How Medical Establishment Keeps Americans Sick, and Evils of Censorship, with Dr. Marty Makary and Naval Ravikant | Ep. 881
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Is America as politically polarized as we seem to be? Is the concept of the left and the right a myth? In a new season of the You Might Be Right podcast, former Tennessee governors Bill Haslam and Phil Bredesen speak with experts on polarization, diving into the research, exploring its impacts on our civic discourse, and seeking solutions to foster more constructive debate.

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It pays to discover. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. As Trump and RFKJ's surprising alliance of Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, has shown us, there is a dire health crisis happening in this country. And more Americans than ever recognize there is a problem that needs to be addressed. The people in charge of looking out for us are not doing that. To the contrary, they're making us sick and getting rich off of it.

One person who is tackling the medical group think that has led to this crisis is Dr. Marty McCary. He's a Johns Hopkins professor and New York times bestselling author who has a fascinating new book coming out later this month. It is called blind spots when medicine gets it wrong and what it means for our health. It's out September 17th. You can pre-order it now

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Um, that's what happens. And Dr. Marty McCary, he may not be a household name. You probably remember him as one of the truth speakers on COVID. Uh, but the publishing houses underestimate the demand and then you're stuck waiting weeks and weeks. So pre order it right now. Take my word for it.

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Dr. McCary, welcome back to the show. Megan, great to see you. Thanks so much for having me. It's wonderful to talk to you. There's so much to go over. You debunk so many things about medicine that I did not know. And I like to think of myself as somebody who's relatively informed on this stuff, but I read this like, oh my gosh, I didn't know any of this. So let's talk about, first of all, why you thought this was necessary.

Well, groupthink is a powerful force. And in medicine, we get sort of medical dogma that takes on a life of its own, and it permeates. And what we develop are these giant blind spots, these areas of medicine and health that affect everything.

Every aspect of everything we're doing, of every person's health, but we never talk about them. The microbiome, the poison food supply, the toxins we're exposed to, the bad recommendations that we put out there, the fact that some of our modern-day health crises have been caused by the hubris of the medical establishment.

We said opioids were not addictive, igniting the opioid epidemic. Yes. We said we gave the wrong advice on peanut allergies, igniting the modern day peanut allergy epidemic.

So when we use good science and medicine, we can help a lot of people. But when we use the opinions of a small group of leaders and central planners in medicine where they issue these broad edicts, we have a lousy track record. Food pyramid, the opioid epidemic, the obesity epidemic. So we've got to take a step back and actually ask ourselves,

Why is cancer doubling in many areas of GI cancer? My area of pancreas, I'm a pancreas specialist at Hopkins. We do more pancreatic care and pancreas cancer than any hospital in America. Never at any point in my 20 plus years there did anyone ever stop and say,

Why has pancreas cancer doubled in the last 20 years? Now, they're all good people. They're my friends. They're great doctors. But we have done this terrible thing to doctors. We've put them on this war path where all they do is put out fires at the end stage. No one's asking the big questions. No one's asking, why has autism been going up 14% each year for the last 23 years? Why are half our nation's children obese or overweight?

Why are nearly a quarter of them dealing with fatty liver and prediabetes? I mean, this is a well-being issue for the country. It's a national security issue. It is a issue of the economy. This entire over-medicated population is a massive burden. I mean, a $4.7 trillion economy that's expanding like crazy. And we're sort of told by the politicians, okay,

Oh, we were able to get Medicare to negotiate drug prices and save $6 billion in the first year. Okay, that's great, but that's...

a drop in the ocean. We've got this much bigger blind spot in modern medicine. So why is it like this? Is it all because of the power of big pharma to line its own pockets and get people to go along with it? Pharma controls the narrative. They've captured the big health agencies. They've created this culture. First of all, it's very hard to do research unless big pharma is paying for it or the NIH has a designated center.

So who at the NIH is interested in the fact that

sperm counts have gone down 50% in the last five decades, or that the average age of puberty is going down each year, or that kids feel sick more and more, that autoimmune diseases are going up, that attention deficit disorder is now epidemic, or 40% of our kids will have a mental health diagnosis. Who at the NIH is going to study the microbiome, pesticides, heavy metals, the poison food supply, these food additives that are engineered

to be addictive. So when you eat them, your appetite increases, even though you kind of feel full. And what's happening is all these foreign molecules, these chemicals that are now rampant, including the derivatives of seed oils, they go down the GI tract, which has a lymphatic system, an immune system in the wall of the intestine.

And it's not reacting to these foreign molecules and chemicals with a sudden reaction. It's reacting with a low-level immune fighting of this stuff. And it makes you feel blah. Makes you feel sick.

and sad sometimes. And what are we doing? We have told doctors, you only have your medications to do and your operations to do. We haven't given doctors the time or resources or research funding to deal with the root causes. And so they've lived in these blind spots. We never talk about them. We never talk about these issues at the top medical centers. Trust me, I've gone as far as you can go in academic medicine. All the accolades and tenure and

No one is talking about the biggest issues in health because of these blind spots. I think we've got good people working in a bad system where the culture has said, put your head down, do your job. You'll be rewarded. You'll make back all this debt that you got in medical school.

By the way, we take these highly creative students out of college. They want to save the world, have big ideas. They're altruistic. Heck, 90% of our applicants or so want to do medical missions, if not full-time. Part-time is a side of their practice. And we take these bright, creative young folks and we beat them down with this old,

guard dinosaur curriculum, memorize and regurgitate, memorize these thousands of drugs and learn to get an eye, a hawk eye for when you can use them. And oh, there's an indication. Here you go. There's an indication. Here you go. We put them on this treadmill where they have 10 minute visits, 15 minute visits, and

And they're just diagnosing and treating and doling out diagnoses and meds. We've done a terrible thing to these doctors, to these young folks. It's depressing. Like I went to my eye doctor the other day and the eye doctor is great, but I could see the schedule, like I needed a follow-up and I could see they pulled up the schedule. I mean, this person was double booked every day, all day for every 10 minute interval for weeks, right?

I thought, how much care can they be giving each of these patients? It's a crazy hamster wheel. And I was on it and I got off of it. I said, I'm going to focus on my passion, which is

public health research. I had a degree in public health in medical school that I got. I got basically walked away from medicine after three years of medical school, disillusioned. This isn't for me. What are we doing? And I enrolled in graduate school for public health. I ended up coming back to medicine. I missed the bedside care and I love being a surgeon. But after being on this treadmill that everybody gets on,

I said, no more dangling bonuses at the end of the year. I don't care what my throughput is. The system is designed for throughput and billing and coding. Why do you think we have 35% of doctors burn out and doctors are one of the highest professions for suicide? We're doing a terrible thing to these people. And a lot of doctors now are rejecting it. They're saying we're not going to have anything to do with this.

Half of my students at Johns Hopkins don't want to have anything to do with this crazy broken system. They don't care about the big pay and the house in the suburb. They want to be a part of something bigger. They want to deal with the root causes. They want to start businesses. They're entrepreneurial. They're getting second degrees. They want to spend time in a Medicare Advantage model where

Basically, they get paid on a lump sum for a population. They can spend an hour and talk about the sleep quality of a person that affects their blood pressure, not just doling out antihypertensives. Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs instead of putting every kid on Ozempic. Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes instead of throwing insulin at people. Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemotherapy to treat it.

We're going backwards. We're watching all of these chronic diseases consume our culture, and we've got to get off this myopic focus. So luckily, good stuff is happening. A lot of doctors are

speaking up, they're getting off the treadmill, they're spending time with patients, they're coming up with their own models for care, financial models. And a bunch of us docs are going directly to the public to educate them about health. Yes, it's so revolutionary and it's brave because these are very big, powerful forces that have a financial interest, frankly, in keeping us sick who don't really want to see this. The nutrition aspect of it is

And it's almost never discussed at a medical visit. You know, they might say you're obese, you're overweight, you need to lose weight. But actually, you know, the stuff about, you know, we talked before the show about Casey Means and her new book, the stuff about, you know, seed oils that you mentioned, the stuff about, you know,

and the toxins in our food, the poisoning of the food supplies you point out, all this herbicide or whatever, insecticide all over our fruit and our vegetables that some people don't even know to really seriously wash off, nevermind not buy if you can.

Not to mention microplastics in the air and the water and our furniture and then the, you know, fire repellents on our rugs. And I mean, all it's just a toxic world. A lot of people don't even know about it. And frankly, just me listing it. They're like, I can't. I'm out. I got other things to deal with. I can't deal with all that.

Like a bunch of us are trying to give a different perspective than the perspective the food industry and big ag and pharma have been putting in front of people for a long time. Telling doctors, you don't need to look into arsenic levels in the water. The EPA says no.

you can have up to 10 micrograms per liter of arsenic in your water. Where did they come up with that number from? Oh, my gosh. I didn't know that. I mean, they're making stuff up. I mean, this is where we get into trouble. This is why distrust goes down in the establishment. So you draw the blood of a baby today through the umbilical cord, and there's 287 forever compounds.

How about research on those compounds? How about research on the seed oil derivatives? How about research on the pesticides that have hormone effects

in children, which may explain the declining fertility and lowering age of puberty, instead of research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan and Japanese quail that they give cocaine to and they watch their sexual activity. These are real studies funded by the government. So we have had terrible leaders in the medical establishment. And so a bunch of us, Peter Attia, Casey and Callie Means,

Vinay Prasad, Zubin Devine. We feel like now we're going to go directly to public and educate them about the real story on health because there is a huge body of literature on all these topics you talk about from microplastics to the microbiome. And people need to know about it so they can make better choices every day. That's one benefit of COVID is it did expose our medical leaders as experts.

agenda-driven and in many cases not trustworthy like Fauci and the NIH. And we learned to try to do an end around, to find the doctors who we actually trusted. You were chief among them. I know you worked with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who we love, and we were the first, I think, to put him on when he and his colleagues wrote their paper, the Great Barrington Declaration, talking about focused protection and

So, and Vinay Prasad has been amazing. I've watched all of his stuff on myocarditis for young people because I have three kids. We did not get them the COVID vaccine and I'm thrilled we didn't. I wish I could say the same for myself. But anyway.

I think it was a good lesson for us in question everyone, to find end arounds in the same way media, right? Question everything, find the people you trust as opposed to entire establishments. Yeah, we don't want to create cynicism or hysteria. If you have an emergency, do whatever the doctor says. But when it comes to chronic diseases, when it comes to irritable bowel or why somebody is developing autoimmunity, we don't really ever talk about this stuff in medicine.

You mentioned food and nutrition. I gave the keynote speech. I was invited to give the keynote speech several years ago at the big nutrition conference. This is the biggest conference on nutrition.

For doctors? For dieticians, for nutritionists and dieticians. And so I gave my keynote speech. Of course, I like to push the field, as you've observed. And afterwards, a woman who is from the milk lobby comes and gives me her perspective when I talked about why are we taking out natural fat and adding sugar? Like, what are we doing? We're doing it backwards. Like, there's nothing wrong with natural fat. It doesn't cause heart disease like we thought.

and she says they're one of the two big sponsors of the nutrition conference. The other sponsor, I find out, is Coca-Cola. Oh, come on. So this is a... People are not getting the real story on health. Can you talk about that whole milk thing? I mean, is that whole milk versus 1% or skim? Yeah, so...

Where did we get you should drink three glasses of cow's milk a day? That is still the current recommendation for adults and kids. Like, where is this stuff coming from? And the one thing we do is we take out natural fat. The natural fat causes heart disease, what we call saturated fat causes heart disease, was proven.

put out by a politician scientist named Ansel Keys in the 1960s after Eisenhower had his heart attack. And he said, oh, it was because he ate too much fat and they put him on this low fat, low cholesterol diet.

One of the great ironies of cholesterol, by the way, in the diet is you don't even absorb it. The cholesterol in food goes right through your system, 90% of it, because it's esterified, which means it's bound to a bulky side chain. You can't absorb it. 99% of your cholesterol in your body, which is in every cell, is made by your body. It's not from dietary sources. So that's the great irony of the low cholesterol diet. I mean, misinformation, you might say. The government joined in on this low-fat bandwagon.

So Ansel Keys had convinced a bunch of folks at the American Heart Association, you got to go with the low-fat diet. They started licensing out their little healthy heart to every family restaurant in America, made millions selling cookbooks and low-fat, low-cholesterol cookbooks.

Turns out it was a house of cards. They did three giant studies in the last 60 years to try and prove that saturated fat causes heart disease. All three failed to show that, including some of the biggest studies ever done in medicine. The colleagues of Ansel Keys, the University of Minnesota, did something called the Minnesota Heart Study. It was a randomized controlled trial of 9,000 people and followed them for a long time. It started in the late 60s, 70s.

more heart attacks in the low-fat group. Wow. Now, why is that?

They're eating more refined carbohydrates, most likely. It's the added sugar and refined carbohydrates and ultra-processed nonsense that's engineered that is causing inflammation. The body's reacting to it with an inflammatory reaction. It doesn't know what to do with it. It's reacting. And guess what heart disease? It's inflammation of the coronary artery wall that enables the dense and small lipoproteins to deposit. Wow.

They got it perfectly backwards. Wow. And it's still out there today. I was at a cafe this week and it's low fat, egg white only. What are we doing? In schools, we got low fat, you know, fooling ourselves into thinking. So we have got what we don't do well in medicine is show humility. I'm not talking about everyday docs. I'm talking about the establishment.

When you get something tragically wrong, when you put something out there that's your opinion with such absolutism that everybody must do something and the data shows you're totally wrong,

How about a reckoning? How about apologizing with the same vigor by which you insisted? That we saw in COVID for sure. And we realized that all the stuff was made up. Fauci admitted that it was made up six feet and, you know, all the mandatory masking for children, all of that. For long school closures. I mean, have you heard anyone apologize from that group, that crew? No. A single apology for any single one of the many errors? No, they haven't even acknowledged. Never mind apologized.

So it's maddening, of course, but you know, eye-opening on the bright side, eye-opening. One of the areas that you touch on in the book is the whole peanut allergy thing. And may I just say, a lot of this was raised on this show by RFKJ a couple of years ago, we put him on and people said, he's a kook. He's been banned from all social media. He was saying all of this.

He was like, why do we have all these ticks in children in today's day? Why do we have such an alarming rate of autism? Why do we have all these, right? And he was saying it's environmental. There's stuff around us and there's stuff we're putting in our bodies. People said he's a lunatic. We got blowback for putting him on. We didn't care. But here you are, Johns Hopkins, actual doctor saying a lot of the same things. So can you talk about the peanut allergy problem? Dr.

Well, here's a good example of a recommendation that the establishment put out with such absolutism when really they just made it up. And that was...

In order to prevent peanut allergies, mothers who are pregnant or lactating, any child zero through three years of old should avoid peanuts 100%, peanut butter in particular. Peanuts have a choking hazard, so we're talking about peanut butter. It had been done for a long time that you would give an infant at five or six months, as soon as they can eat a little bit of peanut butter, maybe a little milk, eggs, and that would

That was kind of a standard, you know, in Africa, they would add a little peanut to the soup that they would drink. So... You start to get the muse to it. Yeah, their immune system learns it and they tolerate. It's called immune tolerance. But in their hubris, the American Academy of Pediatrics had this committee and they said total peanut abstinence in the first three years of life in order to prevent peanut allergies. They had it perfectly backwards.

It ignited the modern-day peanut allergy epidemic. A few years into that recommendation, the peanut allergy rate soared, and the establishment started freaking out and thinking, oh, what's going on here? And they concluded,

Anti-science mothers are not following our recommendation. We need to double down and increase compliance. And they skyrocketed. And we saw a new type of peanut allergy, which is the ultra severe anaphylactic reaction showing up. You know, a kid can be near a peanut or peanut butter and have trouble breathing. That's a real thing. We shouldn't mock it.

This is, by and large, an epidemic that was ignited by this hubris. And then everyone played along, the bandwagon thinking, the group thinking medicine, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, they played along. They sort of firmed up the recommendations, supported it. Fifteen years later, just eight years ago,

The study finally got published, a basic, simple study randomizing kids to the two approaches, early peanut butter exposure, age five months, six months, versus abstinence. And there was a massive difference within a few years. Massive. Eightfold.

Why not do that study initially? Yeah. Instead of just rule by opinion. And this is where we get ourselves in huge trouble. I mean, well, you went this is what I love about the book, because on this and I think on HRT as well and on some others, you went back, found the original alleged study on which these massive policy implementations were based and found the doctor.

who was behind the study. And in multiple instances, they were like, either that's not what I said, or we're so dodgy as to like, you instantly recognize this is not an honest broker. So the book lays these people bare. HRT was another one, hormone replacement therapy for women where everybody's getting it. Women loved it in their fifties and whatever. And then they said, oh, it causes cancer. You know, shouldn't do it. You're going to get breast cancer. And only recently, and we've covered this on the show, did they say that's actually not true

you might be able to take HRT with absolutely no problem. Talk to your doctor, see what your breast cancer risks are, but it's a minuscule risk to the increased breast cancer.

There's actually zero increased risk of breast cancer mortality in the original study. And no one did the investigative journalism to actually look closely at the study. And I found the guy who made the announcement 22 years ago declaring that hormone replacement during menopause causes breast cancer. And he was talking over my head and trying to talk statistics. And, you know, it was a very interesting, long conversation. And

He's talking to the wrong dude. I have a degree in epidemiology and biostatistics from Harvard. And so we taught the numbers, and he acknowledged to me after we stuck to the actual data that there was no statistically significant increased risk of breast cancer or breast cancer mortality. Women who took estrogen alone had a 25% lower rate of breast cancer, and yet 50%.

50 million women have been denied this amazing therapy that helps them live longer and feel better because of this dogma put out by this one doctor from the NIH who hoodwinked all of his many of his co-investigators in a meeting just before his press conference where he said, hey, we're going to do this. I'm going to make this announcement. And I find out there's a shouting match that happened in that meeting in 2002.

They said, you can't put this out there. It's not statistically significant. And if you scare women with fear of breast cancer, with something as sensitive as breast cancer, you will never be able to put that genie back in the bottle. And that was really true. 80% of doctors today still will not prescribe hormone therapy or try to minimize the amount of prescribing.

because they will tell you that it causes breast cancer. And when you ask them why, they will point to the 2002 Women's Health Initiative that was announced by this doctor without releasing this data until later after the media ran with the headlines. And just for context, Megan, arguably with the exception of antibiotics, there is no medication that improves the health of a population more than hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women taking estrogen or estrogen-repleniposy.

They live, on average, three and a half years longer in the group that took it. Their nitric oxide levels are higher because the estradiol oxidizes. So their blood vessels are a little softer, more dilated, more healthy, improves the blood flow. It's also believed to help with nerve conduction. That's why it may be that many researchers have observed

50% to 60% less cognitive decline in women who start hormone therapy. And on top of it, it helps you sleep better and greater sleep is better to prevent Alzheimer's and all those things. Yeah, 35% lower risk of Alzheimer's in one of the big studies. The short-term symptoms of menopause that last, say, five to eight years are either...

eliminated or alleviated in part from... So there's less suffering, less mood swings, less weight gain, less... Bone breakage later. A 30% lower rate of breaking a bone, 50% in some studies. So if a woman falls later in life, they're far less likely to need surgery or have a broken bone. My mom just broke her hand just about a year ago. She's fine now, but

She was never given hormone therapy. The fracture was borderline if it needed surgery, but the colleagues I trust at Hopkins said she should really have surgery. Had this guy never made this false claim, misrepresented his data, I got to wonder,

Could my mother have avoided all the immobility and cascade of events? That's amazing. So women feel better, live longer. Not to mention, we had a doctor on the show, not this past summer, but 23, who was saying it can help with sex drive because as your estrogen goes down, if you get it just back to normal, you know, for women, I mean, it just...

I don't want to say it's a miracle drug, but it's kind of a miracle cocktail. It's pretty amazing. Less dryness is true. And a 50% lower rate of heart attacks in one study because the blood vessels may be healthier. That's incredible. And to this day, this NIH scientist created this dogma that resulted in one of the greatest screw-ups of modern medicine. And it's still going on. That's why I wanted people to know about this. And that's why I write about it in the book. Can you speak about the microbiome? Because

There's a woman named Dr. Robin Chutkin who came on my show at NBC a couple of times. She was great. She has whole books about the microbiome with recipes, and I recommend just Google. They're out there. We eat from that book all the time. But here's the problem with the microbiome as I see it. The system around us does not support us cultivating a healthy microbiome, and I know you're big on caution about antibiotics, but...

They're prescribed for everything. I mean, I'll just give you an example. I just went to the eye doctor. I have dry eye. And she's like, you know, your eyes are a little inflamed right now and we should be doing 50 milligrams of doxycycline a day because it'll bring the inflammation of the eyelids down. And that's good for me because it's very uncomfortable to have inflamed eyes, especially in this job. But back on antibiotics, 30 days. You know, it happens all the time. They push them on you.

They push them in also. There's a consumerist culture now. Doctors are getting rated with a five-star rating, and some of the parents are coming in demanding antibiotics for their kids. There's many factors going on here, but we have to be disciplined as a medical profession and say, if you're not going to benefit, if it's a viral infection...

We have to stop screwing up the microbiome by carpet bombing the microbiome with these antibiotics. Remember, the microbiome is a lining of millions of different bacteria along the GI tract that are involved in absorption and digestion. It trains the immune system that's in close proximity in the wall of the intestine. Some of those bacteria produce serotonin involved in mood.

And maybe mental illness. And some of those bacteria make GLP-1. That's the ozempic thing. The ozempic active ingredient. So your microbiome makes your own ozempic. At low levels, yeah. It's a natural hormone in the body. So 60% of antibiotics in many studies are unnecessary that are prescribed. I think it's much higher. I'm forced to give antibiotics or have been much of my career prescribed.

for minor procedures because there's a protocol, even though the data really supports antibiotics for major procedures, not minor. But it's just kind of, ah, what the heck? There's this myth that, oh, they won't hurt you. They're probably altering the microbiome. Good animal studies show that. I go through it on my book with the world expert on the microbiome.

And an amazing study just came out of the Mayo Clinic that is in one of the giant blind spots of modern medicine that no one I know in medicine had noticed this study. It was brought to my attention by a friend. The Mayo Clinic looked at 14,000 kids and compared those who had an antibiotic in the first couple years of life. This is a scary part of the book, yeah. It's amazing, right? Because...

The average three-year-old has already taken about an antibiotic course each year. Wow. Right? So think about its effect in altering the microbiome. They compare... And by the way, antibiotics save lives, C-sections save lives, but they're both overused and people need to have good judicious understandings of these things. The kids who took an antibiotic in the first couple years of life compared to kids who did not

had a 20% higher rate of obesity, 21% higher rate of learning disabilities, all of which are on the rise in the modern era of antibiotics, 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder, 90% higher rate of asthma, and nearly a 300% higher rate of celiac disease.

All of these things are going up and we scratch our heads in medicine and say, I don't know why it's genetic or you're smoking or you're obese. No, it's the underlying disruption of the microbiome and it's not just antibiotics. And by the way, in that study, the more courses of antibiotics, the greater the risk of each of those chronic diseases. But what about something like, I know we're not doing specifics, but

Think about strep, you get strep. And I remember when my kids were little, they'd say, if you don't treat strep, it can cause a heart infection that will saddle your child for life.

So it was like, oh my God, get the penicillin stat. Yeah, you truly have a bacterial infection. You want to treat it early, get ahead of it. These infections can cause real problems. We don't want people listening to let a kid suffer with a bacterial infection because that can cause hearing loss, affect their learning and their long-term hearing.

But most antibiotics are given for these nothing viral, minor... Or just prophylactically. ...prophylactically, people demanding them. So we've got to stop doing that because the guy who had discovered penicillin in 1922...

After he got the Nobel Prize in the 1940s, warned the country and the medical establishment about the massive overuse, how it was going to create superbugs, introducing a new pandemic, and how they would have unintended consequences. Just like when Peter Benchley wrote Jaws.

Did not mean to turn us all off from sharks forevermore. The unintended consequences. I'm still scared of sharks. Of course. Who isn't? But he regretted how much he scared us. So on the microbiome, isn't it true that we can counteract a lot of that with probiotics, with cider vinegar, with kimchi, anything that's been fermented? There's a lot we can do to save the microbiome. It's just we're not being told about it.

Yeah, so you want to eat whole foods. You want healthy meats that are not meats pumped with hormones and all sorts of chemicals. It's kind of interesting. The medical establishment every now and then will come up with a study that whole foods are better and clean meats. And it's like, yeah, these are biblical ancient principles. Meditation has health benefits and, you know, yeah.

You know, it's like all of a sudden this crazy... Yeah, this is all stuff from the Bible, right? So you want to eat well, avoid these toxins, avoid the exposures. And probiotics are very popular, but nobody really knows which ones are working well. Now, there's one study... Yogurt.

Good. I say try it, try it all, but you want to just avoid the ultra-processed foods and the things with pesticides. Eat organic because those pesticides, if they're killing the pests, what are they doing to that balance of microbiome? So all fruits and vegetables, everything that you buy that could spoil in three days. Particularly where you're eating the surface of that fruit or vegetable. Like an apple or a pear. A strawberry has been sprayed over 12 times and has 7.8 different pesticides on average.

So is a strawberry healthy? No. Only if it's organic. So you should be buying all organic fruits and vegetables, really? Yeah. Now, if I'll have a mango and I'm taking the peel off, I don't insist on- A coconut peel.

Uh, sure. But I'll take it right off the tree in Florida, but yeah. And we want to move markets. We want people to ask because in restaurants, when people start asking for healthy products, it moves markets and suppliers. That's so true because you might eat only grass fed beef in your house, but think of how often you go out to dinner and you order a steak and you haven't asked that. And I've talked to a lot of guys about seed oils and they're saying too, like,

will you please prepare it in butter? Like, I don't want you to use the certain, like whatever canola oil or vegetable oil. Yes. Or even, you know, your kid is making like a cake. It's like, you don't want to use that stuff. They're very misleading because they sound healthy. You know, vegetable oil. Hey, vegetables are good. I was just told. Right.

right? But there's such a misnomer around them. They are heated up, denatured, chemically modified, and it's not just cold pressed olive oil like when you typically buy healthy olive oil. These are chemicals. And so the seed oils right now are really in focus. And good luck. One of the things they tell us to eat are nuts. Eat nuts. But then you go to the grocery store and all of the nuts are like

Canola oil, canola oil, canola. They roasted them all in canola. It's very hard to just find one that reads like macadamia nuts and salt. Yeah. Great, right? Yeah. You really have to work at it. You got to work at it. And peanut butter is the same. Look, I wish it wasn't just us and a small group of individuals trying to get this word out. Where's our medical establishment? Where's the leadership of our $4.5 trillion economy on this stuff? As long as we're just talking about medicating and operating...

We're going to continue to have the most medicated generation in the history of the world. Well, I know you're sounding the alarm on Ozempic, not necessarily saying it's bad, but how is this the solution we're going to for under 10-year-olds who are obese? Yeah. But is it bad, by the way? Because America wants to know. Well, it's got side effects and you're on it for life. It's expensive. And we don't know about a major downside to GLP-1 drugs, and that is

Just like they reduce excess body fat, they also will reduce your muscle. So unless you're eating a high-protein diet and exercising like crazy, we may be accelerating muscle loss, which, by the way, muscle mass is the number one predictor of longevity. So you'll die younger, but you'll be thin. There's no long-term studies. So we just are told by the pharma, hey, it's safe, it's good, you know.

Opioids were, OxyContin was approved on a 14-day follow-up study for chronic pain. We cannot trust pharma to tell us what's safe in the big food and big ag. That's terrifying. Oh, wait, let's go back to the childbirth thing. Oh, did you have another point you wanted to make? Maybe that's a segue to childbirth. I was going to say the other thing to sort of make your microbiome healthy is not just avoid unnecessary...

Avoid pesticides, eat whole foods, but also avoid unnecessary C-sections. So that's an important message. Yes. I mean, I hate this part because I had three C-sections, but it was bad, I guess. I didn't know that. What's bad about it?

So, first of all, C-sections save lives. And the best doctors who I know who are very appropriate about C-section use and do high-risk deliveries have C-section rates in the 12% to 20% range. Now, we do data analytics on my team, and we can see doctors...

who have C-section rates of 60 or 70% in low risk deliveries. Okay, we don't do it. I had a high risk. That's what happened. Okay. But the second two were by choice because, you know, it's like once I'd done the one, I didn't want to blow everything out. Sorry, TMI. Well, so the so-called once you have a C-section, you always have to have a C-section is medical dogma.

And that pendulum has swung back and forth. You can do VBAC, vaginal birth after C-section. Yeah. Okay, so what's wrong with the C-section? It hurts the mother and the baby? Well, it's more invasive. Again, they save lives, they're necessary sometimes. But here's how the microbiome forms in a child. Because when a baby's in utero, their gut is sterile. There's no bacteria in their gut. And this critical organ is formed immediately after childbirth because the bacteria from the vaginal canal...

seeding the microbiome. And those bacteria then are also augmented from bacteria in the colostrum, the breast milk, the skin, grandparents kissing the kids, all that stuff is how the microbiome, millions of different bacteria is formed in this equilibrium that keeps us healthy and trains the immune system and is involved in mood. And so...

During a C-section, what's happening is you're extracting a sterile baby out of a sterile operative field. And instead of the microbiome being seeded from the birth canal, it may be seeded by bacteria that normally live in the hospital. And so it's a very different microbiome. And we've known for a long time babies born by C-section have higher rates of asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, because remember, a different altered microbiome

in different proportions and distributions can cause inflammation. And a study just came out in one of our big medical journals, JAMA Surgery, that the higher rates of colon cancer that we're seeing in young people in their 30s and 40s was associated with having been born by C-section. OMG. All right. So how do we... I mean, it was too late. It's too late. So we continue to insult the microbiome. So that's where you want to get back to Whole Foods,

Heck, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, I found out that when a baby's born by C-section, now they have a trial taking some vaginal fluid and swabbing the skin of the baby to try it. So we're learning about this incredible organ system, the micro-arm, that we have been blowing off. Mm-hmm.

telling women, oh, it doesn't matter. How do you want to deliver C-section? It does matter. It does matter. Okay. Well, that's sad, but good to know in any event. Sorry. No, it's fine. I mean, I'd rather know.

We, you went and did an in-depth study on not cutting the umbilical cord. Spoke with a woman who's done in-depth studies. Not cutting the umbilical cord too quickly. It's not like leave it on for four days. Well, even like a minute makes a big difference. Makes a big difference. I remember as a medical student,

And a lot of fathers have had this experience. They give you the scissors and they say, okay, the second we clamp this thing, and I'm sitting there as a nervous medical student, and they're telling me, you're one job, you know, the second we cut this thing, clamp it, you cut it. You know, and there's all this chaos and screaming, and then there it is, cut it, you know.

What are we doing? It was pulsate. You know, it pulsates for a minute or two longer. It's pulsating healthy blood, fetal hemoglobin, which has a very high oxygen binding. It's very good hemoglobin. Stem cells, antibodies, the fluid is warm through the umbilical cord. We're cutting, we're doing this crazy thing. We cut the umbilical cord and we whisk the baby off to some area. And I remember as a student, what are we, where are we going? What are we

Why are we taking the baby away from the mother? Oh, we have to rewarm the baby under some French fry light or something.

Okay. There's the mama. There's the mama. That's a healthy incubator. It's a warm incubator. And the kid was getting a transfusion of warm blood. So we now recognize there's incredible health benefits to a delayed clamping of the umbilical cord. One study found 90 seconds was even better than 45 seconds. There was a study done of the myelination of the brain.

and found different myelination of the brain, there's something- What's myelination mean? The nerve pathways and development of the brain. The myelin is the covering of the nerve. It's the myelin sheath around the nerve. And so having the mom hold the baby immediately after birth for hours, not like, here, for a second, we have to take the baby. There's something magical about bonding we don't understand in medicine.

And the babies who have had this, what we call skin to skin time or kangaroo time. But you're talking about like 12 hours at a time. That's one of the things the book points out. It's not just because at any hospital, you're like, oh, they need skin to skin. And you have your baby on you for 10 minutes. That's not what you're talking about. Yeah. Look, I'm a guy. So I don't know how long a woman after delivering a baby can hold, but at least a couple hours is what's recommended at a lot of these birthing centers or hospitals that are trying to use these

This protocol, this bundle of best practices of delayed cord clamping, maximizing skin-to-skin time for hours, first hour breastfeeding with golden hour of breastfeeding to maximize the odds of latching and breastfeeding affects the baby's microbiome positively. All right, kids, we got that one going for us. That we did.

On the subject of ovarian cancer, you point out ovarian cancer begins in all cases. I've heard different. I've heard the most pernicious cases and I've heard all cases begins not in the ovaries at all. Yeah, this is a relatively recent discovery.

My colleagues at Hopkins, many of them were not even aware of this recent discovery, but our GYN department, they're all aware of it, and that is the most common type of ovarian cancer. Not all, but the most common is also the most dominant and the most dangerous and lethal cancer.

And it comes from the fallopian tube, from the end of the fallopian tube, not the ovary. So we've taken out millions of healthy ovaries in the name of preventing ovarian cancer. It turns out we were targeting the wrong organ. So when a woman comes in now to Johns Hopkins and says, I'd like my tubes tied,

our doctors are saying, "We don't do that anymore. We remove the fallopian tubes, leaving the ovaries in place to reduce your 1 in 78 chance of ovarian cancer." I recommend it. I had an ovary removed because it had a cyst wrapped around it. And while I was going under, the guy said, "Do you want me to take the tubes?" I'm like, "Why would I want you to take the tubes?" And he told me this. He was an OBGYN cancer doc.

And I was like, is there anything wrong with him? He said, no, but so they did it all laparoscopically. It was like a few 20 minutes. I'm like, all right, so you're taking out a cyst, you're taking an ovary, you're taking out the tubes. I expect to look like Giselle when this is over. I went totally flat, didn't happen, but I'm thrilled that they're not in me. You know, and I was done having my kids. So it's like, get them out of there. Exactly. So it's nice to have some good medical care. Can you speak to fluoride?

So about 67% of the U.S. drinking water has fluoride in it. In Canada, it's about a third, and in Europe, it's 3%. Fluoride is put into the drinking water because we believe it reduces cavities. It's bacteriocidal. That is, it kills some of the bacteria in the mouth, and that's probably why we see lower cavities. But if it's killing the bacteria in the mouth, what's it doing to the microbiome bacteria?

We're messing with Mother Nature here. I don't think we understand what these consequences are. And separately, a study has suggested that the fluoride builds up in one of the learning centers of the brain. And this is a JAMA study. This is not a fringe study.

finding lower IQs in people with fluoridated water. So the CDC, this is again, groupthink. We get one thing in our mind and the cognitive dissonance is we have to believe it and everyone say the same thing. We can't have any dissent. We have to censor doctors who disagree. It turns out the CDC has fluoridation of drinking water

on their website on the list of 10 greatest public health achievements. Wow. So there's a propaganda piece to this whole thing. The purpose of science is to challenge deeply held assumptions, and we need to challenge the assumption on fluoride. Even in your toothpaste, right? I mean, it's not just the water. That's right. It's ubiquitous and a lot of other things. So yes. Can I tell you, this is crazy, but a few years ago, I interviewed Alex Jones and

And I went, I sat down with him and he's, as we know, he's definitely done some not great things, especially when it comes to Newtown. However, one of the things he was telling me was about fluoride and about early puberty and about the frogs when exposed that went from male to female. Mm-hmm.

It was, I went back to NBC. We had all these fact checkers. It was all true. We found out all this stuff he was saying was true. And here I am across from you, Harvard educated Johns Hopkins attending physician saying, yeah, fluoride, just like Alex Jones was saying, not good. It's crazy. Yeah. But they'll shove it in your kid's mouth just on a general cleaning. They want to saturate your kid in fluoride, like rinses or gels just for kicks.

You know, the current recommendation is young kids should avoid fluoride and they shouldn't drink the water they're rinsing with. In adulthood, maybe it's good to rinse with fluoride and then spit it out and not digest it, but it's in the drinking water. So we need good research on this stuff. Why are we...

funding research at the NIH on dogs and, you know, putting them in cages and having flies sting them and saying, hey, we found that they can spread infection. By the way, the book is called Blind Spots by Marty McCary, M-A-K-A-R-Y. Can you speak a little? We have precious little time, but I heard you talk about LP little a. What is this? So this is one of those dense, small lipoproteins that's normally in your system that deposits lipoproteins

in an inflamed coronary artery or an inflamed vessel and causes a plaque and heart disease. So some people have naturally high levels. And so next time you get a blood test, add an LP little a or lipoprotein a and an APOB. I also recommend generally adding a fasting glucose and insulin. And LP little a is probably one of the best predictors of early heart disease. I believe it should be a public health screening tool.

But the medical establishment is very slow. The data on it is very strong. But we may not hear about this as a guideline for a long time. So they're pushing instead to get those heart defibrillators everywhere. Yeah. Which is great if you have a heart attack, but it'd be much better if we could prevent one. Yeah, I mean, we get so lost in our priorities. We can't see the forest from the trees. I mean, when I see a patient now, anybody...

The electronic health record will flag in a sort of warning, this person has not had the third COVID booster shot. Meanwhile, the public health community has got this pile on. We're pouring raw sewage into the Potomac River. Is that a public health concern? It's like they can't see the forest from the trees. It's like when the Pima Indians got obesity and diabetes from government food.

NIH researchers descended to test their blood to see if they had a gene predisposing them. No, the government food was junk food for 30 years causing obesity. They can't see the forest from the trees. The forest and the trees are distinguished in this book, Blind Spots, by Dr. Marty Makary, M-A-K-A-R-Y, Blind Spots, When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health, on the front page.

an essential read by Dr. Peter Attia, who's also been great on all this stuff. Good luck with it. Thank you so much for writing this. Thanks. Thanks for having me. God bless you. And thanks for all your great work during COVID too.

Is America as politically polarized as we seem to be? Is the concept of the left and the right a myth? In a new season of the You Might Be Right podcast, former Tennessee governors Bill Haslam and Phil Bredesen speak with experts on polarization, diving into the research, exploring its impacts on our civic discourse, and seeking solutions to foster more constructive debate. Listen to You Might Be Right from the Baker School at the University of Tennessee, where

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My next guest has a fascinating life story. He came to the U.S. as a young boy and eventually became a powerful leader in Silicon Valley. They say he has the Midas touch. Over a decade ago, he founded AngelList, which was dubbed the match.com for investors and startups, matching them up together. He later invested in companies like Twitter and

Uber early on. He's known for influencing and helping a whole generation of entrepreneurs, but not just with tips on how to become wealthy, but on how to live a healthy, happy, and meaningful life.

One of his pursuits has been philosophy. And recently he's been speaking out more politically worried about the direction this country is in going in and the threat of censorship recently posting on X. They want to punish you for your words because they can't punish you for your thoughts. Joining me now, Naval Ravikant. Naval, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Megan. So I love your backstory. I think it's really interesting. And I think as somebody who was in New York for 17 years, I

tip of the hat to Stuyvesant is welcome. And I'd love to hear about it because this is a great school that the left has been trying to change for quite some time now because they don't, they don't much like it. You went there at David Axelrod, I think went there. A lot of great Americans went there and it was, it made all the difference.

Yes, Diverson was an incredible school. That's where I got my real education. It's a math and science magnet school in New York City. It's open by pure merit-based admissions testing. You basically take an exam. If your score is high enough, you get in. If it's not, you don't. At least that's how it used to be until they tried to change it. I think that effort was somewhat unsuccessful, but it was attacked on the basis of being merit-based.

And Brian Kaplan, the libertarian economist, has this funny definition of left versus right, which I think is actually quite accurate, where he says leftists are people who hate market outcomes. And by markets, he means both free markets and evolution slash nature. So they don't like inequality and blame it on all kinds of things that you're familiar with.

but leftists hate market outcomes and rightists are people who hate leftists. They're sort of a bunch of people who just want to be left alone. That's why they're sort of a ragtag disorganized bunch. And you get free market conservatives combined with pro-lifers combined with gun owners, et cetera. It's sort of a coalition of all the people who are like, stop trying to fix everything. It's fine. So essentially, yeah,

Because Stuyvesant is a merit-based system, it flies in the face of a classic, call it Marxist or leftist philosophy, which wants equal outcomes for everybody. And so they kind of tried to break the system. But I think Stuyvesant was a better education than almost any college I can imagine. It was a great melting pot, a great way to integrate all the immigrant kids coming into New York.

to steep them in science and math, which I think is frankly the foundation for how we move human civilization forward through building technology and scientific discoveries. And it's a wonderful place and it needs to be promoted.

Thank you.

now really changed the way college admissions are supposed to be done. I don't know whether it's in fact changing all of the college admissions, but it appears that at least at MIT, they did take the ruling to heart as they must because it's now the Supreme law and, um, national review posting a very interesting article.

look at what happened at MIT in this first class that's post the affirmative action admissions ruling. For the incoming class of 2028, the percentage of Asian American students increased markedly from 40 to 47%. The percentage of black students dropped from 15% to 5%. Hispanic students dropped from 16% to 11%. The percentage of white students stayed roughly the same. The conclusion being by National Review and our pal Rich Lowry,

They absolutely were obviously working to keep out meritorious Asian American applicants. And what's happening now is all of the black students and the Hispanic students who are in will not have to deal with the looks at them by other people wondering whether they got in because they checked a box. They are there because they deserve to be there, period.

Well, it's a question if some of these universities are going to follow these rules anyway. I think I saw something about how Princeton and Yale, basically nothing has changed.

because they have essay questions and they kind of have a way to sneak around, not explicitly asking for the race. That said, you know, the problem at the core is cultural and incentive based. As long as the people in the universal system believe in affirmative action, we're going to have affirmative action despite Supreme Court rulings, because they'll just violate it on individual basis. And that's the pernicious things about these modern religions like Marxism and

Whereas if the individuals believe so strongly in the religion that they're going to follow it to a T no matter what, then top-down enforcement doesn't matter because they'll just break the rules on an individual basis. So I think culturally, the institutions are going to continue to be this way. And it's fundamental to the nature of institutions themselves. There are a small number of institutions that can stay true to mission, but the vast majority of institutions automatically get corrupted.

And the larger the institution, the more corrupt it is. And the reason for that is because a group needs consensus to stay together. For a group to stay together, everyone in the group has to be happy and to agree with each other. So groups can't change their mind. And because they're consensus-based,

it's all about making everybody get along. And if that sounds familiar, that's the core tenet of sort of these, you know, equality Marxism kind of movements where everybody has to agree, everybody has to get along. Whereas nature and free markets, as I mentioned earlier, these are merit-based systems. In a merit-based system, you do have a hierarchy. There is a top gorilla, there is a top dog. And so I think generally these highly-

you know, mob-based institutions where everybody gets an equal say regardless of merit, they tend to degenerate. And so I think universities are just in that slow degeneration cycle, just like mass media. And so luckily the internet is offering us a decentralized alternative

The internet has this weird property where it consolidates everything into one giant hegemonic winner and then into a billion little tiny competitors. So as an example, we replaced a whole bunch of local stores like Target and Walmart with one giant Amazon and a million little sellers in Shopify and eBay. We replaced dozens of local monopoly cab companies with one Uber and maybe a Lyft.

And then, you know, maybe people that are self-driving Teslas. So it's sort of the nature of the internet that offers us alternatives like homeschooling. And I think and hope by the time my kids are, you know, old enough that college won't even be an important thing. People will realize that it's just a stamp now. It's a credentialing institution that you get for admission into the elite class. And it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with education. If anything, it's more, you know, brainwashing, hanging out with your peers, paid daycare, paid vacation, what have you.

Um, and in our society, it's a, it's a, it's a bridge between, uh, young adulthood and actual adulthood where you can go and sort of park your car for a while and come of age and have a bunch of fun and make a bunch of friends. But yeah, as a learning activity, I'm not sure it's anything like what it used to be.

Well, the means for learning are now abundant. You can go on YouTube and onto the internet and get everything you want in terms of classes and learning. But it's the desire to learn that's scarce. Very few people actually want to learn most things. So college is a checkbox. And the easiest way to see that is if we said, okay, you can go to college, but you wouldn't get a diploma, we should still do it. If you wouldn't get a credential, you wouldn't do it. So I think the best move now is just to get admitted to a Stanford or an MIT, drop out and put the admission letter on your wall.

Uh, exactly. More and more people are doing that. I mean, I don't like, what do you make of it? Cause I know you're big on books. You're an avid, avid reader. And there are a lot of us who are raising kids right now who want them to be avid readers and want them to sort of be self-educating in the way that you did your entire life up until now. But we're up against tech. We're up against these overachieving sports communities where it's like every waking minute, you'll be playing X, you know, not X though, formerly known as Twitter, but you know, some sport

So you'll get into the best college. Like, how do you foster in your family the things that you say are important, like this love of reading? You can't really. I mean, I can't force my kids to read either. Their attention spans are shot because of the age of iPad and social media. That said...

what matters are not books the number of books read is a pure vanity metric what matters are the ideas do you understand the core ideas and you understand them when you want to understand them for example if you were to travel back in time and you were to tell people some important little tidbits of knowledge you would start with the atomic structure of nature you would start with the germ theory of disease

You would start with maybe equals MC squared or force equals mass time acceleration, depending on where you want to start them in their physics journey. But there's just a small amount of knowledge that you kind of have to understand and learn. David Deutsch, who's my current favorite scientific author, he talks about this in the fabric of reality, that there's basically four great explanations that can be used to explain at a high level almost everything going on in the world. And so if you understand epistemology, which is just the theory of knowledge,

If you understand evolution by natural selection, if you understand quantum computation, if you understand quantum physics, at least even at high levels, then you've got the framework to understand almost everything else, including philosophy, including politics, including art, including beauty, including memetics and ideas and so on.

So I think it's more about understanding the really important things. And the good news about the important things is that if you understand them well, then you can actually explain reality. This is why relativism that says, you know, every kind of science is valid or every belief is valid is not correct. Like you can't launch rockets by not understanding physics. And you can't navigate even your own life learning how to make money or how to be happy if you have

bad knowledge if you have bad explanations. So good explanations do test, do match up to reality much better. And so with my kids, I just always try to teach them the important things, but honestly, you can't teach kids anything. You know, they learn on their own. They learn because they're curious. They learn because they want to. Uh,

And so those are the four subject areas that I need to understand in order to understand life. You have just explained why I'm so confused all the time. I'm going to start reading more. There's definitely more. Like, for example, human psychology. Right. I'll give you a quick example on different one. Human psychology. It's very popular these days to say, OK, you know, why? Why is so and so depressed when they're depressed because of a chemical imbalance in their brain? So we're going to go ahead and give them a pill.

Well, everything is a chemical imbalance in your brain. Even my consciousness is a chemical imbalance in my brain. My attitude, my mood, my speaking to you is a chemical imbalance in your brain. So this is one of those explanations that is the wrong level. It explains everything going on in my brain. So it actually explains nothing.

It's like saying, you know, why are we talking right now on this call? Well, it's because of particle pollution since the Big Bang caused an effect and here we are. Well, that explains everything. So it explains nothing. So instead, we have to look at an explanation at the right level. And, you know, if I'm depressed, it might be because things aren't going my way. It might be a habit that I adopted when I was young. And yes, definitely there are genetic predilections and chemical predilections.

that predispose me to it. And maybe I take the pill or I take the medicine to make myself a little happier and less depressed so I can function while I solve my underlying problems. But approaching it as purely a chemical imbalance is the wrong level of explanation. So I try to explain this to my kids. So for example, you know, if they get angry or if they get unhappy, uh,

I try not to use words like I would say, like, why are you angry? Like, why are you unhappy? Or don't be angry. Instead, I'll say like, why are you making yourself unhappy? Because ultimately every feeling you have inside of you, you are causing it to yourself at some deep level. And I think being able to take agency for that and realize that is important. And of course, I have to live that. The only way I can raise my children is by being an example for them. And everything I say, they're going to ignore it and do the opposite anyway, especially when they go to college. Because at that point, they're trying to...

But get in with your peers. The whole point of young adulthood is to break away from your parents, not make their same mistakes, not do the things that they did and to establish your independence. And the way you do that is by completely ignoring them or doing the opposite of what they want you to do.

Yeah, that's right. That's why you have to be careful of being too overbearing as a parent with your own individual beliefs, whether they're political or some other lane, because they will get to the rebellious period. And then the things you hold most dear may be in jeopardy. That's why you don't have to put like don't put too much stock in. You're going to be this way. And our family is this way because they could they could fly the coop pretty quickly as soon as they hit those teenage years. I've I've.

I've never met an adult, you know, and I think this would be even true of prisoners or people who ended up in bad places in their life who say, I wish my parents had controlled me more when I was a kid and told me more what to do. Right. Everybody wants more independent. Everybody wants to figure it out for themselves. It's just human nature. Yeah.

Well, so having read so much and devolved, you know, or sort of gotten to the point where you realize there are categories of, of information that can help you understand the world. Explain what is happening in the United States of America right now, because we're feeling extremely fractured. We're there.

I'll tell you my perspective. I hear from our audience all the time about these tightening polls. They don't understand how half the country can be getting ready to vote for Kamala Harris. They don't get that people don't see the stakes of this election, the open border, the way the country is fundamentally changing, what we're doing to our children when it comes to this crazy race, you know, critical race theory and gender ideology. And so like a lot of my audience just doesn't get

how people can be getting ready to vote for that and are getting worried, I think, that with this election coming, we could have unified government controlled by Kamala Harris, who many of us think is a know-nothing. And I think if you zoom back, you ask yourself, how did we get here? Like, what is happening to this country? And what do you think the answer is?

I mean, this is a very complex topic and, you know, most causes are overdetermined. There's a lot of things going on, but I'll just throw out a few ideas. First is that I think most voters these days are single issue voters. They're not multiple issue voters. So, for example, a large part of Harris's coalition are women who are upset about the Dobbs ruling, which was kind of a big self-owned for the Republicans. And so I think they're just going to vote on that single issue. And and

And so every each political party is a coalition of these single issue voters. So I think that's one thing to think about. And there are some dominant single issues that are driving the left, just like there are on the right. But, you know, that may help frame, like, why do they not care about the fact that her economic policies are disastrous? Well, because they're focused on abortion. Right. Second is that Nassim Taleb has a great framework where he says the most intolerant minority wins.

And if you look through human history, all change, all revolution, all success does not come from the masses or the majority. It comes from a small organized group. So the largest minority you can build that is heavily organized, that's what wins.

And the left has a very clean and clear message, which is we're all equal. You know, it's all based on your identity. That's where your differentiation and diversity comes in, not on ideology or capability. Like if you can do more than somebody else, if you're better at something than anybody else, that's not diversity. The diversity is based on skin color and gender and identity and sexual proclivities. And

And so that is a very powerful frame because it actually makes you a single issue voter against the one thing you can't get away from, your identity. Now, set aside, the more closely you identify with something that's out of your control, the more miserable you're going to be in life in general. But that is a very powerful frame. So I view this as modern religion.

Christianity sort of, you know, is dying. And why is Christianity dying? Well, because there were a lot of beliefs that went with Christianity that don't really upgrade well into the modern age. When you see technology and you look out with a telescope and you see the stars and now thanks to technology of things like contraception, like Christianity looks more and more obsolete. But that religious instinct in humans doesn't go away. Ultimately, existence is a miracle.

How did I get here? Who am I? How am I conscious? What the heck is going on? Why am I a monkey? Why am I on a Zoom call, right? So the miracle of existence still begs to be explained. So there's a powerful religious instinct within humans. And the world is a dark and lonely place if you feel alone. And so we do have a natural tendency to

to group together. And the left has identified the modern way to do that is through a new religion. And that's why I keep referring to Marxism or a lot of the more extreme leftism as a new religion, because you can't challenge this dogma. It has blasphemy. There are certain things you can't say. But the key thing they've done in this religion, they've gotten rid of Jesus and

Now the main sinner, the devil is man. And the heaven is the pristine Gaia like earth that was here before we got here. Uh, and there's no hope of salvation or redemption. We're only evil. So the only way to basically solve this dilemma of how do you prevent, uh,

man and woman from destroying the garden of paradise is you basically have to throw them out of Eden completely. You have to destroy them, which is why there are so many anti-fertility arguments on the left. There's so many deep growth arguments on the left. It's all about we're destroying the world. We're ending the world. There's like a doomerism that goes on, including in AI or in the, you know, we're going to blow ourselves to pieces or we're going to run out of resources. There's all these different fallacies.

Let alone the fact that, you know, to a caveman, nothing is a resource and resources are byproduct of knowledge. We make things into a resource. But so I think there's sort of this millennialism religion that is succeeding Christianity. So the way I think about it is that since I got to the U.S. in 1983 as a young kid, I've always lived in a highly religious country.

This is a very religious country. Remember, it was founded by the people who were too much of religious fanatics to stick around in Europe. So they had to leave, right? And they had to shove off to the United States to practice their religion freely. And so we had Christianity and we still do in some parts of the country, but it is being supplanted by another religion that is actually more viral, more modern, and much more blame casting on humans. And it can do that through the

mechanism of abundance. The United States is the richest, most powerful country in the world. It has at least historically been the best managed and had the most natural resources. People are incredibly wealthy and they can use this abundance to basically set up a giant church and virtue signal to the rest of the world. So I think that's where we are.

Last thing I would add is that technology, say I was going to add is that culture is downstream of technology. And so what technology does is that technology changes thing, the culture follows. So for example, imagine what the world would be like, uh, if we didn't have contraception, we'd probably be living in much larger families. There'd be less single people. There'd be less stuff going on in cities. Uh, and we care much more about the family unit. So that is a clear case where technology change outcomes, uh,

Another technology is what we're communicating through. That allows us to be more desperate to live where we want. And culturally changes, do you want to do remote work or do you want to go to work or not? The gun is a technology, right? And that indicates how much freedom you have. If you have a gun, if you can 3D print a gun and you can't stop somebody from 3D printing a gun, then that gives them more freedom of a certain kind. So,

technology itself changes politics and culture. And one of the things technology is doing is technology increases leverage, increases free leverage. So for example, I can talk to millions of people now through this podcast and recording, which I could not have done, you know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, I would have had to go on TV and a hundred years ago, it was basically impossible. So technology increases leverage. Well, leverage increases the gap between the haves and the have nots. Uh,

It does lift everybody up. So technology and prosperity and capitalism have made everybody much, much, much richer and lifted people out of poverty. But it increases that inequality gap because the winners win much bigger because they have technological leverage.

And wealth is a modern invention. It's only about 5,000 years old as you can carry anything on your back that had any value. So as monkeys, we are evolved to be highly status seeking and status oriented. And so when we see somebody much higher up than us in wealth due to technology, we become extremely jealous and we want to bring that monkey down. And that is fundamentally a collectivist and leftist impulse.

Oh, this is so interesting. I'm learning a lot. And it sounds exactly right. I mean, we've short-formed that to wokeism as a religion and that it's part of the problem. Part of the problem that led to it is the absence of God in the public square. This was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation and slowly but surely it's been losing its tether to those core beliefs and core principles too that come from it, though the latter should stick around even though the former is leaving. You know, you mentioned something about how the left, one of the signs of the left's

uh, treating woke ism as a religion is there's blasphemy. You're not allowed to say certain things or you'll be kicked out of the cult. And that's absolutely true. And just today, uh, you know, fire, which is a great organization, the foundation for individual rights and expression. They keep a finger on the pulse of all college campuses and free speech and how, how we're doing. And they just released a headline out today from their latest free speech survey. The headline is two thirds of college students believe it is acceptable to

to shout down speakers on campus.

two thirds think that's, that's something you do need to do sometimes depends on the situation, but 7% said it's always acceptable. Like just go for it. Anybody who disagree with shout them down 30%, sometimes 32 rarely, but it is acceptable. And only 32% said it's never acceptable for what it's worth. They say the best universities for free speech are UVA and Florida state, the worst Harvard Columbia, and basically all of the Ivy league. I'm sure you're not surprised.

- Read about speech as a natural right. You can open your mouth and you can talk. It's there God-given to you from the day you're born. And then when the government steps in and tries to take it away, that's sort of the ultimate form of control. It may be helpful to think about it in physical terms. Forget digital where you're being censored in the so-called town square, but it's more, imagine somebody came to your house and every time you tried to say something and they didn't like it, they would put a hand over your mouth.

That lets you understand immediately that to restrict freedom of speech, to have censorship, you need violence. Censorship is inherently violent. It prevents you from saying what you would say. The physical instantiation will be to put a gag on your mouth like in a prison or in a gulag or in a concentration camp. So I do not think that is something we can let slide easily.

misinformation, hate speech, all of this stuff is complete nonsense because who gets to define misinformation? Who gets to define hate speech? The test of a good system is you establish the rules and then you put your worst enemy in charge and then you see how fair it is. So to the people who want to censor misinformation, great.

put Donald Trump in charge of deciding what is misinformation, what's hate speech, and you very quickly regret the power that you gave out. So to me, that is a bright line. That is a bright line. The First Amendment, anyone who violates the First Amendment, anyone who basically says that, no, I get to decide or some godlike censor who gets to hear everything and say everything gets to decide what is acceptable and can be said and can't be said. Those people are

I have no quarter with them. Those people are my sworn enemies because they are going to drive the world into ruin. All the progress that comes in science comes from original blasphemies, from things that you were not allowed to say, you were not allowed to talk about, you were not allowed to think about. And if you want to start muzzling people, then I would say because of these inherent violent tendencies, we should be starting by showing you what muzzling is and muzzling you first. People talk about the

you know, the fire in a crowded theater ruling a lot, you know, that one comes up a lot. They're like, well, no, you know, there are limits on freedom of speech. It's actually not true. If you go and you look at the fire in a crowded theater ruling, I believe it was being made against a draft dodger trying to get, you know, put him in jail for not going to war. And

subsequent Supreme Court rulings and cases and commentaries have made it pretty clear that that was a wartime ruling that even those members of the Supreme Court regret. And there are basically no limitations on free speech like a lot of Internet commentators like to think there are. And then I think related to that, and this is why I'm a big proponent of the Second Amendment, because any rights, any

So any rights that we always are challenged by from the government or from statists, they have to be defended. Otherwise, it's just an idea. Look at what's happening in Britain, where freedom of speech is essentially on the run. If you don't have the ability to stand up for yourself,

then all of these rights will be taken from you. The logic of violence dictates the structure of society. I hate to say it, but at the end of it, it's still nature. We're still animals and nature is ready tooth and claw. If you do not have the ability to defend your rights and your beliefs, they will be taken from you. If you look at the COVID lockdowns, the lockdown started ending first in the West, in the red states. And why in the red states? Because that's where people love freedom in their arms. So the government can't stop them.

It's 40 million intransigent Americans with guns that keep basically the world free. If the US were to fall and turn into an authoritarian regime, I don't think Australia, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, all these countries, Western Europe would survive for that long on their own. Most of the world is run by authoritarian societies or at least half of it roughly. So it's not a pretty place. North Korea is a giant gulag. It's, Christ speaking, freeing the Chinese state or the Russian state.

So if we don't want to end up that way, we need to have freedom of speech. And if we need freedom of speech, then we need to have the right to bear arms to be able to back up that freedom of speech. There's so much in there. Let's talk about that censorship first, because I saw you calling attention to this on X yesterday. It did not escape our notice either. Kamala Harris is very pro, very pro-censorship. Here she was back in 2019 espousing some of this. Listen.

and will put the Department of Justice of the United States back in the business of justice. We will double the Civil Rights Division and direct law enforcement to counter this extremism. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.

And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty scary. I mean, look, the people who are running around saying that

that things are a threat to democracy are usually, in my experience, the threats to democracy. And people like to think that evil comes dressed as evil. They think it wears like a little Nazi uniform, marches around and gives salutes. No, of course. I mean, evil always disguises itself as good. This is something I try to teach my kids. And evil comes from the desire to coerce.

It comes from the desire to fix other people. Ironically, these people have the most broken lives on their own. They're miserable.

You know, they don't necessarily have like, you know, happy home lives. They don't have their, you know, they don't have their stuff worked out. But they want to fix everybody else's problems. And they think they know what's right for everybody else. It's that desire to coerce. It's that road to hell being paved with good intentions. That's the problem. I think Ronald Reagan said it well when he said, you know, I'm here for the government and I'm here to help. That's like the scariest words in the English language.

That's right. So, uh, on the subject of the second amendment back in the news today after the school shooting in Georgia, which is a pretty remarkable case, a 14 year old boy goes in, starts shooting, kills two students and two teachers. But

But the school itself handled the actual emergency, I mean, about as well as you could ask a school to handle it. They had ID badges, all the teachers, which had buttons on them in case there was an emergency. Three times if it's just a regular emergency and press it over and over and over again if it's a serious emergency. Apparently the teachers were doing that. All of the doors to the classrooms automatically locked.

And according to the students, he did try to get into one classroom first and that door was locked. He could not get in. He then went to a second classroom in which the door was open. And unfortunately, it looks like that's where his victims lives were taken. There were school resource officers on the scene who almost immediately confronted him and got him to surrender and

I haven't seen it covered as to whether or not they were armed. I'm sure they were. They generally don't publicize that kind of thing. Um, the good guys meaning, and this carnage could have been much worse, but it was bad enough to begin with. And now we are having the typical divide that we see after all of these shootings and, and school shootings in particular about whether this is about bad or crazy people or whether it is about the ubiquitous access to guns in America. And,

And I'd love to know your thoughts on it. I will point out for the record, his father is now under arrest because for some reason this guy decided after his kid was flagged as a potential school shooter and interviewed by law enforcement a year ago. After that, the dad bought this kid a gun, which is just insane. Yeah, I mean, and now he's facing charges.

Guns are a tool, just like computers are a tool. Money is a tool and they get used for terrible and horrible things. But you can't just disarm society because there are school shooters and there are robbers and there are thieves and there are murderers. Those people will always exist. They will always get access to weaponry and a long enough timescale, the way technology is going,

they're going to get access to all the weaponry they want. They'll just build a 3D print guns or you'll be able to create explosives in your backyard. Technology is just getting better and better in that regard. So these are tools. And unfortunately, your choice is either you can live in a gulag where a small number of people have guns and they control everything going in and out, or you can live in a free society that is going to have these issues. And what you do there is you educate people. People are armed in self-defense.

And you try to make the best of it you can, but it's trying to violate an iron law of nature to say that, you know, one monkey is going to go around and defang and declaw all the other monkeys. Like that's just, that's the recipe for the gulag archipelago. So yeah, the school shootings are awful, but keep in mind, like if you look at terrorism, if you look at school shootings, what do they go after? They go after terrorism.

It's usually a deranged individual who will go after a large massed group. I actually think the problem is institutional schooling. If schools were six-person schools happening in people's backyard, it'd be a very different story. If one kid started getting unhinged, the other five would know. This is because of the industrialization of society. There's a reason why terrorists blow up large airliners or try to hit trains or bridges, because these are large things.

Humans are not meant to live in trustless societies and massive, massive groups. The Dunbar number, which is how many people you can get to know and keep track of is pretty small. It's about 120 to 150 people. We're meant to live in smaller, higher trust societies. And I think just aggregating people into large, low trust elements like schools or public schools are not the right answer for the future.

I'm much more of an advocate of pods, homeschools, small schools, local schools, local government, state government, shrinking everything down to the size where people know each other. But we've now come up with these societies where people move around. We're disconnected from friends and family. We're disconnected from larger families. We're disconnected from our neighbors.

And we rely on the government to build trust and to maintain trust in everything. And that's going to end up a very violent and controlled place where someone top down is looking down and saying, oh, you thousand people have nothing in common, but we're going to shove you all in the same small area, force you to go to school because, you know, a lot of kids are just forced to go to school. You're miserable here. And if one of you snaps too bad, there's lots of you in a small enclosed space.

One of the interesting things about homeschooling is homeschool kids don't get bullied even by the usual bullies because the bullies know that in the homeschooling situation, if you're meeting with other kids, you're meeting by choice. It's like, I can't bully you. You can't bully adults because they'll just leave. The reason why bullying works against kids is because there's this enforced little prison environment where they can't leave.

I had a little quip on Twitter that, you know, schools are prisons for the lucky kids and prisons are schools for the unlucky kids. And I don't think there's as much of a difference from them as we would like to make it out to be. Mandatory schooling where kids are shoved off to school every day. I get it. I get why we do it. It's daycare for kids so the adults can go about their business. But

But the industrialized education system is basically putting kids in a mini prison until they're 18, 20, 21, trying to brainwash them, often unsuccessfully, and then shoving them out in the real world and saying, okay, now you're adults. Now here's a gun. Here's a right to vote. Here's your alcohol. Go make some good decisions.

- Well, that's a very bleak outlook and I don't think you're wrong about a lot of the school systems, though I will say we actually love our schools. - Yeah, I don't wanna be bleak. I do think things are getting better. Why are they getting better? Well, when it's school choice, the school choice movement makes so much sense. The reason why Stuyvesant was great- - Exactly, exactly. I'll say like we had schools that we did not much like that we did feel were indoctrination centers

And now our kids are at schools that are amazing, that are exciting for them. They're fun. They think about days that the kids can sleep in. My my ninth grader went back to school this week and two out of the four days he was there, they went to some go cart facilities so the boys could just bond with one another and have fun. And one day they did a whole day of charity where they packed lunches for underprivileged kids. That's great stuff. Like you can find great schools that are more than just daycare or a reason to send your kid off.

Yeah, you know, there's a funny little historical aside. Mandatory schooling was, which actually still happens a lot in Europe, was created under the French and Prussian empires. Because if you're an empire and you conquer somebody and you want to brainwash them, the current generation is lost. They hate you. But what happens is you grab their kids, you show them in school and you document them eight hours a day. And then they grow up speaking the imperial language and the imperial culture and they're fully assimilated. I mean, look at me.

India was colonized by Great Britain. I speak fluent English. You know, if I go to London, it's like being nostalgic for a place that I've never been to before. I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool. Like, I kind of know this. So I am brainwashed and programmed by that empire. It works. So mandatory schooling was to some extent done so that these imperial powers could indoctrinate the children of the next generation.

In fact, when originally I read something that Napoleon's soldiers used to have to go around and take kids by force from the peasants in the territories they had conquered and send them off to school and the peasants would hide one kid in the basement and say, okay, this one's going to be the free thinker.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm a little more down in industrial education. I think small scale education, homeschooling pods, you know, small schools that are run by well-meaning people who genuinely care about the kids. That's useful. It's these industrial schools where you cram 60, 90, 100 kids into a class. There's a teacher who's just trying to do crowd control because there's like one or two incredibly violent or unruly or depressed kids who are making problems for everybody. You know, and then they're like, well,

How do you crowd control a large group? You know, if you get on an airplane, you start making trouble. The fasten your seatbelt sign comes on. The stewardess, poor stewardess has to run around threatening everybody. So the same thing happens in school. It's like, sit down, shut up. Don't raise your hand. No, you can't go to the bathroom. Just pay attention. Just recite this after me. You have a problem. You need ADHD meds. You know, go to the psychiatrist, get some meds, you know, calm down.

So the teachers are put in this impossible situation of crowd control for a bunch of kids who are of very different backgrounds, varieties, predilections. You know, some are violent. Some have really broken, miserable home lives. And unfortunately, if you want to raise a kid and do it right, they need lots and lots and lots of individual attention from someone who loves them. And there's no substitute for that.

you know, children growing up without the feeling of unconditional love and patience, they're going to have a really hard life. You got to hold your kids now. Otherwise, you're going to end up holding them later. I couldn't agree more. Or somebody's going to wind up holding them like a therapist who they're going to have to pay a lot of money to for biweekly sessions. Stand by, Naval. I'm going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back with some breaking news on Trump and his sentencing.

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Is America as politically polarized as we seem to be? Is the concept of the left and the right a myth? In a new season of the You Might Be Right podcast, former Tennessee governors Bill Haslam and Phil Bredesen speak with experts on polarization, diving into the research, exploring its impacts on our civic discourse, and seeking solutions to foster more constructive debate. Listen to You Might Be Right from the Baker School at the University of Tennessee, where

Available wherever you get your podcasts. Today, we'll be exploring the sounds of comfort. Listen closely. That's the sound of you getting a complimentary hand massage at the nail salon. And that's the sound of your favorite bedroom fan still spinning after five years. Now listen to the sound of a cold, creamy Starbucks mocha frappuccino drink.

With deliciously satisfying flavors, Starbucks Frappuccino drinks are comfort in a bottle. Back with me now, entrepreneur Naval Ravikant. So Naval, this news just broke on the Trump sentencing in the New York case in which he was found guilty of misrepresenting his business records. He was supposed to be sentenced and many believed it would be to jail.

on the 18th of this month. And now Judge Mershon, who make no mistake about it, is 100% a political actor, has said, we're not going to do it. On September 18th, we are going to postpone it until after the election. The date will be November 26th.

And amazingly, this guy has the call to think we're going to believe he's done this to to so as not to influence the election. He goes on. I won't read you the whole thing, but basically says, unfortunately, we're now at a place in time that's fraught with complexities rendering the requirements unbearable.

of a sentencing hearing should one be necessary, difficult to execute. The imposition of sentence will be adjourned to avoid any appearance, however unwarranted, that this proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the defendant is a candidate. The court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution. Oh my God, I can't go on. Let me just

point something out to you that those are all lies. He's very political. We know that the prosecution is very political, but let me tell you something. This, this judge had no choice two days before the sentencing hearing we were, we need to have, he had, he's scheduled to make a decision on whether Trump has immunity and whether the evidence that was introduced against Trump, the

violates the Supreme Court's ruling that you're not allowed to introduce official acts as evidence against a former president. That's been barred thanks to the Supreme Court ruling. So as soon as he ruled on that, Trump was going to take it up. It was going to go right up on appeal and it was going to stay the whole thing anyway. So he's a dishonest broker to the end.

And the left is freaking out about what does he mean if it's necessary, we'll hold it. What he means is he allowed in evidence he shouldn't have allowed in. The Supreme Court is going to so find. And this trial is probably the verdict is probably going to get thrown out long before November 26th if the Supreme Court takes it on an expedited basis.

The dishonesty by our elected officials, Naval, is front and center every day. You know, honestly, it was the lawfare that kind of brought me off the sidelines. It's really disgusting behavior because this is how you descend into a complete banana republic with military coups and military rule. The moment you can start weaponizing the law against your enemies selectively, that's the beginning of the end. There was a famous dictator who said something like, you know, for my friends,

anything for my enemies, the law, right? And what he meant by that is once you're in charge and you get to dictate who the law applies to, you're in a very slippery slope. And slippery slopes are real, by the way, as we know. As a clear example,

if you were to actually look at the charges that were brought against Trump, and I actually read them quite carefully. I mean, these were really trumped up. They were really made up. You violated the statute of limitations. You tried to drum things up into a felony when there was no evidence of such. It was a miscategorization of business expenses. When you have complex business dealings like I do and like many people do, you can always find something. So it's this selective prosecution. It's a selective investigation.

persecution that allows them to get away with this. And, you know, a lot of the progressive DA movement that comes out of George Soros and others is based on this understanding that, hey, actually we can choose whether or not to prosecute certain people. And these are elected offices that are, you know,

that either are in territory where the voters are really favorable to us, or they're really cheap to run because there's no organized opposition. So let's just organize and take over prosecution. That's what happened in San Francisco. If you want the case against Kamala Harris, it's the fact that she was DA at San Francisco and San Francisco is a mess. And in fact, afterwards she advocated for George Gascon, who's the guy who's destroying LA through basically not prosecuting criminals

and going after business owners. So this selective prosecution thing is a disaster. You can take a deep blue or deep red state. You can take a deep blue or deep red jury. You can basically creatively interpret these infinite laws that we have to find anybody guilty of a crime.

Like I think there's another famous saying, like, you know, you find me the man and I'll find you the crime or give me six sentences written by any honest man and I will find the crime. So you can always find a crime that somebody is guilty of violating. So the moment you start breaking down this wall and you get into weaponizing justice.

You know, Hillary Clinton blew up her email server with bleach bit. There was no consequences from that. Turns out the Hunter Biden laptop was real. Who knew? Right. Even though we were told it was all misinformation by the intelligence agencies. This is the scary stuff. This is the stuff that ends a republic or turns into a one party state better known as a dictatorship.

China is a one party state. North Korea is a one party state. So I don't use the words one party state lightly, but I think the weaponization of the justice system, the engagement, willingness to go into lawfare, that is the thing that will lead to violence. That is the thing that will lead to a dissolution and a breakup

and something worse in the United States. So I think when, when these guys start playing with going after their political enemies, when Alvin Bragg runs on the explicit campaign to take down Trump, and then they go hunting through and looking for anything and drumming up any charge and go after him in the most favorable juries and the most favorable, uh,

part of the country and then just control the evidence and control the narrative, that is the beginning of the end. And the people who in Silicon Valley and the donors who are out there supporting this lawfare, they're dead to me. I mean, these people are destroying the ground on which they stand. Do they think they won't be next when you destroy the institutions of fairness and merit?

Yeah, eventually you're the ones who get thrown up against all that. That's what it does. It creates this revenge fantasy, right? Now you want to get back. I mean, that's the only way they're going to learn. It's going to be a sad state of affairs. Your quotes reminded me of this guy we know who's we believe is somewhat of a connected guy. And he has this saying, which I think could be Kamala Harris's campaign slogan, depending on who she's talking to. I'll do anything for you and anything to you.

- It's very scary. - It's mobster behavior, right? It's like the ends justify the means for these people. It's like, well, you know, this is the thing about religions and Marxism is a religious movement. And so Alvin Bragg, I don't think is coordinated necessarily by the DOJ or there's a little bit of evidence of that. But I think it's much more that just when you take a religion

and you spread it and you get these fervent adherents, these true believers. And, you know, like I said, like when I was young, I was growing up under the Christian right. And now I'm growing up against the Marxist left, but they have their own religions. Uh, when you have these religious fanatics, you get decentralized enforcement of the religion. And each one is trying to outdo the next one to show how much of a true believer they are. So the Alvin Braggs of the world are going to get scalps and they're going to get feathers in their cap and they're going to get, uh,

you know, they're going to become famous and they're going to become lots of people cheering them on if they go ahead and they take down these people that everybody hates. So they made Trump into the devil. And it's hilarious because, you know, before he ran for office, he was just a businessman and Democrat. They all they all favor with. But in the minute and a half we have left, sounds to me like you're a Trump voter. Is that how you intend to vote? I don't I don't advocate for people to vote in a specific way. I'm just not a Kamala Harris voter because I've lived in San Francisco long enough.

I tend to be more libertarian, but the libertarians are running some wackos right now. So it's hard to. And what's your forecast? If she does, what if she does win? What if she wins and she actually gains control of the house and keeps the Senate and we have unified Democrat government?

My biggest fear is unified governments in general, because the government that governs best is the one that governs least. So you want divided government. That's why the founders of this country made it so hard to actually pass laws and to change things. So you want divided government. Unified government is very threatening because there's a tyranny of the majority or the so-called majority.

What is the issue? The main issue is changing the rules of the game. So examples of changing the rules of the game, mail-in ballots and making ballot harvesting legal and changing voter ID laws, importing voters, packing the Supreme Court,

making DC a state so it can get two extra votes or making Puerto Rico a state so it can get extra votes. All of these things that they would do in the name of protecting democracy, but change the rules. So censorship, censoring X or trying to seize it from Elon Musk.

These are examples of things they can do structurally that will alter the outcome forever and catapult us towards a one-party state, which is what California is. California is a one-party state and it's never coming back because they've completely changed the rules of the game.

And so to me, the scariest thing is on a national level. Yeah. Don't change the rules of the game. That is where it's beyond the pale. And that's why the calls for censorship and the lawfare, those are beyond the pale because both of those are changing the rules of the game. And when you change the rules of the game, people make this mistake. They think that the right to vote gives you power. No power gives you the right to vote. And if you contradict that, if the people who don't actually have power start using the right to vote to take away power, then it's going to backfire on them.

the system's on its head. Naval, got to run. Thank you so much. What a pleasure. Thank you. We're back on Monday for debate week. See you then. Have a great weekend. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

You might be right. It's simple, but something you almost never hear in politics today, with each side more concerned about scoring political points than solving problems. I'm Bill Haslam, a Republican. And I'm Phil Bredesen, a Democrat. We're former Tennessee governors, and we invite you to listen to our podcast, You Might Be Right.

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And flee from the red hot chili peppers. And trust me, it's always a great hang when Woody's there. So why wait? Listen to Where Everybody Knows Your Name wherever you get your podcasts.