The Megyn Kelly Show - Elon's Free Speech Quest, and Vaccine Mandate Reality, with Vivek Ramaswamy, Ken Mauer, and Jason Phillips | Ep. 439

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of Strive Asset Management and author of "Nation of Victims," to talk about Elon Musk's free speech quest at Twitter, the confusion over a "centrist" approach to censorship and free speech, un-banning President Trump but not Alex Jones, the absurd uproar over Elon in the media, top colleges de-emphasizing merit, Bob Iger back in charge at ABC, Elizabeth Holmes' lengthy sentence, the real lesson of SBF's fake "woke" signaling, Biden's MBS decision and more. Then Ken Mauer and Jason Phillips, former veteran NBA referees and executives, join to discuss their lawsuit against the NBA over the COVID vaccine mandate, what happened when they fought the mandate, attempting to get a religious exemption and being denied it, how the NBA tried to poke holes in their requests, conversations they had with the NBA and actions the NBA took against them, the personal toll this has taken on them, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Happy Monday. I have to tell you, I had a great weekend. I really did. I had my birthday on Friday, spent the day with my kids and Doug, and it was exactly what I wanted to do. You know, we played charades, we hung around, it was super fun, you know, nothing big. And honestly, I recommend nothing big. You know, I recommend just spending your day with your family. I couldn't have asked for better. And then we did something new. We're traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday. And so we had what we were calling fakesgiving, where we had my mom and my sister's kids come and we had sort of

a pre-Thanksgiving. And it was wonderful. If you can't be with your family on the actual day, I highly recommend this. We got ahead of the game. We didn't have to deal with quite the amount of travel. We got our family time together and we played football outside. I actually caught a pass. Abby would have been really proud of me. I know. Who is this person? Anyway, awesome, awesome stuff. And I think it's a new tradition for us because we we've been tending to travel a little bit more on the Thanksgiving holiday. So here's to time with family and friends in a week that all of us usually look forward to. Right. Let's kick it off with some news. Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump on Twitter. How about that? So far, crickets.

President Trump has not tweeted again. Will he ever? We'll tell you what he's saying. Plus, President Joe Biden allows MBS, the Saudi leader, to escape accountability in the death of a Washington Post journalist. And how? And even the left now, including the left wing press, is freaking out on Biden, saying not even Trump did anything this controversial when it comes to this case. Disgraced Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to prison. And wow, did you see her sentence? We talked about this in Kelly's court on Friday. Some now accusing her of getting pregnant so that she would seem more sympathetic to the judge. That didn't work. So what happens now to her baby? I mean, this is like a nightmare. And then last but not least, there's been a major shakeup at Disney. Go woke and go broke, something that our guest today has

been writing a lot about. And by the way, later on in the show, we're going to get to the first long-form interview with a pair of former NBA referees. These guys are stars in the NBA who are now suing the league over its COVID vaccine mandate. When do you find out how the NBA treated these guys? It's absolutely disgusting. Absolutely no loyalty over this stupid vaccine, which does not prevent the spread. Okay, you want to get it? Good. I got it too. But it doesn't prevent the spread. And people are still pretending that it does. We are also following before we get to our first guest. What happened late Saturday night in Colorado Springs where a gunman shot and killed five people and injured another 25 others at an LGBTQ nightclub in just minutes. Police are looking into the 22 year old suspect's history and whether or not the attack would qualify as a hate crime, local reports say the suspect may have been known to law enforcement, as is so often the case in these tragedies. A man with the same name was involved in a bomb threat last year. He reportedly threatened his mother with, quote, a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition. That led to a standoff. No explosives were found,

but his mother reportedly said that he did have firearms. According to the Gazette newspaper, the case was sealed and no formal charges were pursued. So there are still many unknowns right now. We're going to be following this case. We'll bring you the very latest as it unfolds. And now we'll get back to our business headlines with our first guest. Vivek Ramaswamy is founder and executive chairman of Strive Asset Management. He's also an entrepreneur and a New York Times bestselling author and a graduate of Yale Law School, Harvard undergrad. So those become relevant in some of today's discussions. Vivek, great to see you. How are you? Good to see you, Megan. How are you?

Very well. Thank you. So can we start with Disney? Because I think that's fascinating. The woke chief of Disney is out. And Bob Iger has been brought back in. The guy who, I don't know how long he was CEO for, but everybody loved Bob Iger. He was very well respected. He retired. He walked off into the sunset. And then the new chief, who seemed really weak, didn't stand up to any of the woke warriors inside, is out after they just signed him to, I think, a three year contract and four months into it. He's out. Does this have to do with Ron DeSantis? Is this just about cord cutting and Disney suffering? Like, what do you think is going on here? So look, the facts are still early and I'm a big fan of not over-speculating, Megan, but there's a couple of key observations that stick out to me. And I come from the vantage point of having authored actually a letter to Disney's board of directors and to Bob Chapik earlier this year, questioning certain of their business decisions from a shareholder perspective.

I think what happens here is less the fact that Chapik was somehow the woke CEO and Bob Iger was not. To the contrary, Bob Iger was actually a big proponent of meddling in social issues and using Disney as a platform to do it. But I think the difference was the fortitude with which they did it. See, Bob Iger at least made that a coherent part of the company's perspective. That was his line and he was sticking to it. And for better or worse, I think for worse, but for better or worse, built a brand name around it. Georgia was thinking about passing an anti-abortion statute a few years ago. Disney comes out and says they can't shoot films in the state of Georgia if they consider passing the equivalent of a heartbeat bill, even as they go to the Shenzhen province of China to shoot Mulan over there. So that's the

Bob Iger view of the world. I think the issue with Bob Chapik was that he was really half-hearted about his commitment to those so-called politicized agendas. In fact, earlier this year, when employees first pressured him to take a stand on the Florida Parental Rights and Education Act, I will not call it the Don't Say Gay Bill, the Parental Rights and Education Act, he actually said that he didn't want to get involved, but he made the worst move of all. He ended up in the worst of all worlds, where within just a matter of days later, he bent the knee and buckled to that pressure anyway, showing that he was a flag that would wave in whatever direction the wind was blowing, too flimsy for the leadership of a company that, you know, I would say that if you

had to make the choice between somebody who was committed to excellence at the company and their mission versus somebody who was committed to progressive values, I would take the first over the second every day. But there's an argument to be made that at least if you're going to do the second, you might as well do it clearly and unapologetically. And that's the category that Bob Iger falls into. So I think that's really what's going on here. So there's not going to be a change in their approach to, they didn't read Woke Inc and change their minds. Well, so the key is whether or not he appoints a successor. I think as long as Bob Iger stays

in that seat, I don't think there's going to be a change. However, the key thing to watch for is whether or not he actually appoints a successor and uses this as an opportunity to effectively pivot, but without admitting it and putting someone else in that role. That's what I would like to see from a value creation standpoint. I'd love to see that happen, but I reserve judgment until that happens megan before I tell you that's actually what's happening until then as I understand That's part of the deal. He takes over for two years and grooms the successor and passes the baton But uh, the other guy chapik is out and not going to be returning Um, so, okay, let's keep going because the elon musk situation caught fire And people are saying that Twitter is going to close,

that it's going to shut down. And I don't know whether that's true. Like, I don't know whether that's just hyperbole. I guess it might, but you tell me. Here's what happened. Just to bring the audience up to speed. On Wednesday, Musk sent an email to employees entitled A Fork in the Road. According to ABC, the email reads,

going forward to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade. Then he said, click here if you agree to this. If you don't agree, you're going to get three months of severance. Let me know by 5 p.m. on Thursday. Then the next day, RIP Twitter was the top trend worldwide as we got all these virtue signaling Twitter employees like doing a salute emoji like goodbye. Bye bye. I'm not going to I'm not going hardcore to help the world's richest man become richer.

F you, Elon Musk. And then I don't know what the numbers are. Gizmodo says hundreds of Twitter employees resigned. Reuters says more than 600. Washington Post says could be between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars or fifteen hundred. I have no idea. Elon tweets out the best people are staying, so I'm not super worried. But at the same time, he softens his stance on remote work. He had earlier said, get back into the office or you're out. Now he's like, as long as your manager says you're doing fine, I won't bother you. So he does seem to be slightly worried, notwithstanding what he's tweeting publicly. And it's gotten to the, and then he tweeted out this, Vivek, how do you make a small fortune in social media? How do you make a small fortune in social media? Answer, start out with a large one. It doesn't seem like it's going well so far. Well, look, I think there's a couple different issues going on here, Megan. Each of them deserve discussion. First of all, on the hard work issue. Look, I founded multi-billion dollar companies. Elon Musk has founded collectively

multi-trillion dollar companies. So I'm going to offer my wisdom here with humility. But one of the experiences I had in leading a biotech company was actually at a program several months in that I instituted, which said that, you know what? we will effectively pay you to leave, give you a good deal to leave if you don't want to opt in to the culture, which includes hard work and dedication. And it's a great way of pruning out people who don't want to be there. So from a management perspective, I actually like the way he's handled it. First, take an ax to just cut as many employees as you can to save the cost structure while leaving the essential employees intact. And then further allow for some self-selection to be really clear about expectations going forward. What you don't want is misaligned expectations for a workforce to say, here's what

the owner is going to expect of you. If you're misaligned with that, you shouldn't stay at the company. I think that was transparent and clear. I think where it becomes a little bit muddled is that many of those employees have ideological disagreements with Elon Musk and are using their laziness, but justifying it with their ideological disagreements to sort of veil, to sort of masquerade in the morality of the ideological disagreements when in fact it was just laziness all the way down. And so as I prickly joke around, in part, it's our cultures of success, Silicon Valley's culture of success that bred this culture of entitlement among workers at Twitter and other companies in Silicon Valley. That entitlement then inevitably breeds laziness. And this victimhood morality complex fits laziness like a glove. That's really what's going on on the management side, where point of view on what appears to be his vacillations on what it means to actually run a free speech platform. And here, this actually ties to even our discussion about Bob Chapik, about actually having a clear North Star and sticking to it, as opposed to going down the slippery slope of wavering based on what

external demands put pressure on you to do. That's actually what I'm more worried about than the operational considerations, where Elon has great expertise, knows how to run an operation, knows how to drive a hard charging culture, who to keep, who not to keep. I trust him with that probably better than most anyone on the planet. But I do worry a little bit on his lack of a clear definition of what it means to operate a free speech platform. Some days it sounds like he means it's just a centrist model of censorship. Some of his recent statements definitely seem to suggest as much after pressure from advertisers and civil rights groups. But I don't think that's the right way to do this. You and I have talked about this before. There are clear rules of the road for the

way you operate a free speech platform without making those decisions centrally. And so that's where my concern is more. See, I totally get what you're saying. He's so he's let back on Trump, though Trump hasn't tweeted and Trump is now stating, quote, he sees no reason to return to Twitter, though he's got some between 70 and 80 million followers, which is far lower than he used to have. I don't know whether people voluntarily left or they did a cleansing. Who knows with Twitter? In any event, he says he sees no reason to return because he's got his own social network now, Truth Social. So he let Trump back on. He let Kathy Griffin back on. He let on Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee, the latter of whom were suspended, both of them, for

questioning the transgender ideology pronouncements. They said Rachel Levine is a man. They said that, and they got booted. Ellen Pompeo in Jordan Peterson's case. In any event, he won't let back on Alex Jones. And honestly, I'm okay with that decision. I've spoken a lot about Alex Jones in my past shows, but here's why I think that made sense. He should have just been quiet because his justification on Alex Jones is basically you do anything involving children and you get no pardon from me. Well, that, as you just point out, sounds like sort of centrist censorship. Jones fell outside of the free speech parameters. Alex Jones, his speech was unlawful. There is a sliver category of speech that is unlawful that the law will penalize you for and repeatedly

singling out individuals and making up lies about them, pernicious lies like you fabricated the death of your child. There's no one in his grave. You said you held him in a body bag and it was a lie. That's unlawful speech. It's not protected. You can be sued for defamation for that kind of speech. That's what happened to Alex Jones. That's why the jury's found against him repeatedly. That's why he's in such legal trouble.

And if I ran a social media platform where I had that kind of level of irresponsibility when it comes to the law and specific targeting of individuals to the point where the individuals are getting death threats and you're ruining these grieving families lives. I would never allow him to speak on my platform either. So, Megan, let's agree on that. But irresponsibility and illegality are two different things. So let's call that case precisely by what it was. Illegality. It was not First Amendment protected speech. It's made its way through the court system. My view, though, is there are clear rules of the road for how you operate a free speech platform. No viewpoint based discrimination, period.

No government coordination on censorship, period. If you are this relates to Alex Jones case. If you're going to remove false speech, the company bears the burden of proof of demonstrating such speech was false. And yes, a court order is dispositive evidence that such evidence was false, such speech was false. And then lastly, when in doubt, give the choice back to the users. Let the users decide what they do and don't get to see by opting into censorship protocols if they do want to see them. That's what solves the dilemma here because the converse problem is actually the harder one. There's a lot of lawfully protected speech under the First Amendment, spam, porn, at least soft core porn. Much of that is protected under First Amendment doctrines, yet most people don't want that in

their Twitter experience. Well, that's what gives the user the ability to opt out of it. And by the way, that isn't a viewpoint anyway. So no viewpoint-based discrimination is the first pillar, you know, effectively takes care of that. So I think there are some clear principles. I'm not saying that's easy, but it's not as hard as you might think either. I've written about this extensively in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. That's what it means to operate a free speech platform. That is different than taking a poll and saying that, hey, do people think that Donald Trump

should be allowed or not? And then it's 60-40 or whatever the result is, and say the people have spoken. Or to make declarations that say 10% of extremists on the right and 10% of extremists on the left aren't going to be happy. And this is his quote, maybe we don't even want them. To me, I think it may be a step forward incrementally to say that you're going to bring Elon Musk centrist rules of the road to decide who gets censored or not, but do it centrally as opposed to one-sided progressive rules. But that's only a tiny step forward on principle. I think that what he really needs to do, Megan, is to have clear first principles for what

it means to operate a public town square in the private sector. There's, I think, a historic opportunity to do it. And I worry that Elon's skillset is so well suited for the operation and even building the business model and the monetization of this platform, if it's successful, that he's, if I may say it bluntly, not thinking clear-headedly enough about how to stick to his own vision of operating this as a free speech platform. But the problem is doing that well, doing that unapologetically and clearly is actually the path to business success,

because that was the thesis for the acquisition in the first place. This idea of bending the need to advertisers or to civil rights advocates, that is a one-way slippery slope. It seems like a siren song that's appealing. In the end, it's a one-way slide down. And I worry that Elon's getting buffeted by those wins a little bit. Not dissimilar to our friend Bob Chapik, who we talked about earlier, of course, in a very different context here, but there's a parallel between the two. And I think that first principles need to win here. I'm not sure that's what I actually see happening, but I do hope that Elon comes around to that because I think the business success is predicated on first having those clear rules of the road for what it means to be a free speech platform. Not quite seeing it yet.

He's in a pickle because of the advertisers that are on Twitter, right? It's like, I mean, when I launched this show, I intentionally said to my team, don't give me any weak need advertisers who are going to run at the first sign of trouble. This is one of the reasons why I love my advertisers and I am proud to work with them to sell their brands. Right. Because he's he's bought a far left platform that has been patronized by advertisers who are used to the far right or far left messages being promoted and the right messages on the right, the conservative messages being stifled and half of them are running. Now they're running because the mainstream narrative about Twitter is it's gone.

All right. The Nazis have taken over. And, you know, if you care at all about your brand, you'll get off. So I want to talk about about CBS News next. But just a quick correction. I said Ellen Pompeo before. I meant to say Ellen Page, now Elliot Page. Ellen Pompeo is in my head because she's leaving Grey's Anatomy. OK, so CBS News, CBS News, the former home of Mike Wallace. I mean, this is a guy I completely admire, not exactly as a family man, but as a professional. Ed Bradley, you know, I mean, they used to call it murderer's row in 60 minutes because they were just so fearless. They would confront the Ayatollah, confront the head

of the KKK. Nobody put fear in them. CBS News on Friday said, in light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform. It was concerned about about whether it was a safe place. CBS News. They got mocked mercilessly. And with 48 hours, oh, their concerns were satisfied, even though absolutely nothing had changed on Twitter. I can't. So, Megan, of course, that's laughable and hypocritical. But I think there's a deeper

philosophical question here and a different kind of fork in the road for Elon Musk, not the one that he talked about with his employees working hard. I'm with him on that one, but a different fork in the road. And I think that the philosophy here for me is I think fear is contagious in our culture. If the last three, four, five years have taught us anything, it is that fear is contagious with a very low activation energy. It does not take a lot to start a domino effect of fear in our corporate culture. But I think courage can be contagious too. It just has, as I frequently argue, a higher activation energy. Elon Musk has an opportunity to trigger that cascade of courage. I think everyone is looking to the left and looking to the right, to the civil

rights group, to what the other companies are doing, uncertain as to how they're supposed to treat this moment. I think Elon Musk is taking the Mark Zuckerberg playbook right now. Go on the listening tour. Ask people what really extremism means. Build the platform for the 60% of Americans who are in the middle, whatever the middle might mean. It presupposes a one-axis ideological spectrum, which I reject anyway. That's the road he's going down. I think that is doomed for failure, Megan, versus actually leading the way and saying that, you know what? We may disagree with what you have to say, but part of what it means to be American is that you have a right to express it as long as it's a viewpoint. That doesn't mean spam. That doesn't mean porn.

That doesn't mean libelous speech that has been proven as such in courts, but generally viewpoints that are protected under the first amendment, you get to say it, but you also have a right to say that I don't want to see it if I don't want to. I'm a user. I get to opt in or out of those protocols. I think that's something that if framed in the right way, I'm not sure those advertisers would quite flee in the way that they are now, which is instead going to be a steady one-way decline about a debate about whether or not something counts as centrist. That's where the Donald Trump piece comes in, where if you're going to actually take this centrist approach to censorship, some people will say that is an extremist that

you're allowing on the platform. You get back into this tug of war about what it means to be an extremist versus what it means to be a centrist. That is not what the debate about free speech is about. It should be content agnostic with respect to viewpoints that are First Amendment protected. That's just not the direction he's going, Megan. And it pains me, as you probably can tell, to watch this. you know, I'm writhing a little bit because I just don't think that I think he has the motivations in the right place. I don't know that his skill set lies in seeing this level of clarity on that normative question, even though he has a skill set that causes that makes anyone else's pale in comparison to what it actually means to run a hard charging operation. And he's going to need both. In fact, the clear vision on the content moderation question first in order to actually make this work. That's what I'm worried about.

Are you connected to him? He needs to be listening to you. He's smart. He'll recognize you've got the skills. David Sachs is helping him. Are you connected with these guys? I've connected with a number of investors in the deal and people who are close to Elon. I actually haven't spoken to Elon directly myself.

My sense, limited from the people who are in the situation is that he's focusing first on the business questions, right? He's got a revenue problem, revenue's potentially falling off the cliff. He's picking up the pieces with respect to firing employees. I'm sympathetic to all of that. And I think he's taken a much more rigorous and hands-on approach with respect to those questions at the expense of sort of punting on the content moderation question. Yeah, maybe we'll set up this council later and so on. I think that unfortunately that gets the case backwards a little bit. And so I've shared my perspectives with folks who are close to the situation, many of whom don't necessarily disagree. It's very easy to sort of call the shots from the sideline. I've got my own day job with

Strive and sympathetic to how hard it is to build an enterprise from scratch, let alone run one the scale of Twitter. But I think in this particular situation, because that was his thesis and vision for the platform, he just needs to get that right and hopefully is able to use, I think, first principles and people who can articulate those first principles to be able to not lose those advertisers. But I think counterintuitively, that might actually be the way to keep the revenue model through making a domino effect out of courage, as opposed making a domino effect out of courage as opposed to the domino effect out of fear that we're now seeing on the table. My God. I mean, if they if Twitter files for bankruptcy, if Twitter goes out of business, it would be it would be such a sad

result of Elon's effort, which was to to restore some of the free speech, free speech rights on this platform and to give people who are being stifled, like the Babylon Bee, a favorite of his, the right to say what they think on these controversial issues. So I don't do you think that's likely to happen? He said, I just feel like, is it going to go? I don't think it's likely to happen. You know, I don't know how into finding you are, Megan, or I could probably put you to sleep. If I'm putting you to sleep, we could switch topics. But yeah, there's an interesting state of the world where you wonder what is the price that Twitter trades that out of bankruptcy? Let's say it's that distressed and for a billion dollars. Elon Musk could put up a billion dollars to buy Twitter back out of bankruptcy,

debt-free, have spent $28 billion or $27 billion on the whole platform instead of $44 billion with a whole bunch of debt. Now, that would be, I think, a trick out of bankruptcy for the ages. Crazier things have happened out of bankruptcy before too. So I don't know that bankruptcy spells the end of the road. This has been a winding enough saga and Elon Musk does have a good financial engineering IQ. So I'm not saying that's what he's planning for, but just because there would be a bankruptcy filing, which itself I don't see as likely, doesn't even mean that's the end of the road. There could actually be, the way bankruptcy laws work is that there's crazy things that can happen coming out of a bankruptcy. So I joked around about that about Twitter myself. I think not a lot of people followed the mechanics of how that could actually

work. But anyway, I don't think bankruptcy necessarily spells the end of the road. I also don't think it's heading there. Okay. Yeah. And I mean, you know, I'm sure he says the core people have stayed who he needs. So, you know, the coming days will tell us. I want to get to, speaking of bankruptcies, what's happening with this FTX and sam bankman free but i want i'm going to table that for just one second because first i want to hit you up on harvard and yale law school and uc berkeley law as i mentioned you went to yale law school and they have unranked themselves in the treasured precious u.s News and World Report that does the annual college rankings and the annual law school rankings. They're at least at the law school level, no longer going to be in that publication. They're not going to participate or cooperate. And this has been

criticized as a, quote, flight from merit and transparency at these schools. And this is what the Yale law dean, Heather Gerken, has said. I'm sorry, but Heather Gerken is the person who's been after Amy Chua in the most absurd way for doing absolutely nothing other than being a great professor. I remember that name. In any event, today, she says 20% of a law school's overall ranking is median LSAT slash GRE scores and GPAs. Well, duh. You mean the academic performance of those applying to your school? Yeah, that's time immemorial and been honored by most schools. While academic scores are an important tool,

they don't always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test prep courses. Okay. We know that. I understand that. I think everyone's always known that. So you look beyond the scores. It's not the only thing you consider, but she's basically trying to set them up to come off the grid entirely because what she wants is for diversity to be the, the chief characteristic and for grades and LSATs to go out the window because they're not merit-based anymore, Vivek. I mean, what do you

make of it? Well, let's call out the elephant in the room here. It's the pending affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, which likely appears to be heading for outlawing affirmative action in college and higher education admissions. I mean, you think about this US News debate has been around for a very long time. I mean, for those of us who have been in elite academia, it's almost boring. It's hack night. It's a pretty trite debate. It's like, okay, we've done that. Do I want to fetishize US News' ranking system? I mean, this is how US News manages to run a business is by publishing this ranking thing. It's kind of silly. On the other hand, trying to leave it and make a big deal out of it is also kind of silly. It's

just a low stakes issue that kind of crops up every few years. But this has been around for decades. I think the key issue is why did it happen right now? It was a month, weeks after the Supreme Court oral arguments, which made pretty clear that I think affirmative action is on its way out in higher education in the United States. And that's for the better. If you ask me, that's going to be good for our country, good for the restoration of merit, good for the restoration of excellence, which by the way, Megan happens to be part of our national identity. So that's a longer

conversation for another day, but that's the tail wagging the dog at Yale and Harvard, because for years, affirmative action has been a cat and mouse game where the Supreme Court will say, well, you can't use explicit racial quota systems, but personality scores and subjective attributes and one among many is something that you could consider it. I mean, but personality scores and subjective attributes, and one among many is something that you could consider it. I mean, the Bakke lineage of cases, this was, you know, I think the mistake of starting a separate slippery slope that allowed the schools to stay one step ahead by using these racial quota systems, even though they weren't admitting that they were using racial quota systems. Well, now even the shadow use of racial quota systems

is actually likely, I believe, to be outlawed if you believe what the justices said in their questioning. I think Yale Law School and Harvard Law School saw the writing on the wall as well. So what are they doing? They're giving themselves maximal latitude to make sure that if they do want to continue engaging in that type of racial discrimination, and that is indeed what it is, racial discrimination, that they're able to do it in the maximally non-transparent manner by getting themselves off the US News World Report rankings, by detethering themselves from test scores and GPAs and numerical objective metrics. That's really the essence of what's going on here. But that doesn't exempt them from the Supreme Court ruling.

No, it just allows them to unlawfully sidestep it, which is, I think, what is effectively the, well, we don't know what the Supreme Court ruling is going to be for that matter too, right? I think if the Supreme Court comes out with one of these ham-handed three-part tests, that's going to give these schools plenty of latitude. That's not real jurisprudence, that's cop-out jurisprudence, but that's exactly what might fit like a glove, the ability of these schools to be able to create non-numerical standards. So I would be very disappointed in the Supreme Court if that's what came out as another three-part test or equivalent of some sort of made-up judicial doctrine to deal with something that's illegal, both under existing law and even under the

Constitution. But nonetheless, yeah, that's what they're preparing for. That's what we have in religious freedom cases, and it's been an absolute jurisprudential nightmare to try to follow and apply and predict the law. You know, the thing about the affirmative action cases up at the Supreme Court is right now it's legal for these colleges and advanced schools to consider race as a factor in the admissions process, as a factor. So if the Supreme, there's a very good potential of the Supreme Court that is going to say no longer, it cannot be considered at all. That is not something you can allow somebody in on the basis of or deny somebody in on the basis of race.

It's written right there in the Constitution. But, you know, there's going to be ways around it, of course, because let's say they get rid of the boxes on the application where you list your race. There's nothing to stop any applicant from saying, oh, you know, the clubs I was in, well, I volunteered for the NAACP, you know, and I was, I spent my weekends at BLM and I, you know, was in whatever the student affinity group is called, the DEI group, but my respective, like, of course, and these schools will continue to consider it because how could they ever let it go, Vivek? How could they ever say goodbye to it?

Well, I think one of the things they're betting on now is just random chance, right? Stochasticity of, you know, if you take the test scores and the GPAs out of it, at least we're more likely to end with a visually melanin content diverse class. If we've taken those metrics out, maybe we can't explicitly target on the base of race,

but at least we can be random in terms of who we let in. And randomness is likely to yield a greater, more visually diverse class than non-randomness. I think there was a study by Espen Shade, I think it was probably the most rigorous study that was done in the last 10 years, that found, I think it was in the top 10 colleges, there was a difference of over a staggering 400 points on the SAT between the scores required of an Asian American to get in versus the scores required of a black American to get in versus the scores required of a black American to get in. Keep in mind, this is a 1600 point scale where you literally cannot score lower than 400. I mean, this is the equivalent, Megan, if this were

basketball we were talking about, if you were black, you'd have to make a half court shot. And if you're an Asian, you get a ladder that takes you right up to the hoop to do a slam dunk. That is the equivalent of how malign I think these systems have been in anti-Asian discrimination and to a lesser but real degree, anti-white discrimination as well. But I think what they're doing is they're saying that if we can, you know, maybe we can't actually use that racial quota system anymore, but let's just say we turn into a random lottery system where we are not able to take into meritocratic account meritocratic factors at all, or at least in a much more dilute manner, at least we're going to be more likely to

achieve the higher priority goal of achieving visual diversity, even if merit and excellence become a notable second or third priority instead. So that's what's going on with these affirmative action cases. As you well know, that's only half the battle. Then they're going to get into the law school. And then you know what happens after that? Work and grades and assessments against your peers. And if you are 400 points behind the rest of your peers on your SAT or LSAT score in this case that we kicked it off discussing, it's going to reflect. And you know what happens when you bomb your first year of law school? You drop out. That's what happens. You fail out. If you're not on a law review, if you're not whatever, all these things determine whether you get a job. So it's like, how are you really setting these folks up for success? Why not let them align

with the natural place they belong? In my case, it was Albany Law School. It was fine. You know what? I wound up at Jones Day, which is one of the best law firms in the country. Everybody around me was from Harvard and Yale, and I did just fine. But I had a different way in and I had a different skill set. And I didn't have a miserable law school experience where everyone around me was smarter and doing better on the test. And I felt like crap about my performance to the contrary. You make a great point, Megan, which is that if affirmative action actually worked to achieve its own objectives, you would not need to use it for the exact same groups to get into boarding school, who then are the exact same groups who needed to get into college, who are then the exact same

groups who needed to get into law school, who are then the exact same groups who needed to get into the workforce. You wouldn't need the double or quintuple counting if it was actually working. And the problem is, it is also a disservice to the members of those minority groups who actually do achieve their positions on the basis of those minority groups who actually do achieve their positions on the basis of merit. Having gone to Harvard, having gone to Yale, I can tell you some of my smartest classmates in several of my disciplines from science to law were indeed black. They were indeed Hispanic. They were indeed multiracial of many different qualities. But the problem I think is particularly unfair to people who actually earned their positions

on the basis of merit, be it a pilot sitting in the cockpit, be it a lawyer arguing a case in the courtroom, where they lose the right to be judged, not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. They lose their ability to be judged on the content of their skills. Now, what does that do? First order, it spawns a wave of the anti-white, anti-Asian racism. What does that do? That's what affirmative action is in the first instance, is anti-white and anti-Asian racism. But it spawns this inevitable wave of then anti-black racism in response when you're denied something by someone else who takes your spot, especially because of the color of their skin, that fosters grievance. And I think that that's actually part of what creates the new wave of racism that wouldn't have existed but for affirmative action that over the course of the next four

decades may actually recreate the very problem that this cursed system was designed to solve in the first place. And I hope that we don't see that Ferris wheel go one more round again. It's in the Supreme Court's power to put it to an end, not with a ham-handed three-part test or something vague that's a cop-out, but with a clear statement that the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. To quote John Roberts, who will be one of the justices deciding this case. Yep. I was actually at that oral argument as a young reporter listening to that exact moment at oral argument, and I expect that the chief justice to finally have his say in the majority opinion on this, uh, soon. I hope so. Great, great discussion. Uh, stand by Vivek. Cause I want to get to this, this guy SBF and what's happening over there and what the guy who took over the company, he's the guy who sort of sees the company through the bankruptcy proceedings. He did it for Enron. Now he's doing it at FTX.

What he found, he looked under the hood and issued a statement telling us what he found. She got 11 years. Wow. Wow. I mean, I realize the prosecution was recommending 15. The third party independent magistrate was recommending or consultant was recommending nine. Her lawyers wanted 18 months and she got 11. So this judge, he did not go easy on her. And the the the Twitter mob, I hate to agree with the Twitter mob, but they're angry about the pregnancy, suggesting she did that. She she intentionally got. Think about it, Vic. You know that you're likely to go to prison. You know, the odds of you getting 18 months or being on house arrest are nil. No one's going to get that who committed these crimes and got convicted of them. I just don't understand. You get pregnant anyway. And I understand the theory that she did that for sympathy. She did it intentionally on the on the gamble that the judge

would say, I won't throw the book at you for the sake of your child. Now that child's going to be without its mother for the first 11 years of his or her life. I, too, feel angry about it. I don't want to presume the motives, but the whole situation is a disaster. So, look, I can't get in her head. I can't tell you what her psychology is, Megan. I know what I've seen in the documentaries and read in the book about her bad blood. I'll say this, though. I think the philosophical question that's interesting at the heart of this is how much of a burden from a deterrence perspective she should bear in this one case to send this signal to all the other future would be fraudulent entrepreneurs that they should not take that road versus just restitution for the scope of her wrong here.

And I think it's hard to argue what's baked into that sentencing is a little bit, if not more than a little bit, at least a little bit of the former, of the idea that, okay, here's how you wronged your own investors. And by the way, I'm just offering a contrarian perspective here, Megan, because I don't disagree with a lot of what you said and what's been said on Twitter by others. But just to sort of add a little bit of nuance to this conversation, I think if we're looking at that sentencing, there is more baked into those 11 years than to say that that is exactly what someone would have suffered for defrauding a sophisticated group of presumably accredited investors, multimillionaire type investors in a private company, to say that this was also about sending

a societal signal. And that's always the puzzle at the heart of criminal law is how much of a role the judge ought to play in sending that signal to actors in the future versus how much of a role that judge ought to play in settling the merits of that particular injustice from the people who are aggrieved in that case. And what I see in the 11-year outcome is maybe she was game playing in terms of getting pregnant, trying to win sympathy points. Clearly, that didn't work. But I think the essence of the struggle here was this judge made, it appears to me, a decision to say that the deterrent effect of sending that signal was worth it. And this is the stuff you study in criminal law in law school. You brought up that I went to law school. You did too. These are tough

questions. And I am at least cautious on the use of criminal law to pick one person to hang as a sort of a figure that you nail to the cross to bear other people's been punished. And I hope that something like this doesn't happen again. We'll talk about SBF. Of course it does. It's got Sam Bankman Freed, for those of you listening at home, with a pregnant belly, like an emoji with a pregnant belly and Sam Bankman Freed's head on the top, because people are saying this is what he's going to be doing to engender sympathy in his case. He's also going to try the pregnancy move. It's a joke. In any event, he's in a whole lot of trouble now. And his ex girlfriend who was running Alameda, the hedge fund that appears to have lost the money to begin with, that he then covered from his crypto exchange, is whereabouts unknown. We don't know where this woman is, but she's said to be considering going to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States. So that doesn't exactly scream I'm innocent.

By the way, turns out she is good at math, even if she didn't appear to use it here. I guess she was majoring in math at Stanford. So she did take a math class after at some point. In any event, it wasn't reflected in her work product from what I read. So the interim CEO is a guy named John Ray III. He's the guy who helped Enron through its Chapter 11 case. And he filed a document in the bankruptcy chapter, which is called the First Day Declaration, where you kind of explain what happened. Quote, never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls from compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad. They're based in the Bahamas to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, potentially compromised. He says this situation is unprecedented.

Then he goes on to say SBF, the guy running it, Sam Banker and Freed, no longer speaks for this company, saying that he is continuing to make erratic and misleading public statements and that numerous balance sheets created under SBF's watch, quote, are not to be trusted. Or wait, that's not a quote, but he's saying that they are not to be trusted. So this is quite the indictment against this guy saying, I opened up the hood and it was an absolute bloodbath of a nightmare from an NC-17 movie that you would never show a minor. I mean, this is quite an indictment. Yes, I think it is, Megan. I mean, just to sort of call a spade a spade at the outset, I just, in fairness, have to say that that is basically what any newly appointed CEO in a messy bankruptcy situation comes in and says. That's the thing you want. He did Enron. It's his responsibility now to deal with this.

The situation is unprecedented, and he did Enron. He went even further. So it's less his statement. I'm just judging the facts on their own merits. This is wild stuff. Now, the question on SBF's case, I think the moral of the story, and I worry, I can see right now we're not learning the moral of the story, is that anytime you have a captain of industry, and that is what SBF was, that is, you know, consumers and the public need to start raising their eyebrows and asking questions. The kind of regulation he was advocating for was a catch-all form of regulation that included both centralized exchanges, like the one that he operated,

as well as decentralized exchanges, which run according to totally different kinds of technological principles. And the key distinction, this is a little technical, Megan, but in a centralized exchange, someone else takes custody of your assets. And so whether that's a crypto exchange or whether it's just an exchange for old school stocks and bonds, that means that someone can steal your assets. That's exactly what SBF did here. That's what happened in the MF Global disaster about a decade ago as well. But the problem that we're seeing, I predict we're going to see, we're already seeing early signs of it, is in the next few months, we're going to see calls for regulation that actually mirror what SBF himself was calling for, catch all regulations. Ironically, the very kinds of regulations that might make decentralized exchanges,

the kind that he was competing against and trying to make less competitive, actually less competitive. And so I think that the moral of the story is anytime you have a self-interested actor wearing the veneer of goody two shoes, wanting to wear the veneer of virtue, there's a good chance that they're just acting out their self-interest. And that is what he did with his pro-regulatory lobbying. That is what he did with his donations to the Democratic Party. That is what he did with his ESG-isms, which he's now even admitting were woke shibboleths that he said to get people to like him. Sadly, it worked. But as a general investing public and just general consumers, we need to wake up to the reality

that it's more often than not, the guys who cultivate the good guy image. Take Winterkorn, who is actually Volkswagen's CEO, winning ESG awards before they found that Volkswagen was tampering with their emissions monitors. We learned this lesson time and again, and yet we don't actually act on the lessons that we learn. I hope this fraud was of such a big scale and so notable that we might actually learn the lesson this time around. Well, yes, because I read your tweet last week, which I thought was so right on. Sam Bankman Freed's ESG-friendly smokescreen wasn't just a matter of hypocrisy. It was an essential element of the fraud. That's exactly it.

When people are running around talking about this altruism and they're going to give all the money away and they're saying they're checking all the right woke boxes or DEI boxes. It's a red flag. It's something to be alarmed about. It's not just hypocritical. exactly. It is how the game works. You pretend like you care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more profit and power. I mean, this was the stuff of Woke Inc. I wrote a book about it a little over a year ago. I did not expect to have to write a sequel. SBF actually provides the telltale story of a sequel.

But this pattern repeats itself where the problem with virtue signaling is that at some point signaling your virtue becomes more important than the act of actually being virtuous. And it would not, I would argue, Megan, that it would not have gotten to this point. People would not have vested SBF with the trust and FTX with the trust that they did if it were not for the veneer of morality, the aura, the patina of morality that he happened to cultivate. Let that be a lesson that we should just want business leaders who are greedy, self-interested, money-grubbing actors to be greedy, self-interested, money-grubbing actors so that we can see it clearly and trust them or not accordingly, as opposed to the tripwire in the system.

It's like sort of tampering with the smoke detector in the airplane lavatory, as I was traveling last week. And so you hear about this. It sort of is a tripwire in the system that prevents the otherwise smoke detector from going off in consumers' minds to say that this isn't someone that I'm going to unquestioningly trust. I hope that this lesson at least has a positive impact on the future. Yeah. So, so much for Fortune calling him the next Warren Buffett, a cover they're now defending, saying, oh, we were excited to be there when he was, you know, at his height. You know what? A little bit more kicking of the tires would have been appreciated. The writer's now saying, well, I asked for documents, but I guess I should have insisted on them. Yeah, you think? Finally, before I let you

go, MBS, this is the Saudi crown prince. He they're being sued. The Saudis are being sued by the widow or that she was the fiance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And he had written for The Washington Post. He'd been critical of of MBS. And now she's suing. And the Biden administration has weighed in saying, you know what? The Saudi crown prince has immunity and really shouldn't be subjected to this. And The Washington Post and several others are attacking the statement by the Biden administration, saying this is way out of whack. This is this is he's granting a license to kill to one of the world's most egregious human rights abusers, says The Washington Post. So one of the those involved in the case said not even Trump did this to us. What do you make of it? So I disagree with Biden's move. This is not a partisan question, though, Megan. Actually, Tom Cotton actually was also saying that he believes

that Biden actually made the right decision because it would have been out of line with precedent to deny sovereign immunity in this case. But it's out of whack, so to speak, with Biden's own stated agenda. When he was running for president, he said that he wanted to turn MBS and Saudi Arabia into a pariah. And the real elephant in the room here is the circumstances in energy markets have changed, where Biden, the leader of the free world, will go hat in hand to beg every foreign dictator to produce more oil while refusing to make it easier for domestic producers to do it right here at home. He has abased himself, begging MBS to do it, ultimately actually getting shunned. That's a slap in the face not once but twice, yet still now licking his feet when in fact, President Biden should be at least feigning to play an iota of hardball with MBS.

Instead, he's just buckling at his knees. And the lesson in all of this, Megan, is you can't actually project strength abroad when you are economically and culturally weak at home. That's exactly the circumstance that Biden has created with respect to the US energy situation, the regulations impairing the US energy sector, the regulations impairing the U.S. energy sector, the refusal to allow refinery projects to proceed, land leases to proceed, increasing his reliance on foreign actors, foreign autocrats like MBS.

That's why he's licking his feet. And I think it's sorry to see the leader of the free world obeys himself in this way, because in a certain sense, he represents all of us when he obeys himself. Vivek Ramaswamy, always a pleasure. Thank you, sir. And hope to talk to you again soon. Don't go away. We will be right back with an exclusive. You'll see only here. You may know the story of the NBA's vaccine push as it relates to Kyrie

Irving or Jonathan Isaac, but you likely have not heard this story before. Three former NBA officials are suing the league for rejecting their requests for religious exemptions over the COVID vaccine mandate. Ken Maurer was one of the longest serving referees in the NBA. Jason Phillips spent 19 years as a ref for the NBA before he was terminated from his position as vice president of referee operations earlier this year. They have now filed a lawsuit against the NBA and are speaking out with us for their first long-form interview. Welcome to the show, Kenny and Jason. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Megan. Thanks for having us, Megan. No, the pleasure's all mine. I'm sorry about the circumstances. The more I read about your case,

the angrier I got. So let's start at the beginning so that we can get the audience up to speed on exactly how this unfolded. So, Kenny, as I understand it, you're a referee with the NBA for 35 years. Well, it would have been about 37 now, Megan, but you're right. You're right on. Wow. So you had a good relationship.

I imagine I don't really know much about professional sports, but my team tells me you're one of the refs everybody knows. Like people would, you became sort of a celebrity. People know you, you're beloved. And had you gotten along with the people inside the organization? Everything was fine? Well, up until recently, I think so. I mean, again, you have your ups and downs when you've been doing it, you know, almost 40 years, but I've always had great respect for the NBA. I love the game of basketball. I love the profession I'm in or have been in. You know, a lot of the people I work with were great people, coaches, you know, GMs, players, you know, there's good and bad with every aspect of every profession, but I really enjoyed it. And just made me wonder, Megan, you know, how much didn't I know?

What, you know, was I naive in my almost 40 years? Was a lot of what I'm thinking and feeling now, was it in front of me? And I just never noticed it. I don't know. There's so much that's gone around in my head over the last year and a half that I just, you know, I'll never accept it. But I mean, I just don't think it has to be. And I'm still trying to figure out in my head just what's precipitating. Why is the NBA doing what they're a company of equality and a company of Black Lives Matter and social justice and fair play and freedom of speech and all that. And, well, let's just say I'm questioning all of that now because I believe freedom to be able to preach or be able to take part in whatever religion you want.

I don't care if you're Presbyterian, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu. It doesn't make any Jewish. I believe I respect all types of religions. And I, I believe that everybody should be allowed to take part in, you know, in their own religion. And, um, so I'm wondering just where, why the NBA is doing what they're doing, Megan. And it's, um, I understand that I said, I. And it's- I understand that. It's heart-wrenching. I've said it for a while now.

I said it on the show last week. As somebody who was also canceled, I do believe that cancel culture, though it's painful to go through, has a way of separating people from organizations that they ought to be separated from. You know, like it wasn't meant to be and their colors are exposed and you start to understand

the kind of people that you were working with. So there is that somewhat silver lining. But you raise an interesting point right there when you talk about how, OK, so you can you can put Black Lives Matter. You've got to sit in front of people who don't even share your religion and try to persuade them that you're a true believer. I swear I'm a real Catholic. I really do object to abortion. It affects my feelings about these vaccines, the absurdity of them making you prove it. You know, just how good a Catholic are you? How deep does your objection run? It's it's there's something indignant about it. It's deeply offensive that they make you jump through those hoops to try to get an exemption. Well, you're right. I'll have Jason weigh into it. First of all, it's something that should be, it's very private. Your religion is very private. My wife and I were talking the other day. I shouldn't have to explain why I've been a Christian and a Catholic since I was baptized 60 some years ago. I shouldn't have to explain that. And I don't get mad very often anymore. I mean, like I said, I have good friends like Jason and Mark and our attorney and a lot of other

people that are, there's many people, Megan, that feel the way we do. There's millions of people that feel the way we do. They just don't have the, they aren't lucky enough to be, you know, on a platform like you're giving us right now. And so, but it's a private thing. It's a, how dare they? I don't have to explain my religion to anybody. I don't have to. But yet they they think they could interview us for 30 minutes and then they can. And it was a Jewish lawyer that interviewed me. I mean, I give you like a Christian person who knows the faith. Yeah. Right. The absurdity like down on down the line. So we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let me take a step back so the audience knows how we got to the point where you're talking about exemptions.

So both of you objected to the vaccine mandate. And just to be clear, Jason, the COVID hit spring of 2020. Then we go into the 2020 to 2021 season. And we didn't even have the vaccine for the first part of that season. So that year, what was happening on the courts? Was there any sort of, there couldn't have been a vaccine mandate for most of that? No, Megan. So, you know, I'm a little bit different from Kenny, as you stated just a moment ago. In the fall of 2019, I actually retired from refereeing on the court after game five of the finals in 2019 in June. And then later that year, took over the day-to-day operations of the Replay Center based in New Jersey, right there in Secaucus. And yeah, so we started the 2019-2020 season. Then, as everyone knows, in March of 2020, the league shut down because there was a positive test.

And, you know, that's kind of when everything started shutting down. Right. So we shut down for a couple of months. We came back in the bubble down in Florida in July. And yes, for the rest of that season, you know, everybody else, for the most part, as far as I know, for the NBA, worked from home. You had the games going on down in the bubble. But as for me and my team, we had to go into the office every day because of the technology that was involved to get replay access still for these games. We had to go in. And so, as you stated, this was pre-vaccine and we were testing every four days, I believe it was. You had to test every four days. We would come into the office

early in an isolated room. They would tickle my brain. I'd go back in the room, wait for about 45 minutes for the result. And then they would either send you home if you tested positive, or they would allow you to go into work. And so Megan, for two seasons, both the 2021, or excuse me, the 1920 and the 2021 season, that me, the 2021 season that ended in July of 2021, we were made aware basically via email that if you were not vaccinated by, I believe the date was September 13th or September 15th of that year, you were no longer going to be allowed in the building. And that was how I became aware of it. And that is what led me, you know, my wife and I became very prayerful about it. We have been prayerful about it, about COVID in general, from the time that it hit. Megan, as you know, very well, kind of being at the epicenter of COVID,

being in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, there was a lot of stuff going on, right? And so we were praying for the health and safety of our friends, of our family, of everyone. And then when this mandate came out, of course, we became very prayerful of that and were just led to believe through our prayer and our readings that that that was not the right thing to do. And that's what led me to submitting my religious exemption request. OK, so before we get to that, the just so people know what happened was there was a revised collective bargaining agreement for the 2021, 2022 season and the NBA and the NBA referee union voted to mandate the vaccine. So your union sold you out. I mean, your union said we're pro mandate. Yeah. I'll let, I'll let Ken speak on that. He was still a member of that union, and I was a member of management by that time. Yeah, you moved up to management. Yeah, what about that,

Kenny? Do you feel like the union sold you out? Well, you're right. Absolutely. I was hoping you'd give me a chance to speak on that. Yes, I mean, I think it's safe to say our executive board is just an extension of the NBA. I'm not privy to many unions. I mean, I believe in union. I believe in our union as a whole for years. Jason was part of it, and we were on the executive board together, and we believed in trying to do what was best for the group. Well, the absurdity of our executive board is that we as a group never even took a vote

on whether or not we were in favor of a mandate. There was like 73 referees on the staff. That summer of 21 that Jason referred to before the 21-22 season, all of a sudden there was a mandate in the collective bargaining agreement. Either you vote in the mandate, which was in the collective bargaining agreement, or there's no collective bargaining agreement. You don't work. So there were several referees, Megan, almost 20 that voted the contract down. And, you know, head of the executive board and the attorneys will tell you that, oh, yes, we all wanted this. And this was something that we all agreed to. That's not true. None of that's true. And again, the NBA executive board, the five members and the two referees just basically do whatever the NBA wants

them to do. That's it. They're an extension of the NBA. And our referees are weak. Our referees follow what the executive board says, thinking that the executive board is acting in their best interest. And I, for one, never believed they were. I don't believe anybody. I would never vote in a contract where any member of our staff was terminated as a result of a contract. Never. I never have. I never will. So needless to say, I don't speak to too many people in the union anymore because the 58 or 60 people that voted in the contract thought it was fine. Let's just vote in the mandate. And if somebody loses their job as a result, so what? That's when they offered us the religions and medical exemptions that we're going to get to next, I'm sure. But no, I don't have any respect or time for the union. I don't have any respect or time for the attorneys that represent our executive board because they're just going to

do what's best for the NBA. They set up an arbitration committee that I'll get to. It's just, you know, what's best for the NBA. And again, a lot of the referees were not in favor of this, but we'll get into down the road why they aren't doing what I'm doing. Well, but the absurdity of it is, I mean, the real absurdity is the players did not have a mandate. So what is the point? I came back to the executive board.

And again, I don't talk to them. I don't talk to them anymore. Not one of them has ever reached out to me in the last year while I've been going through. It's been a little bit of a difficult year. That just shows you what they think. But anyway, yeah, I mean, all they would have had to do, in my opinion, is, well, the NFL players aren't mandated. The NFL referees aren't mandated. Major League Baseball players aren't mandated. The NFL referees aren't mandated. Major League Baseball players aren't mandated. Major League referees aren't mandated. So NBA

players aren't mandated. All they would add to it is, no, are the players mandated? Sorry, our guys, we're not going to do it. Boom. What were they going to do, Megan, a week before the season started, if all the referees said, no, we're not going to do the mandate. You don't like it. Get your own. What were they going to do? Nothing. But our executive board wanted to do what was best for the NBA. So they forwarded on and, you know, let's move ahead here. Let's get this done for the NBA. And they basically forced the referees to vote in the contract with the mandate in it. Again, there were 17 that voted it down. And then, but again,

the players, the players, Megan, never have been mandated. They've got a stronger union than we do. Never been mandated to take the vaccine. They weren't mandated

2021-22. They weren't mandated this year. And the referee's contract this year does not mandate a referee to take the vaccine. But they said that Bauer, Ayat, and Phillips have to take it in order to come back i mean again that's the great that's i mean that's

we're truly in crazy town now like that so the current we didn't have the max the vaccine mandate 2021 because we didn't have the vaccine and then the later part of the season we did but they didn't yet implement it then 21 to 20 then Then came 21 to 22. And that's when you had the vax mandate. You wouldn't take it. You got suspended. Both of you got suspended. Then we get to this season.

They take away the mandate altogether. And meanwhile, anybody who got the vaccine back when it was mandated, that vaccine is no longer good. You have to get the booster. You're like that vaccine is no longer good. So it's totally irrelevant. So now they're saying you don't have to get it. None of these other guys has to get the booster. You're like, that vaccine is no longer good. So it's totally irrelevant. So now they're saying, you don't have to get it. None of these other guys has to get the booster. Even though their old vaccine is dead, expired and no longer good. Don't have to get the booster. You don't do anything. But those guys, we're going to punish them. If they want to come back,

they have to get a vaccine. What? And OK, so wait. So so before we get to that, back to the players, do you think when I hear the story, to me, this is like classist. It feels like a class discrimination thing to say all of the guys who are going to be running around on the court making millions of dollars. They can rub, run into each other, breathe on each other, rub body fluids on one another. But the one guy standing over there who has the least contact with the players, he's got to get it. Why? Because he's a surf and we can control him.

These big star players who make millions, we got to cater to them. I mean, to me, there's like a class element here. Am I wrong? Well, you can be our assistant attorney with Sheldon anytime you want a job because you got it. Because you said it better than anybody. I mean, I don't think Jason could say it any better and I know I can't. Yeah, they're going to spit on each other and sweat on each other and bleed on each other

and they're going to rub elbows and they're going to fight and they're going to hum a gun. But the three referees that are sitting over there, the whistle, the goal, peep, we got to get it back. We're mandated. It's absolutely absurd. I feel it's discrimination. I know my our attorney feels that way. And and again, you know, we're going to get to the vaccine. This isn't about the vaccine with Jason and I. We're not about the vaccine. We're I'm if you want to get the vaccine, Megan, go get it. I respect whatever wishes people when it comes time to their body. Go ahead and do it. But we didn't choose to. And they offered us a religious're going to see reason before we get there. But it was the same thing you're going through where they say they're going to give a religious exemption potentially or a medical exemption potentially,

but they don't. The hoops you have, the only medical exemption that they'll give at our school is if you had a negative reaction to the first shot, but you will be getting a shot of the COVID vaccine in your arm. All right. Only then. Oh, great. So I have a lifelong blood clotting problem. Not good enough. We have to make sure you have problem clotting after this shot. That's absurd. And on the religious exemption, I know personally of people who there was one one was on the cover of Catholic magazine and they were like, no. OK, because Catholics, they tend to be pro-life and they tend not to be in favor of anything having to do with stem cells gotten from aborted babies. And this is where you guys come in on your objections. I know you're Baptist, Jason, but similar in everything I just said. And so you you are subjected to the indignity of having to sit across from two lawyers who were not Baptists, who cross-examine

you without representation on your part. You don't have a lawyer there. You don't have somebody who knows what they know in terms of like, you're just trying to be honest and answer the questions. And they make you try to prove just how faithful you are. Right. Is that basically what happened? That's exactly what happened, Megan. I mean, you know, the conversation started off with, hey, these questions are going to be very personal in nature. So, I mean, what do you expect a comment earlier, right? That, um, there is, there is something about being where you are now, right? And it was the meaning for, for lack of a better word, the, the interview, if that's what you want to call it process, process, and having to explain why I believe what I believe and getting questioned about, well, you know, leaders in your religion have said that it's okay to take this vaccine.

And, you know, Megan, my belief, what I've always been taught, what I've always believed, is that's why it is called a personal relationship with God. It's because it's between you and God. And I am not here to judge anybody else or anybody else's decisions. If you ask me my opinion and what I believe the Bible says, I will offer that opinion. But at the end of the day, that's your decision to make. And so, you know, for the first time in my life, I had to justify, I guess, what my beliefs are. And I will say this, that, you know, the Bible says God's plans are not our plans, right? And His ways are not our ways. So I just want to be, tell you that I agree with you of your previous statement, that God takes us down paths that we

don't know we're going down sometimes, right? As you probably well know. But so thankful. And I truly believe that we are right here at this moment, at this juncture, talking to you in our lives where we are for a reason. And to me, that is to shed some light. You know, we're called to be a light. Right. And I think that's why we're here now. I'm glad you said that. I agree with you 100%. And you guys are in a position now, where you can fight for a lot of people who didn't know what to do when this kind of thing hit, whether it was in the NBA or elsewhere. And I'm sure there's a lot of refs on that list who are behind you and are angry that they were forced to take the vaccine in order to keep their jobs.

So you guys are heroes to those people. On the subject of the exemption, Jason, I understand both of you had to go back to your minister, to your church, and actually get like a letter verifying that this is so offensive, that your religious belief is genuine. Like, I can't imagine having to go to my priest and say, will you please write a letter that my religious beliefs are genuine? What do you do? Like, how do you figure that out? I'm here every Sunday. Well, what does that tell you that I really believe? Maybe I'm just here for my kids. Maybe I'm just here because I like, you know, getting out of the house on Sundays you have no idea how does he know right it's like and as you point out the leader of my church to the current Pope there's a lot of disagreements between that Pope and most Catholics he does not speak for his

entire flock the relationship is with God it's with Jesus it's not with Pope Francis it's not with even your particular priest in the Baptist Church. But you still had to go and humble yourself in a way to try to get this third party to say your religious beliefs are legit. What was that like for you? You know, Megan, it's funny. I actually had to submit to religious exemption, so to speak, because when I was first notified via email from the HR department, they provided a link that you can click on and submit your request. Right. So I did that radio silence. I hear nothing back. So I follow up with the HR department and said, hey, we're drawing close to this date. Do I need to do anything else? No, you're good. It's all good, right? Well, then I received notification that it had been,

I guess, quasi denied because I received another email saying, hey, we noticed you haven't updated your vaccine status to vaccinated yet. And you've got X amount of days before your security card doesn't work anymore. So at that point, I submitted a formal religious exemption through my attorney. And that's when we had to get the pastoral letter to help support because obviously what I did originally was not good enough. And, you know, Megan, luckily, I knew the beliefs of my pastor up front. We have a very pro-life group of ministers at our church. And, you know, in as so much as they've adopted children. Right. Um, and, and so I, I, I didn't have as much problem probably with that as, as probably many, many others would have had, uh, but so thankful for the support. And, and again, in, in my beliefs, um, you know, life begins at conception, right? And so that is my belief. And luckily,

I did have the ability to get that support from my pastor to then submit. But, you know, obviously, it wasn't good enough. So, Kenny, they look at you and basically want you to be a Jehovah's Witness. That's kind of the only way to get this religious exemption. If you're willing to take any modern medicine, they see you as not able to raise a religious exemption from what I read. And even from our own experience, they kind of want to make you saying I have an objection to the fact that the COVID vaccines were tested using stem cells from aborted fetuses. They're like, well, there's no aborted fetus cells in the vaccines. We know that. Okay. Even accepting that. They admit that the testing process involved stem cells from

aborted fetuses. They admit that. So that's a real problem for some Catholics. And it's not a problem for others, but for some it is. And yet they continue trying to question you in your meeting, Kenny, as I understand it, as if you're a Jehovah's Witness. And any admission that you've taken any sort of drug, any prescription drug, any over-the-counter drug is ballgame for you. Because as I read their statements, they asked you if you had taken, they asked you about your medical history. I mean, it's amazing. You could have had so much fun with them. You could have been like, well, after I solved the syphilis and then the gonorrhea, it could be so fun. Okay, but anyway. So they want to go through your medical history in detail. They quote, extracted an admission, they feel, that you took hydroxychloroquine and ivermect drugs was a gotcha moment because in their view, their use logically conflicts with your state of belief that vaccination pollutes the human body. You see, because what they say is that it's you do not, in fact, believe solely in divine healing and in the healing abilities of the human body. So,

aha, you can no longer object to the use of the stem cell without all that. So what did you make of that whole thing? Well, there's a couple of things in the interview, Megan, that were interesting. First of all, I recorded the whole interview, so I still have it. That's the one, that's the wonderful thing. Back to one thing I'd like to cover a little bit on how you were talking to Jason about is, again, I was interviewed by a Jewish attorney. Attorney I've known, he's been in the league almost as long as I have. And so I knew some questions were coming because other people had been interviewed before I was. And so we had talked and we knew some of the questions that were coming. And it was just, you're right, we knew they were all I got you moments. They're

going to try to find whatever they could to find fault, to come up with whatever they could. So one of my conversations with Neil Cern was his name. I can't wait till he's deposed. I can't wait to listen to him on the stand because we'll have our day with him. We'll be able to interrogate him like he interrogated Jason and I. It was interesting because I said to him, I said, Jason, I said, Neil, are you Jewish? He said, yes, I am. I said, okay, have you ever been to Krakow? Have you ever been to Auschwitz? No, never been to Europe. So you do know that six million of your Jewish compatriots were killed in World War II by the Nazis. Well, he said, yeah, I know that, Maul,

I know that. I said, well, you were aware that the Pope in 1944 turned his back, knowing very well what happened with your Jewish people, and basically turned his back. Not one church in Italy was even bombed. Are you aware of that? There was silence. He wouldn't even give me an answer. I said, so if you're going to ask me what my take is on the Pope's current stance,

I didn't agree with the Pope back in 1944. I wasn't alive then but i did i wouldn't have agreed with him then would you have no no you wouldn't you wouldn't give a statement i said how about in the 1980s when all the children were were molested by priests in the 1980s by the cat now i love i i'm a belief i i believe in the catholic religion but you're right as you said earlier megan i don't believe in a lot of what this pope has said or some of what the clergy has said in the past so i said said, in the 1980s, when all the priests were, you know, they were all, it was proven what they had done to these, you know, these, these little,

little children, little kids, and yet not one of them was, was persecuted by the, you know, not one of them were charged by the, by the pope. I said, Neil, I said, do you agree with that? Am I supposed to agree with the Pope's stance on that? I said, it's a personal choice. Your religion is a personal choice. I shouldn't have to defend my love and my faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. I shouldn't have to defend that. Who are you, NBA, to have to defend, to make us defend that?

So you're right, Megan. It was horrible, and I didn't like it, but we had to do it. There was a person from HR there. And then as far as the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, I mean, again, hydroxychloroquine, Megan and ivermectin don't have abortive fetal cells or mRNA in it. I don't know if you're aware of that, but they don't. I can give you literature and send you documents. I have more, I have a file that's eight inches thick on anything you want to know. But anyway, so, so he was trying to ask me these questions. And again, what I should have just said was, this isn't about the vaccine.

This isn't about what I feel about the vaccine, good or bad or whatever. This is about my faith in God. My religious image is based on a board of fetal cells and mRNA, which is in, well, it's in both the Pfizer and the Moderna. And I don't believe the mRNA is in the J&J. But the testing of abortive fetal cells is. So I said, that's why I based my religious exemption. Why are you trying to poke holes in me for reasons, you know, maybe it was because I filed a medical exemption too. I had already had COVID.

So I had, you know, natural immunity. And, but again, you know, my crux and my whole, what I'm fighting is religious freedom and religious faith, freedom in general, but religious freedom and that everybody, Megan, and I know where you stand and I'm proud of you. I'm proud of so many people in this country that feel the exact same way that we're just,

you know, thrown on the streets, don't have a job. How about the 10,000 Air Force guys who all followed religious exemption? They were all denied. How can 10,000 people be denied a religious exemption? How can every person in the NBA denied a religious exemption? You mean nobody in the NBA has any faith? It's ridiculous. Is it true, Kenny, that they actually asked you about how you reconcile the risk of COVID, the risk it poses to unvaccinated children

with your concern about the sanctity of life? I mean, yes, yes, yes. He did ask me that question. That is total ignorance. Exactly ignorance exactly i mean i didn't really know at the time megan how to even answer the question it was so ridiculous and absurd but by that time in the interview it was so obvious as i'm sure jason you know figured out and mark and everybody else again there was eight or nine other referees who followed those exemptions they all were denied um i don't think anybody in the entire NBA family was granted a religious medical exemption. So, I mean, by that time, it was just ridiculous. And then he got into the civil liberties, too.

I mean, you know, religious freedom, religious liberties, that's a form of civil liberty, religious freedom. And, again, it comes back to the same thing that keeps going in my mind. I don't know. Why are they doing what they're doing, Megan? When you can come up with that answer for us, why pro sports, maybe more than any of them. I don't know. Why are they doing?

Because I don't know that it's, I don't think it's the players. I don't think it's the coaches. I don't, is it the owners? I don't know. That's not for me. That's my attorney. Our attorney is going to handle all that. But again, why is a far left belief that you have to do what I think is good for me and society? You have to.

This belief encompasses so many areas besides COVID, but COVID has been their way in. This has been the one avenue in which they've made real progress in getting their thumb on their fellow Americans and forcing a certain complied behavior. And even your lawsuit, I have to give credit to your lawyers, because even your lawsuit acknowledges what will give the benefit of the doubt for early on in the process when there was a mistaken, misguided belief that the vaccines prevented the spread. All right. So even if you give them the benefit of the doubt on that, how are we now at the point where we know we know the CDC, Fauci, everyone's admitting that now that they don't they don't prevent the spread. They're still saying not those three guys, you two and a fellow ref. Those three cannot come back in unless they get the Vax. How? Why? So even if you presume good faith in the initial part of this, it falls apart when you get to the end. And it can only be a desire for control over the way you live your life. I am saying this is what's fair. We got it.

You have to get it whether you want it or not. That's the point we're at in your litigation. Well, you're right. And again, I'm we're going to keep coming back to again. We're not going to argue the vaccine. We're not going to argue medical. Not saying I don't agree with you. People can have their opinion on that. But from a religious standpoint. And again, let's come back to Megan. They offered us the religious and medical exemption. But you had to prove that you qualified. Well, yeah, that came out almost after.

But yeah, again, well, who's going to prove that I qualify? One Jewish lawyer in the NBA office who then brings back my statement to, I don't know, whoever made this decision. I don't know. But again, not one person has a faith in the NBA. Not one. Right, right. It's very curious that not a single

person got an exemption. Almost makes you think that the policy wasn't real at all. All right, stand by, you guys. I got to squeeze in a break. Much, much more with Kenny and Jason. You mentioned the arbitration where we are now. We'll get to that in one second after this quick break. Back with us now, former NBA referees and executives kenny mauer and jason phillips who have filed a lawsuit against the nba over its vaccine mandate that left them without their jobs even once the nba lifted the vaccine mandate it singled them out and said you can't come back to work unless you get one it's crazy if a gets hired tomorrow, does he have to be vaccinated? I do. I do keep in touch. Not not not that often with a couple of the referees.

And the contract was signed in September. To the best of my knowledge, as of yesterday, the NBA referees weren't even given a copy of the collective bargaining agreement yet. So I don't even know. That's how it works. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And now they're talking about making them take more boosters and flu shots. And they're having a conference call, I believe, today. And all this is going on.

And I don't even think they've ever. Well, as of yesterday, Megan, they had not received a copy of the collective bargaining agreement they supposedly voted in. But in September, they did vote in a collective bargaining agreement that said that in their seven-year contract, that in the next seven years of their contract, there is not a mandate for a referee to be vaccinated. That's correct. Wow. So you guys, you guys can't come back unvaccinated, but a new submission who comes back unvaccinated can get in. And that makes a lot of sense, given your 36 years of experience as an NBA ref. Like, sure. OK, this is personal. This feels

your lawyers allege that you've been persecuted. Is that how this feels? Well, you know, I'm I'm I'm not going to admit that, you know, I'm yeah, I mean, you just keep fighting through it. I mean, I mean, I'm, I'm a better man because of it. I think, you know, because of my faith, my wife is amazing. She's strong. She's, she's a Christian and she's, she's as strong as I am. And we're both adamant about what we're doing. We're proud of what we're doing. And I, I get it out there and I, I, I've spoken at churches and, and different functions and stuff. So, you know, I won't allow myself, Megan, to be called persecuted. But at the same time, I guess by definition, yes, discriminated against, persecuted against.

They had a side letter in the agreement with the referees that the referee executive board brought to the group. And the side letter said that even though there's no mandate for this in the next seven years, Maurer, Ayat, and of course, it would have been Jason too. And there was one other referee that went through arbitration, have to take the vaccine in order to come back. Well, I said on one conference call, why? If there's no mandate moving forward, why as an executive board, would you allow a side letter in there? I know you're a lawyer, Megan. Why would you allow a side letter into an agreement like that when it only affects three people? Well, they couldn't answer that. Why? Well, because the NBA wanted it, Megan, why would you allow a side letter into an agreement like that when it only affects three people?

Well, they couldn't answer that. Why? Well, because the NBA wanted it, Megan. The executive board will do whatever the NBA wants them to do. That's it. And initially, the collective bargaining agreement was voted down, 58 to, what, 13. Well, then the NBA came back and offered a couple dollars here and a couple dollars there to some of the people within the union. And the vote turned right around.

It was 56-13. The other way, we'll vote in the contract. So, again, the NBA referee staff is weak. They're going to. They're all afraid to lose their jobs. They're all afraid to stand up to the NBA. They're all afraid to go against the executive board because maybe the executive board will say bad things about them to the league office. Come on. You know how it works. You know, it's a shame. That's the way executive

boards and unions work. I don't have any respect for the executive board at all with the NBA. They turn their back on me because, oh, I got an attorney. So therefore they don't have to talk to me. Instead of working with my attorney. Not only that, you'll be punished. You'll be punished. You'll be made an example of. so nobody else deigns to get themselves legal representation and i understand jason you you too were not allowed a lawyer when you were cross-examined by these two lawyers and then you they wanted you actually to waive your rights before you left that meeting uh megan the the what they didn't actually actually they didn't actually ask. They didn't actually ask me to waive my rights in that meeting. But when it came time that they did terminate me, they offered me a very small severance package, basically, you know, nothing.

And that is when they asked me to waive my rights for anything. And in fact, that was insulting when they did that. I would have felt better if they would have offered me nothing, in fact. So, but yes, I mean, and that's, in my opinion, that's what they're going to do. And I mentioned about we're called as Christians to be a light, right? My belief is there are some people that are scared of the light, and that's why we're here today, to be a light and to expose. We all make mistakes, right? We all do. Human beings make mistakes. That's just the way we are. But thank goodness, I believe that Christ and his son died on the cross so that we don't have to, right? So that we don't get what we deserve.

We get eternal life with God in heaven. But during that time, the Bible calls us to be a light and shine light on darkness. And again, I mentioned earlier, we are where we are for a reason. And I think that's why we're here. And I can't wait till we get in court because then everything becomes public record, to my knowledge. And, you know, I just believe we are right here, right now, for a reason. You guys got suspended for a year without pay while this played out. And I'm sure you were hoping it would resolve. They would see the light. They would see reason. Before I get to the ultimate phone call where they told you what their decision was, Ken, did anybody, you've been there almost

four decades, did anybody call you? Did anybody reach out to you, offer some sort of support? Again, Megan, when you've been around as long as I have and I've I've listened to a lot of veteran referees if you allow things like this to surprise you shame on you so anything that the NBA does or anything the actions of my fellow referees as weak as they have been doesn't surprise me because I I won't allow it to surprise me because I've seen it happen to other referees not quite at this this extent but so no nobody there hasn't been an executive board member that's reached out to me. Again, they will hide behind, Megan, oh, you got your own lawyer. Well, no, I got my own lawyer because I didn't want to go through your arbitration process. You did that with one referee. He lost.

I knew it was going to be rigged, and it was. And under the advising of my lawyer, I didn't become a part of it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be supporting me. Well, they suspended us without pay. And they were going to take away our medical. But then they didn't allow us to have medical this last year. I can't even get my severance package made. I'm allowed 36 years of severance. I can't get my severance package because I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm on your show. I'm going public and I'm suing them. So I like I would have had to assign what Jason was going to have to sign a release or whatever you call it. You're more familiar with that, Megan, than I am in order to, you know, not sue them or not come back after them. Well, naturally, I wasn't going to do that. And so I can't even get my severance. So,

you know, and just just just a couple of weeks ago, my actual pension severance. So, you know, and just, just, just a couple of weeks ago, my actual pension was released. So, I mean, it's been a tough year financially, but you know, you do what you have to do and you save and you, you, you know, you, you borrow and you, and you, you know, there's been other people that have been extremely supportive of, to me. I never realized there's a lot of people that don't like the NBA. There's a lot of people. Kyrie Irving should help you. Kyrie Irving should say, Jonathan, these guys should help you. And by the way, so the audience knows the reason those players were subjected to the vaccine mandate is just local ordinances like Kyrie Irving in the local stadium said, you've

got to get the vaccine in our town. They said, you've got to get the vaccine. But the NBA never required of the players, just the refs. He should cover you. He should he should pay for your pension. He's got it to spare. You guys are, quote unquote, the little people who could use help from these guys who make 30, 40 million dollars a year, probably more at this point.

I'm proud of what he did. I'm proud of what he did. I know. Well, I mean, honestly, good for him because he was in a position to stand up to them and he did it. Can I ask you, though, because I appreciate you not taking on the persecution label, but you make a good point, which is it's not for lack of trying on their part, but you don't see yourself as a victim.

But let's be real. You just ticked off some of the things that they're doing to you. Suspended without pay for a year. Your pension's been released. Does that mean, what does it mean, released? Like it's no longer there for you to claim? No, I can now go and get it for the longest time. You know, they're real good about you mandating that you have to do something by a certain date or else, but they had to do something by a certain date or, well, that date came a long

time ago. And, but now finally, they finally, okay. So it took them a while. They almost took away your medical. And so you, I just have to ask you what it took them a while. They almost took away your medical. And so you, I just have to ask you what the toll this has taken. I'll start with you on it, Jason, like the personal toll, this kind of thing takes. Yeah, Megan, one of the, if not the most stressful thing I've ever been through in my life. I mean, obviously, I went from making a very good salary working for the league, and I'm very thankful for that, to making nothing. And so to kind of shake your life up like that has been very stressful, and not just the monetary part of it. I'm very open with my life and share with other people. You know, Megan and Ken both, marriage is hard on a good day, right?

This has been the stress that it has put on my relationship with my wife is difficult. Just not that we don't love each other or love each other any less. It's just stressful. And I don't know how to describe it better than that. Waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep. You dedicate, for me, over or just short of 23 years to an organization and then six years in the minor leagues prior to that. So just short of 30 years total, not anywhere close to what Kenny did, but you dedicate your life to an organization. And then, you know, all of a sudden, in a blink of an eye, it's gone, you know, based on, I don't the 2021 to 2022 season, this is the one you were suspended for. You wouldn't take the vaccine. Everyone else went and got it. Okay, great. They're safe now. They're going to prevent the spread of COVID. Of the NBA's 73 fully vaccinated referees, 65 tested positive for COVID. 89% tested positive for COVID. The vaccine did nothing to prevent the spread. They just decided to penalize you. I only have a minute left, but same question to you, Kenny. The personal toll this has taken on you.

Well, like I say, it's tough. I mean, again, I'm not surprised by the way the NBA has acted or the referees in the union. Shame on all of them. It's OK. I'm going to rise above that. It's been tough on my wife. It hasn't been tough on us. We're stronger than ever. Our faith is stronger than ever.

I'm very proud of her. I'm very proud of what I'm doing. But, you know, it's just a shame, Megan. You know, again, nothing the NBA done has surprised me, but this is, this is, they're just playing wrong. It's good versus evil and they're evil and we're good. And shame on them. Evidently, I don't know if any of them have any, any faith whatsoever, but it seems to me that they don't. And I don't, it's tough to be a part of something that has no faith. And so I'm okay with our decision. I always will be. Well, it'll play out in the courts. We reached out to them for comment. They said they don't comment on ongoing litigation. So, you know, we'll hear

from them in court and we'll see whether you prevail. But all the best to you for telling us about the struggle, the unfairness, and what this has been like for you and your families. We'll be watching and rooting for you. Thank you, Megan. unfairness, and what this has been like for you and your families. We'll be watching and rooting for you. Thank you, Megan. Thank you, Megan. Thank you for what you've done. I appreciate it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, right back at you. Kenny and Jason, all the best. Oh, my heart. That was, love to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.