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April 8, 2025 - The Charlie Kirk Show
43:27
The Science Cartel, the College Scam, and the DOGE Defenders
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Okay, everybody, welcome back to the Bitcoin.com studio to the Charlie Kirk show.
We are here live in Phoenix, Arizona with Blake.
Also, my conversation with Antonio Gracias from the White House.
Email me, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
Get involved with Turning Point USA, which is the most important organization in America, at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I love hearing from you.
That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
here.
We are here live in Phoenix, Arizona with Blake.
Now, Blake, welcome.
We have lots to talk about.
I do have to start this with difficult Roman trivia.
Oh dear.
Alright. Just one though.
Okay. Hit me.
Alright. I think you're going to get this though.
Alright? I'd better.
You're not allowed to get it wrong.
What Roman general was awarded the Spoila Opima, the rarest military honor in Roman tradition?
You can't look it up, Blake.
For killing an enemy king in a single combat was the only third man in Roman history to receive it.
So the original one who did it, Romulus supposedly does it.
And then...
What's the second one?
Think about it.
You have all segment to think about it.
We're all just going to have a conversation.
Blake is like jostling back and forth.
He killed a Celtic chieftain.
Is it Regulus something?
I don't fault you for getting it wrong because I can't even pronounce it.
I know what it is.
I know what he got it for.
I can't remember the guy's name.
The initials are MLC.
MLC. There's not that many possible names.
It's Crassus.
Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Marcus Licinius Crassus has it?
Unless ChatGPT is wrong.
Okay, so it might be the grandfather or something of the famous one, because the famous Marcus Licinius Crassus is just a really rich guy, and he walks 10 feet over the border with Persia.
The younger.
It says the younger.
The younger.
Okay, so this is probably a different Crassus then.
You have some homework to do.
Okay, I'll have to go polish up on the spoiler.
Just to be fair, I asked ChatGPT for the hardest PhD advanced level questions.
Really? Do you have another fun hard one?
I will.
You gotta earn it.
Alright, but speaking of which, so there's...
So Blake, I stumbled upon this about someone in D.C. I was just in D.C. recently.
I was at the White House.
And they said, Charlie, we really think you should do a segment to look into this because it deals with the college scam, the college cartel.
I never even heard about this.
I thought this was a water company, Springer Nature.
I thought this is like Dasani.
And it's all about basically academic journals effectively funded by the taxpayer.
This is a world that most people don't actually know about.
So let's first just explain the medium.
What is this whole academic journal world?
How does it exist and why does it matter?
Okay, yeah.
So since people might not really grasp this, the way science is conducted in the modern world is basically through the medium of journals.
So if you are a researcher at MIT, you'll have a lab, you'll have a study you conduct on literally anything, whether this is medicine, chemistry, computer science, and you'll do a bunch of work.
And then you'll compile it into a paper, and it could be 10 pages long, it could be 500 pages long.
You'll compile it into a paper, and then the way you make it official is basically you will submit it to a journal.
The most famous journals are Cell, that's a medicine journal, Nature, Science, but...
There are literally thousands of these journals.
So you'll have the Journal of Applied Epidemiology.
I just made that up, but I assume it exists.
And you'll have math journals and history journals and social science journals.
They'll get really specific.
I'm looking at a list, for example, that are offered by the company we're talking about today.
And they have Angiogenesis, JMST Advances, Jewish History, Mathematical programming, mathematical programming computation, mathematical sciences.
There are tons and tons and tons of these.
And getting published in these papers is essentially, it's how you suggest your work is legitimate, and it's how you get prestige.
It's a lot more prestigious if you have a paper in Nature, one of the most famous journals, than to have it in a very obscure one.
And some are more selective than others.
So there are journals that are basically open access.
You can just publish with us, and that's it, and it doesn't really accord it a lot of legitimacy.
And there are some that, because they're more prestigious and allegedly they have more strict peer review, the research is presumed to be better.
And so where the Doge taxpayer thing comes in is that there's this whole analysis about the Department of Education, where is this money going?
And you have some of these numbers here.
Springer Nature, this company, which is one of the biggest incumbent actors, is effectively funded by the Department of Education because these colleges spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these journals.
What are they even spending the money on?
Exactly. So let's lay this out.
Springer Nature is a, I think it's a joint British-German company.
It's European.
And they recently went for profit.
It's listed on a stock exchange somewhere.
And what they do is they own hundreds, thousands of these journals.
Including nature, as the name suggests.
And the main way you get access to these, you can't just freely read them, which is a problem in its own right, because we'd probably have better science.
It's all paywalled.
Yeah, it's all paywalled.
And they're huge paywalls.
And if you think tuition goes up a lot, the...
Expense to have access to these journals goes up even faster.
I haven't looked at it recently, but I've occasionally seen numbers like they'll hike it 30% in a year, the cost to get these journals.
And they'll charge this to universities.
So people might know this if they've been in a university recently.
Like, oh, if you...
I remember this actually at Dartmouth.
Since I was at Dartmouth, I could basically just read any article at any journal.
That's actually pretty helpful.
And that's very helpful if you're, you know, trying to be an academic in anything.
But normal people don't have this access.
Schools pay for this.
And the way they pay for it is they pay millions of dollars for these things.
I have Springer Nature's price list for 2025.
This is individual journals.
They're electronic only price.
Don't need to get it in paper.
Let's see.
Three biotech.
$1,171 to subscribe a year.
Abdominal radiology, $4,926 to subscribe per year.
Acoustical physics, $6,161.
And what they get you with also is they'll get you to sign up for packages of 100, 200, 500 journals, and you have to pay for all of them.
And it's tens of thousands of dollars a year.
And if you multiply that over a bunch of universities, thousands of universities in the U.S., they're all effectively taxpayer-funded through our student loans, through our grants.
And the U.S. government itself pays for these, too, because our government agencies will, like the Department of Agriculture, for example, will subscribe to every agricultural journal.
And they...
My understanding is they don't do that much negotiation for what the price on this should be.
According to what I was sent, they charge researchers upwards of $11,000 per article.
Yeah, so they also get in on the other end.
So the justification for all of this is that these places at least, they do the peer review.
They're the ones who are checking the research to make sure that it's not bogus.
But infamously, peer review is an incredibly weak process.
It's not nearly as strong as it should be.
A lot of these journals don't pay.
Scholars for doing peer review?
It's more like, oh, you pay your dues by doing the peer review on this.
And then you end up with these costs.
It can cost you thousands of dollars to publish your own scientific paper.
And there's even, last year, there was an antitrust suit brought against Springer Nature and some of the other big publishers, where allegedly they just do cartel-like behavior.
It sounds like a syndicate.
Yeah, like they agree not to, they make it so you can't submit your paper to multiple places so they might compete over it.
So if there's a really high-value paper, they could maybe bid, we want this published in our journal, but they prevent that through cartel-like behavior.
And they collude to not pay peer reviewers.
Well, for example, one of the major reasons we have large language models that are advancing, I owe you another Roman history question.
but this this is one of the the Springer nature is an example also of like why college is so bad.
I mean it's like and some of these are very poorly managed publications as well.
Yeah I mean some of these are the publications that get literally scammed where you write that fake paper that's all like you know feminist biochemistry blah blah blah and you can just trick them.
And a lot of the COVID stuff.
Like, ran through some of these journals.
Yes, that's another issue with them.
And also, they're more ideological.
You're getting nature-running articles that are just screeching at Trump, and that's part of the journal.
And, you know, ideally, that's not really related to scientific research, but they use their prestige, which we are paying for, to do this.
Did you prove ChatGPT wrong?
I think so.
Yeah, you said Marcus Licinius Crassus.
It's totally not that guy.
It's Marcus Claudius Marcellus.
He killed a Gallic chieftain.
Alright, I'm going to scold ChatGPT then.
I'm going to say you're wrong about number five.
Incorrect answer.
Yeah, it's actually correcting it.
It now says Marcus Claudius Marcellus.
Was that the answer you first gave?
It wasn't the one I gave, but I looked it up because it didn't sound right.
Got it.
So it corrected itself.
Blake correcting ChatGPT is quite a sight to be seen.
Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Based on everything I'm seeing about the Springer Nature thing, I think it's time for some sort of investigation.
Why would the federal government be indirectly funding this, basically this cartel, this syndicate, from poorly managed publications and also all the COVID nonsense that's there?
Blake, I owe you another question, so stay right there.
but I think it's time for someone to look into Springer Nature.
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Alright, Blake.
What obscure Roman official often overlooked in modern discussions was tasked with investigating the moral conduct of senators and equestrians during the Republic and had the authority to expel them from their ranks?
The censor?
Yeah. That's pretty easy.
I think they only had the one censor.
Alright, then I'll ask you a different one.
What Roman law passed in 18 BCE under Augustus was designed to increase birth rates among the Roman elite by rewarding marriage and penalizing celibacy?
I don't...
It was Augustine Law.
I don't know what the name of it was.
Lex Julia De Marte.
It's Latin.
Yeah, yeah.
Julian Law.
Okay. He famously passed it, and then his daughter was kind of an immoral woman, and no one would tell him about this.
And then it finally came out.
If you ever watch iClaudius, which you should sometime, it's like a big scene.
I will.
So, just kind of finishing on this medical journal, not just academic journal thing.
So... Do a lot of these universities pay money because they have to to these journals?
Yeah, I mean, you have to to be an academic institution.
It really is a cartel.
If you secede from it, you are not...
You're basically telling your guys that you can't take part in the world of scientific research.
And it is true.
There are...
Informally, what a lot of people do, especially if you just want to be a scientifically engaged normal person who's not working at a university or at the government, you just pirate these things.
And there's a lot of that.
There's a ton of academic piracy out there.
But yeah, it truly is a cartel.
If you're going to be a major university, they kind of have you over the barrel.
I mean, open source would make a lot of sense.
Open source stuff, but again, there is the real concern.
You don't want fake science, and if anyone can publish anything, there will be fake science.
But ideally, a company like Spinger Nature is supposed to check the science, right?
Yes, they're supposed to do that, and one of the big attacks on them is they're clearly not doing that much of the time.
A big scandal that just happened recently, Nature, they published a very important paper on Alzheimer's about 20 years ago, and it recently came out that...
Basically, the research for this was falsified.
It was entirely falsified, and literally the last 20 years of research into Alzheimer's may have been a blind alley of completely pointless, and we could have known this all along.
And hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of research from taxpayers was directed towards this blind alley that, in theory, nature should have caught.
Yeah, I mean, and there's just example after example here of engaging in censorship, They censor stuff in China.
We don't care for that.
I don't even necessarily want to fixate on...
They were definitely involved in discouraging the lab leak hypothesis from COVID.
I don't want to bash that because it's fine to hypothesize whether it was natural or from a lab leak.
But if they were putting their finger on the scales...
Which there's evidence that they did it.
They've done stuff for the Chinese government.
Exactly. And so if they're censoring on the Chinese government, it may be very well that...
And they can also choose what articles they select.
I never knew how much power these institutions have.
Enormous amounts.
It's one of those hidden things.
We see the high cost of tuition at universities.
We see the degree cartel.
And you even see things like people know how textbooks have gotten way more expensive way faster than college itself has.
Similarly, this is one of those background ways.
There's like the college scam is even deeper than you yourself described.
I don't even talk about this in my book.
The colleges themselves are getting scammed by a super college scammer.
Like a publicly traded scammer.
There's layers of the scam.
It's like a Russian doll of scamming.
Incredible. Alright, let's finish with one more Roman history question here.
Let's see.
I almost knew this one, to be honest.
I'm not going to do this one.
I don't think that one.
Okay, hit me with a hard one.
All right, this one I think you'll get, honestly.
Which Roman emperor briefly reigned in 193 CE during the year of five emperors and was killed by the Praetorian Guard after trying to buy their loyalty?
Is that Didius Julianus?
Yeah, I knew you were going to get that.
That one I knew.
Okay, what...
Replaced by Septimius Severus.
That I did not know.
I didn't know either.
Is this posthumous?
Yes. So is that where we get the word posthumous from, looking at things posthumously?
I don't think so.
I think that's usually spelled differently.
Yeah, it is, but it would have some connective tissue there.
So of all the history stuff, is Rome the stuff you know the best?
Maybe overall, although if you think in like relative terms...
You have like bizarre Russian history.
I know a lot about Russia, but maybe not as much as I know about Rome.
Someone said to me recently that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I heard this when I was in D.C., that trying to get Vladimir Putin to approve this peace deal would be like the fastest military decision for the Russian government in like 200 years.
Yeah. They usually move incredibly bureaucratically, right?
They're bureaucratic, they're slow moving, they don't...
And they totally do have a history of sort of just being a bit evasive on these things.
It's very real, but he might be rope-a-doping Trump a little bit.
We will see.
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I want to air for you an amazing conversation I had with Antonio Gracias.
Antonio Gracias is a very smart man, dear friend of Elon.
I had it while I was at the White House, actually.
We got this done.
My conversation with Antonio Gracias from the White House.
All right, everybody.
Charlie Kirk here, live from the White House with a very interesting man, Antonio Gracias.
Antonio, great to meet you.
Thank you, Charlie.
Good to meet you.
And so I first became aware of you by reading Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk, which we won't spend too much time on all the inaccuracies.
But I think it did paint a broader macro vision of, quite honestly, one of the most compelling people ever to live and the most compelling innovator of our time.
You've known Elon for quite some time.
And right now he is villain and public enemy number one of the activist left.
Tell us about your story and how you met Elon and what people should know about him.
Well, so I met Elon because of PayPal.
So I went to law school with David Sachs.
And David Sachs was the chief product officer of PayPal.
And so we invested in PayPal.
That's how I first met him.
And then invested, we're the first institutional investors in Tesla.
And we're operating guys by training where I built the company in the 90s.
So I got deep in operations at Tesla with him.
And that's really when I got to know him and developed a profound respect for his ability to go deep into the detail, to really operate, understand what's going on, and to his desire, truly genuine desire, to make the world better.
So I find that to be one of the more unique things about Elon is that he's a visionary, but also he's micro.
Yes. And it's very difficult to find the macro and the micro combined.
Yep. With drive.
I find the combination of those three things to be exceptional.
Talk about that.
His mind is very unique.
Okay, so to be able to go from the, to say the least, right, to go from the very, very top macro strength.
Go to Mars.
Yeah, go to Mars.
And then zoom all the way down to the, like, engineering detail of, you know, what the door handle on the car, why it's got to be perfect.
It's exceptionally unique.
And what he does is he's able to galvanize terrific engineers, terrific people on a mission because he actually wants to make the world better.
He wants to better humanity.
Those missions are huge.
But then he zooms all the way to detail to make them happen.
So that combination is exceptionally unique, yes.
What is his drive?
Because a lot of people are trying to ascribe motivations to him, world's wealthiest man.
What keeps him going?
Why is he only sleeping three hours a night and obviously putting some of his wealth, you know, Not in jeopardy, but just saying I don't really care.
What is his why?
I think Elon has a really big heart.
He's a really compassionate man.
And if I can just tell you one story, please.
During COVID, we were reopening the factory at Tesla.
And I was there with him reopening the factory.
And we had employees that had COVID.
And we had some of the hospital ventilators.
And he pulled me off the line one day to speak to a woman who only spoke Spanish.
Because I speak Spanish, my first language.
And our husband was in a hospital in Ventilator.
And he wanted to tell her that we were there for her.
And we were there for her family.
And we would do whatever we needed to to help her husband.
And he had me literally sit in a conference room on a Polycon and transit for him.
You know, and that is just, to see a CEO, we're back in a crisis.
We don't get the factory launched.
We're going to go bankrupt.
Yes. Right?
The local authorities, Alameda County.
They threatened to arrest him, right?
Yeah. I mean, I got there because he called me and said he was going to open the factory and they were threatening to arrest him.
I said, listen, I'm going to come with you.
They'll arrest me too.
He said, no, no, no.
Yes. Yes.
please come tell her, help me tell her that we're there for her.
And that compassion is what's driving it.
That's what this is all about.
This is about America.
It's about saving America, not just cutting costs, but saving the entitlement programs for our seniors, for all of our people.
The idea that it would be...
This has got anything to do with taking money or doing anything other than making sure people get their payments is totally absurd.
Just look at the facts.
It's BS.
I completely agree with that.
He has a huge heart for humanity, which I think really is his why.
Talk about the last five to ten years where it went from Elon, the innovator, to all of a sudden he got more and more involved in, you could say politics, but just kind of some of the cultural issues.
And I think his purchasing of Twitter, now X, will go down as one of the most monumental and courageous decisions for freedom of speech in the history of the species.
I don't think President Trump would have had the movement.
President Trump deserves all the credit, but I don't know if he would have had the movement behind him if X would not have existed.
We would not have been able to expose the COVID lies or the lockdowns or the open border if it wasn't for a free and open portion of the internet.
Did you see a moment where really a switch went on, where all of a sudden he saw a sequencing where like, if we don't win back the White House, then these other 100 things that I want to get done for humanity will not be able to happen?
Yeah, I think it was a, I'd say a progression that began with a belief in free speech, a fundamental belief in free speech.
And what Twitter had done was corrupted free speech.
Who believed it was free speech?
This is not true.
They had no constitutional standard.
I was there myself.
I asked these guys myself these questions.
There was a long time I went to law school.
I took con law.
They weren't at all worried about a constitutional standard.
They were a private corporation, and they could decide what was said and what they were suppressing and actually promoting on Twitter.
And it began with that, seeing that this was sort of the center of the woke mind virus being pushed out in the world.
That had to stop.
That's really why he did it.
I think from that point forward, his mind went, you know, it kind of goes to the biggest problems, right?
What are the biggest problems?
And from there, it went to, wait a minute.
The problem is deeper than just this one thing, Twitter.
It has now infected the government, it's infected many of our children, it's gone in many directions, and that he believed that President Trump was the right leader.
So now fast-forwarding to today, one could make the argument, I would actually make the argument, that going to Mars, having autonomous vehicles, it's going to be far easier than actually getting Congress to cut spend.
Oh, Joe, I've got to tell you, man, I was just speaking for myself.
This is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Okay. But I want to just pause you.
I mean, you have been involved in the hardest things an entrepreneur and innovator can be involved in.
I mean, just what Tesla was up against to get car output.
You guys had people short selling your stock.
I mean, you've been up against the wall multiple times.
Yes. But this is the hardest.
Hardest. I mean, look, I started my career doing serious turnarounds.
I mean, auto factories with unions, all that stuff, all the way to Tesla and then Ford, which you've seen in the book.
And this is by far the hardest.
It's the hardest because, first, it's the biggest problem, right?
You're talking about an enormous organization in the U.S. government, and I'd say there are very good people.
There are some very good people that are helping really great, and there are people that don't want help, right?
And so you've got the industry bureaucracy problem going on, and the problems are deep.
They're deep, and they're really hard to deal with.
So let's talk about that.
I just want to go back a little bit.
So Doge was born out of a spirit that our government is wildly inefficient.
There's programs that should not exist.
And if I were to kind of read into Elon, who I've had the pleasure to get to know and I have enormous respect for, I think that a switch also went off in his head where he said, hey, if bankruptcy, then no civilization.
Yes, look, we're at 130% GDP, maybe higher, depends on how you calculate numbers.
And the reality is, you know, it's a pretty simple math calculation.
We keep going.
You know, at some point, the currency gets devalued and we turn it as well.
That's what happens.
So we have to stop it.
And it's, you know, the target here is over 15% of the cost, right?
You're an entrepreneur.
You built a great business.
If I said to you, hey, Trey, look, we got to squeeze 15% of the cost of your business, you'd be like, you know what?
I can do that, right?
Anyone can do that.
And we try to do that, but if I had to...
I think it's important.
It's an important point.
The people that are screaming the loudest...
Are the fraudsters.
So why are they burning deserterships?
Why are they doing all this stuff?
Because we're taking money away from people that are committing a fraud.
Such as?
Okay, I can tell you something I've seen.
At SSA, an example.
The Social Security Administration.
Yeah, Social Security Administration as an example.
The 40% of the fraud came down the phone lines and do direct deposit.
So you could get on the dark web someone's social security number, answer six simple questions, and change the bank information from one place to another.
This was 40% of the fraud.
It was actually about a billion and a half dollars of fraud, well over a billion dollars of fraud that we know of, that we know of, okay?
So what's the implication of this?
If you're a senior like my dad, he's 84, he expects his check.
It doesn't show up for a month, maybe he notices it, maybe he doesn't, maybe it's two months, and it's all going to foreign formal syndicates taking the money.
That's the cash cost.
What we can measure and should measure is the headache to the senior.
Oh, man, it probably shortens their life expectancy.
Yeah, I mean, think about the stress, right?
These people need the money and they got to go into the office, they got to fix the problem.
They've been subject to identity theft because we didn't have basic two-factor authentication.
Every bank in America, you have two-factor authentication, right?
Why do our seniors deserve less?
They don't.
We put this in, the fraud went down.
This kind of thing is all over the place.
I can tell you, I don't think there's one thread to pull on, "Hey, let's go save a trillion dollars." It's like every business, right?
It's a game of inches.
It's a billion here and a billion.
But Elizabeth Warren-Yeah.
Or one of our friends on the other side would say, Antonio, that's just a billion dollars.
Come on.
Listen, Charlie, it's a billion dollars in American people's money, okay?
That's a lot of money.
I can tell you a crazy story.
In 2024, $800 million, quote, fell off the balance sheet of the Social Security Administration.
So what does that mean?
Gravity applies?
Gravity applies, exactly.
What do you mean fall off?
That's a question I ask.
Who did it fall to whom?
Exactly. Exactly.
Okay, so what happened was there's a $20 billion balance sheet of money owed to the Scottish administration, right?
Because during the Biden administration, they took, if we overpaid you in some way, it used to be, even going back to Obama, that the Treasury could recoup 100% of the money in, as an example, the retirement program, right?
If we overpay you, you know, it was an accident, okay, we take the money back.
They reduced this, the payment plans from, it was three years up until literally through Obama into President Trump's first term.
They took it to five years and then took it down to $10 minimum payment.
So the payment plans went out past 2047, which is the end of the system date in the computer.
What happened?
When that $800 million went past the system date, the technicians in the field had to write notes in the computer to be able to collect that money.
Those notes aren't very good.
When I met with the auditors myself and asked this question, what happened to the money?
The auditor said, it fell off the balance sheet.
I said, is that a gap term or a non-gap term?
She was like, The gap is generalized accounting principles, right?
Yes, of course.
Just for the audience.
Yes, and they said what the auditors told us was it's a $1.5 trillion program.
It's not material.
But how did they answer that question?
That's how they answered the question.
It's not material.
I said, look, it's $800 million.
Just to make sure I'm clear, so when I file my taxes in two weeks, can I just say that my...
The money fell off my tax return?
No, you were in jail.
You were in prison.
Is that an official Internal Revenue Service term?
You're absolutely right.
Fell off.
Fell off.
And we asked this question.
We're like, mind boggled.
$800 million is a huge amount of money.
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No, but so, I mean, I want to just drill on this one micro example.
I mean, don't we have, like, wire transfer information?
We're like ACH.
I mean, money must be sent somewhere, right?
If it's not an account, can we reverse engineer?
No. I mean, the money, this particular $800 million, I've asked this question, the notes that were taken that relate to these debts were so poor that the auditors included.
It's not our collectibles.
Sorry to interrupt, but are the auditors the U.S. government, or are we hiring, like, McKinsey?
No, it's outside auditors.
You can go look it up.
No, no, I know.
I'm just like, but like, they have to stake their entire reputation on this, right?
They have.
I mean, look, there are, if I remember correctly, about 100 weaknesses in the audit they've identified, and they still give us a clean audit opinion at Social Security Administration.
It is, I've never seen, like, I have never in my career in 30 years seen anything like it.
So if you, you're an investor, if you came across a company like this, what would be the first thing that comes to mind?
I would go home.
I'm only doing this because of the U.S. government and because I believe in America.
You would probably report that company to the Department of Justice.
I mean, most likely, yes.
I would for sure go home and then maybe call the DOJ.
So that's just the Social Security Administration in just one year of what you know of.
Yes, yes.
But your critics will say, Antonio wants to cut Social Security.
Yeah, categorically not true.
Categorically not true.
This is a complete lie.
We're trying to save it.
And the reality is it's going to run out of money anyway in 2037, no matter what.
We have to try to save it.
And I can't tell you this is a high-probability event, but it's worth fighting for.
You know, going to Mars was really hard.
It wasn't obvious 20 years ago or 15 years ago.
It was worth fighting for.
This is worth fighting for.
I mean, people have paid into the system.
They deserve their money.
And if we've got to save it $100 million at a time or $10 at a time, we're going to fight to save it $10 at a time.
We have to.
It's their money.
That's a really important point.
And I want to talk about that for a second.
Because what I find when I talk to bureaucrats, which is not very often, they don't talk to me very often.
But at least those that have, let's just say, bureaucrat worldview.
Yes. There is a disconnect of whose money is it.
If I had to distill the divide that runs this town, it's the patriots, such as yourself and Elon, look at you guys as stewards of somebody else's money that is sent into the system, whereas the permanent bureaucracy, they actually view it as the government's money, and the people just loaned it and then sent it back.
We collected what was rightfully ours.
Do you think that is a properly distilled analysis?
I would break the bureaucratic criterion, too.
Because everything we found is because people told us.
We just mapped the system.
This is whistleblowing.
Yeah, I mean, we do what we don't do.
So it's probably even worse than this.
It is probably worse than this, yes.
For sure it's worse than this.
But the reason we had the information we had is because people told us where to look.
There are very good people in these agencies all over the place.
They have been stifled.
And they are now telling us the truth.
They're telling us their truth.
They're asking us where to look.
And they're really helping us.
I mean, it is not the case that everyone is bad.
This is not true.
I mean, it's like anything, right?
There's great people and there's not great people.
There's some phenomenal civil servants.
Yes, absolutely.
And they're doing it for the right reason.
They're here to serve their fellow citizens.
They really are.
Yeah, they are.
And I want to honor them.
And I want to feel compassion for what they've gone through because they're frustrated.
Look, we went to the border.
I can just tell you the Border Protection and Border Patrol, they had the highest suicide rates they've ever experienced during the surge.
This is a human tragedy.
Yeah. So looking now, is it fair to say your...
Assigned tasks as a Social Security Administration?
Are there any others under your purview, under the kind of Doge umbrella?
Yeah, so what happened was we mapped the entire system for Social Security, from enumeration, how you get the number, all the way to the end, how you get a payment.
We went all the way to the offices.
In that process, we found this category called Enumeration Beyond Entry, and it had ramped dramatically.
So it should be for like H-1Bs, green cards, this kind of thing.
And it was like, you know, call it two to four hundred thousand people a year, every year.
And then it goes up and up and up, and it doubles every year during the Biden administration.
It ends up at about 2.1 million people.
So if you think about baseline, 4,000 to the 2.1, that really caught our eye.
One of our engineers, Peyton, actually found this, and he showed it to us because we were mapping through the whole system.
When we dug into it, we found that the asylum programs were the vast majority of the increase, and so we dug into that.
That led us to Homeland Security.
It led us all the way to the border to try and figure out what it was because it's about...
A little over 5.4 million people or so in total that came in in those years.
What we found in the data was that 1.2 million of them were marked as unknown, knowing what the status was.
1.2 were marked as general parole.
This was during Biden's presence?
This was all during Biden's presence, yes.
And by the way, it continued through the first fiscal quarter of the federal court of 25, right?
So right before President Trump came in.
And President Trump has not closed the border, so it's not happening now.
We were just trying to figure this out.
We were following the number to complete our map.
And I would say we accidentally came across this problem, which led us to the border.
And the people at the border reported, you know, I'd say some of the most disturbing behavior that I've ever heard, where we would, you know, they got so overwhelmed at times.
They provide people with, you know, I think called the notice to appear or own recognizance release.
They'd have, they'd get in the system with a court date.
Once you're in the system with a court date, if you file for asylum when you're in, you can get a form, just filing a form that allows you, once that form is filed, to get...
And this was just, I mean, it was...
and we found in a handful of states, we just sampled a handful of states, we found thousands of people on the voter rolls and many of them had voted.
And this was just, I mean, it was...
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'm not sure I'd have believed it.
First of all, phenomenal work, because look at all the different layers you had to go through to get to that conclusion.
Yeah, the team is very tenacious.
The team we have is great.
And by the way, again, I want to point out, we wouldn't have been able to follow the breadcrumbs if people hadn't told us where to go.
That's critical.
So two thoughts on that.
Number one, someone had to be issuing the Social Security numbers.
Yes. And so that was the Biden administration knowingly just giving them out, like throwing them out like Frisbees.
Yes. To be clear, this was making illegal people legal, right?
But without any act of Congress.
Without any act of Congress, yes.
It's illegal what the government did.
The programs were there.
What they did was, I would say, abuse them.
They opened the aperture dramatically on these programs and didn't do any due diligence, proper diligence on the people coming in.
And so there is a requirement for diligence, and I would say that requirement was not met.
So the second part is something you mentioned, which I think is a great way to conclude, which is you talk about the team.
Yes. Which I've had the opportunity to meet some of these Doge super geniuses.
They're young, they're hungry, they're tenacious, they're relentless, they don't sleep.
I mean, these are the high IQ patriots that we want in this building.
They have been doxed by the Washington Post and by Wired.
They have been singled out and their names and their addresses have been shared.
Talk about this group of mostly very young super geniuses that are dedicating their life to save this nation.
Yeah, I make the joke.
I call them ninjas.
These are engineering ninjas.
And look, these guys could all go get jobs in Silicon Valley for lots of money.
A million bucks a year, minimum.
Yeah, I mean, plus equity.
They would all become very wealthy people, right?
I mean, I met young people.
One of them dropped out of college.
He was a senior Harvard dropout.
I met him, too.
He's an amazing rock star.
And by the way, there's a number of these guys, right?
The guy we're supposed to be around.
These guys are really geniuses.
They're amazing.
Yeah, they're patriots.
They believe in America, and they believe in the future, and the future is for them and our children.
And I am...
Deeply grateful and very respectful of what they're doing.
And they're really, really good.
And look, they're also, you know, Joe Gabby is walking around here.
I'm here.
There are other, Anthony, if you guys more understand, they came out.
There are other people as well, along with the young folks, right?
So we have the engineers.
Yep. And then we have kind of, I'll call it the business people are helping on as well.
We've been creating teams around this so that we can cover, I'd say, the entire spectrum of thinking.
Yeah, this is a great team.
This is almost like the Avengers got assembled to try and come help the government.
And I, okay, I credit President Trump.
I mean, really, in the end, President Trump, he had the courage for the first time ever, and foresight, okay, this is a really, really, really smart thing to do, to sign an executive order that allowed us to go across databases.
Otherwise, we could never have figured this out.
Could never transcend the spear crowd.
Yeah, they did all silos, so we had to go across.
They do that intentionally, obviously.
I mean, look, I will say it might be an artifice of like the 1970s databases they have.
I wouldn't impute intent, but I will say it's created massive holes for people to commit fraud.
And that's what we're looking for, right?
And look, we're doing it with like 2010 technologies and SQL queries because we can't use AI.
We're not using AI to do this at all.
And why?
We can't.
You're not allowed to?
I'd say it's above my policy grade.
I mean, I would love to learn the answer there.
Because, I mean, we use AI for sports ticketing.
I think it's a privacy issue, but I would say that, I think, that's my opinion.
No, I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
I just, I think that what could be more important, I mean, I think Grok could do some damage.
Let me just put it that way.
I would say if we could use AI, definitely we'd be faster and more efficient.
And just imagine what it's like for an engineer who could use AI to not use it, to use SQL queries.
Compare and compare data and try to look for it.
It's really hard, painstaking work.
So you're saying that is this just Social Security Administration or all data they're not allowed to use?
Anywhere that I know we're not using it.
I've not seen any I use now.
Zero. None.
I'd love to learn.
I ask questions on my phone sometimes like, hey, what's the law on this?
Because I keep being told it's against the law.
That's an important distinction that actually a lot of what they think is law is actually inherited presidential custom.
Correct. Article 2 is that the president has the complete vested authority of this branch.
So if the president says to use Grok, I mean, is there a law, a congressional law that says you can't use AI?
Very much doubtful, man.
Anyway, I don't want to put you on the spot.
I just, this is the type of stuff we run into.
The final thing is this, is all of this would just be, will end up as a very well-publicized Warren commission.
Okay. If you guys don't get Congress to act.
Because there's only so much the president can do.
There's only so many recisions, impoundment act, all that stuff.
If Congress does not then put forward the president's budget and act upon your discoveries, the audience is salivating to hear marching orders.
Talk about how important it is that Article I internalizes all of your findings and then acts on it in this budget.
Look, I would say this.
This is a bit above my thinking grade, right?
I'm very focused on the narrow task of fraud, waste, and abuse.
My opinion is this.
The president of the United States is elected by the people, and he has a mandate to make change.
And if the bureaucracy is resisting that change, Congress should act to help him achieve the mandate of the American people.
And that's the reality.
It doesn't matter who the president is.
The bureaucracy doesn't run this country.
The president does.
The president appoints the secretaries.
The secretaries we've dealt with have been great across the board, from VA to DHS to Social Security Administration.
They really are aligned.
And the bureaucracy does not run this government.
The President of the United States does, along with the Congress.
And if we need Congress to act to enforce that, we should.
Amen. Antonio, thank you so much for your time.
God bless you.
I speak on behalf of our listeners and our audience.
The fact that people like you that have a ton of wealth, you guys could be in Monaco or you could be in Fiji, literally, enjoying all of the blessings you guys have earned.
Instead, you are here in D.C. in these kind of dimly lit office buildings.
Go until 2 a.m. looking through spreadsheets without AI to still be attacked by the media and be doxxed is the definition of a servant government.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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