The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220607_crime-and-chesa-boudins-recall-and-elon-musks-twit
Aired: 2022-06-07
Duration: 01:36:51


=== The Cost of Decarceration (15:12) ===

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[00:01:32]  Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
[00:01:34]  Your home for open, honest and provocative conversations.
[00:01:43]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:01:45]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:01:47]  Two critical elections happening today in California, and these are big.
[00:01:52]  They could send a very clear message to the Democratic Party nationwide that people are fed up with rising crime, rampant homelessness, and district attorneys who let criminals walk free to reoffend.
[00:02:06]  So much sympathy these DAs have for those who break a law, and very little for those who are their victims.
[00:02:14]  One critical race is to replace the outgoing Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti.
[00:02:20]  Today's primary is mainly seen to be between two candidates, Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass and recent Republican, but now turned Democrat billionaire developer Rick Caruso.
[00:02:33]  The other race, and we've been talking about this for months now, is the recall election against San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.
[00:02:40]  He's, I mean, to say he's a progressive, like putting it mildly.
[00:02:46]  This is the guy, we've talked a lot about him, who's the son of two members of the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist group.
[00:02:53]  They went to jail for being part of this Brinks armored car robbery, in which two cops and a security guard were killed.
[00:03:02]  And little Chessa had to be raised by two other domestic terrorists, Bill Ayers and his wife.
[00:03:09]  Okay, so that's Chesa Boudin.
[00:03:11]  Shockingly, he doesn't really want to enforce the law against anybody.
[00:03:14]  And yet, San Franciscans are elected this guy, anybody.
[00:03:19]  Boudin is a George Soros-backed prosecutor who doesn't like prosecuting crimes.
[00:03:23]  He used to be a defense lawyer.
[00:03:26]  He doesn't really like to pursue felonies.
[00:03:29]  He thinks homeless camps are fine and shouldn't be touched.
[00:03:32]  He promised not to touch any crimes like prostitution or even public urination.
[00:03:38]  And on and on the list goes.
[00:03:40]  Turns out San Francisco's actually have a problem with that.
[00:03:43]  They do.
[00:03:44]  My guests today have had a big hand in the effort to try to oust Chesa Boudin.
[00:03:49]  They are major players in Silicon Valley.
[00:03:51]  David Sachs is a successful entrepreneur, a venture capitalist who runs Kraft Ventures, and he's a co-host of the popular tech podcast All In.
[00:04:00]  He's also a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia.
[00:04:04]  Also joining us today, another co-host of the All-In podcast, Jason Calicanis.
[00:04:09]  Jason is the founder and CEO of Inside.com and one of Silicon Valley's most successful angel investors.
[00:04:21]  David, Jason, welcome to the show.
[00:04:23]  Thanks for having us.
[00:04:24]  Good to be with you.
[00:04:25]  So I live out here now in Connecticut, but on the Northeast, and I've had this day on my calendar for a long time.
[00:04:31]  And that's nothing compared to what you guys have had and how hard you've worked and waited for this day to finally get here.
[00:04:38]  How big is it?
[00:04:40]  So we'll start with Chesa Boudin, that this is it.
[00:04:42]  This is the day that San Franciscans get to decide whether this guy who they put in office, he ran against somebody who promised to be tougher on crime, and they elected him instead, they finally get their say on whether they regret that choice.
[00:04:57]  David, I'll start with you.
[00:04:58]  Yeah, this is so June 7th is the day that we have the recall election and exit polling, all the polling looks like San Francisco is going to vote to recall Chase Boudin.
[00:05:08]  He won election and he won his office of district attorney in an off-year election in late 2019.
[00:05:15]  It was a low turnout election and with ranked choice voting, he only got something like 36% first choice votes and he narrowly squeaked by.
[00:05:23]  Since then, he's implemented this agenda of decarceration, which is to release as many offenders as possible.
[00:05:31]  That is his mission.
[00:05:32]  And the result has been, you know, chaos and lawlessness in San Francisco.
[00:05:36]  We can drill a lot more into that.
[00:05:38]  And I think that people at San Francisco have had enough, and I think they're likely to recall him today.
[00:05:44]  You know, lately, the press has shifted Jason to the only people who really want to get rid of Chesa Boudin are rich Silicon Valley elites to whom homelessness is just, it's a blight on the attractiveness of their city.
[00:05:59]  That's really who's behind this.
[00:06:01]  And we've heard Chesa Boudin say, this is a Republican-led effort and also disparaging the police because the police union doesn't like him.
[00:06:11]  What a shock.
[00:06:12]  So what do you make of that?
[00:06:13]  It's Silicon Valley elites.
[00:06:15]  It's the Republicans and it's the police.
[00:06:18]  Yeah, I mean, the devil mixes the lies with the truth.
[00:06:22]  So of course, anybody who is running a right-wing news source is going to jump on this story because it gets ratings and clicks.
[00:06:30]  So sure, you might get some Republican donations on the margin to a situation like this.
[00:06:37]  But the truth is, San Francisco is overwhelmingly Democrat and you can only vote in the recall election if you live in the city.
[00:06:45]  So it is not technically possible for him to be recalled for the recall to be on the ballot or for today to happen unless San Franciscans themselves vote him out.
[00:06:55]  And so the facts are the facts.
[00:06:57]  He's done a horrible job.
[00:06:58]  You don't need to really, you can just trust your eyes on this one, as Sach says often.
[00:07:04]  If you were to walk through San Francisco 20 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, and then during Chesu Boudin's reign of terror, it is stark the difference.
[00:07:14]  And people are having their homes broken into.
[00:07:18]  People, places like Walgreens are closing up shop here because they just can't sustain, you know, operating in a city.
[00:07:25]  And it's really tragic because, you know, if you really double click on what's happening here, the crime is based largely on a super drug known as fentanyl and its sister drug, methamphetamine meth.
[00:07:39]  And these two drugs are radically different than other drugs that we've seen.
[00:07:43]  And they cause people to live a really horrific existence that is actually being, You know, extended and being supported by the policies that San Francisco has chosen.
[00:07:55]  And I think a lot of the intent is good.
[00:07:57]  People want to be compassionate.
[00:07:59]  But anybody who's had somebody addicted to these kinds of super drugs and people who have been addicted to it themselves say the only time that they get help and the backstop is when there are consequences.
[00:08:11]  So it's very sad.
[00:08:12]  It's a very hard discussion for us to have as a society, but there must be consequences to people breaking into people's homes, to people, you know, breaking into 20 cars, to people, having psychotic breaks on the street because they're so hopped up on what really are super drugs that we have not seen before.
[00:08:30]  And that's a whole nother thing.
[00:08:31]  So I think the bigger picture, of course, is if San Francisco says Ciscans really do recall Chesaboon today, is that the tipping point?
[00:08:41]  And Michael Schellenberger, if he does win and he starts debating Newsom, maybe we're seeing a tipping point where, you know, California, which has been blue, maybe wants to be a little more purple.
[00:08:52]  Maybe they don't want these really far radical left policies.
[00:08:57]  And maybe they want to be more like Clinton Democrats and maybe balance the budget and have some reasonable policies that are actually effective for the city.
[00:09:06]  That would be quite eye-opening, right?
[00:09:07]  In a city like San Francisco.
[00:09:09]  And that's what's so interesting about this is that you've got the bluest of the blue cities, San Francisco doing this recall.
[00:09:14]  This isn't like, you know, in the heart of Ohio, some DA went a little too soft and Ohioans are rising up.
[00:09:20]  This is San Francisco.
[00:09:22]  And even the mayor, London Breed, has changed her tune mightily when it comes to defunding the police and so on.
[00:09:28]  But, you know, David and I have talked about this before.
[00:09:30]  About, I did a very long interview of Bill Ayers, and I got to know him and the Weather Underground pretty well in terms of their history and what they're all about.
[00:09:39]  So, of course, it wasn't a big surprise to find out that his son, it's effectively his son, Chesa Boudin, isn't much interested in enforcing the law.
[00:09:46]  And is it, I mean, to say he's a bleeding heart is to make him sound kind and benevolent.
[00:09:51]  It's not really that.
[00:09:53]  It's that he cares more to me about the criminals than he does about the law-abiding citizens of San Francisco.
[00:10:00]  Where is his empathy for the people who are getting hurt, who are getting attacked, who are getting robbed, who are having their businesses robbed so many times that they can't keep the doors open?
[00:10:10]  He only has empathy for people, I would posit, he feels ideologically connected to because of his own family's history of crime and his weird connection to this world.
[00:10:22]  That's my own psychoanalysis.
[00:10:23]  But even the very blue voters, David and Sam Friend, are seeing it.
[00:10:28]  They're feeling it.
[00:10:30]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:32]  And in particular, I would say the sort of powerful Asian-American community in San Francisco has really turned against Chase Boudin as a result of a number of cases.
[00:10:42]  There was a case of an 84-year-old elderly man who was pushed down and killed while the assailant recorded the whole thing on his phone.
[00:10:51]  And Chase Boudin later said that the perpetrator was suffering what he called a temper tantrum.
[00:10:57]  This was basically an act of murder.
[00:10:58]  There's another case in which an elderly Asian man was sitting at a bus stop, just on a bench, and he was kicked in the face by some sort of psychotic perpetrator.
[00:11:08]  Rather than punishing the offender, Chase has sent him to what's called diversion, which is basically psychiatric treatment where a therapist comes to your house once a week.
[00:11:19]  And he defended this on the grounds that the family of the elderly man who was attacked supported it.
[00:11:24]  Well, they came out and said, no, we didn't.
[00:11:26]  This is not what we wanted.
[00:11:27]  So there's been case after case of assailants getting away with not just what Boudin has called quality of life crimes, like the ones you've mentioned, but real acts of violence where the perpetrators have not been punished.
[00:11:41]  There was a case just broken the other day where a local reporter named Susan Dyer Reynolds, who's done a tremendous job sort of unearthing all these facts.
[00:11:50]  There was a case of a cab driver named Arif Qasim, who was bludgeoned to death with a metal pipe.
[00:11:59]  And Boudin pled the case down to involuntary manslaughter with time served.
[00:12:05]  And the perpetrator is now out walking the streets.
[00:12:07]  These are dangerous people who are now walking the streets of San Francisco because Roudin refuses to lock anyone up, even perpetrators of violent crime.
[00:12:17]  The jail population has gone some, gone down some 25% since he took over, which is just a couple of years ago.
[00:12:24]  More than that.
[00:12:25]  More than that.
[00:12:25]  I mean, over something like he released during COVID, he released 40% of the jail population.
[00:12:32]  And the crazy thing is he wrote an op-ed in the LA Times saying, I'm making San Francisco safer by emptying out the jails.
[00:12:40]  That was literally the headline of the piece that he wrote in the LA Times.
[00:12:45]  So he has this warped view that somehow he's going to make all of us safer by emptying out the jails and not prosecuting anybody.
[00:12:53]  And it is, it's a very bizarre view, but he is not alone in this.
[00:12:58]  This sort of agenda of decarceration has now been championed by these sort of progressive district attorneys, like you mentioned, backed by Soros, backed by people like Reed Hastings.
[00:13:08]  You've got Kim Fox at Chicago.
[00:13:09]  You've got George Gasco in LA.
[00:13:11]  You've got Alvin Bragg in New York.
[00:13:13]  There are other ones in Austin.
[00:13:16]  There's a number of cities that have now elected these sort of Soros DAs.
[00:13:20]  Soros, I think, realized something like six years ago when he created this initiative that he could change laws across the country by supporting candidates for a DA.
[00:13:30]  And it wouldn't cost very much money in relative terms.
[00:13:32]  He could affect a very big change with not that much money because people weren't really paying that much attention to these local DA elections.
[00:13:39]  And so on that level, he was very successful in changing the laws of the country.
[00:13:43]  But this sort of progressive agenda of decarceration is a national agenda.
[00:13:48]  And Boudin is really just unusual in how explicit he's been about his objectives and his aims in releasing as many criminals as he can.
[00:13:57]  But this is something that is, you know, people across the country really need to pay attention to.
[00:14:03]  Yeah, go ahead, Jason.
[00:14:04]  Well, I was going to say, you know, that this is perhaps one of the harder discussions to have because we do have too many people in prison.
[00:14:11]  We have many nonviolent offenders in prison.
[00:14:13]  We have many people who are in prison for cannabis.
[00:14:16]  You know, that is now legal.
[00:14:17]  And that seems profoundly unfair, I think, to everybody listening that, you know, we are now selling cannabis legally, you know, in Whole Foods type stores.
[00:14:25]  And then people who sold it just 10 years ago or five years ago are serving 10-year sentences.
[00:14:29]  None of us want that.
[00:14:30]  There's too many people in prison.
[00:14:31]  And we do need to think about who goes to prison and then how horrible our prison system is and how we are not actually getting people on a path to have a sustainable life.
[00:14:41]  And the recidivism is just off the charts.
[00:14:44]  So this is what is so cynical and horrible about Jesu Boudin, specifically as an individual.
[00:14:50]  You pointed out the psychology of this.
[00:14:51]  His parents are literal cop killers and radicals.
[00:14:56]  And he's the worst possible person to be addressing this issue.
[00:15:02]  And we need to put people in jail, obviously who are committing violent crimes, but we also need to think about, hey, how do we get people who maybe aren't committing violent crimes and who are victims of circumstance or who maybe were selling dime bags in the park?

=== Why Prison Fails Everyone (14:52) ===

[00:15:16]  Do we really want those people to be serving 10-year prison sentences or do we want to invest in programs to get them on the straight and narrow?
[00:15:24]  And that is the challenge here.
[00:15:25]  And I think that's where the right, it's not helpful for the right to just frame this as only an issue of, hey, we're letting violent people out.
[00:15:35]  And that's why he won.
[00:15:36]  I think the reason he won and why he does have some support and this movement does have some support is because we know that our criminal justice system has been profoundly unfair.
[00:15:45]  The statistics prove this over and over again.
[00:15:47]  And we incarcerate people who are black more than we do people who are white.
[00:15:50]  The sentences are longer.
[00:15:51]  These are all irrefutable facts.
[00:15:53]  So we do need to have a very adult discussion about all of these issues.
[00:15:57]  In this case, it's fairly obvious.
[00:16:00]  You can just trust the statistics.
[00:16:02]  He doesn't prosecute violent crime.
[00:16:04]  And that's just way too far.
[00:16:06]  And nobody wants to live in a city where their kids, their families are in danger, people are breaking into homes.
[00:16:12]  And the statistics prove that as well.
[00:16:14]  People are leaving San Francisco.
[00:16:16]  They're leaving California.
[00:16:18]  They want to be in states that have a little bit more law and order.
[00:16:20]  And so hopefully today, we can start to get to a moderate position.
[00:16:24]  The left and the right can stop screaming at each other and maybe just look at these really challenging issues and come up with effective policies.
[00:16:32]  This is not an effective policy.
[00:16:33]  There are policies on the right that are not effective as well.
[00:16:36]  So let's have that adult discussion.
[00:16:37]  You keep mentioning the right.
[00:16:38]  The right really doesn't have anything to do with this fight.
[00:16:40]  The right.
[00:16:41]  Oh my God.
[00:16:41]  It's on.
[00:16:42]  Of course they do.
[00:16:43]  They talk about it.
[00:16:44]  No.
[00:16:44]  They talk about it in San Francisco.
[00:16:45]  They're talking about Fox News.
[00:16:46]  Show me the liberal who's sitting there being influenced by Fox News.
[00:16:49]  They may be watching it.
[00:16:50]  They're not influenced by it.
[00:16:51]  Wow.
[00:16:51]  I mean, this is San Francisco creates a culture in this country.
[00:16:54]  Let me finish my point.
[00:16:55]  San Francisco is 6.7% Republican.
[00:16:58]  6.7% Republican.
[00:17:01]  The Republicans are not driving this.
[00:17:02]  They're covering it because they see their enemies eating themselves and they're enjoying it.
[00:17:06]  And they think they're right.
[00:17:07]  They think that their policy is not.
[00:17:08]  My point is that's not helpful, Megan.
[00:17:10]  Is that helpful?
[00:17:11]  Is that helpful?
[00:17:11]  It's news.
[00:17:12]  Who gives a shit whether it's helpful?
[00:17:13]  It's news.
[00:17:14]  We cover the news.
[00:17:14]  This is, it's, it's Democrats.
[00:17:16]  That is the political.
[00:17:18]  That's actually, Megan, what you just said is actually what's wrong with media.
[00:17:22]  No, I shouldn't, you shouldn't just cover this because it's entertaining, Megan.
[00:17:25]  You should cover it with the intent of actually finding a solution.
[00:17:28]  I said it's new.
[00:17:29]  I said it's new.
[00:17:30]  Let me jump in here because I'm used to Jason's both sidesism here.
[00:17:35]  Look, nobody in San Francisco has been locked up for selling a dime bag since 1965 or something like that, okay?
[00:17:41]  In like 50 years.
[00:17:42]  This whole idea of- I was talking more about Texas, but okay.
[00:17:44]  Okay, fine.
[00:17:45]  But I'm election is in San Francisco.
[00:17:47]  Go ahead, David.
[00:17:48]  Yes, it is.
[00:17:49]  It's a myth that, look, we do have a problem in this country that we have a lot of people locked up.
[00:17:56]  But the reason we have a lot of people locked up is we have a lot of people committing crimes.
[00:17:59]  And so we need earlier intervention.
[00:18:01]  Once somebody does the crime, especially a violent felony, they got to be locked up because you need the deterrence and you got to protect society from a dangerous offender.
[00:18:09]  I think Jason agrees with that.
[00:18:11]  So we need earlier intervention.
[00:18:12]  And I think there are things we can do to make prisons more humane and rehabilitative.
[00:18:17]  I mean, we don't want prisons to be gladiator academies.
[00:18:20]  You know, we don't want people to be in fear of their life when they go to prison or fear of getting raped.
[00:18:25]  I mean, we just accept that as if it's like some sort of normal, you know, occurrence that if you go to prison, you should expect to get raped.
[00:18:31]  We shouldn't allow any of this stuff.
[00:18:32]  So we should absolutely be reforming prisons.
[00:18:34]  But the way to achieve reform is not simply just to release on a mass scale all these offenders.
[00:18:41]  And look, but this is, you know, you're trying to both sides a little bit, Jason.
[00:18:45]  But the reality is this agenda of mass decarceration is coming from one side and one side only of the political spectrum.
[00:18:52]  It is the radical progressives and the Democratic Party has bought in wholesale to this agenda.
[00:18:58]  And until we inflict some losses electorally at the ballot box, the Democratic Party is not going to repudiate this agenda.
[00:19:05]  And that's what we need to have happen right now.
[00:19:07]  Sachs, is it not correct that the Republican Party is very much in favor of drug reform and legalization of a lot of drugs and decriminalization of them?
[00:19:16]  I thought you were taking this on as an issue.
[00:19:18]  I personally am in favor of cannabis decriminalization, but what's your point about that?
[00:19:24]  Well, my point is that that is a big part of the problem here is what's happening in drugs.
[00:19:28]  So I do think both sides can come up with solutions together.
[00:19:32]  It is not just that the Democrats or the libs want to release everybody from prison.
[00:19:37]  There is a drug problem that is at the core of this.
[00:19:40]  And if we work on that together, Republicans and Democrats, I think we'll see a lot of progress here.
[00:19:45]  And this is, again, a very difficult discussion for people to have, but there's a series of drugs that do not result in the pain and suffering we've seen in San Francisco, whether it's psychedelics, cannabis, et cetera.
[00:19:58]  Those are going to be reformed, decriminalized.
[00:20:01]  And I think we'll see a much different world if we could separate these two classes of drugs and really go after fentanyl and really go after methamphetamine.
[00:20:10]  If you look at the number of overdoses, 70, 80% of them are coming specifically from fentanyl.
[00:20:16]  This is a new phenomenon.
[00:20:18]  We didn't have this drug 10 years ago.
[00:20:20]  And this truly leads people to a very dark place, a life of crime, and then ultimately death.
[00:20:25]  Well, there's no question that it's a deep problem.
[00:20:27]  But the Republicans are focused in part on stopping it from coming across the southern border.
[00:20:33]  And they get no help from the Democrats on that.
[00:20:34]  They say, great, let's work on it.
[00:20:36]  Why don't we stop it from coming into the country in droves the way it is thanks to the cartels?
[00:20:41]  Let's tighten up our border.
[00:20:42]  And then they get, no, you're inhumane.
[00:20:44]  You're bigot.
[00:20:45]  You're racist.
[00:20:45]  And they say, okay, all right.
[00:20:47]  So everyone back to their corners.
[00:20:49]  Are we going to go to immigration?
[00:20:51]  Are we going to go to immigration, Magnum?
[00:20:53]  If we're really going to solve the fentanyl problem, we are going to have to.
[00:20:56]  But my point is even Ben LeBol.
[00:20:59]  I mean, where is this coming from?
[00:21:00]  We talk about the cartels.
[00:21:01]  The cartels are getting the precursors for all this from China.
[00:21:04]  And I think this is actually a specific strategy by the Chinese to have this drug here.
[00:21:09]  I don't think you're wrong about that.
[00:21:10]  Yeah.
[00:21:11]  And I think that's another thing we have to think about is a relationship with China in relation specifically to this horrible phenomenon that's going on that we have not seen before.
[00:21:22]  When it comes to China, we have a long time.
[00:21:24]  We were so reluctant to condemn them and make them pay for any of the things they're doing to us because we decided to form this weird economic partnership with them, both at the sort of private level and the government level.
[00:21:35]  And we sold our souls.
[00:21:37]  Now we're in a tough position to wiggle out of the relationship, though wiggle we must because these are not ethical.
[00:21:42]  This is not an ethical country and we shouldn't allow them to have this amount of influence on us.
[00:21:47]  But I will just say this.
[00:21:48]  What's that?
[00:21:49]  Yeah.
[00:21:49]  Now the Chinese, the Chinese know their history and there was a period, what they call the century of humiliation, where we had these things called the opium wars going on.
[00:22:00]  And the Chinese blame the West and the United States in particular for the century of humiliation and these opium wars in which as many as something like 25% of the Chinese population was actually addicted to opium.
[00:22:14]  So you could look at what's happening here as a certain kind of payback where they've produced these, like you said, fentanyl precursors.
[00:22:21]  They go to Mexico, they get turned into the product, smuggled across the border, and then they're, you know, it's addicting huge numbers of people in our city, something like 100,000 plus fentanyl deaths every year.
[00:22:32]  We can all agree that's a huge problem.
[00:22:34]  But what we need are for these Democratic officials to stop being useful idiots for the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:22:40]  And they are allowing these open drug scenes in our cities.
[00:22:44]  We have these, you know, open drug marketplaces where you've got people who are so sick with addiction that they're now living in these drug marketplaces and openly using.
[00:22:54]  And you have Democratic DAs and mayors doing absolutely nothing about it.
[00:22:58]  They refuse to enforce the law.
[00:23:01]  And that is where we need to start: enforcing the law in these cities, cleaning up these homeless encampments and open drug scenes.
[00:23:07]  That has to be.
[00:23:08]  I mean, we're conflating a homeless problem, which was a real problem and still is, with an addiction problem.
[00:23:14]  And, you know, to call what's happening in the tenderline a homelessness problem when there are plenty of beds for everybody and everybody who comes here gets $800 to $1,000 in welfare basically and a bed is actually a big part of the problem.
[00:23:29]  We're framing this as a homeless and an equity problem, and it's just really an addiction problem and mental health.
[00:23:34]  And those two things are in a particularly horrible dance because if you have mental health issues and you self-medicate with something like fentanyl, or if you take too much fentanyl, you will have mental health problems.
[00:23:46]  And so it's pretty intractable until you start arresting the dealers and there's some consequence.
[00:23:53]  And listen, you don't want to make addiction a crime.
[00:23:56]  You want to treat it as a healthcare problem, of course, but there has to be some backstop.
[00:24:00]  And if you talk to anybody who has a child who is addicted or a brother or sister, and you gave them the choice, would you like us to leave your child on the street of San Francisco taking drugs and not arrest them?
[00:24:10]  Or would you like us to arrest your child for using fentanyl or for selling fentanyl?
[00:24:15]  They would all pick the latter.
[00:24:16]  And so why would we not, the people who are most impacted, the parents, the family members, they would rather see their own children, their own siblings go to jail, as horrible as that is, versus the horror of living on the street and living as an addict.
[00:24:31]  And I think that's very eye-opening once you frame it in that way, which is there must be a consequence in order for folks to go to rehab.
[00:24:37]  And that really, you know, I was taken by Michael Schellenberger, who's running as an independent here in California for governor.
[00:24:44]  You know, I think he's got the right idea there, which is, you know, if you're, if you're on the street and you're using, it's one thing if you're in your house and you're using.
[00:24:52]  I think, listen, fine.
[00:24:54]  But then when you're on the street and you start committing crimes, that's when we have a problem and you have to choose.
[00:24:59]  Are you going to go into treatment or you're going to go to jail?
[00:25:03]  And when faced with that, somebody who's suffering, you know, some number of them will make the right decision to go into treatment.
[00:25:10]  Another piece of it is what we do once people are done with jail, which is basically close off all options of employment to them.
[00:25:17]  It's basically your sin follows you around forever in a way that leads you to sin again and, you know, to recommit another crime.
[00:25:24]  And we do have to take a hard look at how we hold the criminal record against people in state after state after state forevermore, because does it really help society to make these people totally unemployable if they have any sort of blight on their record?
[00:25:39]  I mean, I've seen that in situations that are very close to home.
[00:25:43]  And I've seen how it can impact somebody who's just got addicted and then got swept up into the criminal justice system.
[00:25:48]  And then before you know it, their entire life is completely blown to smithereens forever, forever.
[00:25:55]  Okay, so back to the situation in San Francisco, because I do want to spend a little bit more time on the specifics there.
[00:26:00]  So a lot of the people who are involved in the San Francisco recall of Chesa Boudin, in the one that's happening in LA as well, are former prosecutors who worked with the prosecutor at issue with Chesa Boudin and with Gascon over in LA saying this is actually, here's Brooke Jenkins.
[00:26:20]  She's a former prosecutor for Chesa Boudin in his office and she's now a volunteer spokeswoman for the recall saying it will be Democrats that vote him out.
[00:26:28]  If he goes, it'll be Democrats that vote him out.
[00:26:31]  And if you look at the numbers, it's going to be, I mean, I'm sure the 6.7% of Republicans want him gone too.
[00:26:37]  But the numbers do not bode well for him today or prior to today.
[00:26:42]  It seems like most of the city is very upset.
[00:26:44]  Only 65% say that they feel, let me see, oh, 65% say they feel less safe right now than they did in 2019.
[00:26:55]  2019 was actually a very good year for San Francisco when it comes to the crime stats.
[00:26:59]  73% say they want arrests for minor property crimes like car break-ins, which apparently were everywhere right now in your city and for shoplifting.
[00:27:08]  They don't agree with this, you know, sort of, oh, I'm not going to go after the sort of lifestyle crimes or whatever he calls them.
[00:27:14]  66% favor forcing drug users who are at risk to themselves into treatment, to your point a minute ago, Jason.
[00:27:20]  68% say homelessness is what they like the least about living in San Francisco.
[00:27:28]  Policing is the number one area the voters want to see more spending in, at least 44% of these.
[00:27:35]  So, and the latest polling by this group, again, this is by the San Francisco Standard, found that it was 57% of the voters say they do support this recall.
[00:27:46]  So, the voters are unhappy.
[00:27:48]  They're really unhappy.
[00:27:49]  And it looks pretty good for the recall.
[00:27:51]  However, however, what do you make of San Francisco Chronicle, the editorial board, opposing it and saying as follows?
[00:27:58]  Recall is a last-ditch tool for emergencies, not for buyers' remorse.
[00:28:03]  And San Franciscans should respond accordingly.
[00:28:06]  You know, they put him in office.
[00:28:07]  This isn't an emergency.
[00:28:10]  You know, you have a duly scheduled election coming up in a year or two.
[00:28:15]  You wait for that.
[00:28:16]  What do you make of it, David?
[00:28:18]  I don't think we can wait.
[00:28:19]  I think it really is an emergency.
[00:28:21]  I mean, you've got violent repeat offenders who are being let go every day.
[00:28:25]  You've got Chase Boudin dismantling the DA's office.
[00:28:28]  The first thing he did when he came in in January of 2020 is he fired seven veteran prosecutors that he had repeatedly crossed swords with when he was the public defender.
[00:28:37]  So he, first of all, got rid of the DAs who actually know how to prosecute cases.
[00:28:42]  Since then, something like 30% of the office has just quit on their own because they're so disgusted with the way that he's run the office and the way that he's interfered in their cases to plead down charges.
[00:28:53]  So every single month that goes by that Chase Boudin is DA, that office basically continues to degrade.
[00:29:02]  And it's not like you can just put a DA's office back together again very easily.
[00:29:06]  I mean, these people, these veteran prosecutors have gone on to take other jobs.
[00:29:11]  So whoever replaces Boudin is going to have a really tough task ahead of them, which is to reconstitute an effective DA's office.
[00:29:19]  So, no, we cannot, the people of San Francisco cannot wait.
[00:29:23]  The situation in the city is dangerous and it's going to continue to get worse unless we get a change.
[00:29:28]  He says, Chesse Boudin says, among other things, that the cops are doing this to him on purpose, that the cops are holding back, essentially to make him look bad and to drive up crime numbers so that he can be ousted.
[00:29:40]  Do you think the voters will find that persuasive, Jason?
[00:29:43]  I mean, it seems to me, even if that's true, if you're a voter, you're like, well, I'm sorry, but you still have to go.
[00:29:48]  Like, either way, it's bad for me.
[00:29:51]  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, he, I listened to a podcast they did.
[00:29:54]  He blamed everybody from the Republicans to the media to the cops to the pandemic.
[00:30:00]  I mean, he's, this guy's got a million excuses of why people who commit murder or beat, you know, senior citizens up can't go to jail.

=== Blaming the Parole Division (05:28) ===

[00:30:08]  You don't really, there's no great mystery going on here.
[00:30:11]  He's a radical.
[00:30:12]  He doesn't believe in prison.
[00:30:14]  And he's just the wrong person.
[00:30:16]  He should be in the public defender's office, which, by the way, is where he was.
[00:30:19]  Yes.
[00:30:19]  Like this is a public defender who now has basically embedded themselves into the prosecutor's office.
[00:30:26]  And it's just obvious to everybody what's going on here.
[00:30:28]  And I would encourage everybody when you look at these, you know, fun with numbers and statistics.
[00:30:33]  Anybody who's lived in San Francisco, and I left the city a couple of years ago, but I did live there and I do have a property there.
[00:30:41]  And, you know, when you go to the city, it's pretty well known your car will get broken into.
[00:30:46]  And it's pretty well known that your home is going to be either broken into or certainly people are going to attempt to break into your home.
[00:30:53]  And people have stopped reporting it.
[00:30:54]  Now, why did they stop reporting it?
[00:30:56]  Because when you talk to the police, they tell you nothing's going to happen.
[00:30:59]  And so you do have this.
[00:31:02]  I think people have capitulated and said, you know what?
[00:31:04]  This is as long as this person is running the show, Chesse Boudin, we're not going to get anybody prosecuted.
[00:31:11]  So why even report it?
[00:31:12]  So people have given up that that is actually true.
[00:31:15]  And back to why these, I think these recall elections actually are quite effective because it takes a lot of effort to do one.
[00:31:24]  You need to spend a lot of money and you need to present your case.
[00:31:27]  It's like firing somebody, you know, and I think it's actually a great backstop against incompetence.
[00:31:33]  And so, to, we had our San Francisco Board of Education, we had some crazy folks there who wouldn't reopen the schools and were obsessed with changing the names of the schools over getting parents, you know, and kids back in school during the pandemic.
[00:31:47]  And they were fired through a recall election.
[00:31:49]  So, I think actually these recalls in California are a unique policy and process that people should be studying.
[00:31:58]  Because I don't know how you feel about it, David, but it does seem like a great backstop.
[00:32:02]  Could it be abused?
[00:32:03]  I guess.
[00:32:04]  Well, unfortunately, in California, we don't really have a very functional Republican Party.
[00:32:08]  So, we live in a one-party state.
[00:32:10]  And that is a big party is a giant political machine that seems to control the state.
[00:32:15]  And the recalls are one of the few ways that we have rebelling against that political machine.
[00:32:20]  And that's why it's very important.
[00:32:21]  And by the way, that's why recalls were created during the progressive era about 100 years ago, is that the progressives of that era, 100, you know, during Teddy Roosevelt's time, they were worried that government could be captured by special interests and the people needed a way to rebel against the party bosses.
[00:32:37]  And that's exactly how recalls are being used right now as we're basically rebelling against this democratic machine that controls California.
[00:32:44]  But let me just go back to this point about the blame game that Chase Boudin is playing: whenever something bad happens, he always is blaming somebody else, whether it's the police or the parole division.
[00:32:56]  There's a fundamental dishonesty and lie at the heart of this decarceral agenda, which is this, which is when Chase of Boudin is on NPR or he's running for office and he's talking about his agenda, he will admit, he will basically say openly, I don't believe in using prison as a deterrent.
[00:33:15]  I'm in favor of mass decarceration.
[00:33:18]  And, you know, anybody with a brain could tell you what's going to happen if you start releasing repeat violent offenders.
[00:33:23]  But, you know, when he's giving the sort of the NPR interview, this is basically his position is that decarceration is a good thing.
[00:33:30]  But then when the chickens come home to roost and you get, you know, crimes perpetrated by the very people he's released, like, for example, there was that case of Troy McAllister, who's a third strike offender that was released by Chase of Boudin.
[00:33:41]  He was arrested five times.
[00:33:42]  Chasa never pressed charges.
[00:33:44]  He then kills two people on New Year's Eve of 2020, 2021.
[00:33:51]  And Boudin blamed that on the parole division.
[00:33:53]  Well, he should have been supervised better by parole.
[00:33:55]  No, he should have been imprisoned.
[00:33:56]  He should have been charged.
[00:33:58]  And so this is the fundamental dishonesty is that Boudin wants us to believe that decarceration is a good thing.
[00:34:03]  And that whenever the results of decarceration sort of come home to roost, well, that was somebody else's fault.
[00:34:10]  That wasn't the result of his agenda.
[00:34:12]  It was the cop's fault.
[00:34:13]  It was the parole division's fault.
[00:34:14]  No, it's your fault.
[00:34:15]  It's your agenda's fault.
[00:34:17]  That is so true.
[00:34:18]  That New York Magazine, of course, decided to weigh in.
[00:34:21]  And they interviewed him.
[00:34:23]  And of course, this comes from him.
[00:34:25]  This is their interview with him.
[00:34:26]  They're defending him.
[00:34:27]  And they list the reasons why San Francisco is in trouble, you know, why the crime rate is what it is there.
[00:34:33]  And this is what they wrote.
[00:34:34]  Boudin is endangered by forces largely beyond his control.
[00:34:38]  He cannot build more housing or decide what a judge wants to do with a defendant.
[00:34:43]  Hello, he's the DA.
[00:34:45]  Where do you think the judge gets his recommendation from?
[00:34:47]  A district attorney can't make arrests or wave a wand to magically lower crime tomorrow.
[00:34:54]  Oh, sure, the DA never speaks to the police about who should be arrested and what crimes we want to prioritize.
[00:35:00]  And then Boudin goes on to add in this piece, their effort to blame me and my office as though we were the sole actor in the criminal legal system, as though we play God in these cases is not how the system of checks and balances our founders devised works.
[00:35:16]  It's unbelievable.
[00:35:18]  I like the fact that they're trying to absolve him, the magazine and Chesa Boudin himself from any responsibility for any of this while still openly admitting he's for decarceration and won't enforce the laws that are already on the books for those who are not yet incarcerated is, I think we call it chutzpah.

=== Unfair Blame for Crime Spikes (12:27) ===

[00:35:37]  One of the problems here, Megan, is also that once people realize that you're not enforcing certain laws, the word spreads.
[00:35:44]  Criminals are really smart.
[00:35:46]  Addicts are really smart when it comes to acquiring drugs.
[00:35:49]  And, you know, most of the folks who are addicted here and who are homeless in San Francisco are not from San Francisco.
[00:35:55]  This is not, you know, there certainly is a housing problem in California.
[00:35:59]  We all know that.
[00:36:00]  But what happens in the rest of the country is addicts are finding out that the place with the best drugs at the least price, at the lowest price, with the least enforcement is California, Los Angeles.
[00:36:12]  And so where do addicts go?
[00:36:13]  They literally come here because for them, this is where they continue that addiction and not face any repercussions.
[00:36:22]  If you were to do this in another state, you would wind up in jail.
[00:36:25]  And so now California is disproportionately supporting and now having to pay the price for the addiction problems across the entire country.
[00:36:37]  When you look at the car break-ins, once we stopped prosecuting those, and they're really easy to catch people who break into cars, you just create a bait car.
[00:36:44]  It's not rocket science, folks.
[00:36:46]  You put some cameras in a car, you put a police officer on the car, you leave a laptop in there, and you can arrest the person.
[00:36:51]  Once that became obvious, then groups of gangs were coming from across the wider Bay Area to come into San Francisco to specifically go to Fisherman's Wharf and other places where they knew tourists would be and rob their cars.
[00:37:04]  And then we lost tourism here.
[00:37:06]  Then they did the same thing, breaking into people's homes and Walgreens.
[00:37:10]  And you saw all these snatch and grabs at high-end stores.
[00:37:13]  So again, when you make it clear to criminals, hey, this is allowable behavior and your chances of being arrested are incredibly low, there's a direct correlation with the price of drugs and, you know, enforcement.
[00:37:29]  In other words, if dealers get arrested, you need to find another dealer.
[00:37:33]  You have to pay to get them out of jail.
[00:37:34]  You got to pay for lawyers.
[00:37:35]  And that side of the equation raises the price of drugs.
[00:37:38]  That's why in places where it's really costly to deal drugs, the price of drugs goes up.
[00:37:43]  And that's what happens with consumption is basic economics.
[00:37:47]  And the economics here are you can score very powerful drugs at very low prices and face no repercussions.
[00:37:53]  What does that mean?
[00:37:53]  Well, and I think it's a statewide problem that crimes under $1,000, thefts under $1,000 won't be prosecuted.
[00:38:00]  That's not just San Francisco.
[00:38:02]  So that's why Walgreens is really struggling.
[00:38:05]  And it's got, I think, crime up 47% year over year.
[00:38:08]  And it had to close five locations in the San Francisco area because all the problems plus that law don't lead to good business.
[00:38:14]  You can see why things are falling apart and why the voters, even progressive-minded, quote, liberal, believing liberals, have had enough of this and are seeing the consequences of bad policy on their personal lives.
[00:38:28]  That's what actually does drive somebody to the voting box, like when you see it in your personal life.
[00:38:32]  All right, let me take a quick pause so I can squeeze in a break and more with David and Jason.
[00:38:36]  So much to go over, including what's happening with their pal, Elon, and Twitter.
[00:38:40]  We'll get to that a bit later in the show.
[00:38:41]  Stay tuned for that.
[00:38:50]  So one of the things that they are doing now to defend Chesapeake from this recall effort is to say, hey, look at other cities.
[00:38:57]  It's not just San Francisco under Chesa Boudin.
[00:39:00]  Look at Sacramento.
[00:39:01]  They've got a tough talking DA up there and their crime rate numbers are way up.
[00:39:07]  So, you know, it's unfair to blame this guy for that.
[00:39:10]  Now, we took a quick look.
[00:39:12]  This is the San Francisco Chronicle.
[00:39:15]  They're pointing to the Sacramento DA Ann-Marie Schubert saying she's running for California Attorney General now.
[00:39:21]  She's an ex-Republican prosecutor.
[00:39:24]  And they're talking about San Francisco crime in 2015 to the pandemic saying it went way up.
[00:39:30]  It jumped from 2968 to 3611.
[00:39:37]  What is that?
[00:39:37]  I'm not sure what that is, like number of crime victims.
[00:39:40]  Number of crime victims, though, it's a 22% increase in number of crime victims.
[00:39:45]  Now, the thing about Sacramento is, as you guys may be aware, it's part of California.
[00:39:52]  So it seems to me, similar to what we talked about right before we went to break, of course they would be suffering year over year because California over the past couple of years since the pandemic has implemented a lot of very soft on crime policies that have affected the entire state.
[00:40:05]  But what do you guys make of it?
[00:40:08]  I think that's right.
[00:40:08]  So you mentioned before this editorial saying that Jason Boudin doesn't have agency, that he doesn't really have control.
[00:40:15]  That's not true.
[00:40:16]  He has a tremendous control, not just over individual cases, but also over policy.
[00:40:20]  So for example, zero bail.
[00:40:22]  Boudin has implemented a zero bail policy in the city of San Francisco.
[00:40:27]  So criminals basically get booked and it's a revolving door and they're out the next day or even the same night.
[00:40:32]  That has basically demoralized the police and caused a sort of sense of learned helplessness in which people stop reporting crime.
[00:40:40]  They stop bothering because they know that nothing's going to happen.
[00:40:43]  But that policy of zero bail that's so detrimental has also been supported at the state level by Gavin Newsom, the governor, and his handpicked attorney general, Rob Bonta, as well as by George Cascone in LA.
[00:40:56]  So they are pushing for these policies as well.
[00:40:58]  And Newsom is responsible for the early release of something like 76,000 inmates.
[00:41:03]  He's also shut down prisons at a time when we need more prison space.
[00:41:08]  And they continue to do things like reduce punishments and sentences.
[00:41:12]  They continue to do things like downgrade felonies to misdemeanors, which aren't even being prosecuted anymore by these progressive DAs.
[00:41:19]  So it is a statewide problem.
[00:41:21]  And voters really need to hold not just Boudin accountable, but they need to hold Newsom accountable and Bonta accountable.
[00:41:28]  And that is why I'm supporting Schellenberger for governor and I am supporting America Schubert for state AG is because we do need a statewide change on these issues.
[00:41:38]  Is there any chance?
[00:41:39]  Like what?
[00:41:40]  Could Schellenberger actually win?
[00:41:42]  I love him.
[00:41:43]  I'm 100% rooting for him.
[00:41:45]  I'd be open about that.
[00:41:46]  He's brilliant.
[00:41:46]  I love his writings on the environment and climate change and homelessness and San Francisco and SICCO, I should say.
[00:41:52]  That's the name of his book.
[00:41:53]  But does he actually have a chance?
[00:41:56]  Well, what I would say is it's certainly an underdog chance.
[00:42:00]  But here's why there's a path is because today, June 7th is the California primary.
[00:42:06]  And California has sort of what's known as a jungle primary where everybody from all parties is voted on and the top two go to a runoff.
[00:42:15]  So if Schellenberger, for example, as an independent could beat the Republican and go to a runoff, if he could just come in number two behind Newsom, he goes to a heads-up recall against Newsom.
[00:42:26]  And so there would be no Republican or other third party candidate in that race.
[00:42:31]  And I think once you get into a heads-up competition against Newsom, particularly when the alternative is not a Republican, is not branded with the Scarlet R.
[00:42:39]  I mean, California is a very blue state.
[00:42:41]  I don't think a Republican has much of a shot of winning here anymore.
[00:42:45]  But Schellenberger's an independent.
[00:42:47]  So if he could just get into a heads-up race against Newsom, I think that there's a chance there.
[00:42:52]  And he would get a lot of earned media.
[00:42:54]  There would be a lot of attention on that race and discovering who Schellenberger is.
[00:42:57]  So it's certainly a long shot, but there is a path.
[00:43:00]  He's an exciting thinker.
[00:43:02]  He's somebody who comes at problems the right way by actually just taking an honest look at them, not through an ideological lens, and then trying to figure out what works.
[00:43:10]  He's certainly not somebody who thinks we should be shutting down prisons or California nuclear plants.
[00:43:15]  I mean, the guy makes so much sense, but we'll see whether people are lucky enough to accept the gift that he is offering them, which is a willingness to serve.
[00:43:24]  Back on the crimes, just to go back to Boudin, because I know that you, Jason, did something interesting.
[00:43:30]  Like, David, you got behind this recall effort.
[00:43:32]  And then, Jason, you, you have a background in media before you got into being like the most like visionary angel investor of all time.
[00:43:39]  Basically, if Jason gives you your money, continue, Megan.
[00:43:42]  I like this one.
[00:43:44]  Your business is going to do well.
[00:43:45]  It's crazy the list of successes you've had, even though you were off base on that Republican stuff.
[00:43:50]  But anyway, you know, but we'll talk about January 6th later, Megan.
[00:43:55]  Well, I mean, we probably won't have too much of a debate on that one.
[00:43:57]  But can we talk about the journalist?
[00:43:59]  So you hired a journalist to take a hard look at his, what he's actually done.
[00:44:04]  How is he actually handling crime?
[00:44:05]  Because it's one thing to say, all these cars are getting broken into.
[00:44:08]  Our homes are getting broken into.
[00:44:09]  I feel it.
[00:44:10]  I don't need to see a study, but I feel it.
[00:44:12]  But you hired a journalist to actually figure out who is he releasing violent offenders?
[00:44:17]  How are things changing under him?
[00:44:18]  Give me specific cases.
[00:44:19]  And what did you find?
[00:44:20]  Yeah.
[00:44:21]  So what you were mentioning before, you know, we have very liberal magazines here and newspapers.
[00:44:29]  And the coverage is almost uniformly in favor of Chessa Boudin.
[00:44:33]  So I said, listen, one of the problems here is I think people are not getting great coverage of what's happening with his office.
[00:44:41]  And so what if we just hired a journalist and we did a GoFundMe campaign and we said, you know, let's look at what he's actually doing.
[00:44:50]  And so I started this GoFundMe and I put 500 bucks in myself.
[00:44:54]  And I said, anybody else want to join me on this journey?
[00:44:56]  And $65,000 showed up in a couple of weeks.
[00:45:00]  And so we hired Susan Reynolds, who Sachs mentioned before.
[00:45:03]  And now she is just covering, you know, specific cases of victims.
[00:45:07]  And I said, listen, here's the money.
[00:45:08]  I trust you to do the best you can here.
[00:45:10]  I suggest you just do coverage of them.
[00:45:13]  And if you go to GothamBythe Bay, GothamBythebay.com, you can read all these stories.
[00:45:17]  And I don't have them pulled up right now, but she'll write a 2,000-word story about the victims and she'll go into exactly how crazy these cases are.
[00:45:24]  And it's kind of irrefutable.
[00:45:25]  Of course, they're trying to discredit her, discredit me.
[00:45:28]  But the facts are the facts.
[00:45:30]  The cases are the cases.
[00:45:31]  David actually mentioned a couple of them.
[00:45:33]  And the ching one is one of the ones that jumped out to me.
[00:45:37]  Stephanie Ching helped kill and dismember her father.
[00:45:40]  This is quoting from Susan's January 2022 article, but she didn't spend a single day in jail.
[00:45:46]  And you go through the details of this case.
[00:45:47]  They showed up at her house, police did, found a nylon rope, box cutters, duct tape, a worm circular saw, red stained latex gloves, pan sponge, reddish brown fluid, human blood on the saw, multiple plastic bags in the refrigerator.
[00:46:00]  You do not want to know what was in the bags, but I'm sure you can figure it out.
[00:46:03]  Let's just say Stephanie's father did not meet a timely or kind death.
[00:46:10]  And somehow this woman escaped any jail time.
[00:46:14]  I mean, like that doesn't seem possible even in Chessa Boudin's world.
[00:46:18]  She received a suspended sentence.
[00:46:20]  I think he put her down to something like desecration of a body or something.
[00:46:25]  She was credited with time served for 17 months spent in jail.
[00:46:27]  Now she's walking free in the streets of San Francisco.
[00:46:29]  I mean, these are dangerous people who have just been released.
[00:46:32]  It's mind-boggling, absolutely mind-boggling.
[00:46:36]  Another story that Susan just broke in the last week, which I think is really important, is on gun crimes.
[00:46:43]  So what she found is that Udin likes to make a big deal about gun crimes.
[00:46:49]  He talks about banning ghost guns and he wants to prosecute firearms manufacturers.
[00:46:53]  But when you actually look at felony gun cases, he has dismissed over 75% of them.
[00:47:00]  So he will talk a big game about gun crimes and gun violence and going after gun manufacturers.
[00:47:07]  But when it actually comes to crimes committed with guns, he won't prosecute them.
[00:47:11]  And, you know, there was a real, a tragic real world example of this.
[00:47:15]  There was a perpetrator named Zion Young who was caught with a lot of firearms.
[00:47:23]  They had 11 gun-related felonies on him.
[00:47:27]  And Boudin pled it down to one misdemeanor, released him from jail.
[00:47:32]  And just a couple of months later, he killed a young man named Kelvin Chu in a botched robbery.
[00:47:37]  So, you know, these examples have real world consequences.
[00:47:41]  Real people get hurt when Boudin does not prosecute these crimes.
[00:47:46]  That's right.
[00:47:46]  That's right.
[00:47:47]  And the same thing is happening over in LA, where another Soros-backed DA is doing very similar policies unapologetically.
[00:47:57]  And he could also lose his job.
[00:47:59]  I'm actually going to take a pause there and pick it up with that case because there's this one particular case.
[00:48:04]  It's insane.

=== Real World Consequences (02:16) ===

[00:48:05]  We have video of it.
[00:48:06]  This mom pushing her toddler, her baby, down an alley.
[00:48:10]  She's on the sidewalk.
[00:48:11]  And this perpetrator comes along and mows them down.
[00:48:16]  We'll tell you what happened and what her message is for these soft on crime DAs and the cities that back them.
[00:48:26]  You guys had this recent like summit.
[00:48:28]  I don't know, maybe that's not the right word, but I saw my pod Glenn summit because I saw Glenn there.
[00:48:34]  I saw Matt Taibbi there, a couple of other folks that we've had on the show, and I loved it.
[00:48:39]  People got into like heated debates and you let them go at it.
[00:48:43]  Yeah, the concept was pretty simple.
[00:48:45]  You know, we, the, the all-in podcast has become a bit of a phenomenon.
[00:48:48]  We, we hit 26 in the world recently, and it's just the four of us talking about, you know, the issues of the day from a first principles point of view.
[00:48:57]  And we actually build businesses.
[00:48:59]  And it's a great debate format.
[00:49:01]  You probably see a little bit of it here with me and Sachs going at it.
[00:49:05]  But we can remain friends, right?
[00:49:06]  And so I think that's what we're trying to show the world is we can debate these very important topics.
[00:49:11]  We can learn from each other.
[00:49:12]  We can change our opinions based on new information and maybe be less tribal and more solutions-based.
[00:49:18]  We decided to do an event.
[00:49:20]  850 people showed up and it was a colossal success.
[00:49:24]  You know, some of the world's greatest thinkers and speakers.
[00:49:27]  And we really had a hardcore discussion.
[00:49:30]  No press was allowed, but we did release all the videos to the all-in podcast stream.
[00:49:36]  And it was a great success in terms of having productive dialogues in a really rigorous way.
[00:49:43]  And I think David, you know, his debates specifically, some of the stuff he curated was absolutely fantastic.
[00:49:50]  Which was on what?
[00:49:50]  What was yours?
[00:49:51]  What did you take on?
[00:49:53]  I had two panels.
[00:49:54]  So we did one with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taiyevi, like you mentioned, on domestic politics and really trying to ask the question of whether the traditional left versus right distinction really captures the dichotomy in our politics today or whether it's something different like populist versus elitist.
[00:50:12]  So we had a really good conversation about that.
[00:50:13]  And then separately, I hosted a debate on Ukraine between Glenn and Antonio Garcia Martinez.

=== Building Products with Care (06:35) ===

[00:50:21]  Glenn opposes our involvement in Ukraine.
[00:50:23]  Antonio is very much in favor of it.
[00:50:26]  And those two really went at it.
[00:50:28]  And I did my best to sort of moderate.
[00:50:33]  I like Antonio.
[00:50:34]  He came on the show as well.
[00:50:36]  He's a good thinker and has been kicked around too much by Silicon Valley as well.
[00:50:39]  I mean, it's a rough business out there.
[00:50:41]  I mean, it's amazing you guys have done as well as you have.
[00:50:43]  I was just, as I was getting ready for the show and reading through like all the stuff that you've done and all the things that you've invested in.
[00:50:50]  I mean, hold on, I want to pull it up because you probably won't say it about yourselves.
[00:50:53]  I was just, it's stunning.
[00:50:56]  One of my questions was, how rich are they?
[00:50:59]  So, David, you were COO of PayPal.
[00:51:04]  You were founder, CEO of Yammer.
[00:51:06]  Have you ever heard of Yammer folks?
[00:51:07]  Well, if you haven't, it was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion.
[00:51:11]  Okay.
[00:51:12]  General Partner of Craft Ventures, which we keep mentioning, that's a venture capital fund that you co-founded.
[00:51:16]  Your angel investments, meaning one of the first ones, the other ones that helped get it started, include, oh, Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Airbnb.
[00:51:24]  Those worked out okay.
[00:51:25]  You raised over a billion dollars and so on.
[00:51:27]  Okay.
[00:51:28]  So then Jason, who I didn't know as well, forgive me, Jason.
[00:51:32]  But I love that you were born in Brooklyn and you got a BA in psychology from Fordham.
[00:51:36]  Because at that point, your parents were probably like, oh, shit.
[00:51:39]  Well, I went at night.
[00:51:40]  It was either that or joining the New York Police Department.
[00:51:43]  So those were my two choices.
[00:51:44]  Go at NYP or go at NYPD.
[00:51:46]  And I went at night.
[00:51:47]  Because nobody really wants to see their kid get a degree in psychology because that's not really the one that you see, you know, really necessarily going anywhere, even though it's important.
[00:51:55]  But I was going to go for the FBI.
[00:51:58]  So I was going to go for forensic psychology at John Jay for my master's, but then the internet happened and I got derailed from my FBI career.
[00:52:05]  So you started off as a reporter covering the internet industry in New York and founder and CEO of something called Rising Tide Studios, a media company, and went on to stay sort of in the media company.
[00:52:16]  You had an angel investor, Mark Cuban.
[00:52:18]  He and I have also had some sparring, but it was fun.
[00:52:21]  And then went on to start doing venture capital and invested, this is what my note says, invested $25,000 in Uber, which is likely worth about $100 million now.
[00:52:31]  Whoa, that's a big number, Megan.
[00:52:33]  I think that's like, what, half the amount of your last contract?
[00:52:37]  I wish, but I will tell you, I was listening to this packet that my producers prepared for me in my car.
[00:52:43]  You know, you can set like the read aloud thing.
[00:52:45]  And my daughter, who's 11, was in there with me.
[00:52:48]  And she was very impressed at your 25,000 and really wanted me to invest $25,000 in Uber.
[00:52:53]  And then I had to explain to her, that ship has kind of sailed.
[00:52:56]  Mommy doesn't have that opportunity in front of her right now.
[00:53:00]  You know, it's, I'll tell you, it's one of the great privileges enjoys of both of our lives.
[00:53:05]  I can speak for David on this, that we're lucky enough to be in a position where we get to allocate capital to the greatest founders in the world trying to solve the world's biggest problems.
[00:53:16]  And we take it very seriously because we meet with hundreds of founders each year, both of our firms, and we sort that down from thousands to tens of thousands of pitches.
[00:53:28]  And we have to do the hard work of making bets that are non-consensus, that are long shots, and hoping they work out.
[00:53:34]  For every Uber you hit, you know, there's going to be, you know, hundreds of others that, you know, fail.
[00:53:41]  And so it's a very hard job.
[00:53:43]  Luck is part of it.
[00:53:45]  But really consistently investing over time is the secret to being good at this game and having a great process.
[00:53:50]  David's got a great process.
[00:53:51]  My team's got a great process.
[00:53:54]  And I know this is a little bit more than you can give me in their short time.
[00:53:58]  But like, what would you say is the difference?
[00:53:59]  Because I know, you know, one of these, a pitch comes in from somebody who's got a great idea.
[00:54:04]  And nine times out of 10, it probably sounds insane.
[00:54:06]  You know, all these great companies that we're looking at here, like SpaceX, what?
[00:54:09]  That sounds insane, right?
[00:54:10]  You have that.
[00:54:11]  That's your initial reaction.
[00:54:12]  So how do you figure out, no, that one really is insane?
[00:54:16]  And this one we could make happen.
[00:54:17]  Does it boil down to the founder?
[00:54:19]  You know, the guy or gal standing in front of you?
[00:54:22]  Yeah, I mean, there's really three things at its core.
[00:54:24]  There's a team that produces a product that ultimately touches a consumer.
[00:54:29]  And those are the only three things that matter in this.
[00:54:32]  People will use fancy terms like market or total addressable market.
[00:54:36]  And when it comes down to it, you're betting on a founder and their team or the ability to recruit a team to make a world-class product and to not give up and to delight customers.
[00:54:45]  And it's pretty basic in that regard.
[00:54:47]  And then what you're doing is we have a milestone-based system.
[00:54:50]  And this is why capitalism is absolutely fantastic.
[00:54:53]  And I believe in America more now than ever is because this merit-based system, people can do just a little bit of work.
[00:55:00]  And all of the lessons on how to build a company are online.
[00:55:03]  They're on YouTube.
[00:55:04]  They're on various services available for free.
[00:55:07]  I never had a chance to go to MIT, but I listened to MIT lectures in my spare time for fun.
[00:55:12]  All the world's information is now indexed on YouTube and other platforms.
[00:55:16]  And you can learn these skills at home in just a couple of months and build a prototype.
[00:55:21]  And if you build a great prototype and you get a couple of customers maybe to embrace what's called an MVP, a minimum viable product, you can bring that to angel investors.
[00:55:30]  Those investors might give you 25, 50K and you get 10 of them.
[00:55:34]  Now you hire an employee or two, and then you go downstream to Sachs.
[00:55:38]  Maybe Sachs puts in a million or $2 million, $3 million.
[00:55:42]  And each milestone, you have a chance to raise more money.
[00:55:45]  And so it's an absolutely beautiful and chaotic system.
[00:55:49]  And capitalism is alive and well in America.
[00:55:52]  And opportunity is actually more fair and more distributed than it's ever been.
[00:55:57]  But we live with a narrative today that the world is more biased and there's more gatekeepers.
[00:56:02]  And it's simply not true.
[00:56:04]  This is the most open capitalism and entrepreneurship has ever been.
[00:56:09]  Any skill you want to learn is available for free.
[00:56:12]  If you have an Android phone that costs about $50 to $200 and you have a connection which costs 25 to 50 bucks a month, it could not be more equitable than it is today.
[00:56:23]  It never has been.
[00:56:24]  So if you're out there listening and you want to start a company, just learn how to build websites or be a designer, a product manager, and get a couple of friends together and start building something that you want to see in the world.
[00:56:34]  It's really that simple.
[00:56:36]  It's exciting.
[00:56:36]  I mean, I thought, I think one of the businesses you were in, yeah, Facebook, as I mentioned, you wound up disinvesting from back in 2018.
[00:56:45]  Now, why was that?
[00:56:46]  Was that political?
[00:56:47]  You know, is it like during the Trump?
[00:56:48]  I heard you speak with Kara Swisher about who I also in a good way.
[00:56:54]  But what was the story behind that pullout in 2018?

=== Beyond Social Media Addiction (03:21) ===

[00:56:57]  Well, I didn't like a lot of Facebook's behavior.
[00:57:01]  I wasn't originally an investor.
[00:57:03]  I invested in another company that got acquired by Facebook.
[00:57:07]  And I just thought Zuckerberg's process of releasing products was not very thoughtful.
[00:57:13]  And I probably left a modest amount on the table, but it was probably a good trade overall.
[00:57:18]  And I just haven't been a fan of the way he moves fast and breaks things.
[00:57:21]  I think he can be a lot more considerate in how he built products.
[00:57:24]  And we've seen that over time.
[00:57:27]  Social media is a very hard business to run.
[00:57:30]  And we've seen that.
[00:57:32]  So, you know, it's not just him, but I think he could have been a lot more thoughtful.
[00:57:35]  And, you know, I like to vote with my dollar on businesses that I think are world positive and founders, I think, are world positive.
[00:57:41]  And I just haven't been a fan of how Zuckerberg is.
[00:57:42]  What do you make of it?
[00:57:43]  He's obviously excellent at what he does, though.
[00:57:45]  As somebody who's not in that industry at all, I wonder, you know, you hear these reports of, for example, Instagram, you know, causing massive depression amongst huge swaths of young girls.
[00:57:55]  And obviously what Facebook does as well, the manipulation and trying to get in your head and walking, you know, trying to make it more addictive and trying to get more and more of your time without much care for mental health.
[00:58:05]  And I can see the capitalist argument, you know, like pure capitalism might not factor that in.
[00:58:09]  It might.
[00:58:10]  You can make another argument too.
[00:58:11]  But do you think he cares about any of that?
[00:58:13]  I mean, maybe that's a simple question, but do you think he gives a damn?
[00:58:17]  I think he probably wanted to win more than he cared about those things.
[00:58:21]  And the techniques of winning, you know, sometimes are to remove friction and get people addicted to these products.
[00:58:26]  I don't think it's limited to social media.
[00:58:28]  I think all screen time, you know, too much screen time is not good for your health.
[00:58:31]  I think it's probably one of the reasons we're seeing increases in anxiety and depression amongst kids.
[00:58:36]  And they should really be out with their friends in nature and doing activities.
[00:58:40]  I think anybody who's got kids understands this when your kids use an iPad for too long, you know, maybe you get a little permissive on a weekend and you don't have some help to, you know, watch the kids or something.
[00:58:50]  You don't have an activity set up for that day.
[00:58:51]  Kids get weird if they spend too much time online.
[00:58:54]  Adults get weird if they spend too much time online.
[00:58:56]  So I think we're navigating that as a species, really.
[00:58:59]  And you really, I think, have to monitor screen time, limit it, both for yourself and for your kids.
[00:59:04]  If you look at the Chinese government, they've passed an edict that, you know, you can't play video games but on the weekends and for a certain number of hours.
[00:59:12]  Now, we have personal freedom here in America.
[00:59:14]  You can never pass a law like that.
[00:59:16]  But I think they probably know something and they have a concern that's very valid, which is kids who play too many video games or on social media too often, or even adults who are addicted to these screens, life can get a little anxious.
[00:59:31]  And we need as human beings to be more social and to meet more people and spend time with our friends.
[00:59:35]  That's why I always take David out to dinner and give him a big hug when I see him.
[00:59:39]  Wait, so where are you living now?
[00:59:42]  Oh, we both live in the Bay Area.
[00:59:43]  Okay, okay.
[00:59:44]  You just got out of San Francisco.
[00:59:45]  I left San Francisco, the city, because, you know, and I'll probably wind up leaving California for Austin or for Miami soon, because I actually think my thesis is that the California problems, and this is why I'm watching the Chesapeake thing and the governor's race.
[01:00:01]  I don't know that it can be solved in the next 10 or 20 years, having lived through New York in the 70s and 80s and watched, you know, how long that took to work out.
[01:00:09]  I think this might be a multi-decade decline and we might be only halfway into the first half of California's decline.
[01:00:16]  I think you're right.
[01:00:16]  I mean, honestly, I've said the same thing.

=== A Miracle After Attempted Murder (04:46) ===

[01:00:19]  It's heartbreaking.
[01:00:20]  I felt the same about New York City.
[01:00:21]  New York City has gone just crazy in its politics and defunded its police by a billion dollars and homelessness everywhere.
[01:00:29]  And it's like we were getting approached by truly deranged people on the street all the time where my kids didn't know whether to run, whether they, you know, are they in danger.
[01:00:37]  And I didn't know either.
[01:00:38]  You know, it's like all of it.
[01:00:39]  You're thinking, what am I paying this, you know, this amount of taxes for?
[01:00:43]  And on the police, on the DAs, it's not like sanitation.
[01:00:48]  Sanitation is a major irritation of mine in New York City.
[01:00:50]  It's disgusting.
[01:00:51]  I don't know if you've been in New York recently, but it's like the on-ramps, the off-ramps on any bridge, tunnel, et cetera, to get into the city.
[01:00:56]  And then you get into the city and it's almost as bad are absolutely covered with trash.
[01:01:02]  I mean, heaps, mountains of trash.
[01:01:05]  We pay, we pay for this, you know, for the trash removal.
[01:01:08]  All the plastic bags now adorning the New York City trees as though they're Christmas ornaments, you know, because they sanitation doesn't take them down anymore.
[01:01:16]  It's blight, you know, and it's depressing and it worries me, but it's not going to kill anybody.
[01:01:23]  You know, I mean, it's not going to kill anybody.
[01:01:25]  And that's why the police strain is so, so dangerous.
[01:01:28]  I want to go back to your business backgrounds, but David, before we do that, let's talk about LA for one second because the DA there, the soft non-crime DA, George, I always want to call him Gaston, right?
[01:01:37]  Because of the beast.
[01:01:42]  It's Gas Khan.
[01:01:43]  And he is like a Chesapeaudine.
[01:01:45]  Now, he's not facing a recall today, but he is facing a second recall effort, which, like with Chesapoudine, has the support of many deputy prosecutors in his own office.
[01:01:55]  There was a petition to get him recalled, 500,000 signatures.
[01:01:59]  They've surpassed that last week.
[01:02:01]  They need 67,000 more by July 6th to secure a vote, I guess.
[01:02:07]  Now, this guy, similar to what we were just talking about, about looking at the cases in San Fernand, there was a woman.
[01:02:14]  She's only known as Rachel.
[01:02:16]  She was pushing her son Charlie in a stroller through the Venice neighborhood of LA.
[01:02:22]  We have the video of it.
[01:02:23]  It's downright alarming.
[01:02:24]  This is via Daily Mail and New York Post.
[01:02:27]  This car comes out of nowhere.
[01:02:28]  It's a narrow alley, but she's on the small sidewalk there.
[01:02:31]  You can see, oh my God, oh my God.
[01:02:33]  I mean, he has plenty of room to stay away from her.
[01:02:37]  He runs over this woman and her baby.
[01:02:39]  I want to tell everybody they lived amazingly.
[01:02:43]  They both lived.
[01:02:44]  She tried to get out of the way, but it almost seemed like he was trying to mow her down.
[01:02:48]  And that's certainly what she thinks.
[01:02:50]  Now, his full name was never released, only his initials, KB.
[01:02:53]  And she gave a victim impact statement.
[01:02:56]  And if you guys will forgive me, I'm going to read part of it because there are no cameras in the courtroom.
[01:03:01]  But we have the transcript.
[01:03:03]  And she says, August 6th, 2021, that's the day KB tried to murder me and my eight-month-old baby.
[01:03:11]  As the car got dangerously close to us, KB turned the wheels in our direction and accelerated as he aimed to kill us.
[01:03:16]  I screamed at the top of my lungs for him to stop.
[01:03:18]  I made eye contact with him.
[01:03:19]  His face had no look of fear, surprise, or regret.
[01:03:22]  He stared right at me with a look of intention.
[01:03:24]  I have fragments of memories of watching the car hit us, me hitting the windshield with my body and head hitting the ground.
[01:03:30]  I saw a tire as I fell to the ground, thought my head would get run over, that my life was over.
[01:03:35]  I assumed my baby was already dead.
[01:03:37]  We're indeed very fortunate to be alive, but make no mistake, my son would be dead if it weren't for my actions in those last moments.
[01:03:43]  Had I not thrown my child into the air and instead had left him on the ground in his stroller, KB would have succeeded in killing my baby by driving the nose of his stolen car right into my child's face.
[01:03:53]  He tried to kill us for sport.
[01:03:55]  And if you look at this still grab we have of the actual moment of impact, you will see, and for our listening audience, check it out on our YouTube feed later, but what you see is the car.
[01:04:05]  You see the mom on her left side on the windshield being hit.
[01:04:09]  And you see the stroller wheels up and you'll see a white thing close to the front wheel of the car and close to the ground.
[01:04:17]  That white thing is the eight-month-old boy.
[01:04:19]  That's her baby whose head looks like it's about to get run over by the back tire.
[01:04:24]  I mean, it's a miracle, a miracle that this mother and child lived.
[01:04:31]  She goes on to say, I was shocked to find my baby alive afterward, screaming, thankfully still strapped into his stroller.
[01:04:38]  I was dumbfounded when I learned KB had only been sighted out and was never arrested for our attempted murder.
[01:04:47]  She's very angry about that, saying, I've never felt so victimized as I have by this system and current policies of LA's DA, George Gascon.
[01:04:55]  My heart breaks when I think about all the other victims out there less fortunate than me, whose murderers are getting lenient sentences and being released from prison before their sentences are complete.

=== Gun Control and Mass Shootings (11:26) ===

[01:05:05]  When I met with the juvenile DA in Englewood, I was told Gascon's policy of, quote, delivering the lightest touch possible for minors would prevent us from ever seeing any justice.
[01:05:16]  What about my child, also a minor?
[01:05:18]  He was eight months old when KB tried to kill him.
[01:05:22]  I was also told that his record would be wiped clean when he turned 18.
[01:05:26]  How on earth can that be?
[01:05:28]  He tried to murder two innocent pedestrians.
[01:05:31]  Murder.
[01:05:32]  And we have video evidence.
[01:05:34]  And she goes on from there.
[01:05:35]  Basically, this guy got a slap on the wrist.
[01:05:37]  He was treated as a juvenile.
[01:05:39]  And the DA really had no qualms about it saying, trying to find the exact quote, but unapologetically saying he was a minor and this was the right course not to throw the book at him.
[01:05:51]  And that's where it stood.
[01:05:52]  So it's not San Francisco.
[01:05:55]  It's not LA.
[01:05:56]  It's California.
[01:05:58]  And it's other states too who have on a massive basis taken this approach of, he didn't mean it.
[01:06:05]  He's too young to really throw the book at.
[01:06:08]  We've been too tough on criminals.
[01:06:10]  And you've got real life victims who are starting to stand up.
[01:06:15]  Absolutely.
[01:06:16]  And, you know, the way that Gascon got elected in LA, he was actually the DA in San Francisco.
[01:06:22]  That's where he came from.
[01:06:23]  He went down to LA to run against a veteran experienced DA named Jackie Lacey, who happens to be a black woman.
[01:06:31]  And Gascon was supported by Soros and Reed Hastings and basically billionaires who don't live in LA.
[01:06:40]  It's out of town money.
[01:06:41]  They don't have to live with the consequences of their policies.
[01:06:45]  And he replaced this extremely experienced DA.
[01:06:49]  And so, you know, we had this black woman replaced with this incompetent white man.
[01:06:52]  And we never heard anything about this being institutional racism.
[01:06:56]  So, you know, it's been a real disaster and we've seen the consequences of these policies.
[01:07:02]  And you've seen now a rebellion by the Hollywood left against Gascon as a result of the case you're talking about.
[01:07:08]  There was a case of a young woman, Brianna Kupfer, who was working in a furniture store and just was randomly attacked by a deranged homeless person and stabbed to death.
[01:07:18]  There was a case, there's been a rash of these follow-up home armed robberies that took the life of a world-renowned person, Jacqueline Avant.
[01:07:28]  You know, criminals followed her home and she was shot to death.
[01:07:31]  So people in LA are getting scared.
[01:07:34]  And there's been a bunch of applications for people in LA who are never into guns before to basically become first-time gun buyers.
[01:07:42]  So yeah, I mean, you're starting to see a real rebellion by the citizens of these cities against these DAs who really got elected with out-of-town billionaire money.
[01:07:52]  Yeah.
[01:07:53]  That's right.
[01:07:54]  And George Soros will never see the effects of these policies that these DAs are putting into effect.
[01:07:58]  And she, this woman, because this, her perpetrator was just sentenced last Thursday.
[01:08:03]  She was asked to speak after he was sentenced.
[01:08:05]  So she, she gets to give her victim impact statement after the sentence has already been handed down.
[01:08:10]  That doesn't do her any good.
[01:08:12]  They sentenced him five to seven months at a youth camp, juvenile probation camp.
[01:08:19]  This guy who literally tries to mow over a woman and her eight-month-old baby.
[01:08:24]  They said, oh, look, fortunately, Gascon's office said the baby was uninjured and the mother received a laceration to her elbow.
[01:08:31]  I mean, absolutely no empathy for crime victims, only for those who perpetrate them.
[01:08:38]  And so, you know, we see it city by city, state by state.
[01:08:42]  George Soros, I don't know.
[01:08:44]  He lives, I'm sure, in a very nice neighborhood.
[01:08:46]  He's never going to be made to pay, but it's not just him.
[01:08:48]  You know, I've talked about this before.
[01:08:50]  I had a meeting with a billionaire here in New York, who I will do the courtesy of not naming.
[01:08:55]  And I was just given access to him, talk about media, talk about future, talk about, you know, sort of where he thinks things are going.
[01:09:02]  And this guy was one of the main funders of the no-bail policy in New York.
[01:09:06]  He was like, this is my only mission.
[01:09:08]  And why?
[01:09:09]  Because it makes him feel like a social justice warrior.
[01:09:12]  It made him feel better, like he was doing something for the black community, for people who have been unfairly punished by police in the past and so on.
[01:09:20]  And of course, the stats that were just released a couple of months ago by the DA or by the FBI show that the people who have been hurt more than ever by the increase in crime over the past couple of years in the wake of these policies are black and brown people.
[01:09:31]  So there'll be no accountability for that.
[01:09:36]  Yeah, I mean, it's the case that as with the whole defund the police movement, this sort of decarceration movement, the zero bail movement is supported by generally upscale, well-to-do white progressives and who are very insulated from the effects of these policies.
[01:09:52]  And when you actually poll the communities who are most impacted, they are very much against these policies.
[01:09:59]  And the defund movement, just like the decarcerate movement, they come from the same place of this misguided sort of progressivism.
[01:10:08]  Let's be clear.
[01:10:10]  David Sachs backs, you know, politicians all over the country.
[01:10:14]  So, I mean, this isn't just a matter of people backing people from other states.
[01:10:21]  Sachs does this every day of the week.
[01:10:23]  Well, but you know, but that's an interesting point because I never thought, I mean, I do contribute to national races where and local ones, but I don't contribute to local races where I don't live.
[01:10:37]  So it was claiming that you have many homes.
[01:10:41]  I do.
[01:10:41]  Yeah.
[01:10:42]  So where's JD Vance running?
[01:10:44]  JD Vance is running in Ohio, but he's running for a hundred years.
[01:10:47]  Do you have a home in Ohio?
[01:10:48]  No, but he's running for the United States Senate.
[01:10:50]  And that vote is going to impact.
[01:10:52]  That makes a difference.
[01:10:52]  That's a national election, Jason.
[01:10:54]  Got it.
[01:10:55]  I never, I never in a million years would have thought to fund a local DA or say mayor's race in a city in which I had no nexus, in which I did not live or work.
[01:11:05]  And this has been a strategy of these left-wing progressive groups, which is to change policy across the nation by flooding these local races that people never previously paid much attention to.
[01:11:19]  They didn't realize how important it is.
[01:11:21]  The race doesn't do that.
[01:11:23]  Well, I can't.
[01:11:24]  I can't speak for that.
[01:11:25]  I never thought to do it.
[01:11:27]  Well, here's what I think is nuts.
[01:11:28]  Here's what I think is disturbing.
[01:11:30]  We've seen the crime rates go up in our major cities and in particular, the murder rates go up in our major cities massively over the past couple of years.
[01:11:37]  And there's no question the pandemic played some role in that for sure.
[01:11:40]  But these soft on crime policies played a massive role as well.
[01:11:43]  And certainly the defund the police and the summary attacks on police as racist in the wake of George Floyd did not help either.
[01:11:54]  I mean, there have been whole studies on the Ferguson effect, so-called Ferguson effect.
[01:11:56]  Cops do pull back when they don't get backing, when they get demonized.
[01:12:00]  You know, they're like, what am I doing this for?
[01:12:01]  I'm not making $300,000 a year.
[01:12:04]  So we've seen all that.
[01:12:05]  But what we're seeing right now is a weird phenomenon in the past month or so since Buffalo, since Uvalde, since we've seen more and more coverage of shootings pop up.
[01:12:17]  Those were mass shootings.
[01:12:19]  There's no question about that.
[01:12:20]  But now you start to hear CNN, you listen, you read the New York Times, you listen to the Biden White House, some Democrat politicians, they describe everything as a mass shooting, like four people shot at the grocery store or wherever.
[01:12:32]  It's a mass shooting.
[01:12:34]  I mean, I guess technically, I'm not trying to argue over value of that.
[01:12:38]  How many people need to die in a shooting, Megan, or get hit by a bullet for you to consider it a mass shooting?
[01:12:42]  Is it four?
[01:12:43]  Is it seven?
[01:12:44]  Let me finish my point.
[01:12:45]  Let me finish my point, Jason.
[01:12:47]  As I was saying before you interrupted me, I'm not trying to dispute the use of the word mass.
[01:12:52]  What I'm trying to dispute is the attempt to now say we've got to get guns because of all the mass shootings.
[01:12:58]  The mass shootings are what justify our newfound push on, quote, gun control.
[01:13:04]  And what it is, to me, is a dodge on the rising crime rates, which have been a drag on the Democratic ticket and are going to take them down come the midterm elections in October.
[01:13:13]  It's gaslighting.
[01:13:14]  It's gaslighting.
[01:13:15]  There's not some new rash of mass shootings thanks to guns.
[01:13:19]  There's crime.
[01:13:20]  There's increasing crime in city after city, which this DOJ's own FBI has documented.
[01:13:26]  And no attempt to blame it simply on this phenomenon of bad mental health coupled with easy access to guns is going to excuse the Gascons of the world, the Chesapudines of the world, and these soft-down crime policies, including zero bail.
[01:13:40]  That's my point.
[01:13:43]  So how many people do need to die in a mass shooting for it to be just?
[01:13:46]  Why don't you answer my question since you're here as the guest?
[01:13:48]  What was the question?
[01:13:48]  Was there a question?
[01:13:50]  Yeah.
[01:13:50]  I thought we're here to have a dialogue, Megan.
[01:13:52]  I thought you were.
[01:13:52]  Yeah, and I'm shooting the point at you, and I'm asking for your reaction.
[01:13:55]  Okay.
[01:13:58]  I think you're conflating a lot of different issues in a very partisan way to get ratings.
[01:14:03]  That's bullshit.
[01:14:04]  Don't question my motives.
[01:14:06]  This is where you turn out to be a message.
[01:14:07]  I think that's what I said.
[01:14:08]  That's what I think.
[01:14:09]  I think you're conflating a lot of issues here.
[01:14:11]  I think we need to have a realistic discussion about gun control in this country.
[01:14:14]  No, no, no.
[01:14:15]  Let me just stop.
[01:14:16]  Let's have a stop.
[01:14:17]  You said that there was something.
[01:14:18]  I'm giving you my honest analysis.
[01:14:19]  And for you to say that I am misleading the audience for ratings is a prick thing to say.
[01:14:24]  You don't know me.
[01:14:25]  All right.
[01:14:25]  I've made my name and I've made my business based on honest journalism.
[01:14:29]  I realize you may be number 26 worldwide, but you've never done real journalism at the level I have in your life.
[01:14:34]  So I don't need a lecture from you about ratings.
[01:14:37]  I am here to deliver honest information to my audience.
[01:14:39]  That's what I'm doing.
[01:14:40]  You can disagree with my point without getting personal.
[01:14:43]  How many people have to die in a mass shooting as a journalist?
[01:14:46]  We're both journalists.
[01:14:47]  How many people have to die in a mass shooting for it to be considered mass for you?
[01:14:51]  That's not the discussion.
[01:14:53]  I don't know.
[01:14:53]  Six, seven, eight.
[01:14:54]  Where do you put the line?
[01:14:56]  I don't know.
[01:14:56]  But you know nothing about me.
[01:14:57]  Do you know my stance on guns?
[01:14:59]  I don't.
[01:15:00]  That's why I'm asking you the question.
[01:15:01]  You brought it up because you came into this with an idea that I might be opposed to your positions on January 6th on guns and so on.
[01:15:10]  You don't know anything about me.
[01:15:12]  You don't know anything about me.
[01:15:13]  Let me give it to David.
[01:15:14]  David actually asked you answering.
[01:15:15]  You might actually, let me give it to David and might actually engage on the point I'm trying to raise.
[01:15:20]  Do you think there's any validity to that?
[01:15:22]  That now we're trying to deflect from the problems of soft on crime DAs and zero bail policies with gun control, mass shootings.
[01:15:30]  That's the real issue.
[01:15:32]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:15:33]  I mean, just let's take the city of Chicago.
[01:15:35]  You had over 200 homicides this year, mostly gun deaths since the beginning of the year.
[01:15:40]  No one was talking about that before Uvalde.
[01:15:43]  Now they're trying to rebrand that as, you know, a mass shooting problem.
[01:15:47]  You know, handguns are already illegal in Chicago.
[01:15:49]  That's not a gun control problem.
[01:15:50]  That's a gang problem.
[01:15:51]  It's a crime problem.
[01:15:53]  Crime has been out of control.
[01:15:54]  And you've got a decarceral DA named Kim Foxer who's pushing the same policies as Gasco in LA or Boudin in San Francisco.
[01:16:01]  So they're actually trying to rebrand, let's say, heinous but conventional murders, violence, gang violence as some sort of mass shooting to put it in a different category.
[01:16:13]  They never expressed a concern about these crimes until Uvalde.
[01:16:18]  Now, Uvaldi is a separate thing.
[01:16:20]  We do have a problem of these young, disturbed, psychotic young men who go off and do these mass shootings, who kill dozens of people.
[01:16:30]  Those are a problem.

=== The Twitter Termite Problem (15:33) ===

[01:16:32]  And we can have a conversation about how to control that on our pod.
[01:16:36]  We talked about red flag laws.
[01:16:38]  We talked about background checks.
[01:16:40]  I'm in favor of those things.
[01:16:41]  So I think we should address this problem of psychos getting guns and committing these mass shootings.
[01:16:47]  But what's happening in our cities where handguns are already illegal, that is not a mass shooting problem.
[01:16:53]  That is a crime problem.
[01:16:54]  And progressives didn't care until they figured out a way to rebrand that as a gun control problem.
[01:17:00]  Yep.
[01:17:01]  That's exactly it.
[01:17:02]  Thank you for engaging.
[01:17:04]  Stand by.
[01:17:04]  I'm going to squeeze in a break and we'll be back with more with David and Jason on Elon Musk and Twitter and much, much more right after this.
[01:17:15]  All right, so let's talk Elon Musk because this week people started to get nervous when Elon suggested that he has the right to back out of this deal.
[01:17:25]  And then people started to ask, well, does that mean he wants to back out of the deal?
[01:17:29]  And there was a suggestion doesn't necessarily mean he's doing that.
[01:17:32]  And then Tesla might be facing some layoffs.
[01:17:36]  And then it was released that Elon had said he has a very bad feeling about the economy.
[01:17:40]  And this leads a lot of folks who want to see this sale go through to be concerned that it won't.
[01:17:46]  And a lot of folks who don't want to see it go through, feeling hopeful that it won't.
[01:17:50]  Jason, I understand that you actually have helped raise funds for Elon's Twitter buy.
[01:17:56]  So what can you tell us?
[01:17:59]  So just a little fact check on that.
[01:18:01]  I have a tiny allocation I was given to invest in the company, but I'm not helping him raise funds, nor does he need any help.
[01:18:06]  You know, he's got his own money to buy it.
[01:18:09]  You know, I don't have any inside information other than what Elon says on Twitter.
[01:18:16]  And he's been pretty vocal about it.
[01:18:17]  We also had him at the all-in summit where he said, listen, if the bot problem is less than 5%, as Twitter has said in all their SEC filings, okay, great.
[01:18:25]  If it's more than that, well, it's kind of like, I think he used the analogy of termites in your house.
[01:18:31]  And so, you know, in my experience, you can take Elon at his word.
[01:18:34]  You know, if the termite problem is 5%, let's say in the house, okay, great.
[01:18:38]  We agreed on a price.
[01:18:39]  But if the termite problem is 50% or 25%, and I think anybody who uses Twitter at this point or has done some research into it would say it's probably more than 5%, then either it's a breach of the deal or maybe the deal should be at a different price.
[01:18:59]  And so I think there's a chance the deal happens.
[01:19:02]  If I had to handicap it, there's a chance the deal happens.
[01:19:05]  There's a chance the deal happens at a lower price, or there's a chance that there's some sort of legal action.
[01:19:11]  And so it's kind of up in the air right now.
[01:19:15]  I think Twitter is in a really bad place because maybe they could have been misleading their shareholders all this time.
[01:19:23]  And so, you know, if they can't give him the information, because it seems like he's trying to get some information when you do these deals, you have information rights.
[01:19:32]  So in that latest SEC filing, he asked for more information and they're not giving it to him.
[01:19:36]  So that certainly does not look good for Twitter.
[01:19:39]  But again, I don't have any inside information and I just had a small allocation to invest in it.
[01:19:44]  So I don't have any inside information.
[01:19:47]  I'm just giving the handicapping of what I read publicly.
[01:19:49]  No, I got it.
[01:19:50]  And can you handicap it?
[01:19:52]  Can you put an odds on it?
[01:19:53]  You know, odds that this thing will go through.
[01:19:55]  I think it's starting to feel like the deal is not going to happen to me if I had to take a guess.
[01:20:02]  Yeah.
[01:20:03]  That's not what we want to hear.
[01:20:05]  It's just one of these companies to be run by somebody reasonable.
[01:20:10]  He would be a great owner for it because he really is great at executing.
[01:20:15]  He would solve the bot problem.
[01:20:17]  I think his, you know, freedom of speech positions are, you know, classic American.
[01:20:22]  You know, we have the law and, you know, everybody deserves to, you know, have their opinion.
[01:20:29]  Even if you don't like it, it's hard to hear certain things.
[01:20:33]  You and I just had a little flare up ourselves.
[01:20:35]  Sometimes it's hard, but we have to learn to disagree with each other, right?
[01:20:38]  And do so in a productive way, hopefully.
[01:20:42]  But it's hard to be for freedom of speech when some things are uncomfortable.
[01:20:47]  Now, there is in a private company, obviously, a zone of you get to decide what people do in a private company.
[01:20:53]  You get to decide what happens on your podcast.
[01:20:55]  I get to decide what happens on mine.
[01:20:57]  So there'll be some things that'll be judgment calls.
[01:20:59]  Like, for example, sharing information on people's location.
[01:21:03]  Gawker famously would stalk celebrities in New York and tell you the location of people.
[01:21:07]  This is kind of dangerous, but perhaps not illegal, right?
[01:21:10]  And so, you know, the law has to catch up.
[01:21:14]  And there's this other phenomenon with these new systems where things can trend.
[01:21:18]  And so the fact that, you know, some piece of speech that might be legal, but also, you know, could be deadly or could be dangerous can trend and could become the number one story and could be exposed to millions of people, like somebody's home address or somebody's, you know, a phone number, you know, and there's obviously varying degrees of the fallout from these things.
[01:21:40]  You know, that does make this unique.
[01:21:43]  And so it's not just standing on a soapbox in the middle of Times Square.
[01:21:46]  You know, you could all of a sudden have a picture, you know, shared with millions of people, as we've seen tragically, you know, when people have their phones hacked or whatever.
[01:21:55]  So it's very complex.
[01:21:57]  He's the greatest entrepreneur of our time.
[01:22:00]  And so it'd be great to see him take this on.
[01:22:02]  That being said, you know, it's the deal looks like it's very challenged right now.
[01:22:09]  And so it does.
[01:22:11]  Life's a negotiation.
[01:22:12]  So we'll see.
[01:22:12]  I think it's something that has to occur.
[01:22:15]  I don't know.
[01:22:16]  Initially, the Twitter board seemed, David, to be like, no, we don't get out.
[01:22:20]  We don't want Elon Musk coming in here.
[01:22:22]  Get out.
[01:22:23]  And then the price was so good.
[01:22:25]  I don't know if they were forced to accept or they just did accept, but in any event, they got a good deal on paper.
[01:22:31]  And now I don't know how they'd feel.
[01:22:33]  Do you think they want it to fall apart?
[01:22:36]  And secondly, so two-part question.
[01:22:37]  Do you think they want it to fall apart on the Twitter end?
[01:22:40]  And secondly, I read that Elon waived his right to due diligence.
[01:22:45]  And if that's true, does he really get to unwind the deal if the bot numbers are understated?
[01:22:51]  Okay, so on the first question, what does the Twitter management want?
[01:22:56]  And initially, they fought Elon really hard on this.
[01:23:00]  And it was pretty clear they didn't want to work for him.
[01:23:02]  It was also pretty clear that Elon was going to replace a lot of them.
[01:23:06]  So there's a fair amount of antipathy between Twitter's current management and Elon.
[01:23:11]  And I suspect that management, if the deal doesn't happen, would probably breathe a sigh of relief.
[01:23:16]  I don't think shareholders would.
[01:23:17]  I think shareholders want the deal to go through, including the shareholders on the board who have major positions.
[01:23:24]  But I suspect that management probably would rather just remain independent and not have to report to Elon and they can continue the content moderation policies they want.
[01:23:33]  And they've even during this period have basically, there's been a lot of leaked content that basically shows that they're kind of doubling down on their on their censorship.
[01:23:41]  So I think that's what's going on there.
[01:23:44]  In terms of the diligence and what Elon is required to do, I think Elon's position on this, based on what he said publicly, is: look, I relied on their public filings and public statements.
[01:23:57]  So even if he waived his right to conduct sort of independent due diligence, he relied on what they've said publicly.
[01:24:04]  And what they've said publicly for many years is that the bot problem is 5% or less.
[01:24:09]  And he's saying, listen, when I sample my own account and I look at my followers or I look at my own tweets and the likes and reactions they get, the bots seem to be a lot more than 5%.
[01:24:20]  So I need you, Twitter's management, to answer my reasonable questions about this.
[01:24:25]  And Twitter has refused to.
[01:24:27]  So now, if the deal falls apart over this, then what happens is Twitter's going to have to make a decision.
[01:24:33]  Do we sue Elon Musk for the billion-dollar kill fee that he would otherwise be obligated to pay?
[01:24:38]  And if they do, Twitter, Elon's defense against that is going to be, but you didn't give me all the information.
[01:24:44]  You didn't answer my questions.
[01:24:45]  And then they're going to have to go to trial.
[01:24:47]  And I think the issue will very quickly become what did Twitter's management know about the bot problem and when did they know it?
[01:24:56]  And why didn't they basically answer Elon's questions?
[01:24:59]  And what will the discovery show?
[01:25:01]  If the discovery in that lawsuit shows a chain of correspondence between Twitter execs saying, hey, we have a big bot problem here, that would look very, very bad for them.
[01:25:11]  And so I think if this deal doesn't happen, I think there could be a lawsuit and that lawsuit could be very embarrassing for Twitter executives.
[01:25:18]  I mean, could there be a securities fraud lawsuit against him by the government?
[01:25:21]  Against not him, against Twitter.
[01:25:23]  I mean, if they're misstating this problem in their SEC filings, they could have bigger problems than a lawsuit against Elon.
[01:25:29]  Right.
[01:25:29]  And that would all come down to the discovery.
[01:25:32]  You know, what did Twitter executives know?
[01:25:33]  When did they know it?
[01:25:34]  And what does the discovery show?
[01:25:36]  I mean, are there emails between Twitter executives saying that, hey, we have a bot problem?
[01:25:41]  Well, don't look into that.
[01:25:42]  Don't fight that too hard because it would hurt our revenue.
[01:25:45]  Elon's contention is: look, the reason why this is important is 70% of Twitter's revenue is brand advertising.
[01:25:53]  And the ad rates depend on how many eyeballs are looking at that advertising.
[01:25:58]  And if, I don't know, 25% of the eyeballs are fake because they're actually bot accounts, then a lot of Twitter's ad revenue could go away.
[01:26:06]  So, you know, is there correspondence, is there discovery within Twitter showing that people were aware of this problem and didn't want to look too closely into it because it could have an adverse impact on revenue?
[01:26:18]  By the way, I'm not saying that's the case, but that's the kind of liability that I think Twitter would face.
[01:26:23]  And it will be really interesting to see if the deal falls apart, does Twitter sue Elon and subject itself to that kind of exposure?
[01:26:33]  Or do they just let it kind of quietly go away?
[01:26:36]  Go away.
[01:26:37]  And I think the answer to that question will tell you how much exposure Twitter executives feel like they have on that question.
[01:26:44]  Do you also think, are you also as doubtful as Jason that it will go through at this point?
[01:26:50]  Well, it seems like they're at this impasse where Elon is saying, I need this information.
[01:26:56]  I can't proceed without it.
[01:26:57]  And Twitter is basically saying they won't give it to him.
[01:26:59]  So unless this impasse gets resolved, I think the deal probably does fall apart.
[01:27:04]  Although, like you, like Jason, I'd like to see Elon buy the company.
[01:27:10]  I think David nailed it, Megan.
[01:27:12]  When you look at the discovery process, they've been talking about the bot problem for a decade.
[01:27:17]  So there'll be every level of executive talking about this.
[01:27:20]  And certainly, you know, the number 5% is like a very specific round number and less than 5% doesn't seem very credible.
[01:27:30]  And the exposure to Twitter of taking this to the mat would be so great to have misstated that for so many quarters that the shareholder lawsuits and the chaos from that, executives' liability, if they were lying or if they were misrepresenting in any way, I mean, it would just cause utter chaos.
[01:27:51]  I mean, and we're talking for years of lawsuits that would take, I don't know, David, you're the attorney here, but I mean, the amount of time it would take for this to all hash out would be measured in years.
[01:28:02]  And in the meantime, that company is already mismanaged and not running properly.
[01:28:06]  And so this kind of distraction for management would, I think, lead them to say, hey, listen, you can be a shareholder in the company.
[01:28:14]  Maybe we do a modest breakup fee, like, you know, $100 million or something.
[01:28:18]  And let's all move on as friends.
[01:28:20]  And we love having you on the platform.
[01:28:22]  And it didn't work out, but that's okay.
[01:28:23]  We believe there's a bright future for Twitter.
[01:28:26]  Or, you know, hey, here's another price, $34 and 20 cents or something.
[01:28:30]  Right.
[01:28:31]  Or I mean, or Twitter's board or Twitter could renegotiate, or they could be willing to renegotiate, or Elon could renegotiate.
[01:28:37]  So neither side is obligated to renegotiate, but that would be a pretty good outcome.
[01:28:42]  I mean, obviously, the stock market and really the market for growth stocks has gone down precipitously since they worked out this deal.
[01:28:50]  I think Twitter's own share price is down something like 30%.
[01:28:54]  If I were on the board, knowing everything I know about this management team and how distracted they are and how many issues there are at the company, wouldn't you rather want to take a lower price from Elon?
[01:29:05]  Remember, his premium is relative to Twitter share price and the stock market in general.
[01:29:11]  If the overall stock market has declined because of higher interest rates and inflation, is it really that bad an outcome to renegotiate the price down to reflect where the market is today?
[01:29:22]  If I were on the board, I'd be seriously thinking about that option.
[01:29:25]  Why wouldn't they come under?
[01:29:27]  Why wouldn't they give him the information, David?
[01:29:29]  That to me is a very strange moment in time.
[01:29:31]  He's asking for information, they won't give it.
[01:29:33]  That to me seems bizarre.
[01:29:35]  If they really do want to finish the deal, wouldn't they want the information?
[01:29:38]  Well, they want to give him the information.
[01:29:40]  I suspect they don't want to open the door where if they basically give him the information he's looking for, first of all, the answers may not be very good, or the answers may be that they either might be the wrong answers or they might not be very detailed.
[01:29:53]  Elon's asking for details about their methodology.
[01:29:56]  How did you come up with the 5%?
[01:29:58]  Maybe they don't have a good answer to that.
[01:30:01]  Maybe they don't want to be subjected to scrutiny on that point.
[01:30:04]  But I suspect that so that's part of it.
[01:30:06]  And then I think also if they, maybe they're thinking that, hey, if we start answering his questions here, we're kind of waiving our argument that you've given up your due diligence rights.
[01:30:18]  Well, and what to what extent, I mean, what's your thought on the argument that this is just protectual?
[01:30:24]  That Elon saw what you saw, that the stock market fell.
[01:30:28]  Tesla, I never know how to characterize what's happening with the Tesla stock because you see like, it fell 10%.
[01:30:32]  And then the next day it's like, no, that was bullshit.
[01:30:34]  It didn't.
[01:30:34]  Wait, what do you mean?
[01:30:35]  I don't get it.
[01:30:36]  It either fell or it didn't fall.
[01:30:37]  Anyway, but they say Tesla may or may not have been struggling.
[01:30:41]  And he announced this week that there could be, there were going to be, I think, potentially as much as 10% of the staff being cut and then a hiring freeze as well.
[01:30:51]  But then he kind of backtracked on it.
[01:30:53]  So, I mean, like, truly, I have no idea what the status is of Tesla, but the argument is that this is all protextual because he's losing money and he can't.
[01:31:01]  He can't lose money at Tesla and lose money at Twitter.
[01:31:04]  And he's looking for an excuse to get out of the deal.
[01:31:07]  Well, as of this moment, Tesla's market cap is $743 billion.
[01:31:11]  So it's still a very highly valued company.
[01:31:14]  And Elon is still, if not the richest, one of the top few richest people in the world.
[01:31:19]  So he still has the means to do this.
[01:31:22]  He has backers.
[01:31:23]  It's not only his money.
[01:31:25]  So I think Elon has the means to do this.
[01:31:27]  I don't think he has to walk away.
[01:31:28]  It's not like he's in distress or anything based on what's happening in the market.
[01:31:31]  So, you know, if Twitter wants to maintain or the idea that this is a pretext, they're going to have to sue Elon.
[01:31:41]  They're going to have to sue him to go get that billion dollar kill fee.
[01:31:45]  And we know what Elon's response is going to be.
[01:31:47]  He's going to have a counter complaint and it's going to start this discovery process.
[01:31:51]  And my guess is that Twitter doesn't want to go there.
[01:31:54]  If this deal falls apart, my guess is they just walk away.
[01:31:57]  In discovery, you got to lift the dress up.
[01:31:59]  There's no way around it.
[01:32:01]  As uncomfortable as it may be, you got to show the details.
[01:32:03]  And that's where it gets very ugly.

=== Tech Layoffs and Recession Fears (03:18) ===

[01:32:05]  Can I ask you before we go on a more expansive question about big tech?
[01:32:09]  Because there have been layoffs there.
[01:32:11]  There's a headline today about, I think it's Microsoft slowing the growth of a cybersecurity venture.
[01:32:16]  Projected growth was 4,000 jobs.
[01:32:18]  Now it's just 200 jobs being added.
[01:32:21]  Lyft says giving this lower than expected recovery and so on.
[01:32:26]  We're going to significantly slow hiring.
[01:32:29]  Tesla, again, I mentioned what he said, Coinbase hiring pause.
[01:32:33]  Now, of course, crypto has been hit hard, but they're on a hiring pause for new and backfill roles for the foreseeable future and rescinding a number of accepted offers.
[01:32:41]  So are we looking at a larger big tech slowdown, you know, mass layoffs, recessionary type attitude right now?
[01:32:50]  Oh, yes.
[01:32:51]  I mean, that's already happening.
[01:32:53]  I think we, the tech stocks have been in correction for the last six months and it accelerated in April and May.
[01:33:00]  And if you, Megan, if you just look at the indices, the big indices like the Dow Jones, like the SP 500, even the NASDAQ, you don't realize how hard growth stocks have been hit.
[01:33:11]  So the indices are off somewhere between 15 and 25%.
[01:33:14]  That's because they're so weighted towards these large cap companies.
[01:33:17]  But if you look at the new IPOs, the SPACs, the new listings, the software companies, sort of the high flyers from last year, they are off 60, 70, 80, even 90%.
[01:33:28]  And that has now trickled down all the way to early stage financing in Silicon Valley.
[01:33:33]  The big crossover investors like Tiger and CO2 and D1, they are out of the market.
[01:33:38]  They've pulled back funding tremendously.
[01:33:40]  And there is a recession happening in Silicon Valley already.
[01:33:43]  Companies are freezing their hiring plans.
[01:33:46]  They're conducting layoffs.
[01:33:49]  There is a real downturn already in Silicon Valley.
[01:33:53]  And I think it's sort of the canary in the coal mine for the economy as a whole.
[01:33:57]  The economy right now is on very shaky ground.
[01:34:00]  It's not going into it.
[01:34:01]  I'll give you a last word, Jason.
[01:34:02]  Well, I was going to say, the good news is, you know, the prices of the companies was unsustainable and people were hiring for scenarios a year or two out.
[01:34:13]  Salaries were a little bit out of control.
[01:34:15]  You'd have 10 offers for every executive in Silicon Valley and talent was being diluted across many different companies.
[01:34:23]  And so now when you see all the big companies, you know, go on a hiring freeze, maybe some of the smaller companies make deeper cuts, 10% or less, pretty much insignificant.
[01:34:32]  That's like a reorg, but when you see the 25% cuts, that means the company really has some fundamental problems and challenges they have to deal with.
[01:34:39]  And so, people taking this hard medicine and then correcting their balance sheets in big companies and people doing it personally means people will start to get back to work.
[01:34:47]  And we've had very low participation in terms of the economy and people going back to work and even going back to offices.
[01:34:55]  So, I think this is actually a healthy part of the process.
[01:34:58]  And I think the country will be stronger for it.
[01:35:00]  I'll predict a three or four quarter recession and then a very slow recovery into 2023.
[01:35:07]  But I don't think this is going to be cataclysmic.
[01:35:09]  I think it's going to be very similar to what happened in 2008.
[01:35:11]  Well, I hope it's not cataclysmic.
[01:35:13]  It's like you think about all the people who are already dealing with the gas prices and the grocery prices and the fears about the housing market next.
[01:35:20]  And now it's like layoffs and a recession.
[01:35:22]  It's just terrible.
[01:35:23]  You can feel the stress from here.

=== Join the Apple Podcasts Conversation (01:27) ===

[01:35:24]  You guys, thank you so much for the thought leadership and for coming on the show and for sparring and for all of it.
[01:35:29]  And look forward to hearing your reaction no matter what happens today in San Francisco.
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[01:35:36]  Thanks for having us.
[01:35:36]  Thanks for watching.
[01:35:37]  And we'll have an update for you tomorrow on what happens in those elections as well.
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[01:35:44]  It had some ups in Dallas, didn't it?
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