The Megyn Kelly Show - 20221017_bidens-strong-economy-spin-and-smears-over-ukraine

All Episodes

Previous Next

Plain Text

Oct. 17, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show

01:36:41

20221017_bidens-strong-economy-spin-and-smears-over-ukraine

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
Silicon Valley Minds React 00:01:39
	Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
	This is Kanye West, apparently buys parlor.
	And former President Obama again lecturing Democrats on cancel culture.
	He thinks they really need to dial it back because of Fox News.
	Okay, we'll play you the sound bite.
	And to react to all of this news, two of Silicon Valley's most brilliant minds.
	David Sachs is a founding member of PayPal.
	He's a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist who now runs Kraft Ventures.
	After a stint at Google, David Friedberg started the Climate Corporation, which he later reportedly sold for a billion dollars.
	Among other ventures, he now invests in startups focused on health and wellness and has all sorts of advice on how to keep your microbiome in good shape, your gut, which we're going to talk about.
	He bags a company that makes shakes and bars that actually help you lose weight.
	And he also wants you to throw away your probiotic in favor of something you may find far more disgusting.
	We're definitely going to get into that.
	Together, they are two of the four co-hosts of the very popular tech podcast, All In.
	It's not just tech, but it's big in the tech world, which just celebrated its 100th episode.
	What sets them apart from most people in Silicon Valley is they're not afraid to speak their minds.
Persistent Global Inflation 00:16:11
	Not at all.
	And they teach others to not be afraid either.
	Saxon Friedberg, welcome to the show.
	Great to have you.
	Good to be here.
	Thanks for having me.
	Welcome, David.
	We've upgraded your besties this time.
	I appreciate it.
	I love you.
	I'm not going to have the same moment that happened a few weeks ago, I promise.
	Okay, good.
	I never foresaw it devolving to the point where I was going to call him a prick, but that's kind of where it went.
	And I later found out you guys call him that all the time.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, we are surprised.
	As much as I'm used to it, it was still a little cringe-worthy to watch him on your show.
	He was a little cringy.
	Yeah, I felt the same.
	Okay, so let's talk about cringy as long as we're on the subject.
	And that is the president of the United States.
	I mean, truly is a let them eat cake moment.
	Downing his chocolate ice cream again.
	Like, why is he always eating the ice cream?
	It's just so weird.
	He's like, you know, the slurring jello juggle chip, and now he is eating it again, telling us we're fine.
	We're fine.
	Now, the economy is not just strong, it's strong as hell.
	Here's a little bit of that, just in case anybody missed it.
	Sat too.
	I'm not concerned about the trends in the power.
	I'm concerned about the rest of the world.
	That makes sense.
	Can you explain that?
	Yeah, our economy is strong as hell.
	Inflation is worldwide, of course off everywhere else, at least in the United States.
	So, the problem is, I think the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries, not so much happens.
	And that's how it's worldwide inflation has consequential worldwide.
	So that's this is the new line.
	We've heard this a little bit from the White House last week, too.
	It's worldwide.
	You know, we're like, we're, we're the thinnest kin kid at Fat Camp.
	You know, it's like, we're bad, but we're not as bad off as the others.
	Economy's strong as hell.
	And then last week he also added, oh, and inflation, while it may be at 8.2% up September over September, year to year, it's really only up 2%.
	If you just look at the last three months on an annualized basis, my eyes started to glaze over, but I recognized a lie when I heard it.
	So what do you guys make of that claim?
	You want to go for your buddy?
	Yeah, go for it.
	Well, I think this claim the economy is strong is going to be the inflation is transitory of this year.
	I think the administration, when it gets bad, economic news has a tendency to want to spend it.
	Obviously, we have an election coming up in a few weeks.
	So they're spending it the best they can.
	But the truth is that there's a lot of weakness in this economy.
	In fact, it's scary how weak it is.
	And I think most smart investors and economists at this point expect a recession next year.
	We're already technically in a recession.
	We've had two quarters of negative GDP growth, but they're expecting economic conditions to worsen significantly next year and just to see unemployment go up as a result of these interest rate hikes that we've had, which again have been driven by inflation.
	So the economy is very shaky.
	I think people are feeling it.
	And that's why you're seeing all of a sudden the generic ballot shift very dramatically towards Republicans for this election.
	Just to upgrade viewers on that, there was a New York Times Sienna poll showing the Republicans that have a now four-point advantage on the generic ballot.
	When they have just a one-point advantage on the generic ballot, they tend to crush in the midterms because they tend to underpoll.
	So now showing a four-point advantage is very big, very significant this close to midterms.
	Go ahead, David.
	No, I mean, I was going to say, I think that there is a frailty and fragility to the global economy right now.
	It is true.
	In the last couple of weeks, the U.S. dollar has rallied unlike any other time in history against nearly every other major foreign currency.
	And that's because all of those global economies are underperforming.
	There are significant inflationary pressures and recessionary pressures at once around the world.
	And we do just happen to have the shortest straw.
	The problem is we end up typically having to step in as the United States to bolster and safeguard the rest of the world's economies.
	And that means that we're going to have a significant cost ahead and a significant trade problem going into the next year that is almost certainly going to hit the P ⁇ L, the profit line of nearly every major U.S. corporation, fueling our recessionary problem.
	And so this isn't just a, hey, we're great because we don't just buy and sell goods to ourselves.
	We buy and sell goods around the world.
	And so the global economy collapsing or being very shaky right now and the U.S. dollar rallying is not good for us.
	And it does mean that we are going to face a real headwind going into 2023.
	So it's a little bit of a, you know, a lipstick on a pig kind of moment.
	How about this lie about the 2% inflation?
	Because honestly, those numbers hurt my head and they really make me want to just shut off.
	I know it's a lie, but I can't totally figure out how it's a lie.
	But he's looking at just the last three months and saying if you annualize the, I guess, the percentage increase, I don't know, but it's not true.
	We're up basically 8% year over year when it comes to our prices.
	That's what people are feeling when they go to their grocery store, when they pay their electric bill, when they go to the gas pump even still.
	So what is he saying?
	It's only 2% when we look down at the numbers and we could see it's 8.2%.
	Inflation is always measured on a year-over-year basis, Megan.
	So this idea that you can somehow measure it on a three-month basis is just an arbitrary timeframe they've picked because those three months sort of mitigate the problem.
	But the problem is even worse than what you're saying.
	Yes, on a year-over-year basis, it's over 8%.
	But you got to remember that last year around this time, that inflation was getting bigger and bigger.
	So if you remember last summer, when we first got that shock inflation print of 5.1%, it went up to in the sevens by around this time last year.
	The expectation was that as we started to lap a bigger and bigger number from last year, that this year's inflation number would come down because again, you're measuring, you're comping on a year-over-year basis.
	So what's actually happened is inflation has not gone down.
	It stayed above 8%, even though it's 8% above a much bigger number last year.
	So price levels just keep increasing.
	This is not slowing down and the problem is not going away.
	It's persistent rather than transitory.
	And this implies that interest rates need to keep going up.
	And then that has a huge impact on the real economy.
	If I could just add one more point about this idea that inflation is happening all over the world, there is some truth to that, but I think it's important to understand that we exported a lot of this inflation and we did this in a couple of ways.
	First, we bought into this whole idea of MMT, modern monetary theory, this idea that the government could just keep printing money and there'd be no comeuppance for that.
	There'd be no consequence to that.
	So we exported this doctrine intellectually.
	And then on top of it, when the U.S. persisted in these zero interest rate policies for so long and quantitative easing, other central banks had to do the same thing.
	Otherwise, their currencies would rise against the dollar, making their exports extremely unattractive relative to American exports.
	And so other central banks basically copied our policies.
	And that's why you're seeing this sort of inflation all over the world.
	It also doesn't help that we have persisted in this policy of no diplomacy towards the Ukraine war.
	And that's exacerbated all sorts of problems with the cost of energy.
	We'll get to that.
	I definitely want to get to Ukraine, but on the modern monetary theory, I mean, that in defense of Biden, that's been pursued for many, many years now by the U.S.
	Yeah, you've had this idea of ZERP or zero interest rate policy since 2008.
	But what happened is that originally in 2008, we had this sort of global financial crisis.
	We broke the glass in case of emergency and the government started doing extraordinary things like quantitative easing, effectively bringing the real interest rate below zero.
	The problem, I think, was not breaking the glass when there was a genuine emergency, but the fact that the Fed persisted in this policy for roughly a decade after the crisis had passed.
	And even last year, even last summer, after you got that surprise inflation print, Powell and the Fed persisted in this policy of buying U.S. bonds.
	They bought something like $160 billion of U.S. bonds after last summer.
	So they were basically continuing to print money and flood the zone with liquidity, even after the inflation problem had become clear.
	And the question you have to ask is why?
	Powell was up for renomination.
	He is the only Trump official who was renominated by Biden.
	It went through in November, but they were already talking about it starting in the second half of last year.
	The administration had come out with this line last summer that inflation was transitory.
	Powell bought into that, hook line and sinker.
	And you have to imagine that part of the reason is he wanted Biden's renomination.
	Well, he sailed through.
	He's the only Republican to sail through as a, again, as a nominee by Biden because he got online with, he got on board this party line.
	And the result is the Fed made this problem enormously worse by continuing to print money into an inflationary spiral.
	Freeberg, they could see it coming if they just read the tea leaves because it was, I mean, those who raised challenges to this modern monetary policy had been doing it for quite some time and said at some point those chickens are going to come home to roost.
	And now you have the pandemic and the slowdown of businesses, the intentional lockdowns.
	And so that's what had a lot of fair-minded economists saying it's it's it's coming.
	Like we need to stop the spending now because all these things are going to sort of peak in an inflationary crisis.
	And yet we were told over and over, no, no, it's transitory.
	Don't believe your lion eyes.
	And even now, even now, it's, I know it's an overused term, but the gaslighting of the economy is strong as hell.
	What's interesting to me is they're not buying it.
	Like you can't hide the truth from the American people.
	That's why the New York Times Siena poll is so strong for the Republicans.
	It's the economy.
	In fact, what they said was, let me get the number.
	This is likely voters, by the way.
	So it's the only kind of poll that matters.
	Don't pay any attention to registered voters at this point.
	All that matters is likely.
	Economic concerns were the most important issues facing America.
	And the number who believe that has leaped since July from 36% in July to 44%.
	There's nothing close.
	It's far higher than any other issue.
	Everything else is down in the single digits.
	It is the economy stupid.
	So they're not believing transitory economy strong as hell.
	They're not believing any of this.
	Yeah, I mean, Stan Druckenmiller, Larry Summers were banging the table last summer, declaring that this policy is ineffective and counterproductive, and no one listened.
	And now you can actually see Larry Summers effectively going rogue.
	And despite his deep-seated connections back to the White House and current kind of economists sitting there, he's kind of writing his own op-eds trying to get someone to listen to the policy changes that are needed and the forecast ahead.
	And it's really challenging to watch because these are some of the smartest minds and historically been proven over and over again to be kind of the best policy advisors on these topics.
	And they've not been listened to.
	I'll say, if you zoom back a second, I would argue that we're still coming out of or being fueled by the 2008 global financial crisis.
	We really took on this idea of quantitative easing at scale and almost normalized it as behavior coming out of that where we saw the Fed actually build up a balance sheet and start to buy bonds and try and fuel the debt market to support economic growth.
	And it became this accelerated behavior in the pandemic because we'd done it before in 2008.
	We were still sitting at zero interest rates from 2008 or very low interest rates in 2008.
	And then there was nowhere else to go and the COVID pandemic hit.
	And then that normal behavior got accelerated.
	And now it's become a real crisis and a real problem.
	If you look back historically, debt has been used to fuel economic growth.
	If you can borrow money and invest it in something that creates a productive system of taking an asset in and making something more valuable out the other end, debt makes sense.
	You grow the economy, you build more value, people are willing to spend money on new goods and services.
	The problem is if you have too much debt, then the economy can keep up with.
	Then you have inflation and you actually have recession.
	And that's what we're now facing, where we've tried to artificially grow our economy by using debt to create businesses, create jobs.
	But guess what?
	The economy can only grow at a certain natural rate.
	And there's only so much new value to be created each year.
	And so instead, prices are shooting up and jobs are now declining.
	And we've simply got too much debt.
	The United States is sitting with $31 trillion of federal debt and at a 5% interest rate.
	That ends up being more debt service than we've ever seen.
	spending $800 billion a year on debt service right now.
	That could skyrocket to $1.5 trillion, which is over a third of the federal budget each year going into next year.
	It's a scary position to be in.
	It's a scary place to be.
	And we really do have a global economy that is addicted to debt.
	And it's creating all of these bubbles, these asset bubbles, and these services that don't actually create value.
	The financial services industry in 2008 took all of the free debt that they got.
	and they inflated the cost of houses and they inflated the cost of mortgage-backed securities and they took on more risk.
	And it looked like the economy was growing.
	There were all these new services popping up.
	And at the end of the day, you didn't actually create new value for the economy.
	You just increased prices.
	And that's where we are sitting today.
	And it's really scary going into next year, continuing to spend like we were like we are with our federal deficit growing every year and 5% interest rates on $30 trillion of debt means we as a federal government need to spend a trillion five a year just to cover debt service.
	And, you know, we really need to kind of at some point face austerity like this.
	Let me ask the basic question there.
	So is that why, despite the Fed now hiking rates over and over and over, it's like every time you turn around, now they're hiking them after not having done so in all that time.
	Is that why it's not doing much?
	Because I mean, the inflation numbers keep continue to grow.
	You would think that it would have some sort of measurable effect, but I assume it would be even worse if the Fed were not doing that.
	But this is what they're up against, what you're talking about.
	Yeah, let me say one thing on kind of the curve of inflation because everything doesn't inflate together at the same time.
	So the first thing we saw inflate was sort of hard commodities and soft commodities, things like energy and agricultural products and metals and so on.
	And those are easy because you can deflate them later.
	So, you know, the prices go up and down all the time.
	But then suddenly businesses start getting addicted to the revenue of selling higher priced commodities and they start to raise their prices.
	And then eventually their service providers raise prices.
	So the last part of the inflationary cycle is the services part of the economy.
	So now the accountants and the lawyers and everyone's wages start to go up.
	And when that happens, inflation becomes sticky.
	It's a lot harder to go back from inflation once everyone is earning 30% more and all the accountants and the lawyers and all the service providers that aren't selling a physical good are charging 30, 40% more.
	And at that point, it's harder to kind of recede back and decline.
	And that's why if you do it too late, if you start to raise rates too late, and yeah, now the economy, the commodity prices are all starting to come down a little bit, but the services have already raised their prices.
Austerity and Wealth Hits 00:05:41
	And so now this is becoming, how do we catch it?
	How do we keep it from becoming a wildfire problem?
	You know, I looked at this politically, David Sachs, and thought he'll find a way before the midterms to get these numbers ticking down the right direction.
	Now, maybe I'm just too much of a believer in the political savvy of the people who got him elected.
	But now I'm asking myself, are they just playing a longer game?
	Are they going to just take the hit on the House?
	And now at this point, you'd have to say, perhaps the Senate and just work on saving the White House?
	Could there be a two-year plan that ratchets down these numbers considerably so he's got something to run on or some Democrat does?
	I just think the problem has gotten so big now that they just can't cover it up.
	I mean, for the last few months, they've been releasing oil from the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try and bring down the price of energy before the midterms.
	But there's so much inflation now in the economy.
	It's not just energy.
	It's also sort of this core, this non-energy component.
	And the problem now is so big that I just don't think they can do anything about it.
	I mean, remember, Biden spent so much money.
	First, you had that.
	I think this problem all started.
	MMT goes back a while, like we talked about.
	But if you talk about Biden's political problem, it really started when he passed that $2 trillion American rescue plan.
	This was the sort of COVID relief bill that we didn't need because COVID was basically over.
	This is when Larry Summers first sounded the alarm bell.
	This is in the spring of last year, and he sounded the alarm bell that this could cause inflation.
	And that's why when inflation happened a few months later, the administration was so eager to dismiss it as transitory because they said Larry had been crazy.
	So, politically, they didn't want to acknowledge they might have caused this.
	And again, that I think caused Powell to get on board with this party line.
	And he waited six months longer than he should have to raise interest rates and control the problem.
	And now we have a wildfire that's burning out of control and they just can't cover it up anymore.
	So, I don't think there is a good answer to this.
	I think we're headed for a very severe recession last year.
	And I think the bill is coming due not just for all the spending over the last couple of years, but really over the last decade.
	And I think we're in for a long-term period of austerity here.
	So, what does that look like for the average person listening to us right now?
	What are they going to see?
	I mean, I'll say if you see rates rise to 5%, which is likely what they'll kind of drive to.
	So, the market currently is pricing four and a half, and the market's probably off by half a point.
	So, folks think it should get to about 5%.
	The economic models indicate you should see about 6% unemployment, 7% unemployment at that level.
	And so, there could and will likely be job loss across certain sectors of the economy.
	I think the manufacturing sectors are likely going to be better supported than some of the services sectors, which is really where the first cuts are going to be made because you can kind of get more productivity out of people than you can out of a factory.
	But that means job losses.
	And I don't think that this food price and energy price problem is going to go away anytime soon.
	A lot of folks think that by raising the price of stuff, by raising rates, you have what's called demand destruction, which means people are going to, you know, it's going to be so expensive to afford stuff, people are going to buy less.
	And the reality is that there's so many elements in the supply chain now that have inflated that it's likely going to be a long time before we see a decline in food prices and energy prices, insurance prices, healthcare prices.
	And so, you know, I think one of the most prudent things to tell folks, you know, right now is we have to be very careful about overspending and individuals need to be careful about saving.
	We saw in the last consumer credit report that consumer credit spiked once again.
	I think there was a trillion eight in revolving credit now.
	And if you have a credit card balance and the interest rate spikes by, you know, 5%, it's going to be very hard to make payments.
	So, you know, in credit card rates are going to go up.
	The food prices and energy prices are not going to come shoot it rocketing back down.
	And there may be unemployment on the horizon.
	So it's a really bleak picture going into next year.
	This is reminding me, David Sachs.
	Yeah, go ahead, Seth.
	Go ahead.
	Well, just to add to that, I think in addition to the job loss, which is coming, there's also a wealth effect.
	So people have already seen their 401ks go down 20 to 30 percent.
	On top of that, I think the housing market is already starting to correct.
	So the immediate impact of interest rate hikes is on the mortgage rate.
	Right now, the 30 mortgage in California is 7.6%.
	It was something like 3% to 3.5% at the beginning of the year.
	So the cost of a mortgage has literally doubled.
	That means you can only buy roughly half as much house as you could at the beginning of the year.
	That means that the value of people's homes goes down and homes stay on the market longer.
	So the sort of the inventory piles up.
	And that's what we're starting to see right now.
	So I think that most people's source of wealth is the equity they have in their homes and the equity they have in their 401ks.
	Both of those are taking a huge hit right now.
	And so next year, you can expect that people are just going to feel a lot less wealthy.
	There's also going to be risk, increasing risk to their jobs.
	And I think people are just going to hunker down and not want to spend nearly as much next year because these economic conditions.
	And then that cascades into obviously the revenues and earnings of companies.
	And then, you know, that translates into worse financial results and so on.
	So I think that this is really going to impact the real economy.
	Right now, we're talking about sort of more financial impacts, but there will be a real impact to Main Street next year.
The Future of Labor Jobs 00:05:46
	All right.
	I have a question relating to this, but not directly on point.
	Hearing you, you know, we talked about how it sort of got started with the 2008 financial crisis, this MMT, and it's almost like a hedonism that we've been undergoing since then, you know, thinking that we have all this money that we don't really have and living high on the hog when we really shouldn't be either, both at the corporate level and at the individual level.
	And I was having a conversation with somebody who, very successful person, the other day who was suggesting to me that there's more and more corporate executives who don't want to hire from Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Princeton because these kids come in there privileged.
	They're wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
	What are you going to do for me?
	You know, they have so much choice and they need to be lured in with promises of unlimited vacation, all this stuff, right?
	And that a lot of employers are now looking more to the Midwest and schools that used to be considered more second tier because you get the guys and gals showing up in a suit and saying, what can I do for you?
	And I'm ready to work and so on.
	And I just wonder whether this world in which we're, you know, that we're about to enter, according to you guys, maybe it'll have a somewhat of a silver lining.
	Maybe we're going to get back to people who understand the value of a job and how to work hard and how not to be a smug elite prick when applying for jobs or working at them.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, could there be an upshot?
	I never even considered that this attitude we're looking at on campuses and so on may be linked to this larger economic fallacy that we've been immersed in for the past however many years.
	Yeah, I mean, the internet also is a resolving factor here, Megan.
	We see knowledge being democratized.
	People can go on YouTube.
	People can go get online educations and they can come up the ramp and be as smart and as educated and as knowledgeable as an Ivy Leaguer.
	Sure, they didn't get access to the institutional connections that, you know, have enabled success for many for generations coming out of those institutions, but they can be as smart, as capable, as well equipped as those people because of the democratization of education online now and the ability for everyone to access information.
	And I think that the other big trend is work from home, because so much of the U.S. economy now is based on a knowledge economy, meaning folks are working on computers and they're doing services online or through the phone.
	We can actually see people working from anywhere.
	I think the trend that you're pointing out is absolutely happening, which is a burgeoning economic growth engine for non-urban America, for non-institutional America, for a diversity of educational backgrounds, for diversity of work backgrounds and regional backgrounds.
	And I think you're absolutely right.
	There may be a big transition that we see because it's going to be far more cost effective to have well-educated, well-equipped people that didn't go to these Ivy Leagues that can work from different places because knowledge work allows us to do that today.
	So it's, yeah, I think there's definitely a couple of trends that are pointing in that direction.
	And who want to work, David Sachs?
	You know, like one of the co-hosts on your podcast, I was just refreshing on your bios before you guys came on, flip burgers, you know, and that Charles Koch told me that one time that they have this program where they reach out to kids and they try to help them get into the corporate, into corporate America.
	And that's really what they try to teach them is that there's no problem being a burger flipper, but you better be the best damn burger flipper McDonald's has ever seen.
	And then before you know it, you're going to be running the McDonald's.
	And then before you know it, you're going to be owning a McDonald's and so on and so forth.
	But I feel anecdotally, we're getting away from that.
	We're getting to this sort of, you know, like I say, what can you do for me culture with people seeking jobs?
	Not at my company, but at a lot of these big companies.
	I hear it from all my friends who work at the Wall Street banks, and it's disgusting to me.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that if you look at the labor force participation rate, it's still very low.
	So the number of people who could be working, who are actually working, is low.
	It's lower than it should be.
	We should have a lot more people participating in the economy.
	And part of the reason why is we've had this mentality of needing to protect people from work.
	I mean, I guess that was the whole premise behind the STEMI checks: we're going to sort of protect people from having to go out and get jobs.
	And I think that was a mistake, or at least we overdid it.
	And so that would be one offsetting benefit is if we could get more people into the labor market.
	And like you're saying, these entry-level jobs are important jobs because they begin people on the ladder of economic opportunity and working their way up.
	And there's a lot of people who might, you know, who end up becoming very successful starting off as a burger flipper at McDonald's.
	And if you try to protect them and say that they shouldn't do that job, then they'll never go on to have the type of career that they could have.
	So I think that is a silver lining, but I still think that overall, I'd rather have a sort of healthy, bullish economy than one that is retrenching and in the austerity mode.
	Yeah.
	Right, exactly.
	Wisdom tends to come hard.
	You heard David Sachs mention Ukraine and how it's affecting this.
	We're going to get into it because he's been very outspoken about the war and gotten into kind of an interesting fight with Adam Kinzinger, which is like whoever's opposed to him, I'm kind of on the side of.
	We'll talk about Kinzinger's tears and how he may be shedding them over David Sachs and Ukraine right after this.
	So let's talk Ukraine and make that understandable for people.
	I respect what you're doing online, David Sachs, because it's really crazy now.
War Hawks and Nuclear Risk 00:09:50
	Ukraine has crossed over to the area of questioning the COVID vaccines, you know, like pushback on whether this is really worth our while.
	And should we really be this far down the line of threatening nuclear war or being on the receiving end of those threats over Ukraine is now treated as the COVID started in a lab and the vaccines do more harm than good, right?
	Like that, it's in that category of information, but you're fighting the good fight.
	So how did we get there?
	And why do you feel so strongly about this?
	Well, I mean, it's even more extreme than that.
	I mean, I remember a year or two ago when I was tweeting against COVID lockdowns and getting blowback from that.
	This is 10 times worse than that in terms of the attempts by pro-Ukraine partisans and sock puppets and bots to silence dissent, to basically accuse anyone who raises a question about what we're doing over there and what the American interest is in all of this.
	And anyone who dares to suggest peace, as Elon did, he just floated a peace proposal.
	And if you do any of that, you're denounced as basically being a pro-Russian puppet.
	Even Elon was denounced by no less than Zelensky himself for this peace proposal, even though Elon's given them Starlink at an out-of-pocket cost of $80 million.
	Can you explain what that is?
	Just so for people who are.
	Yeah, Starlink is a satellite system that's given Ukraine internet access in the field remotely.
	So they would have no ability to communicate in their war effort if it weren't for Starlink.
	And yet, all Elon did was float a very reasonable peace proposal for, you know, as kind of a sort of straw man to debate on Twitter.
	And for this, he was just denounced widely by Zelensky himself and then mobs of sort of pro-Ukraine partisans who were ordering Musk to stay in his lane.
	The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany told him to F off.
	And just so people know, this is all Elon proposed.
	Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision.
	Crimea formerly a part of Russia, as it has been since 1783.
	Water supply to Crimea assured and Ukraine remains.
	Neutral.
	That's what got him to an F you from the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany.
	And not to mention Zelensky accusing Musk of supporting Russia, despite this, the SpaceX donating Starlink thing you just mentioned.
	Right.
	I mean, so basically what's happening here is that the pro-war faction, these sort of super hawkish war hawks and Ukrainian partisans are using woke cancellation tactics to basically try and shape our public discourse on this issue.
	And they're basically demonizing anyone who supports any reasonable diplomatic solution as being pro-Russian.
	We're not pro-Russian.
	I have no interest in Russia.
	I'm sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.
	Elon's donated massively to the Ukrainian cause, but I am not interested in getting in World War III over Ukraine.
	And the fact of the matter is that Ukraine is not our 51st state.
	It is not part of America.
	It is not even a treaty ally of America.
	We have no obligation to defend Ukraine.
	And we need to think about what is in our national interest, not just what's in Ukraine's national interest.
	We are a different country, and it is not in our interest to get into a direct shooting war with Russia that could lead to World War III.
	And if you merely state what I'm saying right now, you'll be roundly denounced by hordes of this sort of Ukrainian, the sort of pro-Ukrainian online Twitter mob.
	And, you know, you'll be smeared in the most extreme terms.
	In fact, there's an organized effort to do this.
	It's called NAFO, N-A-F-O, the name is the North Atlantic Fellows Organization or something like that.
	It's an online effort to basically go around the internet and basically attack anyone who expresses any of the concerns that I do about this war.
	And this includes not just, again, Ukrainian partisans and bots and sock puppets, but also a congressman, Adam Kinzinger, who came, who sort of unprovoked started attacking me, presumably because of my Jewish name.
	I don't really get it.
	And as it turns out, the founder of this NAFO effort was actually a neo-Nazi.
	So, you know, Kinzinger should really think about who he's keeping company with in terms of this online organization that he has self-enlisted in and self-identified with.
	Let me explain what you're talking about.
	You tweeted out, if one of my companies told me that it had a 25% chance of going out of business, we would drop everything and focus on that.
	Intel analysts say there's a 25% chance of nuclear war and Biden is in Oregon.
	And that was Leon Panetta who said that.
	He said it's between 20 and 25% chance now of nuclear war, which is significant.
	Yeah.
	And he's in Oregon having his ice cream.
	That's what happened.
	By the way, the president in Delaware this weekend, he gets back to the White House around noon today.
	Nothing else scheduled.
	Tomorrow, he makes remarks at one point on some lame thing.
	Nothing else scheduled.
	I mean, this is his whole week.
	Maybe he makes one appearance, nothing else scheduled.
	He is not working full-time on preventing this 25% of nuclear war.
	Then Kinzinger responds to you.
	Must be a tough existence being so afraid.
	The Ukrainians started as the underdog, but still fought, and now we'll win.
	Ole Snowflake at David Sachs is trembling as he blames America for the invasion.
	Hashtag NAFO, which as you point out, stands for North Atlantic Fellas Organization, supposedly an informal alliance of internet culture warriors, national security experts, and ordinary Twitter users who are trying to push back against Russian online disinformation.
	Or are they doing the bidding of some neo-Nazi?
	We report you decide, but that's the fight to which you are referring.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it's this really bizarre thing where now they have framed any concern about the destructive power of nuclear weapons as somehow being cowardice.
	Our entire philosophy during the Cold War, our doctrine that kept us safe for 45 years was the principle of mutually assured destruction.
	We worked very hard to avoid a hot war.
	with the Soviet Union that could lead to, that could escalate into World War III.
	And today, if you have that same concern, you are now denounced as a snowflake by this prying congressman.
	So look, I'm not ashamed to say that I am very concerned about the risk of escalating to World War III.
	That does not make me a coward.
	It makes me sane.
	And I don't really understand the insanity of this online mob that's formed to denounce anybody who is pushing back against the escalation of this war into nuclear use.
	Isn't Adam Kinzinger the one who was crying at the January 6th hearing?
	He was crying.
	Yes, that's what I'm referring to.
	But you're not allowed.
	Yeah, there he is.
	But you're not allowed to be concerned about nuclear war.
	Okay, so that's where we are.
	Meanwhile, there's an article by Jeremy Shapiro called War on the Rocks, a national security website.
	He entitles it, We Are on a Path to Nuclear War.
	This is the former director of research at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
	He's at the Brookings Institution, which is a left-wing organization, but he served in the U.S. State Department under Obama.
	And even Rich Lowry wrote a column about this op-ed, which is somewhat scary.
	Now, this is a guy on the left.
	The left now is sort of marching in lockstep for the most part behind Biden and his interventionalist policies.
	So it's interesting this guy should stand up and say, hold on, hold on, stop it.
	And he lays it out in great detail how this has become a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, which, you know, that's scary in and of itself, and says we're locked in an escalatory cycle that will eventually bring these two countries into direct conflict and then go nuclear.
	And he goes on killing millions of people and destroying much of the world.
	It's worth a read.
	But he talks about how we've already crossed a lot of Putin's so-called red lines, which turned out to be more like pink lines.
	But at some point, Putin's actually going to mean it.
	And then it's off to the races.
	And it's a scary thing to have that kind of a showdown between two huge nuclear powers.
	And he lays out exactly how it will escalate, what the next steps will be and who the diplomats will be.
	And David Sachs, I thought this played perfectly into what you tweeted out, which I wrote on my notes.
	Yes, yes, in all block letters, yes.
	You write, here's why we're in a pickle.
	Biden does what the staff tells him.
	The staff does what the media tells them.
	The media does what the Twitter mob tells them.
	And the Twitter mob is a bunch of keyboard warriors who think they suffer no consequences for their virtue signaling.
	That's what's terrifying.
	The Twitter mob may be getting us into World War III.
	Yeah, I call it woke war three because again, you have this woke virtue signaling phenomenon where everybody is playing this game to be more pure than the next person.
	And the way that you win this sort of purity contest is by expressing more and more unqualified and unlimited support for Ukraine, no matter what the consequences are.
	And that has influence.
	That influences the media and then the media influences the staff and the staff basically influences or decides for Biden.
	So we have this very scary, I think, dynamic in our society.
	We've never had a social media war before.
	And I think it could lead to a really extreme outcome here because we keep pushing for maximalist demands.
	Remember, Shapiro, the guy you cited, he worked at the State Department.
	He's a very credential person.
	Leon Panetta, who's citing a 25% risk of nuclear war, was the former director of central intelligence and a defense secretary under, I believe, Bill Clinton.
	So these are people who know what they're talking about.
	We face a very serious risk here.
	This is not just me making it up.
	This is what I'm concerned about.
	What I don't see happening in response to this risk is anybody saying, stop, let's reappraise the situation.
	Let's evaluate how we got here and let's work to find a diplomatic solution so we can step back from the spring.
Sanctions and Diplomatic Solutions 00:13:05
	Friedberg, what about the economic consequences of Ukraine?
	Because, you know, you heard David Saxon earlier say this is going to play into our economic numbers.
	But before it really starts to do a number on ours, it's going to affect our friends in Europe.
	who are dealing with this Ukraine war as well.
	And there are a lot of predictions that it's going to shake their support because the Europeans are facing a rough winter given all the sanctions that we've placed on Russia, who supplies a lot of the European oil.
	So how does Ukraine affect, for example, that New York Times Sienna poll, right, showing this huge spike in voters here in America who are worried about our economy and inflation?
	I mean, energy prices and food prices are the most obvious effects.
	We've obviously seen significant energy price spiking in Europe as well as rationing happening now.
	And around the world, we're seeing food prices spike.
	Most food is made with fertilizer.
	Fertilizer is made with natural gas to make ammonia.
	And natural gas prices have doubled and tripled.
	And so it's much more expensive to make fertilizer.
	And potash and phosphate are the other two fertilizers.
	Russia exports 20% of the world's potash.
	So these fertilizer costs have doubled and tripled in the past year, year and a half, past year.
	And that means that it's harder for farmers around the world to afford to buy fertilizer, which means less food is being grown.
	And the UN World Food Program has declared that we're marching towards 300 million incremental people that are facing undernourishment and starvation in 2023 because of the food shortages that are arising from the increment in fertilizer prices.
	And no one's really paying attention to this or thinking about it.
	But when it starts to hit, the U.S. is already spending $5 billion a year supporting the World Food Program and trying to get food to those in need around the world, but there's simply not enough food showing up.
	And so these are the moments where I think people wake up and realize, but they're a slow moving train.
	And it's much easier to have the fast moving conversation about moral superiority and who's right and who's wrong on the moral bandwagon than it is to take a look in the mirror and realizing that 300 million incremental people are about to go starving.
	That's an increase of over 50% of the starving people in the world, by the way.
	And so these are these moments where I think people start to wake up and realize, but at that point, it may be too late.
	And so the unfortunate asymmetry here is that the negative consequences and impact that might cause us to think objectively and rationally instead of emotionally about these sorts of decisions take a lot longer to resolve than the reason to kind of push forward and drive forward.
	And remember, there's no right and wrong in war.
	There's only suffering.
	Every side thinks that they're right.
	Every side thinks that they're morally correct.
	And so you can make the moral superiority and the moral argument, we need to protect and we need to defend or we need to protect ourselves and defend ourselves.
	And every side of every war has always said they're doing it for other people.
	They're doing it for the purposes of others.
	And then you kind of wake up one day and everyone's in trouble.
	And that's kind of where we're at.
	I keep thinking about President Biden saying, you just wait, wait a couple of months, and then we'll see how Putin's doing.
	When we first imposed the economic sanctions after this war first started not quite a year ago, and the reports out of Russia are Putin's doing just fine.
	His gas is being priced at astronomical levels.
	And while there's been some blowback on the Russian economy, he's gamed this out pretty savvily.
	And I'm waiting for the big surrender because we've imposed so many economic sanctions that Putin can't last another month in office.
	It's not happening.
	Well, let me say one thing on this.
	Sorry, Sachs, but when we put those economic sanctions on Russia at the beginning of this conflict, we basically made it illegal to trade in Russian securities and the stocks of Russian companies.
	And they were all delisted around the world.
	Over $600 billion of value was wiped out.
	Those shares were largely owned by pension funds and mutual funds that support retirees around the world, not by a bunch of rich people, not by a bunch of hedge fund guys.
	They were owned in retirement funds.
	And so part of our economic sanctioning of removing Russian stocks from European and U.S. listed stock exchanges caused a $600 billion wipeout in value that ultimately affected retirement accounts.
	The cost of this war has already been borne several fold more than the cost of the weapons we're sending over.
	And folks aren't even paying attention to this.
	We've also stranded over $150 billion of U.S. assets in Russia because of the sanctions.
	So I'm not an advocate for Russia.
	I'm not an advocate for the Russian economy or their businesses, but there's a significant cost to this war that we need to kind of weigh the benefit against.
	And we're not really having that conversation or that debate.
	It's a very kind of morally superior, one-shot decision.
	And these consequences are being borne by us and by people and primarily by developing nations all around the world.
	Yeah, just so just to add, just to add one idea here, the fundamental paradox of this war, Megan, is that the administration says that, and the media says that we are winning, that we've just had the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, and yet the risk of nuclear use has actually gone up, Panetta says, from this 1% to 5% number at the beginning of the war to 20% to 25% right now.
	So if we're winning the war, why is nuclear use more likely?
	And the reason is pretty obvious, which is that if the Russians cannot achieve their aims through conventional arms, they are more tempted and incentivized to turn to unconventional weapons.
	That's always been the sort of paradox here.
	And the Russians have declared that this war is absolutely existential for them.
	It was existential for them last year.
	They said that admitting Ukraine into NATO was an absolute red line for them because they cannot tolerate American weapons, troops, and bases directly on their most vulnerable border.
	And basically they said they're willing to go to war to prevent that.
	And now their entire global position is at stake and Putin's personal survival is at stake.
	So obviously this is massively existential for them.
	And so they're going to be willing to do anything to avoid a total defeat.
	And yet a total crushing defeat is the only position that the administration insists on as the, again, as the only acceptable position here.
	So we are really saying.
	Zelensky saying that.
	Zelensky is saying that too.
	Exactly.
	So we are really playing with fire here.
	We are courting disaster.
	And the problem for all these moral absolutists is that what Freeberg is saying is that war is not about moral absolutes.
	The moral absolute here is that you're either going to end up with a total Ukrainian victory or nuclear war.
	Those are basically the sort of polarities.
	If that is an unacceptably risky situation for the United States of America, I can understand why Ukrainian nationalists might take that point of view.
	That should not be our point of view.
	We need to find an off-ramp here.
	And the scary thing is Biden says, oh, we're wondering what Putin's off-ramp is going to be.
	Well, why are you talking in the passive tense?
	Why don't you give him an off-ramp?
	That's what you should be working on so we can avoid the risk of this escalating into nuclear war.
	Well, and I've seen you tweet about this too, but it's like, I love the delusion that if we can just somehow get rid of Putin, we're going to get Gavin Newsom in as the new Russian leader, right?
	The way they talk about regime change in Russia shows no understanding of Russian history whatsoever.
	Some senior intelligence folks that I spoke with told me that we really don't have a great sense of who's going to fill the void if Putin is toppled.
	And that's what's most scary about this proposition that we're facing right now.
	If he goes, we don't know who's going to fill the void, and they're going to have the largest, second-largest nuclear arsenal in the world at their disposal.
	So it's actually a very scary proposition.
	Right.
	And on top of that, if you look at who is Putin really under pressure from, it is his far right, is the hawks in his government, you know, like this Chechen leader and some of these other military figures, the military bloggers who've been questioning why did you only go in with 100 to 200,000 troops?
	Why did you go in so light?
	Why was this a special military operation instead of an all-out war?
	They basically are criticizing Putin for half measures.
	They think that Putin needs to do whatever it takes and that his big mistake was not going in heavy from the beginning.
	I know that we think Putin is Hitler, but to these people, he has not gone far enough.
	And the reality is that Putin has basically gotten rid of the liberal reformers in the government there.
	The people who are most likely to replace him are hardliners.
	Yeah, there's no Neville Chamberlain sitting on deck waiting to take over.
	All right, let me pause it there.
	Quick break.
	We'll come right back.
	Much, much more to go over with the guys.
	And don't forget, you guys, that if you would like to listen to the show and you're driving your car, you're putting your makeup on or you're running your errands, you can follow and download us on Apple Spotify, Pandora, or Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast for free, or go to youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly if you'd like to watch it.
	We'll be right back.
	Elektroimportøren.
	Hvis du har tenkt å fikse uterommet i sommeren, så må du huske utebelysning, utevarme og kanskje utestikkontakter.
	For det har faktisk mye å si for utekosen.
	Og det synes vi er viktig at du husker på.
	Men vi synes jo at alt med strøm og utekos er viktig å huske på.
	Så kom innom og se hvordan du kan få det skikkelig utekoselig.
	Elektroimportøren.
	Lys, varme, elektromateriell og smarthus.
	Så by the way, I did find Biden's schedule.
	This is just absurd.
	I mean, think about it.
	You guys run companies.
	Think about it.
	If you worked this level, you would not be the men you are today.
	Biden's Monday.
	He will leave Delaware at 11:25 a.m., arriving back at the White House at 12:20.
	That's it.
	That's his big day.
	Return from Delaware.
	Tuesday, he will speak at a political event at the Howard Theater.
	Okay.
	Wednesday, he will speak about the bipartisan infrastructure law.
	All right.
	Thursday, he will speak about infrastructure in Pittsburgh and take part in a reception for John Fetterman.
	Friday, he will go back to Delaware for the weekend.
	I mean, this is like refund.
	I want a refund on the salary that we pay this guy.
	He's not doing anything.
	Megan, on the one hand, he says that we're facing Armageddon and the most elevated risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
	And then, on the other hand, this is his schedule.
	It's like we're cosplaying World War III.
	And the thing that scares me the most is that if you actually study the Cuban Missile Crisis and how we got out of that situation without nuclear annihilation, it was because Kennedy did not listen to the staff.
	He didn't listen to his military advisors.
	They were all pushing for greater escalation in war.
	That is usually the dynamic with the staff.
	And Kennedy eschewed their advice.
	And instead, he dispatched his brother Bobby to go open up a secret back channel with the Soviets.
	And they cut a secret deal where we would pull our nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles out of Turkey in exchange for them pulling their missiles out of Cuba.
	And we promised not to invade Cuba again.
	So that was the deal that was cut.
	And Kennedy actually felt the need, even though he had just saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
	He still felt the need to lie about the quid pro quo he cut because there were so many hotheads and hardliners in Congress and among the military.
	So the issue here that I see is just that all of the forces arrayed around the president generally do not really feel this sort of the moment, the sort of the decision-making importance here that the president feels to avoid a catastrophic outcome.
	They're always pushing for more and more escalation.
	It takes a really strong president who's mentally acute, who has flexibility to figure out how to de-escalate a nuclear showdown.
	And do we really have a president like that in the White House right now?
	If Biden thinks this is like the Cuban Missile Crisis, he needs to start acting like it.
	Let's figure out a way to cut a deal here that makes sense.
	Kennedy was able to do it without compromising our values.
	We didn't give up anything of vital importance to America.
	And I believe that we could figure out a diplomatic solution here for Ukraine if only we were willing to try.
	Now, you remember that famous debate?
	You're, I knew Jack Kennedy.
	You're no Jack Kennedy, sir.
	He's no Jack Kennedy.
	And I don't, I don't know that what we want is more of Biden working.
	I'm not sure actually that that's the solution to anything.
Presidential Instincts Questioned 00:02:28
	I mean, I'll tell you something that jumped out at me is the things he does work on, I tend to find outrageous.
	You know, it's like just yesterday, they tried to make woke policy on DEI, the federal government, you know, instilling it across the federal government as a mandatory thing.
	And they wanted to be the model for corporations across America, right?
	To make skin color and gender and all these things above, above everything else as a work quality.
	He's right now dialing back due process rights for young men on college campuses, all these things.
	He says he's pro-woman, but he's elevating trans kids over biological girls at the sport level.
	He's in favor of that.
	And that's going to become policy soon, too, if he gets his Title IX revisions.
	And all this happens while we see him when he does go out on the campaign trail or doing anything, behaving in the weird way he always has, in particular with respect to women.
	I'm sorry, something's off.
	I don't know what it is.
	I don't know what he's done, but something's off.
	And there was yet another example of this just this past weekend where he was in Irvine, California at some event.
	And this made all the rounds.
	And I realize like his harshest critics love to make fun of these moments.
	To me, I'm just saying like there's something wrong with this guy.
	There's something off.
	Normal men don't behave like this.
	He goes up to a young girl.
	How old was she?
	11?
	Trying to remember the, she was 11 or 12.
	And look, look what he says and does to this girl.
	Now, the very important thing I told my daughter and granddaughters, no serious guys in your 30s.
	No serious guys to your 30s.
	Don't keep that in mind.
	I'm sorry.
	It's weird.
	No one wants him touching their shoulders and giving dating advice to an 11 or 12 year old.
	No serious guys to your 30s.
	First of all, shut up.
	Look how uncomfortable she is.
	Don't advise my daughter on when she should get serious with a man.
	Like, step away, sir.
	Go back to Rehoboth Beach.
	Like, I like him better when he's not doing anything.
	At least he didn't sniff her hair.
	Well, how do you know?
	Facts are not in evidence.
	Yeah.
	You told me as a CEO.
	Truly, like a CEO of a company would never be elected.
	You'd have the rest of your board pulling you aside immediately, being like, yo, stop that.
	He's not all there.
	And there's something distressing about it.
Missing Leadership in Democracy 00:02:15
	I mean, the thing that concerns me is that Biden has been in Washington his entire adult life.
	I think he's been there for something like 50 years.
	So all of his instincts are shaped by Washington.
	And what are Washington's instincts?
	First, to spend money, as much of it as they can, and second, to go to war.
	And if you look at the Biden presidency so far, it has been basically a glut of spending, which has now helped fuel this inflation, which is tanking our economy.
	And we have this very bellicose policy and uncompromising policy on Ukraine, which is bringing us to a point of geopolitical risk that we haven't seen since 1962.
	So, and then on top of it, Megan, the things you're pointing out means that we've got a president whose hands are not completely on the wheel.
	All these things are, I'd say, rather disconcerting.
	His hands are everywhere they shouldn't be.
	I think this is one of the challenges structurally with democracy in the social media age.
	Because of the fast feedback cycles that we talked about earlier and that a point of view kind of the mob coalesces around a point of view, you end up electing the person who represents the mob, which means that ultimately over time in a democracy, in the social media age, is you don't end up electing leadership.
	And leadership, as Sachs points out, needs to and has to be willing and able to lead, which means being contrarian and being inspiring.
	It means that you need to know when you're right and when you're wrong and when the people are right and when the people may be wrong and how you can lead them to a safer, better place.
	And what we're doing today in democracy in the social media age is we're electing those who best kind of sit and represent what the mob's opinion is and the mob rules.
	And so we're seeing leadership not just in the White House, but around the country today being those who basically pander to and do what the electorate tells them to do, as opposed to standing up and saying, you know what, this is right and this is wrong.
	And this is the objective and this is how we achieve our objective.
	And that voice is missing in this country today.
	And leadership is missing in this country today.
Herschel Walker Senate Race 00:15:17
	And it's not just a lack of inspiration.
	It's a lack of willingness to stand up and say when something is right and something is wrong, even though it may not be popular.
	And that's what I think we're starting to see kind of happen everywhere.
	So we heard President Obama speaking out about cancel culture, which, you know, to speak out about it and to stand up against it certainly requires leadership by a corporate head or whoever's employees being targeted.
	And President Obama has never really been pro-cancel culture.
	If you listen to his comments over the past 10 years or so, he referred to them as these keyboard warriors or something to that effect, using their thumbs to get people canceled, thinking that that's activism.
	It's not.
	So that was good.
	You know, they didn't listen to him, but it's good to have people on the left speaking out about this.
	And he did it again.
	And actually, I've been listening.
	He went on Pod Save America, right?
	It's a leftist podcast with three of his former guys who worked for him.
	And I'm thinking as I'm listening to him, this is great.
	Love it.
	Yes, right on.
	And then it's got the weirdest landing that I did not see coming.
	I'd love to talk about what you think happened here.
	Take a listen.
	People just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells.
	And they want some acknowledgement that life is messy and that all of us at any given moment can say things the wrong way, make mistakes.
	Michelle talks about her mother-in-law, or her mother, my mother-in-law, who is an extraordinary woman.
	But as Michelle points out, she's 86, you know, and sometimes, you know, trying to get the right phraseology when we're talking about issues, Michelle's like, that's like her trying to learn Spanish.
	It doesn't mean she shouldn't try to learn Spanish, but it means that sometimes she's not going to get the words right.
	And that's okay, right?
	And that attitude, I think, of just being a little more real and a little more grounded is something that I think makes goes a long way in counteracting what is a systematic, the systematic propaganda that I think is being pumped out by Fox News and all these other outlets all the time.
	Wait, what?
	What happened at the end?
	What?
	Megan, I had the same reaction when I started watching that.
	I was like, wow, this is really nice.
	This is, it's a reminder of what we liked about Obama is that he, you know, he's gently dressing down these woke warriors.
	He's trying to bring us together.
	He's reaching for the center.
	This is the Obama who did the beer summit at the White House.
	So you see all these great characteristics.
	Wow, it's so nice to have a president who's bringing us together.
	It's been so long.
	And then he kind of ruins it at the end by, oh, this is just another partisan political attack.
	So it's, yeah, it was very disappointing.
	I mean, the first 90% was great.
	I've got my producer, Canadian Debbie.
	Her theory is that he is talking and he realizes he's basically just called his mother-in-law a bigot.
	He's like, I need a different landing.
	I got to stick the landing.
	I've just revealed something bad about Michelle's mother.
	Oh, Fox News, Fox, we can all agree they're terrible.
	I mean, look, that's what he said, though, is correct, right?
	Freeberg, it's like life is messy.
	I've always, I've quoted my therapist on the show many times.
	People are complicated.
	They're complicated.
	And that really is all people are looking for is a little bit of grace in interpreting other people's behavior.
	It's not to say it's happening.
	And I do think it's, it's a big reason why so many Democrats are going to vote Republican in November.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	I think people want some recognition that they need to feel like they're having progress and that they can take care of their families and have a future for their kids.
	And, you know, besides that, everything's a mess.
	I mean, that's one almost kind of universal set of truths.
	And everything else is not what we expect and not what we want.
	And I think that, you know, kind of being pushed into places that we've been pushed over the last couple of years is going to cause a lot of people to rethink their politics.
	I hear it in San Francisco, by the way, a lot of folks who have historically been very solid blue are reconsidering their position and their point of view.
	And, you know, before we started recording the show today, we were teasing Sachs.
	You know, I said, Sachs, you should run for governor of California someday.
	And he's like, I can never win in a plus 30 blue state.
	I don't know how long that's going to be the case.
	I'll be honest with you.
	A lot of people I know who have been big donors and big supporters are rethinking their politics because things seem to be moving in a very kind of binary way.
	That poll that we've been discussing shows, I think it's now 17% of black voters are getting ready to vote Republican.
	17?
	That's big.
	I mean, obviously, not net net, but just versus where they've been in terms of the voting block.
	Hispanics are up in the high 30s getting ready to vote Republican.
	I was just talking about this anecdotally with some friends of mine.
	A lot of Jewish voters who had been leaning blue are now getting ready to vote red or who have had it with the Democratic Party because this wokeness tends to be very anti-Semitic, very anti-Semitic.
	And so there's all sorts of different groups that historically had been aligned with the Democratic Party who don't like this rhetoric.
	Black people, I'm sure, don't like being told that they come into the game behind the eight ball, that their children arrive less liked, less rooted for, less capable of doing the math, you know, all that terrible racist stuff that they say in these woke diversity groups.
	Same for Hispanics who don't tend to like that nonsense.
	And nobody likes their paycheck doing what the paychecks are doing against inflation.
	So I do think like what we've seen in that poll is connected, though it wasn't polled for, to cancel culture and wokeness and this sort of general backlash that we're seeing.
	I think what you're seeing is an evolution.
	Look, both parties have always been evolving for decades.
	There's no static set of objectives of either party.
	And, you know, the parties evolved such that there's generally a pretty good balance in this country, 50-50 between the two, you know, what we call parties.
	But, you know, the objectives shift over time.
	What I think is the biggest driver of shifting politics today is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
	And I think increasingly we're seeing the blue side, the Democrats, push for an equality of outcome set of positions, whereas the red side is increasingly pushing for an equality of opportunity set of outcomes.
	And I think that the dividing lines that you're mentioning, Megan, really speak to the stronger interest by some segments to have an equality of opportunity as the basis of this country and the opportunity for being in this country versus an equality of outcome, which is a different categorization of people that sit in a different position in a different place today.
	And I think that's going to be the biggest driver over the next decade of how the two parties evolve.
	You know, on the political front, all of this, I think, goes into why we're seeing Herschel Walker hang on in the Georgia Senate race, despite all the revelations about his past and whether he did or did not pay this woman who bore one of his children to have an abortion, paid for the abortion, I should say.
	He denies it, but there's a note that appears to be in his handwriting to her, canceled check and so on.
	So he went to this debate the other night.
	And I think a lot of, I listen to a lot of left-wing podcasts and read a lot of left-wing news.
	In addition to right-wings, I just don't like anybody manipulating my mind.
	I like to have input from both sides.
	And the left is completely befuddled as to why Herschel Walker has not fallen apart.
	They don't get it.
	They're like, but hello, evangelical Christians.
	We brought you these stories about other children he hasn't taken care of and an abortion that he paid for.
	And you're supposed to be the party of family values.
	Why is not his support cratering?
	And I think really the party, the Republican Party and the evangelical Christian voters already struck this deal when they elected Trump, you know, and they said, we realize we don't buy two Corinthians.
	We know that he's got a questionable past when it comes to women.
	But we want somebody who's going to be a reliable conservative vote, even if he's not a reliable conservative man.
	And they got it.
	That's why we just had Roe versus Wade overturned.
	They don't regret putting Trump in the office, not even a little.
	And I feel like the same thing is happening right now in Georgia.
	So they had their debate.
	It's going to be the one and only because he refused to have a second debate.
	So they went, Raphael Warnick went with like the libertarian who's got no chance and Herschel Walker didn't appear on Sunday, but they just had a debate 48 hours earlier on Friday.
	And lo and behold, even the New York Times had to admit that Herschel Walker held his own.
	And they could feel the jaw drop to the floor.
	I was like, oh my God, you know, he's not a Neanderthal.
	Look at him.
	He can put two sentences together.
	And this is in part because Herschel Walker had lowered the expectation so much that you didn't know what you're going to get.
	But I bring you to this debate, for example, on the issue of abortion, which I thought was very telling to watch.
	The patient's room is too narrow and small and cramped a space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government.
	We are witnessing right now what happens when politicians, most of them men, pil into patients' rooms.
	You get what you're seeing right now.
	And the women of Georgia.
	The women of Georgia deserves a senator who will stand with them.
	I trust women more than I trust politicians.
	May I respond?
	Very quickly, Mr. Walker.
	You know, it is, and I heard about him that I heard he was, he was, he was a neat talker.
	But did he not mention that there was a baby in that room as well?
	And also, did he not mention that he asking, that he asking the taxpayer to pay for it?
	So he bringing the government back into the room.
	That's so interesting.
	It was a great back and forth between the two of them.
	And I don't know.
	What do you think?
	He's still polling behind by a couple of points, Walker is, but I think he's going to win that race.
	What do you guys think?
	Well, I think this wave is breaking towards the Republicans right now.
	It's been swinging back towards them.
	We had the, you know, Republicans were up significantly back in June.
	And then you had the Dobbs decision.
	And it looked like things were breaking the Democrats' way.
	And there were these tactical victories where, you know, Biden got to spend more money on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and so forth.
	But now it looks like, obviously, the Inflation Reduction Act didn't work.
	Inflation's still high.
	The stock market is hitting new lows.
	And it just feels like the economy is falling apart so quickly that, again, it's breaking back towards the Republicans.
	And look, my view on candidates' personal lives is, you know, this is an area I feel like, you know, I just never want to get into.
	I don't think voters think that way anymore.
	I think they understand that this sort of mining the personal lives of these candidates is it's almost an invasion of privacy.
	And they're much more interested in making decisions, I think, today, based on what their policies are going to be.
	And I think also voters kind of know that, look, if the Democratic candidate had the same issues that Walker did, would the media really be harping on it the same way?
	So I think the media is fairly selective in who they try to basically gin up outrage against and who they conduct these types of opposition research tactics against.
	But at the end of the day, I think voters are going to vote for the policies they believe in.
	Oh, just today, I was listening to the New York Times, The Daily, talking about Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock.
	And they did have the good sense to point out that Warnock has an accusation against him by his ex-wife that he ran over her with his car over her foot, but ran over her in a heated argument, which is extreme.
	And they were quick to point out, well, the EMT didn't notice the injuries and they weren't documented.
	It's like they are so quick to dismiss that if it's against somebody on their side, right?
	As opposed to like, I don't remember them pointing out the evidence on the other side of Larry Elder's accusation that came out in the LA Times about whether he loaded a gun in front of his ex-wife, right?
	Remember all that?
	They weren't like quick to go, well, well, there's no eyewitness and they were in the middle of a brutal divorce.
	And so whatever.
	It's just so obvious.
	So I don't know.
	What do you think is going to happen in Georgia?
	Because that's one of the ones we really need to watch that one in Pennsylvania, Freeburg.
	You got to ask Sax.
	Not a political prognosticator.
	So yeah, my orientation is I don't follow the races very well.
	I'm much more interested in kind of identifying and debating the issues that I think are most going to impact us.
	And I'm less about the politics of who ends up in those seats.
	But Sachs is the expert.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I feel like.
	Yeah, go ahead, Sachs.
	I just think that all these races that are within two points are going to break, are going to break red just based on what's happening in the economy.
	So I think, Megan, I think you're right that the way the media dredges through these candidates' personal lives, it's very selective.
	They don't do it evenly.
	And voters know that and can see through that.
	And at the end of the day, just want to choose the candidate who's going to support the right policies and get the economy back on.
	Yeah, we got to figure out what's going on.
	I mean, generally speaking, Megan, produced.
	Yeah.
	No, but I'm saying generally speaking, when the economy's been headed in the wrong direction and generally people think it's headed in the wrong direction, they flip parties and you see a lot of seats turn.
	So that's what we should expect to see happen.
	Well, not just that.
	So you listen to the daily today and they went on site and they started asking people, these two reporters from the New York Times saying, you know, are you concerned about Herschel Walker's personal history?
	Now, have we learned nothing from the polls during the Trump era?
	The people, it's like my friend, I had a very good friend.
	She's from Texas originally, but now she lives in the Northeast.
	And she was talking about how she would get polled all the time and people would ask, or even friends would be like, can you believe Trump?
	And she'd be like, no, I can't believe he's terrible as she pulled the lever for him.
	Like, people know what they're supposed to say.
	When the two New York Times reporters ask you if you're concerned about the revelations about Herschel Walker, you say, yes, I'm concerned.
	And they had quotes from this one woman saying, I'm a Republican, you know, but I might just not fill in that box.
	I might just vote, you know, for the gubernatorial race and not vote.
	Oh, she's voting for Herschel Walker.
Monopolies and Cancellation Waves 00:11:38
	People are so stupid.
	Of course, the Times reporters are going to be told that.
	Don't believe this woman.
	She's misleading you because Republicans don't like pollsters to begin with.
	I'm just saying, I really think Herschel Walker is going to run away with that.
	And I don't think the Republican base is going to be moved by this so-called scandal.
	I really don't.
	We'll find out.
	All right.
	Let me talk to you about tech because this is your area of expertise for sure.
	And I thought it was very interesting that after Kanye got booted off of Instagram and then his account frozen on Twitter for these comments about Jews, he's going to go DEF CON three on Jewish people.
	He announced he's buying Parlor.
	He's buying Parlor, the embattled parlor that got completely screwed over after January 6th by Amazon and everybody else who wouldn't give it a platform.
	It did come back, though its battles continued.
	And now Kanye's buying what's essentially a Twitter competitor.
	Is it too late for Parlor?
	And what do you make of it?
	This supports my long-running debate with David Sachs that there is a free and open market to compete effectively with social media platforms, as they're called, in this country today and around the world.
	Sachs has made the case that the town square has become Twitter and we need to have the government intervene to regulate and support freedom of speech on these platforms.
	And I've made the case that there can be many platforms.
	The internet is, you know, default open.
	Anyone can build a website.
	Anyone can build a service.
	You can build your own server farm.
	You can build your own data center.
	You can launch a website.
	And the argument has been that we need to get Section 230 rewritten and we need to get this government to intervene and make sure freedom of speech enables that.
	And I've made the case, I don't think that's true, because if the audience doesn't like what's happening on one of these platforms, another one will emerge and it will compete.
	And I think that's what we're seeing.
	I think Kanye behind Parlor might build an audience.
	They get the right tech people involved and they could rebuild that service.
	And ultimately, that could be a viable competitor and a viable alternative to some of the other scaled social media platforms.
	So I don't think anyone has a monopoly in social media, in video, in audio, in communication channels, in Twitter.
	I think all of these services are up for competition.
	And I think that there could be a lot of new services where you start to see almost like a balkanization of media online that kind of breaks down a lot of these, what people are calling monopolies today.
	Sax and I, we'll have this debate.
	Yeah.
	Well, I want to hear this debate, but let me tee it up to you, Sachs, as follows.
	So Elon was reportedly inspired to make his original bid for Twitter after they shut the account of the Babylon B. Kanye may have been inspired by the fact that he got bounced off of two of the social media platforms.
	So it's kind of funny to me to see a pattern of the more right-leaning people who get targeted, the more we do see competition.
	But we all know what happened to Parler when it tried to be the right-wing Twitter.
	These like Amazon and Apple and all these others pulled the platform to where they couldn't operate.
	So go ahead.
	I'll give you your response.
	Right.
	Right.
	Well, I have a hard time believing that the answer to these big tech monopolies control over speech in our society is Kanye West.
	I mean, sorry.
	I just, I don't believe that Kanye is going to be able to break their gigantic network effects that sustain their monopolies.
	And remember, all of these big tech companies generally act in sync and in concert with respect to these speech rules.
	So if you get banned on one platform, all the others follow suit.
	That's exactly what happened with Trump.
	First, he got banned by Twitter, and then all these other platforms followed suit.
	So it's great that maybe there's some free market competition happening here.
	I just don't think it's going to be sufficient, which is why I believe that these big tech monopolies need to be treated like common carriers who are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of people's viewpoints.
	Now, I do think Freeberg raises an interesting point, which is what level of the stack should Common Carrier be applied at?
	And I do think you can make the case that it shouldn't be applied at the level of a Twitter or Parlor because those sites will always have some messy content moderation issues to deal with.
	But I do believe that at minimum, we need to apply Common Carrier to the so-called dumb pipes below the stack.
	So that would include AWS.
	Remember that the way that Parler got thrown off the internet was because AWS canceled them and also the app stores canceled them.
	So I do not believe that the app stores, that AWS, that banks and big financial platforms like PayPal, who should never be in the business of content moderation anyway, those companies should not be able to engage in deplatform and discrimination.
	Can we just talk about how absurd the PayPal thing was?
	So as I understand it, they now claim, oh, it was a mistake that that was released.
	That was never really our policy.
	But of course, they're going to claim that because they were humiliated.
	But somehow it was released that they had a plan in place to fine users to steal money of $1,500 from users of PayPal who were engaging in misinformation on the internet, not having anything to do with PayPal.
	It's not like it'd be controversial enough if you were out there saying, PayPal is a fraud.
	PayPal is terrible.
	And they tried to do this to you.
	But essentially, I think the plan was if I went out there and said, the vaccines are killing people.
	$1,500 was going to be gone from my account with PayPal.
	Totally unconstitutional and illegal.
	But this was originally their plan, as I understand it, until it got accidentally leaked and the internet lost its mind.
	But the hubris of your old organization, David, to think that they could get away with that.
	I know.
	And it wasn't a mistake.
	I mean, there's no way you don't change the terms of service on your website.
	This is reviewed by hundreds of lawyers.
	They don't do that accidentally.
	And the reason why we know for sure it's not a mistake is it's actually a continuation of the policies that have been in place.
	They started over a year ago.
	I wrote a piece last summer talking about how PayPal was working with Democratic partisan groups like the ADLC, like the Southern Pacific Law Center, to identify conservative individuals and groups to be blacklisted from their service.
	Again, discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.
	What business does PayPal have getting into the political views of people using its platform?
	It doesn't need to be in the business of content moderation.
	And yet, last year, it was proudly announcing that that's what it was doing is discriminating and deplatforming people based on their political views.
	This was a continuation of that policy.
	And they want to encourage other companies in Silicon Valley to follow their lead and follow suit.
	This is the next wave of cancellation, which is we're not just going to take away your free speech rights.
	We're going to take away your rights to accept payments, to earn money, to transact.
	In other words, we're not only going to censor you, we are going to try and starve you out until you have the politically correct views.
	PayPal and these other big tech companies should not be allowed to do that.
	This should be agenda item one for the Republicans when they take back Congress, which is to restore the rights of the common man to have speech and to earn a living in this economy.
	Well, it's like the GoFundMe shutdowns during the Canadian trucker protests, right?
	I mean, I heard my pals over on National Review talking about how if you're a bank and you need a license to operate or any sort of government permission slip, this should be illegal.
	They should absolutely be able to stop you from discriminating against your customer base, against them doing business with you based on their political viewpoints.
	Go ahead, Freeberg.
	No, I mean, but look, it started before politics.
	And I think that we need to be cognizant of the fact that there were precedents set here.
	So about a year and a half ago, there was a claim made about some pornography websites exploiting.
	I don't know if it was a child porn or a non-consent porn that was uploaded.
	And the credit card network said, we're going to stop servicing these pornography websites.
	And they stopped allowing payments to them.
	And then Bill Ackman earlier this year went on a big crusade.
	I think this was in August, actually, where he said Visa, MasterCard, and Amex need to stop making payment services to pornography websites in this country.
	They're exploiting women and there's sex slavery and all sorts of other things happening.
	And so it may be true that that is what's going on, but the precedent then gets set, that the mechanism for resolution isn't to go to the Department of Justice and file criminal charges and get these issues resolved.
	It's to go to the credit card networks and get them to shut off that service.
	And as soon as that happens, a precedent is now set that if there's something that the majority disagrees with and that the majority thinks is morally wrong, then the majority can leverage its voice with the network to turn something off.
	And so a lot of people, I think, listening might say, you know what, that sounds reasonable.
	We should shut off payments to the pornography websites.
	Then the problem comes around that when it's about the voice that you want to hear or it's about the service that you want to subscribe to and you can no longer access it, you can no longer get it.
	You can no longer earn.
	Now we take concern.
	Any precedent setting, I think, creates the slippery slope where you have a real problem down the road on resolution.
	Ultimately, maybe you're not going to.
	I don't know what porn sites you're referring to.
	Not asking you to.
	So which one specifically can we no longer hit?
	No, no, but wait, I was just going to say, I know that, for example, we did a lot of reporting on Backpage, which was really just a front for sex traffickers.
	I mean, that's, I'm sure there's plenty of porn websites out there.
	This was called, yeah, he put this thing out here in August and he went wild on Twitter and he tried to get Visa MasterCard Amex to stop payments to Pornhub, which I guess operates a very large network.
	And they said that, you know, there's a lot of bad stuff going on and it's not being properly regulated.
	The point is that the mechanism of resolution there was to go to the payment networks and get them to shut down the site, as opposed to going to the DOJ or going to a, yeah, going to an authority to come in and investigate and resolve the matter that way.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's like, for example, you see child pornography on one of these websites, you call the police.
	You don't call the police.
	You call the police.
	Yeah.
	But now, but now the precedent is set, which is, hey, if you have a loud enough voice, you're Bill Ackman, you can tell the payment networks to stop accepting payment for something that you think is wrong.
	You know, this becomes the standard.
	And now you're going to see more and more of this behavior.
	I'm not saying anything about whether or not the pornography site should exist or not.
	This is simply about the mechanism that we're now using to resolve things that we're concerned about or we have disagreements with, which is to go to these big networks and shut down a service and shut down a voice.
	And this doesn't go through some government or regulatory authority.
	Did you want to weigh in on that one, Sachs?
	Well, the founding document of our republic says that all of us have inalienable rights.
	And inalienable means that they cannot be taken away, but taken that they have been taken away.
	They've been taken away by big tech.
	These big tech monopolies have worked together to restrict or limit or take away or deplatform us to take away our rights of free speech and our rights increasingly to earn and to accept payments.
	And the only solution to this, I think, will ultimately be an online bill of rights where the government steps in and says to these big powerful monopolies, they cannot do this.
	They cannot discriminate against ordinary Americans because the management of these companies have political beliefs that they want to impose on the rest of the country.
	That should be completely out of bounds.
	Yeah, they're now starting to slowly realize the error of their ways.
Twitter Subpoena and Free Speech 00:06:58
	Like Facebook has decided it's going to stop censoring COVID misinformation.
	Oh, thank you.
	Oh, we appreciate it now that it's all turned out to be true.
	Not all of it, but a lot of it that they censored.
	I'm going to ask you next about Elon and the Twitter deal and what's going to come next and why David Sachs, after speaking about this very issue on our show, got a subpoena in the lawsuit.
	What?
	We'll talk about it next.
	And then the gut microbiome and why you may not want to continue taking your probiotic.
	So David Sachs, you do us a solid, you come on the Megan Kelly show and whammo, subpoena in the Elon Musk versus Twitter battle, which is, which feels very wrong because you talk about that on your podcast too.
	But we apparently got you in some trouble not long after you appeared.
	They wanted all your communications regarding Twitter with Elon and so on and so forth.
	What happened?
	Yeah, I mean, no, no good deed goes unpunished, Megan.
	No, I mean, I've been a commentator throughout about this issue.
	And because of that, yeah, I got subpoena and depositioned in this case.
	I told them and gave them everything I had, which certainly wasn't very much.
	My lawyers have advised me not to comment further till it's over.
	So I guess I'll listen to their advice.
	But yeah, it's, you know, it's called a non-party subpoena.
	I'm not a party to the litigation, but they wanted to know what I know, which like I said, wasn't much.
	But, you know, we've got to.
	I love that they, one of the things they wanted was all the documents concerning any of your tweets.
	Like you and your team sit together and you get your files together before you put your 240 characters together, whatever they are.
	Like you're busy, man.
	I'm sure you don't have time for that.
	It's, I mean, do most people extensively document their tweets?
	I don't think so.
	No, I mean, it always felt a little bit paranoid on their part.
	I think if I were just to speculate, I think they bought into this media narrative that was created, I think, by the Wall Street Journal or something like this, that there was this so-called shadow crew is what they called it, advising Elon Musk.
	It was a totally made-up news story.
	But because I was mentioned in that article, I think that if I had to speculate, that's the reason why I got the subpoena and deposition.
	And my guess is they were disappointed with how little I knew about the matter because almost all of my information has come from what's been publicly reported about it.
	Yeah, well, just FYI.
	So this was an article in Business Insider from August, in which they quoted you calling the subpoenas harassment and a phishing expedition.
	That's petty and vindictive.
	The subpoena, 30 pages long, requests any communications with your friends over the past six months, including requests for documentation relating to your public tweets about Musk's purchase and on and on it goes.
	I love all this.
	I think it's actually very funny.
	And in the end, I guess it's fine because they reached a deal.
	Elon is said to be buying Twitter at the original purchase price.
	So do we believe, are you, can you comment on that?
	Do we believe this is actually going to go through or do you?
	I just don't know anything that hasn't been publicly reported.
	So because I am still under the subpoena and deposition, I'm not seeking to reach out to Elon or something and talk about it.
	Did you get a subpoena, Friedberg?
	Did they want you to or just your pal, David?
	I got friends on all sides of this debate.
	So I'm kind of sitting here neutral party.
	I've got friends that are involved in the financing syndicate or yeah, and friends at Twitter and on the board and so on.
	So I'm, I got to be a little careful, but I think it's pretty clear that Elon sees an opportunity for doing something pretty significant and transformative with Twitter.
	I think it's a very large user base that's very engaged.
	I think we're all on Twitter all the time.
	And I think there's a lot of people like us.
	And he sees the opportunity to create a more open dialogue and an open forum where voices don't get shut down.
	So I think the fundamental interest in the platform is certainly there.
	And I think he's obviously very encouraged to try and close this thing.
	The challenge is in this market.
	Some people have said that Twitter is probably only worth $15 billion if it were to just be trading today.
	And he's doing the deal at $44 billion.
	So there's a syndicate of people that are supposed to put money into this deal at $44 billion that are saying, holy crap, I'm putting in money at three times the original of the real value of this thing.
	What am I doing?
	And that's what's creating a lot of tension on the other side.
	Like, is there a way we can cut a better deal?
	Is there something else that we can do to get out of this?
	There are banks that are on the hook for $13 billion of debt that are freaking out because they're not going to be able to sell that debt at the price that they're paying to get into the deal.
	So it's creating a lot of tension and a lot of torment.
	Ultimately, I think he wants to get it done.
	I think the other side wants to get it done.
	And, you know, I think there's going to be some pain felt by somebody to get over the finish line here.
	All right, let me, but let me ask you a question now.
	So let's say the very first thing that happened when Kanye started tweeting again after Instagram shut him down, because he made an anti-Semitic remark over there.
	And then they shut him down.
	So he went to Twitter and then he made the DEF CON three against Jewish people remark on Twitter.
	And so they shut him down on Twitter.
	But the very first thing that had happened to Kanye when he reappeared on Twitter prior to that tweet was Elon tweeted at him, welcome back to Twitter.
	And then he made, boom, how you like me now.
	I do wonder what would an Elon Musk control Twitter have done with a Kanye tweeting about I'm going to go DEF CON 3 on Jewish people.
	And I know you don't know the answer, but what do you think?
	My guess is you'd let him keep tweeting.
	I think Elon's all about open free speech.
	When I worked at Google early in, I worked at Google when it was a small private company before the IPO and everything back in 2004.
	And the founders of Google, the founder of Facebook, the founders of Twitter all had the same ethos, which is the democratization of access to information to allow every voice a chance to proliferate and to speak their mind.
	The challenge, and Reddit was the same.
	And the challenge with all of these platforms ultimately is that very nasty voices get very loud on these platforms.
	And then the rest of the audience and the rest of the community says, I don't want those voices on here anymore.
	And all of these platforms ultimately resolve to being less open and more editorialized and narrated and closed.
	And I think that's what's happened with Twitter.
	And I think it's a bit of an idealistic point of view to say, let anyone say anything until you see how nasty it gets.
	Just go to the forums on 4chan or go look at what Reddit used to allow and you'll recognize pretty quickly why most people said, I don't want that and I don't want to be on here if you allow that to happen.
	So over time, maybe he'll change his point of view, but I think he has the same sort of idealism that all of the founders of all of these platforms had when they first started out.
Gut Biome Health Secrets 00:04:42
	Yeah.
	Well, there's a bedrock principle of our country, which is the answer to speech you don't like is not less speech, it's more.
	Now, wait, I got to pause you, David Sachs, because if I don't get to why you shouldn't be taking your probiotic, my hardcore listeners are going to be upset and I got to get that in.
	So David Friedberg, in addition to his other talents, has been an angel investor in technology, food, agriculture, life science startups.
	You bought the largest quinoa supplier in Canada, which is, I think, why you guys call him the quinoa king.
	You know about a lot of these issues because you've put a lot of money there, lifelong vegetarian and so on.
	And I take a probiotic every day and this jumped out at me because you were saying on one of your recent shows, probiotics do not work because they're single microbes.
	Instead, we should be considering, wait for it.
	Well, why don't you tell them?
	What do you think works better?
	Well, yeah, this, you know, the research in the gut biome really proliferated when DNA sequencing costs came down.
	It used to cost $100 million to get your genome sequenced.
	Now you can do it for $200.
	So DNA sequencing is so cheap.
	We started sequencing human poop to see what was in the gut, what the gut microbiome showed us.
	And it turns out there's 40 trillion bacterial cells that live in your gut.
	And your body's only made up of 10 trillion human cells.
	So the gut microbiome is really a big part of your health.
	And it turns out that that microbiome is releasing chemicals and absorbing chemicals that truly do modulate your health.
	So now we can see with DNA sequencing, what's going on in the gut biome, what probiotics are doing and how human health changes from the biome.
	And it turns out that a lot of probiotics, they don't really inoculate in your gut.
	They don't stay there.
	They don't live there because putting a probiotic in your belly is like putting a house cat in the jungle.
	It doesn't have the right food to eat and all the other animals will eat it.
	There's already an existing ecosystem in your gut.
	So the best way to transform your gut microbiome is to use prebiotics.
	It's why we started this company, SuperGut.
	You know, not trying to promote the product, but the research really shows.
	Yeah, I mean, the research really shows that the best way to change your gut biome to what we would call healthier gut bacteria that secrete what are called short chain fatty acids.
	These are little compounds that end up in your bloodstream, drop your blood sugar, modulate your metabolic health.
	And there are other compounds that help you sleep better, reduce anxiety and stress.
	So much of your health can be modulated by changing your gut biome.
	And the best way to change it is by putting the right feedstock so that the good bacteria thrive and the bad bacteria die.
	And so that means need to do is a prebiotic.
	But what I I thought I was going to have to eat fecal transplants or something.
	Yeah, you don't need to do that.
	So this is what's?
	Yeah, this is what's really interesting.
	Going back to my point, probiotics are one microbe.
	You put them in a pill, you swallow them and they don't really last in your gut.
	It turns out, if you take the whole ecosystem of someone else's gut and you put it in your gut, it changes your gut biome.
	So somebody else's fecal matter matter yeah, so so, believe it or not, there are what are called fecal microbiota transplants fmts and there are research studies going on right now for multiple sclerosis and a lot of other disease indications, where people will take freeze-dried poop, put in a capsule, swallow it and it inoculates your gut, changes your gut biome and actually modulates your health, decreasing the frequency of things like ms attacks and lesions and a lot of other disease conditions are being tested for this, so it's a really incredible kind of advance.
	Now I don't think, and no one thinks, that fecal transplants are going to become standard medicine.
	Uh, it's.
	It's really creating a series of discoveries that are allowing us to figure out what microbes, what combinations of microbes, what prebiotics can really change the biome and how they actually modulate disease and human health.
	And that's a really burgeoning area right near nearly every um uh Human Health AND Human Disease uh research uh department right now is running some sort of fecal microbiota transplant uh program.
	So it's really interesting to see all this this come to to fruition.
	Our very common mainstay product that we have is called supergut, which is just a prebiotic and it it's really targeted at people with high blood sugar, a high a1c, you know, for weight loss and so on, but anybody.
	I think there's a whole set of medicine um research underway right now.
	Wait, super gut, and what's the company supergut.com?
	Yeah okay supergut.com, all right.
	So just a viewer warning, do not try this at home, because if you just eat crap you're gonna wind up with very dangerous, very dangerous.
	Don't do that.
	Yeah yeah, this is all done through hospitals with research institutions yeah yeah well, it's fascinating research and I love anything that settles that microbiome and I I will say that once you get a better balance going there you, you can eliminate bloating.
	I mean, it's like a vanity thing, but it also feels uncomfortable, bloated all the time.
SuperGut Product Insights 00:00:34
	Um, so i'm going to check this out today and I know that uh you, David Sacks, have eaten a lot of these bars and so on, and you've lost weight thanks to your pal.
	So thank you both for the tip, for the thoughts and all the uh wisdom and insights.
	It's a pleasure to have you guys on.
	Thanks, Megan.
	Thank you all right, I like that a lot better than the Jason guy.
	Thank you, David Sacks.
	Darren Oleon is a health and wellness expert who hosts a show with Zach Efron.
	He's here tomorrow.
	You're gonna love it.
	See you then.
	Thanks for listening to THE Megan Kelly SHOW.
	No BS, no agenda, and no

Chapters

00:00:30 Silicon Valley Minds React
00:02:10 Persistent Global Inflation
00:18:22 Austerity and Wealth Hits
00:24:03 The Future of Labor Jobs
00:29:49 War Hawks and Nuclear Risk
00:39:39 Sanctions and Diplomatic Solutions
00:52:45 Presidential Instincts Questioned
00:55:14 Missing Leadership in Democracy
00:57:29 Herschel Walker Senate Race
01:12:46 Monopolies and Cancellation Waves
01:24:25 Twitter Subpoena and Free Speech
01:31:24 Gut Biome Health Secrets
01:36:06 SuperGut Product Insights