Big Tech Turns Against Free Speech and Fighting the COVID Ruling Class, with David Sacks

Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. Today we have a fascinating guest for you who will be joining us for the full show. David Sacks is a successful entrepreneur, a venture capitalist who runs Craft Ventures, and a co-host of the popular tech podcast All In. He's a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, that's a group of men who founded PayPal and went on to build very successful tech companies after that. Other members of the mafia include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others. And he's been called our guest today, California Governor Gavin Newsom's loudest critic in Silicon Valley. He's also now setting his sights on San Francisco's far-left radical district attorney, Chesa Boudin. David, so great to have you here. Thank you for coming on.

Okay, so just help us a little bit with your background. I think everybody knows about PayPal and they've heard certainly the name Elon Musk, but how did you guys get connected and how old were you and how did this sort of powerhouse of guys come together to create a company that would then launch careers that would be epic in the tech industry?

Okay. And when you first started it, did you know it was going to be a blockbuster or was it like, oh, we'll give it a shot?

You guys were both at Stanford together. What was it like being in that late 80s, early 90s?

So was it not as unusual back then on a college campus like Stanford's for you to be a conservative, or did you feel like an outlier even back then?

Now in the tech industry, has it been the same? On college campuses, most kids don't feel comfortable saying that they're a Republican, or that God forbid they supported Trump. Is it the same in tech?

Now, my audience has heard the story from me, but I'll tell it to you. A few years ago, I published my book and Sheryl Sandberg, who's a friend of mine, threw me a book party. So I flew out there and I went to her house. It was like a who's who in your industry of tech people. I barely knew most of the people because it's not my thing. But when she started listing companies, I was like, 'Oh wow, Sheryl, this is a very nice party. Thank you.' This is right after I had clashed with Trump in that presidential debate and so on. So most of the people there are just assuming I hate Trump, which I never hated Trump. I was irritated when he kept coming after me, but I never hated Trump. And I of course had worked at Fox News and understood how the right half of the country felt too. So the long and short of it is, person after person would come up to me and they'd shake my hand and they'd say, 'Oh, you know, I love you, I love you, I hate Trump. And you know, we kicked Peter Thiel out of Silicon Valley for supporting him. He's done. He doesn't get invited to any parties now.' And I'm thinking, 'Oh wow.' And then the other half of the group would come up to me quietly and be like, 'Trump 2016, like go MAGA. Great job on the debate and great job in covering the race. Is he going to win? Can he win? Don't tell anybody I'm a Republican. Don't tell anybody I'm a conservative.' By the end of the night, I wound up laughing. I really wanted to go to the few people who were willing to confess that they were Republicans and say, 'You need to talk to that man in the blue, that woman in the yellow, that guy with the red tie, because you are not alone.'

Do you think it's softened at all? Because the economy did pretty well under Trump, but then came January 6th.

You know, to me it's sad. I look at Stanford usually once a year, and I look out at these minds, and it's like these are our best and brightest. It excites me, the intellectual firepower. It's just thrilling to see how their minds work and where they could take the country. And then you get to anything that is non-woke. I say words are not violence, and the look, the recoiling, the shock and horror at such a crazy statement then depresses me. I think how can it be that these intellectual would-be giants are so pathetically weak when it comes to words that might upset them? I don't mean to pick on Stanford because they're probably better than most schools in many ways, but the people who lead this charge to silence people on the other side ideologically seem incredibly weak to me.

I'd love to get your take on Section 230 and what the answer is in terms of stopping the ideological stifling that they do.

See, I love that. Do you know Vivek Ramaswamy? He had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal, I don't know, a year ago last summer. He argued that what we really need is a declaration by a court that says effectively they are so controlled, they're so big, and they also respond to carrots and sticks from the federal government in a unique way that we can treat them as a government entity and subject them to First Amendment protections, which would prohibit viewpoint discrimination. We wouldn't have to touch 230 and you could leave that immunity in place. I don't know whether the courts will do it or whether we need to do it legislatively to get them declared a common carrier. What do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, and we've totally seen this with COVID and the vaccine mandates. You've seen so much censorship over the past two years of censoring so-called misinformation that then turns out to be true. You had the lab leak theory. You had first it was disinformation, now it's become the prevailing theory. You had cloth masks. Dan Bongino was kicked off YouTube for basically saying masks don't work. Two weeks later, the CDC comes out saying the same thing. So we've seen over and over again that what starts as misinformation ends up being recognized as the truth. I think this is why with respect to vaccines, you had these so-called anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics. I don't think that they were opposed to the science of vaccines, at least they weren't pre-COVID. What they really are is media skeptics. They think the media's got an agenda. If the media is trying to push something on them, they're going to second-guess it. If you don't allow them to have the conversation, if you don't allow them to ask the questions and explore the debate, then for sure they're going to think you're trying to pull one over on them. So I think this whole idea of censorship has totally backfired around the vaccine. What they should have done was allow an honest debate around vaccines, and I think you would have gotten more buy-in from the part of the country that distrusts the media.

Why don't you and Peter Thiel just create a competitor to Facebook or the Amazons of the world? Why isn't there a huge platform that is built by conservatives who are more committed to the free and open exchange of ideas, good ones, bad ones, offensive ones, all of them?

I just had a conversation with a friend of mine, and she's losing friends over COVID. She wants the masks off. She's vaxxed and boosted, and her kids are too, but she doesn't like the mandates. And she's losing friends left and right. She's a liberal in New York City, or at least was a liberal. I feel like what I said to her is what I'm feeling about our country right now, which is, were they really friends if they don't want to be with you because of this? It's like you're better off now. You know who they are, that they prioritize their own weird ideology over human connections and the love that you've built over 25 years of friendship. I kind of feel like in a way, Trump helped us do that with big tech. He brought out their most censorious instincts. He helped us do that with the media. He brought out their worst bias and exposed them for who they are. And now we have to wrestle with, okay, it's sad we have this problem, but let's get solutions based, because there's no point wallowing.

Oh yeah, I definitely want to get into politics with you because I know you've made some predictions about November and they're interesting. But up next, let's get into crime because you've been very outspoken about what's happening in your town, San Francisco, about this lunatic DA Chesa Boudin, the son of two terrorists. You're pushing the recall effort on him as well as the school board out there, which has done nothing for the kids. They're too busy renaming schools because they find the George Washington name on some of them offensive. We'll pick it up there and we'll get into some of the other censorship around Joe Rogan and so on in just one minute.

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Okay, so let's talk about crime in your hometown, San Francisco, and the mess that it is. We're having the same situation here in New York, so I can relate fully. There was a really good piece by Michael Shellenberger on Barry Weiss's Substack writing about the mess in San Francisco. He was talking about how bad crime is, open drug use, people shooting up. He writes about how London Breed, when she went off on the quote 'destroying our city,' the mayor, he said he naively believed her, but it's not getting better. It's gotten worse every day since she said that. He talks about this supervised drug consumption site at UN Plaza, just blocks away from City Hall and the Opera House. He talks about how he's not against legalized drugs. Michael Shellenberger did a whole book called San Francisco, but he talked about Portugal decriminalizing drug use and how he thought that had worked, the Netherlands with these drug consumption rooms, and it was working. But both of those condemn hard drug use and intervene when the addicts break the law. In San Francisco, totally different story. People are smoking fentanyl and meth that they buy from dealers right across the street. Now the taxpayers there are basically paying for these addictions. They're paying for these folks' hot meals and shelter in exchange for nothing. Even though the mayor has said, 'Oh, we're going to use this to get people into treatment,' apparently in the 19 days the site has been open, just two people went to detox so far, and they're serving 220 a day. So your thoughts on what's happening in your hometown, why?

I cannot believe he was elected as DA. I understand San Francisco's left, but that's like out of your mind to elect a guy like that to be your chief law enforcement officer for your city.

This leads me to my own experience with his family. One of the viewers wrote in recently asking what my favorite interview was that I've ever done, and I've said the same for years. It was of Bill Ayers, who is a domestic terrorist, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a group that was bombing the country during the Vietnam War ostensibly in protest of the war, but they hurt a lot of people and they damaged a lot of buildings that we hold in high esteem, like the US Capitol. He came in the news when Barack Obama ran for president because they were friends in Chicago. He is a problematic figure in our country's history, and so is his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who with him raised Chesa Boudin. So is it Chesa or Chesa? I think Chesa is what I call him. Whatever. He was born to two other people, their names are David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. They couldn't raise Chesa because they were in prison for his entire life from the time he was 14 months on, because they were part of this Weather Underground and they participated in a Brinks robbery, an armed robbery of a Brinks truck trying to get $1.6 million. They got caught. Two cops were killed along with a security guard. That's his parents. So they both go to jail. So does he go into the hands of some loving aunts and uncles? No, he does not. He goes into the hands of Bill Ayers and his wife, who are probably even more radical. Bernadine Dohrn, that's Bill's wife. Forgive me, I'm going to take a little walk down memory lane. I think you'll find it interesting. I got, as far as I know, the only extensive long-form interview with Bill Ayers that he's done with a person in television, and it was extraordinary. The whole thing ran over an hour, and we did a big special on it in the prime time of Fox. I've boiled the following clip down to about three minutes or so. It's well worth listening to, and I'm going to play a little bit so people can understand this is the man who raised Chesa Boudin from 14 months on. You'll hear him talk about himself, his group, and his wife, Chesa's effective adoptive mother. Listen.

How many bombings are you responsible for? Well, they're underground. I think we took credit for just slightly over 20 in a period when there were 20,000 bombings in the United States against the war. And how about you personally? I might. Me personally, I've never talked about it, never will. Bernadine Dohrn was not a fan of the police and referred to them typically as pigs. 'Last night we destroyed the pig again. It's two and a half weeks since Fred Hampton was murdered by the pig to own this city.' Well, that was again the inflated rhetoric of the time. That sort of rhetoric is what catches people's attention. When she's calling them pigs and celebrating bad things happening to the police at the same time one gets murdered, it's true that the rhetoric was inflated. It's also true you take a situation like Chicago today, the police are a violent, out-of-control enterprise. But I think it would be fair and balanced to also look at the violence that was and is going on perpetrated by the government, by the official agencies and organs of the government. Let me just tell you what I hear when I hear that. I hear you saying you sound like, with respect, Osama bin Laden. But you understand, professor, is that what began for your group as outrage over mass killings turned into a plan to kill hundreds of Americans? Did you not cede the moral high ground? Oh, absolutely. You don't sound remorseful. But you want me to be remorseful for something I didn't do rather than for the things... This is your group, professor. This isn't something... Oh, that's not true. Yes, it is. That's true. It is true. This is the Weather Underground that was going to bomb military. That's right. And we criticized it then and now, and we said it's wrong. It was wrong. It is wrong. Professor, you said it didn't happen. The only reason it didn't happen is because the bomb blew up on those who were making it. And when it blew up, your girlfriend Diana Oughton was killed. That's right. And you later described her death as valiant. While underground, you stole, you lied, you hid. Any disagreement? You stole. Onwards, yes, you did. You wrote about it in your books. We stole. Ripped off dead babies' identities. And yet the violence continued. Just because you went underground didn't mean the violence stopped. What violence? March 1st, 1971, you bombed the US Capitol. May 19th, 1972, you bombed the Pentagon. January 29th, 1975, you bombed the State Department. That's what I mean by violence. In 1980, you and Bernadine Dohrn resurfaced, and when she turned herself in, Bernadine Dohrn promised to spend her energy organizing to defeat the American empire. And within a year of that, October 20th, 1981, was a triple homicide. Kathy Boudin learned some of her very criminal tactics while she was with the Weather Underground. She was in the townhouse that exploded when that bomb went off, wasn't she? You adopted her child. She's a wonderful person. Your wife, Bernadine Dohrn, was asked to cooperate in that investigation. That's right. She refused. Absolutely. She spent seven months in jail because she refused to help the police in their investigation. Well, she refused to speak to a grand jury. That's quite different. Why would she do that? Nine children lost their father. I agree. Why didn't your wife help? Grand juries are a terrible overreach of the US government. She said about the Charles Manson murders of a pregnant woman and six others, 'Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives and then eating a meal in the same room. Far out. The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.' This is your sweetheart? No, no, this is your soulmate, your wife. Miraculously got a job teaching at Northwestern University. Absolutely. Which is amazing. They must be offering classes in what you can learn from your future clients. But are you surprised that you got those job offers, you and she? Giving you really? I mean, he was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. I know. So was Angela Davis. A lot of great people have been on that list. But what would it take to make you bomb this country again? I can't completely say no. I would never ever rise up in opposition in a very militant and serious way. I can't say I wouldn't. I doubt it. Unreal.

Thank you. That's your DA's adopted father. And you heard the stories about his adoptive mother, Bernadine Dohrn, in there, and stories about his biological mother, Kathy Boudin, and on and on. How did this city elect this man?

As if one is not related to the other. How is your psychological safety when there are murders in the street, when you can't cross the street without getting hit by one of the drunk drivers that he's let out without parole, without bail? That's his big thing, no bail. Just like we're seeing in all these Soros-funded DA cities. This guy, his biological mother and father killed two cops and a security guard. She now teaches at Columbia University. The dad just got out under Andrew Cuomo as one of his final acts in office to grant the guy clemency. He just got let out last October. His adoptive parents spent years bombing the home in which a little nine-year-old boy was present, and bombing police precincts. Bill Ayers tried to deny that to me in his interview, but he had confessed it in his book, which was one of my favorite moments in the interview. I really encourage everybody to go look at it on YouTube because it's an interesting window into that period of time and what we were allowing. But it's in his DNA, this sort of life of crime, this disrespect for police, this hatred of police. And the very people he's supposed to be working with to stop crime as the DA. Now I read there's a real schism between Boudin and the cops in San Francisco.

Yeah, victims here, criminals welcome. We're going to pick it back up. There's more to discuss on him and on San Francisco, but also these other cities like New York, which just had stunning new numbers released by the NYPD on crime. How's it going here with our soft on crime DA? All these things are canaries in the coal mine. If you live in a city that's elected one of these DAs, pay attention because this is coming your way. More with David Sacks in one second. And don't forget folks, you can find the Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East. And the full video showing clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/megankellyshow. Definitely go today because you can see that piece we just put together. If you don't have the full hour to watch the old Bill Ayers on Fox News with me, you can watch the four-minute version. Our thanks to Fox News for that. If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast for free. You can check out our archives, more than 255 shows.

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So David, on this subject of Chesa, just to close this out, what he is promising as he empties the jails is new solutions and alternatives. But you've written in a piece that really all we've seen so far is a move to empty the jails with absolutely no plan for the aftermath. He says he's going to create an algorithm for determining the risk to public safety posed by an arrested suspect before granting their release in terms of no bail. He's not just going to throw them out, he's going to use an algorithm. Is any of that happening?

Yeah, no, it doesn't. And then when confronted with all these people who you said would make us safer if you let them out with no bail even though they committed terrible crimes, they're reoffending and they're murdering people and they're hurting people. You pointed out in a piece you posted on Medium that Chesa's response was to refer to the serial reoffenders as 'prolific folks.' You're right, as if they were akin to writers or painters working assiduously at their craft. They've been prolific, as if he's proud, which he probably is. He cannot bring himself to name who they are and what they're doing. This is why he refers to crime as noise. He refers to serial repeat offenders as just prolific folks. It's misdirection. He is what he has always been at heart, a public defender. There is a role for that person in our system to defend criminals. But when you put that person in charge of prosecution, it's a disaster. He's the most extreme case, but there are now examples of this all over the country. Until voters get serious about voting these people out, about recognizing the threat they pose, this crime wave in America is going to continue.

Well, that's right. That brings me to New York, where we're dealing with the same thing. Granted, I don't know about Alvin Bragg because he was forced by New Yorkers to roll back a couple of policies, only a little bit though. Let's be honest, most of them stand. But the NYPD released the following stats on Monday. Crime is up 60% compared to the same week last year, despite frigid temperatures here in New York. The cops are saying it's only going to get worse as it warms up. Car thefts up 116%, 255 over the last week versus 118 a year earlier. Grand larceny up 93%, 908 cases versus 470 a year ago. Reported rapes up 67%, 35 versus 21 a year ago. Transit crimes up 89%, 34 versus 19 a year ago. And on and on it goes. This doesn't even touch on murders, murders of cops. But where we're going to take it next is your prediction that this stuff will come back to haunt not just these guys but the Democrats at the ballot box. Give your prediction. We'll take a break and then we'll dissect it.

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So David, let's talk a bit about COVID and what we're seeing now. You're one of the sensible people on this issue as far as I can tell. In the news this week is more hypocrisy, of course. Last week, the story was Gavin Newsom sitting at that football game where the indoor mask mandate was his creation, and yet he wouldn't obey it. And then when caught, he lied and said he only took off the mask because Magic Johnson asked him for a photo, but he had it on at every other moment. That was a lie. He had it off before as he approached Magic Johnson. He had it off and he was just sitting in a seat next to Tom Hanks. He barely wore it. Okay, then there's Eric Garcetti from LA, who said, "I held my breath when I took my mask off. I did not exhale." That's good. And now we have Stacey Abrams. I'm telling you, this photo is going to come back to haunt her and other Democrats over and over and over again. How stupid is her campaign? I mean, they put this out there as though we are going to celebrate this politician sitting in front of the little ones, every single child masked, and she has nothing on her face. And then when it immediately had a negative reaction on Twitter from people on the left and the right, her attempt to handle it was by saying it's the Republicans launching a false political attack on me. Her explanation for the photo was, "I posed for the pictures on the condition that everyone else mask up." Hello, Stacey, not helping. And then she said, "I had to remove my mask to speak to the students so they could hear me." Right, we get it. We have children. Guess who they need to hear even more than you, Stacey? Their teachers, their classmates. As if the rules of hearing change whether Stacey Abrams is in the room or not. It's infuriating. And I wonder what your thoughts are on her and the others and just their ongoing willingness to flout the rules they create. I mean, this is more of this mass hypocrisy where we're seeing these politicians saying, "Do as I say, not as I do." And we see the same thing when Nancy Pelosi throws a fundraiser and all the wealthy people there are unmasked, and then you've got this serving class they've created. You have to wear the mask. I think it's creating huge resentment among the working class. It's creating huge resentment among parents. There's no reason to have these kids masking up in schools. The kids have negligible risk, and we've seen that schools that don't have these requirements, there's no more spread than those that do. So we're far enough into this pandemic that we know the answers. And the problem they're having now is that most of the country wants to move on from COVID, but within the Democratic Party, there's still a huge number of COVID dead-enders who never want to give this stuff up. And so the question is, why are Newsom and Garcetti coming up with these preposterous lies? It's because they're afraid of their own base. They've basically programmed these people with so much fear of COVID over the last two years that they're having trouble now deprogramming them.

Absolutely. I mean, CNN declared that the science has changed. No, the science didn't change. The polls changed. Somebody produced a memo inside the DNC showing apocalyptic poll numbers for Democrats in November if they stick to these COVID restrictions that the country is sick and tired of. And so that is why the science has suddenly changed, because the politics has changed around this issue. And it's not like it's happening in a vacuum. If we could just get this kid off the masks and, you know, yay, we're beating COVID. You've been very vocal about how this monetary theory that we could just spend however much we wanted and it would never come back to haunt the economy has been proven totally insane, completely boneheaded and wrong. Now we've got 7% inflation that we're dealing with, and the supply chain crisis goes on, though it doesn't make as many headlines as it used to. And so this environment is going to prove toxic and very unfortunate for the Democrats. There's only so much, however, they can do about those other issues right now.

No, no, we need better experts. And I want to talk to you about Joe Rogan and why he and others are such important alternatives. But before we get to that, I think you and I are eye to eye on Fauci, as far as I understand. I'll tell you, give you a compliment. My producer Debbie Murphy absolutely loves your podcast, and she listens to it all the time, and she told me that you explained how Fauci has been compromised with respect to gain of function and then trying to get all the scientists around him to shut up about how they've been doing this kind of research in the Wuhan lab. I don't know if she said it better than I had, but equally as strongly. But that's something that the mainstream media won't touch. His hands are dirty in getting us into this pandemic. I'm not saying he created this particular virus, but his hands are so dirty, and yet we're supposed to worship this guy like a god. He shouldn't have had anything to do with the public health messaging on this.

But you tell me about the vaccines, because he's obsessed with them, David. He's obsessed. You listening to him, it's like listening to a broken record. He says it in every answer: "We need more people vaccinated, more people vaccinated, more." But it's his answer to everything. So why?

That's right. I mean, this was absolutely a stifling, I guess you call it a cover-up, of the official investigation. And for a year, we weren't allowed, and then social media censored on the basis of these officials, and we weren't allowed to ask questions about where the virus may have come from.

Yes. Fauci and Collins smeared them. Doctors who didn't go along with the "no way was it a lab leak" line started to get smeared and diminished. And all along he's done that, you know, the Great Barrington doctors who said, "Let's do focused protection where we just prioritize the most vulnerable and not lock down society," something that we've had studies show did absolutely nothing, did way more harm than good, targeted by Fauci.

But in the meantime, what they're doing in terms of the mistrust is then trying to silence voices that put on alternate viewpoints, that push back on the narrative from Anthony Fauci. You know, Joe Rogan's done it, all of us have done it who are in independent media now. It's just that Joe Rogan's the biggest behemoth there is in this space. He's the biggest show that there is in this, and actually his show is bigger than anything you see in cable. I mean, it's huge. So now Spotify's been trying to crack down on him this week. There's an orchestrated campaign to get him because it's like "COVID misinformation," and that didn't work, so it's like "He's a racist." Then we'll see, there'll be something else next. Neil Young, who kind of got it started over on Spotify, said, "I'm pulling my music because of his COVID misinformation." And apparently I didn't know this, but Neil Young has been out there for years railing on GMOs and food and giving all sorts of misinformation of his own. Why are we listening to Neil Young for anything outside of how to make music? But he's now warning to the Spotify employees, to the workers of Spotify. I say the CEO, Daniel Ek, is your big problem, not Joe Rogan. Ek pulls the strings. Get out of that place before it eats up your soul. The only goals stated by Ek are about numbers, not art, not creativity.

I think we've been talking about it. I think this agenda on COVID and so many other things is so unpopular with the country, the only way to sustain it is to stop there from being an honest discussion about it, to stop the debate. And who has an incentive to do that? It's the people who've made these decisions, who are in power, who are terrified of being voted out of office. And so there is an orchestrated campaign now to try and silence dissenting voices and anybody who might bring to light the truth on these issues.

Right, exactly. You see this on COVID. Like you said, Fauci should be gone just based on the fact that he thought gain of function research was a good idea. That alone should be a reason for termination. But he's been wrong so many times. He's been behind every unnecessary COVID restriction over the last two years. He has been the main shot-caller of our COVID prison. He is the guy who's been ruling the yard, telling us what we're allowed to do, where we're allowed to go for the past two years. But there is no comeuppance for that. You see this in the military. You've got this General Milley, this botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was a fiasco. And where is the comeuppance for that? Where is the punishing of incompetence? All you see is the punishing of any dissenting voice.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good point. I think our adversaries do perceive weakness in a note-card president who's being led around by the nose by his staff and seems frail and weak. That being said, I do have a slightly different view on Ukraine. My view is that we should be trying to defuse the situation the way that Obama did. I think this is another area, along with the ban on gain of function, where Obama got it right. He basically said, "Listen, this is when Russia occupied Crimea. He said, listen, that is an area that is contiguous with their border. They have an interest in that part of the world that is vital to them. It's never going to be as vital to us. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We do not have an obligation to come to their defense. And I think we should be very, very careful about inserting ourselves in a new foreign war." I mean, we've only been out of this war in Afghanistan for six months, and we've been blundering through the Middle East for 20 years—Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya. Do we really want to now insert ourselves into the Caucasus, into Russia's backyard, to risk a war with them over territorial borders that we have no obligation to defend? I would just be very careful about deferring to the Washington establishment on this issue, because they've been wrong about so many other things, so many other foreign interventions.

It's a good point, and honestly, like, is it really important to us to have Ukraine in NATO? I don't know that it is. I don't think we need to have them in NATO. Why? It doesn't seem like we have to have it. And so if that's going to be the final deal point, I mean, why couldn't we give on it? I realize it's right. You don't give in to terrorists and the toddler throwing the fit, you don't give them the lollipop. But this is a lot of layers to it, and it's a lot more sophisticated than that. And we don't want to see any blood and treasure of ours spilled in Ukraine. That's not going to happen.

Okay, but let me answer this question. Let me ask you one question on that. I don't know the answer, but you know how we were talking about crime in the cities and these light-on-crime DAs are a luxury that people afford to themselves thanks to the gift of low crime. Like, no one even thinks about electing a soft-on-crime DA if they've got rampant crime in their city that they're overwhelmed by. So you get tough-on-crime prosecutors and policies in place. The cities get better, they get much more livable, they make more money, things are doing well. And then they say, "Oh, bleeding heart, let's get the soft DAs in there." And then crime goes back up because they do all these policies that lead to an increase. Are we at risk of doing something similar with Russia? If we do give Putin the assurances he wants, if we are forgetting what the Soviet Union used to be like and what Putin's dreams for Russia and its future are about? He'd love to see the USSR reestablished. He would love to start amassing greater territory and have it all be under the same control. So are we doing the same thing if we give him what he wants as these people who elect soft-on-crime DAs?

Right. I'm so excited to have David Sacks here. Isn't this a great conversation? You're fascinating. I'm so glad you're here. Let's just talk for a minute about what's happening in Canada, because it's extraordinary. I mean, our neighbors to the north are not exactly known for protests in the street. They're nice, they're sweet, they're sweet Canadians. But I love what they're doing now. They've had it. It's just human nature taking over. Started with the truckers who were protesting this weird rule that if they delivered goods in the United States, when they crossed back over into Canada, they basically would have to quarantine and so on and so forth. So Monday was the 11th day in Ottawa. There were, I think the weekend before, 15,000 people, 3,000 trucks. This past weekend, 5,000 people, 1,000 trucks. There have been some 20 criminal arrests. I mean, of all those thousands of people, it's not so bad. People are being ticketed for things like excessive honking, too much honking. The Canadian police have too much time on their hands. And Justin Trudeau fled initially and was at an undisclosed location and finally reemerged for some emergency session at parliament yesterday. And this is how he decided to characterize this freedom movement that's now been joined not just by truckers but regular folks from Canada and America alike. Watch: "The people of Ottawa don't deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods. They don't deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner, or a Confederate flag, or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing a mask. Everyone's tired of having to wear masks, having to follow public health restrictions. Families like mine just last week that tested positive have to follow public health rules, have to isolate themselves. Nobody wants to do that. I don't know how many conversations parents have had to have with kids about not going to birthday parties, not getting to have sleepovers. This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians." Well, he's made it suck. I mean, a lot of countries and a lot of states here in America chose a different way forward, and they have not had worse results.

Well, you're right. I mean, they this is a type of class warfare in which these professionals, the professional class, these elites, these experts, whether they're in government or big tech, they think that the other side is a bunch of deplorables, and it's okay to cancel them, to deny them their speech rights, to steal from them, and to starve them out. These are the tactics they're willing to use. I want to clarify what I said: they didn't reopen the money, like the donations. They just refunded the money to the people who donated it, which is just disgusting. So it's like you can't get your voice heard, you can't even listen to experts who disagree with people like Fauci. If you try to donate money to help the people with whom you agree, you get shut down by these lunatics. This brings me back to you and Elon and Peter. Elon actually responded to somebody online the other day when they said, "You need to create a network." Interesting idea. He's got more money than God, so he really could do it. Enough with the space nonsense, help the Earthlings. Look, we need you guys to do something for good. It could be your legacy, even better than PayPal. I like calling in, but it needs to be bigger and needs to be more comprehensive, and we need to fight back against these professional thieves. I agree with him.

Yeah, I mean, that now you're talking civil war. Like if people can't get jobs and can't access money, I mean, that's next level. People wonder where does all this feeling of division in our society come from. They can only blame the other side for it, but they cannot see the way that their own decisions are contributing to the problem.

Well, maybe you could solve it on a flight to space. If you know Elon as well as like, do you ever ask him, "Can I go? I want to go."

Let us come out there and film you if you do it. I would like, we'll tell the whole story. I'd love to see somebody who's actually reticent about it do it. It makes it more. It's gonna be somebody else. So a lot of interesting things happening with space. All right, so you know a lot of interesting people and you've got this great podcast and you guys were in the news recently because your colleague and friend, Chamath Palihapitiya, right? Did I get it? Palihapitiya?

He is the one that made the comment about not caring about the Uyghurs in China. Do we have that? We must have that right. Yeah, okay, just to remind the audience, here is what he said: "Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs. Okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think, what do you mean? The rest of us don't care. I'm just telling you a very hard, you're saying you virtually don't care. I'm telling you a very hard ugly truth. Okay? Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line. Okay? Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line." Disappointing. Whereupon NBC offered him a contributorship. Great, you're just the commentator we need. But he took all sorts of incoming for that and wound up apologizing for his phrasing and so on. He said he does have empathy. I think he was, I don't know, you tell me what he was trying to say.

You know what of it, though? Because we've been watching the Olympics this week. Well, no one's really been watching it. They've suffered almost a 50% drop in ratings from the last time around on NBC. But it really has been a little alarming to hear the commentators say, "The problem with the genocide going on in China right now." I mean, they talk about it like, "Well, there's been some allegations." No, we know it's happening. We've seen it. We've seen the tapes with our own eyes. It's not like we're in China, but we're at the point now where we know it's happening. We've made a decision as a country not to do much about it. We do a couple small things, but it's not all that impressive. I find it alarming that we're hearing that kind of propaganda on American television.

Why do they call you Rain Man on the podcast?

Yeah, I know. But do you have any of those abilities? Like, can you, because I know you talk about poker, but like, is it about cards? Can you count cards?

I was thinking, you know, maybe when I come out to film you going to outer space, we could swing by Vegas and I could actually learn a thing or two maybe.

What's your game of choice?

What kind of poker do you like? Five-card?

It's funny because we love poker in my family. My mom, what we did every Thanksgiving whenever we got together. And my mom just loves it. And so now even my eight-year-old, he's been doing this since he was five. He'll say, "Hey, will you play poker with me?" And some poor unsuspecting adult will be like, "Sure, okay buddy, let's do it." Then he gets him sitting down and he's like, "All right, Annie up, up and down the river, low spade in the hole splits the pot." With the cards whipping, it's great. We love it.

Okay, good. So this is not a waste of time. We're actually building a future entrepreneur. Last question before I let you go, need a quick answer: Do I or do I not buy Bitcoin or Dogecoin or any of that other stuff?

Okay, well, I love it. I love asking people that question because I don't understand it, it scares me, and I want to know more. David, thank you so much. So fun talking to you.

All right, don't miss the show tomorrow because we're going to have Ezra Levant back from Canada. Remember he came on last week and he was so good talking about what is happening up there. He'll have all the latest and where it's going from here. And our old pal Ben Shapiro is back on the show. I'm looking forward to discussing everything with Ben. He's so fun, he's like one of my favorites, and he's got something exciting to share with us. That's a tease for you. In the meantime, go ahead and download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. While you're there on Apple, would love to hear a review. If you wouldn't mind giving me five stars, that helps us out, would love that. And go to YouTube.com/MegynKelly and subscribe to the show. That's what I ask of you. Subscribe at YouTube and subscribe and download at Apple. And that's it. All that helps us keep it free for you guys. We appreciate you being with us. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.