The Megyn Kelly Show - 20221115_gops-next-move-ftxs-crash-and-men-out-of-work-with
Aired: 2022-11-15
Duration: 01:35:28


=== Blame, Win, and Rural Votes (14:54) ===

[00:00:15]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:27]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:28]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:30]  Later, we're going to have the latest on the Biden mega donor crypto billionaire who has been exposed as a fraud.
[00:00:37]  This is unbelievable.
[00:00:38]  We're going to go in depth.
[00:00:40]  Plus, the alarming number of men out of work permanently, it seems, and the effect it's having on our society.
[00:00:46]  But we begin with former President Trump.
[00:00:49]  We are now just hours away from his apparent announcement, expected announcement, that he is running for president in 2024.
[00:00:56]  Mr. Trump, truthing early this morning, quote, hopefully today will turn out to be one of the most important days in the history of our country.
[00:01:04]  His announcement comes after Carrie Lake lost her bid to become the next governor of Arizona.
[00:01:11]  Lake has yet to concede, tweeting out Arizonans no BS when they see it.
[00:01:16]  The GOP, meantime, inching closer and closer to officially gaining control of the House.
[00:01:21]  They've already been projected to win, but it's not official yet.
[00:01:25]  There is still a lot of soul searching going on regarding what went so wrong a week ago today for the party.
[00:01:32]  Senator Ted Cruz said yesterday he is, quote, so pissed he cannot even see straight.
[00:01:37]  So it's going to be interesting to hear from my next guest joining us now for his first interview since winning re-election, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
[00:01:46]  Senator, welcome back to the program.
[00:01:48]  Thanks for having me, Megan.
[00:01:49]  Yeah, great to see you.
[00:01:50]  So Ted Cruz is very angry.
[00:01:54]  How are you feeling?
[00:01:56]  I guess I don't get angry.
[00:01:58]  I try to get even.
[00:01:59]  I try to figure out how we do better in the future, what we did wrong, and look to the next election.
[00:02:06]  I try not to look backwards.
[00:02:08]  The one thing that is very clear, both in my reelection, which we won overwhelmingly, and across the country, is we're the party of rural America.
[00:02:16]  You know, I had 10 counties where I got over 85% of the vote.
[00:02:20]  I had another 10 counties or 15 counties where I got over 80% of the vote.
[00:02:24]  Throughout most of rural Kentucky, I averaged over 70% of the vote.
[00:02:28]  In our two big cities, I lost 60-40%.
[00:02:31]  Fortunately for Kentucky, our big cities don't dominate the population, but you go to Georgia and Atlanta basically equals the population outside of Atlanta.
[00:02:41]  So the urban equals the rural vote in Georgia.
[00:02:44]  And it used to be otherwise.
[00:02:45]  You know, Georgia was Republican for a couple of decades, but the rural vote outnumbered the urban vote considerably during that period of time.
[00:02:54]  And now Atlanta's grown to become even.
[00:02:56]  So there are a lot of different ways to look at it.
[00:02:58]  Personally, I think one way to look at it is we have to get more African-American vote.
[00:03:02]  I think we also need to get more every sort of ethnic group, Asian Americans as well.
[00:03:07]  I think we have great inroads there, Hispanic Americans, but particularly African Americans.
[00:03:11]  If we can get to where we're getting a more substantial portion of that vote, I think there is a way that the urban-rural divide can be broken and we can do better.
[00:03:21]  I know that when you won, you won earlier in the evening last Tuesday.
[00:03:27]  You believed that you were in the middle of a red wave, as so many had predicted.
[00:03:31]  Now, it's funny to listen to some of these more left-leaning shows and anchors say, you know, how the right was predicting a red wave.
[00:03:37]  Well, that's not true.
[00:03:38]  It was coming from the left and the right.
[00:03:40]  Virtually everyone, with just a couple of exceptions, believed the only question was how big the wave would be.
[00:03:46]  So you thought you were in the middle of a red wave.
[00:03:48]  It didn't wind up happening.
[00:03:51]  Why do you think it didn't?
[00:03:53]  You know, there are some interesting things that are going to have to be analyzed.
[00:03:55]  There are people saying that we won a significant majority of the votes for Congress, but didn't win a significant number of new seats.
[00:04:03]  Some of that has to do with how the seats are districted.
[00:04:06]  So gerrymandering can have something to do with it.
[00:04:08]  I also think that it's very, very hard to win a vote where the ballots are mailed to everyone.
[00:04:14]  You know, when it used to take some initiative to vote, I think that the voters tended to be people with more initiative and people I believe to be probably more involved and maybe better informed about politics.
[00:04:27]  Now, like in Nevada, it's very difficult to win when the franchise has become complete through mailing the ballots to everyone.
[00:04:35]  But I think it's also harder to verify who these are.
[00:04:38]  Now, I'm not saying there was widespread fraud, but I am saying it's easier to verify who someone is if they show up.
[00:04:44]  And the sort of tragic comedy of Arizona, not looking at Chad's, but looking at everyone's signature, shows that they know that there could be a problem and they're trying to prevent it.
[00:04:55]  But that problem doesn't exist when you vote in person with an ID.
[00:04:59]  And so I really think that it also, I guess, creates more doubt on the part of the voter.
[00:05:06]  You know, even though I can't say, oh, well, there was fraud, it makes me worry that I see all the candidates that I'm for winning on the same day of the election.
[00:05:14]  And then I see drip by drip by drip as the votes keep coming in over weeks that they lose their elections.
[00:05:20]  And so I think if they want to encourage, you know, the left says they, you know, it's all about democracy for them.
[00:05:25]  If they want to encourage support of Democratic voting, we'd all be more encouraged to believe the results if they all came in in a very timely fashion and were counted that day.
[00:05:35]  Why a state would take early voting and not start counting them before the day of the election?
[00:05:39]  If it takes two weeks for Arizona to count its mail-in ballots, for goodness sake, they should start counting them two weeks before the election's over.
[00:05:47]  So, you know, I think that there are a lot of things going on with the way the elections are run that make a difference.
[00:05:53]  The 10 states that send out ballots to everyone, nine out of 10 are dominated by Democrats.
[00:05:58]  Utah is the only exception.
[00:06:01]  So I think how we run our elections is important.
[00:06:04]  And like in Kentucky, I think 95 to 98% of people showed up and voted in person, which I think is a better way to run an election.
[00:06:12]  It's the way we always used to do it and worked out fine.
[00:06:14]  And there wasn't a lot of election denialism going on back in those days.
[00:06:18]  What about Trump?
[00:06:20]  New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Salmon Fox pointing the finger at him as responsible for bad candidate quality, making certain candidates embrace his election denialism.
[00:06:32]  JD Vance has an op-ed out today saying, don't blame Trump.
[00:06:35]  What the GOP needs to do is build a turnout machine, get more money, saying our party has one major asset, contra conventional wisdom, to rally the voters we need.
[00:06:45]  President Donald Trump, now more than ever, we need his leadership to turn these voters out.
[00:06:49]  And we suffered from his absence from the stage.
[00:06:54]  So which camp are you in?
[00:06:57]  I think it's easy for people to have arguments when you lose.
[00:06:59]  Everybody's got an argument because nobody wants to take responsibility, but it's probably an all of the above that there's a little bit of everything involved and why people lose.
[00:07:08]  But when you say it's candidate quality, you know, if I were one of those candidates, I'd take offense of that.
[00:07:12]  But just for example, Dr. Oz, I think he's an intelligent, well-spoken, he was on daytime television for 10 to 15 years.
[00:07:20]  He connects with people.
[00:07:21]  I've seen him do the one-on-one town halls.
[00:07:23]  He really can talk to people and listen to people.
[00:07:27]  And hands down, he knew the information better and could, you know, present himself in a debate.
[00:07:32]  His opponent was and is severely impaired, and yet the opponent won.
[00:07:37]  So I think it's unfair to Dr. Oz and also not an accurate thing to say, oh, Fetterman was the better quality candidate and Oz was lacking in quality.
[00:07:45]  That's not right.
[00:07:47]  To blame it all on Trump's not right.
[00:07:48]  To blame it all on McConnell's not right.
[00:07:51]  It's a combination of things, but it's also, I guess I'm not big into the blame game.
[00:07:56]  I'm into what do you have to do moving forward?
[00:07:59]  For example, that may require some blame.
[00:08:02]  Say again?
[00:08:03]  That may require some blame, right?
[00:08:04]  Like if there was one major force working for evil, you know, like the, like some tell, like John Pedoritz, I keep mentioning him because he's a never Trumper who really thinks Trump is to blame for all this stuff.
[00:08:16]  Then we need to know that, right?
[00:08:17]  So, I mean, an honest look would require factoring in everything and seeing whether it's real.
[00:08:22]  Yeah.
[00:08:23]  And I guess, but the thing is, if I'm looking at Pennsylvania, I'm looking at a state that they describe as Alabama in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
[00:08:32]  The rural part of Pennsylvania is probably as conservative maybe as Kentucky is, but Pittsburgh and Philadelphia dominate.
[00:08:39]  Probably together, they're more than half of the vote would be my guess.
[00:08:42]  And so the problem really is if you want to win Pennsylvania, you know, try instead of getting 10% of the black vote, we need to get 20 or 25%.
[00:08:51]  Now, it's easier said than done.
[00:08:52]  We've been saying it forever, but I can give you an example.
[00:08:55]  In our state, our attorney general is Republican, African-American.
[00:08:58]  Our previous lieutenant governor, when we had a Republican governor, African-American.
[00:09:02]  Good friend of mine.
[00:09:03]  She served in the military and also came out of the Tea Party and I met at some of the first Tea Party movements.
[00:09:09]  We had several other candidates that were great candidates, all African-American, all running as Republican.
[00:09:15]  You just have to keep doing that year in and year out till the African-American public says, well, these Republicans aren't too bad.
[00:09:21]  Maybe I'll consider it.
[00:09:22]  But this isn't like a white country club.
[00:09:24]  We weren't even being considered.
[00:09:26]  Say again?
[00:09:26]  Yeah.
[00:09:27]  I said that they until they look at the party and say themselves, okay, this no longer looks like a white country club.
[00:09:32]  You know, you got people like you mentioned, Daniel Cameron.
[00:09:34]  You got Winsom Sears, Lieutenant Governor in Virginia, and so on.
[00:09:38]  And the party is definitely becoming more diverse.
[00:09:40]  There's no question about it.
[00:09:41]  But yeah, bigger numbers, especially now that they're losing so many white suburban voters to the Dems.
[00:09:48]  Let me ask you this because I'm not that interested in this, but I should spend a minute squabbling over leadership fight.
[00:09:54]  You know, who should be in the leadership?
[00:09:56]  McConnell?
[00:09:56]  Should he be the leader of the minority now in the Senate?
[00:09:59]  Should Kevin McCarthy be the leader over in the House?
[00:10:03]  Would you support McConnell?
[00:10:04]  And do you support a vote before George is decided?
[00:10:08]  I think it's probably better to wait on the vote.
[00:10:10]  I think that we don't know who's going to be the senator from Georgia, but we also don't know who the senator is from Alaska.
[00:10:15]  You know, this is for the next session.
[00:10:17]  Does the current senator from Alaska, she's probably going to win, I think, in the ranked choice.
[00:10:22]  But should she vote on the next one?
[00:10:24]  I guess she doesn't get to vote now because she hasn't been declared the senator for January.
[00:10:28]  But is that fair to her not to let her vote?
[00:10:30]  Or is it fair to Herschel Walker just to say, oh, yeah, we really want you to win, but you don't get to vote on who the leader is.
[00:10:35]  So I don't know.
[00:10:36]  I don't care what you have to say.
[00:10:38]  It makes no sense to have the vote now, though they should definitely wait.
[00:10:41]  Okay.
[00:10:42]  What about Trump's going to announce tonight, we expect?
[00:10:44]  He certainly has given all indications.
[00:10:46]  His tweet this morning has a picture of himself sort of leaping through the air with a Trump 2024, you know, moniker beneath it.
[00:10:57]  What do you think about Trump 2024?
[00:10:58]  Is he the party's standard bearer still?
[00:11:01]  And is this a good idea so soon in the process?
[00:11:05]  You know, I would prefer that it wait once again until after December 6th and that we concentrate on the seat in Georgia.
[00:11:11]  And my fear is, is that by getting in now, it will appear to some people that it's all about him and not so much about, you know, trying to win the Senate.
[00:11:19]  So I think it would be better for him to wait till after December 6th.
[00:11:24]  As far as my decision, I haven't decided whether I'm going to get involved in the Republican primary prospects.
[00:11:29]  I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be personally involved as a candidate, but I don't think that at this point I'm going to get involved too much because there's so many things that, you know, I just came from a meeting.
[00:11:39]  We're talking about COVID origins.
[00:11:41]  We really want to have some investigations.
[00:11:43]  The House definitely will have it.
[00:11:44]  I'm hoping the Senate, when they see the House move forward, will say, well, gosh, if the House is going to do it, maybe we should try a bipartisan investigation over here.
[00:11:51]  They've stonewalled us for two years, but like I saw your interview the other day.
[00:11:55]  It was one of the best ones I did.
[00:11:56]  And I compliment you on this on Bob Gehry.
[00:11:59]  And, you know, I think the counterpart was Alina Chen.
[00:12:04]  And that was just wonderful, incredibly informative.
[00:12:07]  But the American public hasn't seen that.
[00:12:09]  And we do need to see this because the next virus that leaks from a lab could be much worse.
[00:12:14]  And we have a death wish if we're going to keep doing this research without any controls on it.
[00:12:19]  And I had three doctors who came in recently, scientists, all peer-reviewed many, many journal articles, and they all came to the same conclusion.
[00:12:27]  This type of research needs to be treated as if it were a nuclear weapon.
[00:12:31]  It needs to be controlled by an independent agency.
[00:12:33]  And tax dollars shouldn't be sent willy-nilly to communist or totalitarian countries to do this type of research.
[00:12:40]  That's my biggest disappointment in seeing the GOP not take control of the Senate is I really wanted to see you run those hearings.
[00:12:47]  I mean, it could still happen, as you point out, but could it happen in the House alone?
[00:12:52]  I feel less confident about how that will go, but could it?
[00:12:56]  It's going to happen in the House.
[00:12:58]  You know, the leaders over there are very much into it.
[00:13:02]  And I know that two that will be prominent in this will be Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer from my state.
[00:13:09]  Jim Jordan will be chairman of the judiciary and Jamie Comer will be chairman of oversight.
[00:13:15]  And I know they're very interested in this investigation.
[00:13:18]  They want to get to the truth.
[00:13:19]  You know, one, because we care about this happening again.
[00:13:22]  It isn't so much, you know, I think blame goes where it goes, but to me, this isn't so much the blame game.
[00:13:28]  It's looking forward to saying the virus COVID-19 killed 0.3%, but that was still about a million people.
[00:13:35]  But if we had a virus that killed 20%, that'd be 60 million people in our country.
[00:13:40]  And there are viruses that they're experimenting on that can kill 20, maybe even 50% of the people.
[00:13:46]  And this is a death wish for civilization.
[00:13:50]  That's the way one of the scientists put this, a death wish for civilization.
[00:13:54]  And it absolutely has to come.
[00:13:56]  And I am still trying with my Democrat colleagues here to get them to agree to a bipartisan investigation.
[00:14:02]  And it's not completely out of the question.
[00:14:04]  And maybe they'll see it going on in the House and say, well, gosh, we don't want just the Republicans to investigate it.
[00:14:09]  Maybe we will have a bipartisan investigation in the Senate.
[00:14:13]  What are they so afraid of?
[00:14:14]  Why on earth wouldn't they do it?
[00:14:17]  Lastly, I know you're short on time, but I have to ask you about Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was attacked a few weeks ago.
[00:14:24]  She came out and spoke about it for the first time on the Sunday shows and really took aim at disrespectful Republicans because she did not like the way some were speaking about the attack.
[00:14:34]  Here's a little bit of that, Sat 3.
[00:14:37]  But it wasn't just the attack.
[00:14:39]  It was the Republican reaction to it, which was disgraceful.
[00:14:44]  But that trauma is intensified by the ridiculous, disrespectful attitude that the Republicans, and there's nobody disassociating themselves from the horrible response that they gave to it.
[00:14:59]  Well, you would think that there would be some level of responsibility, but you see what the reaction is on the other side to this to make a joke of it.

=== Right-Wing Anger Over Trauma (04:15) ===

[00:15:10]  So she didn't much appreciate people saying anything other than, I'm so, so sorry for what happened to your husband.
[00:15:16]  I know you were on the receiving end of a vicious attack that punctured your lung.
[00:15:21]  You had six ribs broken when somebody, a neighbor, ran down a hill and slammed into you.
[00:15:27]  You had your earbuds in.
[00:15:28]  You didn't see him.
[00:15:29]  You didn't hear him coming.
[00:15:31]  And I wonder if you received above-board treatment of the kind she's demanding from Nancy Pelosi's own family at the time.
[00:15:40]  You know, I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything, but on this I do.
[00:15:43]  I think some of the accounts of her husband were despicable, and I had a great deal of sympathy for him and his injuries.
[00:15:51]  I was struck once in the back so hard that six ribs were broken.
[00:15:55]  Three of them were completely separated.
[00:15:56]  We're not talking about cracked ribs.
[00:15:57]  We're talking about broken in half, where the ends rubbed upon each other until they could finally heal months later.
[00:16:04]  Lung was damaged.
[00:16:05]  I coughed up blood for a year and a half.
[00:16:07]  I finally had part of my lung removed.
[00:16:09]  And so the left-wing media thought was hilarious, including Nancy Pelosi's daughter, who basically tweeted out that my neighbor was her hero.
[00:16:18]  My political opponent this time around, we crushed him in the election, but I wouldn't debate him because he actually put an ad out mocking it and celebrating the attack on me.
[00:16:28]  So, no, the left-wing MSNB, MSNBC anchors laughed on air and said it was the funniest story of the year for them.
[00:16:36]  And so, no, I went through a terrible amount of pain.
[00:16:39]  I still have health issues related to this and no sympathy, not only no sympathy, but mocking.
[00:16:45]  And still to this day, people who worked for my opponent calling the person who attacked me their hero every day online this.
[00:16:53]  So I don't like what they did to Paul Pelosi, but I think Nancy needs to talk to her daughter.
[00:16:57]  I mean, her daughter's part of this same kind of crazy left-wing anger.
[00:17:01]  There's crazy right-wing anger.
[00:17:03]  And Paul Pelosi deserves nothing but our sympathy.
[00:17:06]  He's just an innocent man who was attacked.
[00:17:09]  And I think we should have nothing but sympathy or empathy for that.
[00:17:13]  Yes.
[00:17:13]  And you've said that before.
[00:17:14]  It's crazy.
[00:17:15]  Even now, Anna Navarro over on The View sends out some message suggesting, oh, some GOPers like McConnell and Romney condemned the attack on Paul Pelosi.
[00:17:25]  Most remained silent.
[00:17:25]  Others made jokes.
[00:17:26]  Others suggested the attacker be released.
[00:17:28]  And then others tried to score points by comparing to Rand Paul getting decked by his neighbor.
[00:17:35]  This from the party of Christian values.
[00:17:38]  I know your wife, Kelly, of whom I am a fan, tweeted out what exactly this felon did when he attacked you and said this guy had violent anti-Trump social media, yet you belittle his violence because you don't like Rand.
[00:17:53]  I mean, the double standard is pretty galling.
[00:17:56]  It's got to hurt in a few different ways for you and your family.
[00:18:00]  Yeah, Anna Navarra is a, you know, she's a comedy and nothing about her is serious or should be taken seriously.
[00:18:09]  She's not a Republican, not a conservative, and it's just a farce to have her on the air claiming to represent that she's in any way Republican.
[00:18:18]  But she's not very insightful either.
[00:18:20]  She, we were on one time with the show, and we were talking about my book, The Case Against Socialism, that my wife and I wrote together.
[00:18:27]  And in the book, one of the themes is basically that there isn't a kinder, gentler, nice sort of socialism that they tend to go hand in hand with state-sponsored violence.
[00:18:37]  And I was talking about Maduro and Chavez in Venezuela, and she's yelling at me on the couch, saying, I was saying that they were socialists.
[00:18:45]  And she was like, no, no, they're murderers and thugs.
[00:18:47]  And I said, precisely, they're socialist murderers and thugs.
[00:18:51]  That's the theme of the book.
[00:18:52]  You just don't get it.
[00:18:53]  But she wants them to be just evil people.
[00:18:55]  So people want Hitler to be evil, which he was, but they don't want to acknowledge that he was a socialist.
[00:19:01]  Or they want to say, well, yeah, Stalin was evil, but they don't want to acknowledge that he was a socialist or Pol Pot or Mao.
[00:19:07]  So the consistent theme with all these people is evil, but it's also socialism.
[00:19:12]  And this is the kind of subtlety that Ana Navarra is not capable of.
[00:19:16]  But, you know, I think her form of buffoonery, I guess it appropriately is on a show featuring buffoonery.

=== Pushed Buttons and Crypto Philosophy (04:29) ===

[00:19:25]  Senator Paul, always a pleasure talking to you.
[00:19:27]  We'll definitely be watching what your next move is and what your colleagues over there in the house are going to do when and if they do take control of the gavel.
[00:19:35]  All the best.
[00:19:37]  Thanks, Megan.
[00:19:38]  Coming up, a deep dive into the crazy FTX story.
[00:19:41]  Do you understand it?
[00:19:42]  We're going to help you understand it and we're going to explain exactly why it has such far-reaching implications into the Democratic Party.
[00:19:48]  Think they're giving the money back?
[00:19:53]  If you have not heard the name Sam Bankman Fried before or SBF, you're about to learn a whole lot more about him, whether you listen to this program or you don't, because his name is everywhere and it's going to be for quite some time.
[00:20:06]  He is a multi-billionaire at just 30 years old, reportedly, thanks to cryptocurrency.
[00:20:12]  And he has been a mega donor for the Democrats, a funder of left-leaning media outlets and the major lobbyist in DC for the industry he represents.
[00:20:22]  And now, over the past week, it all came crashing down.
[00:20:27]  And there are major questions to be answered about how this happened.
[00:20:31]  Jeffrey Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and knows the crypto industry very well.
[00:20:37]  He joins me now.
[00:20:38]  Jeffrey, welcome to the show.
[00:20:39]  It's so nice to see you, Megan.
[00:20:40]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:20:42]  And I hope you're right that this becomes a big source of controversy.
[00:20:45]  I'm not very optimistic based on the New York Times article this morning, but.
[00:20:49]  Well, right.
[00:20:49]  We'll get to that too.
[00:20:50]  But it's going to be tough because, I mean, it's just such a colossal failure and implosion that's going to be tough to ignore, at least the financial papers, but beyond.
[00:20:59]  And okay, so this guy, SBF, he's 30 years old and he starts, he went to MIT.
[00:21:06]  He's the son of two Stanford professors.
[00:21:10]  He goes to MIT, gets out of MIT.
[00:21:12]  He works for a traditional firm, as I understand it, for four years or so, and then decides at the age of 26, he's going to get into the crypto business.
[00:21:20]  And what is his crypto business and what made it different from the other crypto businesses?
[00:21:25]  Well, there are many exchanges in the U.S. now.
[00:21:27]  I mean, there's Jim and I, there's Coinbase.
[00:21:29]  There's very many legitimate crypto exchanges out there, but he decided that he was smarter and fancier than the rest of them.
[00:21:36]  And he would take on the industry in 2019 and started FTX.
[00:21:43]  And just strangely out of nowhere, he kind of rocketed up.
[00:21:46]  I mean, he passed up the market capitalization of all of his competitors.
[00:21:51]  And there's something very funny about it.
[00:21:53]  And he did all the fashionable things, right?
[00:21:55]  He talked a different game from, say, the Winkleboss twins or, you know, the head of Coinbase or the rest of the industry.
[00:22:04]  He was all about marketing himself as a socially conscious business person, so to speak.
[00:22:10]  So it was all about ESG and DEI or what he called effective altruism.
[00:22:17]  And also playing well with the regulators.
[00:22:20]  So he became a big Washington presence and then pushed all the other buttons, right?
[00:22:24]  It was big advertising.
[00:22:26]  He bought a stadium, the FTX stadium in Miami, you know, hired fancy stars, you know, Katie Perry, you know, advertising.
[00:22:37]  Tom Brady, Joseph, Tom Brady, and Larry David.
[00:22:42]  So, you know, you had all these buttons being pushed.
[00:22:44]  I tell you, there's other funny things about him.
[00:22:48]  He became a sort of a cartoon style caricature of these sort of youthful seeming geniuses that have become come to be valorized over the last 10 years, almost just inhabiting an archetype, you know, with the leg twitch and the disheveled look and unwilling to wear anything but cargo shorts and t-shirts and sneakers and, you know, had the look of somebody who just guzzles sodas all day.
[00:23:17]  You know, he had that, you know, and the MIT thing and, you know, this sort of this structured really to get rid of incredulity that would normally affect venture capitalists.
[00:23:29]  He pushed all the buttons.
[00:23:31]  And so celebrated as the next JP Morgan, the world's first trillionaire, and adoring media interviews.
[00:23:41]  Tell us about your philosophy.
[00:23:43]  Why is it that you want to be so rich?
[00:23:46]  And he says, well, you know, my philosophy.
[00:23:50]  Just as great as you think you are.
[00:23:51]  Explain why you're even greater.

=== The Influence Game Exposed (15:33) ===

[00:23:54]  Right.
[00:23:55]  My philosophy is that you should become rich so that you can give your money away to good causes.
[00:24:03]  Really?
[00:24:03]  That's amazing.
[00:24:04]  You don't need the money.
[00:24:05]  Oh, not for me, you know.
[00:24:07]  Well, you don't drive a Lamborghini.
[00:24:09]  Oh, no, no, no.
[00:24:10]  I drive a Camry.
[00:24:11]  It's right over here.
[00:24:12]  Have a look at it.
[00:24:13]  Of course, off camera was his $40 million estate in the Bahamas.
[00:24:20]  I think I know the place that he was staying in the Bahamas because I recognized the building from the television.
[00:24:26]  We've gone vacation on vacation there.
[00:24:29]  I think it's the Albany Resort down in the Bahamas.
[00:24:31]  And it's a very swanky place that Tiger Woods and others have invested in.
[00:24:36]  And we've never stayed in that place that he's in because it's ridiculously expensive.
[00:24:40]  Like we could never afford to be there.
[00:24:42]  It's right in the marina looking at all the yachts.
[00:24:45]  And so, yeah, his little humble Toyota Camry story is a lie too.
[00:24:49]  But let me just back up for people who don't follow it, like I don't.
[00:24:53]  The exchange, when you say he started the FTX exchange, that's a place where people who want to buy and trade in crypto can do it.
[00:25:02]  You can do it on an exchange.
[00:25:04]  So if you want to invest in, you know, Bitcoin, you might buy it on his FTX exchange, correct?
[00:25:12]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:25:13]  So the crypto ecosystem is self-contained.
[00:25:16]  You know, once you get on the blockchain, you can move money here.
[00:25:19]  All these coins are fungible with each other.
[00:25:21]  You can do it all from your cell phone or store all your assets in a cold wallet, you know, on a treasure wallet.
[00:25:29]  You know, you don't need these exchanges.
[00:25:31]  Where you need them is for the on-ramps and the off-ramps.
[00:25:34]  So if you're moving dollars to crypto, you need somebody to make the exchange for you.
[00:25:39]  If you want to convert your crypto back into dollars, you need somebody to do that too.
[00:25:45]  So exchanges have always been part of the industry.
[00:25:48]  Back before 2013, anybody could run an exchange, you know, because it was kind of a wild west.
[00:25:54]  I actually liked it better.
[00:25:56]  But then the U.S. Treasury said, uh-uh-uh.
[00:25:58]  If you're going to run an exchange, you have to register as a money exchange, same as any business.
[00:26:03]  And that means registering in every state, which means you're going to spend six figures.
[00:26:07]  You're going to comply with thousands of pages of stuff and so on.
[00:26:11]  So the industry actually became just a few dominant players after that.
[00:26:17]  They're good people and they are running a legitimate business, you know, from Coinbase to Jim.
[00:26:22]  And I mean, you need these services to buy.
[00:26:25]  And what you do with the exchange, you just link them up to your bank account and buy and sell crypto as you see fit.
[00:26:31]  A lot of people use them to custody their assets and play games, right?
[00:26:37]  Trading this, trading that.
[00:26:40]  And you know how it is, the same as with the stock market when the market's going up, everybody's a genius, you know?
[00:26:46]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:26:49]  So he not only had FTX, the exchange, but he had FTT.
[00:26:53]  He created his own Bitcoin or like sort of crypto currency, FTT.
[00:26:57]  So he's like, this is great.
[00:26:58]  I'll run the exchange and I'll have my own coin too that people can buy.
[00:27:02]  And then he had this company, Alameda, I guess, which is more, it's like the, is it like a JP Morgan?
[00:27:09]  Is it like a Goldman Sachs?
[00:27:11]  Is it like a, hey, Megan, you want to invest in crypto?
[00:27:14]  We'll advise you.
[00:27:15]  We'll do it for you.
[00:27:16]  We'll probably use the FTX exchange and buy the FTT coin, but we're just going to take this hassle off your hands.
[00:27:23]  And they engaged in a lot of mergers and acquisitions.
[00:27:26]  So Alameda research was used for a lot of purposes and receiving funds, manipulating funds, moving them in or out of the industry, holding a gigantic portion of FTT.
[00:27:39]  And you should be clear about these tokens.
[00:27:42]  Anybody can create a token of any name in about 20 seconds.
[00:27:46]  I can make a Megan Kelly while I'm talking to you right now.
[00:27:50]  But the value is zero until I market it, right?
[00:27:53]  So until I can create a market for it.
[00:27:57]  So Alameda Research was considered to be a market maker in Wall Street terms.
[00:28:02]  But I mean, what that meant was just a sort of a way to pump up the value of FTT.
[00:28:08]  So a lot of the danger of these institutions, they become these strange sort of perpetual motion machines.
[00:28:14]  Well, my company is backed by my token.
[00:28:15]  Well, what backs your token?
[00:28:17]  Well, my company.
[00:28:18]  Yeah, right.
[00:28:19]  It's all very incestuous.
[00:28:21]  And he had this band of, you know, very sketchy characters helping him run these corporations and these entities out of this Bahamian resort.
[00:28:31]  They all looked like they were about 14.
[00:28:34]  His ex-girlfriend, I guess, ran one of them, was bragging about how she's not good at math.
[00:28:40]  She didn't know what she was doing.
[00:28:41]  There was no stop-loss program.
[00:28:43]  And all of this is coming home to Roost now.
[00:28:45]  So while the goose was looking good, everybody said they're all brilliant.
[00:28:48]  This is amazing.
[00:28:49]  They sleep on beanbags.
[00:28:50]  How cool.
[00:28:51]  And now the bloom's coming off the rose as we realize what's really going on.
[00:28:55]  So, so how, so, okay.
[00:28:57]  So he starts FTX.
[00:28:59]  He's, he's good at sort of creating this weird image.
[00:29:01]  As you said, he's sort of like they, he's right out of central casting for who the media loves to pump up.
[00:29:06]  Like he's a little, I don't know if he's on the spectrum or what, but they like that.
[00:29:11]  They promote that the way he dresses to his little verbal and physical tics.
[00:29:16]  And since he come from MIT, I was at a legitimate bank for a while.
[00:29:20]  I was like, oh, okay, he's got credentials, kind of like Madoff, Madoff too, right?
[00:29:24]  He had a good resume.
[00:29:27]  And so during the height of crypto, I guess he must have had some value to the company and started to parlay that into dazzling things like having FTX on the name of the Miami Heat Stadium and partnering with Tom Brady, all these things.
[00:29:41]  And then more money came in, more money came in.
[00:29:44]  And then we'll get to the collapse in a second, but then the media came in too.
[00:29:47]  And the media had a big role in creating this guy's image.
[00:29:52]  How so?
[00:29:54]  Well, it was the adoring interviews and the fact that he sort of expressed all the fashionable values of woke ideology.
[00:30:03]  I mean, he was really a piece of work.
[00:30:06]  And just funny because you can, these days, woke ideology, you can find in, it's like a can you open up and dump it out on the table and pick through it, right?
[00:30:17]  So it's climate change, pandemic planning, socially conscious investing, giving away all your money.
[00:30:26]  I mean, just all these sort of buzzwords they use.
[00:30:29]  None of it's really serious.
[00:30:30]  But he really set out to say, look, I'm one of you.
[00:30:34]  And then he backed it up with lots of donations to the Democratic Party.
[00:30:38]  So one of the things that's funny about the crypto world is every new token has to have a shtick, you know, a marketing gimmick.
[00:30:45]  Well, his value added to the crypto world was basically woke ideology and all the fashionable causes associated with him, among which was this backing of Ukraine and the war with Russia, which we can get to in a minute.
[00:31:04]  That's a strange thing.
[00:31:05]  But that was his value added.
[00:31:07]  And then the media loving media interviews.
[00:31:11]  And you would think that, as you mentioned earlier, that the CEO of Alameda Research, for example, says, oh, you don't need anything other than elementary school math to run this company.
[00:31:23]  She actually said this, right?
[00:31:26]  But it just, it's so funny, isn't it?
[00:31:28]  How dope it is.
[00:31:29]  It's funny, horrifying.
[00:31:31]  So wait, a couple of soundbites that I want to get in here.
[00:31:33]  Here's a sound by with credit to Jesse Waters, who turned me out of this as I watched his opening monologue last night.
[00:31:39]  This has got a little bit from a YouTube profile that was done on this guy, Sam, saying, who is he?
[00:31:46]  And here's just to color in the lines on this image that we've created for the audience.
[00:31:51]  Here's a clip.
[00:31:57]  Okay, the guy you see next to me is the most generous billionaire in the world.
[00:32:02]  And I found him.
[00:32:03]  Hi, my name is Sam, and this is my story.
[00:32:06]  Sam has crazy hair.
[00:32:08]  Sam is vegan.
[00:32:10]  Sam sleeps five hours a night.
[00:32:13]  Sam lives in the Bahamas with 10 roommates.
[00:32:17]  Sam is 29 years old only, but Sam has $22 billion.
[00:32:24]  And he wants to donate all of it to charity.
[00:32:29]  Okay, so you can see where it's going.
[00:32:30]  But now here and there, watch this next clip of Sam talking about how he wants to fund Democrats.
[00:32:36]  And you can see the leg twitch and the press building him up and why they fell in love with him because his messaging, as weird as the guy seems, was spot on.
[00:32:46]  I think it's SAT 8.
[00:32:49]  In the end, I want to do what's right for the country.
[00:32:51]  You think every money you spend in politics should be disclosed publicly?
[00:32:54]  Are you comfortable with that?
[00:32:55]  If there was a norm where every dollar that Everett donated in politics was to be disclosed publicly, I would have a lot of sympathy for that.
[00:33:04]  I think I might support it.
[00:33:05]  I haven't thought carefully about it enough to know.
[00:33:07]  Well, it sounds like what you're saying is maybe there's some donations that you have made that you wouldn't make if you knew they were going to be immediately public.
[00:33:13]  So I think I don't generally think about it that way.
[00:33:19]  Okay, so the more he says he's going to donate, although he's like, and I want more and more disclosure, although I'm going to keep my company in the Bahamas where I don't have to follow all the same rules, right?
[00:33:29]  That's basically how it was going.
[00:33:30]  But the numbers that he actually wound up giving to Democrats were staggering, have been, I mean, up until last week, have been absolutely staggering.
[00:33:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:41]  And one of his rackets was, you know, arguing for this regulation, the transparency, and all this kind of stuff.
[00:33:48]  I mean, you know, and then buying off all the people who would be investigating him and otherwise looking carefully at his business operations.
[00:33:57]  So I read somebody said a couple of days ago, there's a great line that he hoped to become a too big to jail, which I thought was a very interesting phrase.
[00:34:07]  I mean, it's sort of paying protection money for his little racket.
[00:34:12]  And the more money he gave away and the more he engaged in the sort of marionette, you know, child genius routine, the less incredulous people were.
[00:34:23]  And the more people were celebrating him as the world's most generous, enlightened soul, you know, who understands things about crypto none of us understand, who's just making this empire that's going to fund all DNC-friendly charities, you know, all over the country.
[00:34:41]  And, you know, his brother even established a pandemic, it's called something like Fund Against Pandemics or Pandemic Planning Fund or something like that, solely for the purpose of receiving some of the $30 billion the Biden administration had scheduled for to fund pandemic planning.
[00:35:02]  So every time you see Sam out there going on about the importance of preventing the next pandemic, you know, he's basically showing for his brother.
[00:35:10]  And then you have his mother, you know, who herself is a co-founder of Mind the Gap PAC, one of the largest democratic packs.
[00:35:19]  So you could see how he surrounded himself with all this protection, all these protection rackets.
[00:35:27]  And you mentioned the fact he was in the Bahamas.
[00:35:29]  Now, that is a fascinating thing to me.
[00:35:32]  Why would you be in the Bahamas as a crypto exchange?
[00:35:36]  There are some regulations in the U.S. that you don't like and you would like to get rid of.
[00:35:41]  Some regulations, some costs of doing business, some taxes.
[00:35:43]  That's why you're in the Bahamas.
[00:35:45]  I do find it really interesting that all the champions of all these hyper-regulations of the crypto industry suddenly became adoring worshipers of Sam Bankman-Freed, you know, even though he's in the Bahamas for a reason.
[00:36:02]  I mean, why didn't Bill Clinton, you know, why didn't something go off in his head?
[00:36:05]  This guy may not be entirely on the up and up here.
[00:36:08]  I mean, he's operating.
[00:36:09]  What's he trying to avoid?
[00:36:12]  What's he trying to avoid?
[00:36:14]  No, but they kept saying, oh, this is entirely normal.
[00:36:17]  Oh, lots of lots of great business people see the Bahamas as a friendly place because the ocean views and fancy houses.
[00:36:25]  That's what I think.
[00:36:26]  You know, you had every reason to suspect this guy was running a racket.
[00:36:32]  Every reason.
[00:36:34]  Three years to go from nothing to one of the dominant crypto exchanges in the world, Larry Davids showing for you and Vine Stadiums in Miami.
[00:36:43]  It kept gives me a break.
[00:36:45]  And you're worth a lot of people.
[00:36:46]  Looking back.
[00:36:48]  And I have to tell you, Megan, like within the community of Bitcoin and related currencies and Ethereum and all these crypto world, people were very suspicious of this guy.
[00:37:02]  And let's not forget that the company that finally brought him down with a series of tweets was the CEO of Binance because they were involved with a deal.
[00:37:13]  Either Binance was going to buy FTX or FTX was going to buy Binance.
[00:37:19]  It would actually reverse order.
[00:37:21]  And once they started doing due diligence, the CEO of Binance says, I'm highly suspicious of this guy.
[00:37:27]  I don't think that the numbers are really adding up.
[00:37:30]  If I were you, I mean, the subtext is, I were you, I would watch your money carefully, have a look.
[00:37:37]  Well, it turned out, of course, that his suspicions were exactly right.
[00:37:41]  Sam had been using depositors' money and his exchange to subsidize his emergence and acquisitions activity that were being run by Alameda Research.
[00:37:52]  So there was this deep session.
[00:37:56]  Hold on one second because I'm going to set that up for the audience.
[00:37:58]  But before I go there, I just want to give some of the numbers.
[00:38:03]  He gave, well, he said that he expected to give north of $100 million in the next presidential election and that he had a soft ceiling of $1 billion with the spending likely to be on the higher end if Trump runs again.
[00:38:17]  He gave $10 million plus to back President Joe Biden in 2020.
[00:38:23]  He has hired a network of political operatives and spent tens of millions more shaping Democratic House primaries.
[00:38:31]  So I'm sure Tuesday was a complicated day for him because his company was being exposed as a fraud.
[00:38:37]  And yet all of these people who he had backed were winning elections.
[00:38:41]  And he was ready to do it again.
[00:38:43]  He had also backed a bunch of media companies through the brother and the pandemic thing was a huge thing thanks to the brother Gabe, who was going to run all that.
[00:38:52]  But he was also putting a bunch of dough into companies like Vox, The Intercept, ProPublica, the Law and Justice Journalism Project, and most recently Semaphore, which is, that's the Ben Smith organization, right?
[00:39:09]  In any event, formerly of the New York Times.
[00:39:11]  So he put a bunch of money in all these left-leaning, you know, some would take issue with that, but yeah, organizations.
[00:39:20]  And many of them then went on to cover him very favorably or got the money right after they did a favorable piece on him.

=== Timing Power and Journalism Scandals (05:34) ===

[00:39:28]  So you can see how the influence game works.
[00:39:32]  You sure can.
[00:39:33]  And I do find the timing interesting, right?
[00:39:35]  So we went right through the midterms and, you know, what is it, 48 hours later, just a few days later, the whole funding machinery of the Democratic Party and all the associated media companies that have been engaged in censorship and partisanship, you know, all along, the whole thing just falls apart.
[00:39:57]  you know, just very conveniently a few days after the midterms that he basically funded through his magic bean company in the Bahamas.
[00:40:05]  I mean, there's a lot of very strange things going on here, I would say.
[00:40:09]  Now, maybe it's just a complete coincidence of the timing, but, you know, you've got major distortions of political decisions that the American people are engaged in.
[00:40:26]  Thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars of fake money and Sony companies and fraudulent activities and Ponzi schemes.
[00:40:35]  You think about it.
[00:40:36]  How much trouble did Trump go through on the Russian investigation to find out how much interference was there?
[00:40:41]  Well, we should have at least that much sort of focus and an intrepid concern for what happened and the relationship here between FTX and the midterm elections that just took place and the entire machinery behind it.
[00:40:55]  What's going to happen with that $10 million?
[00:40:57]  Is Joe Biden going to give that back?
[00:40:59]  His campaign used it.
[00:41:00]  He won the presidency.
[00:41:01]  Now you've got a lot of investors who are going to be hurt as a result of this guy not having the actual money.
[00:41:06]  So does he give it back?
[00:41:07]  Do these Democratic politicians give back the money?
[00:41:10]  Clearly not, right?
[00:41:11]  I mean, sorry, it's spent.
[00:41:12]  I mean, they're, you know, they're busy paying off their debts and so on.
[00:41:15]  So the money's been banked.
[00:41:18]  And I don't know.
[00:41:19]  You know, one really does wonder.
[00:41:21]  And this is why I hope we get some investigations.
[00:41:23]  I was going to have a close look.
[00:41:24]  I'm sure the books are a mess, if there are any.
[00:41:29]  By the math scholar.
[00:41:30]  Right.
[00:41:31]  Yeah, right.
[00:41:32]  And the elementary school education, you know, of the CEO there.
[00:41:37]  So maybe there were no books at all.
[00:41:38]  And maybe the whole thing was just intended to come and go in three years.
[00:41:41]  I don't know.
[00:41:43]  I have no proof of that statement.
[00:41:45]  But FTX was founded just right after Biden declared in 2019.
[00:41:50]  And in three years, and I have people who have been in this industry a very long time.
[00:41:55]  They work very hard to build up company.
[00:41:58]  They keep clean books.
[00:42:00]  They comply with all the regulations.
[00:42:02]  They're serving their customers very faithfully.
[00:42:05]  They do proper marketing.
[00:42:08]  They have a good relationship with their customers.
[00:42:11]  And this punk shows up out of nowhere with all the right connections and loving media coverage of his eventual trillionaire status, the new Warren Buffett, the JP Morgan of God knows what else they called him.
[00:42:25]  And he gives it all, gives away vast amounts of money.
[00:42:28]  I mean, second only to Soros, to the Democratic Party, and the media covering the elections.
[00:42:36]  It's all really interesting.
[00:42:38]  And Megan, I'm sure you have seen this before, but it shows you just how dopey people can become when they believe that there's a magic money tree out there and that they're going to be able to pluck leaves off of it at will.
[00:42:53]  And that's why he got a free pass.
[00:42:55]  Instead of using his MIT education and his obviously brilliant mind to create something that was actually of value, he used it to pay off the relevant people who would expose his fraud.
[00:43:06]  I mean, that's how he used his brilliance.
[00:43:08]  And it was a smart move.
[00:43:10]  The party in power, which he had a hand in putting in power, the media who would expose and cover him.
[00:43:16]  And they went along like lap dogs.
[00:43:17]  I mean, even today, I know this is one of the things that's concerning you.
[00:43:21]  Even today, today, post the chapter 11 filing, which was Friday.
[00:43:25]  And he's now been exposed as, you know, there's nothing there.
[00:43:28]  People bought a pig and a poke.
[00:43:30]  They did a fawning piece on him in the New York Times, which the Times' critics are talking about as if they wrote something to the equivalent of Bernie Madoff.
[00:43:38]  Well, he made a couple of bad investments, but his heart was in the right place.
[00:43:43]  That was what the story said.
[00:43:44]  I read it this morning.
[00:43:45]  I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that.
[00:43:47]  How can you do this?
[00:43:48]  Did you cover Elizabeth Holmes this way?
[00:43:50]  Bernie Madoff?
[00:43:51]  I mean, come on, this is a scam.
[00:43:53]  This guy was running a Ponzi scheme and robbing people all over the place.
[00:43:57]  Instead, the New York Times says, well, you know, it's been a tough time in the crypto world.
[00:44:01]  And his company was so successful.
[00:44:05]  It just, it almost like it got ahead of him, you know, and nobody expects that kind of success that fast.
[00:44:09]  And maybe he just wasn't quite ready for it.
[00:44:11]  But fortunately for him, he's getting a lot of sleep and thinking through things.
[00:44:16]  Guys, are you serious?
[00:44:17]  This is the New York Times.
[00:44:19]  You know, it's unbelievable.
[00:44:21]  It's unbelievable.
[00:44:22]  Now, and you know this, and I do too.
[00:44:25]  The New York Times is a foreshadowing.
[00:44:28]  It's like a messaging system for a whole network of media.
[00:44:32]  This is how we're going to speak about this issue, people.
[00:44:36]  You want a career in journalism?
[00:44:40]  Do what we do.
[00:44:42]  And so it's a signal to the whole media now to cover the FTX scandal, which is a scandal for our age.
[00:44:50]  And it may just be B beginning, by the way.
[00:44:52]  I mean, this could just, you know, this, this, the failure of FTX, it could be the layman brothers of our time, you know, as it was in 2008.
[00:45:00]  I mean, there could be a lot of things that are going to unravel from this.

=== Media Signals for the FTX Story (03:05) ===

[00:45:02]  We can talk about that too.
[00:45:04]  Yeah.
[00:45:04]  So the media needs to be all over this.
[00:45:07]  This is a scandal for the ages.
[00:45:08]  You know, this is like Bernie Madoff.
[00:45:11]  You can't ignore.
[00:45:12]  It's a story whether you like it or not, whether you covered it right in the first instance or not.
[00:45:16]  Everyone needs to get on board and correct their past sins.
[00:45:19]  Yes, I want to go over how the implosion took place with Alameda and how that, like, because it relates to what's happened in the crypto market over the past year and just how bad it is.
[00:45:29]  Because I heard Charles Payne on Fox News say yesterday, this is Enron Times 2.
[00:45:34]  Enron Times 2 is a phrase nobody wants to hear.
[00:45:36]  You know, I mean, that was such a colossal implosion.
[00:45:39]  They brought down Arthur Anderson, one of the top six accounting firms in the world when they went down because they weren't looking over the books.
[00:45:46]  I don't know whether anybody looks over the books in crypto, but all things that I want to get to, could you stay over?
[00:45:51]  Could I hold you over?
[00:45:52]  Yeah, sure.
[00:45:53]  All right, we need to talk about this.
[00:45:55]  Yeah, I feel like we only booked you until like right now, but I need you to stay a little longer.
[00:46:00]  And we'll do that.
[00:46:01]  We'll keep Jeffrey here and we'll pick it up on the opposite side of this break.
[00:46:05]  It's such a pleasure talking with Jeffrey Tucker.
[00:46:07]  And don't forget, folks, that you can find this show, The Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
[00:46:22]  If you prefer your news via audio, like an audio podcast, you can go ahead and follow and say, download Apple Spotify, Pandora Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast.
[00:46:31]  There you find our full archives of more than 430 shows.
[00:46:34]  And in the meantime, if you're a podcast lover, you should know that I, not only am I no longer the only podcaster in the family, I don't think I'm even in the number one spot.
[00:46:44]  Doug Brunt, my husband, is on fire with his new podcast.
[00:46:48]  I'm getting so many nice compliments from his fans on it.
[00:46:51]  I want to share it with you.
[00:46:52]  It's called Dedicated, dedicated with Doug Brunt.
[00:46:55]  He opens up the cocktail.
[00:46:57]  He sits down with these well-known authors and he talks about their writing process, their biggest busts, how they came up with the ideas, their book to movie rights.
[00:47:06]  He asked Lee Child, who he had in mind when he wrote Jack Reacher.
[00:47:09]  It was not Tom Cruise.
[00:47:11]  So you'll find out who it was.
[00:47:13]  All sorts of fun things.
[00:47:14]  He has Jess Walter just out and that is, he wrote Beautiful Ruins among many others.
[00:47:19]  One of the great things about I'm loving about the podcast is writers are great with words.
[00:47:23]  And you listen to Jess Walters talk about something as simple as how he loves his favorite cocktail.
[00:47:28]  And suddenly you're transported to a better place.
[00:47:30]  Anyway, you'll love it.
[00:47:30]  Check it out.
[00:47:31]  Dedicated with Doug Brown.
[00:47:36]  Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute is still with me talking FTX and its founder, SBF, Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy who is the son of two Stanford professors who are totally donated to left-wing causes, as it turns out, is their son.
[00:47:53]  And he pumped some $40 million into the last, into this election cycle, not counting the $10 million he gave to Joe Biden in 2020 and the rest.
[00:48:02]  And as I told you, he was aiming to do between $100 million and $1 billion in the coming election.

=== Inflation Rounds and Money Crashes (15:58) ===

[00:48:08]  So that's the guy who has now fallen, totally imploded as a fawning media and industry experts just continued to look the other way, just continued to look the other way.
[00:48:20]  Now, we mentioned Madoff, and this does feel very much like a Ponzi scheme.
[00:48:25]  Our producer, our executive producer, found a clip of Sam speaking in front.
[00:48:30]  Let's see, is this, I don't know who he's talking to, but he's speaking to CNN in July, and he's talking about Ponzi schemes.
[00:48:39]  This very man, listen to SOD 11.
[00:48:41]  Because I think that when you have something which is basically an empty product, which I do think is true of some places, some assets in crypto, that is something where there's certainly real crash potential from it and where there's a lot less utility being brought by it.
[00:48:58]  And so I think that's a much less healthy piece of the ecosystem, whatever you want to call it.
[00:49:06]  Yeah, a real crash could be possible.
[00:49:07]  And that's what he just went through.
[00:49:09]  So let's just, let's talk about how it was exposed and how it came crumbling down.
[00:49:15]  You mentioned a rival of his called Binance.
[00:49:18]  And as I understand it, he, Sam, FTX, was thinking about buying Binance, which is very, that's ballsy.
[00:49:26]  And then, no, as it turns out, he didn't have the money to do that.
[00:49:30]  And then Binance, which was a rival too, was looking at buying FTX.
[00:49:34]  And this is where things started to fall apart for FTX.
[00:49:37]  How so?
[00:49:39]  Well, so let's just be clear that this scam could have gone on forever if the prices had just risen and risen and risen, right?
[00:49:46]  I mean, this is just like the Madoff thing.
[00:49:48]  If there's ever more money pouring into the Ponzi scheme, it can go on in perpetuity.
[00:49:52]  And in fact, Madoff lasted for, what, two decades or something like that?
[00:49:57]  It was the housing crash that brought Madoff down.
[00:50:00]  Yeah.
[00:50:01]  So FTX faced a lot of pressure this year and 2022 when the crypto sector began to kind of fall apart in light of Jerome Powell's dramatic changes in the federal funds rate, right?
[00:50:17]  So we're tightening money.
[00:50:19]  We're trying to crush this inflation thing.
[00:50:21]  And what people didn't really entirely understand, which is now more and more obvious, is that we've been living in an era for 14 years of relatively cheap money, right?
[00:50:30]  I mean, so we've had zero interest rate policies when inflation came along, interest rates turned dramatically negative.
[00:50:37]  That means that you can't make money by saving in the old-fashioned way.
[00:50:41]  Instead, you have a lot of money chasing return anywhere and everywhere.
[00:50:46]  Over 14 years, that's included a lot of things, you know, financial markets, of course.
[00:50:51]  Big tech companies got levered up.
[00:50:53]  Students took on tons of student debt to get their credentials so they could get cushied to six-figure jobs, all of which are being eliminated now from many, many companies.
[00:51:06]  But one of the sectors to really benefit from this era of cheap money was the crypto sector, right?
[00:51:12]  And we like to think that crypto somehow had an immaculate conception in 2009 and lived exogenously from financial markets.
[00:51:21]  And that may have been true for the first, you know, three, four, five years.
[00:51:26]  But in the meantime, once it became fashionable, it just became yet another place to dump a lot of money that benefited from the cheap money policies that Ben Bernanke started in 2008.
[00:51:36]  So when Jerome Powell started tightening rates and he wants to get them into the positive character, well, let me just back up slightly.
[00:51:44]  After the pandemic hit, the Fed was always trying to tighten.
[00:51:49]  But then he got talked into once again going to the floor and zero interest rates policy starting in the middle of March 2020.
[00:52:00]  That worked fine for about the first year until the inevitable inflation began, because unlike Bernanke, who put all the fresh money into the vaults of the Fed, the policy of the U.S. Congress was to distribute it widely as if from a helicopter, right?
[00:52:17]  So we had some $6 trillion printed over the course of 18 months that just was dropped into everybody's bank accounts as well.
[00:52:24]  Well, remember, well, that fueled inflation, got very high, really started squeezing business margins and really lowering real wages and creating that very close to being in a crisis kind of situation.
[00:52:38]  Jerome Powell did not want his legacy to go down as creating the greatest inflation in America in 40 years and destroying the domestic value of the dollar insurance of goods and services, would rather be known as the only truly heroic Fed governor in the post-war period, which is Paul Boecker.
[00:52:58]  So he set out to crush this inflation by tightening money and getting to a terminal rate of interest that's positive and restoring some sanity to the system.
[00:53:10]  But with that came the end this year of this sort of wild scramble for return.
[00:53:18]  Is this one of the reasons why if I bought Bitcoin a year ago, it was at something like 54,000 for one.
[00:53:25]  And now I'm told it's more like 14,000 a year later?
[00:53:31]  Yeah, it's really, it's experienced a 75% crash in value, which we've seen before in this space, you know, and everybody in it should be aware that that's how volatile it is.
[00:53:40]  But I think what's important here is that we've seen crypto really benefit from the loose money, especially in 2020.
[00:53:47]  It's not a coincidence that we peaked at $65,000, which proved to be utterly unsustainable.
[00:53:53]  And now we're in the $15,000 range and everybody's panicked about a return to $10,000 and lower.
[00:54:01]  And that's in what is the most reputable token.
[00:54:06]  But you've got 20,000 listed tokens out there.
[00:54:09]  And most of them are just going to vanish into San Array.
[00:54:13]  And this is one of them.
[00:54:14]  So FTT is his token and it trades on FTX, his exchange, and it's helped along by his market maker, Alameda.
[00:54:25]  And they, like everybody else, were affected by this dynamic that you're just discussing.
[00:54:29]  It's been a very rough year for crypto, all crypto.
[00:54:32]  Well, that's right.
[00:54:33]  It's been a rough year for everybody in this industry.
[00:54:35]  Yeah, but he was seen as sort of a golden boy still in this time.
[00:54:38]  He started buying up distressed firms that were going down left and right during the past 12 months.
[00:54:44]  But let's advance the discussion because I want to get to a couple of other points before I have to let you go.
[00:54:48]  So he gets into this thing with Binance.
[00:54:50]  Turns out Binance starts kicking his tires.
[00:54:53]  All right, maybe I'll buy you.
[00:54:54]  Let me take a look.
[00:54:55]  It doesn't go well.
[00:54:57]  And then the head of Binance takes to Twitter.
[00:54:59]  And why?
[00:55:00]  Why did he do it?
[00:55:01]  Does he hate SBF?
[00:55:02]  Like, why did he do that?
[00:55:03]  Well, it's certainly our competitors, but you know, when you've got a whole industry that lives off confidence, it's devastating to undermine it.
[00:55:11]  So you got, you know, FTX got tested with some withdrawals, the crypto equivalent of the bank run, which we've seen time and again.
[00:55:19]  And once that starts, it's hard to stop.
[00:55:21]  It's just like it's a wonderful life, you know, in the famous scene.
[00:55:25]  I want my money back, right?
[00:55:27]  Yeah, the guy from Binance is saying bad things about STA, whatever, this company.
[00:55:31]  And I want my coin.
[00:55:32]  I want my money.
[00:55:33]  Right.
[00:55:33]  Which would be fine if he had kept full reserves like any reputable crypto exchange would do.
[00:55:40]  In fact, all the exchanges sent out, you know, big notes to all their customers just to be clear.
[00:55:44]  We're keeping full reserves around here.
[00:55:46]  We have your money.
[00:55:47]  We're the custodian of your money.
[00:55:48]  If you want it back, we'll give it back to you.
[00:55:50]  We hope you don't.
[00:55:50]  But, you know, if you withdraw your funds, it's not going to make us illiquid.
[00:55:54]  It's not going to make us go under.
[00:55:55]  Okay.
[00:55:55]  We're a full reserve bank exchange.
[00:55:59]  Well, he was using depositor money and converting it to FTTs, shoving it over to Alameda Research, which served two purposes.
[00:56:07]  One was to pump up the value of FTT and move it in a way that was sort of surreptitious or whatever.
[00:56:14]  And then Alameda Research was able to get this.
[00:56:17]  This is where it gets really weird.
[00:56:19]  You shouldn't have 29-year-olds in this kind of world.
[00:56:21]  It's just crazy.
[00:56:22]  What they started doing once these exchanges around the country and the world were starting to fail in light of the lower prices for the crypto market in general, he thought the way to fix this was to buy up a bunch of companies, which he did with Alameda Research.
[00:56:39]  He kept acquiring more and more companies.
[00:56:41]  Now, initially, that looked like, wow, this genius, my goodness, he's just gobbling up companies left and right.
[00:56:47]  You know, this guy is just liquid, like you can't believe.
[00:56:51]  And then he gave interviews about that.
[00:56:53]  Why are you doing this, Sam?
[00:56:55]  Well, I'm doing it because I feel a moral obligation to this community.
[00:56:59]  You know, we just can't abandon our friends in times of need.
[00:57:03]  So this is, for me, another example of my effective altruism at work.
[00:57:10]  Oh, wow.
[00:57:11]  You just amaze us with your virtues.
[00:57:13]  It just never, there's no end to the depth of your virtue and your socially conscious investing.
[00:57:18]  That's great.
[00:57:19]  Well, what he was actually doing was trying to first fall the oven, inevitable, right?
[00:57:23]  He was trying to, he was trying to perpetuate the con game in light of these, of the tighter money and the collapse of the industry in general.
[00:57:31]  Maybe he was trying to put it off into, maybe he was trying to put it off to the end of the midterms.
[00:57:36]  I don't know.
[00:57:36]  What was he doing?
[00:57:37]  Look, the end was nigh already months ago, six months ago.
[00:57:42]  So he just wanted to squander as much money as possible and get it out there and keep the company.
[00:57:46]  And he didn't have the pot of money.
[00:57:48]  Like he, when, when there was a run on the bank, effectively, he did not have the pot of money to give to the investors.
[00:57:53]  He'd been spending it over at Alameda to keep that afloat.
[00:57:56]  And this is a no-no.
[00:57:57]  This is a hard and fast legal no-no.
[00:58:00]  Like you're going to go to jail for doing that kind of shit.
[00:58:02]  No-no.
[00:58:03]  And this is what he's dealing with right now, where he absolutely could be facing some very serious criminal charges.
[00:58:08]  It's well beyond the collapse of his company at this point.
[00:58:12]  Yeah, we'll see.
[00:58:12]  I'm actually skeptical of this.
[00:58:14]  The New York Times article this morning really rattled me because I'm afraid that his too big to jail scheme might actually work.
[00:58:21]  So, you know, I'm glad you're on the case.
[00:58:23]  There are a lot of people that are on the case.
[00:58:24]  A lot of independent journalists on Twitter are on the case and are discussing the details of this because God knows you can't depend on the mainstream media at this point.
[00:58:32]  I'm so sorry to say that.
[00:58:33]  The Wall Street Journal actually has run some pretty good stuff.
[00:58:36]  But the New York Times, if that's the signal of how we're going to treat this situation, it's going to be like child genius, you know, business gets ahead of them.
[00:58:45]  Sometimes people grew too fast.
[00:58:48]  Successful.
[00:58:49]  Too successful.
[00:58:50]  You know, sometimes people are too smart for this world.
[00:58:53]  But the media has a couple of reasons to do this.
[00:58:55]  Not only did they cover for him and not ask the right questions when he was growing weirdly quickly, they love him because he's this altruistic guy in their view who's helping a bunch of Democrats get elected in this midterm cycle and Joe Biden last time around and clearly hates Trump, checking all boxes.
[00:59:13]  But on top of that, there appears to be some sort of relationship with Ukraine that you referenced 20 minutes ago that they would also approve of.
[00:59:21]  And now I've looked at this six different ways, and this is how I short-formed it for myself, right?
[00:59:28]  Okay.
[00:59:29]  The United States gives money to Ukraine.
[00:59:31]  Check.
[00:59:32]  Ukraine then invests money in FTX.
[00:59:37]  They have a crypto donations partnership with FTX.
[00:59:40]  I mean, of all the companies and all the things that you can invest in, Ukraine has chosen FTX, this huge Democrat donor.
[00:59:48]  Then FTX, as I mentioned, gives a bunch of money, 40 million this past cycle, to Democrats.
[00:59:55]  Where did that money originate from?
[00:59:57]  Well, yes, money's fungible, but I'm just saying, like originally, it seems like a lot of that Ukrainian money came from us, went through FTX and wound up in the pocket of these Democrats who then vote for more aid to go to Ukraine and who then gets more money from us again.
[01:00:14]  And round and round and round it goes, which, you know, most of the media is very pro this intervention in Ukraine.
[01:00:21]  And this is yet another reason why they may very well want to look the other way.
[01:00:26]  Have I I realize I've gone down 101 on the Ukraine relationship, but have I summarized correctly what's being done?
[01:00:33]  I listened to you very carefully, Megan.
[01:00:35]  As far as I know, everything you said is true.
[01:00:39]  And the only question is, you know, was this purely a coincidence, purely an accident, or was it a well-thought out money laundering scheme?
[01:00:49]  And that, I think, is the critical question.
[01:00:52]  We've seen this in the past.
[01:00:54]  You know, I'm old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, which, you know, was under investigation for nearly two years because the administration wanted to get money to the Contras and Congress wouldn't allocate it.
[01:01:08]  So this is the way they did it.
[01:01:09]  All right.
[01:01:09]  So that's, it was, it was messy and it was scandalous.
[01:01:12]  But this is next level stuff.
[01:01:16]  You know, if you're, you're going to be giving aid to Ukraine, Ukraine deposits the money in FTX of all the places in the world.
[01:01:24]  And then FTX gives the money back again to media sources that support the Democrats and direct candidates with that are that are favored by the DNC and the Democrats and that whole machinery.
[01:01:38]  It all looks really, really weird.
[01:01:43]  And, you know, you talk about election interference, you know?
[01:01:47]  I mean, presumably we care about that stuff.
[01:01:51]  We need some very careful looks into this.
[01:01:54]  I was very pleased that, and by the way, again, this is why I listened to you very carefully.
[01:02:00]  Nothing you said is a conspiracy theory.
[01:02:03]  Everything you said was true.
[01:02:05]  So yeah.
[01:02:08]  And money is fungible, right?
[01:02:10]  I mean, so by that, I mean the dollar here is a dollar there.
[01:02:15]  So the Ukrainian government's getting money.
[01:02:17]  They're depositing with FTX.
[01:02:18]  FTX feeds it to Democratic candidates and causes, you know, among which, as we mentioned earlier, his brother with the pandemic fund, which itself had been endorsed by many Democratic candidates and they brag about it on their site.
[01:02:33]  So, you know, we're talking about a real money machine here.
[01:02:36]  And would they, I don't know, it's just bizarre.
[01:02:39]  Would they have resorted to something this sketchy, this shady?
[01:02:44]  Well, the stakes are pretty high, you know?
[01:02:48]  Well, I'll tell you, one of the independent journalists you mentioned, I think, is Alex Berenson.
[01:02:52]  He's coming on the show tomorrow.
[01:02:54]  He used to write for the New York Times, and now they hate him because he pushed back on all the COVID overreaches.
[01:03:00]  But he tweeted out the following.
[01:03:01]  Everyone should understand already that Sam Bankman-Fried was far more dangerous than Bernie Madoff.
[01:03:07]  Madoff mostly avoided small investors and picked up marks through word of mouth.
[01:03:12]  SBF's company ran a Super Bowl ad, the definition of chasing retail money.
[01:03:18]  Sam Bankman-Fried is about to become a litmus test for the elite media.
[01:03:21]  Will they investigate him half as hard as they chase Bernie Madoff?
[01:03:25]  Parenthetical.
[01:03:25]  I was on the New York Times team on Madoff.
[01:03:28]  I know we went hard.
[01:03:29]  Or will SBF's story like the lab leak become too ugly to Democrats to be pursued?
[01:03:38]  Barron is so, he's so insightful and he's a good one to follow because he just has he has a nose for these things and he and he has a tendency to tell the truth as far as he knows it.
[01:03:50]  I'm so grateful that we live in a time where people like him can have a platform because God knows at this point, we can't trust the New York Times to run this down.
[01:03:59]  Yeah, well, what about that comment about the Madoff comparison?
[01:04:01]  That Madoff, Madoff made it so that people would come to him begging to invest their pension fund.

=== Scam Artists and Cheap Money (03:23) ===

[01:04:07]  But this individual investor thing, this, you know, using Tom Brady, using Larry David at the Super Bowl, these kinds of ways of getting into the pockets of small investors who it tends to be younger investors sometimes in crypto.
[01:04:20]  I don't know exactly who the victims are, but what about that?
[01:04:23]  That's right.
[01:04:24]  It's a really interesting distinction because there's a lot of winking and nudging going on with the Madoff thing for years, 20 years.
[01:04:30]  People knew that.
[01:04:31]  Well, it's a little strange that he's guaranteed a 9% return, whether the markets are up or down, but he seems to know what he's doing.
[01:04:38]  He's well connected.
[01:04:39]  He's a former SEC Chairman Gawai.
[01:04:41]  He's well connected in the industry.
[01:04:43]  He surely knows what he's doing.
[01:04:44]  But yeah, he didn't pick on small investors.
[01:04:46]  You couldn't get in to Madoff's stuff without millions to throw around.
[01:04:50]  Okay.
[01:04:50]  So it's bad.
[01:04:52]  It's criminal.
[01:04:52]  It's rotten.
[01:04:54]  But you're right.
[01:04:54]  There wasn't anybody, no normal person suspected that FTX was a scam.
[01:05:01]  They didn't suspect that it was a racket.
[01:05:03]  And it's made everybody in the industry have a lot of scrupulous people, legitimate businesses that are doing legitimate work trying to reach customers, custody their money, provide services to people.
[01:05:16]  This scam artist came along and marketed it to so many people in these populist ways with easy interfaces.
[01:05:24]  Oh, just put your bank account in here, buy a bunch of crypto, get it back anytime, watch it go up and up and up forever.
[01:05:30]  So he's a real robber.
[01:05:34]  Yeah.
[01:05:35]  A real scam artist.
[01:05:36]  And, you know, you have to, but we should also be angry at, you know, look at all the VC investors.
[01:05:41]  I noticed this morning that they're all talking about suing him.
[01:05:43]  Well, look, for what?
[01:05:46]  I mean, why didn't you recognize that this inarticulate, silly man, you know, you had no standards whatsoever?
[01:05:56]  I mean, people would get on Zoom calls with the guy and he would babble a bunch of nananities.
[01:06:01]  And it's a bubb, that is a great man.
[01:06:04]  Let's just sign over a lot of VC funding to that company.
[01:06:07]  I will say this is where the media comes in too.
[01:06:09]  This is where the media comes in.
[01:06:11]  Usually these people get exposed because some savvy media journalist who follows the industry like Theranos, hello, this is what happened there, gets a hold of the story, starts digging deeper and has the freedom to do an expose, which raises the alarm.
[01:06:25]  But the immediate fell down on this one.
[01:06:27]  All the pieces about this guy are fawning about his stupid car and his beanbag.
[01:06:32]  So, you know, in their defense, everyone should have been paying more attention.
[01:06:39]  It discredits in many ways.
[01:06:42]  I would say just the left in general, because, you know, is it really enough just to virtue signal and to just say the word climate change over and over again and pandemic planning and socially conscious investing and effective altruism?
[01:06:58]  You just mutter a bunch of cliches, connected with the right crowd, just send a bunch of signals, and then You can depend on a vast machinery out there to cover for you and to apologize for you and to celebrate you, you know, and to valorize you.
[01:07:15]  Is that really how disconnected we've become from reality?
[01:07:19]  Is it all these days entirely about symbolism?
[01:07:22]  And I guess that gets back to my point about the cheap money.
[01:07:24]  In an age of cheap money, you know, 0% interest rates for 14 years, that's the habit we got into in this country.

=== Women Men and Workforce Gaps (14:53) ===

[01:07:30]  Instead of looking at values, you know, real economic value, at profit and loss, at return, open so old-fashioned, Jeffrey.
[01:07:41]  Such an old-fashioned concept.
[01:07:44]  All right, I gotta wrap it up.
[01:07:46]  But I think you raise a good point about what now.
[01:07:48]  This is such a big force in the crypto market.
[01:07:50]  Where does it go?
[01:07:51]  And only time is going to tell the art.
[01:07:52]  Will there be criminal charges?
[01:07:54]  Will the media do its job?
[01:07:56]  And how many others are going to follow if this has a domino effect on the industry?
[01:08:00]  All questions we will take up as the story unfolds.
[01:08:03]  Jeffrey Tucker, thank you so much.
[01:08:06]  It's a pleasure to be with you, Megan.
[01:08:07]  Thank you.
[01:08:08]  Likewise.
[01:08:08]  All right, coming up next, a deep dive into the decline of men in the workforce with some alarming numbers.
[01:08:18]  Now we're switching gears and turning to a topic that desperately needs more attention.
[01:08:23]  It's a topic our friend Mike Rowe discussed with us last time he was on the show: the disappearance of men from the workforce in America.
[01:08:31]  Today, over 7 million men of prime working age are neither working nor looking for work.
[01:08:39]  This is bad for those individual men and for us as a society.
[01:08:43]  Here to discuss it is the author of Men Without Work, Nick Eberstadt.
[01:08:48]  Nick, welcome to the show.
[01:08:50]  Hey, thanks so much for inviting me.
[01:08:52]  Yeah, thanks for being here.
[01:08:53]  So define how bad the problem is right now.
[01:08:56]  Well, look at it this way: we can do a work rate, an employment rate for the prime age men.
[01:09:03]  If you take a look at last month's numbers, they're lower than they were in 1940 at the tail end of the Great Depression.
[01:09:10]  So we really do have a depression-scale problem for work for men in the United States.
[01:09:17]  If you look at the 21st century as a whole, the work rate for prime age men is actually substantially lower than it was in 1940.
[01:09:28]  So we've basically got a 1937 scale work crisis for men in America, and we're missing it because we only look at the unemployment rate and at the number of people employed.
[01:09:43]  We forget to look at the numbers for people who are neither working nor looking for work.
[01:09:48]  For every guy who is out of work and looking for a job these days, there are over four who are neither working nor looking for work.
[01:09:58]  So if you track the unemployment happy talk, you are missing four-fifths of the problem.
[01:10:04]  Were they working at one point?
[01:10:08]  Some of them were, but many of them are long-term dropouts from the workforce.
[01:10:14]  What you see if you look over the history of the post-war era is a series of declining trajectories, almost like failing rockets.
[01:10:27]  Each younger group works less at any given age in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, than the group before them.
[01:10:36]  It's almost like rings on a tree.
[01:10:38]  And so now you have a very large number of men who are basically longtimers out of the workforce altogether.
[01:10:48]  So why aren't they working?
[01:10:51]  Well, one reason that doesn't fly is that we can't say they're at home taking care of other people.
[01:11:00]  There's an enormous care chasm between guys who are out of the workforce and women who are out of the workforce.
[01:11:06]  It's like an order of magnitude different.
[01:11:08]  If you ask these guys, and we do in these different labor surveys, you know, why aren't you at work?
[01:11:15]  Only a tiny fraction of them say that it's not because there are any jobs for them.
[01:11:20]  And today, that would be kind of implausible if you look at the peacetime labor shortage that we've got going on.
[01:11:30]  Some of them say that it's because of health problems.
[01:11:32]  Some of them say that it's because of other problems, but it's not because of a lack of work and it's not because of things that they're doing at home.
[01:11:40]  When did the problem start in earnest, like these big numbers?
[01:11:44]  That's a really interesting question.
[01:11:46]  For the first two decades of the post-war era, there was no sign of this problem at all.
[01:11:52]  Then, starting around 1965, a flight from work by men started to become evident in these numbers.
[01:12:01]  And the really weird thing about this flight from work is that it's almost like a straight line from the 1960s to today.
[01:12:09]  I mean, people are a little bit disorderly and irregular.
[01:12:14]  But if you look at the numbers themselves, it's almost tracking a straight line from through the 60s and 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, the 2010s.
[01:12:26]  It's been going on with almost kind of geophysical regularity now for almost 60 years.
[01:12:35]  I don't get it.
[01:12:36]  If it were pandemic related, I would get it.
[01:12:39]  They got paid by the government to stay at home.
[01:12:41]  They liked it.
[01:12:43]  The pandemic induced a lot of stress, anxiety, depression in people that they're struggling to get over to this day.
[01:12:48]  I don't get 50 years of men leaving the workforce more and more and more.
[01:12:52]  Like, I don't, what is that?
[01:12:55]  Well, it's Megan, it's clearly unnatural because for what, 10,000 generations, 50,000 generations in Homo sapiens in our species, men are kind of like a natural provider force.
[01:13:08]  And now you have an enormous contingent of men in modern America who are cast into this unnatural role as dependents upon society.
[01:13:18]  You couldn't have something like this happening if we weren't as fantastically prosperous as we are today.
[01:13:24]  You go through the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, up to the present, and you can come up with different kinds of explanations that kind of work in part.
[01:13:37]  One of the things that is said about rich countries in general is that they've been affected by what economists call structural and economic transformation, you know, decline of manufacturing, outsourcing.
[01:13:52]  China enters the WTO.
[01:13:54]  I mean, there's some truth to that in depressing work rates and labor force participation for men all around the world, but it doesn't really explain what you see in our country.
[01:14:06]  I mean, you wouldn't have a straight line out of the workforce if this was a consequence of the business cycle, right?
[01:14:15]  You'd see something that was kind of wavy.
[01:14:17]  You'd see the China shock when China entered the WTO.
[01:14:21]  You don't see that at all.
[01:14:22]  Is it related to women entering the workforce in greater numbers?
[01:14:26]  I mean, are these like, you know, is it a role reversal where these guys are staying home and the wives are bringing home the bacon?
[01:14:32]  Well, you know, there are some people who argue that I'm not so persuaded, and I'll tell you why.
[01:14:38]  I mean, women obviously have always worked.
[01:14:40]  It's just since the end of World War II that they got paid for it in the labor force.
[01:14:44]  But there was this huge influx of women into the labor force after World War II.
[01:14:49]  And if they were displacing men, you know, the participation rates would have flatlined.
[01:14:56]  Instead, what we saw is that the participation rates went way up for like 50 years from 1950 to the end of the century.
[01:15:05]  And that means that women were kind of supplementing men.
[01:15:08]  Since 2000, the participation rates for both men and women have been going down.
[01:15:14]  So they've both been feeling the same pain.
[01:15:18]  There's also something that I mention in this book, which we might want to keep our eye on.
[01:15:25]  I'm not sure that it's a four-alarm fire yet, but it's, let's say, a yellow flashing light.
[01:15:32]  This is the women without work problem for prime age women who are out of the workforce and don't have kids at home and aren't currently married.
[01:15:42]  There are about 3 million of them.
[01:15:45]  And some of the patterns that they're reporting about their own lives, what they do with their own time, their drug use, are looking a little bit too close for comfort to what I show in this book about the guys.
[01:15:57]  What's prime age?
[01:16:01]  What is the prime age?
[01:16:03]  What's the range?
[01:16:04]  Oh, prime age is 25 to 54.
[01:16:07]  Oh, same as in the television key demo that we use to base our advertisement rates on.
[01:16:12]  25 to 54.
[01:16:13]  That's the money spot.
[01:16:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:16]  Well, I mean, I didn't come up with this.
[01:16:17]  I wasn't smart enough to come up with this demographic, but it's kind of self-evident, you know, prime working ages, 25 to 54, but it's not just all dollars and cents.
[01:16:27]  I mean, this is also a key group for raising, you know, raising children, starting families.
[01:16:34]  It's got a tremendously important social component to it, too.
[01:16:38]  And a lot of the dropouts, a lot of the male dropouts, they're disproportionately unmarried, don't have kids at home.
[01:16:46]  I mean, you drop out of the workforce.
[01:16:48]  You're also dropping out of family.
[01:16:50]  You're dropping out of community.
[01:16:52]  One of the things which I think is really kind of spooky that you see from looking at some of these numbers is how the workforce dropout guys say that they're spending their time.
[01:17:05]  What do they do between waking up going and going to sleep, right?
[01:17:09]  Yes.
[01:17:10]  This is their social.
[01:17:11]  I want to get to that one second, like how they're spending their time.
[01:17:13]  But before we get to that, like if you said this began in like even the 90s, I would get it.
[01:17:18]  Opioid crisis hits.
[01:17:20]  People are, you know, they're pulled into this darkness.
[01:17:22]  And then sometimes it's hard to find a job, right?
[01:17:25]  Like if you're an active addict or even a non-using addict, you have a criminal record.
[01:17:31]  All this makes re-entering the workforce much tougher, right?
[01:17:36]  Much tougher.
[01:17:37]  So that I would get starting back 30 years before that.
[01:17:41]  My God, I'm so confused.
[01:17:42]  If you said this started in 2007, the advent of the iPhone, I'd say, I get it.
[01:17:47]  People, it's addictive.
[01:17:48]  You spend all day.
[01:17:49]  You can't pull yourself away.
[01:17:51]  We said COVID, right?
[01:17:52]  Like this is a much bigger problem.
[01:17:54]  It's been going on for decades.
[01:17:56]  And against it is the genetic gravitational pull of hunter-gatherer, support family, be the man.
[01:18:05]  You know, like it's the same reason why, you know, women like me who work can't deny that for most of us, there is this biological pull to be with our children.
[01:18:13]  And like that, that's why we wrestle so much when we're not all day.
[01:18:16]  Anyway, I'm so confused, Nick.
[01:18:19]  I still don't get it, but I do think those events I mentioned probably exacerbated it.
[01:18:23]  No?
[01:18:24]  Sure, absolutely.
[01:18:25]  Let me mention a couple more.
[01:18:28]  The decline in the post-war era of the previous family system, the two-parent family norm.
[01:18:37]  Guys who are not in the workforce are way more likely not to be in families either.
[01:18:43]  The rise of the modern welfare state, our European cousins tell us that we're terribly stingy.
[01:18:52]  But in 1965, we were even stingier.
[01:18:55]  The welfare state was still a twinkle in Lyndon Johnson's eye back then.
[01:18:59]  And one of the things which we have seen over the last half century, I think, is how terribly destructive the whole disability archipelago of benefit payments for being out of work because you're said to be not able to work has been.
[01:19:18]  Another thing is crime and punishment.
[01:19:21]  We had this incredible long-term crime wave that was followed by this explosion of punishment.
[01:19:27]  We've got tens of millions of adult ex-cons in the United States today as well.
[01:19:33]  We don't track them very well, but it's clear that they're disproportionately overrepresented in this men without work.
[01:19:41]  Yeah, because they can't work if they have to check the box on whether they committed a crime.
[01:19:43]  Who's going to hire a guy who committed a crime if they've got, in today's day and age, four other applicants who didn't commit a crime?
[01:19:50]  Or, you know, they just do a background check on you if you, depending on the job you're applying for.
[01:19:54]  It makes it almost impossible for people who are ex-cons to find work, which is a problem for all of us.
[01:19:59]  I'm not, it's not a bleeding heart thing.
[01:20:01]  It's a this is a problem for society.
[01:20:03]  It's not good to have ex-cons sitting there out of work doing absolutely nothing.
[01:20:06]  Guess what happens?
[01:20:07]  More crime.
[01:20:09]  Yeah.
[01:20:09]  And you could, and certainly there are millions and millions of ex-cons who can be rehabilitated, who can re-enter work, re-enter family, re-enter society.
[01:20:19]  We've got this strange thing in the United States.
[01:20:21]  We're basically a data-oriented country, but we've cloaked all of the ex-cons in statistical invisibility.
[01:20:28]  For some reason, Uncle Sam has no interest in coming up with information about their circumstances.
[01:20:34]  Now, that means, among other things, that we can't have evidence-based policies in the United States for getting them back to work because we don't have the evidence.
[01:20:44]  How big a factor was COVID, right, when we started literally paying people to sit on their couch?
[01:20:50]  Even people who didn't need the check were getting the check of, how much was it?
[01:20:56]  Like 600 a month, then 300, I mean, a week, 600 a week, then 300 a week for 18 months.
[01:21:02]  Well, I mean, obviously, COVID was a catastrophe.
[01:21:05]  It killed a million people.
[01:21:07]  But most of the people, the overwhelming number of people who died from COVID were older than labor force age.
[01:21:15]  There's still some people who are at home sick with long COVID who say they can't work because of long COVID, but that's in the scheme of things a pretty small number.
[01:21:24]  We're talking about hundreds of thousands.
[01:21:28]  We're about 4 million short of where we would have been on pre-COVID trends in terms of workforce total numbers, which coincidentally is about the increase in unfilled jobs in the United States since before COVID.
[01:21:45]  This isn't all men, this isn't all these prime age guys we've been talking about.
[01:21:49]  We've got a new face to the flight from work in modern America.
[01:21:54]  Most of that gap is older former workers, men and women 55 and older, who were the kind of sole rate ray of sunshine in the pre-pandemic, you know, kind of tableau because their work rates had been going up for a generation.
[01:22:11]  Also, we're seeing more of the younger women, I think, in this labor force dropout population for the time being.
[01:22:21]  Who is paying their bills?

=== Free Time and Premature Retirement (06:47) ===

[01:22:23]  Not to dumb it down, but like, you know, it takes money to live.
[01:22:27]  You got to pay your rent.
[01:22:28]  You got to buy your groceries.
[01:22:29]  Well, Amegan, your listeners, of course, you and I and your listeners are paying Uncle Sam, which is either us right now or our children and unborn grandchildren in deferred debt payments, right?
[01:22:44]  We had this extraordinary thing that happened during the pandemic crisis.
[01:22:49]  Pandemic crisis is the only time in history that I'm aware of when disposable income for a population actually increased during a national economic crisis.
[01:23:02]  This was because of the fire hose of money, borrowed money, that was shot at households with the $600 a week and the $300 a week and other interventions, right?
[01:23:13]  During the years 2020 and 2021, the national savings rate more than doubled, which is to say that households had more money than they could spend from these transfers.
[01:23:26]  And a nest egg of over $2.5 trillion was put aside just from these transfers.
[01:23:33]  That's apart from other wealth effects, the zero interest rate that your previous guest was talking about.
[01:23:41]  And $2.5 trillion, a lot of money.
[01:23:44]  And an awful lot of people use this either to supplement their earnings or to substitute for their earnings.
[01:23:51]  And I think what we're seeing right now is a certain amount of being out of the workforce on premature or maybe premature and unsustainable retirement.
[01:24:01]  I mean, they better realize like those checks, maybe they still have dough in the bank, but that doesn't last very long.
[01:24:07]  Even if it's $1,200 a month or $2,400 a month, that does not last, get you very far.
[01:24:13]  We're about at the point where that money should be running out.
[01:24:16]  But again, pre-existing problem.
[01:24:18]  So now to the question of what they are doing all day.
[01:24:21]  We would like to fantasize that they are doing like what my mom used to do when she was a little younger in her free time.
[01:24:29]  She would drive the other ladies who are elderly to church on Sundays.
[01:24:33]  And I've got a big friend who's into meals on wheels and so on.
[01:24:38]  That's not really how they're spending their time.
[01:24:42]  So shortly after the end of the Stone Age, I was taught economics.
[01:24:47]  And back in those days, as a kind of a mental tick, economists would say you were either working or you had leisure.
[01:24:55]  Now, that is a wrong way of looking at it because leisure is a very special way of using your free time.
[01:25:01]  It's a way of using your free time to restore yourself or to elevate yourself.
[01:25:06]  It's also possible to use free time in a way that degrades you or degrades you and others.
[01:25:13]  And unfortunately, that's what we see in the self-reported time use for male dropouts from the workforce.
[01:25:23]  They say that they do almost no civil society stuff of the type your mom used to do.
[01:25:29]  They say almost no religion worship, almost no charitable or volunteering activities.
[01:25:37]  They got an awful lot of time on their hands, but they say they do very little, strangely little, help around the house, either with chores and housework or with looking after people in the home.
[01:25:51]  What they say that they do is watch screens.
[01:25:55]  Now, surveys don't tell us what they're looking at or what type of screens, but like 2,000 hours a year on average of looking at screens.
[01:26:05]  I mean, that's as much as a full-time job for a lot of people.
[01:26:09]  And some of these surveys ask the poignant question, do you use pain medication?
[01:26:17]  One of the pre-COVID surveys showed that almost half of the dropouts reported using pain pills or pain medication every day.
[01:26:30]  So it's not just sitting at home playing Call of Duty or whatever.
[01:26:34]  It's playing Call of Duty Stoned.
[01:26:37]  And need I say this is not a springboard for getting you back into the labor market.
[01:26:43]  It's much more likely to be a kind of a pathway towards deaths of despair.
[01:26:47]  It's kind of a portrait of misery.
[01:26:50]  Right.
[01:26:50]  These people, they need mental health services.
[01:26:54]  These people sound depressed to me.
[01:26:56]  It doesn't sound like they're like, you love my existence on the government dime.
[01:27:01]  They sound down and in need of assistance.
[01:27:04]  To me, it's like yet another reinforcement that we need more readily available mental health assistance in this country, whether it's via Zoom or just cheaper and better, by the way, because too often cheaper means crappy.
[01:27:15]  It needs to be cheap and good.
[01:27:18]  No, it's a portrait of suffering and misery and anomy and loneliness and disconnection.
[01:27:27]  I mean, you can play video games while you can watch television, you can do all sorts of things to entertain yourself a little bit.
[01:27:35]  But if you substitute those things for like your real life, you're going to be in a pretty tough place.
[01:27:43]  Yeah, you need to look at another person's flesh and bones, face, and body, and have eye contact in person.
[01:27:52]  And life is not the same without that stuff.
[01:27:54]  To jump back to something else you mentioned, the long COVID.
[01:27:58]  I feel like you wrote something.
[01:28:00]  It must have been from the book.
[01:28:01]  I can't remember, but it was something about how the long COVID numbers don't add up with the actual COVID that went around.
[01:28:07]  Like there's some question about whether these people really have long COVID.
[01:28:11]  Is that from you?
[01:28:11]  I'm trying to remember where I got that.
[01:28:14]  I only made the distinction between numbers of people who reported having long COVID and happened to be out of the workforce and numbers of people who said they were out of the workforce because of long COVID.
[01:28:27]  So kind of accidentally, two of those groups overlap a lot.
[01:28:32]  But when you ask people, are you out of the workforce because you have long COVID?
[01:28:37]  You've got a surprisingly small number about right now, about 400,000 persons.
[01:28:42]  Remember, I said the gap was about 4 million.
[01:28:45]  400,000 is a lot of people, but it doesn't account for the majority of that gap.
[01:28:50]  I mean, COVID obviously is like such a disruptor, but I do think that, and I do believe in long COVID, I think that's actually a thing.
[01:28:57]  I don't dismiss that, that some people are suffering with that.
[01:29:01]  Who the hell knows?
[01:29:01]  It's such a pernicious virus.
[01:29:03]  However, I also think there are people who just say they have it because it's something that's accepted.

=== Stigma Beyond Dollars and Skills (04:04) ===

[01:29:10]  It'll get you out of work.
[01:29:11]  It'll get you out of judgment from a lot of people in terms of your wanting to stay at home on your couch and watch TV all day.
[01:29:19]  And that's not okay either.
[01:29:21]  I don't maybe like, maybe we need the return of some stigma for those who just don't work.
[01:29:28]  You know, I'm so glad that you mentioned the word stigma because we seem to have veered into this kind of value-free, judgment-free, you know, kind of environmental space.
[01:29:40]  And that's pernicious.
[01:29:41]  That ends up hurting people more.
[01:29:45]  Stigma is the kinder, gentler version of enforcing social norms, kinder and gentler than the police state, right?
[01:29:56]  It's a way of kind of helping people straighten up and fly right.
[01:30:02]  And one thing which is self-evident to those of us who've had long lives in the workforce is that work isn't just dollars and cents.
[01:30:14]  Work is a service to other people that helps you complete yourself.
[01:30:21]  It helps you self-attain.
[01:30:24]  It helps you kind of earn your own kind of success, no matter what your station is.
[01:30:29]  And being attached to the world through the workforce, like being attached through family or being attached through community, it's good for us in ways that go way beyond dollars and cents.
[01:30:43]  There was that old funny Greek guy, Aristotle, who said that human beings are social creatures and we are social creatures and we suffer if we're not in society.
[01:30:55]  Yeah, it's like you think, but working is so important, I think.
[01:30:59]  Just gives you a purpose and makes you feel like you matter.
[01:31:01]  It could be any job, but especially if you manage to line it up with something that thrills you or excites you.
[01:31:10]  I don't know.
[01:31:10]  And I think the contrary is also true.
[01:31:12]  If you don't work and you think you're just going to be sitting around, you're going to be doing your favorite things.
[01:31:15]  You're going to be whatever, gardening, or you're going to be reading or you're going to be, I don't know.
[01:31:20]  I think the odds are higher that you're going to be searching the screen.
[01:31:22]  After a while, you're going to be on that damn screen all day doing something that probably depresses you.
[01:31:27]  It's just the least amount of effort for the highest return, but it's not good for you.
[01:31:32]  It's just not good for you.
[01:31:33]  So what do we do about this, Nick?
[01:31:35]  I mean, I wouldn't even know where to begin if we're going to solve this problem.
[01:31:39]  Well, I mean, every one of us, I think, can do a little bit on this.
[01:31:44]  We can start by committing truth in public.
[01:31:46]  I mean, you've been kind of doing this.
[01:31:48]  You know, you say that work is important.
[01:31:52]  It's important for all sorts of reasons that go beyond the dollars and cents.
[01:31:56]  I mean, we have these conversations around the kitchen table or around the public square.
[01:32:00]  I mean, being able to tell the truth on this kind of matters to begin with.
[01:32:06]  There are things which we can do in our social conventions, which I think matter a lot.
[01:32:12]  During my lifetime, I have seen the death of the summer job.
[01:32:16]  I mean, when I was a kid, you know, when I was a teen, it was a thing.
[01:32:22]  You know, boys and girls, teens all got summer jobs.
[01:32:25]  10 years, you know, postponing work for 10 years has no good consequences for society.
[01:32:32]  Government can do some things and it can also avoid doing some things, and those might help.
[01:32:38]  More skills, vocational skills.
[01:32:41]  It's kind of a scandal that the educational establishment has omerted the word vocational.
[01:32:47]  That kind of tells you a little bit about the problem.
[01:32:51]  I think we need to turn the disability insurance system, the government disability system on its head and flip it from being subsidizing and encouraging dependence and helplessness to a kind of a work-first principle.
[01:33:07]  We had a great welfare reform in the 1990s for single moms that did very well.
[01:33:12]  I think we could do something here.

=== Vocational Magic Wands for Work (02:13) ===

[01:33:14]  Also, I'd kind of like to see more information about the ex-felons.
[01:33:20]  I mean, I'd like to see us at least take them out of the statistical darkness.
[01:33:26]  They shouldn't be untouchables.
[01:33:29]  There's some things which we can't do.
[01:33:31]  I mean, I don't have the magic wand to fix the family in America.
[01:33:34]  I don't have the magic wand to get us back to 1965 value systems.
[01:33:40]  But if we know what we're missing, we can kind of grope towards solutions, I think.
[01:33:46]  So I've painted a pretty sobering picture, but I don't think that this is one that we give up hope on because it's been a very bad bet for people who bet against the United States of America for about 250 years.
[01:34:02]  Well said.
[01:34:03]  Wow.
[01:34:04]  Thank you for calling attention to it, for writing the book, for sharing your expertise with us.
[01:34:08]  Really, really appreciate it.
[01:34:09]  And it's just scary that all this is very scary.
[01:34:13]  All the best to you, Nick.
[01:34:14]  We'll see you soon.
[01:34:15]  Thanks so much.
[01:34:17]  Oh, so interesting.
[01:34:18]  Ron DeSantis weighing in just now.
[01:34:20]  One of the things I've learned in this job is when you're leading, when you're getting things done, you take incoming fire.
[01:34:26]  That's just the nature of it.
[01:34:27]  Oh, shots fired.
[01:34:31]  We'll hear what President Trump has to say tonight.
[01:34:34]  I have my alarm set.
[01:34:35]  My team and I are going to be on a group text, and we're very much looking forward to discussing it all with you tomorrow starting at noon live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111.
[01:34:45]  And we will dive into the announcement with those in the GOP who are happy to see Trump in the 24 race and those who are not.
[01:34:52]  Plus, we'll have Alex Berenson here with us.
[01:34:55]  In the meantime, go to MeganKelly.com.
[01:34:59]  Sign up for the American News Minute.
[01:35:01]  It's such a fun correspondence with a bunch of highlights of the week's news and highlights from the show.
[01:35:07]  And what you see Mr. Strudwick doing this week will shock you more than any other thing you've ever seen before.
[01:35:15]  Thanks for listening, you guys.
[01:35:16]  Don't forget to download the show, the podcast and youtube.com.
[01:35:20]  See you tomorrow.
[01:35:23]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:26]  No BS, no agenda, and no