a lot darker now that there's a

01:20:45.220 Democrat back in office. I think that without Bezos owning it, regardless of the politics,

01:20:50.120 I don't think you'd be incensed because I think it would be irrelevant. I think the Washington Post

01:20:54.080 was literally diving towards irrelevance and he came in and the bottom line is that the best thing

01:20:58.940 that can happen to a media company, especially a newspaper, is that a billionaire buys it because

01:21:02.980 they economically, most of them aren't viable. And so I, you know, regardless of the, I'll put the

01:21:08.920 politics aside. I just find that the Washington Post is discussed more, more relevant, showing up in

01:21:14.280 your inbox, showing up in your feed. And you're right. I just don't think there's any arguing

01:21:18.520 that the majority of media has a liberal bias. It's usually people who went to college and live

01:21:23.300 in urban areas and you typically skew liberal, especially the ones that go into media. I think

01:21:28.280 they have a lot of affection for Bezos and are prone to spinning stories such as the one we referenced

01:21:34.140 towards Bezos. Shifting gears now, I want to pick up on something I was asking Vivek Ramaswamy

01:21:39.980 about, which is China. Is it you? I know you've, you've thought a lot about it and written a lot

01:21:43.980 about it. And I, what do you, what are they doing right now? Like how are, how fast are they growing?

01:21:50.000 How much control do they have? How are they influencing us in ways we don't fully understand?

01:21:56.200 Well, we're going to need a bigger boat. I mean, I would argue that China, I would argue that China's 1.00

01:22:01.420 in many ways winning. And one of the, of our, I think our comorbidity as a nation is our arrogance and

01:22:06.120 that we think that we can't learn from other nations. And the reality is China has pulled 750

01:22:10.260 million people out of poverty in the last several decades, which is arguably one of the greatest

01:22:14.420 achievements in mankind. They're also committing, you know, what a lot of people would argue is

01:22:18.680 genocide. It's an autocratic society denying people's freedom. So obviously these are very

01:22:23.640 real issues. But what I find interesting is lately is they've gone in and basically wrapped the knuckles

01:22:28.940 of the big tech companies. And it's clear that they've looked at the U S and said, we are not going to

01:22:33.120 allow our tech companies to do to us what they've done to America. We're not going to let them roam

01:22:37.900 the earth and make these big statements about what's right and what's wrong. We're not going to

01:22:41.820 let them, um, um, abuse data. We're not going to let them, uh, addict kids to video games. We're not

01:22:48.340 going to let tutoring companies help the rich continue this caste system where the children of rich people

01:22:54.680 get into the best schools with these tutoring companies. So to a certain extent, they've said,

01:22:58.580 we're not, we're not going to subvert national interests in the health of the commonwealth,

01:23:02.540 economic interests. Now, the question is, is whether these companies, whether she is just

01:23:08.080 wrapped their knuckles or it's going to cut off their fingers. It's my view that he's pulled kind

01:23:11.920 of an MBS and pulled the most powerful tech people into the Ritz Carlton and said, this is your prison

01:23:17.120 unless you swear up, down and center that you are on board. Uh, and I don't think that, I don't think

01:23:22.900 that they're going to totally kneecap their, their national champions, the Alibaba is the by dues, the,

01:23:28.160 um, uh, uh, the 10 cents of the world. I, and, and if you look at these companies right now,

01:23:33.500 the stocks are trading at a fraction of their peers in America on a PE ratio. So it's going to

01:23:39.140 be fascinating to see what they, they do, but it there's, it's interesting to learn from what they

01:23:44.040 think they've learned from us. And that is, that is anti-monopoly or monopoly abuse, abuse of the

01:23:50.380 commonwealth, a lack of regard for children around addiction. They said, we're not going to let the same

01:23:54.840 thing happen over there or happen here. What happened over there? I think it's fascinating.

01:23:59.440 Yeah. Because this is the first time I've read a report about China in the news where I was like,

01:24:03.560 I think I'm on their side. I get it. Yeah. Right. They started cracking down on the abuse of

01:24:08.520 children and this crazy tutor and work at all hours, uh, culture that's developing in China.

01:24:13.400 And they were like, you're not going to be allowed to do that to the children. It's not healthy. And I'm

01:24:16.500 thinking to myself, what? I want, we want to be more like China. Wait, what? What did I say? 0.94

01:24:21.460 Yeah. I mean, it's, there's some advantages to being an autocracy and, and they essentially,

01:24:28.220 I mean, it'll be interesting. America might pivot the other way and say, bring all of your, 1.00

01:24:32.760 your entrepreneurs and mavericks here. And there's some very scary data for Chinese. And that is 1.00

01:24:36.560 supposedly two thirds of people worth over a million dollars to be the left or planning to

01:24:40.000 leave China. Cause they realize someone can just come up and cut your company stock in half. And we 0.83

01:24:45.060 can't do that here. And that's probably a good thing, but I had a lot of empathy for the tutoring

01:24:50.280 industrial complex. I mean, higher education in the U S Megan, I think it's turned into the great

01:24:55.040 or more from the greatest upper lubricant of mobility to an enforcer, the cast system where

01:25:00.060 the tutor industrial complex and coaching gets your kids into college. And my university, NYU is

01:25:05.200 guilty of this. There are primarily two cohorts now going to elite universities, which are the

01:25:09.500 ultimate on-ramp to a better lifestyle. And those cohorts are one, uh, the children of rich people

01:25:15.720 into what I call the freakishly remarkable. And we're under the belief that our kid is the

01:25:20.000 freakishly remarkable one. And I can prove to all of us that 99% of our children are not in the top

01:25:25.020 1%. And as what I would like to think is kind of the tip of the spear of what is supposed to be

01:25:29.260 America in many ways, our universities, we're not supposed to be about taking the top 1% in the

01:25:34.720 wealthiest households and turning them into billionaires. We're supposed to be about taking

01:25:38.100 good kids and give them remarkable opportunities. I think we have totally lost the script

01:25:42.220 in higher ed here in the United States. Oh my gosh. It's so true. And what people don't

01:25:47.440 realize, maybe they do now more after the college admissions scandal, but so many people are buying

01:25:52.520 their kids way into these top, top schools. I mean, it, it absolutely happens every year that

01:25:58.220 somebody makes a $10 million donation to Harvard, a $5 million donation to Yale, a $3 million donation

01:26:04.740 to Stanford. And then suddenly they apply their child and expect good results and very often get them

01:26:11.580 sometimes don't, right? Sometimes they get waitlisted. Sometimes they get outright rejected.

01:26:15.220 But if these kids who are just busting their asses in these public schools across America to get

01:26:19.680 straight A's only understood what they're up against, I think it would just be heartbreaking.

01:26:25.440 Spring used to be a nervous, but joyous time for parents about where your kid was getting into

01:26:29.740 school. And I literally get dozens of these emails. It's turned into the season of despair.

01:26:33.540 Our daughter's done everything right. Great grades, great SATs, captain of the lacrosse team,

01:26:37.660 and has been rejected from five of five schools and has now been downshifted to a tier tier school

01:26:42.940 that manages to charge the same price. You have middle-class households all across America with

01:26:47.540 great kids who are paying a Mercedes price tag for a Hyundai education. And my colleagues have become

01:26:53.360 so drunk on luxury. We think of ourselves as Hermes, no longer as public servants, and we love

01:26:59.160 rejecting 95% of the applicants. That's not what America is about. When I went to UCLA,

01:27:03.300 the acceptance rate was 70%. Now it's 12. So what we basically said to people is, okay, unless you're

01:27:11.960 rich and unless your kid's building wells and has a patent by the time they're a senior, they're going

01:27:16.540 to go to, they're going to be downshifted or arbitraged to a second tier school that takes

01:27:20.280 advantage of the most corrupt cartel in history and raises prices in line with Harvard. And you're

01:27:25.120 going to incur student debt. We have transferred a trillion and a half dollars from middle-class homes

01:27:29.580 to the faculty and endowments of universities who have this delusional BS image of being nice,

01:27:35.940 noble people. This is the most corrupt cartel. We need to expand enrollments dramatically,

01:27:41.420 or we need to cut funding. We need to start taxing endowments. And my colleagues need to recognize

01:27:46.580 that we are public servants. We are not Chanel. That's awesome. That's a rant. What'd you think

01:27:51.460 of that, Megan? That was a boom. You nailed it. So wait, so how old are your kids and do you want

01:27:56.500 them to go? I mean, Tucker Carlson was out there publicly the other day saying he discouraged all

01:28:00.680 four of his children from going to college. They didn't listen to him, but for the very reasons

01:28:04.040 that you're saying, uh, he didn't think that they should go there. What do you think?

01:28:07.720 Oh no. Yeah. You get your kids to college. I mean, I would like to see more on ramps to a

01:28:13.800 middle-class lifestyle apprenticeships programs, but the bottom line is in America,

01:28:17.400 we are a certification driven society. We're a brand driven society and nothing,

01:28:22.020 nothing creates, there's no certification like, uh, graduating from an elite university.

01:28:26.180 So I think Tucker's full of it, quite frankly, and his kids have a, not a hammock, but a cashmere

01:28:31.620 hammock because their father is a multimillionaire. But if you're from a middle-class household, 0.99

01:28:36.640 I think that you should be absolutely aiming towards trying to get into a good to great school.

01:28:41.780 I think college is still transformative. It was transformative for me. I think the onus is

01:28:46.140 on us and universities and as voters to expand enrollments at our great public universities,

01:28:50.880 such that Michigan, the university of Florida, the UT system, the university of California can

01:28:56.380 continue to change the lives of children of single, single immigrant mothers who lived and died of

01:29:01.220 secretary. The reason I'm here with you right now, Megan, is because the university of California

01:29:06.680 decided we're not about finding freakishly remarkable kids. We're about finding good kids

01:29:11.380 and giving them freakishly remarkable opportunities. And that's no longer the case. This isn't a radical

01:29:15.960 idea. We just need to go back to the future and make college a great place for good kids. 0.99

01:29:22.460 I hope that I hope you meander out of Stern Business School and over to the admissions department

01:29:26.460 very soon at NYU, or at least do it within the next six years before we're applying. I will say,

01:29:31.460 listen, I went to Syracuse undergrad. I went to Albany Law School for law school. And those are,

01:29:35.660 you know, mid tier to be kind schools. And it all worked out fine. And I think it's because,

01:29:40.720 yes, the education was important, but they weren't, I don't think you could fairly say that they

01:29:44.280 were elite. And it worked out fine because I worked hard and I made the most of the opportunity,

01:29:49.300 you know? And so even if your kid doesn't get into an Ivy or a junior Ivy or whatever,

01:29:54.320 I just think, remember that it's still an opportunity for them to learn, for them to grow,

01:29:57.920 for them to make some contacts and to have some fun and mature in sort of a relatively,

01:30:03.180 relatively safe setting. What a pleasure, Scott. I hope you come back. I really,

01:30:07.280 really enjoyed our discussion. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for having me and congratulations on your

01:30:11.360 success. Oh, thank you. All the best. After the break, I would love to hear from you guys.

01:30:16.220 We're taking calls right now. What do you have a thought on social media? Has it caused a change

01:30:20.280 in your child? Would you send your child to college? Do you want to do it? Right? I don't know. I still

01:30:27.860 think yes, but I see the reasons not to. And I understand the decline in the mail application rate.

01:30:32.480 Anyway, call me. 833-44-MEGAN. Speaking of my time at Syracuse, 44 is an homage to Syracuse. 44,

01:30:41.760 Jim Brown, all sorts of greats wore that number. 44-MEGYN. That's 833-446-3496.

01:30:54.120 Welcome back, everyone, to The Megan Kelly Show. We're taking your calls right now at 833-44-MEGAN,

01:31:00.360 spelled M-E-G-Y-N. That's 833-446-3496. Yesterday in the program, I went off on AOC at the stupid 1.00

01:31:09.760 Met Gala in her stupid dress without a mask while my kids and yours sit there all day with this 1.00

01:31:15.480 muzzle over their faces for eight to nine hours. I'm so irritated by it. It's not just my kids. It's 1.00

01:31:21.020 kids who are old enough to be vaccinated and have been in several states, have to sit there all day 1.00

01:31:26.560 with masks on and watch this loser out there parading in her dumb ass dress like she's really 1.00

01:31:31.800 Marie Antoinette. That's what she looked like with all these serfs below her masked up. But she and 1.00

01:31:37.600 Carolyn Maloney, the congresswoman from the Upper West Side, who's praising equal rights while she's

01:31:41.360 out there, is basically stepping over the lowlifes so she can get her picture taken in front of the 1.00

01:31:46.320 case. OK, anyway, you can see it on YouTube now. Go to YouTube dot com slash Megan Kelly.

01:31:50.800 We have a channel. You can see it, among other things. But a lot of callers today calling in

01:31:55.600 about masks. And I understand your anger and upset. It's just gotten insane. So we're going to kick it

01:32:02.000 off with Melissa in Missouri, who I understand has got a mask story. Hey, Melissa. Hey, how are you?

01:32:08.120 Good. Thanks for calling. Well, not a problem. So we started school. I'm in Missouri. We started

01:32:16.800 school August 23rd. That first week of school, we were before heat index. We were looking at 100

01:32:24.000 degrees before the heat index. And I was a school bus driver in a district. And the first day of school,

01:32:33.420 I got on my bus. I bought little thermometers and it read 104 degrees. That's before I turned the key.

01:32:38.960 Right 104 degrees. And I sit up the front, obviously. So I have a 200 degree motor sitting in front of me.

01:32:45.920 And most of the school buses don't have a great firewall when it comes to heat, at least. It'll

01:32:53.680 stop a fire, but not the heat coming through. So what happened? Hotter for us. I posted it to

01:33:00.740 Facebook for parents to see, was told, was brought into my boss's office going, you can't do that.

01:33:06.600 You can't let kids take off their masks. I'm like, but what if I pass out? What if my kids pass out? He

01:33:11.300 goes, they have to wear the mask, period. It doesn't matter the temperature. I understand

01:33:15.280 it's hot. And I was like, so is this a compliance issue or is this a health and safety of our

01:33:18.820 children issue? Without missing a beat, he goes, compliance. And it's all over the internet right

01:33:23.960 now, the recording of him actually saying it. And then the next day I was brought in and fired

01:33:30.240 for, quote, posting on Facebook without district approval. But yet we have drivers in the district

01:33:38.040 that have been posting for years and are still posting to this day, pictures of their bus,

01:33:42.640 pictures of their kids, pictures of everything. But because I brought it to the attention that it

01:33:47.200 is too hot to have a child in a mask or have us in a mask. The second day was 106.

01:33:52.240 I feel like it's a whistleblower situation. I mean, it's so grossly unfair. The masks in the heat

01:33:59.820 is truly endangering. I mean, we just went through this in our school. Speak up if this happens. You

01:34:05.880 have to speak up. Alyssa, thank you for telling us a story. Wait, we've got to get somebody in quickly.

01:34:10.160 Let's go to Linda in California. We've got very quick time. Linda, what's on your mind?

01:34:16.400 Yeah, I just think that with the Internet and Facebook and Instagram, I think it's the parents'

01:34:24.060 responsibility to watch that and be really on top of it because they have no idea who they're talking

01:34:29.760 to. They think that it's their friend or just really nice person, but they have no idea.

01:34:35.180 That's exactly right. But it would be nice if the big tech companies would help us out a little.

01:34:39.640 But yeah, that wouldn't excuse the parents. We have to stay on it because they're not our friends.

01:34:43.720 And listen, thanks for everyone who called in today. Thanks for watching and listening.

01:34:47.360 And check us out on YouTube.com slash Megan Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow.

The Megyn Kelly Show - September 15, 2021

The COVID Numbers Game and the Toxicity of Big Tech with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Prof. Scott Galloway ｜ Ep. 160

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript