 let's talk a little bit about what's going on with the Sam Bankman Freed FTX scandal. What the hell, guys? A massive, massive scandal. And we have some insight into it because about six months ago I interviewed Ronnie Goodman, who wrote the book The Star Chamber of Stanford on the secret trial of a Stanford law fellow. And he has two major antagonists with Sam Bankman Freed's parents, Barbara Freed and Joe Bankman Freed. You too, where she saw essentially nothing of value in it. Just found it, you know, ponderous and repetitive and whatnot. So it goes back and forth. But, you know, I mean, assuming, you know, and likewise... So he's talking here about his time at Stanford Law School. As to the specific gas lighting conventions. I've had intelligent people who were readily persuaded of my claims. I've had intelligent people who are completely, I met intelligent people who were really dismissive of my claims and, you know, all sorts of people in between those. And so they're sort of, you know, you go back and forth, you know, my crazy or am I not? Am I saying anything original or am I not? So I assume that experience is, some version of that experience is, you know, pretty common for most artist types. Yeah. Yeah. Now, let's talk about some of the lead characters and the number one character in the book from my understanding is Barbara Freed. So who is Barbara Freed? Well, you know, she was, she was one of the two professors in one of the classes. I took my last year at Stanford and she, you know, she clearly liked my work and she was one law for the fellowship. So that's why, you know, she is in a sense, the main, the main character also has the most email communications from her. So, you know, I, and this is something that I tried to emphasize, you know, I'm not attacking anyone personally. No, I'm not, they're all, you know, nice. Okay. So Barbara Freed is the mother of Sam Bankman Freed. And she published an op-ed back in 2013, right, where she shreds the philosophy of personal responsibility. So she argued in 2013, the philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. All right. This is the mother of Sam Bankman Freed of FDX. Right. She's a Stanford law professor. She said, it's time for Americans to ditch the philosophy of personal responsibility. So she was on the Democratic super PAC mind the gap. She was the board of directors chair. And she penned this 2013 essay, published ambassador review arguing, there's time for Americans to ditch the philosophy of personal responsibility. It's time to move past blame, guys. Philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. All right. She wants harm reduction policies such as rehabilitation instead of incarceration. She's public reactions to wrongdoing have been studied extensively. We need to listen to the peer reviewed experts. And more information people have about the context of a crime, the person who committed it, the circumstances that that person came from, the more nuanced their views of moral responsibility. So to know all essentially is to forgive all to use that old French phrase that we alter our judgments of blame as we acquire greater knowledge of the person or the context in which she acted should put to rest any thought that our blaming practices are naturally immutable or even recalcitrant. She says that harm reduction policies are not to coddle criminals or deny their accountability. It is to reduce future harm and a tolerable cost to all of us wrongdoers, including by influencing wrongdoers future choices through rehabilitation or carefully calibrated deterrents and when necessary isolation from society. She says we have got nothing from our 40 year blame fest, except the guilty pleasure of reproaching others for acts that but the grace of God or luck or social or biological forces we might well have committed ourselves. Interesting. She talks about the power of biological forces. It would be nice to have, you know, a lot more people investigating the power of biological forces. So let me send an invite to duvid here. These nice people were committed to their chosen profession, no question of that, but you know, I am critiquing the norms of that profession as they were embodied in these people. So yeah, I sort of do see the partner as kind of a paradigm case of certain academic pathologies. Not hard to do because you wouldn't be successful if you didn't have those pathologies to one degree or another. You know, and so I have a certain... You wouldn't be successful if you didn't have these pathologies, right? So some of these pathologies that might make for success are okay. They also make for absolute disasters for society. And so Sam Beckman freed. He was awesome. Thank you. Thank you. He was, you know, a major player in philanthropy and he was trying to do all these good works. Major donor to the Democratic Party and he was clearly running a scam. I send an invite here to duvid. Do people who don't have these pathologies, are they as equally cut out for success? Because a large part of success usually is getting along with other people and speaking the language. Critics of her worldview, but I think I'm on the other side now. So I acknowledge her virtues, namely that she kind of, from words that she said, in a sense, she had certain prophetic pressures. So you know, I think she had intuitive sense that this conflict was there and was, and Joe as well, they had a certain intuitive sense that was probably, I thought it could be managed and it couldn't be. But I think they... So the Joe here is Joe Beckman. All right. That's the father of Sam Beckman freed. All right. So both Barbara and Joe are Stanford law professors. Not understanding how things turned out. I think that... And they are the major antagonists in Ronnie Gordman's story at Stanford. He wrote a memoir about it at the start chamber of Stanford on the secret trial of the Stanford law both she and Joe saw a certain potential in me, which a lot of others didn't. And I'm grateful for that though. That potential could not unfold according to the rules which they had prescribed and hence the conflict. Now, how do you think in a safe space Barbara Fried would talk about her experience with you? How would she describe it? Well, look, people move on with their lives. So, you know, when, you know, Josh co-responding, you know, maybe I did enough opinion of me, but I left no, you know, lasting impression. That's perfectly fine with me because people move on with their lives and there's absolutely no, you know, no reason why they this many years later would really have, you know, any strong feelings about me one way or the other. Maybe whether they'll have strong feeling about the publication of the book is something else. I don't know. But yeah, I wouldn't expect her or anyone else. I would expect me to be very important to them, to any of them, because they're the right to move on with their lives. But of course, I have the right not to move on with my life, you know, also, which describes why I've been clinging to this experience and seeking to articulate it for so many years. Yes, I was running good a minute ahead of the curve. Was he warning us about something that we should be aware of? This is Anthony Scaramucci. Guy Bridge Capital founder, CMBC contributor and somebody who had sold part of his business to Sam Bankman Freed. Anthony, it's great to see you, sir. Well, I would say it's good to be here, but it's a, you know, concerning day, Andrew, and there's a lot of the stress in the markets and a lot of my friends think it's the worst week in crypto in cryptocurrency history. Well, let's talk about that and let's talk about the ramifications of it. But but first on a very personal basis, you spent some time with Sam recently. So this is from 10 days ago. Well, you know, I spent a lot of time with him. Actually, we traveled to the Middle East. This is before these revelations were exposed. We were embarking upon helping him fundraise. He had, you know, he had purchased 30% of my business. And so as good citizens, we were, we were trying to help him around the world. When the crisis hit over the weekend, I made a unilateral decision to fly down to the Bahamas on Tuesday in the spirit of helping. And so you caught what Brian was saying there. The original idea was this is a rescue finance situation. And could we somehow help, which would obviously help the entire industry. And then when I got to the Bahamas, it became clear, at least from some of the people that worked on the legal team and the compliance team, that perhaps there was more going on than it being a rescue situation. So when I left the Bahamas in the afternoon, I was actually distressed. I don't want to call it fraud at this moment, because that's actually a legal term. And none of us know. And we have to leave it up to the regulators. We also have to give people everybody a presumption of innocence. But I have to tell you, I'm distressed about it. I don't like it for the industry. And I would implore Sam and his family. He has two wonderful parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Freed. I would implore them to tell the truth to their investors, get to the bottom of it, stop 22 tweets, but get their, get themselves in front of a regulator and explain exactly what happened. And if there was fraud, let's clean it up to the extent possible and repair the accounts at FTX. For myself, I'll be working on buying back my equity and restoring that. The good news for Skybridge investors, we had no assets on custody there. We thought that was a potential conflict of interest. And so we were saved that way. But the bad news is, and I'll say this very candidly to everybody, I liked and liked and trusted Sam. And Duvid, what's going on, Duvid? Okay, Duvid, how are you doing? Hey, Broker Sham. Broker Sham, Broker Sham. So what's new, what's new by you? Nothing much. We're just listening books on my ebay. And have you paid any attention to this Sam Bankman Freed FTX meltdown and Ronnie Gordon, he wrote a memoir about dealing with Sam Bankman Freed's parents. You know, I didn't put that together till you just mentioned it. Yeah, Sam Bankman FTX is probably the main story that I'm following right now. You know, since it came out, I've been, you're reading basically everything I could find on it. You're watching videos. Maybe I even have my own theories on it. Okay, so what are you thinking? Well, there's the conspiracy theories because obviously, we don't know that much information. And I didn't put together, you know, the Ronnie Gouldman connection because I didn't read that book of his. Although I did look, you know, watch your video, but I didn't put it together that that was his parents. Yeah, I mean, my prediction is that there's a pretty large conspiracy going on. And, you know, he's probably just going to be the fall guy without us figuring out too much information. You know, there's also the Ellison against their connection. And, you know, the involvement of his parents is hard to tell whether, you know, was set up as a scam the whole time, whether they're getting kickbacks from the Democratic Party, whether his father, you'll help them out. You know, I know he like provided some of his legal advice, some of his original connections. So, yeah, I'd say it's more speculation because there's not much facts that we could, you'll pull out of it, but you're certainly ripe for conspiracy theories. No, you've been following it. What drew your attention to this story? I never invested in crypto. I follow crypto a little bit. And, you know, God forbid, I think I think it's just going to be the major story. Like I think that there's probably a lot of people involved. And it's just it's interesting because you keep on wanting to check back the news and see if there's going to be more information. You know, I think you're probably over a million people are going to lose significant amounts of money. And God forbid, probably also the majority of the people involved are probably also Jewish. And you said Ronnie Goldman's going to come on your show or who's talking to Ronnie Goldman? I was asking you like when you were first doing it, I thought maybe you were going to bring him on. He was going to give some special insight. Is that the same law school that has like the Palestinian protests where they supposedly like you aren't allowing Jews to speak or Zionists to speak at clubs or it's a different law school? I'm not sure. Did you hear those national, I mean that made the national news over and over again? Like it was probably overdone by anti-Semitism watchdogs, but you know, saying like a Jew free space, whereas really just a few student clubs that made an agreement not to invite pro-Israel speakers. But I know the, you know, it's probably a hotbed for anti-Zionism at the same time, a huge overrepresentation of Jews. I mean, have you analyzed the Jewish angle? I mean, certainly none of these people are Orthodox. You know, a handful of his partners may be non-Jews, but you know, it appears God forbid most of the names involved are Jews. You're like Gensler, Ellison's, you're her father, the MIT professor, you're the Berkeley, the Democrat fundraising arm. It's funny, I was just showing a week in review. The New York Times still hasn't taken down November 30th, their big annual conference that has Netanyahu, Zuckerberg, Janet Yellen, Zelensky, and Sam Bankman Freed. So if you check the New York Times for their advertisement for that event, they haven't removed Bankman Freed. Obviously, the more you have in common with people, the better you're likely to get along. So it makes sense that there are Jewish affinity networks. Also, if you speak in a similar sense, there's a way that elite speak, there's a way that people who go to elite universities speak. And so if you have that education in how to speak, like a member of the upper class with the right social political values, you're going to do much better as you try to navigate your way through the rich and powerful. So affinity networks and cultural ties and similar worldviews and similar vocabulary, similar ways of speaking, all these things that kind of bind people together and make them make people comfortable with each other. It makes sense that those who have that say elite university education and maybe have that secular Jewish identity, secular liberal Jewish identity in common, more likely to do business together. Yeah, probably an optimism, even though they're probably atheistic circles, that a lot of times I'll use this argument against atheists of this hope that the good guys are going to win their perspective of what a good guy is, even from the perspective that you've talked about, hero, what do you call it, the hero systems, hero systems, where Jews would be gullible to think that Bankman Fried might be the hero that fits their hero system. So it's like, oh, you know, this Jewish guy is just so smart that he's making all this money, and he's basically a good guy, doesn't really need all that money, and he's going to give the money to the right systems. And even though you're not like an orthodox view of who succeeds in them being rewarded by God, but some sort of hero system where Bankman Fried was the hero that they were looking for, and the hero that they could believe somehow was going to beat the system, and then you'll send a lifeline out and donate to their charity and their causes, and you'll support the Democrats and all these various institutes. What do you think about the idea that makes sense to me, that we all need a hero system? We all need some way of transcending our own insignificance by attaching ourselves to something transcendent, whether it's science, the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of God, that having a hero system is essentially a biological necessity. I mean, if you're going to say it's a biological necessity, you would require biological evidence. So, you know, as opposed to psychological or philosophical, you know, some sort of like genetic or neurological wiring, and then if you're, if you took an atheistic view, you say like, no, hero systems are false and it's a remnant of belief systems. So, if you're an atheist, you know, there are no heroes, you're like Benjamin Franklin, the power crops and absolute power crops, absolutely. And I mean, I would tend to agree with you, but I'm not sure I would make it a biological argument, might make it a spiritual argument. And then, if you did have atheistic leanings, that you would probably want to root out your tendency to believe in heroes, and even a Judaic view of the Yates, the Hori, Yates, or Tov. All people are fallible. All people make mistakes. There's no such things as hero. It's just a human weakness to want to believe in them. All right. Let me, so the idea of hero systems comes from Ernest Becker and his classic work, The Denial of Death. So he says, the way that we go about denying death is by striving for the heroic, that we take part in activities which lead us to believe that we're something more than just our physical body, that we're participating in something that will go on past our physical death, and therefore grant us a form of immortality. So artists and writers feel like they can achieve this type of immortality through the creation of great work, that they hope will affect people long after their death. But what about the great masses of people, the mediocre, who are incapable of personally achieving the heroic like an artist, how are they able to fulfill their urge to heroism? And so Ernest Becker says society acts as the vehicle in which the vast majority of people act out their urge for heroism. So in our culture, especially modern times, the heroic may seem too big for us or we too small for it, tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. So we disguise our struggle for the heroic by parting up figures in a bank account or reflecting privately on our heroic sense of worth or by having a better home than our friend or our neighbor, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath all these strivings for the heroic, throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of spoloscope, so that we deny death by becoming fully absorbed in our social role, whether it's as a sportsman, as a do-gooder, as a comic, as a hard worker, as a family man. So we strive for whatever one's group deems most desirable. So this will frequently money fame status, right? And so society is a hero system. Society is a living myth about the significance of human life. It is a defiant creation of meaning. Any thoughts on that description of a hero system? You know, I generally agree with it. And you know, it's been insightful. Like I'd mentioned the Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. You know, ironically, Taylor Swift, I've also been following that story, you know, where her most popular song in the world now is called Antihero. But I think I would generally dispute that like heroes are for the weak, heroes are a fallacy. So it's true that we seek out heroes. There's the natural motive. Heroes fill that social and psychological function. But in essence, they're a fallacy. I might even relate it as a derivative to the question of evil. And I would call karma the Hindu term, but either Judaic conception of Maimonides 13 principles, you know, like we reviewed in Mark Shapiro that the righteous get rewarded and the wicked get punished. So you'll see like a hero as the righteous person who gets rewarded. But from a nontheistic point of view, there's no reason to assume that the righteous get rewarded and the wicked get punished. And people have a natural tendency, I think to be skeptical, especially about success in wealth and heroes, you know, I think like, you know, Taylor Swift, or for example, like that, is she the example of the righteous being rewarded? And, you know, people are like, oh, probably not that you're like, but you know, so why is she the most famous person in the world right now? Does it have anything to do with righteousness? So that natural tendency to believe that there's a connection between doing good things and being rewarded and doing bad things and being punished leads into this creation of heroes like, you know, like, what's the name of the author you said you were reading from again? Ernest Becker. Ernest Becker. I mean, he lays it out pretty well. I'm not sure if you agree with me that you're saying it's essentially a fallacy to related to the belief that the righteous get rewarded and the wicked get punished. Right. Well, the the hero system in Ernest Becker's thought is not so much about having heroes, it's finding a way to be heroic yourself. So some people will get their sense of the heroic from taking care of their family. Other people will get the sense of heroic by volunteering. Other people will get the sense of heroic from the work that they do. Other people get a sense of heroic from being a part of a religion or being part of a particular people. And I don't think it's necessary to believe that the righteous are rewarded and the evil are punished, but it certainly helps, right? So, Becker divorces it from fame and excessive achievement that, I mean, typically people look at you think of heroes as people who have excessively achieved, you know, so like Sam Bankman Fried obviously gave more charity than, you know, almost anybody else because he had the means to do it to be a hero like that. But he just talked like your everyday hero and to normalize the hero, which is sensical and makes sense. But at the same time, you know, Becker is killing the hero idea by saying that, you know, anyone could be a hero. Well, everyone needs to feel like a hero. That's what he's saying. And so I mean, there are shows that I do. And afterwards I feel heroic or even during them, I feel heroic. I get considerable about of my meaning and purpose from doing live streams. I'm sure you've you've been very satisfied with some of your live streams and, you know, heroic that you said something that was unique. I mean, you often say things that I've never heard anywhere else. So I said, I'm sure that you like me get, you know, some of your sense of self and some of your sense of a purpose and mission and doing something, you know, good in life from your participation in live streams. So then you're getting more back towards my hero conception as opposed to Becker, where it's dependent upon exceptional achievement, where, you know, presumably you feel better about your live streaming when you have success and, you know, the type of success that makes you special, as opposed to the average person who, you know, doesn't have the reach of thousands of people that's not a published offer that, you know, never, you know, could have fathomed doing the things that you did, so to say, as opposed to you saying, you know, if nobody tuned in, you're just talking to a handful of people, would that still be a hero system like in the Becker sense? Yeah, it would be. Like, I don't know if you've ever, I've done live streams that very few people watched. So maybe any 80 people ever watched them. But I thought they were good, that I am pleased with the things that I said on that live stream. And so I do feel a sense of heroism that, you know, I said something important, whether or not the world recognizes it right now. I did something. All right, now, it's easier to feel heroic if you're doing doing a live stream where 3,000 people are watching live, 1,000 people or 500 people. But if you do good work, if you write a good essay, and nobody else acknowledges it, but you enjoy reading it, then I still think it's very, very easy to feel a sense of the heroic. So I'll often read something that I've written on my blog. And even if nobody else tells me it's good, if I laugh when I read it, if I, if I look at it in a new browser and go through and read what I've written, and I think, Oh, yeah, that's strong. That makes sense. These are good points. Then I get a sense of the heroic. And I'm, you know, I'm probably vastly exaggerating the importance and the heroism of what I'm doing. But that, that kind of serves us, you know, it gives us a sense of confidence and it gives us a sense of the heroic, even though it's, you know, vastly out of touch with reality. So as long as we don't get drunk on it, as long as we don't abuse other people on it, as long as we don't become antisocial or, you know, wreck our lives over it, because we have this overly intoxicated view of the importance of what we're saying on a live stream, having an exaggerated sense of the importance of what you do on a live stream with very few viewers. I still think that's, it gives one a sense of the heroic. You know, I get with Church of Entropy on Weekend Review, we always get into these circular arguments about the meaning of words. And I mentioned, you know, my grandfather's grandfather, who was a rabbi, was a philologist in Germany, the field of word study, and I like doing etymology. But, you know, it seems that Becker is destroying the historical meaning of hero, which means spectacular achievement, even to demigod, where a hero is someone who displays godlike qualities, where a person would think that maybe this person isn't a mere mortal, but is a demigod. And, you know, so I mean, I appreciate the postmodernism, and I don't know Becker's in the school of postmodernism. But, you know, I'm not, you know, like, I could understand egalitarianism. And, you know, I probably am, you know, largely egalitarian. But I like the classic meaning of hero. And so I don't like the way Becker is doing, you know, like, I think it's, you know, it's like IQ, not, you know, like, if everyone could be a genius, genius doesn't mean anything. If anyone could be a hero, hero doesn't mean anything. Hero demands spectacular achievement, you know, so much so that people be like, well, I'm just a mere mortal. I could never do that. That person must be, it must be a god. And, you know, what drives me is, like, I'm not denigrating what you said. And I agree with you, you could find meaning and have achievement. And, you know, like my rabbi said, small things make big people. But, you know, I assume, like, okay, maybe, you know, maybe you're a few years older than me, where, but even in my middle age, I still want to achieve spectacular things. And I want the classical definition of a hero, where I'm not just going to be a hero from, you know, finding her hero-ness in my banality, but I'm actually going to achieve spectacular things that other people won't be able to achieve or even found them, how it was achievable by mere mortal. Right. But think about people with a 100 IQ, or God forbid, lower than a 100 IQ. Think about how many of them get their primary sense of meaning in life from being a sports fan, but they sort of, they vicariously feel that they're heroic because their team wins a game, or their politician wins a game. So I don't know if you've done any intense sports fans. Generally speaking, seems to be the more intense the sports fan, the more empty their life. And so I just remember a stage in my life where nothing was going right, except the Dallas Cowboys were winning, my favorite football team. And that kind of got me through about four months, because the rest of my life was in absolute shambles. So I don't know if you've had that experience, but I noticed in real life, the more intense person's fandom, like the more emotionally elevated or destroyed they are by the performance of their team, the more empty the person's life. Yeah, I mean, I always filmed the tap, so I never felt connected to, you know, certainly a sports team or, or, you know, possibly like Judaism, Qasidism, you know, more involved with like Qabad, it's like, oh, Qabad is winning, or you know, Judaism is winning, Israel is winning. Even that, I've always felt largely detached. And, you know, not like other people's wins or my wins. And yeah, I put it like, I think I found out when I was small, that that's really just a fallacy, that it doesn't benefit you. You know, it's a false sense of something is okay, yeah, people need to cling on to something, they need meaning, and they could find meaning by group identity, by attaching themselves to a larger purpose. And then then when that purpose wins, you know, kind of like Judaism in general, right, you know, most Jews like, you know, a loss for the Jews is painful to us, like, you know, like any act of anti-Semitism or vandalism or anything, it's just like, oh, no, like I'm personally hurt. But you know, the same time, you know, when Jews win, it's, you know, makes us feel good. But I think that's a fallacy in a weakness. And so I could appreciate, like, people need the weakness, they need the crutch. But in essence, that's all it is. And, you know, saying, you're like the John Lennon, a working class hero, like if you want to be a hero, then just follow me. And that's kind of an antihero song. But saying like, no, I want to be a hero in order to achieve hero dumb. I'll take mentorship, I'll apprentice under heroes, but I'm not going to have the fallacy of sharing the glory with someone else when the reality is like, there's really nothing to share. There's no benefit to me, it's, you know, I'll say it's largely all fake, not just regarding the psychological importance to it. I was walking on Bandai Beach the other day wearing a Yamuka, and this couple came up and said, Shala Malaykum, they were from Oak Park, they were from Jews from Oak Park, Michigan, Oak Park, Michigan. So I think that's relatively near you. David, in the youngest real near my house, there was a couple that moved from Australia a few years ago. It's only the one I could think of. But, you know, there might be some interplay in, you know, there's thousands of Orthodox Jews in Oak Park, you know, said that even in the youngest real near my house, there's a couple that moved from Australia. Now, do you consciously give yourself an exaggerated sense of heroism just to feel better, to feel stronger, to feel more confident, and do you simultaneously know that you're building yourself? So I do, like I give myself an exaggerated sense of heroism when I'm doing a live stream. I usually impute more importance to what I'm doing than is really there because that gives me more energy, more excitement, more confidence in what I'm doing. At the same time, a part of me is kind of standing back and realizing, yeah, I'm giving this an exaggerated sense of importance. So do you consciously give yourself exaggerated senses of importance when you're performing in a live stream, or writing a blog post, or are you always detached? Yeah, I'm pretty much always detached. And I could be somewhat objective about the level of achievement. And you may be like in chess or something, because I put a level where I reached expertise, right, you know, I was playing big tournaments, and I was the winner, hundreds of people played, and I came out on top, or even having high ranking on the scoreboard. But to put it in perspective, like it didn't make me a hero, your possibility of mental gifts, or just that's what I worked on. You know, like in perky elbows, if you put the work in, you get the result. And then somewhat being objective, you're saying like, okay, you know, Adam Green called me up. I was on a show this week. I had Forex shark to talk about this, FTX on Week in Review got the most views, almost 3000 views. We had over 200 viewers, highest view church event we ever had, from our usual like 10 to 20. And I hadn't been on a big stream. So Adam Green wanted to review the Ari Shafir Jew comedy, and you had like 300 viewers. But I would say pretty objective about it, even the times where I've had success or failure, just to say, well, I'm a man of numbers and science and say, there's a theory of expertise, there's human achievement, that I might be on the far end of the bell curve, for certain matters of human achievement. And I think I'd mentioned, you got forbid Rabbi Balkany, the brother-in-law of Ravashkin, who went to prison, and he had went to prison. And he had probably been the most famous rabbi in America for a period of time. He almost was made the rabbinic chaplain of the whole Senate. He had a weekly appointment with George Bush for years, you know, you'll go on. But you said that one moment of honor, of pride could be your downfall. And God forbid he had a downfall, went to prison, and God forbid probably pretty much a broken man. And so I always recognize that, that glory is fleeting, and to be detached from it, and have some sort of objective assessment. Like you're there in Hollywood, so even if you've got hundreds of streamers, you're a published author, that you could objectively look at your level of achievement, place yourself on the bell curve, compare yourself to people that have achieved far more than you, and then even you accurately assess, okay, in this realm maybe you've achieved into the 99th percentile. So maybe you've had some luck, or maybe that's just in relation to the work that you put into it, and remained detached and objective about it. And have you rejoined the Jewish community, or are you still isolated from it? Yeah, I haven't started going back to synagogue yet. I'm not sure, you know, like I probably should just pop in, you know, start going shop this morning again, but I haven't done it yet. I started coaching chess. They called me at the Detroit Institute of Art in Detroit. He asked me to help out again, so I've been coaching at a local high school. You know, like I forbid two and a half miles from my house. It's, there's not a single white in the whole high school. You know, the percentage is some 90-some percent black. Maybe I'm not sure what the non-black is, but zero percent white. But yeah, I feel pretty confident about my chess, so I went in there and been coaching their chess team, and then going to the Detroit Institute of Arts and coaching chess again, almost all African-American. God forbid, you know, the downtown synagogue, the rabbi came out with the, you know, kind of like Michigan had the ballot proposal for abortion and came out like, you know, like as a Jew, as a rabbi, it's very important to protect the right to choose. And, you know, they've taken a pretty hard turn to the left, so I'm not sure if I'll, you know, if I'll go there again. They don't even have regular services, so I don't even know what to go there for. But yeah, I keep on meaning to start going Shabbos morning to my local young Israel, but I still haven't brought myself to do it yet. Is that synagogue you're talking about that came out for the right to abortion? Is that an Orthodox synagogue? No, that's the Detroit, you know, downtown liberal synagogue. I mean, I tried to make an Orthodox Minion, and then it got taken over by, you know, the elective process to a reform progressive synagogue, and they hired a female rabbi, and I'd still continue to work with them, and then they raised millions of dollars to raise a building. But the young Israel is the only synagogue within walking distance from my house. And you've trimmed your beard? Yeah, well, I actually burnt my beard using the Rabbi Nachman method, like the cabalistic fear that cutting your beard with a razor is like spiritually damaging. So I did the, you know, the burning method. I think we've discussed that before, but yeah, I just trimmed it a few days ago. Tell me, refresh me when you mean it's like powder that you put on that burns away the beard? No, I actually just use like a lighter or a match, and, you know, like I'll dampen my beard a tiny bit, so I don't burn myself, but you kind of just go around the beard with a match and it burns right off. It has a certain smell, like the keratin smell in the hair, and the hair has a very distinct smell, but it's semi-common among Hasidim, you know, like Rabbi Nachman. You're like, I'm kind of scared, even though, you know, like I may even admit, like, you know, God forbid, I'll sometimes, you know, like use electricity on purpose or various things, but like I'm scared to trim my beard. So whatever reason, like I'm scared to trim my beard, or, you know, so I'm still burning it. And why did you burn your beard? I mean, why do you feel the desire to trim it to remove, remove myself? Okay, I probably spent eight years of my life where I didn't shave once. You're like, I had hardly shaved just a handful of times. I was very late and had small hair growth, even till about 20 years old. So I'd never even really shaved much. And, you know, I was a Hasidic Jew in the first time I decided to do it, like I, you know, I was superstitious. I was scared to cut my beard because I was like, you know, until Hasidas and the Kabbalistic warnings. So I burnt my beard, you know, because I still wanted to be a Hasidic Jew, but it was getting kind of, you know, kind of longer than I wanted. Even my late 20s, I got a handful of white beard, white hairs now got forgot a little bunch of them. But so, you know, for probably like five years, I started burning my beard while I was a Hasidic Jew, because it was like the exception, because like, you know, like you're definitely not allowed to cut your beard, especially in like the very Hasidic circles I was in, in Brooklyn. So I burnt my beard. And, and so I just, I've just been using that method since even though, yeah, I think I'm still superstitious for whatever reason that I just, you know, like we were talking the hero system. I'm a rationalist, but I'm superstitious about some things. And I've read the Kabbalistic material about the negative spiritual impact of cutting your beard and the, you know, the one exception of burning it, even though that's, you know, even just a weak exception. Okay. Back to the San Bankman Freed FTX meltdown. Are there any perspectives, any articles you've read, any podcasts you've heard, any ideas that have been shared that have most captured your attention in this story? Yeah, I've checked new sources of all kind. And, you know, so there's a few like, I think Coinbase or crypto pages. And I spoke to, you know, this guy forex shark who I became friendly with, he saw me on JF public space debating years ago. And he's, you know, a trader. And we've been talking for years. So there's actually trading periodicals. And then there's the liberal media. So I've noticed the New York Times. You know, I've been reading the New York Times for a few years now, like my mother's got the New York Times for her whole life. Oh, they don't do a hard copy anymore. So just online, she gave me a password. But yeah, I noticed the New York Times has been very sympathetic towards them. The New York Times was propping them up, you know, even kind of putting them as this hero and the future of trading. A lot of the mainstream liberal media, I read the Vox article Vox admitted that they were funded by him and they had the Twitter leaks. But you know, I'll just search it and read all types of information. And you know, I'm not I'm not sure if you're you're familiar, kind of, you know, kind of like the alt-right or any subfield. There's a lot of people into crypto. And so there's a lot of crypto web pages and news servers that have regular stories. I've checked YouTube also. So a lot of names I never even heard of. I think there's a guy, Peter Boyle, that does financial stuff. You know, I saw Sam Harris who had interviewed him and his retake. But just searching YouTube for videos on it. You know, so there's the hard core conspiracies. There's the mild conspiracies. And then there's like the evidentiary conspiracies that are kind of digging through what we know. And you're not trying to label a conspiracy, but just saying something's up here. What can we gather from the information? You know, saying like, is like Bankman Fried's father, how much is he involved? Did he know about it? We know that Bankman got a lot of his connections from his father. You know, like, like how we got into the hero system thing in general was it were they just suckers falling for their desire for for there to be this hero that was going to make all this money? And then you'll be just with it and give it to the right causes? Or was there some sort of active conspiracy? There's a lot of random YouTube videos making connections to Ukraine. There's some evidence like you're certainly he raised money for the Ukraine at least $70 million. If he got cuts on it, you know, the New York Times, he was going to be speaking there with Zelensky. And then there's also the internal crypto like finance. I'm not sure if you know the CZ, the Canadian Chinese competitor of Binance who took him down. So I watched his interviews, and I've read the articles about him. If you have to say, was it some sort of CIA US government, you know, who knows would be involved in the conspiracy to try to take down Bitcoin? And there's all sorts of like, you know, Bitcoin is being used to skirt sanctions, possibly by North Korea, Iran, Russia, Binance has refused to conduct sanctions against Iran and Russia. And, you know, so there's credible motive that your bankman could just be the fall guy for US government activity, trying to steer people away from Bitcoin, or FTX's main competitor, Binance, I'm not sure how much you've read into the story, or know the players if you're finance and CZ, or what he was doing for raising money for Ukraine, or the general fear of Bitcoin, and being used to skirt sanctions and like Iran and Russia. I turned pretty hard against Bitcoin about a year or two years ago. And so I haven't read much about cyber currencies since then. So yeah, May of 2021, that's when I just thought that these cyber currencies were useless. And so I haven't kept up with them. Useless to you, maybe. No, useless in general. I think that in May of 2021, I just don't see any benefit from using cyber currencies unless you're a criminal. Yeah, that's kind of how I looked at it also, because like I heard of Bitcoin, even from the very beginning, and it didn't seem to have any use besides where as one of the most dangerous things, you know, some way to make a bunch of money. And I don't know what I would want to buy with it. And, you know, like I don't have enough money that I would consider, you know, diversifying and investing in Bitcoin. But yeah, I think for the criminal activity, certainly the alt-right, did you ever make a Bitcoin for yourself to collect donations? No, I did. I did buy $500 worth of Bitcoin at one point, and it made some money with it. But you never set up like that Bitcoin? Yeah, so I mean, certainly on the alt-right, stayed alive, you know, like Nicholas Fuentes had that large donation, John Francis Garepi, even from what I understand, that's how the Daily Show, like Mike Enoch and Eric Stryker, made a whole bunch of money and were able to stay afloat on Bitcoin. But also, you know, like God forbid the JCC, the Israeli JCC bomb hoaxer used Bitcoin. And that's why he was so hard to detect for a period of time. And, you know, the likelihood that North Korea and so I was always skeptical. And I always figured that it's probably, you know, some it's probably the major players are like North Korea and Iran and the news stories like Russia. But it's an important story. And so if you're the CIA or the US government and you're worried about sanctions on these countries or, you know, global geopolitics war, that your Bitcoin is probably what they're using. And, you know, that's theoretically why the powers that be in the US were likely propping up Bankman Freed. And then he was just stealing the money or gambling away with it, that it was borderline ridiculous. And I've mentioned that, you know, science and engineering in general, that most people in politics know extremely little about science and engineering. Like, I think we talked about the few times over the years of the congressional hearings on social media, and they might talk about censorship, but when they talk about how the technology actually works, you know, God forbid that, you know, the boomers even my parents are really far behind. And I could see like that it's possible. I mean, how do you how do you see it that that how did you know I could see millions of people getting fooled. If they're just young people thinking it's going to be easy time to invest or cheat on taxes or to not have a digital footprint. But you also majority criminal activity. And, and then you'll just people saying, well, at the same time, there's a lot of people making a lot of money off of it. And I want to get in on it. And you're just so so you're the major driving mark of the market is fear and greed. And so it was probably just greed where people like you, you know, we're like, okay, who cares, you know, I didn't care for the same time, if you're investing, and you see other people making money that yours, the greed factor gets in and it's like, oh, there's easy money. Everyone else is making easy money. And so at some point you try to get in on it. And then God forbid, you know, some like bank and freeze stole all your money and it's all gone. Right. So when I finally did some research on some currencies in May of 2021, I just thought these are not good investments. And most importantly, they're terrible forms of currency. So there are five features that a currency should have. This was a blogger Kevin Drum. This should be hard to counterfeit. It should be stable in value. It should be easy to carry. It should be widely accepted. Should be 100% liquid Bitcoin fails three of these tests. It's not stable in value. It's not widely accepted. It's not 100% liquid. It's just, I just didn't see the benefit for Bitcoin unless you're operating in the black market. And so You didn't even have to drive for easy money, even though you didn't see the benefit. And just saying like, oh my God, all these people are making so much easier money. Yeah, I did. I dropped $500 when I earned 15% on that $500. I just got out. You said 1500%? No, no, no. I invested $500. I earned 15%. I made like $75 that I just got out. Yeah, I mean, that's people you like want to make 1500% and you double their money. So returns that aren't possible in normal markets. And yeah, I thought that was pretty shaky, pretty shady and likely that people would lose their money. Although I don't think they're going away. You're due to global shadiness. And you see people like Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey, a lot of billionaires are pro crypto. And I could see that also that if you had extremely large amounts of money, that you might want to diversify and you might want some of that in crypto. And it's probably shady in general, if it's a distrust in the dollar or the US government. So if it's like me and you would just be like, okay, God forbid if the US collapses, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not preparing for that scenario with like Bitcoin. But if you were extremely wealthy, and you were worried about like post-apocalypse or who knows, like the country turning on you, that Bitcoin also serves that purpose. But you would have to be able to use it somewhere. And that would probably mean like you're going to, I mean, you can't even use it in China, saying that you're going to travel someplace else in the world and try to make a new start with the like, so I don't have that kind of doomsday planning. I doubt you're that type personality where it's like you're thinking like, oh my God, look what's happening here in the United States. And you know, so I'm looking into like moving to South America and making a new start or something like that, where you would you'll think about Bitcoin like that. But you know, that's like also that's also pretty shady. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to move on any, any final words for today. Yeah, nice to see I've watched a few of your videos and I'm not sure your timeframe or your streaming, but you're good to hear from you. And, and you know, see, see what happens. You're definitely coming back in January or yes, you're okay. So I just enjoy any update and possibly my suggestion on using your time to work on a book. I haven't made any progress in that direction. Let's talk to do I've been trying to work on my writing, but you know, like, if you found some sort of narrative arc or idea that you would you probably could write an interesting book, and I don't know how financially successful it'd be, even, you know, Judaism streaming outright, you know, any of these things if you, you know, especially because you have so many blog articles, that you could probably piece together to be the precursor outline of a book. But, you know, I got your book. So if you did that, it'd be interesting. But I can't afford to, you know, like, drop you, you know, someone would probably have to drop you a few thousand dollars to make it worth your while to really work on it. But if you did do that, I think that'd be kind of cool. Okay, David, good to talk to you. Take care. Okay, thanks, David. Let's, this is me talking about Bitcoin and cyber currencies in May of 2021. I've been aware of Bitcoin for approximately a decade, but I only got stuck into it this week. It's I'm reading on it. And I emerge unimpressed by Bitcoin. So perhaps the easiest summary that makes common sense to me is by a liberal blogger named Kevin Drum, how baseball cards explain what a Bitcoin really is. So what is money tends to have these attributes? It's hard to counterfeit. So Bitcoin meets that need. It is stable in value. That's not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is rocketing up and down in value. It is light and easy to carry. Bitcoin meets that. It is widely accepted. Bitcoin does not meet that. And it is 100% liquid. So Bitcoin currently gets close to that. So is Bitcoin money? No, not really. But it is hard to counterfeit and it is easy to carry around. So what else shares these attributes of being hard to counterfeit and easy to carry around? So rest stamps and coins and tulips, baseball cards. So Bitcoin really has few of the attributes of money, but all of the attributes of a collectible. So think of it as like a 1952 Mickey Mantle card. That's worth more than a 1951 Willie Mays. Both cards are more valuable than say a Tom Egan rookie card, which is sort of the doge coins of baseball cards. So Bitcoin fans like to insist that it's money, but that's a serious category mistake. It's a genre error. So to criticize Ben Shapiro for being a shallow thinker, you're making a genre error because he's just a talk show host who just pumps out the most conservative opinions possible, even if he knows absolutely nothing about what he's talking about. But that's the genre that he works in, talk show host. He doesn't write thoughtful books. He just knocks off shallow books. So Bitcoin supposedly strongest selling point absolute privacy is mostly a lie because almost all Bitcoin is traded through central exchanges that are regulated by national governments that have to use a central exchange. If you have the technical chops to trade it yourself, but that's a pain and it makes Bitcoin even less money like than it already was. So don't think of Bitcoin as money. Think of it as like beanie babies or pez dispensers or other collectibles. And after you make this mental adjustment, you no longer confused about Bitcoin. It's a collectible. It's not a currency. It's a collectible that's got a lot of hype. Maybe it will stay valuable the way that rare stamps and coins have stayed valuable or maybe like beanie babies, it won't. But whatever turns out to be the case, it means nothing profound about the future of money. Bitcoin is just another collectible that will go up and down at the whims of its fans. I thought that was an excellent little summary there on Bitcoin. Here is a debate between Anthony Popliano and Mike Green. Both for coming and having this conversation on Real Vision Crypto. Anthony, of course, you've been on Real Vision multiple times and you've hosted Raoul on your podcast, Mike, you host Mike Green in conversation series right here on Real Vision. This debate started on Twitter. We all love Twitter. It's a great place to blast out little squibs, but not always the best place to have a long form conversation. You know, when I think about this, this is more than a debate between two individuals. This is two worldviews colliding. And that broader collision is just beginning to be felt around the world. I couldn't think of two better people to represent those worldviews here than you, Pop. You're at the very vanguard of the digital assets investment movement at Morgan Creek Digital. Mike, what you do over at Logica Capital is some of the most sophisticated analysis of traditional capital markets anywhere. And we're very glad to have both of you here on Real Vision for this conversation today. Mike, since you started to make the case that kicked off this debate, why don't you go first and explain the basic framework? What is your view of Bitcoin and why? Well, this first is background, right? The reason that I became more actively involved in the Bitcoin debate was kicked off by actually a Real Vision event, a Blacklist event in Dallas, Texas in October of 2020. I was fortunate to be there and have the opportunity to engage with a number of family offices that were almost uniformly making the observation that they were in the process of replacing gold in their portfolios or reallocating away from gold into Bitcoin. And interestingly, they all use the same terminology that it was the superior asset. As I began to evaluate that condition and to think about that dynamic, it was important for me to really dig in a professional sense. And as I've indicated elsewhere, I've participated in Bitcoin, I've had involvement with Bitcoin on a personal basis historically. I ultimately have chosen not to do that anymore. And that was a personal choice. As I dug into it on a professional basis, it required a much deeper dive. Once I began to dig into it and to evaluate this claim that Bitcoin was a superior asset, it became very clear to me that that was really totally untrue, that it was an inferior asset relative to gold. So I played around with Bitcoin. Number one, I wanted to make it easier if people wanted to give me money in the form of Bitcoin. I wanted to learn a little bit about it. And I bought some Bitcoin, I held on to it till I made about a 15% profit, then I sold all out of Bitcoin about two months ago. Certainly in terms of the dynamics of why a central bank would choose to hold it. And secondly, it became, it was recognizable as an inferior asset once you actually began to evaluate the claims that are made within the community. I think one of the things that sets my work apart in traditional asset markets is the recognition of the rising price does not tell you something is working, that something is going to be successful. You and I have been reported where I've used the terminology driving uphill with no brakes. I would suggest the same thing applies to Bitcoin where the price has clearly risen and that gives people comfort in the story. But the reality is that Bitcoin is a superior asset for one reason and one reason only. It facilitates those who want to work against the existing system, either to generate dollars in the case of China, Russia, Iran or other bad actors on the global stage that are trying to avoid sanctions or for criminal purposes. And as I dug further into the data that is presented within the industry, it became very clear that the data that is being presented is disingenuous. So for example, the industry will simultaneously say 95% of the data is fake, 95% of the transactions are fake, and then use those same 95% of the transactions in disputing the claim that crypto is primarily used for crime. If you look at reports like the report from Elliptical that came out in 2020 regarding the utilization of crypto for crime purposes, they suggested it's around 2%. And the disingenuous claim is made over and over again that the US dollar is more widely used for crime or the euro is more widely used for crime. Of course, that's true given the relative acceptance of them as a proportion of transactions within Bitcoin. We either have to decide that the 95% of the transactions that are referred to as being fake and therefore shouldn't be considered should be ignored when we're thinking about the dynamics of the utilization for crime purposes. And if we adjust for that, what we discover is nearly 40% of crypto transactions are actually used for crime. So to just get one dramatic perspective on cyber currencies as a terrific series on Netflix called startup, it runs three seasons. It was originally on crackle, but it's all about the world of cyber currencies, about people starting up a cyber currency business and then starting up their own dark web and set in Miami. It's great fun and it's a dramatic way of getting a feel for the cyber currency world. The vast majority of the mining activity is occurring in regions like China, Russia and Iran. And if we incorporate the participation of mining pools, they control in excess of 90% of the hash rate. This is not a decentralized system. It has become an increasingly centralized system focused on one thing and one thing only, attracting US dollars and providing that to those who are utilizing resources in regions like China, Russia and Iran to capture dollars. I imagine you have a different view. Yeah. I mean, look, we can get into all the specifics of kind of mining. Okay. And so also in May of 2020, he was around a lot of Muslims in the Middle East. As I've said to you before, authoritarians love authoritarianism, Shapiro, will you bake Rubin a wedding cake? The answer is no. The very implication that we exist to do for the greater good is totally antithetical to the purpose of being human. Bulsar, Bulsar in a row, no movement goes on forever, right? Eventually, it either spins out of control in a horrific way or it perhaps winds down or something in the middle. If we were having an anniversary party, would you come? You know, honestly, I'd have to think about it in the same way. So that's interesting to me. That's a different thing. I want you to continue to say you're a liberal. You're of great use. No way. I'm not doing it for your use of peace. I know that. I'm doing it for myself. Competition would start kicking in. All I ever wanted was exact equality under the law. Now we're equal. You could call me and that's what it feels like to me. That's what it feels like to me. It wouldn't mean anything to me. Between UPS and FedEx and Amazon and drones and blah, blah, blah, DHL. Your brain's got a lot of stuff in there. 30 years from now, I may have moved you on coming to an anniversary party. He would be unlikely that you'd move me, but I could never rule out the possibility of being moved on anything. I believe that probably at 80 something years old, then I'll go, you know, think maybe I was wrong about that. So you have to confront them with these ethical dilemmas and usually you'll watch their heads explode. Why is it that we're able to do this and most people can't do this? That's what I'm curious about. All right, that's it. Thank you, everybody. That'd be a coward. Hey, hello. All right. Welcome back, fam. How are your diamond hands going? Let's keep it strong, everybody. We just got to hold on a little bit stronger and then we're going to the moon. I promise you guys we're going to go to a million dollars and for your other friends and family, make sure to get them in on this right now. Also, borrow their money, take out the loan, take a loan on your car, mortgage your house, take out the loan on your bank. You can take out loans on your credit cards as well. Max out those credit lines, ask your friends, your family, your parents to put everything into bitcoins because this is your last chance. If they don't, they're going to have fun staying poor. Now in this video, we are going to be pumping our next outcoin with just Cardano and why I think Cardano will 10x. So let's get those diamond gloves, put them on and put it into Cardano, which is going to be the future of DeFi and overtake Ethereum as the number one DeFi coin out there. Now, let's clarify something. I know that I'm the biggest crypto bear out there, but if you're to ask me which one coin I may invest in and which coin I think is going to 10x from here on out, then that may just welcome Cardano. And I wanted to outline for you the bull case for why. I think Cardano has a few legs to run on here. So if we take a look here actually at the top eight coins, let's say, well, we've got Bitcoin number. Okay. This is some of my Bitcoin cynical production from May of 2021. Being a story, who is Sam Bankman freed, who are his parents? But I think there's more, we can do more with her. Let's just focus on her because she's the paradigmatic. She's like the paradigmatic instigator and crusher of your dream. Is that there? Sam Bankman. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But I do just like things in that manner, but I also highlight the other story that I can understand like she, from her perspective, as the person who sort of went out on a limb to give me this fellowship and has certain professional aspirations, my conduct was highly delinquent. So yeah. So I try to keep that tension in view. As you can tell from the book, there wasn't really, beyond a certain point, there wasn't really that much personal interaction other than through email. So, you know. But she got you a fellowship. I would assume that's a trivial guess. She seemed to have substantial hopes and dreams for your career. That's right. I document that. Yeah. Yeah. She did. And I frustrated those. Yeah. You frustrated those. And so I would imagine that she experienced. So he refused to abide by the customs, the norms, the ways of speaking that were expected of someone who wants to succeed in the legal profession. Right. There's a special vocabulary for people in the ruling class. Right. There are ways of speaking. There are ways of thinking. There are ways of discussing moral, political, cultural issues. And Ronnie Goldman refused to abide and he did not get to succeed. He did not get to elevate his career as his mentors Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman at Stanford Law School expected of him. He refused to embody the elite discourse. He refused to embody the approach of the tenured faculty professor. He refused to play by the rules of the game as a result, like his career in the legal profession as a professor was absolutely crushed. You, as betraying her faith in you. Yeah. Yes. I believe that. And I think, and I use those very words. And, you know, is that true or is that not true? Well, that's where it's... It's subjective. Of course, from her perspective, I could understand why she would experience it as betrayal. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Glenn Medley. This is Ronnie Goldman. He got a fellowship at Stanford Law School on the instigation of Barbara Fried, who is Sam Bankman-Fried's mother. Sam Bankman-Fried ran FTX into its meltdown. Billions of dollars have been lost. So Sam Bankman-Fried's parents are professors at Stanford Law School. They are also the antagonists in this Ronnie Goldman memoir on his two years at Stanford Law School. The memoir is called The Star Chamber of Stanford on the secret trial of the Stanford Law Fellow. The Ronnie Goldman was initially the golden boy for Barbara Fried her husband, Joe Bankman. They are also the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX. And this is his story, his run-in, his refusal to abide by the norms expected of someone who's going to join the elite class. Or betrayal is a subjective feeling that other people aren't doing as you expected. Yeah. It's just a hyperbolic expression. Do you think she learned anything? Like, do you think she has... She changed as a result of the Great Disappointment with Ronnie Goldman? You know, I really hesitate to speculate about something where I don't even have a modicum of circumstantial evidence. But with that caveat, you know, again, I felt that there was a strong connection at certainly, you know, at the beginning. It wasn't... And it wasn't just that she thought well of me, but I felt that, you know, she also had a sense of the potential for my project. And maybe she understood certain of its layers or felt certain of its layers even better than I had. So certainly given that... And what was his project? His project was a deconstruction of liberalism. And what he developed from that deconstruction is this epic work that I keep quoting from. It's conservative claims of cultural oppression on the nature and origins of conservophobia by Ronnie Goldman. And that's Ronnie Goldman in the interview that I did with him in July of 2020 too. So this initially began as an essay he produced at Stanford Law School. Now it's been turned into a 700-page Magnum Opus, conservative claims of cultural oppression on the nature and origins of conservophobia. This is a man largely of the left who is deconstructing leftism. And he gets down to the brass tax. The main difference between the left wing and right wing approach to life is a different understanding of human nature. So the left wing perspective is that we are buffered. So that what you do, what goes on outside of me doesn't necessarily have to affect me. But also other key parts of the left wing view on the nature of the self is that we're basically good, that we have the capability of rationality and being strategic and autonomous. The right wing understanding of the self is that we're not basically good, that we are porous so that what you do, what goes on in the house next door is going to affect me. We're vulnerable, we're porous. And so because we're vulnerable and we're porous from a traditional perspective, the greatest danger is contagion and disorder. So people on the right tend to be alert for sources of contagion, moral, spiritual, biological contagion, as well as disorder. People on the left, they believe human nature is basically good therefore the greatest dangers are ignorance and bigotry. So that's the foundation between these two different worldviews. And Ronny Gordman does an excellent job of explicating this in his book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression on the Nature and Origins of Conservatophobia. This is Sam Bankman-Fried's father, Joe Bankman, appearing on the FTX podcast. Just kids in general have like some aversion to doing things with their parents. I don't think this is always the case, but there's definitely some little natural resistance there. Did, when you started helping FTX, like did Sam ask you to come on or did you realize, okay, like Sam needs a hand. I'm going to come on and help them. How did that initial interaction go? Well, I don't know. I think we've always enjoyed working together and thinking together. At least I like to think so. So when I really came on was after Sam asking me for a number of years, if I'd be interested in doing it, which was really gratifying. I think any parent would love to hear that. I wanted to make sure that I could do it and be useful. But I think from the start, whenever I was useful, I lend a hand. And it was clear at the start that on things like law, I mean, the company didn't have any lawyer. So I think my utility there was pretty obvious. Yeah, totally, totally, totally. And what are some of the things, because now you've been much more active member of FTX in the last maybe year, year and a half or something. What have you been up to? Like whatever your interests been? Well, I spent about half my time working on charity projects. One that I'm working on, we call bank the unbanked. And as you probably know, Tristan, there are about, depending on you look at it. Okay, so this is Sam Bankman-Freed's father, Joe Bankman, a professor at Stanford Law School. And this is an interview that was posted three months ago. 30 to 50 million Americans or more that don't have bank accounts or are underbanked. They have them, but they don't use them. And if you're not part of the financial system, everything is harder. It's expensive to cash checks. It's expensive to move money around. So that's kind of a national disgrace. Having a bank accounts a little bit like having utilities. Everybody should have one. So what we're trying to do at FTX is figure out how to give populations that don't have bank accounts, bank accounts and crypto wallets. And so we had a pilot program in South Florida and we have a big program coming up in Chicago. And the goal is to organize a template so that tens of millions of Americans can get a bank account that they can live with. And it's tougher if you're poor because you're living hand to mouth. So your app to overdraft your account and then you face a big penalty. One of the advantages by the way of crypto is that the payment system is a lot faster. So moving from the bank settlement system to the blockchain could be one way we could limit that. Anyway, that's one of the things I spent a lot of time on but actually in my part of FTX charity, which is actually I'd say only about a fifth of it, we have something like 240 activities going on right now or in the last year. So there's all sorts of programs. That's about half of what I do. And the other half of what I do is regulation, broadly speaking. So it's the bills moving through Congress. It's whether we'll get approval from a regulatory agency, things like that. Do you work with Gabe Sam's brother as well with pandemic preparedness stuff or not that much? Whenever I'm asked, I do. Gabe Bankman Fried Sam's brother's doing my son is doing fantastic stuff on pandemic preparedness and Sam and other principles at FTX along with other people are funding some of that. And as some of your viewers know or may know, it's kind of shocking that even after COVID, the one thing Congress has trouble funding is pandemic preparedness. And here's a pandemic that's killed way more people than died in 9-11 and cost trillions of dollars of damages. And yet it's easier to raise money to build a highway than it is to put money aside to deal with the next pandemic. So I do help Gabe a little bit with that. But mostly that's work that he and others are doing themselves. I just hear it along. Got it. And back to the bank then back. So essentially what they could end up with is something like an FTX app where they can receive their salary into if they're working a job or they can have the FTX card where they can spend their balances from their crypto wallet. Is that sort of how it would work? Exactly right. What we're doing is like all FTX app users, you get a bank account with your app if you want it. So in Chicago, for example, we're working with justice impacted families. A lot of poor families, especially the people of color have had family members spend time in prison. That's what my justice impacted. And everything is harder once you get out. And almost none of these people have bank accounts. So what we're giving them is what we give all FTX US users, which is an app that is tied to a bank account. And it's tied to a debit card, an FTX card, basically a Visa card. We're funding that in this program as we've always done with our pilot programs with some money. And then individuals will have a bank account, they'll be able to deposit checks into that. And if they want to send remittances, which is a big deal for actually for a lot of poor Americans because they have even poor family members abroad in the global south, they want to send money abroad. It's a great way to send money abroad using stable coins. So we'll take this population and we'll show them how to use the app and then we'll measure whether it improves their life. Very cool. Yeah, I can totally relate. I mean, less of the primal use case a lot of people use it for, but I've definitely been able to help some of my cousins with their businesses and stuff by just sending crypto down to Chile and get the 20% steel from Western Union or whatnot. Absolutely. And what we found in South Florida is that even in areas we think are very poor, there are a lot of budding entrepreneurs who are moving money around with businesses that have suppliers that are out of the country and crypto is a great way to do that. Yeah, I love crypto as a settlement tool. I think it's a very powerful international settlement tool. One last question for you, Joe, and this is more of a personal one, but what is a life habit or a life lesson that you've really taken to heart that you feel has improved your life? Wow, it's such a great question. Well, I'll tell you something that, I'll tell you a couple of things I tell my clients in therapy, which works for me too. One is giving gratitude. If you can say thank you to someone or thank someone or even think about someone who has done you a good turn, you'll be happier. It's kind of like a little bit of a magic bullet. You'll feel a lot of your hostility and anger and anxiety fade away. And I really use that. Another thing later in life is exercise, the same kind of thing. It's kind of a magic bullet. So if you're not doing it and are willing to try it, same effect on anger and anxiety and depression. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with both of those. Try and keep the gratitude strong all the time. Makes for a better- Yeah, guys, try to keep the gratitude strong all that time. Even if you've lost your life savings in FTX, that was Joe Bankman, the father of Sam Bankman-Freed. Joe Bankman is a professor at Stanford Law School, and this is a bloke in Bondi. Absolute biological necessity. We all fear being insignificant. And so we're looking to attach ourselves to a cause, to something that transcends us, something that's going to outlive us. We want to attach ourselves to something that goes back in time and will outlive us. And by attaching ourselves to something like that, then we can overcome our own fear of insignificance. Oh, well said. I mean, very, very well said there, Forty. Okay, what else is going on? John Baptist of the villain of the 21st century. It's kind of disturbing to some sense. What do you think? I just don't see the dentist. I just cannot see it. I mean, let's just be frank. I don't care if he's involved in the military. That doesn't actually make you a badass. The guy is short. He is fat. He is boring as hell. He generates contempt because he's a candidate of the past. Yeah, he's just some shadow. Right. And he benefited from Trump, but he also carries the baggage of Trump. I mean, I don't think the reaction against the dentist will be as intense as the reaction is against Trump granted, but it will be pretty intense. And it's going to be Martha's vineyard and like, you know, banning gays or whatever. It's going to be intense. They're not going to see him as like, look at this magnetic down to earth leader who saved Florida. That is not going to be the narrative by the media. And that is not going to be a perception. And so it's like all of the Trump baggage, but none of the fun. So to speak, like, I mean, I'm just telling you, like, among most people, you look around your senses and you think, I'm better than you are. He's just lame. He is so horrific. He is short. He seems whiny. He's five foot 11. He's not that short. Like, whenever he supposedly, like, beating people in arguments, he seems like a whiny bitch. Yeah, no, I actually, I don't know about that. I think Trump's senses is like kind of role. It's kind of like a nail polish from over at Trumpism, off the nail, about the Republican Party. I think it's kind of like, I think I told him what his purpose is, kind of like, kind of causing himself against, you know, Trump and his candidacy. So that's a new figure that's not tainted by both opposition and Trump. Who would be the figure? Like, if Trump came out of nowhere. Now, he was, they were setting the groundwork. There was talk in 2010. There was talk in 2012. I think in 2012, he went CPAC. That was the year where he spoke, by the way, at Geo Proud. That is the biggest conservative organization. Anyway, there are all these weird twists and turns and all this, but he, you know, he did come out of nowhere. So who could come out of nowhere in a Trumpian way? He would come out of nowhere as a right-wing populist. I can't answer that question, but I wouldn't be surprised with some kind of a minority. And Brandon says, now that I'm sober, I use food to get high. Yeah. I mean, if you have an addictive personality, right, you're just going to start transferring your addiction from one thing to another. So the most typical trajectory is just start getting recovery from say drug and or alcohol addiction. Once you get recovery there, you need to get recovery in your sex life. That comes next. So you prioritize whichever addictions most likely to kill you first. Then you get recovery in drugs. You get recovery in alcohol. You get recovery in sex. You get recovery in love and relationships. Then you get recovery in money, finances, earning, spending, dating. That seems like the most familiar trajectory, which I see again and again. Oh, yeah. It's something like, you know, based acts or whatever. You know, there's another interesting part about it. It was five-thirty college some time ago. I can send it to you on one or two. And I just said, you know, whites and more prejudice views. They pulled them in 2016 and had Clinton Clinton and Ben Carson's favorability. And they found that precious whites will always find like a base like Ben Carson more favorable than Hillary Clinton. Right. Like by the truth. And there's been a lot of discussion in like a critical race and ultimately it's like this kind of edginess where they're still kind of racist, but they're like thinking like, oh, I'm going to own the live parts by supporting like black and now they think they can't get back to being racist. But yeah, I totally agree with that premise. But who? I mean, I'm not on the West. Yeah, you're right. You nailed it. Who said that? Me. Yeah. I mean, that was so nuts. Also, I someone sent this some defense, but I think Nick Wintes, who we mentioned a few minutes ago had the same opinion of the speech that I did. And he said something to the effect like, I know if this is what it's about. He wanted to read me this Ross Trump stakes thrown out into the audience. But, you know, if Kanye tried it in 2020, but that was a hastily assembled write-in fantasy, I believe. I don't know was he on the ballot at all, but he now has time to do that. He has his own personal wealth. He would activate. Okay, this is from Richard Spence's Twitter Space November 16, 2022. I haven't caught any Tucker Carlson live in a long time. Maybe you haven't either. Maybe it's time to check out Tucker Carlson. It is noon in Australia. We are going out live over Rumble, over Twitter, over Odyssey, over YouTube, over my Facebook page and my Facebook profile. But we are going out to the entire world right now. They can't shut us down. They can't censor us. We are speaking and sharing and forming a bond, creating a shared reality, doing amazing things together. Here we go, Tucker Carlson. Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. On Saturday night, as you may now have read, a 22-year-old man called Anderson Lee Aldrich walked into a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs and opened fire. By the time he was subdued by patrons, he had murdered five people and injured another 25. You've seen this story before, but no matter how many times you've seen it, it never stops being horrifying, and it shouldn't stop. Violence and cruelty should always horrify us every single time. When we start to become cynical about the deaths of other human beings, we have lost something essential to our humanity. Unfortunately, you're seeing that. So the most obvious question is, why did Anderson Lee Aldrich shoot 30 people? And the truth is, we don't know. We do know he was clearly a troubled person. Last summer, he threatened to blow up his mother's house with a bomb. Authorities had to evacuate the neighborhood during the four-hour standoff that ensued. Eventually, he surrendered. You are seeing this video first on CNN. That shows the alleged gunman, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, surrendering to law enforcement. This is just a year ago, in June of 2021, after allegedly making a bomb threat on his own mother. So after that happened, he of course was arrested and charged with first-degree kidnapping and felony menacing. But then, the local district attorney, a man called Michael J. Allen, did not pursue charges. Why? We reached out to Allen's office today to find out why, but he did not get back to us, so we can only guess. We do know what the effect was. Because Aldrich was never charged with a crime and his arrest record was sealed, his violent past did not show up in background checks. Threatening to murder his own mother did not prevent him from buying a firearm, even under Colorado's so-called red flag law, which was designed to prevent that very thing. So those are the facts. That's what we know so far. Once again, authorities failed to keep the public safe. They didn't do their job. You may recognize now a pattern, because you have seen that before. As for Aldrich's motive in shooting strangers, we can only guess. And we're not going to guess, both because guessing would be dishonest and irresponsible. You can't just make up a story because it suits your pre-existing beliefs. But more to the point, we're not going to guess because it would dishonor the memories of the five people who were just murdered in Colorado Springs. These were human beings. They were Americans. They were not props in a larger ideological war. And to reduce them to that is wrong. That's exactly what many politicians are doing right now. Within hours of the shootings, Joe Biden and his allies used this tragedy as a pretext for disarming the law-abiding population of the country. We need more gun control, Joe Biden said predictably, nowwithstanding the fact that Colorado's existing gun control laws, which are extensive, did not prevent this attack. So it was a contemptible and heartless and deeply cynical display of political opportunism. But it didn't stop with gun control because in fact, the Second Amendment is not the freedom that threatens the people in charge of the most. No, that would be the First Amendment, which is your right to say what you sincerely believe. That is the right, the first in our bill of rights that terrifies them the most. Your words are a greater threat than any firearm. They must censor you or else they lose power. It is that simple. So these horrifying murders in Colorado over the weekend quickly became a pretext for yet more censorship of your speech. You are responsible for this, they told you, because you said the wrong things. You are guilty of stochastic terrorism, inspiring violence by your beliefs. Anderson Lee Aldrich committed mass murder because you complained about the sexualizing of children. Every time you object to drag time story hour for fifth graders or point out that genital mutilation is being committed on minors, which it is, every time you say that, you are putting people's lives at risk. Now that seems implausible and yet many are making this claim. Many have made it over the past 24 hours. Watch for example, Brandi Zedrosny of NBC. Online, including this Libs of TikTok account, which feeds larger media like Fox News stories. What has happened is a demonization of LGBTQ people, calling them groomers and pedophiles. This type of thing, whether we can say it's motive or not, what we know is that it's just another reason why LGBTQ people are scared. So there it is, right there. When you point out the truth, indisputably, and the truth is that some adults in this country, apparently a growing number, have a deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children. When you say that out loud, you get people killed. That is what Brandi Zedrosny is saying. And by saying that, Brandi Zedrosny, and the many people like her, are effectively defending that same deeply unhealthy fixation on the sexuality of children. By the way, it's absolutely real. You're not imagining that. It's happening. The evidence is everywhere and it comes to light on the internet. And Brandi Zedrosny, and people like her, hate that you are seeing that. Notice that Zedrosny is not claiming that libs of TikTok is making this up. She never even suggests that. She is threatening them, and what she's doing is threatening them, you should know. And she's doing that because they're pointing it out. Noticing it's happening is their crime. And once again, it is happening. Children's Hospital in Boston, one of the most famous hospitals in the world, has admitted performing double mastectomies on children for no medical reason at all. There is no scientific justification for sexually mutilating kids. They are not doing it for a scientifically defensible reason. They are doing it because they believe in a very specific religious ideology. That's true. Is pointing that out an attack on gay people? Of course, it is not an attack on gay people. It has nothing to do with gay people. It has to do with sexually mutilating children, which is wrong, period. It should be a crime, period. And yet suddenly, it's very common. As we've reported on this show, UCSF, University of California, San Francisco Hospital, one of the leading hospitals in the world, is doing this as well. And they've said so out loud. This is an actual quote from their website, quote, genital surgery is being performed on a case-by-case basis more frequently in minors. In the absence of solid evidence, providers often must rely on the expert opinions of innovators and thought leaders in the field. So your child gets sexually mutilated genital surgery that is irreversible, not on the basis of science, but on the basis of innovators and thought leaders. It's hard to believe that's happening. That quote was scrubbed, by the way, after we reported on it, not because it wasn't a real quote, but because it was a real quote. It was too incriminating. Once again, this is everywhere. A parent in Pennsylvania called Megan Brock decided to do some actual reporting on it, because actual reporters choose not to. They look away and attack anyone who wants to know what's actually happening. So she filed a records request. Oh, man. Oh, man, my pirate stream of Fox News has gone down here. Let's listen to a little Richard Spencer and company from the event of the 16th. He would be Trumpian in the sense that the media would just have to cover him. They would just, I mean, they would cut away from a Trump speech and cover an empty podium on the planet. No doubt. I think that's why I think someone just kind of Rachel Levine she wrote a high reirving from a Hebrew's to from Hebrew's to a president or something like that. More than 10 cases because of that had chest surgery under 18 as young as 50 because of the and bottom surgery 17. That's the sexual mutilation of children for no medical or scientific reason, simply because right now it is fashionable and consistent with a cult that has taken over a lot of leadership of this country. But the fact remains children are being destroyed by this. It should be a crime. The people who commit it should be in jail. But it's not just the sexual mutilation of children in hospitals. This is part of a larger trend and the trend is this. Adults crossing the line and it has always been a bright line into deep involvement with the sexuality of children. That has always been and must in the civilized society always be the most forbidden thing. It's considered unacceptable even among prison inmates. But now it seems to be growing in its prevalence. Consider the latest ad for the clothing brand Balenciaga. This was just uploaded on Instagram. As you can see the photo shoot they're using to sell their products features a young girl holding a teddy bear in a bondage outfit. Then in case you missed the point the photo shoot also contains this image. It shows several documents. Most of them aren't visible. But what you can see when you zoom in and of course the point is that you see it is a reference to a U.S. Supreme Court case called Ashcroft versus Free Speech Coalition. That case struck down a law against kiddie porn. What is this? Well it is what it appears to be. It's an endorsement of kiddie porn of child pornography. What else could it be? We wanted to know. So we reached out today to Balenciaga to get their explanation and they didn't respond. So we're going to have to take that on face value and ask where's the moral outrage? We have an entire industry in this country comprised of moral outrage merchants. If you've ever been on Twitter you know what we mean. Truly an entire sector of our economy is devoted to attacking people for falling short of the mark. And here is a high-end retailer promoting kiddie porn in an ad on Instagram and nobody notices. There's no boycott. There's no front page New York Times editorial against it. And of course Instagram let the advertisement run endorsing kiddie porn. And by the way if you have an alter and explanation for what this was let us know. A child with a teddy bear in a bondage outfit and a Supreme Court decision striking down a kiddie porn law displayed on the table what is that? Are we jumping to conclusions? Don't think so. It is what it appears to be. It's right in your face and no one's saying anything. Again Instagram had no problem with this until Elon Musk took over Twitter. Twitter allowed hashtags that explicitly linked to child pornography. Nobody said anything because crimes against children are no big deal. It's thought crimes that are the real crimes. So if you said something about it if you were libs of TikTok and said wait a second this seems to be abetting child molestation which of course that's what it's doing. You were at least instantly booted off Twitter. But the links to kiddie porn they're still there. Well now they've been deleted. Thank God that's one improvement. So all of this has been happening out in the open but NBC News hasn't bothered to report on any of it. Where is their report tonight? A Balenciaga pushing kiddie porn in the Instagram ad. No. They're reserving all their energy to attack you for noticing. You're a stochastic terrorist if you pointed out. And you need to be censored. Watch. Content moderation is a hard task. What we know is that Twitter and where the bulk of this information is right now because that's where the biggest accounts like Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok again where they sort of post this stuff. What's being done. Well two days ago we know that Elon Musk who owns Twitter now he just reversed the policy that Twitter did have against targeting and harassment of LGBTQ people against misgendering transgender people. So here you have people mutilating the genitals of children running ads on Instagram promoting kiddie porn. And there's Brandy Zadrosny on NBC News. She's not attacking them. She's attacking anyone who notices and accusing them of attacking gay people. Once again this has nothing to do with gay people. This is an attack on the sexual fixation on and mutilation of the generals of children pushing kiddie porn. There's nothing to do with gay people. That's an offense against anyone's definition of decency and she's effectively defending it and they all are. You're not allowed to notice it. Or else you're committing violence. You're complicit in mass murder. Well the people who are doing these things are fine. No one attacks them. An ACLU spokesman launched this attack on Doug Lamborn a congressman from Colorado. Watch this. He voted against the Respect for Marriage Act and is a co-sponsor Marjorie Taylor Greene's nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth. Huh? That's the crime? Children having their genitals mutilated in the basis of no science, no actual real medical guidance, no longitudinal study. There's no evidence this is a good idea but GLAAD is for it so doctors mindlessly do it and you can't complain or else you're a murderer? Too crazy. These are our children can't put up with it. For her part, GLAAD's president declared that because of Saturday's shooting you need to shut up while activists mutilate doctors mutilate children. In terms of trans kids and gender-affirming care the American Medical Association the Pediatric Association has confirmed that these are safe procedures. This is finished business it's politicians and junk science who's creating some kind of debate or argument about this. Really? Now we realize she's paid to say that. Of course all these activists are paid to say what they say very specifically paid ACLU's paid to say what they say they all are. ADL's paid to say what it says GLAAD is paid to say what it says but the truth is the no BS scientific truth is there's no evidence it's safe. Where's the tenure study on that? Do you have one? Oh you don't have one. We have no idea what the long-term effects of puberty blockers are. We have no idea we can't even guess as the long-term psychological effects of general mutilation on a 17 year old or 15 year old. What? You have no idea it's safe you're lying. It's not a safe procedure. We spoken to a lot of victims of this barbarism and it is barbarism we did a whole documentary on it. And by the end of the documentary we were more shocked than when we started reporting it out. Even people who support these procedures can't actually defend them and that's the whole point they have to make you shut up because they don't have any facts on their side. If you're not okay with child abuse you're a murderer and it's worked on a lot of weak-minded journalists who only care about status and acceptance by the group but there are a few on whom it has not worked at the top of that list is Chris Rufo. He joins us now he's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Chris thanks so much for coming. I don't understand how Balenciaga whatever they sell can put an ad on Instagram today promoting kiddie porn and no one says anything. Well we're going to find out exactly what's going to happen to them certainly people are contacting them they're in a lot of hot water but the broader trend here is that what we're seeing is the emergence of a decentralized censorship regime. A hundred years ago governments in Europe and the United States would have to censor content from the top down but they could be easily identified as the ones doing the censoring. Today we have this consortium of left-wing activist journalists left-wing NGOs and nonprofits and then friendly administration officials in the FBI and the DOJ that work together behind the scenes to enforce public debate to deplatform journalists who are actually doing the reporting on these issues and then even calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of political opposition using the FBI we've seen that on critical race theory we've seen that on radical gender theory and the brilliance of this system if we're going to give them some credit is that it's almost operating invisibly so what we have to do is we have to bring it to the surface just if you've done make it visible put a name on it and stop it because this is the greatest threat to the First Amendment in the last 50 years. And I just find it remarkable the passive aggression that is always at work with these people you pointed out and they're the victims I'm sure brandy Zendrosny will be on Twitter right now saying that you're threatening your life by sitting across from someone who mentioned her name they are never held to account for what they are promoting which is the sexualization of children like let's stop lying about it it's right in our faces that's right and in that specific example brandy Zendrosny works for one of the largest and most powerful media corporations in the world she has an affiliation with elite universities this is someone who is in a position of power who has actually made her career doxing and targeting random online citizens Trump supporters et cetera she wrote a very sympathetic profile of an actual pedophile a sex offender a number of years ago these are people that pretend to be the powerless holding the powerful accountable when in fact they're actually the powerful bullying the powerless bullying independent journalists and bullying people who stand in the way of the left wing apparatus that wants to push this ideology on all Americans oh they'd hurt you if they could trust me Chris Rufo thank you for joining us tonight appreciate it so outside say the IRS and the FBI the last organization you want to get a text from is probably the New York Times because it's not going to be good news that I have to hurt you let's stop lying but unlike Dave Portnoy you probably didn't save the text Dave Portnoy saved the text that he got from the New York Times when they tried to hurt him he got them lying he joins us in just a moment okay so Ashcraft versus the Free Speech Coalition I actually know something about this I actually know something about the Free Speech Coalition they are the Port Industries Trade Group so one of the talking points that people in the Portnoy industry use to make the argument that what they're doing is okay is that it is legal and they say we don't traffic in kitty porn but they did traffic in kitty porn for as long as they could get away with it he used to be able to go into pawn shops prior to 1977 and buy kitty porn so as long as they could get away with it the pornography industry trafficked in kitty porn then in 1977 the US Congress passed strict laws against child pornography and that is when the industry stopped trafficking in kitty porn so Ashcraft versus the Free Speech Coalition this is a US Supreme Court case which struck down two provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 because they said these provisions abridged the freedom to engage in a substantial amount of lawful speech so simulated child pornography is protective free speech US Supreme Court established that simulated child pornography is protective free speech so they overrode what Congress passed and they have this court case all right is brought against the government against the Attorney General of the time Ashcraft by Free Speech Coalition the Porn Industry Trade Group and Baldtide a publisher with book advocating the nudist lifestyle some dude who paints nudes and run roughie alley photographer specializes in erotic images so the Supreme Court rejected an invitation to increase the amount of child porn speech that could be categorically outside the protection of the first amendment hey probably wondering what the hell's going on with Richard Spencer a company the whole anti-Semitism stuff well I know or being just a politician general to be honest you could kind of say that about 2016 Trump true I mean I don't think we you can't underestimate the degree to which Trump was just treated as just anathema by the party you know I mean they hated him he he would say things like you know we love Israel blah blah blah but he was kind of in the America first stop there were these echoes of the old America first movement there's a kind of sense of you know a kind of vague anti-Semitism and isolationism pro-russia as well really went against the party so and now he fought with him he totally converted I mean it coincided with but he converted them to be Russian fanatics so I mean things can change and you know I think the cognate thing is like just wild enough to work the other thing I've noticed about like predicting history is that oh by the way regarding the news remember when major news story for weeks was will NATO establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine right you had all these politicians agitating for this you had all these media pundits agitating for this now it's completely dropped off the radar Russian planes don't fly over Ukraine because Ukraine has such excellent technology for bringing down airplanes that Ukraine on its own solve this problem right Ukraine is not bothered by Russian aircraft because Ukrainians have the technology to shoot those aircraft down so this major news story will NATO will the United States establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine it's just been obviated by facts on the ground so much of what's in the news is not very important it's just a distraction from from reality there's always a narrative that gets going and then you just throw it out of the window because something else is going to happen you know it's like it's kind of like you know it's rare that like the NFL like the team that everyone has favorited like oh this is their year they're going to do it is Kanye and Milo is that true yes Milo always glomming on to the next big thing I mean Milo acted as an intern the Madri Taylor Green Milo is now a trad Catholic Milo's always finding some new new right-wing populist calls to glom on to it kind of never works out that way there's just something I don't know it's just like a law of the universe and everyone so everyone now if you ask them if you poll them it's oh it trumps over it's desantis you know and Biden's too old to run twice or something like that none of that's going to be correct it's going to be something that's unpredictable that actually happens and then seems inevitable in retrospect you know I mean you even see that with people like I mean I as you know Alberto you can vouch because I know you were at that when I talked about it so like three months ago I was basically saying I think I want to buff the consensus and like make a call for a democratic victory and then I question my own instincts so that yeah that that recording is up on the sub staff but I kind of question my own instincts I was like God damn it I'm looking at these polls I just can't like go against math well it's ultimately not math also people go out and vote and so I kind of should have stuck my instincts but anyway what you see from pundits now is that they're like well no one really thought there was going to be a red wave like we were all it's like no you were you were all convinced of it the New York Times is convinced of a red wave a week before the election so it's always something else and so everyone's kind okay and let's get back to Tucker Carlson he's not especially political he's not a right wing or anything but he's an American so he believes in free speech and because he believes in free speech and exercises is it other media organizations have been trying to destroy him so he got the dreaded text from the New York Times can we talk to you the story that results it was written by a reporter called Emily Steele and in that piece Emily Steele writes this quote the Times provided Mr. Portnoy would detail questions about this article barstool executives did not respond to repeated messages Mr. Portnoy did not provide answers so you probably didn't think about that if you read it in the New York Times but it turns out it's not true they lied and unlike most people who've been attacked by the New York Times Dave Portnoy can prove it he just posted this exchange he had by text with Emily Steele quote hi Emily I know you're currently trying to dig up dirt on me as a bunch of women I barely know have sent me your interactions I'm an open book I'd love to sit down and have an on-the-record conversation with you just to clarify I get to record it and use the footage as well so here's how Emily Steele the Times reporter responded quote we're happy to meet in New York or talk over the phone today or tomorrow we can record audio but not video we do not accept those terms if you would like to provide feedback and response to my email I'm eager to hear it so it turns out Dave Portnoy did respond and offered to talk to them he just wanted to videotape it because what would be wrong with that when you're hiding something you don't want that and they are hiding a lot of things they lied about that exchange and Portnoy unlike most people can prove it he joins us tonight Dave Portnoy thanks for coming on so you grew up in Boston I think you probably grew up in a family that took the New York Times seriously you've lived in New York you may live there now were you surprised by this no at this point I wasn't but what you just said I talked to my dad who is somebody who would I say trust the New York Times and that's the and that's the alarming part because you know in the way you just preface it I reached out to her seven months ago Tucker they've been doing this for nearly a year I knew about this investigation when I heard about it I said let's sit down open book I will answer any question you have in the thing about it and I don't care what your politics are how you sit I am the witness of a story you are working on for basically a year and I am saying I will sit down with you you can ask me anything I'm not saying lawyers in the room nobody just me I will answer every single question you have she had no interest in that she said I'm eager to do it two weeks went by I didn't hear I reached out again I said hey I'm still here so she did this she worked on for nearly a year and then she went ghost crickets I didn't hear anything for seven months and I get the text the list of questions that says hey we want all these answers to all these allegations in 48 hours it would be the equivalent if this is a court case because that's what the time is doing try to create a case that I'm a scumbag and sway people that you give one lawyer basically a year to present the entire case why this guy stinks and oh you have 30 seconds now to defend yourself who would ever do that who would nobody in their right mind she never had interest in telling the truth all she wanted to do was build a case against me she never talked to any of my friends anybody who would advocate she never wanted to hear how we do responsible gaming training at our company it was all a hit piece and she had no interest in hearing my side of the story what's so funny is it's about your personal life and you've got a pretty effervescent personal life but I've been in the media for 31 years you hardly have the creepiest personal life of any in the media I mean ghost of media these are creepy people why are they trying to attack you on this because you're disobedient right yeah I you know I think I've become politicized a little bit but like what you said listen I don't care if people don't like me Tucker I really don't yeah all I'm saying is give people the full picture that's I yeah well I'm not I'm disillusioned I know that's not what the times does but how can you say this woman has a Pulitzer they should take that back break it and throw it in the river like all I'm saying is let people decide how can you do such a one-sided hit piece okay and let's get back to this rich expensive discussion kind of fixated on this and it might be something else it might be something really different and I think the Kanye suggestion it's just crazy enough it's just crazy enough to actually work he was in the Oval Office so experience yeah then they're done that yeah and white lives matter I mean it's kind of like he's taking a meme from 2016 the 2016 alt-right which was a Trump era you know artifacts and he's he got more than 12 million votes and the yes side one so immediately as promised Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump's Twitter account CBS News was highly upset they're for democracy but not if it means presidential candidates getting to talk in public so they got off Twitter saying their security was in danger and then on phase the nation which apparently is still a show they interviewed a completely discredited NYU professor who claimed bugle your seatbelt now that the Russians must have hacked the Twitter poll so I think these polls are mostly a gimmick and I would argue the people haven't spoken the GRU has spoken and these Twitter Russian intelligence you mean 100% Twitter has become a playground for bad actors and fake bots this poll is meaningless this decision is meaningless what a how can that guy teach you to college what a crackpot like the Russians aren't busy enough they're in the middle of a war but they've got time to hack a Twitter poll by the way maybe they are he has no evidence whatsoever like none he's got throws it out there makes it up major claim against a government anchor just rolls with it at MSNBC a guest offered this measured take on the whole situation watch I'm absolutely disgusted but what else do we expect from very white privileged cis hetero men protecting each other because we always mistake wealth and inheritance for genius so yay Elon Musk gets what he wants his buddy back on the air in order to finish burning down democracy while he finishes burning down the town square mm-hmm attacking white people again why is that allowed by the way why can't you just turn on MSNBC white people this is that okay is everyone all right with that you can just like single out a racial group and attack them because of their skin color I thought that was wrong did we have a whole civil rights movement about that apparently not Vince Colonese is a big-time radio host in DC and a very wise person who joins us tonight so are you're for democracy Vince does that mean that presidential candidates gets to talk in public or no but you know for all this screeching the left does to us about democracy it's amazing how much they go completely catatonic if an opposing viewpoint breaks through to a big audience that is they hate nothing more than that if somebody's opposing viewpoints so Kanye West it says that he's against abortion they go crazy if Donald Trump might have an opportunity to tweet again he hasn't even tweeted yet by the way if he might have an opportunity to do that they go absolutely loony tunes and the reason for that is that their ideas are so thin and indefensible that they realize that they don't want to engage in a debate on any of this if you've been wondering why has the left gotten so crazy it's because they've created this airtight echo chamber where no opposing viewpoints ever break their way in otherwise these ideas would be battle tested and that's how you end up with oh we've got a mutilate children oh Joe Biden can control the weather if we only give him more power oh the Russians stole the 2016 election tried to do in 2020 and just voted in Elon Musk's twitter poll this is all left-wing delusions that are fed by their intellectual flabbiness created by this environment where no opposing viewpoints are allowed to break through that's such a wise point and maybe I'm too literal I know that I am but how can you in the same sentence use the word democracy and then go on to say that a political candidate can't speak how can you have a democracy with no free speech that can't happen by definition you can't have that correct these are all authoritarian impulses because look at what happened just a few weeks ago you had Joe Biden step up to a microphone he was asked hey what about Twitter are you going to assess are you going to investigate them and he's like you know we should probably do that the federal government should look into the foreign business dealings of Twitter what the guy who is credibly accused of being bought off by Ukrainian and communist party of China interests is standing up there lecturing us about how we have to investigate whether or not Elon Musk has bought and paid for the guy is allowing conversation not foreclosing it yeah so I hear that Twitter is breaking down that Twitter is on its last legs but Twitter as far as I'm aware has never been better in the last six years as Steve Samuels getting a ton of new followers like I see a lot of good things we've done the climbing you remember the water fountains carbon on one side climate on the other well he's going to make good on that reparations for the climate but guess who's paying reparations not everybody not everybody we'll tell you okay thank you Tucker Carlson what's your experience of Twitter like to me it's gotten gotten better I love people getting back on Donald Trump having his account reinstated fashion show I mean he just yeah he did also make a a gospel album which I guess that's something a lot of Christians would like he was going to get the religious right though Matt Kanye West you imagine them you know being fanatic for Trump and like Paula White doing this like hookah hookah they're coming from South America hookah hookah they're coming from Africa hookah I'm paraphrasing but that's actually an accurate look think of how nuts they would go over Kanye yeah I certainly don't imagine I'm like voting I don't imagine them voting for Kanye over Trump but if it was like Kanye versus DeSantis I can imagine Kanye sweeping that thing I could kind of imagine I I like this I whoever suggested this this is yeah should be good I think you kind of because I was asking I was like who is it who's that dark horse and lo and behold it's it's Kanye yeah I yeah excuse me um name on the president wow that just makes too much sense really yeah I mean there's a a fairly narrative I think it's important and I see what he would tend to follow that uh it's this we're kind of like in the age of like the the big of like the racist non whites of like multiracial whiteness where like you have these like non whites we're kind of like proxies for white for like quote unquote white interests who's like kind of like you know personify the racism and bigotries of the white population who they can now like you know support now having like you know the plausible deniability not being racist because this person's not white God this guy's not a horrible voice yes so that's crazy enough to make sense as an aside I think that becomes funny I think the conservative with the uh this new Indian prime minister these like based acts is are going to be very pragmatic very like non ideological so they tend to wiggle their way up to the hierarchy very well I think eventually in 10 years like you know most conservative organizations we ran by non whites we're essentially grifting the stupid white population but yeah yeah I think that's that's probably accurate and um uh I do think that like the GOP is going to fundamentally change the conservative movement it's going to be affected by this I mean I just mentioned that before in 2012 Romney said you know Russia is our greatest strategic adversary or something like that and actually Barack Obama was more down-to-earth and kind of reasonable about that and said well you know um uh you know we need to get over the Cold War Grandpa basically and you fast forward a decade and there's more Russian sympathetic sentiment not just kind of anti-war sentiment something Russia's sympathetic sentiment in the GOP so things they actually can go off the reservation they can really transform and so I I think this the Kanye stuff it's it's that kind of crazy racism that's kind of possibly deniable you know like it's you know I'm not how can I be racist I'm black but also how can I be anti-semitic I'm a fact that you it's just making Kanye his running mate would unironically boost his campaign and give him that juice that he had in 2016 no question and then you know Kanye from there you know yes becomes president just the record I'm out like I'm not on board basically but uh just if anyone thinks that that's what I'm I'm uh I'm bleeding to but uh yeah I just think wow this is really an interesting prognostication they're gonna have to tap in to that they I mean it fits with my general thesis which is that you need to tap into the id you need to tap you need to like Clarice Starling has to go visit Hannibal Lecter in order to solve the case like you you need to go there and how are they gonna do that maybe Trump can't do it on it's on his own anymore yeah you need to kind of look them in the eyes and kind of see where the wind is blowing yes right let me let some other people speak um Wackaloid hello Richard yes hi hey I was thinking um what is your if you don't mind me asking what is your personal plan to deal with the so-called Browning of America is it just use wealth to insulate yourself live in kind of white areas or is that still even an issue that that um you concern yourself with yeah I mean I I don't I'm just really not interested in this kind of stuff anymore he's not interested in the Browning of America it was like major concern of his he became famous or is concerned about this but just not interested in this kind of stuff anymore I'm sorry I've been out of the loop for a while so I'm not exactly sure where you stand on this stuff okay all right thanks but also Aaron yes so kind of to build off his point I was curious what you learned from the pet pecan interviews that you gave a while back and maybe the Balder Ones might overlap a little well I don't think those overlap yeah I mean what did I learn from them I probably learned more by reading Pat's book than speaking with them I mean he's a very gracious guy and a very intelligent guy I think Pat was almost you know to go back to even some of these comments that Flint has made or something I almost think Pat is too much of an intellectual to be a populist you know like Pat is a very intelligent man Pat does I think his you know he came in with the Nixon administration in his 20s I mean he kind of leans in that direction and I don't think Pat ever tapped into the crazy Pat would make really reasonable arguments about trade and immigration and culture and he would get a bit edgy but you know the 1992 RNC convention speech you know we'll take you know they took back the Los Angeles block by block and that's how we'll take back America I mean okay it's it's passionate it's a bit edgy but it just it doesn't trap into the total lunacy that Trump was able to tap into with the alt-right with QAnon with Stop the Steel with all of it he just never was able to do that so I don't know I mean that's kind of my takeaway but you know I think Pat is is probably most interesting writing about history and kind of making it come alive or even writing about his own career okay Lloyd George knew my father wow you are up to sort of go off what you said about Pat Buchanan Buchanan I think the big difference between Buchanan and like why Trump succeeded where he didn't was that Trump was able to appeal to the sort of socially moderate voters who who might have agreed with Buchanan on immigration and trade but not so much of the cultural war stuff but obviously with with abortion being more of an issue now and and Trump leaning more into the crazy populist right I think that's that's sort of radical centrism or what some people call middle American radicalism that's base of support for Trump is so much somewhat diminished and I think that's sort of the main tension in what you might that's 2016 I mean yeah I do think that there was in in the but in the R and C and going into the election there was a kind of Sam Francis quality to Donald Trump I mean in his book The America We Deserve I believe is the title of it I mean he came out in favor of national health care there was an interesting moment where they I think he Ivanka mentioned extending family leave for women and so on I mean there there was some very interesting kind of pragmatic talk you know at the R and C I don't think he mentioned abortion although maybe he did but it was in passing and it wasn't really salient at least what I saw I watched 30 to 45 minutes of the Trump speech I don't think he mentioned abortion at all and yet that's his ultimate legacy I mean the thing about Trumpism that is lasting is the end of Robie Way nothing else is so if he's now running as like a sleepy version of what he was doing in 2016 I mean again I don't I don't really think that can win you know as I've been saying I think he needs to dial up the crazy but yeah I mean I think you you make an interesting point but I do think that that like the middle of the Richard wants Donald Trump to dial up the crazy he says that's the only way that Republicans can win by dialing up the crazy I just think Richard's past in theatrical productions you know directing theater maybe getting the best of his political analysis here Republicans win by making crime disorder the contagion filth work hysteria nonsense you know the transsexual hysteria making these prominent issues I think that's very solid non-crazy basis for running and winning elections reasonable middle American capital is is kind of a dying breed whites in the suburbs and whites who live in urban areas are going to the Democratic Party it's a slow but sure transition the multi-racial working-class coalition that Trump wants to create and that did create they want you dialed crazy up to 11 man that's what they want that's how you motivate them that's how you win if I may expect sure go ahead gay partisan hey yeah this is what I say first of all like hi Richard and seriously like the whole talk about immigration it's just just upsets me because it's refugee from Saudi Arabia and I have represent myself then so anyone out there who thinks that America has open borders yeah you're wrong okay think that will do it I'm about ready to go on another walk about talk to