The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210915_the-covid-numbers-game-and-the-toxicity-of-big-tec
Aired: 2021-09-15
Duration: 01:34:57


=== Misleading COVID Recovery Data (14:46) ===

[00:00:15]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:28]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:30]  First up today, I want to discuss with you a new COVID study.
[00:00:34]  That virtually all of the media will likely ignore.
[00:00:37]  Why?
[00:00:38]  It suggests almost half of those hospitalized with COVID, you know, they keep trying to scare us with these hospitalization increases and look at the numbers and blah, blah, blah, might not be as sick as we've been led to believe and might not even be there because of COVID.
[00:00:53]  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?
[00:01:05]  Here to talk with me about it today is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
[00:01:09]  Jay is a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
[00:01:12]  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.
[00:01:22]  Great to see you, Doc.
[00:01:23]  Thank you for being here with us.
[00:01:24]  So, this is what they've been doing lately.
[00:01:26]  They've shifted.
[00:01:27]  I think people are on to the whole cases, cases, cases, understanding that's not a meaningful number.
[00:01:33]  You know, it's a pandemic, it's a virus.
[00:01:35]  People are going to get the cases of.
[00:01:37]  Of COVID.
[00:01:38]  It's how bad is it and what are the hospitalizations and what is the death rate?
[00:01:42]  And this is something they've been using to scare us.
[00:01:44]  The hospitalizations are up here, there, everywhere.
[00:01:47]  And now we learn that they're overstating the numbers of people who are in hospitals right now because of COVID and overstating how sick they are.
[00:02:00]  Put it in perspective for us.
[00:02:01]  Yeah.
[00:02:01]  So actually, this is a result that goes back a ways.
[00:02:04]  There was an audit in Santa Clara County and in Alameda County of death certificates, for instance, and found that.
[00:02:10]  In 25% of cases that were coded as COVID deaths, actually, 25% of the time, there were other factors that were probably more important in those deaths than COVID.
[00:02:20]  COVID in hospitals have had a very strong incentive to diagnose COVID.
[00:02:26]  Going back to the CARES Act last year, some hospitals got more than $50,000 additional per COVID patient that they had.
[00:02:36]  So there's a mix of things going on here.
[00:02:38]  But I think there's a really important public health point here, which is that these cases have been used to scare the public.
[00:02:44]  Scare the public into thinking that we're running out of hospital resources or healthcare resources, scare the public into thinking that COVID is more dangerous than it is.
[00:02:53]  It is dangerous, especially for an older, vulnerable population, as we've talked about many times.
[00:02:59]  But it's not 3% mortality like we heard in the early days of the epidemic.
[00:03:05]  It's much closer to 0.2% infection fatality rate, unless, again, unless you're older, in which case it's much higher.
[00:03:11]  So I think that's really the upshot of this study for me.
[00:03:15]  Is that we, as the media, I think, has an obligation to put the COVID numbers in perspective rather than using it to stoke fear.
[00:03:25]  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, okay, distinguish between you have COVID and died from COVID versus it's incidental, is really important to start to put those numbers in perspective.
[00:03:41]  And I hope the media sort of responsibly takes this and helps people allay some of the fears they may have about COVID.
[00:03:48]  You're so cute.
[00:03:48]  You know they're not going to do that.
[00:03:50]  But hope springs eternal.
[00:03:52]  But I mean, I got this originally from, again, David Zweig, who had been on the other day.
[00:03:58]  And it says that the study suggests almost half.
[00:04:01]  Half of those hospitalized, almost half with COVID 19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.
[00:04:09]  That's what we're seeing these folks in hospital with fairly mild symptoms.
[00:04:14]  They've been admitted either for further observation on account of their comorbidities or because they reported feeling short of breath.
[00:04:22]  But they're in, a lot of them are in the hospital for something totally unrelated to COVID.
[00:04:27]  So you go in for a broken leg, they test everybody who goes in.
[00:04:31]  They find out you have COVID and they count in the hospitalization number that is used by the media to scare us all.
[00:04:36]  And I ask you, like, I didn't realize that they were getting paid.
[00:04:40]  The hospitals have a financial incentive to do this.
[00:04:43]  Yeah.
[00:04:43]  So that was from the CARES Act.
[00:04:45]  You get $50,000 per COVID patients.
[00:04:47]  For Medicare patients, they would get 20% bonus.
[00:04:50]  The hospitals would get 20% bonus for seeing COVID patients.
[00:04:53]  So they do have a very strong incentive to diagnose COVID, even if it's incidental.
[00:05:01]  That's so crazy.
[00:05:02]  Why would we incentivize hospitals?
[00:05:04]  To state the number, or why, at a minimum, wouldn't that be a big asterisk on every media report when we get these naked hospitalization numbers out?
[00:05:13]  Yeah, I mean, I think in the early days of the pandemic, that's when the CARES Act was passed, the thought was well, these hospitals are basically going bankrupt because people were so scared to go to the hospital for actual things that they needed.
[00:05:25]  Cancer surgeries were canceled.
[00:05:27]  Many, many hospitals around the country essentially were empty, waiting for COVID patients to never arrive in the early days of the epidemic.
[00:05:35]  And I think partly it was aimed at addressing.
[00:05:39]  The financial crisis caused by that sort of panic around COVID.
[00:05:44]  I mean, I think that was the initial impetus behind the policy, but I think it has had this unfortunate effect of sort of, I mean, it's kind of a catastrophe, right?
[00:05:53]  Like you have this well intentioned policy to keep hospitals afloat, but it results essentially in over diagnosis and induced panic.
[00:06:02]  And I don't think people have thought through all of the downstream consequences when the policy was put in place.
[00:06:07]  Well, and two other things to note about the study.
[00:06:10]  Okay, 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.
[00:06:21]  The increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57%.
[00:06:25]  So, if you're keeping in mind, so when you hear these hospitalization numbers, so 57% of those who have been vaccinated and are in the hospital with COVID had only mild or were asymptomatic entirely.
[00:06:39]  And then, how about the unvaccinated?
[00:06:41]  They've been totally demonized by Biden and others.
[00:06:43]  And this study found that.
[00:06:45]  45% of the cases with the unvaccinated were mild or totally asymptomatic since January 21st.
[00:06:53]  So, once again, it's not as awful as they lead us to believe.
[00:06:58]  But how do we square that, doc, with headlines like this one?
[00:07:01]  COVID hospitalizations hit crisis levels in southern ICUs.
[00:07:06]  This is one of the lead stories right now in the New York Times.
[00:07:08]  Hospitals in the southern U.S. are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units.
[00:07:13]  One in four hospitals now reports more than 95% of the ICU beds occupied.
[00:07:18]  From one in five last month, Alabama, Texas, Florida, talking about problems there.
[00:07:22]  So, how do we square those two things?
[00:07:25]  Well, I mean, I think that actually, hospitalization numbers like in Florida with COVID are plummeting right now.
[00:07:31]  So, I think the HHS actually tracks this.
[00:07:35]  You can go to a website called HH Protect and see what fraction of beds are occupied by COVID patients.
[00:07:42]  And the headlines often don't square with what HHS is reporting.
[00:07:45]  I'm not sure why the media aren't using those like official numbers to track it.
[00:07:50]  I think there's another sort of a Problem how people think about this.
[00:07:54]  Hospitals are not single entities that operate simply by themselves, they're part of systems.
[00:07:59]  So, when one hospital gets crowded or one hospital gets stressed, patients get moved to other hospitals.
[00:08:05]  They're part of a system.
[00:08:07]  And the question isn't whether a particular hospital is overcrowded or stressed.
[00:08:12]  The question is whether the system as a whole has capacity to address the health needs of a population.
[00:08:18]  I think there have been times during the epidemic where some hospital systems have been pushed to the brink.
[00:08:24]  But I don't think that as a whole, the American healthcare system has been Overwhelmed by COVID patients.
[00:08:32]  I think it's been stressed in some places near the brink.
[00:08:37]  And in that sense, the American healthcare system has actually operated better than many other healthcare systems around the world, which have been overwhelmed with patients.
[00:08:45]  I mean, this is a real disease.
[00:08:47]  For a subset of patients, it actually does result in the need for ICU beds and hospitalization.
[00:08:55]  I do think that there are costs, in addition to the monitoring costs, there are Health costs also from overdiagnosis or over reliance on hospitalizations for asymptomatic COVID patients because those hospital beds could be better used for other patients.
[00:09:10]  What do you make of this?
[00:09:12]  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.
[00:09:26]  And he said, What are we to make of that?
[00:09:28]  And Fauci basically said, Oh, I don't know.
[00:09:30]  I don't really know.
[00:09:31]  It's a great question, Sanjay.
[00:09:32]  I don't really know what to make of it.
[00:09:34]  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.
[00:09:42]  And now they're going to, thanks to Biden's executive order.
[00:09:46]  And this is a question that needs to get answered, right?
[00:09:49]  As a result of that, in particular for those who have had COVID.
[00:09:52]  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.
[00:10:06]  But apparently the CDC.
[00:10:08]  Put out its own study on natural immunity and it suggested the opposite, that vaccinated immunity is 2.3 times better than natural immunity.
[00:10:17]  So it appears we have conflicting studies.
[00:10:19]  What do we make of that?
[00:10:20]  So there isn't any conflict.
[00:10:22]  So the question between the CDC study and the Israeli study is three groups actually people who recovered from COVID and then got the vaccine, people who just got the vaccine, and people who just recovered from COVID.
[00:10:36]  And the Israeli study suggests that if you just recover from COVID, You have a very, very high, you know, sort of better protection against both infection and severe disease than people who just get the vaccine.
[00:10:48]  Now, the vaccine actually is fantastic against severe disease.
[00:10:51]  That actually is an important point.
[00:10:52]  I think this is why the messaging is so messed up.
[00:10:55]  Is there people, the public health people like Dr. Fauci, are afraid that if you acknowledge the fact that recovery from COVID confers very strong protection against both infection and disease, severe disease, people won't get the vaccine.
[00:11:10]  But I don't think people are like that.
[00:11:12]  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.
[00:11:24]  So, like with this CDC study, it is comparing the people who have recovered from COVID alone versus the people who have recovered from COVID and got the vaccine.
[00:11:33]  It's a little misleading because the vaccine mediated immunity, there's two sort of things you should think about.
[00:11:40]  One is does it protect you against all infections?
[00:11:42]  And the other is, does it protect you against severe disease?
[00:11:45]  The vaccines protect you against severe disease for over a long period of time.
[00:11:49]  There's a fantastic study of Qatar, for instance, that demonstrates this.
[00:11:53]  But it does not protect you against all infections.
[00:11:56]  After about maybe three, four, or five months, The protection against all infections effectively goes away.
[00:12:02]  And this is why you're seeing in many countries that are highly vaccinated, like Iceland or Israel, you're seeing actually the United States, you're seeing a resurgence of cases of COVID because vaccinated people can actually still spread COVID.
[00:12:17]  The vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine that makes it so that you can't get infected at all.
[00:12:23]  What it does do is protect you against severe disease.
[00:12:25]  So that's why I've always been telling people to get vaccinated, especially if you're vulnerable.
[00:12:31]  That's what we really care about, right, Megan?
[00:12:33]  We don't care.
[00:12:34]  It's not so much if I take the vaccine, I can protect myself against being hospitalized, against dying from COVID.
[00:12:39]  I can worry about COVID much less.
[00:12:42]  And the other thing about these facts is that it has implications for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates.
[00:12:48]  The vaccine protects me when I take it.
[00:12:52]  After a few months, it no longer protects anybody else.
[00:12:55]  The vaccine then is a private decision with private consequences and much less a private decision with public consequences.
[00:13:02]  There are many fewer public consequences than people make up for the vaccine.
[00:13:06]  So, and I think a lot of the thinking behind vaccine passports and mandates is that it has some public implications.
[00:13:11]  You need me to be vaccinated to protect you.
[00:13:13]  But that's not what the scientific evidence is suggesting.
[00:13:16]  Why are you saying after a few months?
[00:13:17]  Because I thought that you could, even two months out of getting your vaccines, you could still potentially get COVID and spread COVID.
[00:13:25]  You would just always have the protection, you know, the greater level of protection against hospitalization or death.
[00:13:30]  Yeah.
[00:13:31]  So, like the data out of Qatar, for instance, says that about The protection against all infection peaks around three months after you've got the second dose, and it's about 70%.
[00:13:39]  So it's still possible to, but there's still some protection against all infection at three months.
[00:13:44]  But by six months or five months, it's all gone.
[00:13:46]  There's like, there's almost no protection against infection alone from the vaccine.
[00:13:52]  The vaccine still protects you against severe disease, though.
[00:13:55]  So that's the basis for my recommendation to take the vaccine.
[00:13:58]  I mean, do you see us going to a place where we acknowledge this, you know, the reality about people who have had COVID and natural immunity and stop?
[00:14:06]  Swooping them into all these mandates.
[00:14:08]  I'm against the mandates to begin with, but it seems to me like at least that group should be exempted.
[00:14:14]  Yeah.
[00:14:15]  I mean, I think tying the vaccine to your job, especially when it's so irrational, you've had COVID, you've recovered, you're actually at less danger to someone who's just vaccinated alone, to others, because recovering from COVID actually does protect you against subsequent infection.
[00:14:35]  So for a long period of time, I think.
[00:14:37]  Longer than the vaccine.
[00:14:38]  So I think this is one of these things where, like, this is a huge failure of public health.
[00:14:43]  Essentially, we've demonized a large class of people.
[00:14:45]  You know, the funny thing is, a lot of those folks were essential workers.
[00:14:49]  We said, okay, you guys are holding society up.
[00:14:52]  They went out, did their job, kept society together, got COVID and recovered.
[00:14:57]  And now we've turned on them because they're like rationally saying, well, why do I really need the vaccine?

=== Public Health Confidence Crisis (02:38) ===

[00:15:02]  I mean, and they don't trust public health, right?
[00:15:04]  Because public health has sort of beclouded itself.
[00:15:07]  And so they're rationally saying, look, do I really need the vaccine?
[00:15:10]  When I've already recovered from COVID.
[00:15:12]  And public health basically says, oh, no, no, no, there's no such thing as immunity to COVID after you've covered.
[00:15:20]  When public health denies basic science results, it's no surprise that people start mistrusting public health.
[00:15:26]  Yeah.
[00:15:27]  Sorry, go ahead.
[00:15:28]  No, I was just going to say, you're right, because these people have been working with patients in the hospital setting.
[00:15:33]  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.
[00:15:40]  And now we're going to turn around and say, not only.
[00:15:43]  Must you get this vaccine that you don't need?
[00:15:45]  But if you don't, you're fired and then you'll lose your medical benefits, your paycheck.
[00:15:51]  It's like, so, okay, so doctors and nurses now, they're going to be the ones without health coverage, without a paycheck because They actually do see the science.
[00:15:59]  And even though we trusted them for months to be in the hospital setting taking care of patients, now we've just decided we trust no more.
[00:16:06]  Yeah.
[00:16:06]  I mean, I think actually you bring up a really important additional point just to tie back to what we were talking about earlier.
[00:16:13]  If a lot of nurses who basically decide, I don't want the vaccine, so I'm just going to go on, essentially, I'm going to say I'm not going to take it and then get fired or let go, well, you're going to have staffing shortages at hospitals.
[00:16:25]  It's going to actually make treating COVID patients and other patients more difficult.
[00:16:29]  I don't think this policy has been well thought through, and it's going to undermine.
[00:16:33]  I think it already has undermined confidence in public health and also in vaccines generally, because people are saying, well, if people, if they're doing this to me with this vaccine, well, what about other vaccines?
[00:16:43]  And that's really unfortunate because vaccines are probably the single most important invention, medical intervention I think I've ever learned about.
[00:16:53]  The MMR vaccines, the DPH vaccines, these are really important for the health of children, of populations at large.
[00:16:59]  And if public confidence in vaccines, which used to be The anti vax movement used to be this fringe movement, less than 1%.
[00:17:07]  Now, what public health has done is it's turned the anti vax movement into a mainstream movement by this denial of natural immunity, by this coerciveness.
[00:17:16]  I think I really recommend that public health go back to sort of the more compassionate ways that it maybe once had.
[00:17:22]  Respect people, tell people the truth about what the science is actually saying.
[00:17:26]  Don't try to manipulate them.
[00:17:27]  People can sense that, and you'll just get much better results.
[00:17:30]  Yeah, like they're doing in the UK, like they're doing in Israel.
[00:17:33]  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.

=== Corporate Power Over Ideas (15:13) ===

[00:17:40]  Listen, we appreciate your straight shooting right from the beginning.
[00:17:43]  Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, great to see you again.
[00:17:45]  Thank you, Mia.
[00:17:46]  Nice to be on the air.
[00:17:47]  Up next, we're going to talk about big tech's censorship.
[00:17:50]  And it isn't just about COVID, it's also about trying to silence political beliefs that don't fit the narrative, as you well know.
[00:17:56]  We have two great guests on this for you today.
[00:17:59]  One of them starts right after this break.
[00:18:01]  He's so concerned about it, he quit the very billion dollar company he founded and built to speak out against this.
[00:18:08]  Vivek Ramaswamy is here next.
[00:18:10]  Don't miss him.
[00:18:11]  And now, watch for kicks.
[00:18:13]  Kicks can be a grenade for selfies.
[00:18:15]  The suit can be a grenade for a crush.
[00:18:19]  But we have to be a little bit more stressful.
[00:18:21]  And we have to be a little bit more stressful.
[00:18:24]  So, welcome to the grenade for your beauty.
[00:18:26]  Connect with your beauty.
[00:18:28]  Who's kicks?
[00:18:29]  Beauty Unlimited.
[00:18:35]  Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:18:37]  Well, in recent weeks, we have seen a mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan during the debacle of a Pull out that Biden orchestrated, suspended from Instagram and having her Facebook page shut down for speaking out against President Biden.
[00:18:51]  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.
[00:19:01]  Both companies later backed off and did a 180 after it became public.
[00:19:05]  But how long until they don't?
[00:19:08]  Joining me now is Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke Inc. and very successful guy.
[00:19:13]  Really thoughtful man.
[00:19:14]  Vivek, it's great to have you on the program.
[00:19:15]  Let's just get a little bit of your background just so people understand how you got to where you are.
[00:19:20]  So, you went to Harvard undergrad, you went to Yale Law School, you were on Wall Street for a bit.
[00:19:26]  You're a young guy, only 36.
[00:19:28]  And then you founded a company.
[00:19:29]  Is it Roviant or Rovian?
[00:19:32]  Roivant was the company.
[00:19:33]  Roivant, okay.
[00:19:34]  And killed it.
[00:19:35]  I mean, just crushed it.
[00:19:37]  And in like a couple of years, the company was worth billions and you were suddenly basking in money and thought, What to yourself about your journey as an American citizen?
[00:19:48]  Well, look, I was actually steeped in building a company for the first six years.
[00:19:51]  You're going to build something from the ground up, you don't have much of a chance to pay attention to much else.
[00:19:56]  And by 2019, the company was running on its own two feet.
[00:19:58]  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.
[00:20:19]  And on the face of it, there's nothing objectionable about it, but it smacked of a certain inauthenticity to me that really bothered me.
[00:20:25]  And, you know, Milton Friedman had criticized the same trend of stakeholder capitalism years ago.
[00:20:30]  Thinking that was going to make businesses run less efficiently.
[00:20:33]  But that wasn't quite the thing that bothered me.
[00:20:34]  So I spent some time reflecting on it.
[00:20:36]  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.
[00:20:48]  And to me, that was a real violation of democracy.
[00:20:50]  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 In my suite in Manhattan.
[00:21:04]  And I think that that principle, I think, was what was at stake that really bothered me at my core.
[00:21:09]  So I wrote one op ed in the Wall Street Journal about it.
[00:21:11]  It was supposed to be a one and done.
[00:21:13]  That ended up getting blown out into a book.
[00:21:15]  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.
[00:21:21]  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.
[00:21:26]  I really needed to separate my voice as a citizen from my voice as a CEO.
[00:21:30]  Okay, because there it is.
[00:21:31]  This January, I had to write in the book.
[00:21:33]  There's the rub right there because when it maybe you would have felt differently about stakeholder capitalism or people, you know, these companies trying to sort of take more political viewpoints if you'd seen a greater diversity of thought.
[00:21:44]  But they've all gone one way, 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 Soul Cycle, having been outed for, you know, doing some fundraising for President Trump, the CEO, you get.
[00:22:04]  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.
[00:22:11]  I think that's right, Megan.
[00:22:12]  We live in a moment with not a monopoly on products in the marketplace of products, but with a monopoly on ideas.
[00:22:17]  And whether you call it a monopoly or an ideological cartel, that's where we live in corporate America.
[00:22:22]  Now, I don't want to portray myself as some kind of victim.
[00:22:24]  I've done perfectly fine for myself in the system of American capitalism.
[00:22:28]  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.
[00:22:35]  And so I felt with that privilege came some responsibility.
[00:22:38]  To be able to speak with candor from the inside.
[00:22:41]  And you're right.
[00:22:41]  If I was spouting out left leaning views like CEOs like Mark Benioff tend to do, maybe that would benefit my business.
[00:22:47]  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.
[00:22:54]  I think you were familiar with this op ed.
[00:22:55]  They ought to be treated as state actors when they're acting in coordination with the state.
[00:23:00]  A relatively technical point that I wrote with a former law professor of mine.
[00:23:03]  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.
[00:23:15]  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.
[00:23:25]  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: separate capitalism from democracy, separate one's commercial activities from one's civic duties.
[00:23:38]  And right now, I've taken a break, in large part, of my commercial activities.
[00:23:43]  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, the way in which this new postmodern dogma has really infected.
[00:23:56]  One institution after another, starting in corporate America, but extending to our universities and beyond as well.
[00:24:01]  I understand it.
[00:24:02]  I understand it, Vivek.
[00:24:03]  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.
[00:24:24]  I mean, this really, this culture war.
[00:24:27]  Goes to the very heart of what America is and ought to be.
[00:24:29]  And it requires extraordinary action.
[00:24:32]  You've been very brave.
[00:24:33]  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.
[00:24:43]  And so I've been your big admirer.
[00:24:45]  But I think that you raise a good point about what could be done to stop what's happening with big tech and its censorship.
[00:24:53]  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 and we covered on this podcast.
[00:24:59]  It was you and Jed Rubenfeld, who was.
[00:25:01]  Your professor at Yale Law School.
[00:25:02]  He's married to Amy Chua, Tiger Mom, who I love as well.
[00:25:05]  They're getting unfairly targeted right now at Yale.
[00:25:07]  It's BS.
[00:25:09]  And she's fighting back, which is awesome to see.
[00:25:11]  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, 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.
[00:25:38]  Can you explain what you wrote?
[00:25:40]  Yeah, sure.
[00:25:40]  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.
[00:25:49]  But the essence of what's actually happening today is a little bit different than that.
[00:25:52]  You have private actors working hand in glove with big government to determine what views can and can't be represented.
[00:25:59]  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.
[00:26:09]  What government cannot directly do through the front door under the Constitution, namely to censor political speech directly.
[00:26:15]  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.
[00:26:22]  We're going to regulate you.
[00:26:23]  We're going to break you up.
[00:26:24]  We're going to make it aggressive.
[00:26:25]  We're going to make it swift.
[00:26:26]  Almost all of those are exact quotes from congressional hearings over the course of the last year.
[00:26:31]  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.
[00:26:39]  Section 230 immunity that preempts any state action at the state level against these companies through the private tort system.
[00:26:45]  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.
[00:27:04]  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.
[00:27:11]  It's that simple.
[00:27:12]  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.
[00:27:20]  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.
[00:27:27]  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.
[00:27:36]  Ironically, in the case of big tech censorship today, we have not just one of those conditions, but all three of those conditions.
[00:27:41]  These companies are definitely responsive to threats.
[00:27:43]  They're definitely protected.
[00:27:44]  They're definitely working and coordinating directly with the government.
[00:27:46]  Just listen to Jen Saki.
[00:27:47]  She boasts about it.
[00:27:48]  So I think that that is state action in disguise.
[00:27:50]  And that's the case that we made they ought to be treated as state actors.
[00:27:53]  Yeah, Jen Saki out there with that.
[00:27:54]  We've given the list of the disinformation dozen.
[00:27:57]  To all of the major social media companies and make sure that they get censored.
[00:28:00]  It's like, well, she admitted it.
[00:28:02]  They showed their hand.
[00:28:03]  This is kind of what Trump is alleging in his lawsuit against these companies, saying that he was unfairly booted.
[00:28:09]  He didn't get it exactly right.
[00:28:10]  So I don't know.
[00:28:11]  In a sloppy way.
[00:28:12]  But yes, I think that's the spirit of what he's getting at.
[00:28:15]  I believe, I have reason to believe that he might have drawn from the principles in our op ed.
[00:28:19]  I actually wrote another op ed under my sole name a little bit later.
[00:28:23]  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.
[00:28:30]  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.
[00:28:36]  45th President of the United States silenced.
[00:28:38]  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.
[00:28:50]  He is rolling over in his grave.
[00:28:51]  I believe he was the 33rd president.
[00:28:53]  Now the 45th president takes his case to court.
[00:28:55]  I actually think it could be one of the historic cases of our time.
[00:28:58]  The asterisk to that is he actually needs to argue it with discipline in the right way.
[00:29:01]  And to me, the jury's still out on whether he's able to do that.
[00:29:04]  But I think that he has the potential to actually even make the case that Section 230 is unconstitutional as applied to protecting big tech behavior in cases like that against him.
[00:29:16]  And just to explain Section 230 because not everybody knows what that is.
[00:29:20]  Yeah, sure, sure.
[00:29:21]  I apologize.
[00:29:21]  So Section 230 is basically a statute that has two parts.
[00:29:24]  I'm going to focus on the second part of it, what's called 230C2, which effectively says that these companies have no immunity under state law, have no liability under state law.
[00:29:36]  For removing content, and here's text from the statute whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
[00:29:44]  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.
[00:29:56]  That's what Section 230 does.
[00:29:58]  Their vision, Megan, was actually applying that doctrine to softcore pornography, certain types of pornography that might have been constitutionally protected under the First Amendment, that Congress still wanted to deputize these private companies.
[00:30:10]  To be unafraid in taking down.
[00:30:12]  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.
[00:30:21]  And what you have is a debate that says that actually Section 230 preempts that law.
[00:30:26]  That is, federal law overrides state law to say that actually the federal law wins when the two are in conflict.
[00:30:32]  That law is now actually on hold.
[00:30:34]  It's being stayed by a district court judge when big tech pushed back and said that Section 230 would preempt that statute.
[00:30:40]  Well, one of the cases I would make is that.
[00:30:42]  Section 230 is arguably unconstitutional if it preempts a state statute that reinforces a constitutional right.
[00:30:49]  So, those are the kinds of arguments that I think President Trump could take all the way to the Supreme Court.
[00:30:54]  That's under Florida law, but he could make it a part of the claim of the federal case that he's bringing against the big tech titans through supplemental jurisdiction.
[00:31:02]  It's so great.
[00:31:03]  It's so rich.
[00:31:04]  If you think about what DeSantis and the Floridians did, they sort of made big tech own its bias.
[00:31:09]  It's like, no, you can't discriminate against political viewpoints.
[00:31:12]  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.
[00:31:19]  I mean, that is what they're doing.
[00:31:20]  It's the same thing as your complaint about what you've seen when it comes to stakeholder capitalism.
[00:31:27]  As long as your bias goes one way, you're fine.
[00:31:30]  The 230 bias that's being executed by these big tech companies is always 90% of the time one way.
[00:31:38]  It stifles the conservative viewpoint, not the individual.
[00:31:40]  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.
[00:31:47]  Was the fact that it actually deputized private actors to do through the back door, through the civil system, what the government could not directly do under Roe v. Wade as a doctrine?
[00:31:56]  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.
[00:32:10]  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, I think, a poorly decided case, but let's put that to one side, you ought to agree that the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States can't be evaded by the government delegating its dirty work to private actors there either.
[00:32:25]  Yet that's exactly what's happening every day.
[00:32:28]  It's actually a tool that could be dangerously used by both sides.
[00:32:30]  I don't think this is a liberal or a conservative issue.
[00:32:33]  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.
[00:32:41]  And whether you're on the left or the right, I think you should see a problem with that.
[00:32:43]  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.

=== Woke Capitalism in Business (07:44) ===

[00:32:53]  You know, we've seen it in sports, we've seen it in media, we've seen it in Hollywood.
[00:32:56]  But the surrender of corporate America to this was, I have to say, a little surprising to me.
[00:33:00]  I thought they'd.
[00:33:01]  Have more backbone.
[00:33:02]  I thought they'd be more like the Michael Jordan, you know, conservatives buy sneakers too, Republicans buy sneakers too.
[00:33:07]  You know, they haven't.
[00:33:08]  They've surrendered.
[00:33:09]  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.
[00:33:15]  And they've gone along with it.
[00:33:16]  And one of the points you make in your book, Woke Inc., is it's a lie.
[00:33:20]  It's a scam.
[00:33:22]  It's a defining scam of our time, Megan.
[00:33:25]  And actually, it's not so surprising to me.
[00:33:28]  When, so I got my first job out of college right before the 2008 financial crisis.
[00:33:33]  At a hedge fund in New York City, I had a front row seat to the 2008 crisis and the aftermath.
[00:33:37]  In fact, the hedge fund I worked for was mentioned in the Big Short.
[00:33:40]  I was kind of pretty close to what happened then and the aftermath of it.
[00:33:44]  And I'll tell you, after the 2008 crisis, what happened was corporate America was really scared of the Occupy Wall Street left, the newly nascent ascendant movement in the left that wanted to reorder economic power structures in this country, take money from those wealthy corporations, redistribute it to poor people.
[00:34:00]  Agree or not, that is what the old left had to say.
[00:34:03]  But there was this birth of this new woke left around the same time that said actually the real problem wasn't economic injustice or poverty quite.
[00:34:12]  It was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and so on.
[00:34:16]  And that presented the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country to go from being possibly the bad guys to being the good guys if they just said the right things.
[00:34:25]  Applaud diversity and inclusion, put token minorities on your boards.
[00:34:29]  This is what's going on.
[00:34:30]  I love this.
[00:34:31]  It's basically a get out of jail.
[00:34:33]  It's a get out of jail.
[00:34:34]  Bad person jail free card for evil CEOs.
[00:34:39]  They're like, oh, there's a new villain.
[00:34:40]  We're onto it.
[00:34:41]  Yes, white men.
[00:34:42]  It just blames everything on white men.
[00:34:44]  And that's distinct from us, most of whom are white men who run companies because we're going to use these companies, at least on paper, to be sort of advocates for social justice and don't pay any attention to what we're doing behind the curtain.
[00:34:57]  Exactly.
[00:34:58]  You'd rather talk about systemic racism than systemic financial risk if you're a bank after 08.
[00:35:02]  That's exactly what they ended up doing.
[00:35:03]  There's a funny story I tell in the book, Megan, where First, you're Wall Street and you criticize Wall Street's lack of gender diversity, even though you're Wall Street.
[00:35:11]  And even better, you then get paid to do it.
[00:35:13]  There was a statue that showed up in front of the Wall Street Bowl in recent years, commissioned by State Street Global Advisors.
[00:35:19]  It was called She or Fearless Girl.
[00:35:22]  And the placard at the feet of Fearless Girl said S H E, in all caps, She Makes a Difference.
[00:35:27]  Well, it turns out they built that statue after a number of female employees at their firm alleged that they were being paid less than their male counterparts systematically.
[00:35:36]  So, your female employees are not going to be paid enough.
[00:35:39]  What's the natural thing you do?
[00:35:40]  You build a statue for them.
[00:35:41]  Sure.
[00:35:42]  That's going to put money on the table.
[00:35:43]  That's going to put food on the table for these women.
[00:35:46]  It gets even funnier, Megan.
[00:35:48]  So, SHE stands for not just Fearless Girl, it also stands for the ticker of the Diversity Index ETF, Exchange Traded Fund.
[00:35:55]  That State Street charges a fee on.
[00:35:57]  So it's a marketing tactic for people to buy SHE, which is an exchange traded fund that they market.
[00:36:02]  And to top it off, you can't make this stuff up.
[00:36:04]  The woman who actually created this, she's a true feminist.
[00:36:07]  She was a true believer.
[00:36:08]  She built Fearless Girl with a mission.
[00:36:09]  She was commissioned by State Street to do it.
[00:36:11]  She was so excited that she actually built three more copies of Fearless Girl because she was really inspired by her own work.
[00:36:17]  Turned out that State Street sues her for making three unauthorized reproductions of the statue because, like any magic act, you can't just make the money disappear in your marketing budget.
[00:36:25]  You have to bring it back.
[00:36:26]  And so that's actually one of the stories I tell in the introduction to the book.
[00:36:29]  But there are countless examples just like it, where this is really just a cynical arrangement.
[00:36:33]  It's not even an arranged marriage.
[00:36:35]  I call it an arranged marriage sometimes.
[00:36:36]  It's not even really an arranged marriage.
[00:36:38]  It's more like mutual prostitution, where the woke left and big business secretly have disdain for one another, but they're each getting something out of the trade.
[00:36:45]  And that's the state of affairs that led to the birth of woke capitalism that allowed them to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
[00:36:51]  And I'm sorry to say it worked effectively.
[00:36:53]  Yeah.
[00:36:53]  No, I mean, you look no further than Colin Kaepernick, who's like, capitalism, disgusting racist system, as he Cashes his huge multi million dollar checks from Nike.
[00:37:02]  Cha ching, I actually love America.
[00:37:05]  All right, stand by, Vivek, because up next, we're going to be discussing the news that broke today on this secret Facebook program, just uncovering what the company did not want you to know that it knows about your children.
[00:37:17]  That's next.
[00:37:21]  Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:37:23]  Joining me now is Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke Inc., and he's an entrepreneur.
[00:37:29]  He's a very successful guy, and he's trying to help fight back against this.
[00:37:34]  I mean, it's really turned into corporate bullying by companies that want you to think that they have good hearts, that they're really just trying to improve our world.
[00:37:45]  But really, they've signed on to this woke ideology to protect their own bottom line, their butts, and make themselves feel like better people while behind the scenes they're sticking the knife in.
[00:37:53]  And one of the great examples in your book, Vivek, is what Amazon did.
[00:37:57]  I love this.
[00:37:58]  It really tells the story about what it did in 2020 when it pledged to donate $10 million to groups focused on aiding black.
[00:38:05]  Communities.
[00:38:06]  And why don't you tell us what they were doing behind the scenes while that was happening?
[00:38:10]  Well, I mean, Amazon's hypocrisy just runs rampant, right?
[00:38:13]  They had fired one of their black employees at one of their warehouses while calling him behind closed doors dumb and inarticulate.
[00:38:20]  Amazon also challenged Walmart when its profitability was temporarily facing a trough to a challenge to pay its workers a minimum of $15 per hour voluntarily.
[00:38:32]  But of course, Amazon is one of the worst perpetrators of having treated its workers poorly for decades.
[00:38:36]  But I just think that that.
[00:38:37]  Comes back to principle number one, commandment number one, if you will, of the church of woke capitalism, Megan.
[00:38:43]  The more ruthless your business practices are, the more woke progressive you have to act.
[00:38:48]  Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, I put in this category, there's no woke way to make ballistic missiles that kill thousands of people.
[00:38:54]  I'm not saying they're wrong to make those missiles, but it is counterintuitive that they would then be training their employees about white privilege rather than about the myriad other things they could be talking about that relate to the core of their business practices.
[00:39:05]  I just think that that is actually.
[00:39:06]  I actually missed that one.
[00:39:07]  Raytheon's doing that.
[00:39:08]  Oh, Raytheon's doing it and Lockheed's doing it.
[00:39:10]  And the funny thing is, Lockheed did it first and then Raytheon follows.
[00:39:13]  And so it's a new form of market competition, Megan, competition in the marketplace of ideas where you have to keep up with the Joneses, where once your competitor's done it, then you have to do it too, or you're missing out on the competitive advantage of having blown woke smoke to be able to evade accountability for your actual actions.
[00:39:28]  Because if the competitor is blowing woke smoke, that's a competitive advantage because they could get in bed with the regulator, they could get in bed with the public.
[00:39:35]  And now you have to do it too if you're to keep up, or else you're at a competitive disadvantage.
[00:39:39]  And so that's the way this game is played.
[00:39:40]  You see it play out in one sector after another.
[00:39:42]  Oh, guys, like Harvey Weinstein making donations to women's groups, which did happen prior to him being outed as a sexual predator because he thinks he's going to, it's paying some sort of insurance policy so that people won't get you.
[00:39:54]  You know, just as an aside with Harvey.
[00:39:57]  So he tried to lay the foundation with me too.
[00:40:01]  I mean, he knew what was coming for him because the articles had been circulating, the rumors of articles had been circulating.
[00:40:06]  And he tried to make nice, nice with me for quite some time and even with my husband.
[00:40:11]  And I'm so gullible, Vivek.
[00:40:13]  I was like, I don't know.
[00:40:14]  I hadn't heard the stories about Harvey.
[00:40:15]  I'm not in Hollywood.
[00:40:16]  So I'm like, I know they say he might be a bully, but there's nothing I want to do with him professionally anyway.
[00:40:21]  But my husband, Doug, who always, always knows, he's like, Meg, He's not a good guy.
[00:40:25]  I'm like, oh, yes, he is.
[00:40:27]  So he said the same thing to me about Matt Lauer.
[00:40:29]  I'm like, oh, he seems like a nice guy.
[00:40:30]  He said the same thing to me about Charlie Rose.
[00:40:32]  I'm like, I don't know.
[00:40:33]  I could go on, Vivek.
[00:40:35]  The bottom line is trust Doug.
[00:40:36]  Doug, is that right?

=== China and Big Tech Threats (06:58) ===

[00:40:38]  That's the key.
[00:40:39]  You married a smart man then.
[00:40:41]  But he's just got the instinct for it.
[00:40:42]  He's just got the instinct for it.
[00:40:43]  Whatever Shakespearean lady doth protest too much.
[00:40:46]  You're trying too hard.
[00:40:47]  You're trying too hard for a reason, right?
[00:40:49]  I mean, I could just go on and on about the list of Goldman Sachs last year goes to the mountaintops of Davos and says it's not going to take a company public in the United States.
[00:40:58]  Unless its board is sufficiently diverse where they're the sole arbiter of diversity on skin deep attributes.
[00:41:03]  Of course, right there, that's a moment when Elizabeth Warren is the front runner of the Democratic primary, and they know they're not going to place their alumnus in the Warren administration.
[00:41:12]  This is just tithing in a new currency.
[00:41:14]  It's what these guys do.
[00:41:15]  It's completely inauthentic, whether it's at the first personal level with Harvey Weinstein or whether it's at the corporate level.
[00:41:21]  It's the same thing of using a form of woke insurance.
[00:41:24]  I actually like that term a lot.
[00:41:25]  You're buying an insurance policy inexpensively to buy yourself out of a catastrophe scenario that you'd rather avoid.
[00:41:31]  In most cases in corporate America, unlike in the case of Harvey Weinstein, it's working out pretty well for most of these corporations.
[00:41:36]  What I'm trying to do in the book is to really just call out that hypocrisy for what it is, not because I think corporations are wrong to pursue profits, but because I think our system works better when they openly admit and even embrace that that's what they're exactly doing, rather than duping the public into forgetting about its otherwise intact system of accountability, both market accountability and political accountability, to actually hold companies accountable.
[00:42:00]  That's the reason I'm doing it.
[00:42:01]  I know, I love it.
[00:42:03]  Can you?
[00:42:03]  You shine a light on China too.
[00:42:05]  And I think we've heard China, you know, people talk about China as a boogeyman.
[00:42:09]  China's doing this, China's doing that.
[00:42:10]  But you kind of do a very nice job of laying out exactly how it works, how these companies buddy up to China and China to these companies.
[00:42:19]  China has the last laugh in almost every circumstance and then winds up controlling these companies, their public messaging, the way they speak in a really disturbing way.
[00:42:30]  Could you talk about that?
[00:42:31]  Totally.
[00:42:32]  So, this is the first book to talk about the geopolitical implications of wokeism and woke capitalism.
[00:42:36]  And I think the China dimension is probably the most important of them all, even though there are certain relationships to other countries too.
[00:42:42]  The way it works is effectively, China has realized that if the new international arbiters of moral justice, multinational corporations generally based in the United States, if they relentlessly criticize the United States for alleged social injustices like racism and transphobia, but say nothing about actual human rights atrocities in China, like the million Uyghurs who are enslaved in concentration camps, subject to forced sterilization, communist indoctrination, and worse.
[00:43:07]  then that creates a false moral equivalence on the global stage between the United States and China.
[00:43:12]  That erodes our greatest asset of all.
[00:43:14]  That is not our nuclear arsenal.
[00:43:15]  It is our moral standing on the global stage.
[00:43:18]  And if you have any doubt about that, just listen really carefully to what China says now in nearly every diplomatic setting.
[00:43:24]  Xi Jinping did it last year before the EU.
[00:43:26]  His top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, did it in the Alaska summit this year.
[00:43:29]  When they're pressed about the weaker human rights crisis, the first thing Xi Jinping now says is that Black Lives Matter shows that the United States is no better.
[00:43:37]  That would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that Nike and Disney and BlackRock and the NBA and so on legitimize their claims by consistently criticizing racism in the United States, the suffering of Black people in the United States, without saying a peep about the Uyghur human rights crisis or other human rights atrocities in China.
[00:43:55]  Even worse, Disney films Milan last year there in the Shenzhen province.
[00:43:59]  Now, a couple of years ago, they said they can't film in the state of Georgia if Georgia passes the equivalent of an anti abortion statute.
[00:44:04]  But they film in Milan in Shenzhen, and they actually thank the CCP authorities for allowing them the privilege of filming there.
[00:44:11]  And so, Megan, I think this goes to a core issue of failed US policy over the last 30 years the flawed policy of democratic capitalism.
[00:44:19]  We say stakeholder capitalism today, we said democratic capitalism in the 1990s, where we thought we could export Big Macs and Happy Meals and spread democracy to places like China.
[00:44:28]  We thought we could use our money to get them to be more like us.
[00:44:33]  Instead, they have turned that on its head.
[00:44:35]  They are now using their money to get us to be more like them.
[00:44:38]  And I think that is what progressives need to wake up to, to get woke to, if you will.
[00:44:42]  The idea that once you turn corporations into vectors to drive progressive agendas, they become vehicles to advance any agenda.
[00:44:50]  And nobody has mastered that game better than China.
[00:44:53]  They have sent back our Disney movies and Nike sneakers filled with their values, creating that false moral equivalence between the US and China.
[00:45:01]  And I'm sorry to say, thank you, LeBron James, it happens to be working out pretty well for the Chinese side of that equation.
[00:45:06]  And I think that that equation of Chinese nihilism with American idealism is probably one of the defining geopolitical threats over the course of the next decade.
[00:45:14]  I think the two greatest threats to American democracy, we've talked about both of them, are China and big tech in that order.
[00:45:19]  But I think there's a deep relationship between the two in terms of how they use corporate America as effectively a Trojan horse to accomplish their ends.
[00:45:26]  Yeah.
[00:45:26]  So what do we do about it?
[00:45:28]  Such a big question in such a few words.
[00:45:31]  Yeah, look, I mean, I did write a book about it, and I think there's more to say than we can cover here in short order.
[00:45:36]  But I think that there are combinations of symptomatic therapies, legal and policy solutions, and then much more importantly, I think the cultural solutions that we really need to be talking more about.
[00:45:45]  But I think the symptomatic solutions can play a role in creating the conditions for cultural change.
[00:45:50]  I think a lot of it begins with revisiting conservative dogmas, right?
[00:45:53]  You know, Ronald Reagan did what he needed to do in his era, because in his era, big government was the singular threat to liberty and prosperity in this country.
[00:46:00]  He cut regulations, he slashed taxes.
[00:46:02]  Did what he needed to do.
[00:46:04]  But I think the dogmas of 1980 do not necessarily apply to address the unique problems in 2021, where at least I think the biggest threat to liberty and prosperity today is not just big government.
[00:46:14]  It might have been in 1980, it's not today.
[00:46:16]  It is this new hybrid of big government and big business that's far more powerful than either one alone because it can do what either one can't on its own either.
[00:46:25]  And that's a new monster that's far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned.
[00:46:29]  It's far more powerful than what our founding fathers envisioned.
[00:46:31]  And the kinds of policy solutions we need today are ones that go back to these businesses or this new hybrid of big business and big government.
[00:46:37]  To say that you can't have it both ways.
[00:46:39]  Take big tech, simple Section 230 reform that says that either you behave like private companies and you're free to decide what doesn't show up on your websites, or you get this special form of federal immunity, but it comes with strings attached.
[00:46:51]  And if you're protected by the federal government, then you also operate according to the same constraints as the federal government, including the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
[00:46:59]  That's online behavior.
[00:47:00]  Let's talk about this political discrimination offline, where a lot of people are fired for saying the wrong thing, wearing the wrong hat, of Virginia shipyard workers.
[00:47:08]  Fired from his job for wearing a Trump hat to work in 2020.
[00:47:11]  I mean, the list of examples goes on.
[00:47:13]  What I say is that we need to add political belief as a protected class or political speech as a protected class to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to say that if you can't discriminate on the basis of race or sex or religion or national origin, or after the Bostock case last year on sexual orientation either, then you should not be able to discriminate on the basis of one's political expression or political beliefs either.
[00:47:34]  And I don't think that's an academic issue.
[00:47:35]  I think it is happening every day in this country.

=== Social Media Impact on Teens (15:22) ===

[00:47:37]  If it can happen to the 45th president of the United States, I think it can happen to anybody.
[00:47:41]  To anyone.
[00:47:42]  Now, Megan, I used to do it.
[00:47:44]  It would change the way universities operate, K 12 operate, and obviously corporate America too and big tech.
[00:47:49]  Vivek, got to run.
[00:47:50]  It's been a pleasure.
[00:47:51]  Thank you so much.
[00:47:52]  The book is called Woke Inc., well worth your time.
[00:47:55]  Up next, Professor Scott Galloway.
[00:47:58]  He's on the left, but calls Apple, Facebook, and these others soul killing, job killing.
[00:48:02]  He's next.
[00:48:03]  He's fun.
[00:48:11]  Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:48:13]  Joining me now, Professor Scott Galloway.
[00:48:16]  He's a marketing professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, a tech startup veteran, and a best selling author, just to mention a few of his accomplishments.
[00:48:24]  He's been called Gordon Gecko with a social conscience.
[00:48:27]  Love that.
[00:48:28]  And he's been taking on Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google for years.
[00:48:32]  More importantly, been taking on Kara Swisher, which is very scary because she is super smart and tough and pretty awesome, even though our politics look nothing like one another's, have so much care and love for her.
[00:48:43]  Welcome, Professor Galloway.
[00:48:44]  Great to have you here.
[00:48:45]  Thanks for having me, Megan.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, so she's so fun.
[00:48:47]  I met her, by the way, when I was at NBC.
[00:48:49]  We were doing a story on tech and Me Too and so on.
[00:48:52]  And I said, You know, these guys, these CEOs, I don't know that they're going to change.
[00:48:56]  What's your message to them?
[00:48:57]  And she was like, I'm going to get you.
[00:48:59]  I'm going to get you.
[00:49:01]  And I was like, I'm afraid for them.
[00:49:03]  She will get them.
[00:49:05]  No, she's scary, but she's been a great partner and I really enjoy.
[00:49:10]  You know, after working my ass off for 30 years, I'm an overnight success because I care a swisher.
[00:49:16]  Well, I like, as you have more, I don't know, is it fair to say working class roots?
[00:49:21]  I've heard you describe your background in different ways.
[00:49:24]  Yeah.
[00:49:25]  Raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary.
[00:49:30]  You know, it was really, Megan, transformed by kind of big government, the generosity of California taxpayers and the Regency University of California went to UCLA and Berkeley for undergrad and grad for a total of tuition of $7,000 in the 80s.
[00:49:43]  And even more importantly, back then, the acceptance rate at UCLA was 70%.
[00:49:47]  I had to apply twice to get in, and now the acceptance rate is 12%.
[00:49:50]  So things have changed a lot.
[00:49:52]  Well, and it was at a point where young men were still going to college.
[00:49:56]  I mean, I know this is one of the things you've been pointing out, but where are all the young men going to college now?
[00:50:00]  They're going another way, or I don't know what they're doing, but they're not going to college in anywhere near the same numbers as they used to.
[00:50:06]  It's a really interesting issue.
[00:50:08]  I'm sure you saw the Wall Street Journal article, but it's now 60 40 women to men in college, which sounds bad, but it's even worse when you consider that if your son shows up to college, there's 50% more women there, and seven in 10 high school valedictorians are girls.
[00:50:23]  Some of this is good, some of this is catching up, some of this is just warranted reward for young women and girls who are overachieving academically, but also.
[00:50:33]  It signals, I think, something very dangerous.
[00:50:35]  And that is, men are not attaching to school.
[00:50:38]  They're not attaching to work.
[00:50:40]  They're more likely to be unemployed, more likely to have opioid addiction.
[00:50:44]  And also, this is a strange stat.
[00:50:48]  In 2008, 8% of men under the age of 30 had reported never having had sex.
[00:50:54]  And while people hear the term and their brain fires a bunch of different ways, just assume it's a key component of establishing a relationship.
[00:51:00]  That number, as of last year, is 28%.
[00:51:03]  And the reason why that number is so scary is if men aren't attaching to work, they're not attaching, or young men attaching to work, school, or a job, they're very dangerous.
[00:51:11]  Our most unstable societies have what is too many of the most dangerous person in the world, and that's a young, broken, alone male.
[00:51:18]  So when we hear that men continue to not pursue college, we really do need to look at it.
[00:51:23]  We're producing too many of this cohort.
[00:51:26]  Do you think it has to do with politics at all, with how, in particular, the white male has been so demonized and they know what's going to happen on college campuses?
[00:51:35]  They're at the lowest on the totem pole in terms of.
[00:51:38]  Economic or socio, I should say, status.
[00:51:40]  And I don't know.
[00:51:42]  I'm just talking to my friends who are very worried about their son, who's a conservative.
[00:51:45]  He's a senior in high school, but he's been really attacked and demonized by the faculty at his school.
[00:51:50]  And they're thinking it's only going to get worse when he goes to college next year.
[00:51:53]  I think they'll still send him, but.
[00:51:55]  I wonder how much of that plays into their unwillingness to put themselves through those four years.
[00:52:01]  I don't think it's discouraging them from going.
[00:52:04]  I think other reasons discourage them from going, but I wouldn't be surprised if it lends to more of them or disproportionate amount of them to drop out.
[00:52:12]  I do think there's an unhealthy gestalt in universities right now where just informally we say on freshman orientation, okay, oppressors over here and oppressed over here.
[00:52:25]  And we start from an unhealthy place of identity politics.
[00:52:30]  And universities have become especially rough and tumble places around this where people's comments are taken out of context.
[00:52:37]  They've made a caricature of it and then they're shamed.
[00:52:40]  And I would argue, Megan, that it's actually their fellow students who are less forgiving than faculty.
[00:52:44]  And I've seen it happen play out in class where someone makes one false move.
[00:52:49]  And universities are generally the most progressive places in the world.
[00:52:53]  I think we've become really made a ton of progress being more accepting of people who don't look like us.
[00:52:59]  Where we have failed is we have become increasingly intolerant of.
[00:53:01]  People who don't think like us.
[00:53:03]  2% of the faculty at Harvard identifies as conservative.
[00:53:06]  And universities are supposed to be a place where we debate and have provocation and welcome the dissenters' voice.
[00:53:13]  And around politics, we just don't tolerate it anymore.
[00:53:17]  So I wonder if a lot of young men show up and immediately say, All right, my freshman orientation kind of told me I was an oppressor.
[00:53:24]  Maybe this isn't the place for me.
[00:53:26]  So I do think there's something there.
[00:53:28]  I don't think it's discouraging them from going to college or enrolling them.
[00:53:31]  I think it might be.
[00:53:32]  Just encouraging them to drop out.
[00:53:35]  I know you've written a book on happiness for just a short form.
[00:53:39]  It's called The Algebra of Happiness Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning.
[00:53:44]  And I do wonder, because I feel like you've written so much on big tech and it's so ubiquitous in our lives and these companies that have all these tentacles and they're manipulating us in ways we don't even fully understand, but we can feel it, whether we know it's as a result of all the hours we spend on Facebook or not.
[00:54:01]  Just how big a role those big tech companies are playing in our lives?
[00:54:05]  Unhappiness, whether it's of young men or in particular of young women.
[00:54:08]  We'll get to a story that just came out today from Facebook.
[00:54:12]  How meaningful do you think their role has been?
[00:54:15]  I don't even think it's meaningful.
[00:54:16]  I think it's profound.
[00:54:17]  My colleague at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, wrote this fantastic book called The Coddling of the American Mind.
[00:54:22]  And we have an epidemic or an emerging epidemic in teen depression.
[00:54:27]  And he identified two sources of that or two drivers.
[00:54:30]  The first is our fault as parents, Megan.
[00:54:32]  I know you're a parent as well.
[00:54:34]  And that is our concierge or bulldozer parenting has led to this sort of This approach where we use so many sanitary wipes on our children's lives that they don't develop their own immunities.
[00:54:43]  And we developed this princess in the P generation where they show up to college and get their heartbroken or get their first C and literally freak out.
[00:54:51]  The second thing, though, is that social media has been proven, and even Facebook knew this and decided to hide it, to result in greater levels of depression.
[00:55:01]  That levels of depression in young men and especially young women are correlated with social media use and specifically around.
[00:55:10]  And it used to be when you and I didn't get invited to a party in high school, it was bad.
[00:55:14]  And that happens to everybody.
[00:55:15]  But now you see it play out in real time on your phone.
[00:55:17]  And it's especially damaging to girls and young women because men or boys bully physically and verbally.
[00:55:25]  Women or young girls bully relationally.
[00:55:29]  And we've put these nuclear weapons in their hands.
[00:55:32]  And we keep waiting for the better angels of these companies to show up.
[00:55:35]  And it just doesn't happen.
[00:55:38]  How could they?
[00:55:38]  I want to get to the Facebook news in one second because it confirms everything that you've been saying.
[00:55:43]  How could they, you know, because for example, my friend John Stossel, who I love, he's a libertarian.
[00:55:48]  You know, he would be, if he were here, he'd be saying, They're very successful companies.
[00:55:52]  There's a reason they became so successful.
[00:55:54]  The American people voted.
[00:55:56]  You know, with their dollars and with their eyeballs and with their time.
[00:55:58]  And, you know, therefore, it's clearly what people want.
[00:56:02]  And it's not a place for government to step in and protect people from themselves.
[00:56:06]  So, what could they be doing differently that would protect our kids more, but not totally abandon American capitalism and the way it works?
[00:56:14]  Well, I'd be in favor of age gating.
[00:56:16]  I remember when my son posted a video of his handstand on YouTube and he got a like.
[00:56:20]  And then all he could think about was checking back on YouTube.
[00:56:23]  And then someone made sort of a snarky comment and it really upset him.
[00:56:26]  And I wonder if 12 year olds should even be on YouTube.
[00:56:29]  I think there's a capitalist argument to be made that if we, in fact, broke these companies up and had more options than one social media network or one search engine, that it might result in emerging players that say there are advertisers and parents who would rather have a video search engine that doesn't radicalize young men.
[00:56:46]  There are, I think we need a photo sharing app that advertises it will not allow people under the age of 16 and it will not allow bullying or it'll come up with some sort of affirmation.
[00:56:56]  That doesn't make people feel worse.
[00:56:59]  So, I think competition is an answer here.
[00:57:01]  I think regulation is an answer.
[00:57:02]  And if your show, Megan, could be reverse engineered to girls cutting themselves, I don't think this show would survive because I think there are other podcasts and other media personalities that advertisers would rally behind.
[00:57:15]  Unfortunately, in this environment with social media and search, there are no options.
[00:57:19]  So, they don't have any real incentive to be good citizens and attract dollars.
[00:57:23]  So, I think the answer is a capitalist argument that your friend was making.
[00:57:26]  And that is we need more competition because there's a lot of advertisers that aren't.
[00:57:30]  Down with what's going on.
[00:57:31]  And a lot of parents, you know, what choice do you have?
[00:57:34]  I don't want my son on YouTube, but where do they go?
[00:57:36]  So I think the capitalist argument is to break them up and competition would solve a lot of this.
[00:57:41]  But I do think we need regulation and age, Katie.
[00:57:44]  The Facebook story out today in the Wall Street Journal, the headline is Facebook Knows Instagram, it's the same company, is toxic for teen girls.
[00:57:52]  For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo sharing app, Insta, affects its millions of young users.
[00:58:00]  About 22 million teens log on to Instagram.
[00:58:02]  In the US every day, 5 million teens log on to Facebook.
[00:58:06]  And they say that they've been doing a study internally, their researchers, and they found Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of these teens, especially the girls.
[00:58:16]  32% of teen girls said when they feel bad about their bodies, Instagram brought them there.
[00:58:20]  Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.
[00:58:24]  They make body images worse for one in three teen girls.
[00:58:26]  That's their own conclusion make body images worse for one in three.
[00:58:30]  And that they're actually blaming the teens, recognize it's to blame for the increase in anxiety, depression.
[00:58:35]  Among teens reporting suicidal thoughts, 13% of British teens said, and 66% of American users said, the desire to kill themselves was rooted to Instagram.
[00:58:47]  I mean, it's bad.
[00:58:48]  Yeah, it's just frightening.
[00:58:51]  And if you talk to, I'm involved in this wonderful nonprofit called Jed, which is committed to teen mental health.
[00:58:57]  And a lot of times, unfortunately, your kid is suffering alone.
[00:59:00]  You don't know they're suffering, and they're ashamed, and they go into the room and on their phone, and they end up Making one false move, or for whatever reason, they feel bad about themselves, or the mob seizes on them.
[00:59:13]  And it ends up in a level of emotional anxiety in a time when kids are facing increased anxiety from a variety of different factors.
[00:59:20]  What's most disturbing here is that Facebook knew about this and they decided to, you know, Facebook's innovation is how to overrun government to ignore these concerns rather than saying, how do we address this?
[00:59:34]  What changes can we make?
[00:59:35]  What incentives could we put in place to really try and counteract some of these negative externalities?
[00:59:41]  The majority of their efforts are around not making Instagram a healthier thing.
[00:59:45]  And there's some very good things about Instagram.
[00:59:47]  It's about delay and obfuscation.
[00:59:49]  And so, just as the cigarette companies were lobbying companies sitting on top of a consumer products company.
[00:59:56]  Facebook has really become an organization of delay and obfuscation and government overrun, such that they can ignore these types of issues.
[01:00:04]  And this just takes it to a new level.
[01:00:06]  I mean, it's one thing, like I said, you have kids, I have kids.
[01:00:09]  You have your world of work, you have your world of friends, you have your world of fun.
[01:00:13]  When something comes off the tracks of one of your kids, the entire universe distills down to that kid.
[01:00:17]  And the thought that this one company doesn't have this sort of empathy or concern for our children, it's just really continued evidence that this company is bad for the commonwealth and is kind of part of what I would call the The head of the class of a menace economy that is arbitraging depression, circumventing minimum wage laws.
[01:00:34]  It's just more than anything, Megan, it's just really disappointing.
[01:00:39]  Head of a class of a menace economy.
[01:00:41]  Yes.
[01:00:42]  I'm dealing with this right now to some extent because we have three kids, as you point out, and my mom, boy, girl, boy, almost 12, 10, and eight.
[01:00:51]  And my almost 12 year old turns 12 in about two weeks.
[01:00:55]  And years ago, when he started pressuring me for a phone, Right, because all these kids have phones.
[01:01:01]  When can I have a phone?
[01:01:02]  My husband and I were like, Oh, when you're 12, when you're 12.
[01:01:04]  And then we learned more, we listened more, and we were like, There's no way he's getting a phone when he turns 12.
[01:01:09]  He's not getting it.
[01:01:10]  Maybe a flip phone for emergencies where he can just dial us.
[01:01:13]  That's it.
[01:01:14]  And now, you know, kids remember.
[01:01:16]  And he's like, Guess what I want for my 12th birthday?
[01:01:19]  And I had to say, You're not getting one.
[01:01:21]  And he said, What do all my friends have?
[01:01:23]  They all have iPhones.
[01:01:23]  You know, can I please have an iPhone?
[01:01:25]  And I'm like, You can't have it.
[01:01:26]  You know, I don't know what to tell you, honey, but dad and I have done more research and you're not getting it.
[01:01:30]  He's disappointed, but What do you think?
[01:01:33]  As a dad of two kids who's been watching this industry very closely, do we get our kids' phones?
[01:01:38]  Do we let them have social media?
[01:01:39]  Because, of course, their reaction is every single one of my friends has both.
[01:01:44]  It's a really tough call.
[01:01:46]  And the people who take a purist argument and say no screens until they're 16 and no iPhone, that means they don't have kids.
[01:01:54]  Because what you recognize is I mean, it sounds terrible, but at some point you want time for your own screen time.
[01:02:00]  And then also, They do get it's balancing the very real negative impacts of kids on their phones and specifically the social media platforms.
[01:02:10]  And for some of the problems we referenced before, it's balancing that versus them being ostracized because there are some positive things.
[01:02:17]  My sons play video games and they do a lot of their socialization that way.
[01:02:22]  When we were remote this summer and they couldn't be with their friends, one way they caught up with their friends was on video games.
[01:02:27]  And I think actually some of that's healthy.
[01:02:28]  And I would argue that video games and there's research to show this aren't as damaging on the psyche or psychological well being.
[01:02:34]  Of kids.
[01:02:35]  You know, we're struggling with this as well.
[01:02:37]  What we're trying to do is we demand their passwords and we demand to see their activity.
[01:02:42]  So we're never surprised about stuff.
[01:02:44]  And we try to give them some license, even when stuff's a little bit off color, if you will.
[01:02:49]  And we're also just putting a certain time limit on it.
[01:02:51]  And we take their phones from them.
[01:02:53]  We give them their phones for, I think it's one hour at night during the weekdays and two hours in the mornings on weekends.

=== Video Games vs. Snapchat Risks (02:30) ===

[01:02:59]  And then we take them back.
[01:03:00]  But if you're looking for someone who's figured it out, you'll hear that, you know, the arguments at our house that just prove we have not.
[01:03:07]  Figured this out.
[01:03:08]  I think every parent is struggling with this.
[01:03:10]  Well, I mean, I should say he has an iPad, but that's only, he can only use that when we're there.
[01:03:15]  And he does games occasionally and he had to use it for remote schooling.
[01:03:19]  But we, social media is what we're trying to avoid and YouTube rabbit holes, right?
[01:03:23]  I mean, we've done enough research on what that does and to young girls too, what that does and pulling you into just dark places that we, if I'm there, that's one thing.
[01:03:32]  It's quite another to have it in your pocket all day long when you're that young.
[01:03:35]  And to your point earlier, the Snapchat, that's the thing that shows you where all your friends are, Snapchat.
[01:03:42]  So, you can see where all your friends are.
[01:03:44]  And, like you just said, now you can see oh, where's Jane?
[01:03:48]  Oh, where's Donna?
[01:03:49]  Oh, where's Mary?
[01:03:50]  Oh, they're all right here together, and no one's responding to my calls or my texts.
[01:03:55]  And I've been ignored.
[01:03:56]  I've been excluded.
[01:03:58]  It hurts.
[01:03:58]  Yeah.
[01:03:59]  And the question is you know, I don't know if the answer is to keep them off it.
[01:04:03]  I think it's some of it does fall to us to teach them good values.
[01:04:07]  You know, we gave our son a phone at about 13, and we've demanded that he's kind and that he not take bait when people slight him.
[01:04:16]  And we review his social, but we do give him his phone and just the utility of it.
[01:04:20]  I mean, if you want your kid to have any freedom, and I was always worried that we were not letting our kid out of the house enough, you know.
[01:04:26]  I used to leave at the age of seven or eight, and my mom would say, Be home by 10, and that was about it.
[01:04:30]  Same.
[01:04:31]  And now, you know, kids like, you know, we practically have them in armored cars, it feels like.
[01:04:37]  So I think giving them their phones so they can walk, we call it the Avenue down by Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach.
[01:04:43]  I think that's liberating and it's good for them to have independence.
[01:04:46]  It's good for them to walk home in the dark every once in a while and get a little bit scared and, you know, walk by the house with the strange, mean dog.
[01:04:52]  I think some of that is actually good for the kids.
[01:04:55]  But I'm, you know, we're absolutely.
[01:04:58]  You know, we're absolutely struggling with the time, the notion around when and how.
[01:05:03]  And I do think parents and schools have a role here.
[01:05:06]  We're in a lovely school in Florida, and they basically say you're not allowed to bring your devices and you can get in trouble for them.
[01:05:15]  And they've said also your activity on social, and I don't know if this will stand up in court, and I'm sure it'll be challenged.
[01:05:20]  Your activity on social, if you bully another kid or do something, then, you know, we can take punitive action against you in the school.
[01:05:29]  Everyone's trying to figure this out.

=== The Musk-Bezos Double Standard (15:05) ===

[01:05:30]  This is a tough one, but what we have to realize is that the company's not going to figure it out.
[01:05:36]  They're going to continue to manufacture this stuff.
[01:05:38]  That's the thing.
[01:05:39]  They're not an ally.
[01:05:39]  Wouldn't it be nice if you knew that Mark Zuckerberg was in some way your ally in this battle and trying to protect young kids from the damaging effects of it, the addiction that comes from looking at your phone 45,000 times to see if you have a like and so on?
[01:05:53]  It's hard enough for an adult to resist it, never mind a kid.
[01:05:56]  And he's not your ally.
[01:05:58]  I mean, that's really.
[01:05:59]  Sort of the bottom line.
[01:06:00]  The social media companies are on the other side of this.
[01:06:03]  Yeah, there are some companies.
[01:06:04]  There's a great company called Roblox that was hugely successful, multi billion dollar market capitalization.
[01:06:11]  And they do have a lot of content moderators.
[01:06:13]  It's a game platform for children.
[01:06:15]  About half of kids under the age of 16 have been on Roblox and they are taking this issue very seriously.
[01:06:22]  I do think TikTok, I don't know if you spend much time on TikTok, Megan.
[01:06:26]  It seems to me that's a little less toxic or they're trying to.
[01:06:29]  But isn't that just China gathering my child's data?
[01:06:32]  Could be, could be.
[01:06:33]  I don't, I personally don't see evidence of that so far, but I think that's always a risk.
[01:06:38]  You have to assume any Chinese company that the data there is probably subject to inspection by Chinese authorities.
[01:06:45]  So I don't want to pretend that's not a real issue.
[01:06:49]  What I would say though is that when I'm on TikTok, it does feel more optimistic.
[01:06:55]  It does feel a little less, you know, you go on Facebook and you go on Twitter and it feels like the algorithms are just constantly saying fight, fight, fight.
[01:07:06]  And Twitter's, but isn't Kara?
[01:07:08]  Kara's always saying that her kids are like, Twitter's for old people, mom.
[01:07:11]  Like, Twitter's not really the popular venue for the youngins.
[01:07:15]  But Facebook is obviously huge and Insta's enormous and not harmless.
[01:07:21]  I mean, I think people see the pretty pictures and it's like, oh, yay, influencers.
[01:07:24]  And it's like, no.
[01:07:25]  And for every one influencer who will post something without a filter to show her actual rear end or face, there's just millions of opposite doing, you know, doing the opposite, right?
[01:07:37]  So you get in a young girl's heads.
[01:07:39]  And even with the parent counter programming, which I'm sure you try and I try.
[01:07:42]  It's hard, it's ubiquitous.
[01:07:44]  All right, wait, stay with us, Scott, because up next, I want to ask you about Elon Musk and why you think he's a genius but sets a terrible example for young men.
[01:07:51]  And then we want to take your calls out there.
[01:07:53]  What are your biggest fears when it comes to technology taking over our lives?
[01:07:56]  Call me at 833 44 Megan.
[01:08:00]  44 M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:08:09]  Welcome back to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:08:10]  In less than 20 minutes, we're going to be taking your calls.
[01:08:12]  You're starting to fire in.
[01:08:13]  You can get on the queue and we will chat in moments.
[01:08:16]  Back with me now, Scott Galloway, professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, a tech startup veteran and best selling author.
[01:08:23]  So, what about Elon Musk?
[01:08:25]  I read that you do think he's a genius.
[01:08:27]  Is he a force for good or a force for evil?
[01:08:29]  Mostly good.
[01:08:30]  I think, you know, I had this moment where my son said, SpaceX is going, is launching.
[01:08:36]  And we went out, we live in Florida on the beach, and we went out and we saw that rocket going up.
[01:08:40]  And it was one of those kind of hallmark moments with my boys.
[01:08:43]  And, you know, anyone who builds electric vehicles, I own a Tesla, it's an amazing product, puts people in space.
[01:08:49]  You just have to admire someone who's been able to do that.
[01:08:53]  The comments I made around not being a great example for young men, when I look at the two men that have had the most visibility over the last Decade relative to previous decades, it's been Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
[01:09:07]  And I wonder what message they're sending to our boys.
[01:09:10]  And the message I would get or glean from them generally is get really rich so you can be really coarse.
[01:09:17]  And I don't think it's the right message to send to our young men.
[01:09:21]  I think going on Twitter and calling a cave diver a pedophile lacks all grace.
[01:09:27]  I think saying you're taking your company private at $420 a share when there was no veracity, that claim, and the SEC gives you a hall pass.
[01:09:35]  I just don't think there's, you know, it's difficult.
[01:09:38]  I want to be clear on the whole.
[01:09:39]  I think Elon Musk has been good for the world, good for the planet.
[01:09:42]  And I think electrifying the auto industry has got tremendous, tremendous benefits.
[01:09:47]  I just wonder where are role models, Megan?
[01:09:49]  I mean, you have a son.
[01:09:50]  Where, you know, kind of who do you want your boys to look to?
[01:09:55]  Oh, this is one of my problems early on with Trump, was that, you know, the way he talks about people, what a bully he seemed.
[01:10:02]  And certainly not someone I want my sons to model or my daughter to model in any way when it comes to behavior.
[01:10:08]  Now, I could make the opposite argument about the way he governed his policies versus, you know, I mean, Joe Biden's a perfectly nice man, but look what happened in Afghanistan, right?
[01:10:17]  It's like that argument doesn't always work with politicians as we see.
[01:10:20]  I mean, JFK wasn't exactly the best husband in the world, but agreed, right?
[01:10:24]  So we could go down the line.
[01:10:26]  But what is it about tech in particular that seems to attract a bunch of assholes?
[01:10:32]  Well, it's our fault, I think.
[01:10:34]  I think that, I mean, very, going very deep on this, when a nation becomes wealthier, And more educating, or more educating, it's reliance on a super being, and church attendance goes down.
[01:10:46]  Our brain is big enough to ask very complicated questions, but not big enough to answer them.
[01:10:50]  So, into that void slips super beings.
[01:10:51]  And when we start kicking those super beings out, for better or worse, we need answers.
[01:10:55]  And there's nothing that feels more godlike or Jesus like or mystical than technology, because I still can't figure out how my phone is able to do what it does.
[01:11:04]  If I have a very serious question, do I ask a priest, rabbi, mentor, scholar, or boss?
[01:11:08]  No, I ask Google, and I trust Google's answer more than I trust.
[01:11:13]  Any priest or rabbi.
[01:11:14]  So the new Jesus Christ of our generation are a man who denied his own blood under oath when he was worth a quarter of a billion dollars, better known as Steve Jobs, or a guy who believes he can be the CEO of two companies, Jack Dorsey.
[01:11:26]  So we are so, we suffer from an idolatry of innovators.
[01:11:30]  And we have issued the mother of all hall passes for the CEOs of tech companies that we would never issue for CEOs of other industries.
[01:11:38]  And the result is they're taking advantage of it and they're doing things that we just wouldn't have tolerated from other industries.
[01:11:43]  I mean, my question is if Michael Milken, Committed crimes today, but he was the CEO of a tech company, not a junk bomb firm.
[01:11:50]  Would he have gone to jail for 10 years?
[01:11:51]  Did Michael Milken do anything worse than what Mark Zuckerberg is doing right now?
[01:11:55]  Do you think it all started with Steve Jobs?
[01:11:57]  I mean, he obviously was the number one, like the biggest one, the biggest names, and the name and probably the most important.
[01:12:03]  And he was known for being such an ass, as you point out, denying his child and so on.
[01:12:08]  The stories about him are legion about what a jerk he was at every turn.
[01:12:12]  I think it's been a slow creep of technology, slowly but surely, has become such an ubiquitous part of our life.
[01:12:19]  There's such wonder and awe around technology.
[01:12:21]  And quite frankly, it's made so many people so much money that everybody has a friend who's.
[01:12:26]  Whose daughter went to Google and got rich.
[01:12:29]  Everybody, people are just really excited about what Amazon can do in terms of delivering their Nespecial pods within 48 hours.
[01:12:36]  Netflix is a wonder.
[01:12:37]  And maybe you own Amazon stock and you're 401k.
[01:12:40]  So it's easy.
[01:12:41]  And our elected officials, the fastest way to look old is to start going after big tech.
[01:12:46]  It's like putting on mom jeans, it just ages you.
[01:12:49]  And so a 73 year old insurance company.
[01:12:51]  Those are back in, by the way, mom jeans say.
[01:12:52]  They are back in.
[01:12:54]  That makes you look younger.
[01:12:55]  But look, I just think we've treated these companies.
[01:12:58]  There's a two class system in our legislative branch and across our economy.
[01:13:01]  It's the way we treat tech companies and the way we treat everybody else.
[01:13:05]  Again, if any one of these media companies could be reverse engineered to the kind of anti competitive behavior or weaponizing our elections, what if this podcast was found out to be taking ads from the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian government?
[01:13:19]  I mean, what would happen to this podcast?
[01:13:21]  So these guys get to play by a different set of rules, which leads to, I think, extraordinarily bad behavior.
[01:13:26]  And the reality is, if you tell a 30 year old male he's Jesus Christ, he's inclined to believe you and he will.
[01:13:31]  Play by his own rules.
[01:13:32]  It's not their fault.
[01:13:33]  It's ours.
[01:13:35]  Can I get you to comment on Elizabeth Holmes and the whole Theranos debacle?
[01:13:40]  And she's on trial now.
[01:13:42]  And everyone's fascinated by that story, including yours truly.
[01:13:45]  I met her one time and she gave me the deep voice.
[01:13:48]  And I just find her a fascinating character.
[01:13:51]  And I'm clearly not alone since we've had successful podcasts about her and a successful documentary and a miniseries.
[01:13:58]  And what do you make of how she tried to make it in this male dominated industry of a bunch of jerks?
[01:14:04]  And was she just modeling?
[01:14:05]  I mean, was her fraud so much worse than what we've seen from, you know, when it comes to criminal behavior from these other guys?
[01:14:12]  It's a really interesting question.
[01:14:13]  And like you, I'm really fascinated.
[01:14:15]  And I have a difficult time kind of wrapping my head around one specific binary view on it because I wonder I mean, the line between sort of being accused of fraud and continuing to be on the cover of Forbes is getting your next round done.
[01:14:30]  And the question I always ask about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is that if she had raised another billion dollars and then they had shown some progress, Around Edison or whatever the name of the machine was, would she still be speaking at Stanford's commencement?
[01:14:44]  And the difference here is I'm not sure she did.
[01:14:49]  The difference between Theranos and some of these tech companies is when you start talking about something as it relates to health, it just kind of takes it to a different level of seriousness.
[01:14:58]  It's one thing when you lie about your photo sharing app, it's another thing when you lie about your photo sharing app or you delay or cover up depression, that takes it to a new level.
[01:15:06]  But when you're talking about a blood testing, Mechanism and you're making false claims or claims that at a minimum seem outrageous, it takes it to a new level.
[01:15:15]  But the correct question is Elon Musk has never met a production target or has missed most of them.
[01:15:22]  He said two years ago that within 12 months there'd be a million automated self driving Tesla taxis.
[01:15:29]  I don't see one.
[01:15:31]  So is that fraud?
[01:15:32]  So there is a real valid argument from their defense that she wasn't doing anything a lot of CEOs don't do.
[01:15:40]  The difference is this thing collapsed.
[01:15:42]  Before she had a chance to realize her vision.
[01:15:44]  But ultimately, why I do think she's found guilty here is I think people do distinguish claims about a device that has to do with healthcare as opposed to technology.
[01:15:55]  And some of this feels really, I think one of the most disappointing things about her defense is she's claiming abuse spouse syndrome.
[01:16:02]  So, the most famous woman in technology is claiming that she was manipulated by a man and she didn't have the self awareness to have agency in her own domain.
[01:16:10]  I don't think that's especially good for women in tech.
[01:16:13]  So, I think it's fascinating.
[01:16:15]  I think your podcasts on it are going to continue to draw a ton of viewers because we all wrap our heads around it.
[01:16:20]  But I would argue if you've been following the trial, the defense is winning.
[01:16:24]  The defense is saying she showed up every day, she didn't take a dollar, she worked her ass off.
[01:16:29]  And she failed.
[01:16:30]  That's bad, but it's not illegal.
[01:16:32]  We're actually going to do a legal segment on it soon, a couple of days.
[01:16:36]  How about Jeff Bezos?
[01:16:37]  Because I tell you, I mean, I'm like, oh my God, Amazon's taking over the world.
[01:16:42]  I lived in New York for 17 years up until about two weeks ago.
[01:16:46]  And it's like all the mom and pops are out of business and damn Amazon.
[01:16:49]  And then, of course, I'm on my phone like, oh, sneakers within two days.
[01:16:52]  Awesome.
[01:16:52]  Yes.
[01:16:53]  Thanks, Jeff Bezos.
[01:16:54]  And then I noticed it when he, you know, he got caught cheating on his wife with this young woman.
[01:17:00]  When you watch the media cover it, it was like watching Russian state television reporters talk about Vladimir Putin.
[01:17:09]  It was like, you realize it's okay to criticize Jeff Bezos, right?
[01:17:13]  He did a dirtbag thing.
[01:17:14]  Like, it's okay to call him out.
[01:17:16]  The way he's revered, people are afraid to criticize him in the media, makes me feel creeped out.
[01:17:22]  Yeah.
[01:17:23]  Well, again, it goes back to this notion of the idolatry of innovators.
[01:17:27]  And there's just no getting around it, to be fair.
[01:17:29]  I do think Jeff Bezos is going to go down in history, at least history to date.
[01:17:32]  Is the most clearest blue flame thinker.
[01:17:34]  And he's created a second largest employer.
[01:17:37]  Amazon is the largest recruiter out of my class at Stern.
[01:17:40]  I've owned their stock for 13 years.
[01:17:41]  I'm like you.
[01:17:42]  I'm a prime member.
[01:17:43]  I absolutely love their service.
[01:17:45]  You know, the question is does power corrupt?
[01:17:50]  And does it corrupt media?
[01:17:51]  And I think there's two things that led to when I heard what had happened with Jeff Bezos and his wife and some of the stuff with his girlfriend, I thought that's it.
[01:18:00]  And can you imagine if a woman had done the same thing?
[01:18:02]  If a female CEO had been sending out those types of pictures or at least been Accused of it.
[01:18:06]  I think she would have been escorted out by the board.
[01:18:09]  Done.
[01:18:09]  There's just a real double standard.
[01:18:11]  But it's also, he bought the Washington Post, which by a lot of media players, powerful media players, was considered sort of a national treasure.
[01:18:19]  And to be fair, he's been a great steward of it.
[01:18:21]  And so I think there's this reservoir of goodwill towards him.
[01:18:24]  And I think the ultimate PR jujitsu move here was to take pictures of your personal parts sent to your girlfriend.
[01:18:33]  And this is a guy who's in technology.
[01:18:34]  He should have known better.
[01:18:36]  Brad Stone claims there was no pictures, but supposedly there was.
[01:18:39]  And then somehow pivot it to, I'm a hero.
[01:18:42]  I'm not going to take this.
[01:18:44]  I'm going to punch the bully back.
[01:18:46]  I'm the wealthiest man in the world, but I'm being bullied.
[01:18:49]  So I've never seen a PR gymnastic move like that.
[01:18:53]  And I do think, as you said, it reflects this notion of idolatry of innovators.
[01:18:58]  I think Amazon reflects, it's an incredible service.
[01:19:01]  I would argue it needs to be broken up, that we don't know what we're missing because it's very difficult to get an e commerce company funded right now.
[01:19:07]  And it raises a lot of issues around whether one man or two men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, should be worth as much as 40%.
[01:19:15]  Of America.
[01:19:16]  And effectively, Jeff Bezos has paid about 2% of his wealth or his increase in wealth over the last 10 years in taxes.
[01:19:23]  And there's a lot about his behavior I don't like.
[01:19:24]  I think they've abused the Commonwealth.
[01:19:26]  I think this HQ2 contest was a circus.
[01:19:30]  I predicted it was either going to be DC or New York for the genius insight that that's where he had homes.
[01:19:35]  And a guy at that age and with that kind of money doesn't need to commute.
[01:19:38]  And I was wrong.
[01:19:39]  It was both of them.
[01:19:40]  So look, I think he's incredible.
[01:19:42]  He's going to go down in history.
[01:19:43]  I don't begrudge his wealth.
[01:19:45]  I begrudge that we don't want to tax him.
[01:19:47]  And I begrudge that the media has decided that if you're an innovator, you just got to haul pass around every single issue.
[01:19:53]  Mm hmm.
[01:19:55]  I would take issue with your comments about him being a good steward of the Washington Post.
[01:19:58]  I have to say, I actually don't know what your politics are.
[01:20:01]  I read you said you're right of center left, which I think was a joke, but it's funny.
[01:20:05]  But I mean, let me just ask you, though.
[01:20:08]  You don't think the Washington Post has become more relevant under his ownership?
[01:20:11]  Whether you like their politics or not, I would argue it's become much more relevant.
[01:20:14]  I thought it was funny until he bought it.
[01:20:16]  I'm not looking at it through that lens.
[01:20:17]  I guess you're coming at it from a business angle.
[01:20:19]  I'm coming at it from a journalistic angle.
[01:20:21]  And the whole democracy dies in darkness was a joke.
[01:20:24]  It was a joke.
[01:20:25]  Because let me tell you that, as disgusted as they were by some of Trump's overreaches, they were awfully dark during the Obama years when he took out his pen and his phone and was doing a bunch of illegal stuff that he'd already said on the record he couldn't do.

=== Elite University Admissions Scandals (09:43) ===

[01:20:36]  You know, it's like that kind of hypocrisy is stomach turning to me.
[01:20:39]  And I don't buy their, you know, cloak of morality when Trump gets in, which of course now they're a lot quieter and it's gone a lot darker now that there's a Democrat back in office.
[01:20:51]  I think that without Bezos owning it, regardless of the politics, I don't think he'd be incensed because I think it would be irrelevant.
[01:20:57]  I think the Washington Post was literally diving towards irrelevance.
[01:21:00]  And he came in.
[01:21:01]  And the bottom line is that the best thing that can happen to a media company, especially a newspaper, is that a billionaire buys it because they economically, most of them aren't viable.
[01:21:10]  And so I, you know, regardless of the politics aside, I just find that the Washington Post is discussed more, more relevant, showing up in your inbox, showing up in your feed.
[01:21:20]  And you're right.
[01:21:21]  I just don't think there's any arguing that the majority of media has a liberal bias.
[01:21:25]  It's usually people who went to college and live in urban areas.
[01:21:28]  And you, Typically skew liberal, especially the ones that go into media.
[01:21:32]  I think they have a lot of affection for Bezos and are prone to spinning stories such as the one we referenced towards Bezos.
[01:21:41]  Shifting gears now, I want to pick up on something I was asking Vivek Ramaswamy about, which is China.
[01:21:46]  I know you've thought a lot about it and written a lot about it.
[01:21:48]  And what are they doing right now?
[01:21:53]  How fast are they growing?
[01:21:54]  How much control do they have?
[01:21:55]  How are they influencing us in ways we don't fully understand?
[01:22:00]  Well, we're going to need a bigger boat.
[01:22:03]  I mean, I would argue that China's in many ways winning.
[01:22:07]  And one of our, I think, comorbidity as a nation is our arrogance and that we think that we can't learn from other nations.
[01:22:12]  And the reality is, China has pulled 750 million people out of poverty in the last several decades, which is arguably one of the greatest achievements of mankind.
[01:22:20]  They're also committing, you know, what a lot of people would argue is genocide.
[01:22:23]  It's an autocratic society denying people's freedom.
[01:22:26]  So obviously, these are very real issues.
[01:22:29]  But what I find interesting is lately is they've gone in and basically wrapped the knuckles of the big Tech companies.
[01:22:34]  And it's clear that they've looked at the U.S. and said, We are not going to allow our tech companies to do to us what they've done to America.
[01:22:41]  We're not going to let them roam the earth and make these big statements about what's right and what's wrong.
[01:22:45]  We're not going to let them abuse data.
[01:22:48]  We're not going to let them addict kids to video games.
[01:22:52]  We're not going to let tutoring companies help the rich continue this caste system where the children of rich people get into the best schools through these tutoring companies.
[01:23:01]  So, to a certain extent, they've said, We're not going to subvert national interests and the health of the Commonwealth.
[01:23:07]  Economic interests.
[01:23:08]  Now, the question is whether these companies, whether Xi is just wrapped their knuckles or is going to cut off their fingers.
[01:23:14]  It's my view that he's pulled kind of an MBS and pulled the most powerful tech people into the Ritz Carlton and said, This is your prison unless you swear up, down, and center that you are on board.
[01:23:25]  And I don't think that they're going to totally kneecap their national champions, the Alibabas, the Baidus, the Ten Cents of the world.
[01:23:36]  And if you look at these companies right now, the stocks are trading at a Fraction of their peers in America on a PE ratio.
[01:23:42]  So it's going to be fascinating to see what they do.
[01:23:45]  But it's interesting to learn from what they think they've learned from us, and that is anti monopoly or monopoly abuse.
[01:23:54]  Abuse of the Commonwealth, a lack of regard for children around addiction.
[01:23:57]  They said, We're not going to let the same thing happen over there or happen here, what happened over there.
[01:24:02]  This is fascinating.
[01:24:03]  Yeah, because this is the first time I've read a report about China in the news where I was like, I think I'm on their side.
[01:24:09]  I get it.
[01:24:10]  Yeah.
[01:24:10]  Right?
[01:24:11]  They started cracking down on the abuse of children and this crazy tutor and work at all hours culture that's developing in China.
[01:24:17]  And they were like, You're not going to be allowed to do that to the children.
[01:24:20]  It's not healthy.
[01:24:20]  And I'm thinking to myself, What?
[01:24:22]  We want to be more like China.
[01:24:24]  Wait, what?
[01:24:25]  What did I say?
[01:24:26]  Yeah.
[01:24:27]  I mean, there's some advantages to being an autocracy.
[01:24:30]  And essentially, I mean, it'll be interesting.
[01:24:33]  America might pivot the other way and say, bring all of your entrepreneurs and mavericks here.
[01:24:38]  And there's some very scary data for Chinese.
[01:24:40]  And that is supposedly two thirds of people worth over a million dollars would be the left or planning to leave China because they realize someone can just come up and cut your company's stock in half.
[01:24:49]  And we can't do that here.
[01:24:50]  And that's probably a good thing.
[01:24:52]  But I had a lot of empathy for the tutoring industrial complex.
[01:24:56]  I mean, higher education in the US, Megan, I think it's turned into the great.
[01:24:59]  Or more from the greatest upward lubricant of mobility to an enforcer of the caste system, where the Tudor Industrial Complex and coaching gets your kids into college.
[01:25:08]  And my university, NYU, is guilty of this.
[01:25:10]  There are primarily two cohorts now going to elite universities, which are the ultimate on ramp to a better lifestyle.
[01:25:16]  And those cohorts are one, the children of rich people, and two, what I call the freakishly remarkable.
[01:25:22]  And we're under the belief that our kid is the freakishly remarkable one.
[01:25:25]  And I can prove to all of us that 99% of our children are not in the top 1%.
[01:25:30]  What I would like to think is kind of the tip of the spear of what is supposed to be America, in many ways, our universities.
[01:25:36]  We're not supposed to be about taking the top 1% in the wealthiest households and turning them into billionaires.
[01:25:41]  We're supposed to be about taking good kids and giving them remarkable opportunities.
[01:25:44]  I think we have totally lost the script in higher ed here in the United States.
[01:25:49]  Oh my gosh, it's so true.
[01:25:51]  And what people don't realize, maybe they do now more after the college admissions scandal, but so many people are buying their kids' way into these top, top schools.
[01:25:59]  I mean, it absolutely happens.
[01:26:01]  Every year that somebody makes a $10 million donation to Harvard, a $5 million donation to Yale, a $3 million donation to Stanford, and then suddenly they apply their child and expect good results and very often get them.
[01:26:16]  Sometimes don't, right?
[01:26:16]  Sometimes they get waitlisted, sometimes they get outright rejected.
[01:26:19]  But if these kids who are just busting their asses in these public schools across America to get straight A's only understood what they're up against, I think it would just be heartbreaking.
[01:26:30]  Spring used to be a nervous but joyous time for.
[01:26:32]  Parents about where your kid was getting into school.
[01:26:34]  And I literally get dozens of these emails.
[01:26:36]  It's turned into the season of despair.
[01:26:37]  Our daughter's done everything right great grades, great SATs, captain of the lacrosse team, and has been rejected from five of five schools and has now been downshifted to a tier school that manages to charge the same price.
[01:26:49]  You have middle class households all across America with great kids who are paying a Mercedes price tag for a Hyundai education.
[01:26:56]  And my colleagues have become so drunk on luxury.
[01:26:59]  We think of ourselves as Hermes, no longer as public servants.
[01:27:03]  And we love rejecting.
[01:27:04]  95% of the applicants.
[01:27:05]  That's not what America is about.
[01:27:06]  When I went to UCLA, the acceptance rate was 70%.
[01:27:10]  Now it's 12%.
[01:27:12]  So, what we've basically said to people is okay, unless you're rich and unless your kid's building wells and has a patent by the time they're a senior, they're going to go to, they're going to be downshifted or arbitraged to a second tier school that takes advantage of the most corrupt cartel in history and raises prices in line with Harvard, and you're going to incur student debt.
[01:27:30]  We have transferred a trillion and a half dollars from middle class homes to the faculty and endowments of universities who have this.
[01:27:38]  Delusional BS image of being nice, noble people.
[01:27:41]  This is the most corrupt cartel.
[01:27:43]  We need to expand enrollments dramatically, or we need to cut funding.
[01:27:47]  We need to start taxing endowments.
[01:27:49]  And my colleagues need to recognize that we are public servants.
[01:27:52]  We are not Chanel.
[01:27:53]  That's awesome.
[01:27:54]  That's a rant.
[01:27:55]  What did you think of that, Megan?
[01:27:56]  It was a boom.
[01:27:57]  You nailed it.
[01:27:58]  So, wait.
[01:27:58]  So, how old are your kids and do you want them to go?
[01:28:01]  I mean, Tucker Carlson was out there publicly the other day saying he discouraged all four of his children from going to college.
[01:28:06]  They didn't listen to him, but for the very reasons that you're saying, he didn't think that they should go there.
[01:28:11]  What do you think?
[01:28:11]  Oh, no.
[01:28:12]  Yeah.
[01:28:13]  You get your kids to college.
[01:28:15]  I mean, I would like to see more on ramps to a middle class lifestyle, apprenticeships programs.
[01:28:20]  But the bottom line is in America, we are a certification driven society, we're a brand driven society, and nothing.
[01:28:26]  Nothing creates, there's no certification like graduating from an elite university.
[01:28:30]  So I think Tucker's full of it, quite frankly.
[01:28:33]  And his kids have a, not a hammock, but a cashmere hammock because their father is a multimillionaire.
[01:28:39]  But if you're from a middle class household, I think you should be absolutely aiming towards trying to get into a good to great school.
[01:28:46]  I think college is still transformative.
[01:28:48]  It was transformative for me.
[01:28:49]  I think the onus is on us and universities and as voters to expand enrollments at our great public universities such that Michigan, The University of Florida, the UT system, the University of California can continue to change the lives of children of single immigrant mothers who lived and died as secretary.
[01:29:06]  The reason I am here with you right now, Megan, is because the University of California decided we're not about finding freakishly remarkable kids.
[01:29:14]  We're about finding good kids and giving them freakishly remarkable opportunities.
[01:29:18]  And that's no longer the case.
[01:29:19]  This isn't a radical idea.
[01:29:20]  We just need to go back to the future and make college a great place for good kids.
[01:29:27]  I hope you meander out of.
[01:29:28]  Stern Business School and over to the admissions department very soon at NYU, or to at least do it within the next six years before we're applying.
[01:29:34]  I will say, listen, I went to Syracuse undergrad.
[01:29:37]  I went to Albany Law School for law school, and those are, you know, mid tier, to be kind, schools.
[01:29:42]  And it all worked out fine.
[01:29:44]  And I think it's because, yes, the education was important, but they weren't, I don't think you could fairly say that they were elite.
[01:29:50]  And it worked out fine because I worked hard and I made the most of the opportunity, you know.
[01:29:53]  And so even if your kid doesn't get into an IV or a junior IV or whatever, I just think.
[01:29:59]  Remember that it's still an opportunity for them to learn, for them to grow, for them to make some contacts and to have some fun and mature in sort of a relatively, relatively safe setting.
[01:30:09]  What a pleasure, Scott.
[01:30:10]  I hope you come back.
[01:30:11]  I really, really enjoyed our discussion.
[01:30:13]  Thank you, Megan.
[01:30:14]  Thanks for having me and congratulations on your success.
[01:30:16]  Oh, thank you.
[01:30:17]  All the best.
[01:30:18]  After the break, I would love to hear from you guys.

=== School Masks and Heat Safety (03:51) ===

[01:30:20]  We're taking calls right now.
[01:30:22]  Do you have a thought on social media?
[01:30:23]  Has it caused a change in your child?
[01:30:25]  Would you send your child to college?
[01:30:28]  Do you want to do it?
[01:30:29]  Right?
[01:30:31]  I don't know.
[01:30:31]  I still think yes, but I see the reasons not to.
[01:30:34]  And I understand the decline in the mail application rate.
[01:30:37]  Anyway, call me 833 44 Megan.
[01:30:40]  Speaking of my time at Syracuse, 44 is an homage to Syracuse.
[01:30:45]  44 Jim Brown, all sorts of grades wore that number.
[01:30:48]  44 M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:30:58]  Welcome back, everyone, to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:31:00]  We're taking your calls right now at 833 446 3496.
[01:31:02]  833 44 Megan, spelled M E G Y N. That's 833 446 3496.
[01:31:10]  So, yesterday in the program, I went off on AOC at the stupid Met Gala in her stupid dress without a mask while my kids and yours sit there all day with this muzzle over their faces for eight to nine hours.
[01:31:22]  I'm so irritated by it.
[01:31:24]  And it's not just my kids, it's kids who are old enough to be vaccinated and have been in several states have to sit there all day with masks on and watch this loser out there parading in her dumbass dress like she's.
[01:31:35]  Really, Marie Antoinette, that's what she looked like with all these serfs below her masked up.
[01:31:41]  But she and Carolyn Maloney, the congresswoman from the Upper West Side, who's praising equal rights while she's out there, is basically stepping over the lowlifes so she can get her picture taken in front of the camera.
[01:31:51]  Okay.
[01:31:51]  Anyway, you can see it on YouTube now.
[01:31:53]  Go to youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
[01:31:55]  We have a channel.
[01:31:56]  You can see it, among other things.
[01:31:58]  But a lot of callers today calling in about masks, and I understand your anger and upset.
[01:32:04]  It's just gotten insane.
[01:32:05]  So we're going to kick it off with Melissa in Missouri, who I understand has got a mask story.
[01:32:09]  Hey, Melissa.
[01:32:11]  Hey, how are you?
[01:32:12]  Good.
[01:32:12]  Thanks for calling.
[01:32:15]  Well, not a problem.
[01:32:17]  So we started school.
[01:32:19]  I'm in Missouri.
[01:32:20]  We started school August 23rd.
[01:32:23]  That first week of cool, we were before heat in that.
[01:32:27]  We were looking at 100 degrees before the heat of that.
[01:32:31]  And I was a school bus driver in a district.
[01:32:34]  And the first day of school, I got on my bus, I bought little thermometers, and it read 104 degrees.
[01:32:41]  That's before I turned the key.
[01:32:43]  We're at 104 degrees.
[01:32:45]  And I sit up the front, obviously, so I have a 200 degree motor sitting in front of me.
[01:32:50]  And most of the school buses don't have a great firewall when it comes to heat, at least.
[01:32:57]  It'll stop a fire, but not.
[01:32:59]  The heat coming through.
[01:33:00]  So, what happened?
[01:33:01]  Hotter fries.
[01:33:04]  I posted it to Facebook for parents to see.
[01:33:06]  I was told, I was brought into my boss's office going, You can't do that.
[01:33:11]  You can't let kids take off their masks.
[01:33:12]  I'm like, But what if I pass out?
[01:33:14]  What if my kids pass out?
[01:33:15]  He goes, They have to wear the mask, period.
[01:33:18]  It doesn't matter the temperature.
[01:33:19]  I understand it's hot.
[01:33:20]  I was like, So, is this a compliance issue or is this a health and safety of our children issue?
[01:33:24]  Without missing a beat, he goes, Compliance.
[01:33:26]  And it's all over the internet right now, the recording of him actually saying it.
[01:33:31]  And the very next day, I was brought in and fired for, quote, posting on Facebook without district approval.
[01:33:39]  But yet, we have drivers in the district that have been posting for years and are still posting to this day pictures of their bus, pictures of their kids, pictures of everything.
[01:33:49]  But because I brought it to the attention that it is too hot to have a child in a mask or have us in a mask, the second day was 106.
[01:33:57]  I feel like it's a whistleblower situation.
[01:34:00]  I mean, it's so.
[01:34:01]  Grossly unfair.
[01:34:02]  The masks in the heat is truly endangering.
[01:34:06]  I mean, we just went through this in our school.
[01:34:09]  Speak up if this happens.
[01:34:10]  You have to speak up.
[01:34:11]  Melissa, thank you for telling us this story.

=== Whistleblowing on Dangerous Masks (00:45) ===

[01:34:12]  Wait, we've got to get somebody in quickly.
[01:34:14]  Let's go to Linda in California.
[01:34:18]  We've got very quick time.
[01:34:19]  Linda, what's on your mind?
[01:34:22]  Yeah, I just think that with the internet and Facebook and Instagram, I think it's the parents' responsibility to watch that and be really on top of it because they have no idea who they're talking to.
[01:34:34]  They think that it's Their friend, or just really nice person, but they have no idea.
[01:34:39]  That's exactly right.
[01:34:40]  But it would be nice if the big tech companies would help us out a little.
[01:34:43]  But yeah, that wouldn't excuse the parents.
[01:34:45]  We have to stay on it because they're not our friends.
[01:34:48]  And listen, thanks for everyone who called in today.
[01:34:50]  Thanks for watching and listening.
[01:34:51]  And check us out on youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
[01:34:54]  We'll see you tomorrow.