The Megyn Kelly Show - Hysteria Harming Our Kids and Why We Can't Stay Focused, with Abigail Shrier, Johann Hari, and Megan Rafalski

00:00:00.440 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.760 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:15.760 The push for freedom is multiplying. You can feel it, can't you?

00:00:21.040 The demands for our return to normalcy, for a return of the people's rights,

00:00:25.460 like the right not to wear a mask, to say what gets injected into one's body without fear of

00:00:32.320 losing one's job or education, to require truly informed consent on mandated medical treatments,

00:00:39.360 to go to school without a mask, without plexiglass, without being treated like a leper when you're

00:00:45.360 there. You could see it at the Defeat the Mandates rally in D.C. on Sunday. Thousands of protesters

00:00:51.400 in the cold, standing up for a return to liberty. And I also want you to know, spoiler alert, freedom

00:01:01.020 wins. The papers tried to dismiss the event as, oh, just a bunch of MAGA folks with don't tread on me

00:01:14.220 signs, but this was not a partisan event. Brett Weinstein, who helped organize it, is a liberal.

00:01:20.080 Yesterday on this show, a self-described lifelong Democrat called in to say she had driven eight

00:01:25.240 hours to be there. This isn't about left-right. Last weekend, I had dinner with 10 women in New

00:01:31.740 York. These were women who voted for Joe Biden, some of whom campaigned for him. Women who considered

00:01:37.080 themselves liberal and proud of it just one year ago, all of whom had effectively been red-pilled.

00:01:44.220 Some just registered Republican. Most openly prayed that DeSantis will be our next president.

00:01:51.280 A few even mentioned Trump in a positive light. And all are furious about ongoing draconian COVID

00:01:58.580 policies at the local, state and national level. These are responsible, loving, kind, professional

00:02:04.600 women, moms who hand sanitized, masked, quarantined, homeschooled, and didn't complain for nearly a year

00:02:10.840 in a city devastated by COVID. But two weeks became two months, became two years, and nothing has

00:02:18.120 changed. No off-ramps are provided, not just in New York City, but in many cities and states run

00:02:24.600 by Democrats. And any complaints on behalf of themselves or their children are repeatedly met

00:02:31.020 with, do your part, how dare you, or people are dying. Case in point, Barry Weiss, another liberal,

00:02:38.640 friend of ours, who has seen the light on COVID. On Bill Maher, she appeared this past weekend,

00:02:46.060 followed by a CNN doctor responding to her watch.

00:02:50.320 You get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven't gotten back to normal. And it's

00:02:57.840 ridiculous at this point. This is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic

00:03:03.640 moral crime. The United States lost 10,000 people last week. She needed to grow up because she's

00:03:10.420 acting like a child. And when somebody who is relatively young and relatively healthy says that,

00:03:16.000 what they're saying is, I'll be okay if I get this virus. Screw you.

00:03:22.460 He's mad because Barry said she's done. People are dying. He's not wrong about that. We all get that.

00:03:28.260 The CDC says it was 7,000 people last week, not 10,000, mostly seniors. We have no idea how many

00:03:35.440 of them actually died from COVID, as opposed to just dying with COVID, a distinction the fear mongers

00:03:40.920 keeping these tallies refused to make. But yes, people are still dying from COVID, which is not going

00:03:47.080 anywhere. And so we are faced with a decision now, after two years of this, of how we are going to

00:03:53.300 handle this reality and also foster the well-being of our children and ourselves. The COVID death rate

00:04:00.960 matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. And guess who realized that first? Moms, like my

00:04:08.480 new pals. And they are not selfish to say they, like Barry, are done. Their kids missed nearly a year

00:04:16.880 of in-person school. When after 12 months of remote learning, they attended and opened the school's

00:04:22.920 rally, they were called white supremacists. Their kids still play basketball, dripping with sweat into

00:04:28.940 a mask and while mandatorily vaccinated. The children, as young as two, have been forced to wear masks for

00:04:37.420 eight to 10 hours a day for nearly two years. The kids' ears are sore. Their faces are broken out.

00:04:44.740 They can't breathe as well. They can't understand one another. They don't know what anyone's smile looks

00:04:49.980 like. They've been forced to eat lunch outside on the ground while six feet apart, sometimes in frigid

00:04:55.900 temperatures. Many children are not even allowed to speak during lunch, including last year, my own.

00:05:04.260 They see each other, other children at lunch, only through plexiglass. They're no longer allowed to sing

00:05:11.500 at school. They're harshly scolded or even threatened with expulsion if their mask dips down

00:05:16.720 below their nostrils. Hi, Horace Mann, talking about you. These kids lose playdates because other

00:05:23.000 kids' moms are too scared to allow socializing. Their extracurricular activities have been canceled

00:05:28.820 along with their prom, their homecoming dance, their bar mitzvah. Is it any wonder the CDC says

00:05:35.560 attempted suicides by teenage girls in the pandemic have gone up 51%? That stress, anxiety and depression

00:05:42.500 among children has doubled since this thing started? These moms live in a city in which

00:05:48.960 neither they nor their children can go into a restaurant, a Knicks game, a theater or a gym

00:05:54.540 without a vaccine and a mask and now a booster and their papers.

00:05:58.940 A city in which CRT is rampant in the schools, violent crime, including murder, has spiked to

00:06:05.820 record levels. Mentally ill vagrants are cutting up men in ATM vestibules and throwing innocent women

00:06:12.100 in front of oncoming subway trains. They are dealing with a lot. They are doing their best to not scare

00:06:19.940 their children, to give them normal lives, to play down their fears, not stoke them. Why doesn't the harm

00:06:28.380 to these children being done during this pandemic count? Why do so many others belittle it or dismiss

00:06:37.200 demands for normalcy as selfish? People like those who host The View, for example, who undermine

00:06:45.640 these New York moms and others just like them. Yesterday, they took aim at Bill Maher, another liberal

00:06:52.100 who has also had it with the covid hysteria. I don't want to live in your paranoid world anymore,

00:06:59.980 your masked paranoid world. You know, you go out. It's silly now. You know, you have your mask.

00:07:05.100 You have to have a card. You have to have a booster. They scan your head like you're a cashier

00:07:13.240 and I'm a bunch of bananas. I'm not bananas. You are.

00:07:21.060 That messaging? Not OK for the ladies of The View who love to mask, vax and above all, shame.

00:07:31.060 That's not really funny to people who have lost their kids to this vaccine or people who have lost

00:07:37.380 family members. This is not something we're doing because it's sexually gratifying. This is what

00:07:43.820 we're doing to protect our families. And you don't have to do it, but stay away from everybody.

00:07:48.800 Stay out of the public, man. This is not nobody wants this. I don't want it. And I think he's

00:07:55.380 forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated. People who can't get little kids

00:08:01.680 under the age of five. Yeah. Or people with health conditions. How dare you be so flippant,

00:08:06.780 man? They're still people. They're over it. Yeah. Like a relationship. I'm over it. I don't feel

00:08:11.380 like seeing him anymore. Once again, people are still at risk. Don't you care about the people

00:08:18.660 who died? What about the children? How dare you? How dare you, Whoopi? For two years, the American

00:08:28.520 people have sacrificed incredibly during this pandemic. They have proven over and over and

00:08:34.780 over again. They're not a spoiled, selfish bunch of brats. They lost jobs, businesses, careers,

00:08:42.860 marriages, life savings, while at the same time, in many cases, losing parents, friends, colleagues,

00:08:48.780 and teachers. They get it. They watch their children's anxiety, stress, depression, and even

00:08:55.600 suicidal ideations go through the roof, all in the name of doing their part. They wore masks when

00:09:03.000 they didn't want to. They got vaxxed and boosted when they didn't necessarily need to. They missed

00:09:08.440 graduations, weddings, births, even funerals. They did all of this because they do care.

00:09:15.540 And they were willing to make sacrifices for the good of society.

00:09:19.380 But that calculation involves a balancing test. And at some point, the safety provided to society

00:09:27.820 by these measures will no longer outweigh the negative impact on one's self, one's family,

00:09:34.780 and one's community. And we're there. That's what Barry and Bill and these moms and I are saying.

00:09:43.880 We have vaccines. We have therapeutics. We have PCR tests. We have antigen tests. We know far more

00:09:52.260 about this virus than we used to, like the fact that we can all get and spread it, vaccinated and

00:09:59.640 masked or not. And it is time to try to get back to normal. Like those red-pilled liberal moms that I

00:10:10.380 met. I have young kids and I also have an 80-year-old mother and I get the need to protect

00:10:16.180 the young and the old. My mom, she takes precautions and we help her. But she would never

00:10:21.360 want our children to stay in COVID purgatory until all risk had been abated. Why are we treating our

00:10:27.600 seniors, most of whom lived through far more challenging times than we have without caving

00:10:32.880 to their fears, as if they are incapable of handling risk? They're strong. They know how to protect

00:10:38.900 themselves. And most of them have no interest in burdening their children and grandchildren,

00:10:45.060 even if it would eliminate some risk to themselves. As for children under five who cannot yet be

00:10:52.440 vaxxed, whoopee, what a red herring and you know it. The COVID death rate of healthy children under 11

00:10:59.560 is approximately zero. What these kids need is not more restrictions, it's less. They need to go to

00:11:06.440 school, to see their friends' faces, to play, to sing, to play sports and get their heart rates up

00:11:11.960 and have their faces uncovered while doing so. To eat lunch indoors and to laugh and talk, not through

00:11:18.600 plexiglass. To have their proms, their graduations, to not be treated like they are dirty, disease-carrying

00:11:24.540 killers. One final note, some, like Whoopi's colleague Sarah Haynes, take a different view.

00:11:31.340 They maintain this is the new normal. Listen.

00:11:34.940 To the post-mask part, because I think there's a prudence we've learned with the mask,

00:11:38.900 kind of like 9-11 with flying, is always going to be here now. There's a new normal.

00:11:43.180 I think some of the things we've learned in this pandemic are going to stay the same. I may never

00:11:46.960 ride a subway again without a mask. I may never go indoors to big crowds and never feel comfortable

00:11:51.180 without a mask. And that's up to me to do that. If Sarah would like to do that, fine.

00:11:56.980 But I choose something different. I do not accept her new normal. The moms I met do not accept her

00:12:03.320 new normal. Most Americans don't. We have never voted for these restrictions. They were handed down

00:12:10.500 by leaders declaring emergencies that have now lasted years. It's not OK. It has to end.

00:12:18.500 And if you agree, you have to fight. Now is the time. It's past time. Fight. Write your governor,

00:12:27.180 your congressmen and women, a letter to the editor, attend a rally, call your principal.

00:12:31.940 You don't normally do that. Too bad. It's time. And vote. Vote like my new friends in New York are

00:12:38.540 going to do. Vote in November like your future and that of your children depends on it. And don't let

00:12:44.640 anyone shame you for demanding your rights, for protecting your children after two years of

00:12:52.400 enormous sacrifice. We did our part. This isn't selfish. Liberty is a right. And none of this ends

00:13:02.860 until we insist on its return. Joining me now is a mom who is doing just that, insisting on the return

00:13:11.400 to normal. Megan Rafalski lives in Loudoun County, Virginia. She's the head of education

00:13:17.560 task force to take back our schools. And Loudoun County, as you know, has become ground zero in

00:13:23.720 this fight. Yesterday, after Governor Glenn Youngkin said it was up to parents to decide if their child

00:13:29.420 would be masked at school, she sent her 10 year old boy to school without one. The school responded

00:13:34.560 by sending him home. Megan, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

00:13:40.720 Hey, Megan, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

00:13:43.360 Of course. And I know you're feeling the same frustrations I am and had a moment of celebration

00:13:48.600 when Glenn Youngkin won and said, I'm going to sign an executive order and then did so.

00:13:53.720 And you had that feeling that I continue to wait to have where they can just go with their

00:13:59.220 beautiful faces exposed and see their friends' beautiful faces and have a normal day at school.

00:14:03.960 Without all the issues that come attached to these protocols. And you sent your boy and what

00:14:09.660 happened? Yeah, there's so much to say. You're exactly right. I mean, when he when Governor

00:14:17.460 Youngkin came out with the executive order on last week, I cried. And my husband and my son both

00:14:25.260 embraced me and my my son was so excited. We've been battling this since the beginning of the year

00:14:31.900 for first. We asked for a religious exemption that was denied. Then we asked for a medical exemption

00:14:37.680 of which we really didn't feel like we legally needed to. But we were trying to go about the

00:14:44.860 proper channels that was also denied. My son's been having dizziness, headaches. He nearly blacked out

00:14:52.500 in class one day. He began to have nosebleeds right before Christmas break. And his overall

00:15:00.260 demeanor has been with school. Just I mean, I hesitate to say it, but depressed. It's been a

00:15:07.060 really, really rough year. And it's such a travesty because we love our school. We have been there since

00:15:12.860 kindergarten. We actually we have a special exemption right now to go there that they have now threatened

00:15:17.880 to revoke because we want him to finish with his peers to laugh and play exactly like you were

00:15:22.620 talking about. So when we showed up yesterday morning, along with another group of

00:15:26.640 moms, dads and kids to walk in, we were strong armed at the door and told immediately to go to

00:15:35.020 the library. We had asked several questions to which no one gave us answers. Long story short,

00:15:40.280 our principal said he would be with us after announcements, then made us wait outside in the

00:15:44.920 freezing cold for over an hour with our kids waiting to go to their classrooms. We asked why

00:15:50.240 they were not being allowed to go to their classroom. I handed yet another letter of my

00:15:55.300 religious exemption that I didn't really need because the governor said that we had our parental

00:16:00.400 rights restored as they should be. And he took it and pretty much didn't respond to it at all and

00:16:06.580 just continued to quote what he says is policy. It's not policy. It's a mandate by the superintendent

00:16:11.700 that's unlawful by the way. And I would just encourage any teacher. I know you're out there.

00:16:18.020 We see you, we hear you. There are ones that I'm talking to. If you are feeling threatened by

00:16:23.160 administration, you need to go to HR. You need to tell them that you are working in a hostile work

00:16:28.040 environment and that they are forcing you to do things that are unlawful. I know unfortunately right

00:16:33.620 now that you are stuck in between a rock and a hard place in a lot of ways. And you can't talk to

00:16:38.240 some of your colleagues because they have drunk the Kool-Aid. They're, they're experiencing

00:16:43.380 hypoxemia because they've got 18 masks on and they're upset as they should be. They can't breathe,

00:16:48.460 but you've got to start making your voice heard, or this is not going, going to change.

00:16:54.700 So yeah, you're right. My son was in, he was forced to go in the principal's office

00:16:59.020 to which he closed the door with my son in there alone. Highly inappropriate. I already have,

00:17:05.860 you know, I'm not going to get into that. It's getting into some things that are too personal

00:17:10.480 at this point. But the point of the matter is we are having a rally tonight of a rally for our rights

00:17:18.720 at the school board meeting in Loudoun County. And I encourage anyone who's listening right now,

00:17:23.760 if you are in the area and you want to fight for the rights of our, the parents to, to be the ones

00:17:30.280 who decide what is right for their child. And you're right, Megan. I mean, you had so many good

00:17:34.500 things to say in your monologue, like personal choice, right? The party that cries my body,

00:17:40.660 my choice, my choice, my choice, where is choice now? And I understand, and I am not being flippant

00:17:47.180 at all about the severity for some people, but all the actual science and statistic statistics out

00:17:53.200 there show us that cloth masks, which is what these children are wearing. Do not do squat. It's like

00:17:58.880 trying to catch mosquitoes with a chain link fence. It doesn't work. That shows that all of the

00:18:05.260 statistics we're seeing now with tests on these kids for after two years, kids born in the last

00:18:10.900 two years have a lower IQ already. All of this stuff is happening. And it's been a political war

00:18:17.060 in a lot of ways. Listen, I'm a mom. I love to be at my house. I like to clean it. I like to cook and

00:18:23.880 provide and have people in it. I like to take my son to his baseball practices. And I like to do

00:18:30.140 lead a quiet life. But I have been forced to take the reins in a lot of ways because we've got to

00:18:37.160 stand up. And if we don't stand up, then it's not going to change. So Megan, you're right. Plead with

00:18:42.780 people, get involved, get involved. You have to. It's past time. When I was speaking with these moms,

00:18:48.820 I felt so inspired by them because none of them was particularly active. You know, I mean,

00:18:54.500 a couple of them really wanted Joe Biden elected and had worked to get him elected. But, you know,

00:18:58.680 they weren't the ones calling up the school board or going to the meetings or calling the principal

00:19:02.760 or writing letters and so on. They weren't. But what our kids have been through over the past two

00:19:08.800 years is bad enough. And there are no off ramps provided that have raised our level of concern high

00:19:13.940 enough that we realize now no one's fighting for them. No one's fighting for them. And I am

00:19:18.880 sick and tired of people like Whoopi Goldberg trying to shame people who stand up to say something

00:19:25.240 to say that balancing test is now leaning the other way. That doesn't mean we don't give a damn

00:19:31.720 about the people dying from covid, but it's still a balancing test. And we have other little people

00:19:36.640 whose fortunes literally depend on us. You know, we they have no one advocating for them. There

00:19:41.880 there's no one Glenn Youngkin tried and your school board is overruling him.

00:19:47.020 You're right. And can I just say that no one's talking to these kids? That's the whole point.

00:19:51.440 They're talking to one another. They're getting guidance from people that know what they're

00:19:55.360 talking about on all this science, science, follow the science. OK, yeah, let's actually follow

00:20:01.320 the science now since we've been saying it. 14 days to slow the spread has long since come and gone

00:20:06.060 again. The severity of covid for some people is a very real thing. Absolutely.

00:20:11.360 My in-laws over the Christmas break, they were severely ill. I would even say on death's door

00:20:18.040 when I arrived to take care of them from covid. Praise God for people and doctors that are willing

00:20:25.740 to step up and prescribe things that are necessary to fight an illness, things that actually don't cost

00:20:32.400 a lot of money, things that don't have the name Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson and Johnson on them.

00:20:36.920 You need to find a doctor, I would say, before you get sick so that you have a plan of attack

00:20:41.700 when you do get sick. But let me just tell you this. Upping your zinc, your vitamin C,

00:20:47.980 your vitamin D and getting outside for some fresh air is going to give you a really good chance

00:20:53.560 when and if you do get sick, which you most likely will. This is like the flu now.

00:20:58.040 We are we're nearing that endemic like it's going to be around. You've got to figure out how to live

00:21:03.940 with this. And this is not a long term solution that is sustainable. And they are destroying our

00:21:09.620 kids lives. Absolutely destroying them. Yep. And if if we don't fight, no one will. That's what

00:21:17.060 we've seen. You know, you kind of sit back sometimes and let other people take the lead.

00:21:21.020 You don't want to be the squeaky wheel. You're like somebody else is going to solve this,

00:21:23.940 it's going to come to an end. It hasn't. They won't. They they don't they don't want to.

00:21:29.980 And certainly people without kids. I don't know whether would be Goldberg has children of her own

00:21:34.700 or whether she has young children. I don't think she does. She's she's an elder, an older person now.

00:21:40.380 But like they don't care. They really don't give a shit. They look at our kids like you should take

00:21:45.720 the hit. So, OK, it's time for pushing back. The kids didn't take the hit and they were they were

00:21:51.820 champions. They were amazing about it. But it's done. It's that piece of this has got to stop

00:21:58.420 because now we're actually ruining the experience of a generation. And I don't I don't want to hear

00:22:03.920 from one more. My my kid doesn't mind wearing the mask. Great. Good for your kid. Then you put your

00:22:08.720 kid in that mask. My kid minds if it's relevant what they mind or what they don't mind. Then let's

00:22:13.620 talk about that. Let's make it individual. And yet they still pretend like we are in March of 2020

00:22:18.580 and it's infuriating. It is infuriating. It's totally infuriating. And you're right,

00:22:23.440 man. I was not an activist. You know, I I love gardening. I love being outdoors. I like,

00:22:30.380 you know, having coffee with friends and listening to what they're going through and comforting them

00:22:34.680 and encouraging them and praying with them. Two years ago, when we were in school, my son was in

00:22:40.600 third grade at the time. I was hearing about the these pornography books and what in the world are

00:22:45.500 they talking about? These books start coming into our school. That's a whole nother story for another

00:22:50.600 day that I'd love to talk about. And actually, I'm so excited about your next guest. And I don't

00:22:55.600 know if I'm allowed to say who it is. Yeah. Yeah. I have her book. Abigail Schreier. Yes. Right

00:23:00.660 here. Abigail Schreier. She is on to it. So there's so much damage. It's amazing. I know they're damaging

00:23:07.380 them in so many ways. It's like I didn't even scratch the surface. I want to say this. It's going to be

00:23:12.940 a legal battle now in Virginia. There's going to be a lawsuit. There's there's already a lawsuit

00:23:17.840 by the schools challenging the young can executive order claiming that it violates a state law that

00:23:22.820 was enacted under the earlier governor that says you have to follow the CDC recommendations. And

00:23:28.320 that's why they can't lift the mask mandate. That's going to there's going to be a legal challenge

00:23:32.380 and they're going to present it to a judge and a judge is going to have to read the letter of the

00:23:35.820 law and decide whether that's true. But even so, the Virginia state legislature is prepared,

00:23:40.720 as I understand it, to write a new law. So what are they waiting for? Just do it. Just do it.

00:23:45.180 Don't wait. Just do it. Get on it. And apparently they have the votes and now they have a Republican

00:23:48.520 governor. These kids these kids have suffered long enough. Megan, I'm so glad that you're fighting,

00:23:54.360 that your your son is fighting and let him know that I know he knows this, but he's not alone.

00:23:59.420 I know there were about 160 to 100 students not let in yesterday. Yeah. Can I say something about

00:24:05.340 that real quick? Yeah. Give you the last word. So in an effort to control the narrative,

00:24:09.800 as usual, there were so many children that showed up to go into school unmasked and were strong armed

00:24:16.680 by the presence of authority and standing there looking at them and intimidating them. Pull up

00:24:23.220 your mask. Pull up your mask. Put on your mask. Where's your mask? And people, kids. So especially

00:24:28.920 in the high school, and I want to talk about this because this is something that is not being discussed

00:24:32.120 enough. There are teachers that are threatening kids to sideline them from sports, to not write

00:24:38.200 recommendation letters because they either haven't gotten the VACs or they don't wear a mask to

00:24:42.900 school. Let's talk about that. That needs to be talked about a little bit more. The the mind control

00:24:48.520 of the adults in the room is absolutely despicable and deplorable and something needs to be done with

00:24:54.200 about it. And Loudoun County seems to be claiming such an equitable environment. Well, I have seen quite a

00:25:00.180 lack of lack of that recently. Well, I can't wait to see what happens at the school board meeting

00:25:04.060 tonight. We'll cover it tomorrow. Megan, good luck. Sounds good. Thank you so much. I really

00:25:08.840 appreciate it. And when we come back, it was a good tease by Megan. Abigail Schreier is here and we are

00:25:13.480 talking. You're not going to believe this. A mom believes the school has been pushing her daughter

00:25:20.300 to become trans, her seventh grader. And now she's got the actual audio tapes and Abigail's going to

00:25:27.300 play them here for the first time to prove it. Wait until you hear these California teachers and their

00:25:34.180 plan for this one woman's child. Don't go away.

00:25:38.160 I'm joined now by Abigail Schreier, the brilliant Abigail Schreier. And if you have not read,

00:25:51.300 if you haven't read her book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters,

00:25:57.160 you have to, you must. It's a life changer. I mean, truly, it's a life changing experience.

00:26:02.880 She is now an independent journalist on Substack as well. Abigail, that's wonderful. That's amazing.

00:26:09.600 And it's so great to have you back. Oh, it's great to be here, Megan. Always great to talk to you.

00:26:14.500 Likewise. So, okay. And you heard our last guest is in love with you too. Um, this story is scary.

00:26:19.720 This, we talked about this when you came on my show and to the listening audience, if you didn't hear

00:26:23.580 Abigail's full length interview on our show, um, from last year, it's one of my very favorite

00:26:27.980 interviews we did since I launched the show. And, um, we talked about what's happening in certain

00:26:33.300 school districts, including California. And I think you told me about how in California,

00:26:38.880 some schools are the public schools that they allow students to leave campus during the daytime

00:26:44.500 and go off campus to get cross gender hormones, um, or puberty blockers. I know it's happening

00:26:52.020 and they don't loop in the parents, but this is next level. What you've discovered out of this one

00:26:57.640 California school. So can you just set up the story for us? Sure. So I was sent audio, um,

00:27:03.880 of a California teachers association. That's the largest, uh, public school teachers association,

00:27:08.960 a public school union in California, um, and which two teachers were given, were at a large conference

00:27:15.500 and, um, someone had recorded it. And these two teachers were talking about how to deceive parents

00:27:22.680 and, um, uh, electronically surveil students for personalized invitations to the LGBTQ clubs,

00:27:31.300 how to hide the, um, membership of these clubs for, from parents. And we're talking about middle

00:27:36.960 schoolers, 12 year olds. Um, and, and they were, you know, specifically targeting, you know,

00:27:42.880 students they thought would be vulnerable to invitations with personalized invitations to join the

00:27:48.520 club. So, um, you know, this was all on audio. I wrote it up and it's, it's highly disturbing.

00:27:54.060 It's outrageous. It's immoral, uh, and, and maybe illegal. It's unbelievable. This one mom

00:28:00.620 believed that they had tried to push her daughter into thinking she was a boy and she suspected based

00:28:08.360 on her daughter's experience. And then you get it on tape. These teachers admitting they do exactly

00:28:15.540 that. So here is there. It's two teachers in particular who you have on tape. Uh, I believe

00:28:20.820 this teacher is named Kelly Bakari and it's soundbite eight talking about how they totally

00:28:26.680 stalked the children. Listen.

00:28:28.540 So we started brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year. What are we going to do? We got to

00:28:34.400 see some kids in person at the end of the last year, not many, but a few. So we started to try and

00:28:41.000 justify kids. We totally, when we were doing our virtual learning, totally stalked what they

00:28:47.060 were doing on Google, right? When they weren't doing schoolwork. One of them was just Googling

00:28:51.740 to say a disability and you're like, check, we're going to invite that kid when we get back

00:28:56.280 on the campus. Um, whenever they follow like the Google doodle links or whatever, right? We

00:29:02.940 make notes of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email

00:29:09.700 or whatever. Um, and we use our observations of kids in the classroom, conversations that we hear

00:29:17.520 to personally invite students, because that's really the way that we kind of get the bodies

00:29:23.420 in the door, right? That they need sort of a little bit of an invitation.

00:29:29.660 Okay. So, so that's at a teacher's you, I didn't realize it was at a teacher's union meeting. Cause

00:29:34.740 what I saw was that there was some meeting discussing quote, best practices. This is her pitch for the best

00:29:39.700 practices for teachers. That's the important thing to know. These are not two rogue teachers. In fact,

00:29:44.240 I uncovered more, um, videos from the California teachers association in which they are training

00:29:49.840 teachers, uh, statewide in the deception of parents and the, through these, um, LGBTQ clubs commonly

00:29:57.400 called the gay straight Alliance clubs, or, um, they have various names for them. This one was called

00:30:02.520 an equity club and then UBU. Um, but, but they're even doing it in the elementary level and the point,

00:30:07.940 and they will often direct kids not to tell the parents the really insidious thing here is that

00:30:13.420 they're hiding it. They're actively deceiving the parents. They're telling kids to keep secrets from

00:30:17.700 their parents. U B U Y O U B Y O U. And the reason she chose that as the name of her club for LGBTQ

00:30:26.260 kids is because she didn't want it to be too on the nose to where the parents could, I could know

00:30:32.760 just by the name of the club that this was something involving, you know, potential trans issues and so

00:30:38.920 on, because they, they want to foster secrecy between the children and their parents.

00:30:43.560 And they're succeeding in really gender confusing a lot of young kids. I mean, you know, you heard

00:30:51.040 from Jessica Conan, the mother who was, who is furious and suing and rightly so. Um, but you know,

00:30:58.020 going out and changing as young kids, gender identity, um, without discussing this with the

00:31:04.720 parents, giving them a new name and pronouns. And that's what was done, you know, alleged,

00:31:09.600 she alleges, um, to her 12 year old daughter. I mean, this is something that the courts are going to

00:31:15.160 have to sort out and parents are critical here. They absolutely must fight back.

00:31:20.760 This is that mom that you just mentioned. Now, again, uh, her name, Jessica Conan,

00:31:25.040 she was at a school board meeting in December, just to, just so I'm perfectly clear. I may have

00:31:30.180 misstated. This is Kelly Bakari and the other woman who she's talking with on this, on these

00:31:35.480 tapes. Is she at Jessica Conan's school or is this? Yeah. Kelly Baraki and Laura Caldera are at the

00:31:43.040 Spreckel school. They've been suspended. Um, but you know, look, this is how the California Teachers

00:31:49.020 Association is training teachers statewide. This is not about two rogue teachers. And that's

00:31:55.040 what I really want everyone to know. Whatever happens with these two teachers,

00:31:58.940 we've got a massive problem. This was an agricultural community. Okay. This is not a

00:32:04.100 liberal community. The activist teachers know exactly what they're doing and they're not

00:32:08.080 confined to the Upper West Side or Santa Monica. And they, they, just before we play Jessica soundbite

00:32:13.540 of her going off on the school board about what they did to her 12 year old girl, um, they,

00:32:18.320 cause the, the, the soundbite was a little hard to decipher. We have it verbatied if you guys want

00:32:22.260 to look at it on YouTube later. Um, they're talking about how she was going during the

00:32:26.960 remote learning, the teachers on the Google docs, um, record, you know, that the teacher

00:32:31.440 can see what the student's done and the student uses it at home to see where they've Googled

00:32:36.140 what, whether they Googled something, anything having to do with trans or LGBTQ. And that's

00:32:41.320 how they would say, aha, that's a mark. We got to go get her. And they would recruit them.

00:32:46.340 And meanwhile, you and I talked about this last time you explained that in, you know, something

00:32:50.400 upwards of 85% of the kid, the cases where kids think they may be trans. If you just leave them

00:32:55.040 alone and don't do anything, it goes away. It resolves. You don't, you don't want them recruited

00:33:00.100 by teachers into a group that celebrates it. No, we're, we're solidifying, you know, a very

00:33:06.040 gender confused identity, identity and a generation of kids. I mean, really an astounding numbers of

00:33:12.580 kids now. And yes, historically gender dysphoria, which is an absolutely real condition that afflicted

00:33:19.160 an infinite, you know, truly infinitesimal percentage of the population, a very, very

00:33:24.900 small, you know, 0.001% of the population. You know, over 70% of the kids always outgrew

00:33:31.000 it on their own. Some didn't and in adulthood would transition, but today we're not giving

00:33:36.600 them time to outgrow it. We're affirming and solidifying that identity in young people and

00:33:42.040 putting them on a path to being lifetime medical patients.

00:33:45.280 Mm-hmm. And there's so much regret in so many of these kids when they take drastic measures,

00:33:50.800 like Abigail's book says, they cause irreversible damage to their bodies because they get sucked

00:33:56.380 into like groups online or perhaps at school that want to celebrate the transition before

00:34:01.920 they're even sure whether they want to make one. And then there's tons of pressure to go

00:34:05.940 through with it. Tons of pressure to go through with it and not to reverse. Okay. So here is this

00:34:10.800 mom, Jessica Conan, who's now suing this school for what they did to her 12 year old daughter.

00:34:16.320 Listen. Do they have psychiatry degrees that I was unaware of because I didn't hire them. Okay. I

00:34:23.120 did not hire them to sit there and nitpick my child's brain. You took away my ability to parent

00:34:28.680 my child. Even before I had any knowledge, I didn't even get to show support. You asked for support.

00:34:36.040 I didn't get a chance. Your job was to educate my child in math, science, English, et cetera. Do

00:34:42.920 your job and let me do mine. You changed her personal documentation, her gender, her name,

00:34:50.440 her email. I authorized an AKA added to her attendance because I wanted to be supportive,

00:34:55.880 but guess what? She's allergic to bees. Her medical record says a birth name and you changed it. Who

00:35:01.960 administers that now? Not everything, not me. You guys did this on your own accountability and you've

00:35:08.520 gone too far. They downgraded me in front of my child and allowed me to question myself as the

00:35:14.440 mother. You sat there and told me how my child was going to be. And then you wrapped your hands

00:35:20.760 around her while I sat across the table and cried because you thought you could be there better than I

00:35:25.880 and I never got a chance. She was scared to even say anything. Your guys' voice were her, not hers.

00:35:33.480 Wow. What do you make of that?

00:35:36.200 I mean, it's hard to listen to. The pain is so raw and I've talked to a lot of these parents.

00:35:42.280 Look, schools are doing this. They are conspiring. It's a conspiracy because it's a school-like

00:35:47.720 conspiracy. They create these documents called gender support plans. They changed the child's

00:35:54.680 name, gender pronouns, identity in school, and they actively conceal this from parents.

00:36:01.000 I've talked to parents who have walked through the halls, who have been on the PTA,

00:36:03.800 and had teachers lie to their faces by calling the daughter by the female name in front of the parent

00:36:10.040 while secretly calling her a different name with the school. This is so confusing to a 12-year-old

00:36:15.240 when she has been identifying as a boy for a year. It's awfully hard to go back. But it's also

00:36:21.000 alienating her from her parents because she's creating this whole secret world from them.

00:36:25.320 So the parents, the people best able to protect her, are completely unable to do so. We have parental

00:36:31.560 rights under the 14th Amendment. The due process clause allows us to direct the upbringing of our

00:36:37.400 children. And we need to fight this. Parents need to go into court and have the courts sort this out

00:36:42.920 because the public schools are not going to give them back their rights. You know what else? It's such

00:36:46.680 a dangerous precedent. If you're a predator at a school where this is the atmosphere, oh, we do secrets

00:36:53.720 between teachers and students. It's not appropriate to tell mom and dad everything. Mom and dad are the

00:36:58.840 ones who are the bad ones, the outsiders, the ones who don't want what makes you happy. I'm here for you.

00:37:03.640 This is how sexual abuse takes place in schools and stays under the rug for too long because teachers

00:37:09.480 groom young children and lead them to believe that telling is the mistake and that the parents

00:37:15.240 are the outsiders. I'm not saying that these teachers are sexual abusers. I'm saying this

00:37:19.080 approach to the relationship between teacher, student and parent is sick. That's exactly right.

00:37:25.320 That was so well said. You know, the nefarious thing is the secrecy. And what they are doing is,

00:37:30.040 just as you said, they are breaking down boundaries between, you know, uh, uh, children and, uh, and

00:37:35.160 adults and by creating a secret space from the parents, a secret world. And yes, that absolutely

00:37:41.240 conditions a child to be, you know, approached by a predator because after all the child's already

00:37:46.680 been habituated to this idea that there's that you keep these secrets from your parents with adults,

00:37:53.160 with other adults. The, um, this woman did find Jessica Harmeet Dillon. Yay. Thank goodness.

00:38:00.200 She did. She is suing Harmeet's amazing. She's been taken out a lot of these cases and she gave

00:38:04.760 a statement. Um, I think this is to the daily mail saying that since she filed the case, she has heard

00:38:08.680 from parents across multiple States who described quote secretive trans grooming by school officials,

00:38:15.480 similar to what Jessica Conan is alleging the school board. Um, this is amazing. So neither of

00:38:23.400 the teachers could be reached for comment when the associated press reached out. One of them,

00:38:28.120 Caldera had said to the San Francisco Chronicle, the quotes are accurate, but they were taken out

00:38:32.520 of context or misrepresented. The stalking comment was a joke. She said, um, she, that the teachers

00:38:39.480 have been placed on administrative leave, as you said, and the district has hired a law firm to

00:38:44.760 investigate. And, and the superintendent says that, um, the personnel policies prevented from

00:38:50.440 revealing whether the teachers are back at school, but the district is reviewing and updating its

00:38:54.920 policies on student clubs. That's not going to be sufficient. Nowhere near sufficient.

00:39:00.440 I mean, it's amazing. She says the quotes were accurate, but taken out of context. Well,

00:39:04.840 that's why I quoted them at length because I had a feeling once they were aired, someone might say,

00:39:10.360 oh, we need more context. We need more context for the surveilling of kids to find out who's

00:39:15.880 vulnerable to a private invitation, personalized in-person invitation to an LGBTQ club where you can't

00:39:22.040 tell your parents. I mean, look, these clubs are fine. They can exist, but there absolutely needs to be

00:39:28.200 full transparency with parents. And what keeps parents from fighting back is they're embarrassed.

00:39:33.240 They're afraid of upsetting their child. Look at Jessica Conan, her daughter's doing much better.

00:39:38.600 Okay. And her daughter knows that her mother's fighting for her. Parents need to get over

00:39:42.920 their embarrassment and get out there and sue. Because this Lori Caldera is on tape saying,

00:39:48.280 because we're not official, we have no club rosters. We keep no records. In fact, sometimes

00:39:53.560 we don't really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming,

00:39:57.480 we're like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe they came. And your point is, this is all intentional.

00:40:03.960 She did actively work to keep parents from knowing what club their child was in and whether they had

00:40:08.920 an issue like this, which can be severely traumatizing emotionally and otherwise.

00:40:15.720 And she ought to be fired. She should be fired immediately, as should this Kelly,

00:40:21.000 however you say her last name. There's so much more to discuss. We're going to pick it up

00:40:25.320 there. And we're going to talk about this transgender swimmer at UPenn, because now there's

00:40:29.880 an allegation that Leah Thomas, who formerly swam on the men's team, she's biologically male,

00:40:37.480 conspired to lose a race to a different trans swimmer. It's getting complicated. It's next.

00:40:43.640 And remember, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday

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00:40:53.080 youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe and download on Apple,

00:40:57.480 Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find

00:41:01.880 our full archives, including more than 240 shows. And you have to listen to our first time with

00:41:07.640 Abigail Schreier, way back, this is how much I love her, on episode 12.

00:41:18.280 So, Abigail, one other thing before we leave this first story. Buena Vista Middle School is the name

00:41:23.640 of the school I should mention in Southern California. Lori Caldera and Kelly Baraki are

00:41:29.080 the teachers we're discussing, though it's not limited to them in this school or others,

00:41:34.360 maybe even yours to the parents out there listening. But this Caldera was awarded some

00:41:40.040 award as a role model for inclusion. And she came out defending her work saying,

00:41:45.800 the students set the agenda that the teachers are there to provide honest and fair answers to their

00:41:52.120 questions. And this is as this mother is claiming that this that Lori Kelly and others planted the

00:41:58.040 seed in her daughter's head that she was bisexual, then went on to convince her that she was actually

00:42:01.560 a transgender boy. This this happened in my school, not this exact thing. But this is the reason I left

00:42:07.560 my boys school. I took my boys out. Doug and I did because they they taught the boys. I think I told

00:42:14.360 you this on the show. One of the parents at the parent teacher said, why did my son come home

00:42:19.000 asking, is it true he can prevent puberty by taking a pill and then have his penis cut off at

00:42:23.480 age 18 if he wants to be a girl? And the teacher's defense, we expected her to say, no, we never said

00:42:28.120 that. Her response was, we take the discussion wherever the boys want it to go. We were all like,

00:42:34.520 why do you do that? That's not OK with us. That's right. This is all over the country. I mean,

00:42:39.160 this is not confined to Southern California at all. In fact, this was an agricultural community.

00:42:44.920 where this took place near Salinas. This is not, you know, Santa Monica, but it is all over the

00:42:51.080 country. It calls from parents in Florida, you know, you name it. And it's incredibly flagrant.

00:42:57.560 They believe they have the right to do this. And I'll tell you something you said. Oh,

00:43:00.520 this is student led. Well, I can tell you why I know that's not true, because I examined many of

00:43:05.000 the videos put out by the California Teachers Association. That's the largest public school teachers

00:43:08.680 union in California. And one of the things that is a common theme in the creation of a middle

00:43:13.720 school LGBTQ club and the and even elementary school LGBTQ club is they have trouble with

00:43:19.560 retention. Kids don't want to show up, especially when the weather's nice outside. So the teachers

00:43:25.640 will talk and instruct other educators statewide on how do we get the kids to stay? How do we get

00:43:31.400 the kids to come back? And one of the things they talk about is giving out candy. One teacher

00:43:35.880 brought up Jolly Ranchers was very effective. I mean, this is ridiculous. It is very much

00:43:41.560 activist teacher driven. This is not based on the student wants. It's really based on the teachers

00:43:47.560 and gratifying their activist agendas. Giving out candy. I'm picturing that creepy guy and

00:43:54.680 chitty chitty bang bang with a creepy little candy thing. You know, remember, like, that's insane.

00:44:00.280 I love the fact that the students don't really want anything to do with them. You know,

00:44:03.720 I love the fact that they have actually to take these active measures to recruit.

00:44:07.720 So if we can just get them to stop doing that, maybe these kids can lead a normal life and not

00:44:11.880 be bothered and outgrow the normal phases that are being misidentified as a kid being trans.

00:44:19.080 Yeah. And I'll just say that this is not a gay or transgender issue really at all. In fact,

00:44:23.560 most of the teachers who are pushing this agenda are neither gay nor transgender. You know, and

00:44:29.000 unsurprisingly, you know, middle schoolers don't always want to sit around with a middle-aged white

00:44:33.480 woman talking about gender and their new gender identity or their new sexuality. They'd rather go

00:44:40.520 play ball. But, you know, I have transgender parents calling me and gay parents calling me all the time

00:44:46.920 saying, we don't really want these people we don't know keeping secrets with our kids and creating new

00:44:52.920 identities for our kids. I mean, I literally had a transgender parent call me and say, I really

00:44:57.960 don't like this. What can I do to stop it in my kid's school? Nor are transgender parents from coast

00:45:05.000 to coast looking to recruit other transgender people. But transgender people are not looking to

00:45:12.200 recruit other trans people. Only these weird activists are doing this crap, right? They don't speak

00:45:18.680 for the trans community. This is wrong on every level, whether it's gay, lesbian, you know, like

00:45:23.400 you like I have trans people who are friends, gay and lesbian people who are in your family and so

00:45:29.640 like they don't want to recruit. This is a weird new dynamic of like dangling something in front of

00:45:36.120 the children and trying to make it seem cool or desirable. And you've got them in these transcripts

00:45:42.120 talking about how they say like, well, how do we get them? When we go back to them, we say, we miss

00:45:47.000 you. We miss you. And it's just totally, it's so on, you know, truthful to suggest that this is

00:45:54.200 somehow bigoted approach by parents. I mean, think about it this way. What if a teacher were just

00:45:58.600 creating a secret Christian club in which they were going to teach kids about Christianity, but not tell

00:46:04.760 the parents. So they told the kids don't tell the parents, but we're here to talk about faith and my

00:46:09.880 interpretation of your faith. I wonder how parents would react to that. And, and we know how parents

00:46:15.000 would react. They would hate that. They would say, that's none of your business. What are you doing

00:46:18.920 in my family's faith? And my kids aren't supposed to keep secrets from me. And that's what we should

00:46:24.520 be saying across the board with everything, including LGBTQ clubs. Well, and especially if,

00:46:29.480 what if you're Jewish? Then you really object. It's like, wait a minute, stay in your lane.

00:46:34.200 We did a lot to educate our child on what his religion is and what our beliefs are. And

00:46:38.840 you're not going to change it in your secret club, which is kind of what they're doing.

00:46:42.920 All right. We're going to pick it up with Leah Thomas. I'm going to hold you over. If you don't

00:46:46.120 mind, we'll talk about Leah Thomas. Not at all. That case is getting confusing and even more

00:46:51.200 disturbing. And now there's an allegation that she lost. So she is a biological male swimming as a

00:46:55.700 woman. She's been crushing all the women on her team and other teams. Then she swam against a

00:47:01.160 biological woman who was about to transition to male. That's why they were allowed to sleep,

00:47:07.200 swim against each other. And she lost. Now there's an allegation.

00:47:10.880 It was a deal between the two of them. Don't go away. We'll be right back.

00:47:20.880 So, Abigail, this UPenn situation continues to make news. They have a person who was born male who

00:47:28.480 lived his life as a man who was on the male swimming team at UPenn. And then two years or two or three years

00:47:36.320 into swimming as a man decided to transition to female, took a year of hormones and now is swimming

00:47:44.080 on the female team. And he goes now by the name Leah, Leah Thomas. Leah has been crushing all of

00:47:49.920 her competitors. And until earlier this month when Leah, Leah lost. Okay. So Leah, who did Leah lose to?

00:47:59.120 Did Leah lose to another woman that she happened to swim against in a meet?

00:48:03.920 Not exactly. She swam against a transgender swimmer on the Yale team.

00:48:11.120 But this, so I was asking myself, okay, so let's just say Leah is a woman.

00:48:15.840 She should be swimming against, she has been swimming against women.

00:48:20.880 Who is a man?

00:48:22.160 I know. No, but I'm saying I'm trying to walk myself through the gender to try to understand

00:48:25.360 what happens. You know what I mean? Okay. So like Leah's in the pool as a woman, identified as a woman.

00:48:30.640 Who's she swimming against lately? She's been swimming against biological women. That's why

00:48:33.920 she's been crushing because she's actually a biological man. Now she loses. Who does she lose

00:48:38.240 to? That's correct.

00:48:39.520 Yeah. So now she loses. Who does she lose to? Somebody says a man, a trans man. I'm like,

00:48:45.040 well, that's a biological woman. So it's the same. So she's, so she's, but this, this helps Leah's

00:48:49.920 argument in a way because she kind of lost to a biological woman. She did lose to a biological,

00:48:55.040 but now a fellow swimmer on Leah's team comes out and says that was no accident, uh, that she,

00:49:02.080 she told outkick sports, uh, that's Clay Travis's organization that she saw them talking that, um,

00:49:09.760 it was right before the 100 freestyle race on January 8th, that Leah's time. And even this

00:49:16.160 swimmer's observations of Leah that day suggests she wasn't even trying to win. She says, these

00:49:20.880 two are friends. She saw them talking. She said, I think there was a deal to let the other swimmer

00:49:26.320 win to prove the point that Leah could be beaten by quote, you know, a woman. And this other woman is

00:49:33.600 biologically women, a woman. I know it gets confusing. I hope you guys are still with me.

00:49:37.600 And here's an example. So the Yale swimmer who again is a woman who's going to transition to male

00:49:47.280 got a 49.57 on the 100 freestyle Thomas lost Leah Thomas lost to that swimmer at 52.84. So it wasn't

00:49:57.360 close by swim times. That's two full seconds. That's, that's not close or three. Uh, she crushed

00:50:03.280 during a November meet. Leah Thomas swam that same race at 49.42, which would have beat,

00:50:11.760 would not only have crushed her own time, but would have beaten the Yale swimmers time easily.

00:50:16.560 So it does suggest something may have gone on there. And you tell me how this can,

00:50:22.480 this was allowed to happen on the UPenn swim team with no one doing anything about it.

00:50:29.760 Well, it's awfully suspicious. That's a difference of 3.5 seconds, which is massive in the 100 yard.

00:50:36.560 Um, you know, I, I've talked to Olympic coaches about this and, um, the, the times are roughly

00:50:41.840 same that, you know, similar in the 400 meter track events. And there, an Olympic coach just told me

00:50:47.440 that, that you expect to see variations of roughly 0.2 or 0.3 seconds, um, meet to meet here with Leah

00:50:55.120 Thomas. Suddenly we see a, a difference of a variation of 3.5 seconds. That's massive. So

00:51:01.840 look, we're never going to know what happened, but that's awfully suspicious. And, and swimmers,

00:51:06.000 look, the, the swimmer who spoke to an, uh, outkick, they know when a, a, a swimmer is just keeping pace

00:51:12.080 with the other swimmers. You can tell. And when a swimmer is swimming their hardest. So, you know,

00:51:16.560 I think there's a lot of credence to that, but, but there's something else too. You know,

00:51:20.240 the trans man who allegedly beat Leah Thomas, um, was allowed to continue to swim against the

00:51:26.960 females. I mean, this is someone who identifies as a male, but is swimming against the females.

00:51:31.120 Why? Because there is no logic to any of this. It's all about choosing your competitors based on

00:51:37.120 who you can beat and creating chaos. And that's what they're doing. Is the trans male swimmer at

00:51:44.160 Yale? I thought that that person hadn't done anything other than have a double mastectomy.

00:51:49.760 That's all. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm talking about hormones. I thought that, um, that person had

00:51:54.400 done nothing to go from female to male other than the removal of the breasts.

00:51:59.440 So she had the, you know, that that's when her has not started testosterone to the best of my

00:52:04.000 knowledge. Um, you know, it's had a double mastectomy, but not started testosterone,

00:52:09.040 but that person identifies as male. I thought this was about identity. Suddenly when you want

00:52:14.560 to swim against women, it's not about identity. It's about something else. Um, it's about current,

00:52:19.280 you know, by, you know, hormone levels, you know, bioactive hormone levels. This is ridiculous

00:52:24.320 because of course the changes that are brought on by male puberty are enormous. Um, all they're doing

00:52:29.920 is cherry picking the, the competitors they want. And so we're allowing mediocre males to smash

00:52:37.280 women's records. Right. Exactly. Because when Leah Thomas was a man was, it was swimming with the

00:52:43.200 men. Uh, he was nothing special now that he's crossed over to swimming with the women and he's

00:52:48.640 got, you know, a foot in height over them. And his, you know, his femurs are longer, his arms are longer.

00:52:52.880 Uh, he's crushing, he's crushing Leah Thomas. She is crushing in every race. Um, except weirdly that

00:52:59.120 one where, you know, Leah was seen talking to the other trans student, blah, blah, blah. People can

00:53:03.120 form their own conclusions. So explain this to me, Abigail, because even Michael Phelps has come

00:53:07.200 out now saying, uh, look, I believe we should all feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin,

00:53:11.440 but sports need to be played on an even playing field. And that's, I think him saying, this is

00:53:17.520 not fair. He can see it. He knows how hard these women work and how that they have no chance against

00:53:22.560 a biological male. Um, but nobody's doing anything about it. USA swimming, help me understand this.

00:53:29.280 They issued a statement in support of transgender athlete inclusion, but they didn't commit to any

00:53:34.640 particular rules. And I guess now they're kind of saying, I don't know what USA swimming is saying.

00:53:41.280 NCAA is kicking it. Um, USA swimming seems to be kicking it. Who's deciding the rules, who gets to

00:53:48.160 say, no, you can't swim against the biological women here at UPenn. It seems like the Olympic

00:53:54.880 committee is going to ultimately make a lot of these choices are doing it on a case, you know,

00:53:58.560 on a sport by sport basis. But you know, it's ridiculous because as you said, the bioactive,

00:54:04.160 however much you bring down your current bioactive testosterone level, it's too late.

00:54:08.480 If you've been through male puberty, you have a much larger heart, you have much larger lungs,

00:54:12.080 you have much more oxygenated blood, you have much more fast, much muscle fiber,

00:54:16.720 you have vastly greater muscle mass. Um, you know, this is not a fair competition and everyone knows

00:54:21.760 that. And I'll just say one more thing, you know, all these people who go on and on about empathy,

00:54:27.200 we need more empathy. Why don't they try for a moment to put themselves in the shoes of a young

00:54:32.320 woman who has spent her entire life competing and working to be a division one athlete only to be

00:54:39.840 bested by a mediocre biological male. Try that one on for size. It's completely unjust and everyone

00:54:46.720 knows it. Yes. I could not agree more. It's like, it's just like I was opening the show with talking

00:54:51.680 about the COVID thing. You know, like you get lectured if you try to speak up on behalf of your child

00:54:55.360 saying, I, he lived like this for two years and I don't want him to have to live like this anymore.

00:54:59.920 You know, it's time to shift the balance back in favor of the children. They say you want to kill

00:55:03.760 grandma. They call you selfish and blah, blah. It's like, then they demand empathy and they demand

00:55:07.760 that you consider a society at large. Great. Let's both do that. Let's both do that. You consider

00:55:12.800 society at large too, and you include all the children in it too. And, and the sacrifices they have

00:55:17.280 had to make for very little risk to themselves personally, which isn't even medically ethical to ask

00:55:23.280 children to take mandatory vaccines that they don't need to quote, protect the elderly.

00:55:27.680 Uh, there's a lot of doctors have come on this show and said that same thing here,

00:55:30.960 right? It's like the empathy only goes in one direction, the good of society, which is what

00:55:34.720 like glad is, is, uh, arguing to, to keep trans swimmers and athletes in the opposite sports,

00:55:41.280 uh, sports that they say it's, it's about the good of society. It's not just these individual

00:55:46.400 swimmers. Well, why, why aren't they factored in? Why don't they get a vote in the good of society?

00:55:51.120 The good of society, the good of society is successful young women. That's the good of

00:55:56.320 society. It's complete nonsense to suggest. Otherwise America has been awfully proud of

00:56:01.360 its young women with good reason and our talented female athletes. And now we're letting those

00:56:05.760 records and those achievements be vandalized or completely eliminated. Um, it's, it's, it's really

00:56:12.160 an outrage and it's past time we stopped allowing it. Yeah. I'll tell you, it'll be, it's going to be

00:56:16.800 interesting when, and if Leah Thompson, Thomas, um, breaks a record held by Katie Ledecky, you know,

00:56:24.240 one of our most decorated swimmers. And then what are we going to allow Leah to say, I am the first

00:56:30.800 female to swim the 100 freestyle at this number? No, we're not. We're going to have to speak out

00:56:38.400 against it because Leah didn't travel the same roads Katie Ledecky did to get to that number.

00:56:44.240 And, you know, with all due respect, uh, she doesn't get to claim those, those wins under that

00:56:49.920 moniker. Uh, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Think about all these little girls who are watching this right

00:56:55.600 now. And their parents thinking, should I wake her up at 4am every morning for swimming? What's the

00:57:00.640 point? What's the point to have a mediocre boy decide his junior year of high school. Actually,

00:57:05.680 I'm a girl. I want to compete on the girls team. And there you go. He gets to destroy her,

00:57:09.840 her scholarship, eliminate all of her, you know, potential. I mean, uh, you know,

00:57:14.640 we're, we're eliminating a whole generation of, of female potential right now. Now's the time to stop

00:57:21.200 it. Yeah, that's right. And I've said this before, let's see, let's see what happens in women's

00:57:25.220 professional tennis. When you have a man say, you know what? I'm, I'm a woman now I've been through

00:57:29.800 puberty. I've, I'm a full man. I've got all my muscles. I got my biceps. I got it all. And I'm just

00:57:34.180 going to take a little tour on the woman's side and you see, uh, how, who wins all the prize money

00:57:38.420 and who gets all the attention and, um, whether people will be more vocal on behalf of young

00:57:43.680 women. Then Abigail, you're amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having

00:57:48.920 me on Megan. So much love. Um, okay. We're going to switch gears now and we're going to talk to a

00:57:54.100 guy named Johan Hari. He's got a book out called lost connections, uncovering the real causes of

00:58:01.400 depression. Now that book became a celebrated New York times bestseller. And then he wrote a

00:58:06.560 followup. This is the one that's actually out now and it's called stolen focus, why you can't pay

00:58:11.460 attention and how to think deeply again. Have you suffered from depression? Do you now find yourself

00:58:17.500 struggling to pay attention? You are not alone. These are really common problems. And some of them

00:58:24.180 have actually been manipulated into you. Okay. Some of them are not entirely your fault. Uh,

00:58:30.840 so we're going to ask Johan about it all and he's here now. Johan, thank you for being here.

00:58:35.940 Hey Megan. That was a great intro. Thanks very much.

00:58:38.540 Oh, my pleasure. Okay. So let's talk about focus because I can see it. Anybody who's gone out to

00:58:43.660 dinner, you look around the restaurant at any given table, half of the tables are on their iPhone

00:58:48.780 while conversations happening with real live humans before their faces, right? You try to talk to a

00:58:54.180 teenager. They're constantly looking down at their phone. They won't even look at you. You know,

00:58:58.800 the attention span seems to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and how, so I want to know

00:59:05.180 why, and I want to know how is that affecting us? How is the lack of focus affecting us?

00:59:10.000 That was exactly the question I asked myself because I could feel it happening to myself

00:59:13.760 with every year that passed. It felt like things that required deep focus, like reading a book,

00:59:18.600 were getting more and more like running up a down escalator. You know, I could do it,

00:59:22.420 but it was getting harder and harder. So I started to research this. I was quite struck by some of the

00:59:27.280 early research that I saw for every single child who was diagnosed with serious attention problems

00:59:32.360 when I was seven years old. There's now a hundred children given that diagnosis.

00:59:38.260 And that's a real problem that they're identifying. A typical American office worker

00:59:42.200 now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I wanted to understand exactly that

00:59:47.660 question you're asking, Megan, why is this happening to us? So I use my training in the social sciences at

00:59:52.100 Cambridge University to travel all over the world from Miami to Melbourne to Moscow to interview

00:59:57.200 over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention. And what I learned is there's scientific

01:00:01.920 evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the

01:00:07.960 factors that are causing our, that can cause your attention to deteriorate have been hugely rising in

01:00:12.900 the last few years. Obviously invasive tech is one of them actually goes way beyond invasive tech

01:00:17.440 from the food we eat to the sleep we don't get. And this is so important. I mean, I kind of realized

01:00:23.440 it's that our attention didn't collapse. Our attention has been stolen from us by these bigger

01:00:29.020 forces. And the reason, the thing you said that's so important is why is this so, why is this so crucial?

01:00:33.540 I would just say to anyone watching or listening, think about anything you've ever done in your life

01:00:37.920 that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent and learning to play the

01:00:43.060 guitar, whatever the thing you're proud of is, that thing required a lot of sustained focus and

01:00:48.760 attention. And when focus and attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down,

01:00:54.560 your ability to solve your problems breaks down. This is why we become more anxious. In a way you

01:00:58.600 become a kind of stump of yourself. You can sense what you might have been, but you feel you can't get

01:01:03.620 it, which is why we have to tackle these problems very clearly and face on.

01:01:07.780 Hmm. You, you tried it yourself, right? You went to one of the most beautiful places in America,

01:01:14.600 Cape Cod, and tried to unplug and reconnect, grow from the stump to the flowering tree.

01:01:21.140 And so talk to us about that.

01:01:23.120 A child in an elementary school playing when he said that image, but no, you're totally right.

01:01:27.060 Well, at the start of this journey for my book, Stolen Focus, I thought the problem,

01:01:31.380 I basically had two stories about why I couldn't pay attention. I thought you're weak,

01:01:35.480 you don't have enough willpower and someone invented the smartphone. So I decided to make

01:01:40.100 a really big step of willpower. I went away for three months to Provincetown, which you mentioned,

01:01:46.500 with no phone and no laptop that could get online. I had a huge brick phone that couldn't get onto the

01:01:51.420 internet either. And I learned a lot, including about the limits of this approach. But the thing

01:01:56.980 that amazed me was how much my attention came back because I was nearly 40. I thought maybe it's just

01:02:02.420 that my attention, you know, I've gotten older, your mind deteriorates. My attention went back

01:02:06.400 to what it had been when I was 17. It was extraordinary. And I remember at the end of

01:02:10.060 those three months, and there were lots of changes that happened in Provincetown beyond tech that

01:02:14.620 improved my attention that maybe we'll get to. But I remember at the end of it thinking,

01:02:18.280 well, I never want to go back to how I lived before. Why would I go back to that?

01:02:22.460 I remember being reunited with my phone in Boston and within a month, I never went back to quite as bad

01:02:26.520 as I've been, but I went a long way back. And I only understood why when I went to interview

01:02:31.480 someone called Dr. James Williams, who was a senior Google strategist who became horrified by what

01:02:36.380 Google was doing, quit, and has become one of the leading philosophers of attention in the world.

01:02:41.120 And he said to me, the mistake you've made with taking this approach that's purely individual

01:02:45.960 is it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask,

01:02:51.840 right? I'm not against gas masks. If I lived in Beijing, I would wear one. But this is a huge,

01:02:56.980 exactly like you said at the start, Megan, this is happening to all of us. At the moment,

01:03:00.560 it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all the time. And then that person is leaning

01:03:05.200 forward and saying, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch

01:03:09.400 so much. To which the obvious response is, yeah, I'll learn to meditate, but we need to stop you

01:03:13.480 pouring the itching powder on us, which is why we need to have two levels of response to this.

01:03:17.680 There are lots of things that we can do as individuals to protect ourselves and particularly

01:03:22.280 our children. The last quarter of the book is about our kids. There's all sorts of steps that

01:03:26.740 everyone can take tomorrow, but I want to level with people. That will help. It's helped me a lot.

01:03:32.380 I can talk about what those steps are, but it will only get you so far because we're living...

01:03:36.640 Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world,

01:03:40.420 said to me that we need to ask if we're living in what he called an attentional pathogenic

01:03:44.680 environment, an environment that's undermining the ability of all of us to pay attention.

01:03:49.000 And to deal with that, we're going to have to take on these powerful forces that are doing this to us.

01:03:53.720 And I believe we can. And it's not just the iPhone. I mean, I remember, this is anecdotal,

01:03:58.100 but when I was at Fox News, I'm working in cable, you'd look down at the screen and there I am

01:04:04.360 delivering a news report or one of my colleagues delivering a news report. And of course, you've

01:04:08.360 got the lower third that adds a new piece of information, you know, in addition to what the

01:04:12.820 anchor is telling you. And then beneath that, you have the ticker that has got all, you know,

01:04:16.680 the NASDAQ and the stocks. And so people can understand whether their money's going up or down in the

01:04:20.460 stock market. And then on screen left, you'd have additional facts about this guest or this topic,

01:04:25.680 right? So it's like, and then people at home could watch all that and do picture and picture. So

01:04:29.680 they've got the NFL game sitting there in the bottom corner and they probably have their phone

01:04:33.640 out as well. And then you go to break and you give the audience a task, like go to foxnews.com and

01:04:38.380 enter, you know, ask, answer our poll, right? Like how many things can we layer on ourselves at one time?

01:04:44.500 You're so right, Megan. You've gone to one of the key 12 factors that I write about. And it was a

01:04:49.420 moment that's really fell into place for me. I went to interview Professor Earl Miller, who's one of

01:04:53.120 the leading neuroscientists in the world, who's at MIT. And he said to me, look, you've got to

01:04:57.500 understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only think about one or

01:05:02.440 two things consciously at a time. That's it, right? This is just a fundamental limitation of the human

01:05:06.620 brain. Human brain has not changed in 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any timescale.

01:05:11.620 And if I was going to see, you can only think about one or two things at a time. But what's

01:05:15.020 happened is we've fallen from massive delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow

01:05:20.020 six or seven forms of media at the same time. So when scientists get people into labs and they get

01:05:24.920 them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, they observe them. And what they discover is

01:05:28.800 you can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you very rapidly juggle between the things

01:05:34.260 you're doing. And it turns out that comes with a huge cost. The technical term for this is the switch

01:05:40.340 cost effect. When you try to do more than one thing at a time, exactly what you're describing,

01:05:43.740 you're trying to watch Fox News. You're also trying to watch the game. What was that person

01:05:46.940 just say to me on Facebook? What was the WhatsApp message there? Wait, who's at my door? What you're

01:05:50.820 doing is when you try to multitask, you will do everything you're trying to do much less well.

01:05:58.140 You make more mistakes. You remember less of what you do. You're less creative. You're just

01:06:02.680 significantly more incompetent. And there's one study, there's loads of evidence for this,

01:06:06.400 this one very small study that really drove it home for me. Hewlett-Packard, the printer company,

01:06:11.980 did a little experiment. They got a scientist in and he split their workers into two. And one group

01:06:16.680 was told, just do whatever your task is, get on with it. You're not going to be interrupted.

01:06:20.380 And the second group was told, do whatever your task is, but you've got to answer a fairly heavy

01:06:24.340 amount of email and phone calls. So basically the life most of us live. And then at the end of it,

01:06:28.620 they gave them all an IQ test. The group that had not been interrupted did 10 IQ points better on

01:06:34.960 average on that test. And the one that had to give you a sense of how big that is. If you smoke

01:06:38.280 cannabis in the short term, it lowers your IQ by five points. So that evidence shows you'd be better

01:06:43.280 off sitting at your desk, getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than you would what we do at

01:06:48.760 the moment, which has been constantly distracted, you know, not getting stoned. And to be clear,

01:06:53.700 you're better off neither getting stoned nor multitasking. But Professor Miller put it to me,

01:06:57.940 we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. And there's just one more study about this that

01:07:03.500 really threw me. A guy called Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon

01:07:07.700 discovered if you're interrupting, it can be something as small as a text message.

01:07:12.680 It will take you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before.

01:07:18.060 But most of us are never getting 23 minutes spare. So we're constantly operating at this profoundly

01:07:22.620 diminished level of attention and focus. And so the question is, how do we stop doing that? How do we

01:07:29.640 save ourselves? Because if even you went to Provincetown and came back and got sucked back

01:07:33.740 in, I mean, it makes me feel better because, you know, most people don't have three months to go

01:07:38.340 spend at the beach and, you know, they have to stay in this world permanently. And then you came back,

01:07:43.680 the we have to ask ourselves about solutions as opposed to just unplugging because that that's not

01:07:48.400 realistic. That's as good a tease as any to leave it right there. Squeeze in a break, come back with

01:07:54.420 answers. And I want to get to the depression thing, too, because I think a lot of people are dealing

01:07:57.800 with that right now. So, Johan, what are the solutions? And you mentioned one thing you

01:08:05.400 mentioned that I'd love to get to is sleep. Yeah. So for all of the 12 factors that are

01:08:11.040 screwing up our ability to focus and pay attention, we've got to handle it at two levels. I would put

01:08:15.660 it as we've got to play defense and we've got to play offense. So there's all sorts of steps that

01:08:19.820 everyone listening can take tomorrow, today, to defend themselves and their children. So I'll give

01:08:24.400 you just one example that helps a little bit with sleep. Sleep is a huge factor. I'm sure we'll get

01:08:28.020 to that. So you can't see I'm pointing stupidly, but you can't see behind my laptop. Obviously,

01:08:32.480 I have in the corner of my room, something called a K-safe. So it's a plastic safe. You take off the

01:08:38.380 lid, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top and it will lock your

01:08:43.120 phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. On my laptop, I have a program called

01:08:48.120 Freedom that does the same thing. I will not sit down to watch a movie with my partner. I will not sit

01:08:52.960 down to have a meal with my friends unless we all put our phones in the K-safe. And it's hard at

01:08:57.500 first. It massively helps me with sleep, by the way, because you lie there with your phone next to

01:09:01.180 you. You're sort of half awake. You feel anxious. You check it. If you just lock it away, you've just

01:09:05.580 got to go to sleep. You just lie there. You've got nothing else to do. So it's really difficult at

01:09:11.020 first, but as the muscles of focus start to come back, as you find yourself, the rewards of focus start

01:09:17.420 to kick in, being able to think deeply, being able to solve problems, it really works. So that's the

01:09:22.500 defense. That's one of dozens of examples that I give in the book of things we can do to play

01:09:26.200 defense. And there's loads of things we've got to do with our kids on that front. We've got to

01:09:29.260 model good behavior for our kids as well. But then we've got to go on offense because the truth is

01:09:33.400 this is being done to us by really powerful forces from the food industry to the people releasing

01:09:40.220 pollution in the air that's inflaming our brains. But let's look at one that a lot of people think

01:09:43.580 about, which is tech. So there's an analogy that really helped me to think about what we need to do

01:09:50.220 with tech now. We're about the same age, Megan. So I think you'll probably remember it used to be

01:09:54.260 really normal. I remember my mom used to put leaded gasoline in her car, right? And it used to be

01:09:59.100 normal. This is before our time for people to paint their homes with leaded paint. And then it was

01:10:04.220 discovered that the lead in paint and in petrol, when children's brains are exposed to it, it really

01:10:10.380 damages their ability to focus and pay attention. So when this was discovered, a group of ordinary moms

01:10:15.840 banded together and just said, you know what? You're not going to do this to our kids. You're

01:10:19.660 not going to damage their ability to think. We need to ban leaded paint and leaded petrol.

01:10:24.340 Now, it's important to say what they didn't say. They didn't say, let's ban all gasoline. They didn't

01:10:29.100 say, let's ban all paint. They wanted to go after the specific aspect that harms our attention. And

01:10:33.780 there's an analogy. I spent loads of time in Silicon Valley interviewing some of the leading

01:10:37.400 dissidents who designed this world that we live in and have been kind of hijacked by their own

01:10:42.020 creations and feel really bad about what they've done. And that analogy really helped me to think

01:10:46.540 about it because we don't want to ban social media. We're not going to all convert and join

01:10:49.820 the Amish, nor would we want to. No disrespect to the Amish. I was going to say in case they're

01:10:53.380 listening, but I guess they're not. They're not listening because they don't have this technology.

01:10:56.660 I think the Amish demographic is huge, but we're not going to go and join them, right? What we want

01:11:02.020 is the good things about these technologies as much as we can have them without these bad things.

01:11:06.420 And this is why you have to understand the specific aspect of the technologies we use that is

01:11:11.120 invading our attention. And it comes down to the business model, which at the moment is very

01:11:15.300 simple. Every time you or your kid pick up your phone, these social media companies start to make

01:11:21.000 money. And the longer you scroll, the more money they make. So all of their algorithms, all of their

01:11:27.340 engineering power, all of this genius is geared towards one thing. How do we get Megan to pick up

01:11:32.060 her phone more often? How do we get her to scroll more often? How do we get our kids to do the same

01:11:35.980 thing? That's it. That's all they care about. It doesn't matter whether the companies are run by

01:11:40.520 nice people or nasty people. All they care about is, will you do that? But social media doesn't

01:11:46.920 have to work that way. At the moment, as Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in

01:11:51.180 Facebook explained, we designed it to maximally invade people's attention. We knew what we were

01:11:56.420 doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. That's what

01:12:00.560 he said. We now know, of course, from Facebook's, which you've covered very well, Facebook's leaked

01:12:04.320 information that they know they're doing it, right? So Asa Raskin, who designed a key part of how the

01:12:09.880 internet works, said to me, look, the first step of the solution is really simple. You've got to ban

01:12:14.820 the current business model, just like we banned lead in paint. You've got to say, a model premised

01:12:19.620 upon figuring out the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack them and sell them to advertisers.

01:12:24.940 That's just inhuman. It damages our brains, damages our societies. We won't allow it. And when people

01:12:30.020 started saying to this to me, I said to them, it seems so odd. I said to them, but wait, so let's

01:12:35.140 imagine we do this. We ban the current business model. If I open Facebook the next day, would

01:12:40.180 it just say, sorry guys, we've gone fishing? And they said, of course not. What would happen

01:12:44.200 is they'd have to move to a different business model. And everyone listening has experience

01:12:47.980 of the two alternative business models. One is subscription. We all know how HBO and Netflix

01:12:52.040 work. Or another is think about the sewage system. Before we had sewers, we had feces in the

01:12:57.600 street. We got cholera. So we all pay to build and maintain the sewers. And we all own the

01:13:02.920 sewers together. Now it might be that like we own the sewage pipes together. We want

01:13:07.540 to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for

01:13:11.160 our attention. But the key thing to understand is whatever the alternative model we move to,

01:13:15.960 suddenly all the incentives for the social media companies are different. The incentive

01:13:19.800 isn't how do I hack Megan and her kids' attention in order to invade it as much as possible.

01:13:24.200 It becomes, what does Megan want? Oh, Megan wants to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's

01:13:28.700 design it to heal her attention. Oh, Megan wants to be able to meet up with her friends

01:13:32.040 offline. Let's design a way to do that. But if we don't change the incentives, and the

01:13:36.360 only way that will change is if we pressure them, just like the lead industry was never

01:13:39.500 going to go, hey guys, we've made enough money. Let's stop putting leaded paint. We've

01:13:43.280 got to, this will only happen if we force these companies to do it.

01:13:47.280 How? They have shown, I mean, they're so powerful and they're so rich and they're bigger

01:13:51.520 than government now. It's almost like it's too late. That's how it feels.

01:13:56.720 Yeah, there were times when I felt like that. And when I felt like that, Megan, and this

01:14:00.800 might sound strange. I thought a lot about my grandmothers. I was raised by one of my

01:14:03.920 grandmothers because my mother was ill when I was a child. My grandmothers were the age

01:14:07.460 I am now in 1963. One of them was a working class Scottish woman living in a housing project.

01:14:12.940 And the other was a Swiss woman living on the side of a mountain in a wooden hut.

01:14:16.920 And in 1963, my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names because

01:14:21.520 they were married. It was legal for their husbands to rape them, as it was legal everywhere

01:14:25.800 in the world for men to rape their wives. In practice, it was legal for their husbands

01:14:29.140 to beat them up because the police never did anything. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even

01:14:32.740 allowed to vote. And I think about how much power was ranged against them, right? And then

01:14:40.220 I think about my niece who's 17, Erin, who I absolutely love, you know, and I think about

01:14:44.880 her life and how unimaginable it would be for someone to say she shouldn't be allowed to

01:14:48.800 have a bank account. You know, it should be legal to rape her. I mean, no one would say

01:14:52.080 that. They'd be regarded as a psychopath if they said that. And so when people say to me,

01:14:56.140 as you just did, and I totally get it, I feel it myself, oh my God, these forces, and it's not

01:15:00.140 just big tech, many of the other factors invading our attention that write back and style of focus,

01:15:04.100 these are really powerful forces. I remind myself, they're not a tenth as powerful as

01:15:10.340 men were in 1963. Men controlled literally everything in the world in 1963, every country,

01:15:16.000 every company, every police force, every army, and they had since all those things were invented.

01:15:21.200 And it's tempting to say, and I used to say what you just said, Megan, that think about

01:15:24.600 these companies are more powerful than governments. But when you look at the evidence,

01:15:28.080 that's not true. Look at what happened in Australia. The Australian government, a centre-right,

01:15:33.200 a conservative government in Australia, decided to take on Facebook because Facebook has destroyed

01:15:38.540 our industry, the news industry, right? You used to get advertising in newspapers. Now it's

01:15:44.520 almost all gone to Facebook. So the Australian government said to Facebook, you're going to

01:15:48.260 have to start paying the media companies. You benefit from having their news stories on your site.

01:15:52.200 You're going to have to start paying them percentage. And Facebook huffed and puffed.

01:15:57.020 They threatened to shut down in Australia. And what happened? They gave in. Because ultimately,

01:16:02.300 governments are much more powerful. And our governments will be as good as we can make them.

01:16:06.920 So I would argue, just like we needed a movement for women to reclaim their lives, that's what we've

01:16:13.360 made change the story from my grandmother's life to my niece's life. I think we need to have an

01:16:18.180 attention movement to reclaim our minds. And it requires a real shift in consciousness. I think,

01:16:24.280 Megan, we've got to stop. There's lots of things we've got to do at an individual level. And I talk

01:16:28.360 about a lot of them in the book. But also, we need to stop asking just for these small things.

01:16:32.560 We are not like medieval peasants sitting at the court of King Zuckerberg, begging for a few little

01:16:38.000 crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies. And we own our own

01:16:43.080 minds. And we don't have to tolerate our children being hacked and invaded and our own minds being

01:16:48.440 hacked and invaded to the point where one small study found that a typical college student now

01:16:53.280 focuses on any one task for only 65 seconds. Another study found that college students can't

01:16:58.900 focus for more than a few minutes. And the average office worker only focuses for three minutes.

01:17:03.640 This is no way to live. We don't have to live like this. Most humans have not lived like this.

01:17:07.780 We can deal with the factors in our food supply, in the way we work, in the technology we use. We can

01:17:13.780 deal with these factors that are doing this to us. But at the moment, it's like a race.

01:17:18.080 All these factors doing this to us, they're getting stronger and stronger. Paul Graham,

01:17:21.880 one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive

01:17:26.480 in the next 40 years than it was in the last. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your

01:17:31.220 child than Facebook was, right? So they're going to invade us more if we don't act. So what we've got to

01:17:36.040 have on the other side of this race is loads of us saying, no, you don't get to do this to us.

01:17:43.020 This is not a good life. We don't tolerate it. We're going to regulate you. You can still have

01:17:47.340 your business. You'll still be very rich people. We want you to have good lives, but you don't get

01:17:51.840 to invade us to the degree that you're doing. I think people are just becoming aware of it.

01:17:55.540 You know, I think it's just becoming frontal lobe as people realize, wait a minute, I don't feel very

01:18:00.180 good. I'm on the phone all the time and I just don't feel very good. And then you see it happen in

01:18:04.020 your kid and you really have to pay attention. But the business model, you know, thanks to the

01:18:08.240 social dilemma. And I know that you you've talked a lot with Tristan Harris. He was on the show just

01:18:12.340 last week in a very eye opening and disturbing episode, which everyone should should should

01:18:19.140 listen to. I've ever since we did it, I'm like, what can I do with this? I got to go to all my

01:18:22.540 schools and tell them that we need to have him come lecture or I can just summarize or something.

01:18:26.900 But like everyone needs to be, it's a red alarm. It's a five, five star red alarm fire.

01:18:32.940 I don't know. I just, I, I, I think people are, it's just becoming, they're becoming aware of how

01:18:38.420 they've been. I think, I think you're totally right about both things, both that Tristan Harris is one

01:18:43.120 of the great heroes of our time and everyone should listen to him. And also you're right that I think at

01:18:47.900 the moment, most people are where I was when I started writing the stolen focus four years ago,

01:18:51.740 Megan, which is I'm just thinking, well, this is a problem with me, right? I'm just not strong

01:18:55.640 enough. I remember I had a real, I had a real weird moment when I started researching the book

01:19:00.940 because I thought I had a problem with my willpower, right? So I went to interview this

01:19:04.760 guy called Professor Roy Baumeister, who's the leading expert on willpower in the world. He wrote

01:19:09.060 a book called Willpower, right? So I go to interview him and I said, oh, you know, I'm thinking of writing

01:19:13.840 a book about attention. I'm just thinking about it. And he said, oh, it's interesting. You should say

01:19:17.860 that because I've noticed I can't really pay attention very much anymore. I just play video games on my

01:19:23.040 phone all the time. And I was like, wait, didn't you write a book called Willpower? I'm like, oh my

01:19:29.060 God, if this guy can't pay attention. So you know, it's a real moment. I was like, oh, wow, is this

01:19:33.340 happening to literally everyone? Right. We have no hope. I think it's also, you mentioned your kids'

01:19:37.860 schools. And I think it's interesting because if we think about the 12 factors, one of the things that

01:19:41.020 fascinated me is when I started, partly I thought it was a willpower problem. Mainly I thought it was a

01:19:46.120 tech problem. One of the things that was so interesting to me is actually doing the research, tech is not the

01:19:51.020 biggest cause. If you think about things you can talk to your kids' schools about, I'd recommend,

01:19:54.520 for example, one of the other 12 causes, which is the way we eat. So there's this really fascinating

01:19:59.220 new movement called nutritional psychiatry. You should have some of these guys on your show because

01:20:02.540 I think you'd really find them fascinating. Just looking at the ways, how the ways in which we

01:20:07.480 eat affects our mental health and our mental abilities. And what these nutritional psychiatrists and

01:20:12.180 others taught me is the way we eat at the moment. And I've literally got a McDonald's bag in the

01:20:17.360 corner of the room, so I'm not saying there's any superiority. The way we eat at the moment

01:20:20.320 is really damaging our ability to focus and pay attention in three big ways. So one way,

01:20:26.540 so imagine you eat a typical American or British breakfast. You have, you know, a sugary cereal,

01:20:30.760 you have white bread, the stuff I grew up having, right? What that does is it releases a huge amount

01:20:35.840 of energy really quickly into your brain, right? Releases a huge amount of glucose. So it feels great.

01:20:40.020 You're like, I've woken up, right? You suddenly feel like you're awake again. But what happens is an hour or two

01:20:45.500 later, you'll be at your desk or your kid will be at their school desk and you get a real energy crash

01:20:50.520 and you get what's called brain fog. We just can't focus until you get another carb, another sugary

01:20:55.480 treat. And what's happened is we live, the diets we eat make us live on a kind of roller coaster

01:21:01.640 of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day. So we're experiencing periods of brain fog

01:21:07.280 where if we ate food that releases food steadily, which most people of humans, most humans in history

01:21:13.420 have eaten, you can pay attention much more easily. The way one nutritionist put it to me

01:21:17.100 is it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini, those little 1970s British cars. It'll go really

01:21:22.820 fast and then it will just stop. There's two other ways. The diet we eat deprives us of the nutrients

01:21:27.640 that we need for our brains to develop fully. And also it's not just that our diet lacks the things

01:21:33.360 we need. It actually contains chemicals that act on us like drugs. There was a really chilling study in

01:21:38.060 Britain where they got 297 kids and they split them into two groups. And one group was just given

01:21:43.300 water to drink and the other was given a drink that contained a lot of the food dyes that contain

01:21:48.080 in the candies that your kids eat pretty often, the stuff we get in supermarkets. And the kids who drank

01:21:53.180 the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive, manic. So we've got to change our

01:21:59.680 food supply system. If your school is full of vending machines, if it's full of, and there's been a big move

01:22:04.700 to this as we cut back on funding for school meals, vending machines containing cookies and

01:22:09.800 other sugary carbohydrates, that's going to trash your kids' attention. So there's all sorts of these

01:22:15.000 other factors, some of which are even bigger than tech, that we've got to look at.

01:22:19.720 Wow. This is fascinating and something we can do something about like ASAP, our diets.

01:22:25.040 I'm wondering as I'm listening to all this, whether this is, it's no surprise that you wrote a book on

01:22:28.680 depression, now you're writing a book on focus, but they do seem linked, right? All these things,

01:22:33.440 you can't focus, you can't have sort of the joy that comes with long moments of downtime and being

01:22:38.660 able to focus and let your mind wander and become more creative. I'm sure it can be connected to

01:22:44.820 feeling depressed, but I want to ask you about the depression too, because that's fascinating to me.

01:22:50.240 I think a lot of people are dealing with it right now. Lost Connections was the name of that book,

01:22:54.820 released in 2018, New York Times bestseller, The Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected

01:23:00.120 Solutions. And one of the quotes on the book is from Elton John. If you've ever been down or felt

01:23:07.340 lost, this amazing book will change your life. Do yourself a favor and read it now. So great.

01:23:11.500 I'm going to try and persuade Elton to sing a duet with you about the book.

01:23:14.120 That's pretty cool. I got Elton John. All right. So can we talk about that for one minute? Because

01:23:18.940 what is it? Because you kind of ruled out that it's not just like you were put on antidepressants when

01:23:25.340 you went to your doctor and said, I don't feel so good. And he's like, oh, I can increase your

01:23:28.640 serotonin. It's going to be awesome. And then you went through the same cycle that so many people go

01:23:32.120 through, which is the depression came back and then you increased the drug and this cycle until

01:23:36.980 you you beat the drug, sadly, and it no longer is of use to you. And then then what do you do?

01:23:43.480 And you're at you're forced to ask the question of, I guess I'm going to have to deal with root

01:23:46.740 causes. You know, that's a really good way of putting it. And I think one way that helps us to think

01:23:51.700 about it in relation to what we've been through in the last two years is everyone knows they have

01:23:56.440 natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean

01:24:00.880 air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally

01:24:05.900 strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong.

01:24:11.440 You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you.

01:24:16.000 You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And the culture we built is good at many

01:24:20.140 things. I'm glad to be alive today. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep

01:24:26.780 underlying psychological needs for a very long time now. And it's funny, you mentioned chemical

01:24:32.180 antidepressants. There was a moment this really fell into place for me. So I took chemical

01:24:36.460 antidepressants. They helped me for a while. Then the effect wore off, sadly. They give some people

01:24:40.120 real relief. And anyone who's listening, who's getting real relief from them, my advice is to continue

01:24:44.400 taking them. But there was a moment, I went to interview this guy called Dr. Derek Summerfield.

01:24:49.880 And he happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants

01:24:55.140 for people in Cambodia. They'd never had them in that country before. And the local doctors,

01:24:59.220 the Cambodians, were like, oh, what's an antidepressant? And he explained. And they said to

01:25:04.000 him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you

01:25:07.860 mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like Ginkgo,

01:25:11.720 Biloba, St. John's Wort, something like that. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer

01:25:16.720 in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine, and he got

01:25:21.780 his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial leg. And a few months later, he went back to work

01:25:25.860 in the rice fields. But apparently, it's really painful to work underwater when you've got an

01:25:29.540 artificial limb. And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where

01:25:33.300 you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he just refused to get out of bed.

01:25:37.760 He developed what we would call classic depression. This is when the Cambodian doctors said,

01:25:41.720 Dr. Summerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, well, what

01:25:45.840 was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized

01:25:53.060 that his pain made sense. He only had to talk to the guy for five minutes to see why he was

01:25:56.580 so depressed. One of the doctors figured, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become

01:26:01.640 a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought

01:26:06.060 him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression

01:26:09.920 was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see, doctor, that cow,

01:26:14.840 that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about

01:26:19.000 depression the way we have, that it's entirely a biological problem in your brain, that sounds

01:26:23.360 like a weird joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow. But what

01:26:27.520 those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively from this anecdotal example is what the leading medical

01:26:33.140 body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years.

01:26:36.640 If you're depressed, if you're anxious, there can certainly be biological contributions.

01:26:42.560 But in the main, you are not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet

01:26:47.960 needs. And what we need to do is help you to get those deeper needs met. So I went to lots

01:26:52.680 of places in the world that have built their responses to depression primarily around that.

01:26:56.680 Does that ring true to you, Megan?

01:26:58.020 Yeah, my gosh, that's amazing. And that too, we're losing at every turn, right? We're not prioritizing

01:27:03.440 one another or relationships. We look at the phone. As I said, back to my example at the

01:27:07.180 dinner, you have live humans there who want to be with you. They want to hear from you

01:27:10.860 and talk to you, tell you about their experiences and hear about yours. And instead, you're online

01:27:15.860 scrolling with people who are not there and sometimes who you don't even know and who

01:27:20.800 definitely don't care about you. It's like it's all it's all been turned on its head.

01:27:25.820 And I dream of one day, I realize we're not going to be the Amish, but that we sort of

01:27:31.580 get back to more of our Luddite roots and there's a movement that's real and that you

01:27:37.980 can really draft into that rejects this technology where we can go back to living with some of

01:27:43.520 its advantages. I'm not going to lie. I love the convenience of Amazon, but reject some

01:27:49.520 of this social media stuff that can be so corruptive of actual relationships. I want to

01:27:54.460 say one other thing before I let you go. So we talked about your book Stolen Focus. That's

01:27:59.500 what's out right now. We talked about just a bit on Lost Connections, the book on depression.

01:28:05.280 We didn't talk about the book released in 2015 called Chasing the Scream. The opposite of addiction

01:28:12.300 is connection. And I just want to give it a shout out because our audience should know

01:28:15.640 not one, but I think two movies are being made based on this now. A story about Billie Holiday,

01:28:21.360 which is by Lee Daniels. And then another one narrated by Samuel L. Jackson called The Fix.

01:28:27.960 So you're crushing it, Johan. And I'm thrilled for you. And I'd love to have you back to talk

01:28:33.300 about more of these. I would absolutely love that, Megan. It was very weird hearing Samuel

01:28:37.480 L. Jackson read out my lines. I considered asking to record my answer phone message in

01:28:42.140 character as this character from Pulp Fiction. But I thought it'd be a little bit disrespectful,

01:28:45.640 but it's like a weird stress stream. It's like a weird stress stream where you wake up and Samuel

01:28:51.040 L. Jackson is saying your words back to you. It's like, what? What's happening?

01:28:54.860 I insist that you do that. Before you come back, don't come back without telling me you've done

01:28:59.700 it. Samuel L. Jackson has got to read that to you. All right. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for

01:29:03.500 being here. The name of the latest book is Stolen Focus. I hope you listen tomorrow because we're

01:29:07.920 having one of our great debates. This one's going to be on guns. Guns in America tomorrow. Download

01:29:14.760 The Megyn Kelly Show on podcast for free and youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. See you tomorrow.

01:29:21.280 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:29:33.500 Thanks for listening.

The Megyn Kelly Show - January 25, 2022

Hysteria Harming Our Kids and Why We Can't Stay Focused, with Abigail Shrier, Johann Hari, and Megan Rafalski ｜ Ep. 247

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