The Megyn Kelly Show - Did Joe Biden Enable Hunter's Addiction？ Plus Biden's Shameful Maui Visit, with Dr. Nicholas Kardaras ｜ Ep. 611

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00:00:44.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:47.660 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:57.540 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:59.040 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:00.920 Yes, it's Monday and it is the first debate week in the GOP primary.

00:01:06.000 But Donald Trump will not be there.

00:01:08.560 We now know he's not going.

00:01:10.640 He truth socialed it out saying he's not going.

00:01:14.860 We believe that covers the first and second presidential debates.

00:01:18.400 NBC News reporting, according to a source with knowledge,

00:01:21.120 that it doesn't necessarily cover any debates after that.

00:01:24.560 That's my impression from having spoken to Trump as well.

00:01:28.040 But he's not going.

00:01:29.180 And instead, we believe on Wednesday during the Fox News debate,

00:01:32.320 he's going to be giving a one-on-one interview to Tucker Carlson,

00:01:35.340 which I have to say I kind of love.

00:01:38.380 It's just so fun.

00:01:40.060 I kind of love how just Tucker continues to thumb the middle finger at Fox.

00:01:43.900 And why shouldn't he?

00:01:45.900 Why shouldn't he?

00:01:47.780 All right.

00:01:48.700 Meanwhile, President Biden is finally ready to actually go and survey the damage

00:01:52.020 after the deadly wildfires in Hawaii.

00:01:54.640 Do you know that these are the deadliest wildfires in over a century?

00:01:58.940 In over a century. 1.00

00:02:01.000 This is the shit he said no comment to. 1.00

00:02:03.280 He couldn't bring himself to comment on that. 1.00

00:02:06.580 Because he's too busy.

00:02:07.940 What?

00:02:10.640 Yeah.

00:02:11.940 That's what he's too busy doing.

00:02:13.620 He's taking vacation after vacation.

00:02:15.980 It was Rehoboth Beach.

00:02:17.240 Now he's out in Lake Tahoe.

00:02:18.900 And under political pressure, he's got to take a little sojourn over to Maui

00:02:22.560 so he can look like he has a caring bone in his body.

00:02:25.780 Same way he wouldn't acknowledge his seventh grandchild

00:02:28.180 until he was publicly shamed by the New York Times.

00:02:30.800 And then finally came up with a statement late on a Friday night

00:02:34.380 in a fifth paragraph of some paper he released saying,

00:02:37.660 oh, I have seven, not six grandkids.

00:02:39.600 I mean, he's all heart, this guy.

00:02:40.900 He's all heart.

00:02:42.280 By the way, he's going right back to more vacation after his trip to Maui.

00:02:46.480 We're going to talk about the Maui destruction 0.80

00:02:47.800 and residents who are furious at the response efforts,

00:02:51.140 among other topics, with someone who knows the area very well.

00:02:54.140 And that's Dr. Nicholas Cardares.

00:02:57.460 Victor Cardares.

00:02:58.540 Nicholas Cardares.

00:02:59.300 He's the founder of Maui Recovery,

00:03:01.520 among other clinical treatment facilities in America.

00:03:03.940 He's a psychologist and an addiction expert.

00:03:06.440 You may remember we had him on the day the queen died

00:03:09.760 and we switched his topic to the queen of England and he went with it.

00:03:14.820 He was so cool, even though he was on to promote his book,

00:03:19.400 which was just out.

00:03:20.480 The book is called Digital Madness,

00:03:22.280 how social media is driving our mental health crisis

00:03:24.680 and how to restore our sanity.

00:03:27.120 And we absolutely love Nicholas because not a few people can go from that kind of a topic

00:03:32.720 to the queen of England dying.

00:03:34.300 But he did it with panache.

00:03:35.860 Great to see you again.

00:03:36.860 Thanks for coming back on.

00:03:38.840 Great for having me back on.

00:03:39.920 Yeah, you keep me on my toes.

00:03:41.480 Thank you.

00:03:42.600 Well, hopefully everybody will remain well throughout today's two hours.

00:03:46.720 Yes.

00:03:47.180 Yes.

00:03:47.580 Yeah, we can we can stay on point.

00:03:49.560 We just start with Hawaii because I know you have a personal connection to all this.

00:03:52.580 But we never got to the fact that last week when when somebody got a hold of,

00:03:58.560 you know, Biden saying, do you have any comment?

00:04:00.500 He decided to say no comment.

00:04:02.500 And then he was asked.

00:04:08.300 There was a follow up.

00:04:09.560 He was asked about it again and he had very little to say on it.

00:04:12.820 He really seems to have been forced to go pay a visit there.

00:04:15.440 And I realize we don't have a president go out to California every time.

00:04:18.720 But we have a wildfire out there.

00:04:19.860 But this one's got over 111 people dead, including children.

00:04:23.340 And the president didn't seem to give a damn until what until he was forced to politically.

00:04:30.160 Yeah, he described Maui as he couldn't even remember the name.

00:04:33.240 It was that place that they have on the news.

00:04:35.000 It was disgusting.

00:04:35.840 I mean, yes, I spent six years running Maui recovery, which is about 15 minutes south of Lahaina.

00:04:41.380 And there's some of the most wonderful, wonderful people in that area.

00:04:45.120 And I've been in touch with our executive director, Amory Mowry.

00:04:49.460 And one of our staff members is one of the people, Juby Badaya, who was famously filmed being in.

00:04:56.600 He was one of the people that his car caught on fire and had to run into the ocean and save the family.

00:05:01.700 There was a family of five from California.

00:05:03.420 They had to tread water for several hours holding onto plywood.

00:05:07.040 Yeah, that's that's Juby and the people that was helping to rescue.

00:05:11.740 It was it was their 9-11.

00:05:14.000 And and for the president to say no comment and then to not even be able to remember the name of it, then to go today after FEMA gave almost no aid.

00:05:24.140 It's disgusting.

00:05:25.820 You know, Maui is a very special place and they really honor the tradition of what's called Ohana family.

00:05:30.880 And then talking to my friends who are still there, the one thing that had come really through was they all were there for each other.

00:05:38.020 They sort of just they said, forget the government.

00:05:40.440 We can't wait for FEMA. 0.76

00:05:41.500 We can't wait for Joe Biden.

00:05:43.100 And they have all kicked into action.

00:05:46.200 Amo has gone to the war memorial.

00:05:48.020 People were giving out water and supplies and food.

00:05:50.920 And it really showed their true commitment that they have towards one another as a community and not reliant on some, let's face it, a president who leaned on his empathic, you know, lunch bucket Joe.

00:06:05.500 And back in 1988, I was a Joe Biden supporter back in.

00:06:08.840 I was two years out of college and it was like Dukakis and Biden.

00:06:12.760 And I was a Democrat back then, because what's the old saying?

00:06:15.380 If you're not a Democrat or liberal in your 20s, you have no heart. 0.82

00:06:18.140 If you're not a conservative by your 40s, you have no brain.

00:06:21.620 And back then, I thought he was, you know, the bee's knees. 0.89

00:06:24.360 And since then, I'm pretty disgusted at the way he's been as both president and anything else.

00:06:33.560 It's really amazing because he, you know, he does run on, you know, this president who's so, you know, kind and he understands family and he loves, you know, people.

00:06:42.440 That's like why we put him in there and he'll all be this empathetic guy.

00:06:45.880 And then, you know, he acted like it was somebody going up to George Clooney, asking him about some sex scandal at the Oscars.

00:06:54.060 No comment. No comment. No, you're the president.

00:06:57.160 You're the president of the United States.

00:06:58.260 We're asking you to comment on the suffering and devastation that's happened in one of America's treasures, this inside Maui.

00:07:05.680 And he couldn't be bothered to say two words like he couldn't think of anything to say off the top of his head.

00:07:11.860 Like, my heart goes out to the people who are suffering.

00:07:13.980 I've got the government, FEMA, looking into it.

00:07:16.260 We'll be there soon.

00:07:17.800 We know it's not soon enough.

00:07:19.460 And then he had another chance when he was asked about the upcoming trip to Hawaii.

00:07:25.900 This is on the 18th.

00:07:28.000 Today, he's expected to go.

00:07:30.020 And this is how that went.

00:07:31.660 Stop four. 0.70

00:07:34.060 What this tells me is he's just it's perfunctory.

00:07:50.140 You know, he's trying to get out of Dodge.

00:07:51.680 He can't ad lib.

00:07:52.980 He can't fake even at this point empathy in his career.

00:07:56.620 He needs a scripted for him.

00:07:58.280 And unless it's in that teleprompter, you know, we're stuck with the real Joe Biden, who is not caring, who doesn't give a damn about what's happening from the looks of it.

00:08:08.100 Let's face it.

00:08:08.860 The president's role is largely symbolic.

00:08:11.340 And these are one of the symbolic instances that we need to show care and compassion.

00:08:15.140 This is I mean, no one expects him to go there and help rebuild houses or do anything like that.

00:08:20.320 He's no he's no Jimmy Carter, right, with habitats for humanity.

00:08:23.240 But at least at least show a care and compassion.

00:08:27.300 That's what the people needed to hear, that they were it was just disgusting, the response.

00:08:32.320 And, you know, his lack of compassion came out last week when some of the wounded vets from the pullout in Afghanistan were criticizing his lack of compassion.

00:08:40.380 Every time he tries to put on his compassion hat, he starts self-referring to some of his own crisis.

00:08:47.160 I mean, even the death of Bo Biden, he confabulates how Bo Biden has died.

00:08:51.560 I've got a my closest family members right now is struggling with cancer and it's a horrible illness.

00:08:56.620 But it wasn't dying in Iraq, which he's used as a way to kind of play up his compassion bona fides.

00:09:05.220 But he lies about it.

00:09:06.460 And so there's no sincerity there.

00:09:08.300 And it's it's quite honestly, it's it's the most disgusting thing I've seen in terms of many issues that have bothered me about this president and the corruption that we're now seeing as well.

00:09:18.080 Well, that's the thing. So I like Charles C.W. is a C.W. Cook, who I love at National Review.

00:09:23.200 Always. He's a libertarian. He's a conservative. He's got a strong libertarian strain.

00:09:27.060 And he says, I don't want my president to be a comforter in chief.

00:09:30.240 I want him to do as little as possible. I want him to kind of disappear.

00:09:33.600 And I get that. I actually share in that in many ways.

00:09:37.360 But when you've got the president, United States sunning himself on the beach and releasing topless photos while one hundred and eleven people are dead, including children fleeing from the flames into the ocean with no one there to help, it might be appropriate to at least call attention to it.

00:09:54.920 When handed the microphone and asked specifically to say something, it just just call attention to it, if nothing else, so that people understand their suffering, they can do a GoFundMe, they can do whatever it is, you know, send prayers.

00:10:07.720 No comment is not an acceptable answer from the commander in chief under those circumstances.

00:10:14.880 Right. It goes contrary to the narrative that had always historically been that the Democratic ethos was for the little guy, the working guy that they cared.

00:10:23.040 And the Republicans were the big corporate, you know, the the overlords who all cared about corporate greed and money.

00:10:30.180 And and, you know, over the evolution of the last 20 to 30 or 40 years of my adult life, that's those roles have been reversed.

00:10:36.880 It seems that the Democratic Party right now, you know, as evidenced by the current president, just as could care less.

00:10:45.780 And, you know, it was just hard talking to people that were there, still there struggling.

00:10:49.360 It's, you know, say what you want about George W. Bush.

00:10:52.760 But when 9-11 happened, he was there with that bullhorn.

00:10:55.360 He was on the ground at 9-11.

00:10:57.100 And that rallying cry of and pretty soon the world will hear you.

00:11:01.300 That was critical.

00:11:02.640 That was critical for the psychology of our nation, for the emotional well-being of our nation to just symbolically be there and show support.

00:11:09.460 And we're getting the opposite of that now.

00:11:12.500 Now, once again, according to the AP, Joe Biden was asked to get more specific in advance of this trip about what his messaging was going to be once he hit the ground in Maui.

00:11:22.980 And he did, I think, what you just accused him of doing.

00:11:27.360 He gave a statement that began, I know how profoundly loss can impact a family and a community.

00:11:33.920 And I know nothing can replace the loss of life.

00:11:36.120 Maybe it was generic, but knowing Biden's history, that sounds more like, trust me, I know, back to me, back to my son, Beau, who allegedly died in Iraq.

00:11:45.720 And I was there to see his flag draped coffin come home.

00:11:49.100 None of that's true other than the fact that he did die, Beau Biden, of brain cancer.

00:11:53.620 But once again, you know, he thinks empathy is making it about him.

00:11:57.860 So we're going to look at him and feel sorry for him, as opposed to the people of Maui and your friend's story.

00:12:04.100 I mean, good God.

00:12:05.160 It's not like there's not enough fodder to point to that's actually happening there.

00:12:09.000 If you really want to get people's attention, his name is Juby.

00:12:14.200 Did you how did you pronounce the last name?

00:12:15.680 Bedoya? 0.80

00:12:16.080 Juby Bedoya.

00:12:17.820 Bedoya.

00:12:18.360 OK, so we showed some of the video as you were talking.

00:12:21.060 This guy, did he work at your facility out there at Maui Recovery?

00:12:25.040 Yeah, he was the overnight support staff.

00:12:27.880 He was the overnight staff member.

00:12:30.200 He was in recovery long term himself and was a long, long time resident of Lahaina, multi-generations.

00:12:37.220 So Juby is part of probably the most famous, well-seen video of this entire tragedy, which is that these families were desperate to escape the flames.

00:12:48.500 And the flames, we believe, although it's not officially yet, were caused as a result of the electric company that wasn't taking care of its lines and sparks, they believe, flew and caught grasses on fire.

00:12:57.780 And before you knew it, the entire town was burning.

00:13:00.380 And so residents had to flee into the ocean.

00:13:03.500 And Juby's in this video, which everybody has seen.

00:13:06.220 There's a family of, I think, five.

00:13:08.120 The father handed his son, his young son to Juby, a two-year-old little boy to Juby, who was holding him for two to three hours as they awaited help.

00:13:21.440 I mean, were you stunned when you saw your friend and, you know, your associate in the waters?

00:13:26.780 Yeah, my co-worker sent me that clip originally, and I've reached out to Juby.

00:13:31.380 It was, he was trying to escape in his car, and his car got surrounded by flames.

00:13:35.000 And they had to run into, I mean, it's like a horror movie.

00:13:37.520 And so they had to run into the ocean.

00:13:38.840 And keep in mind, as you could see in that video, this was not the calm Pacific.

00:13:43.300 This was, the hurricane didn't quite hit the island directly, but these were really rough waters, turbulent.

00:13:49.380 And this family of five from California that he didn't know, these were, they formed a kinship, and the child of two was wrapped around his neck for the two hours.

00:13:58.480 But this is what I mean about the Hawaiian soul.

00:14:00.800 Juby, you know, my memories of Juby, the many times in my family were in Hawaii, you know, Juby, you know, I had my son.

00:14:08.220 My twin sons were about 10 years old.

00:14:09.860 Juby is a ukulele player, long-term Hawaiian.

00:14:12.600 And he showed my sons how to play the ukulele, and they would have these music sessions at night, and just a really great human being.

00:14:19.940 And salt of the earth people, right?

00:14:22.540 Salt of the earth people.

00:14:24.140 And again, this concept of ohana, of like, we're going to help one another.

00:14:27.300 And you're hearing now hundreds of stories of locals who are helping other locals right now.

00:14:32.620 And they're not waiting for their 744 FEMA check to come in, because it's just too little, too late.

00:14:39.940 And it's just disgusting when we're, again, you know, we talk about aid to Ukraine and aid to all sorts of other places.

00:14:48.380 But when we have people, and you know, the one thing I could say about Hawaii, you do definitely feel, even though it's part of the United States, it's not part of the lower 48th.

00:14:56.500 So Hawaii has always been a little bit off the grid.

00:14:58.820 And so they don't have the resources there.

00:15:01.440 You know, one of the reasons I didn't move there permanently was, you know, I was there three or four years ago during a pretty bad wildfire where I got separated from my family.

00:15:08.940 They were in Lahaina, and I was on the Kihei side of Maui, and the fire tore through the island then.

00:15:15.020 And you do have this trapped feeling when you're in Maui and fires break out.

00:15:19.400 Unlike California, there's nowhere you can drive to.

00:15:21.560 You're kind of stuck.

00:15:23.160 And ultimately, it was one of the decisions where we decided not to permanently relocate there.

00:15:27.920 But you do feel a sense of isolation.

00:15:30.660 You do feel a sense that it's a little third world, even though you're a very part, you know, of the United States.

00:15:36.380 But yet you feel a little bit like the stepchild, that you're not getting the full attention of the mainland.

00:15:43.160 Yeah.

00:15:43.920 We heard that directly.

00:15:45.020 I mean, this is a Maui survivor asking those very questions.

00:15:49.280 I think it was over the weekend.

00:15:50.800 It's SOT 5.

00:15:51.380 It's really affected me because where's the president?

00:16:00.240 He decides to come here this week to come here next week.

00:16:06.120 I mean, like, where are we Americans, too?

00:16:11.520 Like, we're part of the United States.

00:16:13.280 But why are we not?

00:16:14.560 Why are we getting put in the back pocket?

00:16:16.920 Why are we being ignored?

00:16:19.980 Hmm.

00:16:20.940 Let me ask you this.

00:16:22.440 Is one of the reasons is one of the reasons that Joe Biden's one of his biggest pushes as president has been the focus on climate change, green energy.

00:16:34.440 The so-called Inflation Reduction Act was all about renewables and so on.

00:16:38.800 And while we still have the leftist governor of Hawaii out there trying to say that climate change caused these wildfires, the truth has been emerging thanks to The Wall Street Journal, which is climate change may have been to blame for the Hawaii wildfires.

00:16:56.360 But it's because they were obsessively focused on renewables and not taking care of the power lines that were there causing a health hazard.

00:17:05.860 Let me set it up for you this way.

00:17:07.080 Here's Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a Democrat, talking about how it was climate change that was to blame Saud 8.

00:17:14.720 Just to be clear, when you're talking about global warming, are you saying that climate change amplified the cost of human error?

00:17:24.980 Yes, it did.

00:17:26.360 There's always going to be incredible things that people do to save lives from the firefighters, from citizens.

00:17:34.720 And there's always going to be decisions that are made that I'm sure aren't perfect in the moment.

00:17:41.660 OK, so, Nick, here's what actually happened for the people who haven't been paying attention like me.

00:17:46.880 I didn't I didn't know this until this this disaster unfolded, but I'm not in charge of the federal government or the Hawaii electric lines.

00:17:53.580 A couple of years ago, as you point out, there were bad wildfires in Hawaii.

00:17:57.780 And in twenty nineteen, it became very, very clear that they needed to do something about the risks or devastation would follow.

00:18:05.240 Hawaii Electric, which manages the power lines, knew of the threat and said it would act.

00:18:09.560 Four years later, it's done nothing. It has not acted in particular back in twenty nineteen.

00:18:15.660 It knew that its power lines were emitting sparks.

00:18:18.900 It knew it needed to take steps, including clearing the highly flammable grasses from around the electric wires.

00:18:27.180 This is done regularly in other parts of the country.

00:18:29.640 Make sure there's not, you know, tree leaves. Make sure there's not flammable grasses.

00:18:33.460 Make sure there's not flammable trees right by the power lines just in case.

00:18:36.960 And there they knew that there that sparks sparks are being emitted and they didn't.

00:18:40.920 And now it comes out, thanks to the journal, that the reason they weren't doing it is because Hawaiian Electric was focused on renewable energy sources.

00:18:50.380 There was a state mandated requirement that they focus on switching over to renewable energy.

00:18:58.580 So Hawaiian Electric wasn't entirely the bad guy.

00:19:01.220 Thanks to the Democrats policies in Hawaii and on up the federal chain, they had to be focused on renewables and they forgot about the active threat.

00:19:12.040 And now we have one hundred and eleven people dead.

00:19:14.720 Yeah, they didn't maintain the infrastructure of their poles.

00:19:17.100 And they sent information from that night that there were multiple surges that that that have led to multiple fires throughout the island.

00:19:22.700 And so they didn't maintain their power lines.

00:19:25.100 The power lines went down.

00:19:26.040 You mentioned the highly flammable grasses.

00:19:27.900 There's been a lot of articles written about those highly flammable grasses have also been an evolution of the change in forestry or land management in Hawaii, which used to be a very agricultural island.

00:19:39.560 And since that shifted away from when the indigenous folks and the local folks used to really there were many, many crops throughout Hawaii, and those acted as a protective those crops were not as flammable.

00:19:52.340 They weren't these high grasses that were almost like kerosene in a certain way.

00:19:55.600 So you switch from an essentially sustainable island that had renewable crops to now a tourist island with big hotels and a lot of grasses that are not the ideal in terms of land management.

00:20:09.920 And then you had a power company not maintaining their grid and their power poles.

00:20:14.940 And there was a perfect storm, no pun intended, with what happened, a great loss of life.

00:20:20.920 And people are not trying to use it for whatever narrative suits them, but the facts are the facts.

00:20:25.140 And the people on the island know what happened.

00:20:28.120 Yeah, that's right.

00:20:29.340 And it's one thing to be sitting as a politician in the statehouse or in the White House, passing down these policies to make yourself feel good about, oh, I'm saving the earth.

00:20:38.840 I'm saving the earth.

00:20:39.500 And it's quite another to be a Maui resident trying to flee the flames and worry about your children's lives like these folks.

00:20:46.500 We have an insane piece of tape in Sot 3.

00:20:50.240 Take a look.

00:20:50.920 For the listening audience, it just shows a car trying to drive through an inferno.

00:21:20.240 Inferno on all sides.

00:21:21.680 Where to point the vehicle and press gas is unclear.

00:21:26.320 I don't know where I would turn if I were in the midst of that.

00:21:28.560 The fire's coming for you.

00:21:30.120 You could hear the panic and the breathing and the smoke, of course, affecting it as well.

00:21:34.280 And I'm really glad that these folks pushing renewables feel really good about themselves.

00:21:39.240 It's a different reality on the ground.

00:21:41.500 Yeah.

00:21:42.060 Yeah.

00:21:42.260 And then you have folks like Jason Momoa advising people to not visit Maui now.

00:21:47.660 And that's the last thing that this community needs.

00:21:49.780 You know, it's adding insult to injury to now that you've been through this devastation and the lifeblood of Maui.

00:21:55.360 Because there are now the other parts of Maui, the south part of the island, Wailea, Kihei, are functioning.

00:22:01.040 You know, and they need, that's where most of the people get their employment and their ability to survive and to buy food.

00:22:07.380 So to have, you know, celebrities saying, let the recovery process happen.

00:22:13.460 Most Hawaiians are saying, please don't shut down tourism now because, you know, like COVID, right, the last thing you needed was to shut down the industry, the lifeblood of a devastated region.

00:22:25.880 And so people are, the locals are saying, please, if you can, support us, help us do whatever you need to.

00:22:31.580 But don't forget about us and just ignore us now and think two or three years from now, we'll all be fine.

00:22:36.740 You know, it's reminding me of one of the debates we're having on the federal level on presidential politics.

00:22:42.940 And that is, I mentioned Tucker in the introduction to our show, when he had a forum with the candidates out in Iowa, minus Trump.

00:22:51.160 One of the things he was asking, because he's not a supporter of the war in Ukraine, was, should we really be spending all this money to help the Ukrainians when we have a sieve of a southern border?

00:23:02.440 You've got fentanyl, you know, streaming in, killing tens of thousands of young people a year.

00:23:06.740 And the response by people like Mike Pence and others, and I understand the response, I understand the response, was we can do both.

00:23:13.940 In the Ronald Reagan, you know, vein, we can be strong in our foreign policy and still take care of ourselves domestically.

00:23:21.140 OK, that sounds great. I believe we can. I believe we are capable.

00:23:26.340 The question is, are we doing it? Are we actually doing it?

00:23:30.000 And that I'll toss to the sound bit of a Maui resident on President Biden, who seems to be getting to exactly that.

00:23:37.000 Like, it's wonderful that you can say, in theory, we'll do it.

00:23:39.360 But what about right now? Why isn't it actually being done? It's SOT 6.

00:23:43.060 So why aren't you taking care of what you claim to be in charge of, rather than sending out all these funds and whatever else you guys are sending to Ukraine or anywhere?

00:23:54.160 Take care of here first. 0.57

00:23:56.320 You know, this, I don't see why any president wouldn't step up and take care of what's part of their, you know, territory. 1.00

00:24:04.600 I think it's a stupid move on his part. You know, Biden. Yeah, he's an idiot. Sorry. No, not sorry. 0.99

00:24:14.520 I mean, Hawaii is not exactly a blue state, Nick. You know, this has the power to actually influence some people.

00:24:22.360 Yeah, and it's interesting.

00:24:23.380 Not a red state.

00:24:24.240 Well, yeah, and I've moved back to New York, a very decidedly blue state.

00:24:28.740 And I was just reading last week, you know, the average, you know, we're housing tens of thousands of migrants at a cost of $10,000 per month.

00:24:36.160 And, you know, Midtown hotels in Manhattan and various other, you know, everywhere from boutique hotels in Long Island City to dorms in Buffalo, New York, at a huge cost.

00:24:46.080 And we're giving $700 per Maui resident for this who just survived this.

00:24:52.900 We have no resources to give to our, it's just, it's just, it just speaks to the priorities and to the politics of it.

00:24:59.680 The Ukraine war, you know, well, I have my own opinions on that.

00:25:03.200 You know, I don't think we're helping the people of Ukraine by enabling a war, a proxy war to essentially try to try to do regime change with Russia.

00:25:13.180 And so it's to the detriment to the Ukrainians that we're maintaining a war that, you know, some people, and, you know, one of the people that I think speaks the most eloquently about it was RFK Jr.

00:25:23.800 RFK Jr. speaks very eloquently about there was an opportunity for a treaty, for everybody to kind of retreat back to their corners after Putin realized that that war in Ukraine wasn't going to be over in three days.

00:25:35.660 But we weren't, we didn't incentivize that.

00:25:39.480 We, we, there was an agenda for us to keep that war going.

00:25:42.980 And now to the cost of what, 60, $70 billion.

00:25:45.880 And even Joe Biden saying a few weeks ago that we're low on munitions ourselves now.

00:25:51.040 So we can't walk and chew gum necessarily at the same time because we have finite resources and our resources have been clearly aligned with certain priorities.

00:25:59.620 And, and so now when you have natural disasters or other situations, we, we, I don't think we can do both necessarily because we're not, we're not able to at this point.

00:26:09.220 Why doesn't he take some of those monies from the inflation reduction act that are now putting signs up all over his bridge and infrastructure projects, um, saying courtesy of Joe Biden and, and divert it to Hawaii.

00:26:22.520 You know, why doesn't he, he's so intent on renewables, on getting windmills out there, solar power out to the Hawaiians when it results in disaster because the people responsible for maintaining the power lines are too focused on their solar panels, um, that people die.

00:26:38.480 Maybe it's time to divert the money.

00:26:40.860 Maybe it's time to actually swoop in.

00:26:42.620 And by the way, it's $700 per household that they're getting, not just per person, per household.

00:26:48.660 How is that going to help?

00:26:50.120 That's going to, what's it, what does that last a week for your average family of five out there?

00:26:54.480 Forget it.

00:26:54.940 If that, um, they need real help.

00:26:57.440 And, you know, it's true.

00:26:58.720 They don't need a presidential visit.

00:27:00.240 They don't need president Biden to actually swing by.

00:27:02.420 He it's, he's not gonna be able to do anything with a magic wand.

00:27:05.060 But the point was do something, call attention to it.

00:27:08.360 Use the bully pulpit, divert funds, make an effort that shows you get it.

00:27:12.420 But this is so close to his own policies.

00:27:16.900 Like the cause of this thing is dangerous for this president.

00:27:20.380 My belief is he doesn't want to call attention to it.

00:27:22.940 It's dark.

00:27:24.080 Um, all right, stand by because the whole thing is, is upsetting, but there's a lot to get to go over today.

00:27:29.100 And I know, uh, your backstory, we never got to it last time.

00:27:32.060 The audience is going to be stunned when they hear how, uh, you sort of, well, came to the job you're doing now.

00:27:39.180 It's more with Nicholas straight ahead.

00:27:45.100 You are a true expert when it comes to addiction.

00:27:48.200 Could be to drugs, could be to alcohol, could be to tech.

00:27:51.960 And you're, you know, sort of sounding the alarm on that.

00:27:54.780 Can I tell you, I was thinking about it over this weekend because, um, in October, my sister, my older sister, my only sister will have been gone for a year.

00:28:05.000 And, um, sorry, she was a recovering addict.

00:28:08.580 She got addicted during the opioid crisis to a drug called Ultram, which she was told by her doctor was not addictive.

00:28:16.220 And it was one of these opioids that, you know, it, when this was happening in the mid 1990s, a lot of people, even on Oxycontin, if you watch dope sick, um, we're told it's not addictive.

00:28:26.980 Like, don't worry.

00:28:28.640 And before she knew it, she was addicted and she really spent the rest of her life battling that addiction.

00:28:34.560 And then just the massive fallout that follows, uh, you know, a good chunk of your life being an active addict.

00:28:42.420 I mean, it's just so much sets you back.

00:28:45.800 It's very hard to get back even to just stasis, nevermind to then excel and make something out of your life.

00:28:52.800 I think about it when I listened to that song by Oliver Anthony, you know, where he talks about how dejected he feels about rich men north of Richmond and how the country sort of keeps a man down.

00:29:04.660 And some of the pushback to it was, Oh no, you know, in this country you can do anything.

00:29:08.340 Well, you know what?

00:29:08.980 Try factoring in an addiction to your life, your life and see how things go.

00:29:12.960 Cause that gets held against you forevermore, forevermore.

00:29:17.080 There's like, she was on one of those drugs that you mentioned, um, in, in some of your writings.

00:29:22.480 I forgive me.

00:29:23.520 I don't remember the name of it.

00:29:24.440 It's not, wasn't methadone.

00:29:25.540 It was like the box.

00:29:26.600 Suboxone, yes.

00:29:28.140 Suboxone, which was helping her, you know, get off of the actual, uh, drug, but that too, that shows up in blood tests.

00:29:35.840 If you want to be in any sort of a caregiving role, forget about it.

00:29:39.080 It just haunts you.

00:29:40.780 So, you know, about all of this.

00:29:43.080 Uh, and anyway, I was thinking about you over the weekend because we had a mass set for her at our church, you know, uh, for my sister and I was praying for her and I was thinking about her and I was just thinking,

00:29:52.060 you know, how would her life have gone if that hadn't happened to her?

00:29:56.900 How would, how would her life have gone if that hadn't come in and just taken over her life, her children's hours, our relationships, anyone who's had an active addict in the family knows what I am talking about.

00:30:09.780 It's like having a nuclear bomb go off in your family.

00:30:12.840 So this happened to you and you've been devoting your life ever since to trying to help those to whom it's happened and also to help people prevent it from happening to them.

00:30:23.540 Let's, let's talk about your backstory, Nick, and how, I mean, how it happened to you, how you, how you found yourself addicted and how bad it got.

00:30:30.980 I had a nice guy like me wind up, uh, addicted in, in what I do now.

00:30:36.360 Yeah.

00:30:36.760 Um, well, you kind of mentioned the fact that all families are touched, you know, they say one out of 10 people are predisposed towards having an addictive personality and, and the 30% of families have been touched by addiction.

00:30:48.720 So, um, it touches each and every one of us.

00:30:51.460 So this is not just something that happens to a certain group.

00:30:55.040 It's the great equalizer.

00:30:56.300 You know, that's one thing that I grew to find out.

00:30:58.300 Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, and we're, we're so, we're so confused as to how to understand this problem and how to treat it so often.

00:31:10.180 I think that we look at this problem of addiction and we look at it so often as a supply side problem and not a demand side problem.

00:31:16.740 You know, we talk about fentanyl and coming into the border from Mexico and that's a problem having too much of it, you know, awash in our society.

00:31:23.820 But what we're not looking at closely enough is why do we have the demand?

00:31:26.960 Why are we so thirsty for losing ourselves in addictive substances, whether it's pharmaceuticals or whether it's alcohol or whether it's digital, it's, it's what, what is our emptiness all about?

00:31:39.040 That we're seeking escape and numbing in all the wrong places.

00:31:42.260 And so we don't look at that part enough, you know, because we could shut down the border and shut down all the fentanyl, but people have been getting and escaping their pain for a very long period of time.

00:31:51.300 Uh, so my backstory, how I landed here, I'm the son of Creek immigrants.

00:31:55.400 Um, I was actually, I'm an immigrant myself.

00:31:58.040 I was three years old when we came to New York from Greece.

00:32:00.540 My father had seen, uh, was 13, 14 years old when the Nazis invaded Northern Greece.

00:32:06.220 And, uh, he saw witness, most of the men in his village were murdered and had to hide in the mountains and escape to Greece penniless.

00:32:14.000 So my father had seen a lot of horrible things in his life as a young man growing up when he escaped to Athens and, uh, my mother had survived a devastating earthquake.

00:32:22.680 Now we're speaking about devastation in Hawaii, but she had a natural disaster on her Island of Cephalonia.

00:32:27.720 So my parents had lived a pretty hard life when they emigrated to the U S in the mid 1960s.

00:32:34.540 So I was the child of Greek immigrants who had struggled.

00:32:38.540 And in that struggle, there was a lot of dysfunction.

00:32:40.920 My parents had a lot of love in their hearts, but you don't go through stuff like that and not have some emotional scars.

00:32:47.000 And, um, so, you know, I grew up in New York city, good kid, middle-class, lower middle-class background, but I went to the Bronx high school of science.

00:32:55.440 I was a smart kid.

00:32:56.400 I tested well.

00:32:57.140 I played sports a lot and sort of, I, I overcame, uh, a lot of maybe let's call it that childhood dysfunction, but my parents always instilled a sense in me of get an education and, you know, have a better life.

00:33:09.720 They came here to have a better life for, for me.

00:33:12.080 So, um, and I did, you know, and, and I've, I've talked and written about this because when people of my parents' generation or the greatest generation, people have seen some real hard things in their lives.

00:33:24.160 They, they have a pretty profound sense of meaning and purpose in their lives.

00:33:27.780 And the children of those folks sometimes have a little bit more of a struggle because, you know, by the time I landed in college and I went to Cornell upstate New York, I know you're a fan of upstate New York and, um, I've gone to school there as well.

00:33:40.900 Um, my wife went to Syracuse, I went to Cornell and, um, I got out of school and it was, I had the quintessential existential crisis early on.

00:33:50.200 I didn't know my friends were all going to graduate school.

00:33:52.620 I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.

00:33:54.380 I had a profound sense of imposter syndrome because I was lower middle class.

00:33:58.500 And a lot of my peers were from different backgrounds than I was.

00:34:02.900 And so when the opportunity presented itself, I sort of drifted into a career and I was working a corporate job right out of school in 1986.

00:34:11.420 And, um, I had the opportunity to work at a nightclub in midtown Manhattan, the Copacabana, the original Copacabana in New York.

00:34:18.520 Um, and part of my background as I had been a martial artist, I had a block built in Japanese karate.

00:34:23.740 That was one of the big, I did a lot of sports.

00:34:25.600 I played basketball, football, track, but I did this, this karate and karate was sort of my gateway into being the doorman at the Copacabana in 1986 when I was, uh, frustrated with my corporate day job.

00:34:38.360 And it was sort of an escape.

00:34:40.140 It was a way to sort of, um, live almost a double life where I could, you know, kind of live this alternate, this alternate world that was exciting and fun.

00:34:48.520 And, uh, eventually I quit the day job and kind of got deeper into the night job.

00:34:53.720 And eventually that led into me opening my own restaurant and nightclubs in 1988 in, uh, lower Manhattan.

00:35:02.340 And this was sort of this, this was a pretty cool time in New York.

00:35:06.660 New York was very exciting at that point.

00:35:08.460 There was a downtown New York scene with the art worlds were colliding with, with the music industry.

00:35:15.140 And there was, uh, you know, for a middle-class kid from Astoria Queens, which is where I was from, this was a very, uh, seductive world.

00:35:22.560 And so I was 24 years old.

00:35:24.380 I was in New York magazine as the New York's youngest nightclub owner, and it was intoxicating, uh, literally and metaphorically.

00:35:31.960 And eventually I, um, I fell into very bad habits.

00:35:35.940 And so within a few short years, I wound up pretty horribly addicted.

00:35:40.660 And I had one of these, um, awakenings where I was realizing that I was in this, you know, the New York nightlife world, you know, this is, which still exists today.

00:35:50.320 The page six sort of glossy, we had a lot of celebrities would come into, you know, again, I'm 24, 25, 26.

00:35:56.580 And we had Tom Cruise and Uma Thurman and John F. Kennedy Jr. were regulars at my, my, my, uh, my night spot downtown.

00:36:04.900 And for a kid with humble beginnings, like I had, it was, uh, it was, as I said, intoxicating, but also confusing.

00:36:12.940 And by the time I was in my early thirties, it was all spiraling out of control.

00:36:17.440 Uh, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York and he had an anti nightlife task force.

00:36:22.740 And, uh, in pretty short order, I was, uh, they, um, I fought the law and the law won.

00:36:27.480 They, I had my liquor licenses revoked because the reality was at that point, I was not a very good steward of these businesses

00:36:32.960 because I was struggling with my own personal addictive demons.

00:36:36.580 And it started with alcohol and cocaine, and eventually it did turn into heroin, which in my entire life,

00:36:44.140 I never would have believed that that would have happened.

00:36:46.340 Cause I was raised with power parents that taught me about character and integrity.

00:36:51.480 And yet somehow I lost myself in this world and what I discovered.

00:36:55.300 Um, and so my addiction got so bad after, um, my, my night clubs were shut down in 1995.

00:37:02.960 At that point, I was totally rudderless.

00:37:05.160 I was now left, uh, without an identity, without a career.

00:37:08.680 I had some resources still left, but I was broken spiritually, emotionally, physically,

00:37:14.040 and went through a really terrible two or three year period of, um, trying to go in and out of treatment programs to get better.

00:37:20.500 I'm sure you can relate with your sister because, um, it's a pretty, it's pretty treacherous waters to navigate,

00:37:26.800 you know, going in and out of detoxes and hospitals and trying to figure it out and trying to,

00:37:31.440 and that's the terrifying part for most addicts.

00:37:34.360 When you try to get better, cause initially a lot of addicts don't want to get better.

00:37:38.500 They want to go, they want to go back to when they were able to moderate their usage.

00:37:41.820 They want to go back to when it was manageable.

00:37:44.620 And I tried to do that for a period of time until I proved to myself that I, I couldn't,

00:37:49.640 I couldn't control the addiction anymore.

00:37:51.580 And, and then when I really tried to stop and I couldn't, that was the terrifying period.

00:37:55.380 And I became convinced at one point that I was just going to just die and implode.

00:38:00.720 And I almost did.

00:38:02.040 Um, eventually my bottom was, you kind of, you kind of did.

00:38:05.980 I, I kind of, I, uh, I, uh, as far as the doctors are concerned, I did, I was asymptotic, but without a heartbeat.

00:38:13.280 I had a fatal overdose where my heart stopped for over an hour and 15 minutes.

00:38:17.080 I was at Cornell Presbyterian and this is before they had Narcan and all sorts of, uh, medications that can revive you.

00:38:24.420 And, um, and so I wound up being, um, barely resuscitated after an hour and 15 minutes.

00:38:31.180 My parents were at my bedside vigil.

00:38:33.240 I was in the coma.

00:38:34.040 I was on life support and I wasn't expected to survive the first 24 hours.

00:38:38.500 My, my organs began to shut down.

00:38:40.440 They thought I wouldn't make it to the morning.

00:38:42.780 And, um, I did, I survived, but then they told my family that I was going to be,

00:38:47.000 uh, in the vegetative state because I had too much oxygen lost to my brain.

00:38:51.160 So if I were to survive, I would be a vegetable.

00:38:54.940 And, uh, when I came out of it about two weeks later, the only permanent physiological damage,

00:38:59.780 I lost most of the hearing in my left ear.

00:39:01.680 So I did have, uh, and I had really bad tinnitus where there was this really loud ringing.

00:39:06.160 But when I came out of that coma and, you know, I didn't have a classic white light experience,

00:39:12.340 which I was pissed off about because I'd always been interested in white light experiences.

00:39:16.100 And I didn't have one, but I felt profoundly different.

00:39:19.560 Something had shifted with, within me.

00:39:21.620 And I felt I wasn't put on this earth just to just lose myself in this, this, this addictive

00:39:28.320 gerbil wheel of, of just self-destruction.

00:39:31.820 And, um, and that was the beginning.

00:39:33.660 That was the beginning of me sort of saying, I'm going to change my life and I'm going to

00:39:38.360 try to first, first and foremost, I had to put out the fire.

00:39:41.780 I got connected very heavily to a 12 step program and I started going to seeing a therapist

00:39:47.180 and I was able to stabilize my addiction.

00:39:49.560 And then I went back to school and going back to school, gave me a container to kind of channel

00:39:54.960 my energy into, and to start helping other people.

00:39:57.140 And that started giving my life the meaning that I never had as a shallow nightclub owner

00:40:04.020 living in the most superficial of worlds.

00:40:06.160 And then I began to realize in the societal level, we're all, we're an empty society.

00:40:11.120 We're obsessed with materialism.

00:40:13.480 Our values are upside down.

00:40:15.140 And for a lot of people, addiction is about emptiness.

00:40:17.740 It's about your life has no intrinsic meaning or purpose.

00:40:21.260 So why not just self-medicate or escape?

00:40:24.200 And, and so that was a lot of the insights that I had in my own addictive struggle.

00:40:28.940 I knew that if I didn't create a life of meaning or purpose, I was going to implode.

00:40:32.600 And, and that's been the last, I celebrated 23 years of sobriety a few months ago of continuous

00:40:40.640 sobriety.

00:40:41.200 And, and it's been in that process of, of getting my life together that I've now been

00:40:46.460 able to create programs and I've been a university professor and I've, I've taught the treatment

00:40:51.060 of addiction and I've began to understood the societal issue of there's something wrong

00:40:56.440 with our society.

00:40:57.300 And as part of that work, um, I started seeing that we were finding a new flavor of addiction

00:41:02.300 to lose ourselves in.

00:41:03.440 And a lot of that was now looking like digital escapism, things like, especially for young

00:41:08.200 people for like the 16 and the 22 year olds, a lot of people that I was working with as

00:41:13.120 a psychologist were now, um, escaping, but they were escaping through video gaming and

00:41:18.400 social media and all these other sort of, uh, digital fantasy worlds that were much more

00:41:23.600 available than something like heroin, which took some effort to get.

00:41:28.300 So, uh, so I started, everyone's got an iPhone in their pocket.

00:41:31.680 Everyone's got an iPhone or Android phone.

00:41:33.360 Everybody, I mean, not everybody has heroin in their pocket, but they've got this other

00:41:37.240 form of addiction.

00:41:38.800 That's a very good point.

00:41:39.700 And, you know, and the availability and accessibility is, is, is a key point.

00:41:45.240 You know, I was, I got clean when Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York and a lot of people

00:41:49.660 criticize Rudy for a lot of things, but there was something to be said at the time when he

00:41:54.780 cleaned up street corners and he got rid of the squeegee man, um, struggling as an addict 0.99

00:41:59.800 at that point in the early nineties.

00:42:01.600 Um, when he made it less, when he made it more difficult to maintain your addiction, um,

00:42:08.260 you either had to get clean or became harder and harder to become an addict.

00:42:13.600 And that's why sometimes some of the harm reduction programs that we read about in the paper today,

00:42:17.720 I'm a fan of harm reduction, like giving suboxone or methadone to addicts who are trying to,

00:42:23.380 to, to stabilize their addiction and to, to get better.

00:42:27.400 But now when I'm reading that they're having vending machines in New York with crack pipes

00:42:31.020 in them, or that they're, um, they're doing crazy, um, you know, uh, safe side and safe

00:42:38.260 injection sites, which was an initiative of Mary de Blasio, which now Eric Adams is going

00:42:42.440 to continue, you're not helping the addict.

00:42:45.200 If you're normalizing this really self-destructive lifestyle, yes, we want to support people to

00:42:50.900 get better, but some of these harm reduction initiatives at the end of the day, aren't

00:42:55.220 helping people walk through the door of recovery.

00:42:58.380 And that, and those drugs that methadone or suboxone can really help people get off of those

00:43:04.540 hardcore opioids in a way nothing else has.

00:43:08.760 I mean, the dope sick called attention to this too, like they're, they need to be more

00:43:12.340 readily available.

00:43:13.620 You're going to have a vending machine full of anything for drug addicts.

00:43:16.320 Try suboxone instead of crack, you know, needles.

00:43:20.980 Well, I run a program in Austin right now called Austin Serenity and it's a recovery housing for,

00:43:26.520 uh, for struggling addicts who are on suboxone.

00:43:29.920 And it was so critically necessary where it's a joint program with the university of Texas,

00:43:34.080 Austin.

00:43:34.560 It's a granted program through the state because people who were on suboxone to your point about

00:43:39.980 stigmatizing and having challenges, uh, they weren't able to get into recovery housing.

00:43:44.500 So you come out of rehab, you're on suboxone, doctor prescribed suboxone to help you get through

00:43:49.700 those first 12 months or 18 months or 24 months.

00:43:52.520 And you can't get into a sober house because most sober houses have policies against being

00:43:56.520 on any medication.

00:43:57.280 So a lot of these young addicts were getting off of their suboxone to get into housing and

00:44:02.960 then they were overdosing and dying.

00:44:05.560 And so creating, um, suboxone friendly houses, what's called MAT medication assisted treatment

00:44:11.100 was a critical ingredient in this recovery, um, policy approach, create safe housing for

00:44:18.060 people who are on those medications and don't, uh, you know how people can, um, it's against

00:44:24.500 the fair housing act, you know, it's discriminatory to not allow people who are in doctor prescribed

00:44:28.460 medication to not live in certain housing, but that's what was happening all around the

00:44:31.840 country.

00:44:32.240 People on suboxone were not allowed to go into recovery homes.

00:44:35.400 So, um, so I'm part of an initiative of creating programs where people who are on those medications

00:44:40.980 can have safe housing because that's a big step towards saving their lives.

00:44:45.140 I didn't know you were only supposed to stay on it for 24 months or so.

00:44:49.280 I mean, I, I think that my sister was on it for a lot longer than that.

00:44:53.040 And I don't even know what the long-term side effects are of, because isn't it also an opioid?

00:44:57.980 Like, isn't it, but it's just like a much different kind.

00:45:02.160 I don't, I don't really know much about it to be perfectly honest.

00:45:04.480 There's opiate agonists and opiate antagonists where they use the similar pathways in the

00:45:11.800 brain.

00:45:12.120 It's supposed to be an antagonist where it sort of blocks the part of the brain that

00:45:15.800 gets high, but it's supposed to also reduce your cravings.

00:45:18.500 Essentially the biggest part is reducing the cravings.

00:45:21.620 Um, and when I said 24 months, there's no prescribed amount.

00:45:24.960 It's some people need to be on it transitionally for three to six months.

00:45:29.840 Some people need it for multiple years.

00:45:31.340 There's no one size fits all it's if it's working and if it's helping you function and

00:45:35.400 get back to work and you're managing now you're having, um, there are people on suboxone or

00:45:40.180 on methadone who are working attorneys, who are, uh, working in finance, who you would least

00:45:45.340 suspect, but this is what's helping them stay on the path.

00:45:50.780 Right.

00:45:51.500 It's like, I don't know, the whole thing is so infuriating because it's like, if you,

00:45:55.860 if you require a blood test or a disclosure of anything that you're taking for certain

00:46:00.880 facilities, like if you want to go into elder care, certainly childcare, it's, it's a tell

00:46:06.020 that you're a recovering addict for sure.

00:46:08.240 And it's like an immediate, and, but there are so many people out there who are amazing,

00:46:13.880 amazing, you know, people who are, who would be potentially great in these roles.

00:46:18.340 They're not bad.

00:46:19.360 They're not going to steal from you.

00:46:20.400 They're not going to hurt you.

00:46:21.480 They had trouble with a drug, like so many millions of other Americans for a long time.

00:46:26.240 But I understand when the patients are most vulnerable, the defenses are most high toward

00:46:31.180 entry into the professions.

00:46:32.760 Right.

00:46:33.020 But they're not supposed to, that's discriminatory because if someone is on doctor prescribed

00:46:36.740 medication like this is, you're not supposed to, um, be denied employment or anything like

00:46:43.040 that, that would be considered discriminatory.

00:46:44.600 Um, but it may on the down low happen, or it may happen in a, you know, less obvious

00:46:49.920 ways, but legally it's not supposed to happen that way.

00:46:52.380 And most of these folks are not ready for, they don't want a legal battle. 0.70

00:46:55.200 You know, it's like they're dealing with enough.

00:46:57.180 The last thing you want to know to go sue some employers who wouldn't hire them because of

00:47:00.620 their recovery from addiction.

00:47:02.660 And it's such a sticky wicket.

00:47:04.060 And it's like, there's, it's so heavy.

00:47:06.980 It's such a hard, hard topic for anybody who's dealt with it.

00:47:10.020 Um, I want to pick it up on the opposite side of this break because, you know, it's also being

00:47:13.380 used, it's being used politically right now to excuse people like Hunter Biden from his

00:47:17.300 dealings with Ukraine.

00:47:18.440 But the more I learned from Hunter Biden himself about his addiction and when it was most active

00:47:23.800 and what he was doing, the more disgusted I got at the fact that he was permitted to

00:47:27.840 have as much access to the sitting vice president, his dad, to the Ukrainian boards, uh, Burisma,

00:47:33.720 to all these other countries.

00:47:35.060 It seems insane to me that a father knowing his son was this addictive, addicted would allow

00:47:40.120 this amount of access to foreign dignitaries and so on.

00:47:42.860 We'll talk about it right after the break.

00:47:44.460 Nicholas stays with us.

00:47:45.380 And don't forget folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM triumph channel

00:47:50.360 one 11, one 11 every weekday at noon East, the full video show and clips by subscribing

00:47:55.740 to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.

00:47:58.620 And if you prefer an audio podcast, you can get us wherever you get your podcast for free.

00:48:03.240 I will say if you listen to us on Sirius XM channel one 11, when we're done, Dr.

00:48:09.480 Laura takes over and I'm telling you, I've been listening to a lot of Dr. Laura lately.

00:48:13.940 She just makes so much sense.

00:48:15.320 My God, I love listening to her.

00:48:17.480 So you could have a double whammy of the MK show and the Dr. Laura show.

00:48:22.620 And you're welcome.

00:48:23.700 Courtesy of Sirius XM.

00:48:24.760 Okay, so Nicholas, getting sort of back into the reading about addiction and led me to

00:48:33.820 Hunter Biden, you won't be surprised given my day job and what I normally do.

00:48:37.640 So he admitted in his book and reminded the court two weeks ago at his failed plea deal

00:48:43.660 hearing that he went to rehab six times in the last 20 years, in addition to being to

00:48:50.720 several outpatient facilities, was addicted, is addicted to alcohol primarily, he says,

00:48:56.160 but also drugs.

00:48:57.140 We know he's addicted to crack.

00:48:58.880 We've seen him on camera admitting to trying to sniff things like Parmesan cheese.

00:49:02.220 So desperate was he for some sort of fix busted for cocaine possession at age 80.

00:49:07.640 18, taken off his record that bust was by doing a pretrial intervention and he's had

00:49:15.040 six months of probation.

00:49:17.040 Interesting thought there for parents, you know, do you let the book get thrown at your

00:49:20.280 18 year old in that moment just so it's, you know, there's no intervention.

00:49:24.460 It's the full penalty of the law just so he feels the weight of it.

00:49:28.440 And I don't know, I'd love to say I'd do that.

00:49:30.880 I don't know that I would, right?

00:49:32.080 So it's when it's your own child.

00:49:33.360 So, um, story after story about how he quit drinking, but then returned to it.

00:49:37.800 I'd stopped for 30 days.

00:49:38.720 I'd binge for three, started drinking again here, again, here, again, here.

00:49:41.880 And once his father was elected vice president, there was, it was no holds barred from the

00:49:46.680 sound of it starting in 2010.

00:49:48.740 So shortly after Obama was inaugurated and Biden as the vice president.

00:49:52.580 Um, now he did continue trying to try and rehab centers, including one in 2014 in Tijuana,

00:49:58.260 Mexico, but then more booze, more drugs in and out, stumbling, sliding, racing downhill.

00:50:03.880 I could go down.

00:50:04.540 He was presenting all this to the drug, to the judge in connection with his attempt to

00:50:08.260 get a plea deal and excuse his behavior on the taxes and the gun.

00:50:12.060 Um, my question in all of this, and I realize this is not, you know, you don't, you may not

00:50:17.640 be able to answer it with respect to Hunter in particular, but what kind of a sitting vice

00:50:22.260 president knowing full well, as all family members do, when an addiction like this is

00:50:27.740 doing to a child would allow said child to do business, calling him up, using his influence

00:50:34.880 as the vice president of the United States, putting him on the phone with Ukrainian business

00:50:38.160 dealers, going to dinner with them at cafe Milano.

00:50:40.640 This is a severe addict and not only did he not stop Hunter from using the, his connections

00:50:48.340 to make all of this rain, you know, in Burmese, in Ukraine, in, in Russia, um, Kazakhstan, I

00:50:55.320 could go down the list.

00:50:56.340 He helped, he, he was facilitating it.

00:51:00.480 Miranda Devine of the New York post posited on the show.

00:51:03.360 That was the goal all along.

00:51:04.600 It was to line Joe Biden's pockets, not Hunter's.

00:51:06.940 Um, it was a Joe Biden operation, but what do you make of it as somebody who sees people

00:51:12.160 this addicted all the time?

00:51:14.880 Yeah, I, I tend to agree with Miranda Devine just intuitively, you know, the, the narrative 0.81

00:51:19.960 it's been on the mainstream media that poor Hunter Hunter's got these issues, but, but

00:51:24.800 they're divorced from Joe.

00:51:26.780 Joe's just the poor loving father who happens to have an addicted son.

00:51:30.940 And, and yet the more you look at this, the more you drill down into it in terms of the

00:51:35.060 timeline and when things were happening and how these conversations were going on.

00:51:39.360 And, and let's face it, it's come out now that Joe Biden has been dishonest from the

00:51:43.100 start about never having spoken to his son about business to now it feels like rather

00:51:48.140 than Hunter being the albatross around his father's neck, it feels like Joe Biden's been

00:51:53.360 an exploitative father.

00:51:55.000 Um, it feels like, I mean, again, I don't know this factually, but if you look at, if you

00:51:59.700 begin to connect some of the dots, it feels like in spite of the fact that Hunter was severely

00:52:05.180 addicted, his father was sending him out on these missions that high stress missions,

00:52:10.700 you know, these money gathering, um, operations that he was getting involved with, with Ukraine

00:52:16.400 and China and Romania and, uh, the different Uzbekistans, the different, um, you know, despots 1.00

00:52:22.940 that he was working with at the behest of his father.

00:52:25.760 So, so rather than Joe Biden being the, the grieving father here, it feels like he's the

00:52:33.060 exploitative father who is manipulating, uh, of a not very well son.

00:52:37.880 And, you know, again, I don't have great sympathy for, for Hunter because, you know, once you've

00:52:42.840 been exposed to recovery, um, you know, it may not be your fault that you fall down the addiction

00:52:48.360 rabbit hole, like your sister did. 0.97

00:52:51.640 Um, but once you've been exposed to recovery, you do have, that is within your power to continue

00:52:56.600 to walk that path.

00:52:57.980 And, and so there's some personal responsibility that comes in with how you access recovery and

00:53:02.660 treatment.

00:53:02.900 And now look, he's had several attempts at rehab over a couple of decades, but is his

00:53:06.980 father, does his father keep putting him back in the firing line?

00:53:10.340 You know, we talk about addicts and early recovery, slowly getting back into the workforce,

00:53:14.800 you know, the, the, the normal workforce, much less these black ops that he's doing in

00:53:20.420 China or whatever else he was working with Devin Archer or Bobulinski or some of his other

00:53:24.740 partners that have told us, you know, laid out their playbook that this is what's been

00:53:29.340 going on influence peddling one-on-one while he was, you know, days and weeks out of rehab.

00:53:36.080 So I think that's on Joe Biden, quite honestly, having somebody in the family who is, who wasn't

00:53:43.160 addicted to a drug, I understand that the rest of the family is constantly on edge.

00:53:49.840 You know, you're very worried that the person is going to return to active addiction.

00:53:53.540 You're worried about the person finding a stable, honest living.

00:53:58.400 And most of us would work to support a stable, honest living of said family member.

00:54:03.120 And the last thing you would do was allow this person to be dealing with the Ukrainians 1.00

00:54:09.140 and the Chinese and the Romanians and the Russians, while you have such a sensitive position as the

00:54:16.420 sitting vice president, not to mention you're bringing classified documents back to your home

00:54:22.280 where he is in Delaware and elsewhere.

00:54:24.960 Just having him lay out once again, you know, the scope of his addiction and how out of control

00:54:31.940 it was during all the years that we're now being reminded of by James Comer, who's investigating,

00:54:36.540 investigating this in the House, it just, to me, underscored how grossly irresponsible

00:54:42.480 Joe Biden has been, irrespective of whether they prove a bribe or all the rest of it.

00:54:49.780 Like what responsible parent would do that?

00:54:54.120 Irresponsible as a father and as a sitting vice president.

00:54:57.540 Right.

00:54:58.040 Because he was irresponsible on both fronts.

00:55:00.780 It'd be the equivalent, Megan, as if like if if you or I owned a restaurant and we had an

00:55:05.320 alcoholic son and the day they come out of rehab, we're going to put them to work behind

00:55:10.180 the bar and and not understanding that they're going to be triggers and that we should try

00:55:14.160 to be more compassionate about, you know, helping him have a softer, gentler landing in back

00:55:19.160 into the the sober world.

00:55:21.120 It seems like Joe was not concerned about that because he had other priorities.

00:55:24.820 It seems like based on the timelines of when he was doing these overseas missions right

00:55:29.800 out of treatment, right out of treatment.

00:55:31.640 So irresponsible as a father and grossly responsible as a sitting vice president.

00:55:38.220 Oh, my gosh, it's so alarming.

00:55:40.560 And when you look back at it, it's just God, could I come up with some good debate questions

00:55:45.080 for Joe Biden?

00:55:46.080 I mean, I wish so much they would let me have an interview with him or or do a debate with

00:55:51.460 him and they would be fair.

00:55:53.140 They would be fair.

00:55:53.700 It wouldn't all be just a, you know, a jugular excision.

00:55:57.420 But these are questions you can you can ask based in fact, it doesn't have to speculate

00:56:01.580 based on the FBI form or anything that that Comer and his friends have found.

00:56:06.580 It's it's about the actual decisions we know he made as the sitting vice president.

00:56:12.180 And I'd love to hear some answers to these.

00:56:14.400 Let's pivot to tech, because I do think a lot of our audience and yours truly, we all care

00:56:18.680 about this, I, I see it in in kids, my kids, to some extent, they're not allowed on social

00:56:26.140 media, but like my boys, they love games.

00:56:29.120 My little guy, he loves the games online.

00:56:31.400 And I sometimes I see him not obsessing over it, but like he's so intense when he's playing

00:56:37.080 it.

00:56:37.440 It bothers me.

00:56:38.760 And I'll say, Thatcher, what do you think?

00:56:40.580 What do you think?

00:56:41.100 I'm curious.

00:56:41.480 What do you think is a reasonable limit for you to be playing these games?

00:56:44.640 And he was like, I don't think I should be on this device for more than an hour a day.

00:56:49.020 I'm like, and this is summer.

00:56:50.380 So we're a little bit looser with it.

00:56:51.280 I'm like, I agree with you.

00:56:52.480 I agree with you.

00:56:53.800 But if we didn't make a decision to regulate that, I mean, he would he could be on it for

00:56:59.320 eight hours a day.

00:57:00.000 It absolutely is addictive.

00:57:03.140 Right.

00:57:03.500 And our children just don't have to develop prefrontal cortex to manage their impulsivity.

00:57:09.720 Right.

00:57:09.900 We talk about that, that, that part of our brain that manages our impulsivity fully develops

00:57:14.740 when we're 24, 25 years old.

00:57:16.480 So we're giving eight-year-olds and 10-year-olds and five-year-olds these highly dopaminergic

00:57:21.920 and adrenallergic, you know, they spike dopamine and spike adrenaline, these experiences that

00:57:27.100 are so powerful that adults can barely control them.

00:57:29.600 And then we're asking children to moderate.

00:57:32.060 And, and it's, it's a no-win situation where we're exposing them to platforms and games and

00:57:37.560 experiences that are really beyond their neurophysiological capability to moderate.

00:57:42.360 And so when we get upset, when they won't only play for an hour, we have to understand

00:57:47.140 that it's, it's, it's just too powerful of an experience.

00:57:50.380 And so, and it does alter from child to child.

00:57:54.140 There are some children that have a little bit more ability to manage some of these games.

00:57:58.420 And then there are others who fall entirely off the cliff and can't manage them at all.

00:58:03.280 And so, you know, there are no universal one hour, two hours.

00:58:07.900 Cause I get that, that question asked all the time.

00:58:10.600 What's the ideal time of screen time?

00:58:12.840 Well, it really depends on how dysregulated it makes your child.

00:58:15.660 And that varies from child to child, depending on some of their underlying issues or proclivities

00:58:21.180 or, or, uh, mental health predisposition predispositions.

00:58:25.480 That's so true.

00:58:26.400 And honestly, I feel like the parents who pay the least attention, uh, probably have the kids

00:58:31.380 who are on it the most, and then it becomes this cycle where the more they're on it, the

00:58:35.620 more addictive it is.

00:58:36.540 And, and then, you know, boom, they're off to the races.

00:58:39.620 Um, I know you've written about this, but some of the societal problems, a lot of the

00:58:45.000 societal problems we're seeing right now are, are linked back to this tech addiction and

00:58:49.580 influence, um, whether it's the severe depression and anxiety of teenage girls or the explosion in

00:58:56.620 the gender madness. 0.80

00:58:58.280 And I wanted to ask you about this.

00:58:59.640 This is, this is as good an on-ramp to the discussion as any I could think of, uh, Riley

00:59:04.660 Gaines, who's been great speaking out about men posing as women, trying to get into women's 0.97

00:59:09.600 sports.

00:59:10.240 She posts, she found this video on Tik TOK, I think, and she posted a video of herself

00:59:14.480 eating cereal next to it.

00:59:15.920 Just like, okay, okay.

00:59:16.900 Listening, listening, but listen, I'm going to play the soundbite so you can hear what the

00:59:21.960 young woman Riley was reacting to is saying about herself.

00:59:26.040 To me, there is no other explanation for this than life entirely online.

00:59:33.120 Okay, listen.

00:59:35.320 I'm Cody pronouns, E M air airs or Z's and Zersers or really any neo pronouns that aren't

00:59:40.800 Z hers. 0.98

00:59:41.900 I am a white transmasculine femme non-binary temporarily, mostly able-bodied neurodivergent, obsessive,

00:59:49.080 compulsive, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, non-monogamous, demi-low 0.55

00:59:53.960 romantic, gray, demobisexual, survivor of acute and complex trauma, millennial, and cat

00:59:59.500 parent in mental health recovery.

01:00:02.480 Oh my God.

01:00:04.620 I'm sorry, Nicholas, but what is that?

01:00:06.840 What?

01:00:07.260 Explain that.

01:00:08.760 Yeah.

01:00:09.780 It's crazy.

01:00:11.600 In clinical terms, it's insane.

01:00:14.100 Yeah.

01:00:14.460 Yeah.

01:00:14.680 We're seeing a lot of that.

01:00:15.500 So, you know, it's interesting when you look at the psychiatric metrics of the different

01:00:20.100 generational cohorts, the younger the cohort, you know, as we go down from baby boomer to

01:00:24.840 Gen X to millennial to Gen Z, the more psychiatric unwellness we have.

01:00:29.460 So the most health, mentally healthy people are in their fifties and sixties.

01:00:32.840 And as you go down the ladder, more depression, anxiety, suicidality, self-harm, all the, all

01:00:40.220 the psych metrics spike as you get younger and younger.

01:00:42.320 Which seems, which is correlating with their immersion in this sort of digital world.

01:00:47.540 When I wrote my first book, Glow Kids in 2016, part of, you know, I showed all the clinical

01:00:53.480 research that showed about some of the impacts of technology on children and teens.

01:00:59.740 And it was really pulling back the curtain on the playbook of big tech that they've made

01:01:04.540 these devices and platforms habit forming by design.

01:01:07.460 And so first it was saying, we're getting addicted to our devices, which at the time

01:01:11.320 in 2016, I got a lot of pushback from when I wrote in the New York post digital heroin,

01:01:16.220 people thought, what, these can be addicting.

01:01:18.200 Well, now we know ask and answer.

01:01:20.200 These devices are addicting.

01:01:21.740 My most recent book, Digital Madness, we look at what is the price of that addiction?

01:01:26.680 What is it doing to the mental health of an entire generation or entire society?

01:01:30.640 And so what we're seeing is that as we continue to have our love affair with technology and

01:01:36.640 increase our screen immersion, we're getting more and more psychiatrically and well.

01:01:40.780 And a lot of that I ascribe to what some of my colleagues have ascribed to also a social

01:01:45.320 contagion effect.

01:01:47.040 So if you're not, if you're a little bit lost or not loving your life or feeling a little

01:01:53.680 bit drifting and you start going down rabbit holes of different platforms, whether it's 4chan

01:01:59.640 or social media or Instagram, and I write, I've written about this because a lot of our clients

01:02:04.280 in Austin fall into this category, might be going through a little mild depression, but then if you

01:02:09.780 fall into a rabbit hole of there's whole communities for borderline personality disorder,

01:02:14.440 dissociative identity disorder, gender dysphoria.

01:02:17.620 And we know from social learning theory that we, you know, monkey see, monkey do.

01:02:21.880 We begin to emulate our social groups.

01:02:24.420 Well, now our social groups for most young people are digital.

01:02:27.320 They're online.

01:02:28.600 So, you know, if you run with wolves, you become a wolf.

01:02:31.140 If I start running on the, with a pack of borderline young people in a support group, I

01:02:38.360 will now start to kind of aspirationally emulate some of those characteristics.

01:02:43.740 There's no other way to explain the 4,000% spike in gender dysphoria, female to male gender

01:02:48.820 dysphoria that we've seen in quote unquote, late onset gender dysphoria, other than the

01:02:54.360 social contagion explanation.

01:02:56.500 Now, to be clear, as a psychologist for almost 25 years now, I've worked with genuine gender

01:03:02.900 dysphoria and I've worked with genuine dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple

01:03:08.220 personality disorder.

01:03:09.420 Those things are real, but they're extremely rare and they don't happen.

01:03:13.960 And they don't happen to the degree that we've been seeing them over the last five to 10 years.

01:03:18.540 So I've begun to call these variants pseudo borderline personality disorder, pseudo dissociative

01:03:26.720 identity disorder, pseudo gender dysphoria, because it ain't the real thing.

01:03:31.000 These are mimicked social contagion phenomenon.

01:03:34.360 And the proof of that is in my treatment program in Austin where they're off of technology, all

01:03:39.640 our young clients are off technology for eight weeks, there's a percentage of them who came

01:03:44.540 in with these personality disorders or these issues who once they unplug for three or four

01:03:49.420 weeks, they no longer show symptoms of the prior disorder, which shouldn't happen because

01:03:54.740 a lot of these disorders are lifelong or they're much more complex and long, you know, you shouldn't

01:04:00.040 be cured.

01:04:00.860 You don't lose borderline personality disorder because you turn off the iPhone for a month.

01:04:04.880 Exactly, because BPD is a multiple year, very entrenched personality disorder that doesn't

01:04:12.960 get cured in four weeks of unplugging.

01:04:15.140 And so if we're seeing that that's happening, then you didn't really have BPD to begin with.

01:04:19.760 That's the obvious conclusion.

01:04:22.960 This is so interesting to me because one of the first guests we ever had on the show was

01:04:25.960 Abigail Schreier, who wrote the must read book, Irreversible Damage.

01:04:29.980 And one of the first to sound the alarm on this social contagion based on Dr. Lisa Lippman's

01:04:35.420 work at Brown University that was happening in particular to young girls.

01:04:38.640 And we talked all about how this can happen to young girls.

01:04:41.580 They can get immersed on the Internet.

01:04:42.640 Next thing you know, they fall into this gender sort of cult and they're not really trans. 0.99

01:04:47.400 They're just whatever.

01:04:48.260 But this is the first I'm realizing that this the Internet is it's got several pockets of this.

01:04:54.060 Yes.

01:04:54.360 Gender.

01:04:54.700 Yeah.

01:04:55.160 But also borderline personality disorder.

01:04:57.320 Also, whatever we heard in that clip from that woman, Riley Gaines was reacting to.

01:05:02.140 And I can't even list the number of things she said were different about her.

01:05:06.860 And this is all found online in these little groups that affirm.

01:05:10.400 And you think like you tell me as the addiction expert, I would imagine you think you're feeling

01:05:15.380 better because you're connecting with other people who are like validating you.

01:05:20.100 So but but the same as a drug, the fall comes after the initial high.

01:05:26.160 Well, right.

01:05:26.880 You're finding community in this tribe and this tribe is not well.

01:05:31.240 And so now you're again are emulating the tribe that you've fallen into.

01:05:34.860 And so because you're so habituated to your device, you can't sort of look away.

01:05:38.840 The really fascinating ones to look at are the dissociative identity disorder communities

01:05:42.880 where you have, quote unquote, systems.

01:05:45.500 So now, you know, back.

01:05:46.720 Wait, what does that mean?

01:05:47.340 Does that mean like multiple personality disorder?

01:05:49.120 Yeah, so DID, dissociative identity disorder, is what we used to call multiple personality

01:05:54.100 disorder.

01:05:54.920 Remember Sybil and three faces of Eve.

01:05:58.420 And historically, somebody who had multiple personality disorder had childhood sexual trauma

01:06:04.960 and they couldn't, they had to complementalize that in an alternate identity.

01:06:09.520 And so they created alters.

01:06:10.920 And so they would have three or four or five identities in order to, it was a coping mechanism

01:06:16.440 to cope with some of the trauma of the sexual abuse that they had as children, a real thing,

01:06:21.140 very rare.

01:06:21.900 So now they're DID influencers.

01:06:25.360 So now we know that the power of the influencer isn't just Kim Kardashian, but these psychiatric

01:06:29.700 influencers are very popular because of the performative nature of what they do.

01:06:35.040 And we know that the coin of the realm in social media is views and followers.

01:06:40.300 And how do you get views and followers, but being the most over the top, the most performative.

01:06:44.880 So now you have these influencers who claim to have something like multiple personality

01:06:48.860 disorder or DID, and they have hundreds of thousands of followers.

01:06:53.440 And the entertaining part or the part that people really lean into or the popcorn moment

01:06:58.700 is when they do what's called switching.

01:07:00.020 So you'll have, Bobby will be a system that has, they'll say they have dozens of alters

01:07:08.380 now.

01:07:08.760 So their alter will be the full LGBTQI spectrum.

01:07:11.660 It'll be Bobby now has an alter that's a black lesbian 20-year-old or has an alter that's 1.00

01:07:17.720 a bisexual 60-year-old.

01:07:20.340 And they'll alter, they'll switch on demand.

01:07:22.940 And they post these videos.

01:07:24.520 They get hundreds of millions of views.

01:07:26.300 And the phenomenon that we're seeing is now their followers are also beginning to identify

01:07:31.460 as having alters and they do the same behavior and it's monkey see, monkey do.

01:07:36.180 It's not the genuine article.

01:07:38.040 They don't really have multiple personality disorder, but they're aspirationally gravitating

01:07:43.000 towards these influencers who do, or, well, let me, let me retract that.

01:07:47.560 I think many of these influencers don't have genuine personality disorder either, but it's

01:07:52.120 their shtick to get followers consciously or unconsciously.

01:07:56.300 What are our kids supposed to do when immersed in this?

01:08:00.920 I mean, I don't even know what, this is not going to happen to my children because we're

01:08:04.800 too active in our parenting, but they're going to have to grow up around this.

01:08:10.020 You know, they're, they're going to bump into other people's crazy at a rate that's much

01:08:15.460 higher than you or I had when we were growing up.

01:08:18.640 How are they supposed to react to this?

01:08:20.940 We just had the lunchroom in high school, right?

01:08:23.000 You had to navigate the cafeteria in high school. 0.94

01:08:25.780 It was like a bully, a mean girl, a nerd. 0.89

01:08:29.100 That's it. 0.97

01:08:29.620 Like all the normal stuff.

01:08:31.480 So I just came back from a month in Greece.

01:08:33.380 I was in a, on, on an Island in Greece for a month with my family, 16 year old twin boys

01:08:37.920 that I have that are going through high school here in New York.

01:08:39.920 Like, and we didn't see any of this.

01:08:42.720 There was none of this.

01:08:44.200 It was, it was like the land that time forgot.

01:08:47.080 We were on this idyllic Island where the kids grew up there and they weren't quote unquote

01:08:50.920 normal.

01:08:51.540 There was no DID.

01:08:52.680 There was no BPD.

01:08:53.740 There was no gender dysphoria.

01:08:55.660 It was, um, and my kids commented on it.

01:08:57.940 They're 16.

01:08:58.520 They're smart.

01:08:59.000 My, my twin boys.

01:09:00.100 And they're like, wow, all the, all the crazy we see back home isn't happening here.

01:09:04.580 Why is that?

01:09:06.180 Well, there's a variety of cultural reasons that might, uh, maybe give evidence to that,

01:09:11.680 but it's, it's all we can do as parents is immunize our kids.

01:09:15.760 I talk a lot in my books about creating a healthy psychological immune system.

01:09:19.300 And one of the metaphors that I like to use is, um, and it's a recovery metaphor, by the

01:09:23.860 way, um, being in recovery doesn't make the ocean less turbulent, but we can become better

01:09:28.000 swimmers.

01:09:28.880 Um, we're not going to stop the tide of social media from the crazy from bumping up against

01:09:34.340 our kids, but can we make our kids better swimmers?

01:09:37.540 Can we strengthen their psychological immune system and where they have a strong core sense

01:09:42.640 of identity?

01:09:43.480 They have some grit and resilience.

01:09:45.140 They have some critical thinking skills.

01:09:47.000 Um, they have some hobbies and interests.

01:09:49.460 Um, so there's a variety of factors that we can do.

01:09:52.600 Um, that's why I'm a big believer in something like ancient Greek philosophy.

01:09:57.240 I, I, I use the philosopher of warrior archetype is that that should be the ideal archetype that

01:10:02.200 we try to instill in our children.

01:10:03.620 And so the philosopher had the ability to use reason and critical thinking and, and ethics

01:10:10.500 and, and, uh, compassion, the philosopher think of the, you know, the classic idea of

01:10:14.960 what a, uh, Athenian philosopher combine that with the grit and resilience of a Spartan warrior.

01:10:20.700 And, you know, the psychologist, Angela Duckworth, she took, she wrote her book grit and she talked

01:10:24.900 a lot about the importance of grit.

01:10:26.320 Um, our kids need to lean into being able to be resilient.

01:10:30.420 And a lot of the young people that I work with have absolutely no resilience, no ability to

01:10:36.100 navigate through any kind of turbulence in their lives.

01:10:38.500 And so they lean into all these other maladaptive ways of dealing with life.

01:10:43.300 So we don't bubble wrap our kids.

01:10:45.380 We encourage them to lean into experiences that they might trip and stumble and fall.

01:10:50.500 And then that's what helps them become stronger.

01:10:53.220 You know, this in the mental health field right now, and I need to say this part, the dominant

01:10:58.100 paradigm is this model called ACEs adverse childhood experiences.

01:11:02.820 And, and what most mental health folks think now is because it's, it's a scale that they

01:11:07.780 give and that you give a teenager this ACEs test and the amount of adversity that they

01:11:12.420 had in their childhood correlates to the, how likely it is that they might have a mental

01:11:16.660 health issue or an addiction issue.

01:11:18.660 And what I've written and talked about is that the adversity isn't the bad thing.

01:11:22.980 The adversity isn't the boogeyman in this equation.

01:11:25.540 The inability to handle the adversity, to be resilient is the boogeyman here.

01:11:30.900 So, so we know that that doesn't kill us, this makes us stronger.

01:11:34.980 The old Nietzsche thing that things that we've had a struggle through usually empower us at

01:11:40.020 the end of the day, but we have to go through those experiences.

01:11:42.580 And unfortunately, societally, we've bubble wrapped our kids a little bit too much to the

01:11:47.380 point that they don't have, uh, we've had too much safe spaces and trigger warnings.

01:11:52.420 And, and we've created this pathology bubble because we've overreacted to things that we

01:11:58.420 should have not have done, um, even playing the pronoun game feeds into this because we're feeding

01:12:03.940 into, uh, this unhealthy narrative to, to, to do this pronoun game.

01:12:08.660 You know, I'm going back to teaching at a university again, uh, this year, back to Stony Brook.

01:12:12.820 I was a professor there 10 years ago and, and the world has changed in 10 years and I'm

01:12:17.620 refusing to play the pronoun game, uh, because how's that going to go over in the university

01:12:22.020 setting?

01:12:24.420 How's that going to, you know, how are you going to handle that in university setting?

01:12:27.940 I'll let you know.

01:12:28.580 It starts, it starts in two weeks, right?

01:12:31.700 I worry about this for my kids.

01:12:33.300 I, I worry about, I, I did a whole talking points memo a few months ago about on how I'm

01:12:38.660 done with the pronouns and how I got to this point and why I really think that the pronouns

01:12:43.140 are dangerous.

01:12:43.780 Now I've really done a one 80 on it, but I worry about my kids because more and more,

01:12:47.700 you know, school-aged children are declaring themselves this, that, or the other.

01:12:53.780 And it's not real.

01:12:55.220 And I don't want my kids to have to play the game and I don't want them to be cited as

01:12:58.420 bullies if they don't play the game. 0.99

01:12:59.700 Or what if there's a teacher?

01:13:00.980 What if they have a teacher who, who declares themselves a member of the opposite sex? 0.87

01:13:05.060 And then your kids have to play along.

01:13:08.100 Otherwise what's going to happen to them, right?

01:13:09.620 Like you want to be tolerant, but why does my kid need to participate in your delusion?

01:13:15.140 Exactly. And so often it's misguided, you know, oftentimes, you know, sometimes it's

01:13:21.380 well-intended, but misguided.

01:13:23.380 So you have some teacher or some mental health professional who's trying to be supportive

01:13:28.740 and they're, they're misinterpreting, you know, it's the same thing with addiction.

01:13:32.180 You know, it's enabling, I'm trying to help somebody, but I'm enabling that rather than

01:13:35.700 helping them.

01:13:36.580 So you're making the problem worse rather than really clearly understanding the dynamics of

01:13:41.140 the issue.

01:13:41.620 So the teacher that's thinks they're being supportive of a child's gender journey is

01:13:47.620 actually creating more harm than good because they're, they're planting seeds that are not

01:13:53.300 age appropriate and they're impressionable young kids.

01:13:55.860 Kids are going through different developmental stages.

01:13:58.100 They're thinking they're Superman, Batman, a furry, a superhero.

01:14:01.780 You don't feed into that transitional identity that they might be temporarily identifying with.

01:14:06.740 And you certainly don't encourage hormone therapy and invasive surgeries.

01:14:12.340 They're like Nicholas.

01:14:13.620 I'm just realizing they're like the the mayor de Blasio with the with the dispenser of the drugs

01:14:19.220 instead of putting Suboxone in there that might get them off the drugs.

01:14:23.380 They're de Blasio is putting the actual drugs in there.

01:14:25.940 And that's that's like what these teachers are doing rather than leading the children away from

01:14:30.260 this very unhealthy choice, which it is a choice.

01:14:34.340 They're fostering it.

01:14:35.460 They're encouraging it.

01:14:36.260 They're like more of it, which we've said before, but it's bears repeating.

01:14:39.620 That's like encouraging the anorexia.

01:14:41.380 That's like encouraging the borderline personality disorder.

01:14:43.940 None of this is healthy.

01:14:45.140 It should not be encouraged.

01:14:47.380 Right.

01:14:47.620 But they think that they're being somehow compassionate.

01:14:49.780 And so we've gone from trying to, I think, be compassionate or accepting of certain disorders

01:14:57.380 to then normalizing it to not making them aspirational.

01:15:00.340 Let's face it right now in most universities, it's it's cool to be trans.

01:15:04.500 It's cool to be, you know, the worst thing to be is a cisgender white male. 0.74

01:15:08.980 Right.

01:15:09.300 So I had a friend of mine's daughter came back from school and she said three of her

01:15:14.020 white male friends just over the course of the intercession

01:15:18.100 decided they're going to come back and be trans just because it was too hard to be a white male

01:15:22.660 in the culture that they're in because we're potentially so demonized.

01:15:30.020 It's just very toxic right now.

01:15:31.700 And the adults in the room are not sort of standing up and saying, no, the emperor has no clothes.

01:15:35.620 We're not going to play this game because we're feeding into or enabling these

01:15:39.540 really unwell thoughts that are being amplified through social media.

01:15:43.780 And then now we're having the cancel culture and transphobia.

01:15:46.820 And if you call somebody any one of these, you know, third rail words,

01:15:51.220 God forbid you get called homophobic, transphobic, anything like that in your career is over.

01:15:56.420 And so those of us who had a point in our careers where we're a little bit past that

01:15:59.940 and we don't have to maybe necessarily worry about that.

01:16:02.100 We need to kind of speak up and say, this is not healthy.

01:16:04.980 This is not helping the people that are struggling with underlying mental health issues.

01:16:09.620 And this is not helping on the societal level, creating a very

01:16:14.660 unwell society right now.

01:16:16.420 We're already an empty, sick society, materialism-based, Kardashian-worshipping. 0.58

01:16:22.100 Can we have a dialogue about, you know, this goes back to the ancient Greek model of

01:16:26.980 dialogues about ethics and civics and what it means to be a just society and what that really looks

01:16:33.300 like on a very fundamental level. And we don't have those conversations because it's an emotions

01:16:38.580 economy. And so if I say something that might be logically factually true, but it triggers your

01:16:44.260 emotional response, that's that trumps my my ability to speak factually or use reason.

01:16:51.700 And it shouldn't be that way.

01:16:54.020 You know, I'm thinking about developing grit and I think the short answer is always like

01:16:58.660 I've said it before, but run toward the danger, like take on risks, deal with the downside when

01:17:03.300 it comes and manifests. And that's true for parents raising children, too.

01:17:08.740 I think our instincts oftentimes are to try to solve our children's problems for them, right?

01:17:13.220 Because we love them and we know what to do, you know. And what I've realized lately,

01:17:18.180 I love cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, where and this isn't the clinical definition,

01:17:22.580 but my work workman's understanding of it is OK, that little voice inside your head says, 1.00

01:17:28.180 whatever, I'm an idiot. I guess I'm an idiot. And what if you said, OK, what's your evidence? 1.00

01:17:33.380 You're an idiot. Well, I got the answer wrong on that test. OK, that's out there. You did get the 1.00

01:17:37.620 answer wrong on that test. You owe it to yourself to make the second list. What is the evidence that I'm

01:17:42.980 not an idiot there? Oh, wait, actually, there's quite a few things over here on this pile. 0.99

01:17:47.460 And I could go through them. And I'm not trying to unleash that on my children exactly. But I do

01:17:52.820 think it's my default way of parenting. Like if my kid comes home and says so and so insulted me,

01:17:57.700 I'll say that person sounds like an asshole. But also, what are all the things that might belie 0.99

01:18:03.860 that claim? Like, OK, maybe you did this thing or maybe you didn't. I don't know. But let's look at

01:18:07.940 all the other evidence about who you actually are. Like, look at all the things you actually did

01:18:12.100 accomplish. Look at all the things that you've done and you know that you feel good about.

01:18:15.700 And the evidence before the court is more than this one insult. Right. Like,

01:18:21.060 that's basically where and that's the law. That's the gift of having them live with you,

01:18:25.700 ideally, until they're 18. They bring problems home and you can help them. You're not solving

01:18:30.580 them for them. You're giving them problem solving skills. Right. You're teaching them how to confront

01:18:36.340 the faulty cognition, as we call it. Right. So there's a faulty cognition or false narrative.

01:18:41.220 And we're helping them disabuse that so they have the sword in their toolbox or the sword in their

01:18:45.460 sheath to be able to fight off. Because when you look at things like social media, there's so much

01:18:50.900 noise. There's so much toxicity there. If they don't have the ability to critically think and to be able

01:18:56.660 to use this ability that you're talking about to analyze something and to give the counter argument to,

01:19:03.700 they're just going to be lost in the noise or the toxic tide is going to pull them under. And that's

01:19:08.580 what I'm seeing with a lot of the clients that we treat in our Austin program. They've been

01:19:12.580 sucked into, you know, like the video that you showed with that young woman who multiply identified 0.90

01:19:18.580 as all this nonsense. And it's, it's so unhealthy to feed into that. If somebody would have just said, 0.77

01:19:24.660 what's your intrinsic identity and stuff, all these labels, because we've, you know, intersectionality

01:19:29.860 and having parsing people down to the more divisive and divisive ways is instead of the old Martin

01:19:35.380 Luther King, what's the content of your character? How about who, what, who are you intrinsically?

01:19:40.820 Forget all the exterior labels. Cause that can be very schizophrenic inducing and very confusing.

01:19:46.660 Let's get to the core essence of who you are. And for a lot of the young people that I work with,

01:19:50.900 there's so much confusion right now because of all this noise that's coming at them from a thousand

01:19:55.540 different directions. Um, I really think like if, if I were a teacher dealing with this and somebody

01:20:01.380 came in and said all that, I'd say, so no, it's a, no, I won't be doing that. You can pick one

01:20:08.180 male, female. I mean, if I can't tell what it is, you can pick one. And if you don't pick one,

01:20:11.940 I'm going to pick it. We're not going to do Z Z Zer. Well, I love the low radical load trends.

01:20:17.860 I don't know what she said. Um, either you pick or I pick, but we're going to do one and that's how it's

01:20:23.940 going to work here because you're not going to turn yourself into a distraction to me, to the rest of

01:20:27.780 the class. It's just so tricky and you're going to be living it in the belly of the beast. So,

01:20:34.660 all right, Nicholas, would you, I have a question for you. Sorry to ask you this live in the air,

01:20:37.860 but will you take some calls? Because I I'm sure our audience members have got some of these issues

01:20:43.940 in their lives or with their kids or with themselves and may want to ask you for your

01:20:47.700 expertise. So would you want to take some calls from callers? All right. Awesome. Nicholas stays with us.

01:20:52.260 Can I just add one thing? One of the things that I think gets underappreciated is how the narcissism

01:20:59.460 that gets embedded into young people by this whole digital landscape that they're in. Um,

01:21:04.820 there's this idea. And if you think about it, Megan, um, you know, we used to talk about in our

01:21:09.060 generation, it was like, you know, everybody suffered from not everybody, but a lot of people

01:21:12.020 suffered from low self-esteem and the name of the game was to improve self-esteem. A lot of the younger

01:21:16.820 people that we work with now have an inflated, uh, egocentric narcissistic, uh, sense of self-esteem,

01:21:22.500 because if you think about what the digital landscape is with predictive algorithms,

01:21:26.980 an eight, 10, 12 year old kid, they think of something and they do a search engine, uh,

01:21:32.420 search about something. And all of a sudden their digital world collapses around them and gives them

01:21:37.620 more and more of that, that they've thought of. It's a bit of magical thinking because their digital

01:21:42.340 world is created in their image, it's created to suit their needs. And so it's no wonder that

01:21:47.780 a lot of these young people that have been raised in the womb of the digital world that we're in

01:21:53.140 have a profoundly self-centric view of the world because the world does revolve around their

01:21:57.860 interests and needs in a very magical way. So, um, that doesn't often get appreciated enough,

01:22:03.860 I think. But anyway, I just wanted to add that into the equation.

01:22:06.500 Remember, you are not special. You're not. You need the Linda and Ed Kelly method of parenting.

01:22:14.980 You really don't seem that special, but we're open-minded to specialness if you so choose to prove it.

01:22:24.100 All right, let's get, uh, Jeff from Pennsylvania on the phone. Jeff, hi. Thanks for calling in. What's

01:22:30.020 your question for Nicholas? Hey, Emilia. I just have a kind of an interesting story and a great,

01:22:35.460 really great topic because it's, it's insanity what's happening in America today. My niece was,

01:22:42.420 uh, a couple of years ago when she was 19, she declared that she was going to be a day gender 0.69

01:22:48.420 neutral, um, based on her personality traits and growing up really good kid, but she always wanted

01:22:58.340 to be the center of attention for whatever reason and color her hair differently. We took it all in

01:23:05.700 stride. Uh, but then it got serious, changed her name to a, to a non gender or gender neutral name

01:23:15.700 and said, I am, I am now a day. And occasionally she would dress like a female and occasionally she 0.97

01:23:22.820 was just like a male. Uh, uh, it seemed disingenuous and very much a cry for attention at 21. She's

01:23:32.980 matured a little bit. Uh, her tendency was certainly to act very much like a female and at 21, she comes

01:23:44.180 out now and says, you know what, um, mama woman. And it was just simply my uneducated opinion

01:23:57.300 that it was projected on her that this is a way, if you talk about this, you will generate attention

01:24:05.540 towards yourself. If you become a day, it's another reason for people to talk about you.

01:24:14.180 That's a great point. I mean, I'm sure you're seeing that, right? Like it's an attention

01:24:18.980 seeking thing. What do you make of that? Yeah, I think a big part of it. And I think

01:24:24.820 that's a perfect example because we have so many detransitioners today that are evidence to the 1.00

01:24:30.420 fact that this was not a permanent, this wasn't genuine gender dysphoria. It was attention seeking.

01:24:35.300 It was underlying other mental health issues. It was underlying, maybe just natural transitioning.

01:24:41.300 Jordan Peterson talks about this as well, where there's always been masculine women and feminine

01:24:46.740 men. And there's a spectrum of, of what is gender normal, but to all of a sudden have people suggest

01:24:53.540 that if you do this or assume this other gender identity, like your niece did, they all of a sudden 0.77

01:24:59.220 realize when the dust settles after a couple of years that, oh, maybe this is just a passing fad

01:25:03.780 fad. In the addiction recovery world, we have a phrase that we call where an addict might try to

01:25:09.460 do what's called the geographic. And the geographic is when somebody who's struggling with addiction

01:25:13.860 feels that, well, maybe if I move somewhere, that'll cure my addiction because my addiction

01:25:18.340 isn't based within me. My addiction is based because of where I'm living. And if I move from New York to

01:25:23.220 LA, I won't be an addict anymore. I'm, I've become convinced that gender dysphoria or this 1.00

01:25:28.740 is pseudo gender dysphoria. That's the social contagion version of it. For some people is

01:25:33.620 a gender geographic. Uh, some young person is feeling some struggles. They're not feeling

01:25:38.420 comfortable with their life at that point. And they get the idea either through social media or through

01:25:43.540 some well-intentioned or not well-intentioned adult, that if they go over the fence and go into the

01:25:50.340 other gender, that's where happiness lives. And then they find out that's not because that gender 1.00

01:25:55.780 isn't the source of their problem. This reminds me of something my sister

01:25:59.540 learned when she was in recovery. And well, I get, I think it's a saying quote in the rooms,

01:26:03.860 as she used to say, uh, like 12 step rooms, wherever you go, that's where you are.

01:26:08.500 Right. Wherever you go, that's where you are. You take yourself and your baggage with you just because you

01:26:13.380 move a state or change the way you dress, you haven't addressed any of your problems. And in the,

01:26:19.060 in the field of transgenderism, you've, you've created more, uh, especially if you started

01:26:23.220 engaging in these hormone therapies or the medicalization, the surgeries. Let's get

01:26:27.220 another caller in. How about, um, Cheryl Lynn? She's up in Toronto, Canada. Hi, Cheryl Lynn. What's

01:26:31.940 on your mind? Hi, Megan. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for calling.

01:26:38.580 Thank you so much. Everything that you're talking about, I feel like now I've missed the boat because I

01:26:44.020 have a son 20 years old dropped out of university in one program and dropped out of college in a

01:26:51.860 second program. So he's, I'm reluctant to give him chance number three, but the only thing that he

01:26:58.980 does is game online and any money that he has, he buys things for the game. His whole social network

01:27:08.420 is online. And it's, it's really scary. I don't see a way out of this. I need a playbook and I'm

01:27:15.060 really lost in how to help him. Hmm. What do you make of it, Nick?

01:27:21.220 Well, that's half of our clients in our Omega recovery. Austin program is exactly what you

01:27:26.980 just described. It's failure to launch college age, young men who get lost in gaming. Um, the real

01:27:33.060 world becomes harder and harder, and it's much easier to push a button and live in the fantasy world

01:27:36.980 to gaming. It's a hard, I'm going to be honest with you. It's a hard addiction to break because

01:27:41.540 it's so readily available. Um, and so it usually takes more than just seeing a therapist once a

01:27:47.780 week, you know, it takes really a kind of a wholesale transformation. He's got to get back

01:27:52.260 into healthy habits and find a genuine sense of meaning in their lives because oftentimes the gamer

01:27:57.940 feels that their own lives, his own life is not meaningful, but when he's leveling up and he's a

01:28:04.340 level 112, um, in this galactic universe that he's feeling empowered in, um, that's a better

01:28:11.620 reality than the one he's currently living in. And so, um, pretty significant treatment is the

01:28:17.460 solution usually, because usually that doesn't fix itself spontaneously, unfortunately.

01:28:22.740 Get help. Get help. That's a, that is a tough one. And you know, for people with younger kids,

01:28:28.500 stay aggressive before it, before it spirals. Um, I think Jerry in Long Beach, he's got a

01:28:34.980 political thought. Let's get some politics into, into the back half here. Hi, Jerry, what's on your mind?

01:28:39.860 Jerry, are you out there? Can you hear me? Oh, Jerry, we'll miss you. Uh, let's try Kevin in South Carolina.

01:28:55.140 Hi, I, I'm just amazed at our current, uh, vegetable in the White House. I'm sorry about that. Um,

01:29:04.340 how he has no decency to come out and be a human being to care about the people that are affected

01:29:13.700 in Hawaii. Yeah, we, we've been talking about it, uh, on the show that what, I mean, I'm not going to

01:29:21.700 ask you to diagnose him, Nicholas, but what do you make of it? I mean, what would make somebody in his

01:29:26.380 position say no comment as opposed to just actually speak from the heart and say, my God, it's terrible.

01:29:31.920 It's, it's terrible. I'm getting briefed on it. And my heart goes out to everyone there. And

01:29:37.020 you know, I, I'm cynical. So I think he's worried about his own push on the green energy stuff, but

01:29:41.860 what, what's your take on it? Yeah. Again, not having met or diagnosed him, but you know,

01:29:46.980 some signs of a narcissist and it's a little sociopathy there. You know, I was reading the

01:29:51.920 other day that Jill Biden's first husband was reeling a story about how, when they all used to be friends

01:29:57.080 before she married Joe Biden, this is her first husband. And he tells a story of that. He had told

01:30:03.440 some football story, some anecdote that was really funny. And later that evening, they all went to

01:30:09.340 dinner with a larger group and Joe Biden shared that story as his own. And, and, and Jill's husband

01:30:16.500 was sitting right there and he scratched his head and said, wow, this is pretty, there's something kind

01:30:21.200 of off here. This guy is retelling the story that I just told three hours ago as his own.

01:30:26.260 And I'm sitting right here. Uh, that's not normal. Um, there's something off about that,

01:30:31.340 about like sort of confabulating or making up stories and doing it in such a sociopathic way

01:30:37.180 that you don't even are aware maybe that you're doing it. It's, um, and again, it goes back to,

01:30:43.440 it's always about him. Some veterans telling you about their troubles and it goes back to your issue

01:30:47.980 and your pain in a misguided way to seem compassionate, but it comes out as being

01:30:52.600 self-centered. Oh, that is so interesting and makes a lot of sense. Uh, let's go to Sean in

01:31:00.560 New Hampshire, who has a question. Hi, Sean, what's your question? Hi, Megan. Um, so my question is

01:31:07.880 obviously you can't do this for the first debate, but for the second debate, would you consider sitting

01:31:13.820 down with Trump and maybe Trump and Tucker and doing live commentary on the debate?

01:31:21.480 Hell yes. Yes. I would, I would do all of that. I think it's actually a brilliant move to counter

01:31:28.340 program by, by both Trump and Tucker. What a smart kind of middle finger, right? Trump's not happy with

01:31:34.840 Fox because let's face it, they've been all team DeSantis from the beginning of this thing. Only now

01:31:39.260 that DeSantis is numbers are cratering. Are they like, Oh, well, we'd love to have Trump. I'll talk

01:31:43.540 about Trump a little bit more, but they've been on the DeSantis love train. Okay, fine. But let's

01:31:47.780 not be surprised now when Trump doesn't want to show up for your Fox and your Fox business debates.

01:31:51.900 And of course we all know what they did to Tucker. So it's a very, it's a great power move by both men

01:31:56.980 in a way, though. I confess I'll miss seeing Trump at the debate. I mean, that's, we all kind of lose

01:32:01.780 because he's fascinating and he'll keep it interesting. Um, I'll be waiting. The most interesting thing to me

01:32:08.180 is what's going to happen in the polls after that debate, because are these guys going to make it

01:32:13.620 a Trump pile on? I mean, Chris Christie will, of course, or are they going to just make it about

01:32:17.760 each other? And what will that do to the relative numbers? You know, with Trump 46 points up,

01:32:23.060 it just seems immovable. No one's ever been up by these amounts and lost the nomination.

01:32:28.120 So I have no idea what their plan is, but yes, hell yes. I would counter program that way. Sean,

01:32:32.460 thank you for, for calling and asking. Uh, let's see, Barbara in Delaware. Hi, what's your thought?

01:32:38.180 Hi, Megan. First of all, I think you're an inspiration to women and, um, I really appreciate

01:32:44.280 you. So my comment is, I don't think Trump at least should attend the first debate because all I think

01:32:51.340 they're going to do is dump on Trump and take their eye off the ball that this country needs a lot of

01:32:58.060 work and to get it back to where it was prior to the Biden presidency. Hmm. Well, I think, uh, one thing

01:33:06.120 you can't say about Trump is that he doesn't have good political instincts. So if they're telling

01:33:09.980 him, if those instincts are telling him not to go in the wake of this Atlanta thing, you know,

01:33:13.900 the indictments, um, who are we to second guess it? I don't know. I don't, I think he's,

01:33:18.240 he's probably right. He skipped Iowa the first time back in 2015, 16, he lost Iowa, but he still won

01:33:24.240 the nomination and won the presidency. So we'll continue to follow it. Nicholas, it's been fascinating.

01:33:29.160 I hope everybody buys digital madness. There's so much goodness in the madness, uh, that you write

01:33:34.120 about and, uh, love having you on. Please come back. Great. Thank you, Megan. You can keep on

01:33:38.760 doing the great work you're doing. I really appreciate you, uh, you and, and your show.

01:33:42.240 Thank you. Oh, all the best to you. Uh, tomorrow. I want to tell you, we're going to have Jason

01:33:46.820 Whitlock love Jason Whitlock. He's going to be here for the full show. So we'll get to all the news

01:33:51.640 headlines, including that business about CNN and how they manipulated a DeSantis clip. You may or may not

01:33:57.040 be offended with a real clip, but at least play the real clip. Uh, we'll get into it tomorrow along with all

01:34:02.120 the other news headlines. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:34:10.780 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 21, 2023

Did Joe Biden Enable Hunter's Addiction？ Plus Biden's Shameful Maui Visit, with Dr. Nicholas Kardaras ｜ Ep. 611

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