COVID Numbers Game & Toxicity of Big Tech | Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Vivek Ramaswamy, & Scott Galloway

welcome to the megan kelly show your home for open honest and provocative conversations [Music] hey everyone i'm megan kelly welcome to the megan kelly show first up today i want to discuss with you a new covid study that virtually all of the media will likely ignore why it suggests almost half of those hospitalized with covet you know they keep trying to scare us with these hospitalization increases and look at the numbers and blah blah might not be as sick as we've been led to believe and might not even be there because of covid it may be one of those situations like we discussed the other day with uh david zweig about hospitalized because of kovid or just with covet right here to talk with me about it today is dr jay bhattacharya jay's a professor of medicine at stanford university he was also one of the authors of the great barrington declaration which advocated months ago for easing lockdowns and focusing on protecting the most vulnerable great to see you doc thank you for being here with us so this is what they've been doing lately they've shifted i think people are on to the whole cases cases cases understanding that's not a a meaningful number you know it's a pandemic it's a virus people are going to get the cases of of kovid it's how bad is it and what are the hospitalizations and what is the death rate and this is something they've been using to scare us the hospitalizations are up here they're everywhere and now we learn that it's that they're overstating the numbers of people who are in hospitals right now because of covid and overstating how sick they are put it in perspective for us yeah so actually this is a result that goes back a ways there was an audit in santa clara county and in alameda county of death certificates for instance and found that in 25 percent of cases that what they were coded as covet deaths actually 25 percent of the time there were other factors that were probably more important than those deaths than kovid kova in hospitals have a ver have had a very strong incentive to uh diagnose cove going back to the cares act last year uh some hospitals got more than fifty thousand dollars additional per covert patient that they had um and so it's it's so there's a mix of things going on here but i think there's a really important public health point here which is that these cases have been used to scare the public scare the public into thinking that we're running out of of hospital resources or health care resources scare the public into thinking that kovid is more dangerous than it is it is dangerous especially for an older vulnerable population as we've as we've talked about many times um but it's not it's not it's not three three percent mortality like we heard in the early days of the epidemic it's much closer to 0.2 percent infection fatality rate unless again unless you're older which case it's much higher um so i think those those that's really the upshot of this study for me is that we sh we as the media i think has an obligation to put the covid numbers in perspective rather than using it to stoke fear and this study suggests that that's exactly you know a careful analysis of of the the data which is what this study is trying trying to do to say okay distinguish between you have coveted and died from cova versus it's incidental it's really important to start to put the put those numbers in perspective and i hope the media sort of responsibly takes this and helps people you allay some of the fears they may have about code you're so cute you know they're not going to do that but hope springs eternal but i i mean i got this originally from again david zweig who had been on the other uh day and and it says that the study suggests almost half of those hospitalized almost half with covid19 have mild or asymptomatic cases that what we're seeing is these folks in hospital with fairly mild symptoms they've been admitted either for further observation on account of their comorbid morbidities or because they reported feeling short of breath but they're in a lot of them are in the hospital for something totally unrelated to covid so you go in for a broken leg they test everybody who goes in they find out you have covid and they count in the hospitalization number that is used by the media to scare us all and i i ask you like i didn't realize that they were getting paid the hospitals have a financial incentive to do this yeah i thought that was from the earliest the cares actually at fifty thousand dollars per clove of patients for medicare patients uh they would get twenty percent bonus the hospitals get twenty percent bonus for seeing covert patients um so they did have a very strong incentive to to uh to diagnose covid uh even if it's incidental uh because if it's obviously that's so crazy why would we incentivize page uh hospitals to state that or why at a minimum what wouldn't that be a big asterisk on every media report when we get these naked hospitalization numbers out yeah i mean i think in the early days of the pandemic that's when the cares act was passed the thought was well these hospitals are basically they're going bankrupt because people are so scared to go to the hospital for re for actual things that they needed cancer surgeries were canceled uh many many hospitals around the country essentially were empty um waiting for covet patients to never arrive in the early days the epidemic and i think partly it was it was aimed at addressing the uh the the the the financial crisis caused by that sort of panic around around covid uh i mean i think that was the initial impetus behind the behind the policy but i think it has had this unfortunate effect of of sort of uh i mean it's it's it's it's kind of a catastrophe right like you have you have this well-intentioned policy to keep hospitals afloat but it results essentially in over-diagnosis and induced panic um and i don't think people had thought through all of the the downstream consequences when the policy is put in place well and two other things to note about the study um okay so nearly half of those hospitalized uh with kovid may have been admitted for another reason entirely or have had only a mild presentation of the disease the increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients of whom 57 so if you're keep in mind so when you hear these hospitalization numbers so 57 of those who have been vaccinated and are in the hospital with covid had only mild or were asymptomatic entirely uh and then how about the unvaccinated they've been totally demonized by biden and others and this study found that 45 of the cases with the unvaccinated were mild or totally asymptomatic since january 21st so it's once again it's not as awful as they'd lead us to believe but how do we square that doc with headlines like this one coveted hospitalizations hit crisis levels in southern icu's this is one of the lead stories right now in the new york times hospitals in the southern u.s are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units one in four hospitals now reports more than 95 percent of the icu beds occupied up from one in five last month alabama texas florida talking about problems there so how do we square those uh those two things well i mean i think that actually actually hospitalization numbers like in florida are for with covid are plummeting um right now uh so it's it's uh i think the h the hhs actually tracks this you can go to a website called h protect and see what fraction of beds are occupied by pelvic patients and the headlines often don't square with what hhs is reporting i'm not sure why the media aren't using those those like official numbers to track it i i think there's another sort of a problem how people think about this hospitals are not single entities that operate simply by themselves they're part of systems so when one hospital gets crowded or one hospital gets stressed uh patients get moved to other hospitals they're part of a system and this and the question isn't whether a particular hospital is overcrowded uh or or stressed the question is whether the system as a whole has capacity to address the the health needs of a population i think there have been times uh during the epidemic where some hospital systems have been pushed to the brink um but i don't think that as a whole of the american healthcare system has been overwhelmed uh by by covett patients i think it's been stressed and again some some places uh near the brink um and in that sense american healthcare system has actually operated better than many other healthcare systems around the world which have been uh which have have been overwhelmed with patients i mean this is a real disease it's it uh for a subset of patients it actually does result in the need for for icu beds and and and and and hospitalization um i do think that the over i mean there are costs that in addition to the monetary cost there are health costs also from over diagnosis or over reliance on hospitalizations for asymptomatic cova patients because there you know those hospital beds could be used better used for other patients what do you make of this we ran a sound bite earlier this week from dr fauci who was asked by sanjay gupta about this study out of israel suggesting you have much better and longer longer-lasting immunity if you've had covet versus if you've just had a vaccine and he said you know what are we to make that and fauci basically said oh dude i don't know i don't really know it's a great question sanjay i don't really know what to make of it and it's infuriating because people don't want to lose their jobs who have had covid who don't think they need a vaccine and now they're going to thanks to biden's executive order and this is a question that needs to get answered right as a result of that in particular for those who have had covet so the israeli study showed that um you could uh hold on i want to get my facts in front of me that uh natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections apparently the cdc put out its own study on natural immunity and it suggested the opposite that vaccinated immunity is 2.3 times better than natural immunity so it appears we have conflicting studies what do we make of that so there isn't any conflict so the question uh between the cdc study in the israeli study is is uh three groups actually people who recovered from covet and then got the vaccine uh people who just got the vaccine and people who just recovered from covet and the israeli study suggests that if you just recover from cobit you have a very very high neoflexor a better protection against both infection and severe disease than people who just get the vaccine now the vaccine actually is fantastic against severe disease that actually is an important point i think this is why the messaging is so messed up is there people the the public health people like dr fountain afraid that if you acknowledge the fact that natural that recovery from kobe confers very strong protection against against both infection and disease severe disease people won't get the vaccine but i don't think people are are like that if you tell people the truth which is that if you're older you and you're vulnerable and you have not either been recovered from covert or you've got had not got the vaccine the vaccine is very very important to protect you against severe disease um uh so like with this this cdc study is comparing the i think the the the people who have recovered from covet alone versus the people who got recovered and got the vaccine it's a little misleading because uh the vaccine mediated immunity there's two sort of things you should think about one is does it protect you against all infections and the other is does it protect you against severe disease the vaccines protect you against severe disease for over a long period of time there's a fantastic study of qatar for instance that demonstrates this but it does not protect you against all infections after about maybe three four five months the the protection against all infections effectively goes away and this is why you're seeing in many countries that are highly vaccinated like iceland or israel you see actually united states you're seeing a resurgence of cases of cova because vaccinated people can actually still spread covet the vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine that makes it so you know you can't get infected at all what it does do is protect you against severe disease so that's the that's why i've always been telling people to get vaccinated especially if you're vulnerable because what that's what we really care about right megan we don't care it's it's not so much if i take the vaccine i can protect myself against being hospitalized against dying from covid i can worry about coving much less um and the other thing about vaccine about these facts is that it has implications for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates the vaccine protects me from when i take it after a couple of after a few months it no longer protects anybody else the vaccine then is a private decision with private consequences and much less a public a private decision with public consequences there are many fewer public consequences that people make up for the vaccine so and i think that a lot of the thinking behind vaccine passports and mandates is that it has some public implications you need me to be vaccinated to protect you but that's not what the scientific evidence is suggesting why are you saying after a few months because i thought that you could even even two months out of getting your vaccines you could still potentially get covid and spread covet you would just always have the protection you know the greater level of protection against hospitalization or death yeah i said like the data out of qatar for instance says that about three the peaks the protection against all infection peaks around three months after you've got the second dose and it's about 70 percent so it's still possible to but there's still some protection against all infection in three months but by six months or four five months it's all gone there's like there's almost no protection against infection alone from the vaccine the vaccine still protects you against severe disease though so that's that's that's the reckon that's the basis for my recommendation to take the vaccine i mean do you see us going to a place where we acknowledge this this you know the reality about people have had coveted natural immunity and stop swooping them into all these mandates i'm against the mandates to begin with but it seems to me like at least that group should be exempted yeah i mean i think and i think tying the the the these taking the vaccine to your job especially it's so when it's so irrational you've had covid you've recovered you're not you're actually less danger to someone who's just vaccinated alone um to others because you actually recovering from cove it actually does protect you against a subsequent infection so uh uh for a long period of time i think longer than the vaccine so i think this is one of these things where like uh this is a huge failure of public health essentially we've demonized a large class of people you know the funny thing is a lot of those folks were essential workers we said okay you guys are holding society up they went out did their job kept society together got coveted recovered and now we've turned on them because they're like rationally saying well why do i really need the vaccine i mean and they don't trust public health right because public health has sort of declined itself um and so they're rationally saying like do i really need the vaccine uh when i've already recovered from covet and and public health basically says oh no no no there's no such thing as as as recover as as immunity to covet after you've covered when public health denies basic science results it's it's no surprise that people start mistrusting public health yeah sorry go ahead no i was just going to say you're right because these people they've been working with patients in the hospital setting and the reason that people felt comfortable with that is because they knew that a lot of these folks had coveted and weren't going to get it and weren't at risk and now we're going to turn around and say not only must you get this vaccine that you don't need but if you don't you're fired and then you'll lose your medical benefits your paycheck it's like so okay so doctors and nurses now they're going to be the ones without helping without a health coverage without a paycheck because they actually do see the science and even though we trusted them for months to be in the hospital setting taking care of patients now we've just decided we trust no more yeah i mean i think actually bring up a really additional important additional point just to tie back to what we talked about earlier uh if a lot of nurses and uh who basically decide i don't want the vaccine so i'm gonna i'm just gonna go on essentially i'm going to say i'm not going to take it and then get fired or let go well you're going to have staffing shortages at hospitals it's going to actually make treating patients and other patients more difficult uh i don't think this policy has been well thought through and it's going to undermine i think it already has undermined confidence in public health and also in vaccines generally because people are saying well if people if they're if they're doing this to me with this vaccine what about other vaccines and that's really unfortunate because vaccines are the probably the single most important invention medical intervention i think i know i've ever learned about the mmr vaccines the dpp vaccines are really important for health of children of the populations at large and they've public confidence in vaccines which used to be uh you know the the anti-vax movement used to be this fringe movement um that you know less than one percent now what what public health has done is it's turned anti-vaccine into a mainstream movement by this denial of natural immunity by like this coerciveness um i think i really recommend that public health go back to sort of the more compassionate ways that one maybe once had respect people tell people that the truth about what the science is actually saying don't try to manipulate them people can sense that and you'll just get much better results yeah like they're doing in the uk like they're doing in israel which is where we now have to look for real information because our government likes to lie to us likes to mislead us and likes to treat us like we're too uh listen we appreciate your straight shooting right from the beginning dr j baracharya great to see you again thank you nice to be on the air up next we're going to talk about big tech's censorship and it isn't just about covet it's also about trying to silence political beliefs that don't fit the narrative as you well know we have two great guests on this for you today one of them starts right after this break he's so concerned about it he quit the very billion dollar company he founded and built to speak out against this vivek ramaswamy is here next don't miss him [Music] welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show well in recent weeks we have seen a mother of a soldier killed in afghanistan in afghanistan during the debacle of a pull-out that biden orchestrated suspended from instagram and having her facebook page shut down for speaking out against president biden and then just more recently chase banks sent a letter to general michael flynn's wife telling her they were canceling her credit card because they consider her a quote reputational risk both companies later backed off and did a 180 after it became public but how long until they don't joining me now is vivek ramaswamy author of woke inc and very successful guy really thoughtful man vivek it's great to have you on the program let's just get a little bit of your background just so people understand um how you got to where you are so you went to harvard undergrad you went to yale law school you were on wall street for a bit you're a young guy only 36 and then you founded a company is it rovian or rovian roy vent was the company raven okay and killed it i mean just crushed it and in like a couple of years the company was worth billions and you were suddenly basking in money and thought what to yourself about your journey as an american citizen well look i was actually steeped in building a company for the first six years you're gonna build something from the ground up you don't have much of a chance to pay attention to much else and by 2019 the company was running on its own two feet and as i sort of came up for air i noticed a trend that really bothered me megan which was all of my peers elite investors ceos etc around 2019 suddenly started issuing carbon copy statements about how they were now not just going to serve their shareholders but they were going to also serve societal interests and all stakeholders and disempowered communities and on the face of it there's nothing objectionable about it but it smacked of a certain inauthenticity to me that really bothered me and you know milton friedman had criticized the same trend of stakeholder capitalism years ago thinking that was going to make businesses run less efficiently but that wasn't quite the thing that bothered me so i spent some time reflecting on it the thing that really bothered me megan was the idea that people like me people who occupied seats of corporate power were suddenly going to exercise power not just in the marketplace of products but in the marketplace of ideas and to me that was a real violation of democracy it belied the vision of democracy that i thought defined this country where every person's voice and vote counted equally whether they're my neighbor here in ohio or whether they were my neighbor in the corner office of the suite where i used to work in my in my suite in manhattan and i think that that principle i think was what was at stake that really bothered me at my course so i wrote one op at the wall street journal about it it was supposed to be a one and done that ended up getting blown out into a book and that led me on the journey that ultimately led me to step down a ceo this january so that i could really speak freely about these issues because if there's one thing that i learned i wasn't actually free to do that while i was the ceo of a major company i really needed to separate my voice as a citizen from my voice as a ceo okay there it is did this january there's the rub right there because when it maybe you would have felt differently about stakeholder capitalism or people you know these companies trying to sort of take more political viewpoints if you'd seen a greater diversity of thought but they've all gone one way and anybody who deigns to go in a more conservative direction with their viewpoints or whatever becomes a national news story becomes the scourge of the media whether it's the old version of chick-fil-a or um soul cycle having been outed for you know doing some fundraising raising for president trump the ceo you you get punished if you come out the one way and you get lauded only if you come out on the left and in support of these woke ideals i think that's right megan we live in a moment with not a monopoly on products in the marketplace of products but with a monopoly on ideas and whether you call it a monopoly or an ideological cartel that's where we live in corporate america now i don't want to portray myself as some kind of victim i've done perfectly fine for myself in the system of american capitalism i'm able to not have to worry about putting food on the dinner table in a way that so many others are when they're afraid of being able to speak out and so i felt with that privilege came some responsibility to be able to speak with candor from the inside and you're right if i was spouting out left-leaning views like ceos like mark benioff tend to do maybe that would benefit my business in my case i wrote an op-ed in the wall street journal this january making the case against big tech censorship making the case that they ought to be treated i think you were familiar with this outfit they are pleased as state actors when they're acting in coordination with the state a relatively technical point that i wrote with the former law professor of mine yet after i wrote that i kid you not megan in the wake of january 6 the country was in such a heated place that three of the advisors to my company actually resigned that week on the back of me publishing that up but to me that was a wake-up call telling me that actually if i was going to speak in an uninhibited way as a citizen even though it was completely separate from my capacity as a ceo it risked having backlash for my business that's part of why i thought the responsible choice to make was to be able to separate in my own identity what i think america needs to separate in its identity separate capitalism from democracy separate one's commercial activities from one's civic duties and right now i've taken a break on in large part a break of my commercial activities to be able to carry out what i see as a civic duty which is to be able to speak out with candor in an unabashed unapologetic way about what i think of as one of the challenging issues of our time the way in which this new post-modern dogma has really infected one institution after another starting in corporate america but extending to our universities and beyond as well i understand it i understand like glenn greenwald matt tybee barry weiss yours truly all of us who had been i think much more reticent about sharing opinions or sort of making cultural issues more personal have done something similar to what you've been doing which is to speak out in a way we normally wouldn't have because this is the issue of our time i mean this really this culture war goes to the very heart of what america is and ought to be and it requires extraordinary action you've been very brave i'm not going to embarrass you by telling everybody what you've done but i just want them to know that privately i've seen you help a lot of people who get unfairly targeted um both with your time and with your dollars and so i i've been your big admirer but i think that um you you raise a good point about what could be done to stop what's happening with big tap to big tech and its censorship and so before we keep going down the walk line i'd love to stop and just spend a minute on that january op-ed which i loved and we covered on this podcast was you and jed rubenfeld who was your professor at yale law school he's married to amy chua tiger mom who i love as well they're getting unfairly targeted right now at yale it's bs but um and she's fighting back which is awesome to see but you and he wrote this very powerful op-ed about why facebook shouldn't be allowed to censor anybody with a conservative viewpoint from trump on down why it's not appropriate for amazon to kick off parlor why we should be treating them even though they're private actors and therefore not covered by the first amendment which only covers a state actor why we should be treating them like they are state actors covered by their first amendment legally and otherwise which would remove their ability to discriminate based on viewpoint can you explain what you what you wrote yeah sure so conventional wisdom definitely says megan that private actors are free to decide what does and doesn't show up on their websites when they're behaving as private actors but the essence of what's actually happening today is a little bit different than that you have private actors working hand in glove with big government to determine what views can and can't be represented today is that the party in power today the democratic party is effectively using a combination of threats and inducements to be able to get private companies to do through the back door what government cannot directly do through the front door under the constitution namely to censor political speech directly and so the party in power says that if you don't take down hate speech and misinformation as we the government define it then we're going to come after you as private companies we're going to regulate you we're going to break you up we're going to make it aggressive we're going to make it swift almost all of those are exact quotes from congressional hearings over the course of the last year and then these big tech titans do exactly what government has threatened them to do when government also wraps around them the inducement a special shield of immunity section 230 immunity that preempts any state action at the state level against these companies through the private tort system so that combination of carrots and sticks the threats and inducements which now have taken on a new form even over the course of the last 12 months megan of direct coordination willful participation and a joint activity between the government and private companies to be able to censor covet misinformation as they define it that creates state action in disguise and the core case we made in that op-ed megan was that if it is state action in disguise then actually the constitution still applies it's that simple it's a relatively technical argument draws on a lot of supreme court precedents in favor of finding state action when the government induces private parties to do something independently there's a supreme court case called brentwood which says that there's one of three bases for finding state action in the action of a private company it could be either threats made by the government or inducements by the government or as a the term i used before willful participation in a joint activity ironically in the case of big tech censorship today we have not just one of those conditions but all three of those conditions these companies are definitely responsive to threats they're definitely protected they're definitely working and coordinating directly with the government just listen to jen saki she boasts about it so i think that that is state action in disguise and that's the case that we made is that they ought to be treated as state actors yeah jenna's hockey out there with uh we know we've given the list of the disinformation dozen to all of the major social media companies and make sure that they get censored it's like well she admitted it she they showed their hand this is kind of what trump is alleging in his lawsuit against these companies saying that he was unfairly booted he didn't get it exactly right so i don't know but yes right i think that's that's the spirit of what he's getting at i i i believe i have you know reason to believe that he might have drawn from the principles in our op-ed actually wrote another op-ed under my soul name a little bit later you know i don't say critiquing the trump lawsuit but pointing out some of the ways in which it fell short but the ways in which he still has a path to victory if he actually makes the claims in the right way and i think that if he does make his claims in the right way it could be one of the defining cases of our time 45th president united states silenced you know herbert hoover once actually said this is about consolidation in a different industry the radio and telecommunications industry where he said that no president should be stopped from being able to communicate to the people by a private actor who sits in between he is rolling over in his grave i believe he was the 33rd president now the 45th president takes his case to court actually i think it could be one of the historic cases of our time the asterisk to that is he actually needs to argue it with discipline in the right way and and to me the jury's still out on whether he's able to do that but but i think that he has the potential to actually even make the case that section 230 is unconstitutional as applied to protecting cases uh big tech behavior in cases like that against him and just just to explain explain section 230 because not everybody knows what that is yeah sure i i apologize so section 230 is is basically a statute that has two parts i'm going to focus on the second part of it what's called 230c2 which effectively says that these companies have no immunity under state law have no liability under state law for removing content and here's text from the statute whether or not such material is constitutionally protected so that's congress saying there's constitutionally protected material that we can't as congress legislate out that we the government can't ban but that private companies who take down that content will be immunized in return for doing so that's what section 230 c2 does their vision megan was was actually applying that doctrine to soft core pornography certain types of pornography that might have been constitutionally protected under the first amendment that congress still wanted to deputize these private companies to be unafraid and taken down now you have statutes coming up in states like florida that effectively pass non-discrimination statutes that say that actually social media companies cannot engage in political discrimination online and what you have is a debate that says that actually section 230 preempts that law that is federal law override state law to say that actually the federal law wins when the two are in conflict that that law is now actually on hold it's being stayed by a district court judge when big tech pushed back and said that section 230 would preempt that statute well one of the cases i would make is that section 230 is arguably unconstitutional if it preempts a state statute that reinforces a constitutional right so those are the kinds of arguments that i think president trump could take all the way to the supreme court he could that's under florida law but he could make it a part of the claim of the federal case that he's bringing against against the big tech titans through something it's so great it's so rich if you if you think about what desantis and the floridians did they sort of made big tech own its bias it's like no you can't discriminate against political viewpoints and and big tech was basically like well we want to and we're allowed to and we're going to continue to because we're allowed to thanks to 230. i mean that is what they're doing it's it's the same thing as your complaint about you know what you've seen in the when it comes to uh stakeholder capitalism as long as your bias goes one way you're fine the 230 bias that's being executed by these big tech companies is always ninety percent of the time one way it it stifles the conservative viewpoint not the it is and megan if i may for a second just because it's really topical a lot of the liberal outrage against the recent texas abortion law was the fact that it actually deputized private actors to do through the back door through the civil system what the government could not directly do under roe v wade as a doctrine well if you're on the left and you find something offensive about that in the case of the texas anti-abortion statute then i think that there's no basis for you not to see the same issue in spades with what the government is actually doing with respect to restrictions on free speech if you think that whatever you think of roe v wade if you think it was a constitutional right to be able to get an abortion because of a you know i think a poorly decided case but let's put that to one side you ought to agree that the first amendment to the constitution of the united states can't be evaded by the government delegating its dirty work to private actors there either yet that's exactly what's happening every day and so it's actually a tool that could be dangerously used by both sides i don't think this is a liberal or conservative issue we do not want to live in a society where the government is able to sidestep the constitutional constraints by deputizing private mercenaries to do its bidding instead and whether you're on the left or the right i think you should see a problem with that and here's like getting back to the other sort of track which is this stakeholder capitalism and how it's manifesting because corporate america is just one of the lanes that's been taken over by the woke you know we've seen it in sports we've seen it in media we've seen it in hollywood but the surrender of corporate america to this was i have to say a little surprising to me i thought they'd have more backbone i thought they'd be more like the michael jordan you know conservatives by sneakers too republicans by sneakers too you know they haven't they've surrendered i mean they have taken the knee when it comes to these woke activists who try to tell them you will be anti-racist or else and they've gone along with it and one of the points you make in your book woke inc is it's a lie it's a scam it's a defining scam of our time megan and yeah actually put some meat on this not so surprising to me when so so i got my first job out of college right before the 2008 financial crisis at a hedge fund in new york city i had a front row seat to the 2008 crisis and the aftermath like the edge one i worked for was mentioned in the big short you know i was kind of pretty close to that what happened then in the aftermath of it and i'll tell you after the 08 crisis what happened was corporate america was really scared of the occupy wall street left the newly nascent ascendant movement in the left that wanted to reorder economic power structures in this country take money from those wealthy corporations redistribute it to poor people agree or not that is what the old left had to say but there was this birth of this new woke left around the same time that said actually the real problem wasn't economic injustice or poverty quite it was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and so on and that presented the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country to go from being possibly the bad guys to being the good guys if they just said the right things applaud diversity and inclusion put token minorities on your boards this is such a good point i love this it's basically a get out of jail again it's a get out of bad person jail free card for evil ceos they're like oh there's a new villain we're on to it yes white men it just blame everything on white men and that's distinct from us most of whom are white men um who run companies because we're going to use these companies at least on paper uh to be sort of advocates for social justice and don't pay any attention to what we're doing behind the curtain exactly you'd rather talk about systemic racism than systemic financial risk if you're a bank after 08 that's exactly what they ended up doing there's a funny story i tell in the book megan where first you first your wall street and you criticize wall street's lack of gender diversity even though you're wall street and even better you then get paid to do it there was a statue that showed up in front of the wall street bull after you know in recent years commissioned by state street global advisors it was called she or fearless girl and the placard at the feet of fearless girl said s-h-e in all cavs she makes a difference well it turns out they built that statue after a number of female employees at their firm alleged that they were being paid less than their male counterparts systematically so your female employees you have the statute you paid enough what's the natural thing you do you build a statue for them that's gonna put money on the table let's get the food on the table for these women it gets it gets even it gets even funnier make it so she stands for not just fearless girl it also stands for the ticker of the diversity index etf exchange traded fund that states to charge a fee on so it's a marketing tactic for people to buy she which is an exchange traded fund that they market and to top it off you can't make this stuff up the woman who actually created this she's a true feminist she was a true believer she built fearless girl with a mission she was commissioned by stage 3 to do it she was so excited that she actually built three more copies of fearless girl because she was really inspired by her own work turned out that state street sues her for making three unauthorized reproductions of the statue because like any magic act you can't just make the money disappear in your marketing budget you have to bring it back and so that's actually one of the stories of telling the introduction to the book but there are countless examples just like it where this is really just a cynical arrangement it's not even an arranged marriage i call it an arranged marriage sometimes it's not even really an arranged marriage it's more like mutual prostitution where the woke left in big business secretly have disdain for one another but they're each getting something out of the trade and that's the state of affairs that led to the birth of woke capitalism that allowed them to put occupy wall street up for adoption and i'm sorry to say it worked effectively yeah no i mean you look for look no further than colin kaepernick who's like capitalism uh disgusting racist system as he cashes his huge multi-million dollar checks from nike chi-ching i actually love america all right stand by vivek because up next we're going to be discussing the news that broke today on this secret facebook program um just uncovering what the company did not want you to know that it knows about your children that's next [Music] welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show joining me now is vivek ramaswamy author of woke inc and he's an entrepreneur he's a very successful guy and he's trying to help fight back against this bullying i mean it's really it's turned into corporate bullying uh by companies that want you to think that they're um that they have good hearts that they're really just trying to improve our world but really they've signed on to this woke ideology to protect their own bottom line their butts and make themselves feel like better people while behind the scenes they're sticking the knife in and one of the great examples in your book vivek is what amazon did i love this it's it really tells the story about what it did in 2020 when it pledged to donate 10 million dollars to groups focused on aiding black communities and and why don't you tell us what they were doing behind the scenes while that was happening well i mean amazon's hypocrisy just runs rampant right they had they had fired one of their uh one of their black employees at one of the warehouses while calling him behind closed doors dumb and inarticulate amazon also challenged walmart when his profitability was temporarily facing a trough to a challenge to pay its workers a minimum dollars of 15 15 per hour voluntarily but of course amazon is one of the worst perpetrators of having treated its workers poorly for decades but i just think that that comes back to principle number one commandment number one if you will of the church of will capitalism megan the more ruthless your business practices are the more woke progressive you have to act raytheon and lockheed martin i put in this category there's no woke way to make ballistic missiles that kill thousands of people i'm not saying they're wrong to make those missiles but it is counterintuitive that they would then be training their employees about white privilege rather than about the myriad other things they could be talking about that relate to the core of their business practices i actually missed that one raytheon's doing oh raytheon's doing it and lockheed and the funny thing is lockheed did it first and then raytheon follows and so it's a new form of market competition megan and competition in the marketplace of ideas where you have to keep up with the joneses well once your competitor has done it then you have to do it too or you're missing out on the competitive advantage of having blown woke smoke to be able to evade accountability for your actual actions because if the competitor is blowing smoke smoke that's a competitive advantages because they could get in bed with the regulator they could get in bed with the public and now you have to do it too if you're to keep up or else you're at a competitive disadvantage and so that's the way this game is played you see it play out in one second after another oh guys like harvey weinstein making donations to women's groups which did happen prior to him being outed as a sexual predator because he thinks he's gonna it's paying some sort of insurance policy so that people won't won't get you you know it just seems an aside with harvey so um he he tried to lay the foundation with me too i mean he knew what was coming for him because the articles had been circulating the rumors of articles had been circulating and he tried to make nice nights with me for quite some time and even with my husband and i'm so gullible vivek i was like i don't know i hadn't heard the stories about harvey i'm not in hollywood so i'm like i know they say he might be a bully but there's nothing i want to do with him professionally anyway but my husband doug who always always knows he's like meg he's not a good guy i'm like oh yes he is so he said the same thing to me about matt lauer i'm like oh he knows seems like a nice he said the same thing to me about charlie rose i'm like i don't know he i could go on vivek j the bottom line is trust doug doug is that right that's that's the uk you you married a married a smart man then but he you know he just got the amazing whatever shakespearean lady doth protest too much you're trying too hard you're trying too hard for a reason right i mean you could i could just go on and on about the list of goldman sachs last year goes to the mountaintops of davos and says it's not going to take a company public in the united states unless it's boarded sufficiently diverse where they're the sole arbiter of diversity on skin deep attributes of course right there that's a moment when elizabeth warren is the front runner of the democratic primary and they know they're not going to replace their alumnus in the war and administration this is just tithing in a new currency it's what these guys do it's completely authentic whether it's at the first personal level with harvey weinstein or whether it's at the corporate level it's the same thing of using a form of woke insurance i actually like that term a lot you're buying an insurance policy inexpensively to buy yourself out of a catastrophe scenario that you'd rather avoid in most cases in corporate america unlike in the case of harvey weinstein it's working out pretty well for most of these corporations what i'm trying to do in the book is to really just call out that hypocrisy for what it is not because i think corporations are wrong to pursue profits but because i think our system works better when they openly admit and even embrace that that's what they're exactly doing rather than duping the public into into forgetting about its otherwise intact system of accountability both market accountability and political accountability to actually hold companies accountable that's the reason i'm doing it i know i love it we can you you shine a light on china too and i think we've heard china you know people talk about china as a boogie man china is doing this china is doing that but you kind of do a very nice job of laying out exactly how it works how these companies buddy up to china and china to these companies but china has the last laugh in almost every circumstance and then winds up controlling these companies their public messaging the way they speak in a really disturbing way could you talk about that totally so this is the first book to talk about the geopolitical implications of locism and world capitalism and i think the china dimension is probably the most important of them all even though there's certain relationships to other countries too the way it works is effectively china has realized that if the new international arbiters of moral justice multinational corporations generally based in the united states if they relentlessly criticize the united states for alleged social injustices like racism and transphobia but say nothing about actual human rights atrocities in china like the million weakers who are enslaved in concentration camps subject to force sterilization communist indoctrination and words then that creates a false moral equivalence on the global stage between the united states and china that erodes our greatest asset of all that is not our nuclear arsenal it is our moral standing on the global stage and if you have any doubt about that just listen really carefully to what china says now in nearly every diplomatic setting xi jinping did it last year before the eu his top diplomat yang jiechi did it in the alaska summit this year when they're pressed about the uyghur human rights crisis the first thing xi jinping now says is that black lives matter shows that the united states is no better that would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that nike and disney and blackrock and the nba and so on legitimize their claims by consistently criticizing racism in the united states the suffering of black people in the united states without saying a peep about the weaker human rights crisis or other human rights atrocities in china even worse disney films mulan last year they're in the shanjang province now a couple years ago they said they can't film in the state of georgia if georgia passes the equivalent of an anti-abortion statute but they film in milan in xinjiang and they actually thank the ccp authorities for allowing them the privilege of filming there and so megan i think this goes to a core issue of failed u.s policy over the last 30 years the the flawed policy of democratic capitalism we say stakeholder capitalism today we said democratic capitalism in the 1990s where we thought we could export big macs and happy meals and spread democracy to places like china we thought we could use our money to get them to be more like us instead they have turned that on its head they are now using their money to get us to be more like them and i think that is what progressives need to wake up to to get woke to if you will the idea that once you turn corporations into vectors to drive progressive agendas they become vehicles to advance any agenda and nobody has mastered that game better than china they have sent back our disney movies and nike sneakers filled with their values creating that false moral equivalence between the us and china and i'm sorry to say thank you lebron james it happens to be working out pretty well for the chinese side of that equation and i think that that equation of chinese nihilism with american idealism is probably one of the defining geopolitical threats over the course of the next decade i think two greatest threats to american democracy we've talked about both of them are china and big tech in that order but i think there's a deep relationship between the two in terms of how they use corporate america as effectively a trojan horse to accomplish their ends yeah so what do we do about it such a big question in such a few words yeah look i mean i did write a book about it um and i think there's more to say than we can we can cover here in short order but i think that there's there's combinations of symptomatic therapies legal and policy solutions and then much more importantly i think the cultural solutions that we really need to be talking more about but i think the symptomatic solutions can can play a role in creating the conditions for cultural change i think a lot of it begins with revisiting conservative dogmas right you know ronald reagan did what he needed to do in his era because in his era big government was the singular threat to liberty and prosperity in this country he cut regulations he slashed taxes did what he needed to do but i think we the dogmas of 1980 do not necessarily apply to address the unique problems in 2021 or at least i think the biggest threat to liberty and prosperity today is not just big government it might have been in 1980 it's not today it is this new hybrid of big government and big business that's far more powerful than either one alone because it can do what either one can't on its own either and that's a new monster that's far more powerful than what thomas hobbes envisioned it's far more powerful than what our founding fathers envisioned and the kinds of policy solutions we need today are ones that go back to these businesses or this new hybrid of big business and big government to say that you can't have it both ways take big tech simple section 230 reform that says that either you behave like private companies and you're free to decide what doesn't doesn't show up on your websites or you get this special form of federal immunity but it comes with strings attached and if you're protected by the federal government then you also operate according to the same constraints as the federal government including the first amendment to the constitution of the united states that's online behavior let's talk about this political discrimination offline where a lot of people are fired for saying the wrong thing wearing the wrong hat a virginia shipyard worker was fired from his job for wearing a trump hat to work in 2020. i mean the list of examples goes on what i say is that we need to add political belief as a protected class or political speech as a protected class to title 7 of the civil rights act in 1964 to say that if you can't discriminate on the base of race or sex or religion or national origin or after the boss stock case last year on sexual orientation either then you should not be able to discriminate on the basis of one's political expression or political beliefs either and i don't think that's an academic issue i think it is happening every day in this country if it can happen to the 45th president of the united states i think it can happen to anybody with anyone no no it would change it would change the way universities operate k through 12 operate and obviously corporate america 2 and big tech the vet gotta run it's been a pleasure thank you so much the book is called woke inc well worth your time up next professor scott galloway he's on the left but calls apple facebook and these others soul killing job killing he's next he's fun [Music] welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show joining me now professor scott galloway he's a marketing professor at nyu's stern school of business a tech startup veteran and a best-selling author just to mention a few of his accomplishments he's been called gordon gekko with the social conscience love that and he's been taking on apple facebook amazon and google for years more importantly been taking on cara swisher which is very scary because she is super smart and tough and pretty awesome even though our politics look nothing like one another's have so much care and love for her welcome professor galloway great to have you here uh thanks for having me megan um yeah so she's so fun i met her by the way when i was at nbc we were doing a story on on tech and meet me too and so on and i said you know these guys these ceos i don't know that they're gonna change what's your message to them and she was like i'm gonna get you i'm gonna get you and i was like i'm afraid for them she will get there no she's she's uh she's scary but she's uh she's been a great partner and i really enjoy you know after working my ass off for 30 years i'm an overnight success because i care swisher well i like as you have more i don't know is it fair to say working class roots i've heard you describe your background in different ways yeah um raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died of secretary and uh um you know was really megan transformed by kind of big government the generosity of california taxpayers and the regents university of california went to ucla and berkeley for undergrad and grad for a total of tuition to seven thousand dollars in the 80s and even more importantly back then the acceptance rate of ucla was 70 percent and i had to apply twice to get in and now the acceptance rate is 12 so things have changed a lot well and it was at a point where young men were still going to college i mean i think i know this is one of the things you've been pointing out but where are all the young men going to college now they're they're going another way or i don't know what they're doing but they're not going to college in anywhere near the same numbers as they used to it's a really interesting issue i'm sure you saw the wall street journal article but it's now 60 40 women to men in college which sounds bad but it's even worse when you consider that if you're if your son shows up to college there's 50 more women there and 7 and 10 high school valedictorians or girls some of this is good some of this is catching up some of this is just warranted uh reward for young women and girls who are overachieving academically but also it signals i think something very dangerous and that is men are not attaching to school they're not attaching to work they're more they're more likely to be unemployed more likely to have opioid addiction and also this is a strange stat in 2008 eight percent of men under the age of uh 30 had reported never having had sex and while people hear the term and their brain fires a bunch of different ways just assume it's a key component of establishing a relationship that number as of last year is 28 and the reason why that number is so scary is if men aren't attaching to work they're not attaching or young men attaching to work school or a job they're very dangerous our most unstable societies have what is uh too many of the most dangerous person in the world and that's a young broken alone male so when we hear that men continue to not pursue college and we really do need to look at it we're producing too many of this cohort do you think it has to do anyth with politics at all with how you know in particular the white male has been so demonized and they know what's going to happen on college campuses they're at the lowest on the totem pole in terms of economic or socio i should say status and i don't know i'm just talking my friends who are very worried about their son who's a conservative he's a senior in high school but he's been really attacked and demonized by the faculty at his school and they're thinking it's only going to get worse when he goes to college next year i think they'll still send him but i wonder how much of that plays in to their unwillingness to put themselves through those four years i don't think it's discouraging them from going i think other reasons discourage them from going but i wouldn't be surprised if it's if it lends to more of them or disproportionate amount of them to drop out i do think there's an unhealthy gestalt in universities right now where just informally we say on freshman at freshman orientation okay oppressors over here and oppressed over here and we start from an unhealthy place of identity politics and universities have become especially rough and tumble places around this where people's comments are taken out of context they've made a caricature of it and then they're shamed and i would argue megan that it's actually their fellow students who are less forgiving than faculty and i've seen it happen play out in class where someone makes one false move and universities are generally the most progressive places in the world i think we've become really made a ton of progress be more accepting of people who don't look like us where we have failed is we have become increasingly intolerant of people who don't think like us two percent of the faculty at harvard identifies as conservative and universities are supposed to be a place where we debate and have provocation and and welcome the dissenters voice and around politics we just don't tolerate it anymore so i wonder if a lot of young men show up and immediately say all right my first my freshman orientation kind of told me i was an oppressor maybe this maybe this isn't the place for me so i do think there's something there i don't think it's discouraging them from going to college or enrolling them i think it might be just encouraging them to drop out i know you've written a book on happiness for you know just a short form it's called um the algebra of happiness notes on the pursuit of success love and meaning and i do wonder you know because i feel like you've written so much on big tech and it's so ubiquitous in our lives and these companies that have all these tentacles and they're manipulating us in ways we don't even fully understand but we can feel it whether whether we know it's as a result of all the hours we spent on facebook or not just how big a role those big tech companies are playing in unhappiness whether it's of young men or in particular of young women we'll get to a story that just came out today from facebook how meaningful do you think their role has been i don't even think it's meaningful i think it's profound my colleague at nyu jonathan height wrote this fantastic book called the cobbling of the american mind and we have an epidemic or an emerging epidemic in teen depression and he identified two sources of that or two drivers the first is our fault his parents megan i know you're a parent as well and that is our concierge or bulldozer parenting has led to this sort of this this approach where we use so many sanitary wipes on our children's lives that they don't develop their own immunities and we develop this princess and the p generation where they show up to college and get their heart broken or get their first c and literally freak out the second thing though is that social media has been uh proven and even facebook knew this and decided to hide it to result in greater levels of depression that levels of depression in young men and especially young women are correlated with social media use and specifically around instagram and it used to be when you and i didn't get invited to a party in high school it was bad and that happens to everybody but now you see it play out in real time on your phone and it's especially damaging to to girls and young women because men or boys vote uh bully physically and verbally women or young girls uh bully relationally and we've put it we've put these nuclear weapons in their hands and we we've keep waiting for the better angels of these companies to show up and it just doesn't happen how could how could they i want to get to the facebook news in one sec because it confirms everything that you've been saying and we know but how could they you know because for example my friend john stossel who i love he's a libertarian you know he would if he were here he'd be saying they're very successful companies there's a reason they became so successful the american people voted you know with their dollars and with their eyeballs and with their time and you know therefore it's clearly what people want and it's not a place for government to step in and protect people from themselves so what could they be doing differently that would protect our kids more but not totally abandon american capitalism and the way it works well i'd be in favor of age gating i remember when my son posted a video of his handstand on youtube and he got a like and then all he could think about was checking back on youtube and then someone made sort of a snarky comment and it really upset him and i wonder if 12 year olds should even be on youtube i think there's a capitalist argument to be made that if we in fact broke these companies up and had more options than one social media network or one search engine that it might result in emerging players that say there are advertisers and parents who would rather have a video search engine that doesn't radicalize young men there are i think we need a photo sharing app that advertises it will not allow people under the age of 16 and it will not allow bullying or it'll come up with some sort of affirmation it doesn't make people feel worse so i think competition is an answer here i think regulation is an answer and if your show megan could be reverse engineered to girls cutting themselves i don't think this show would survive because i think there are other podcasts and other media personalities that advertisers would rally behind unfortunately in this environment with social media and search there are no options so they don't have any really real incentive to be good citizens and attract dollars so i think the answer is a capitalist argument that your friend was making and that is we need more competition because there's a lot of advertisers that aren't down with what's going on and a lot of parents you know what choice do you have i don't want my son on youtube but where where do they go so i i think i think the capitalist argument is to break them up and competition would solve a lot of this but i do think we need regulation in educating the facebook story out today in the wall street journal the headline is facebook knows instagram it's the same company is toxic for teen girls uh for the past three years facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo sharing app insta affects its millions of young young users about 22 million teens log on to instagram in the us every day five million teens log out into facebook and they say that they've been doing a study internally they're researchers and they found instagram is is harmful for a sizable percentage of the of these teens especially the girls 32 percent of teen girls said when they feel bad about their bodies instagram brought them there comparisons on instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves they make body images worse for one in three teen girls that's their own conclusion make body images worse for one in three and um that they're actually blaming the teens recognize it's to blame for the increase in anxiety depression among teens reporting suicidal thoughts 13 of british teens said and 66 percent of american users said the desire to kill themselves was rooted to instagram i mean it's bad yeah it's uh it it's just frightening and if you talk to i'm involved in this wonderful nonprofit called jed which is committed to teen mental health and a lot of times unfortunately your kid is suffering alone uh you don't know they're suffering and they're they're ashamed and they go into the room and on their phone and they end up making one false move or for whatever reason they feel bad about themselves or the mob seizes on them and it ends up in a level of at you know emotional anxiety in a time when kids are facing increased anxiety from a variety of different factors what's most disturbing here is that facebook knew knew about this and they decided to you know the facebook's innovation is how to overrun government to ignore these concerns rather than saying how do we address this what changes can we make what incentives could we put in place to really try and counteract some of this these negative externalities the majority of their efforts are around not making instagram a healthier thing there's some very good things about instagram it's about delay and obfuscation and so just as the cigarette companies were lobbying companies sitting on top of you know of a consumer products company facebook has really become um an organization of delay and obfuscation and government overrun such that they can ignore these types of issues and this this just takes it to a new level i mean it's one thing like i said you know you have kids i have kids you have your world of work you have your world of friends you have your world of fun when something comes off the tracks of one of your kids the entire universe distills down to that kid and the thought that this one company doesn't have this sort of empathy or concern for our children it's just really it's just continued evidence that this company is bad for the commonwealth and is kind of part of what i would call the the head of the class of a menace economy that is arbitraging depression circumventing minimum wage laws it's just more than anything hank megan it's just really disappointing i'm head of a class of a menace economy yes i i'm dealing with this right now to some extent because we have three kids as you point out my mom a boy girl boy almost 12 10 and 8 and my almost 12 year old turns 12 in about two weeks and years ago when he started pressuring me for a phone right because all these kids have phones and when can i have a phone my husband and i were like oh when you're 12 when you're 12. and then we learned more we listened more and we were like there's no way he's getting a phone when he turns 12. he's not getting it maybe a flip phone for emergencies where he can just dial us that's it and now you know kids remember and he's like guess what i want for my for my 12th birthday and i had to say you're not getting one and he said what do all my friends have they have they all have iphones you know can i please have an iphone i'm like you can't have it you know i don't i don't know what to tell you honey but dad and i've done more research and you're not getting it he's disappointed but what do you what do you think is a dad of two kids who's been watching this industry very closely do we get our kids phones do we let them have social media because of course the reaction is every single one of our my friends has both it's a really tough call and the people who take a purist argument and say no screens until they're 16 and no iphone that means they don't have kids because what you recognize is i mean it sounds terrible but at some point you want time for your own your own screen time and then also they do get it's balancing the very real negative impacts of kids on their phones and specifically the social media platforms and for some of the problems we referenced before it's balancing that versus them being ostracized because there are some positive things my sons play video games and they do a lot of their socialization that way when they were when we were remote this summer and they couldn't be with their friends one way they caught up with their friends was on video games and i think actually some of that's healthy and i would argue that video games and there's research to show this aren't as damaging on the psyche or psychological well-being of kids you know we're struggling with this as well what we're trying to do is we demand their passwords and we demand to see their activity so we're never surprised about stuff and we try to give them some license even when stuff's a little bit off off color if you will and we're also just putting a certain time limit on it and we take their phones from them we give them their phones for i think it's one hour at night during the weekdays and the two hours in the mornings on weekends and then we take them back but if you're looking for someone who's figured it out you'll hear that you know the arguments at our house that just prove we have not figured this out i think every parent is struggling with this well i mean i should say he has an ipad but that's only he can only use that when we're there and he does games occasionally and he had to use it for remote schooling um but we social media is what we're trying to avoid and youtube rabbit holes right i mean we've done enough research on what that does and to young girls too what that does and pulling you into just dark places that we if i'm there that's one thing it's quite another to have it in your pocket all day long when you're that young and to your point earlier the snapchat that that that's the thing that shows you where all your friends are snapchat so you can see where all your friends are and and like you just said now you can see oh where's jane oh where's donna oh where's mary oh they're all right here together and no one's responding to my calls or my texts and i've been ignored i've been excluded it hurts yeah and the question is you know i don't know if the answers is to keep them off it i think it's some of it does fall to us to teach them good values um you know we gave our son a phone at about 13 um and we've demanded that he's kind and that he not take bait when people slide him and and and we we review his social but we do give him his phone and just the utility of it i mean if you want your kid to have any freedom and i was always worried that we were not letting our kid out of the house enough you know i used to leave at the age of seven or eight and my mom would say be home by 10 and that was about it same and now you know kids like you know we practically have them in armored cars it feels like so i think giving them their phones so they can walk to we call it the avenue down by atlantic avenue in delray beach i think that's liberating and it's good for them to have independence it's good for them to walk home in the dark every once in a while and get a little bit scared um and you know walk by the house with the strange mean dog i think some of that is actually good for the kids but i'm you know we're we're absolutely you know we're absolutely struggling with the time the notion around when and how and i do think parents and schools have a role here we're in a night a lovely school in florida and they basically say you're not allowed to bring your devices um and you can get in trouble for them uh and they've said and they've said also your activity on social and i don't know if those will stand up in court and i'm sure it'll be challenged your activity on social if you bully another kid or do something then you know you're we can take punitive action against you in the school i think everyone's trying to figure this out this is a tough one but it's it what we have to realize is that the company's not going to figure it out they're going to continue to manufacture this stuff that's the thing they're not an ally wouldn't it be nice if you knew that mark zuckerberg was in some way your ally in this battle and trying to protect young kids from the damaging effects of it the addiction that comes from you know looking at your phone 45 000 times to see if you have a like and so on it's hard enough for an adult to resist it never mind a kid and he's not your ally i mean that's really sort of the bottom line the social media companies are on the other side of this yeah there are there are some companies there's a great company called roblox that was hugely successful um you know multi-billion dollar market capitalization and they do have a lot of content monterey it's a game platform for children you know about half of kids under the age of 16 have been on roblox and they are taking uh this issue very seriously i do think i think tick tock i don't know if you spend much time on tick tock megan it seems to me that's a little a little less toxic or there but isn't that just china gathering my child's data could be it could be i don't i personally don't see evidence of that so far but i think that's always a risk you have to assume any chinese company that the data there is probably subject to inspection by chinese authorities so i i don't want to pretend that's not a that's not a real issue what i would say though is that when i'm on when i'm on tick tock it does feel more optimistic it does feel a little less you know you go on facebook and you go on twitter and it feels like the algorithms are just constantly saying fight fight fight and twitter but isn't cara cara's always saying they're her kids like twitter's for old people mom like twitter's not really the popular venue for the for the youngins but facebook is obviously huge and insta's enormous and not harmless i mean i think people see the pretty pictures and it's like oh yeah influencers and it's like no and every for every one influencer who will post something without a filter to show her actual rear end or face there's just millions of opposite doing you know doing the opposite right so you're getting a young girl's heads and even with the parent counter programming which i'm sure you try and i try it's hard it's ubiquitous all right wait stay with us scott because um up next i want to ask you about elon musk and why you think he's a genius but sets a terrible example for young men and then we want to take your calls out there what are your biggest fears when it comes to technology taking over our lives call me at 83344 megan 4 4 m-e-g-y-n that's eight three three four four six three four nine six welcome back to the megan kelly show in less than 20 minutes we're going to be taking your calls or starting to fire in you can get on the queue and we will chat in moments you can call me at one eight three three four four megan m-e-g-y-n back with me now scott galloway professor at nyu's stern school of business a tech startup veteran and best selling author so what about elon musk i i read that you do think he's a genius is he a force for good or a force for evil uh mostly good i think you know i had this moment where my son said spacex is going is launching and we went out we live in florida on the beach and we went out and we saw that rocket going up and it was one of those kind of hallmark moments with my boys and you know anyone who who builds electric vehicles i own a tesla it's an amazing product puts people in space you just have to admire someone who's been able to do that with the comments i made around not being a great example for young men when i look at the two men that have had the most visibility over the last decade relative to previous decades it's been donald trump and elon musk and i wonder what message they're sending to our boys and the message i would get or glean from them generally is get really rich so you can be really coarse and i don't think it's the right message to send to our to our young men i think going on twitter and calling a cave diver a pedophile is it lacks all grace i think saying you're taking your company private at 420 a share when there was no veracity that claim and the sec gives you a hall pass i just don't think there's you know it's it's difficult i want to i want to be clear on the whole i think elon musk has been good for the world good for the planet and i think electrifying the auto industry has got tremendous tremendous benefits i just wonder where are role models megan i mean you have a son where you know kind of who do you who do you want your boys to look to mm-hmm oh this is this is one of my problems early on with trump was with you know his the way he talks about people what a bully he seemed and certainly not some someone i want my sons to model or my daughter to model in any way when it comes to behavior now i could make the opposite argument about the way he governed his policies versus you know i mean joe biden's a perfectly nice man but look what happened in afghanistan right it's like that argument doesn't always work with politicians as we see i mean jfk wasn't exactly the best husband in the world but right so we could go down the line um but what is it about tech in particular that seems to attract a bunch of well it's it's our fault i think i think that i mean very going very deep on this uh when it when a nation becomes wealthier and more educating or more educating its reliance on the super bing and church attendance goes down our brain is big enough to ask very complicated questions but not big enough to answer them so into that void slips super bings and when we start kicking those super beings out for better or worse we need answers and there's nothing that feels more god-like or jesus-like or mystical than technology because i still can't figure out how my phone is able to do what it does if i have a very serious question do i ask a priest rabbi mentor scholar or boss no i ask google and i trust google's answer more than i trust any priest or rabbis so the new jesus christ of our generation are a man who denied his own blood under oath when he was worth a quarter of a billion dollars better known as steve jobs or a guy who believes he can be the ceo of two companies jack dorsey so i we are so there's we suffer from an idolatry of innovators and we have issued the mother of all hall passes for the ceos of tech companies that we would never issue for ceos of other industries and the result is they're taking advantage of it and they're doing things that we just wouldn't have tolerated from other industries i mean my question is if michael milken committed crimes today but he was the ceo of a tech company not a junk bomb firm would he have gone to jail for 10 years did michael milton do anything worse than what mark zuckerberg is doing right now do you think it all started with steve jobs i mean he obviously was the the number one like the biggest one the biggest names and the name and probably the most important and he was known for being such an ass as you point out denying his his child and so on the stories about him are legion about what a jerk he was at every turn i think it's been a slow creep of technology slowly but surely has become such an ubiquitous part of our life there's such wonder and awe around technology and quite frankly it's made so many people so much money that everybody has a friend who's whose daughter went to google and got rich everybody people are just really excited about what amazon can do in terms of delivering their nespresso pods within 48 hours netflix is a wonder and maybe you own amazon stock in your 401k so it's easy and our our elected officials no one the fastest way to look old is to start going after big tech it's like putting on mondays it just ages you and so a 73 year old insurance those are back in by the way mom jean said you are back-end that makes you look younger but i look i just think we've treated these companies there's a two-class system in our legislative branch and across our economy it's the way we treat tech companies the way we treat everybody else again if you know any one of these media companies could be reverse engineered to the kind of anti-competitive behavior or weaponizing our elections what if you're what if this podcast was found out to be taking ads from the foreign intelligence arm of the russian government i mean what would happen to this podcast so these guys get to play by a different set of rules which leads to i think extraordinarily bad behavior and the reality is if you tell a 30 year old male is jesus christ he's inclined to believe you and he will play by his own rules it's not their fault it's ours can i get you to comment on elizabeth holmes and the whole fairness debacle and she's you know on trial now and i i mean everyone's fascinated by that story including yours truly i met her one time and she gave me the deep voice and i just i find her a fascinating character and i'm clearly not alone since we've had successful podcasts about her and a successful documentary and a mini series and what do you make of how she tried to make it in this male-dominated industry of a bunch of jerks and was she just modeling i mean was her fraud so much worse than what we've seen from you know when it comes to criminal behavior from these other guys it's a really interesting question i like you i'm really fascinated and i have a difficult time kind of wrapping my head around one specific binary view on it because i wonder i mean the line between sort of being accused of fraud and continuing to be on the cover of forbes is getting your next round done yeah and the question i was asked about elizabeth holmes and theranos is that if she had raised another billion dollars and then they had shown some progress around edison or whatever the name of the machine was would she still would she still be speaking at stanford's commencement and the difference here is i'm not sure she did the the difference between theranos and some of these tech companies is when you start talking about something as it relates to health it just kind of takes it to a different level of seriousness it's one thing when you lie about your photo sharing app it's another thing when you lie about your photo sharing after you delay or cover up depression that takes it to a new level but when you're talking about a blood testing uh mechanism and you're making false claims or claims at a minimum seem outrageous it takes it to a new level but the correct question is a lot elon musk has never met a production target or has missed most of them he said two years ago that within 12 months there'd be a million automated self-driving tesla taxes i don't see one so is that fraud so there's there's there is a real valid argument from their defense that she wasn't doing anything a lot of ceos don't do the difference is this thing collapsed before she had a chance to realize her vision but ultimately why i do think she's found guilty here is i think people do distinguish claims about a device that has to do with health care as opposed to technology and some of this feels really um i think one of the most disappointing things about her defense is she's claiming abuse spouse syndrome so the most famous woman in technology is claiming that she was manipulated by a man and she didn't have the self-awareness to be to have agency in her own domain i don't think that's especially good for women in tech so i i think it's fascinating um i think your podcasts on it are going to continue to draw a ton of viewers because we all wrap our heads around it but i would argue if you've been following the trial the defense is winning the defense is saying she showed up every day she didn't take a dollar she worked her ass off and she failed that's bad but it's not illegal we're actually going to do a legal segment on it soon a couple days um how about jeff bezos because i tell you i mean i'm like oh my god amazon's taking over the world i've lived in new york for now 17 years up until about two weeks ago and it's like all the mom and pops are out of business and damn amazon and then of course i'm on my phone like oh sneakers within two days awesome yes thanks jeff bezos and then i noticed it when he um you know he got caught cheating on his wife with this young woman and when you watch the media cover it it was like it was like watching russian state television reporters talk about vladimir putin it was like you realize it's okay to criticize jeff bezos right he did a dirtbag thing like it's okay to call him out the way he's revered people are afraid to criticize him in the media makes me feel creeped out yeah well again it goes back to this notion of the idolatry of innovators and there's just no getting around it to be fair i do think jeff bezos is going to go down in history at least history to date is the most the clearest blue flame thinker and he's created a second largest employer amazon is the largest recruiter out of my class at stern i've owned their stock for 13 years i'm like you i'm a prime member i absolutely love their service you know the question is does power corrupt and you're in and does it corrupt media and i think there's two things that led to when i heard what had happened with uh with with jeff bezos and his wife and some of the stuff with his girlfriend i thought that's it and can you imagine if a woman had done the same thing if the female ceo had been sending out those types of pictures or at least been accused of it i think she would have been escorted out by the board done um there's just a real double standard but it's also he bought the washington post which by a lot of media players powerful media players was considered sort of a national treasure and to be fair he's been a great steward of it and so i think there's this reservoir of good will towards him and i think the ultimate pr jujitsu move here was to take pictures of your your personal parts sent to your girlfriend and this is a guy who's in technology he should have known better brad stone claims there was no pictures but supposedly there was and then somehow pivoted to i'm a hero i'm gonna i'm not gonna take this i'm gonna i'm gonna punch the bully back i'm the wealthiest man in the world but i'm being bullied so i've never seen a pr gymnastic move like that and i do think it as you said it reflects it reflects this notion of idolatry of innovators i think amazon reflects it's an incredible service i would argue it needs to be broken up that we don't know what we're missing because it's very difficult to get an e-commerce company funded right now and it raises a lot of issues around whether one man or two men elon musk and jeff bezos should be worth as much as 40 percent of america and effectively jeff bezos has paid about two percent of his wealth or his increase in wealth over the last 10 years in taxes there's a lot about his behavior i don't like i think they've abused the commonwealth i think this hq2 contest was a circus i predicted it was either going to be dc or new york for the genius insight but that's where he had homes and a guy at that age and with that kind of money doesn't need to commute and i was wrong it was both of them so look i i i think he's incredible he's going to go down in history i don't begrudge his wealth i begrudge that we don't want to tax him and i begrudge that the media has decided that if you're an innovator you just get a hall pass around every single issue i would i would take issue with your your comments about him being a good steward of the washington post i have to say i i don't i actually don't know what your politics are i read you said you're right of center left which i think was a joke but it's funny um but i mean let me just ask you though you don't think the washington post has become more relevant under his ownership whether you like their politics or not i would argue it's become much more relevant i don't i mean i guess i'm not looking at it until we bought it i'm not looking at it through that lens i guess you're coming at it from a business angle i'm coming at it from a journalistic angle and the whole democracy dies and darkness was a joke it was a joke because let me tell you that as as disgusted as they were by some of trump's overreaches they were awfully dark during the obama years when he took out his pen and his phone and was doing a bunch of illegal stuff that he'd already said on the record he couldn't do you know it's like that kind of hypocrisy is stomach turning to me and i don't buy their you know cloak of morality when trump gets in which of course now they're a lot quieter and it's gone a lot darker now that there's a democrat back in office i think that without bezos owning it regardless of the politics i don't think he'd be incensed because i think it would be irrelevant i think the washington post was literally diving towards the relevance and he came in and the bottom line is that the best thing that can happen to a media company especially a newspaper is that a billionaire buys it because they economically most of them aren't viable mm-hmm and so i you know regardless of the po i'll put the politics aside i just find that the washington post is discuss more more relevant showing up in your inbox showing and you're up in your feed and you're right i i just don't think there's any arguing that the majority of media has a liberal bias it's usually people who went to college and live in urban areas and you typically skew liberals especially the ones that go into media i think they have a lot of affection for bezos and are prone to spinning stories such as the one we referenced towards bezos um shifting gears now i want to pick up on something i was asking vivek ramaswamy about which is china is it you i know you've you've thought a lot about it and written a lot about it and i what do you what are they doing right now like how are how fast are they growing how much control do they have how are they influencing us in ways we don't fully understand well we're gonna need a bigger boat i mean i would argue in china i would argue that china's in many ways winning and one of our i think our co-morbidity as a nation is our arrogance and that we think that we can't learn from other nations and the reality is china has pulled 750 million people out of poverty in the last several decades which is arguably one of the greatest achievements in mankind they're also committing you know what a lot of people would argue is genocide it's an autocratic society denying people's freedom so obviously these are very real issues but what i find interesting is lately is they've gone in and basically wrapped the knuckles of the big tech companies and it's clear that they've looked at the u.s and said we are not going to allow our tech companies to do to us what they've done to america we're not going to let them roam the earth and make these big statements about what's right and what's wrong we're not going to let them abuse data we're not going to let them addict kids to video games we're not going to let tutoring companies help the rich continue this cast system where that the children of rich people get into the best schools with these tutoring companies so to a certain extent they've said we're not we're not going to subvert national interests and the health of the commonwealth economic interest now the question is is whether these companies whether she is just wrap their knuckles or it's going to cut off their fingers it's my view that he's pulled kind of an mbs and pulled the most powerful tech people into the ritz carlton and said this is your prison unless you swear up down and center that you are on board and i don't think that i don't think that they're going to totally kneecap their their national champions the alibabas the baidu's the um uh the 10 cents of the world i and and if you look at these companies right now the stocks are trading at a fraction of their peers in america on a p e ratio so it's going to be fascinating to see what they they do but there's it's interesting to learn from what they think they've learned from us and that is that is anti-monopoly or monopoly abuse abuse of the commonwealth a lack of regard for children around addiction they said we're not going to let the same thing happen over there or happen here what happened over there i think it's fascinating yeah because this is the first time i've read a report about china in the news where i was like i think i'm on their side i got it yeah right they started cracking down on the abusive children and this crazy tutor and work at all hours uh culture that's developing in china and they were like you're not going to be allowed to do that to the children it's not healthy and i'm thinking to myself what i want we want to be more like china wait what what did i say yeah i mean it's there's some advantages to being an autocracy and and they essentially i mean it'll be interesting america might pivot the other way and say bring all of your your entrepreneurs and mavericks here and there's some very scary data for chinese and that is supposedly two-thirds of people worth over a million dollars to be the left or planning to leave china because they realize someone can just come up and cut your company's stock in half and we can't do that here and that's probably a good thing but i had a lot of empathy for the tutoring industrial complex i mean higher education in the u.s megan i think it's turned into the great or more from the greatest upward lubricant of mobility to an enforcer of the caste system where the tudor industrial complex and coaching gets your kids into college and my university nyu is guilty of this there are primarily two cohorts now going to elite universities which are the ultimate on-ramp to a better lifestyle and those cohorts are one the children of rich people and two what i call the freakishly remarkable and we're under the belief that our kid is the freakishly remarkable one and i can prove to all of us that 99 of our children are not in the top one percent and as what i would like to think is kind of the tip of the spear of what is supposed to be america in many ways our universities we're not supposed to be about taking the top one percent in the wealthiest households and turning them into billionaires we're supposed to be about taking good kids and giving remarkable opportunities i think we have totally lost the script in higher ed here in the united states oh my gosh it's so true and what people don't realize maybe they do now more after the you know college admissions scandal but so many people are buying their kids way into these top top schools i mean it absolutely happens every year that somebody makes a 10 million donation to harvard a 5 million donation to yale a 3 million donation to stanford and then suddenly they apply their child and expect good results and very often get them sometimes don't right sometimes they get wait listed sometimes they get outright rejected but if these kids who are just busting their asses in these public schools across america to get straight a's only understood what they're up against i i think it would just be heartbreaking spring used to be a nervous but joyous time for parents about where your kid was getting into school and i literally get dozens of these emails it's turned into the season of despair our daughter's done everything right great grades great sats captained the lacrosse team and has been rejected from five of five schools and has now been downshifted to a tier tier school that manages to charge the same price you have middle class households all across america with great kids who are paying a mercedes price tag for a hyundai education and my colleagues have become so drunk on luxury we think of ourselves as hermes no longer as public servants and we love rejecting 95 of the applicants that's not what america is about when i went to ucla the acceptance rate was 70 now it's 12. so what we've basically said to people is okay unless you're rich and unless your kids building wells and has a patent by the time they're a senior they're going to go to they're going to be downshifted or arbitraged to a second-tier school that takes advantage of the most cartel in history and raises prices in line with harvard and you're going to incur student debt we have transferred a trillion and a half dollars from middle class homes to the faculty and endowments of universities who have this delusional bs image of being nice noble people this is the most corrupt cartel we need to expand enrollments dramatically or we need to cut funding we need to start taxing endowments and my colleagues need to recognize that we are public servants we are not chanel it's awesome that's a rant what did you think of that boom you nailed it so wait so how old are your kids and are do you want them to go i mean tucker carlson was out there publicly the other day saying he discouraged all four of his children from going to college they didn't listen to him but for the very reasons that you're saying uh he didn't think that they should go there what do you think oh no yeah you get your kids to college i mean i would like to see more on-ramps do a middle-class lifestyle apprenticeships programs but the bottom line is in america we are a certification-driven society we're a brand-driven society and nothing nothing creates there's no certification like uh graduating from an elite university so i think tucker's full of it quite frankly and his kids have a not a hammock but a cashmere hammock because their father is a multi-millionaire but if you're from a middle-class household i think you should be absolutely aiming towards trying to get into a good to great school i think college is still transformative it was transformative for me i think the onus is on us and universities and as voters to expand enrollments at our great public universities such that michigan the university of florida the ut system the university of california can continue to change the lives of children of sin single immigrant mothers who lived and died as secretary the reason i am here with you right now megan is because the university of california decided we're not about finding freakishly remarkable kids we're about finding good kids and giving them freakishly remarkable opportunities and that's no longer the case this isn't a radical idea we just need to go back to the future and make college a great place for good kids my hope that i hope you meander out of stern business school and over to the admissions department very soon at nyu or at least do it within the next six years before we're applying um i will say listen i went to syracuse undergrad i went to albany law school uh for law school and those are you know mid-tier to be kind uh schools and it all worked out fine and i think it's because yes the education was important but they weren't i don't think you could fairly say that they were elite um and it worked out fine because i worked hard and i made the most of the opportunity you know and so even if your kid doesn't get into an iv or a junior iv or whatever i just think remember that it's still an opportunity for them to learn for them to grow for them to make some contacts and to have some fun and mature in sort of a relatively relatively safe setting uh what a pleasure scott i hope you come back i really really enjoyed our discussion thank you megan thanks for having me and congratulations on your success oh thank you all the best after the break i would love to hear from you guys we're taking calls right now uh what do you have a thought on social media has it caused a change in your child would you send your child to college do you want to do it right um i don't know i still think yes but i see the reasons not to and i understand the decline in the mail application rate anyway call me eight three three four four megan and speaking of my time at syracuse four four is an homage to syracuse 44 jim brown all sorts of grades wore that number 44 m-e-g-y-n that's eight three three four four six four melissa in missouri i see you and i'm coming to you next [Music] welcome back everyone to the megan kelly show we're taking your calls right now at eight three three four four megan spelled m-e-g-y-n that's 833-446-3496 so yesterday in the program i i went off on aoc at the stupid met gala in her stupid dress without a mask while my kids and yours sit there all day with this muzzle over their faces for eight to nine hours i'm so irritated by it it's not just my kids it's kids who are old enough to be vaccinated and have been in in several states have to sit there all day with masks on and watch this loser out there parading in her dumb ass dress like she's really marie antoinette that's what she looked like with all these serfs below her masked up but she and carolyn maloney the congresswoman from the upper west side is praising equal rights while she's out there is basically stepping over the the low lifes so she can get her picture taken in front of the case okay anyway you can see it on youtube now go to youtube.com megan kelly uh we have a channel you can see it among other things but a lot of colors today calling in about masks and i understand your anger and upset um it's just gotten insane so we're gonna kick it off with melissa in missouri who i understand has got a mask story hey melissa hey how are you good thanks for calling oh well not a problem um so we started school i'm in missouri we started school august 23rd that first week of school we were before heat index we were looking at 100 degrees before the heat index and i was a school bus driver in a district and the first day of school i got on my bus i had bought little thermometers and it read 104 degrees that's before i turned the key right 104 degrees and i set up the front obviously so i have a 200 degree motor sitting in front of me and most of the school buses don't have a great firewall when it comes to heat at least um it'll stop a fire but not the heat coming through so what happened hotter fraud uh i posted it to facebook for parents to see was told was brought into my boss's office going you can't do that you can't let kids take off their math i'm like but what if i pass out what if my kids pass out he goes they have to wear the mask period it doesn't matter the temperature i understand it's hot and i was like so is this a compliance issue or is this a healthy safety of our children issue without missing b he goes compliance and it's all over the internet right now the recording of him actually saying it and then the next day i was brought in and fired for quote posting on facebook without uh district approval but yet we have drivers in the district that have been posting for years and are still posting to this day pictures of their bus pictures of their kids pictures of everything but because i brought it to the attention that it is too hot to have a child in a mask or have us in a mass the second date was 106. i feel like it's a it's a whistleblower situation i mean it's so grossly unfair the masks in the heat is truly endangering i mean i we just went through this in our school speak up if this happens you have to speak up melissa thank you for telling us the story wait we got to get somebody in quickly uh let's go to linda california we've got very quick time linda what's on your mind yeah i just think that um with the internet and facebook and instagram i think it's the parents responsibility to watch that and be really on top of it because they have no idea who they're talking to they think that it's their friend or just really nice person but they have no idea that's exactly right but it would be nice if the big tech companies would help us out a little but yeah that wouldn't excuse the parents we have to stay on it um because they're not our our friends and listen thanks for everyone who called in today thanks for watching and listening and check us out on youtube.com megan kelly we'll see you tomorrow [Music]

Channel: Megyn Kelly

Views: 51,677

Rating: 4.8726835 out of 5

Keywords: Politics, News, Media, Journalism, Journalist, Podcast, Show, Interviews, Interview, Megyn Kelly, Megyn, Megyn Kelly Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, Current Events, Trending News

Id: _IS9V2iSA9g

Length: 94min 59sec (5699 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021