The Megyn Kelly Show - April 10, 2023


Left's Hypocrisy on Women, Ignoring Nashville Trans Shooter, and How to Live Better Longer, with Glenn Greenwald and Dr. Peter Attia | Ep. 525


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 36 minutes

Words per Minute

187.70737

Word Count

18,047

Sentence Count

1,136

Misogynist Sentences

23

Hate Speech Sentences

14


Summary

Glenn Greenwald joins host Megyn Kelly on the show to discuss the latest news and headlines from the past weekend, including the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, and the so-called "Tennessee Three."


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Beat, beat, beatboxing actually has hidden health benefits.
00:00:04.360 It can help strengthen and protect your voice from injury.
00:00:08.900 See healthy living differently with Manulife.
00:00:11.160 Visit manulife.ca slash health.
00:00:14.020 Yeah.
00:00:15.460 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:26.860 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
00:00:28.520 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.
00:00:31.680 Hope you all had a great Easter weekend, enjoyed Passover, et cetera.
00:00:36.140 We did.
00:00:36.720 We had a great Easter weekend.
00:00:38.080 We did the baskets.
00:00:39.240 We did the Ten Commandments.
00:00:41.200 We did church where it was standing room only.
00:00:44.040 And there is something so good about seeing that, isn't there?
00:00:46.340 Our priest was saying how happy it made him to see the number of people who were there
00:00:51.660 for Sunday Mass.
00:00:52.780 And I felt the same.
00:00:54.140 You know, it's just like a good message for your kids.
00:00:55.860 You're part of something larger than yourself.
00:00:58.720 There are others in your community who share these same beliefs.
00:01:01.780 This is not just something being forced on you by mom and dad.
00:01:04.420 See, there are your friends.
00:01:05.540 There are your buddies.
00:01:06.500 There are your teachers, our neighbors.
00:01:08.060 The whole exercise, so worthwhile and just a great time to reflect as a family on what
00:01:15.200 it means, what Easter means, what your religion means to you, how it bonds you with your community
00:01:20.820 and your family and so on.
00:01:22.680 So thumbs up to ceremony, to religious holidays and to Jesus on his big comeback.
00:01:30.940 Later, we're going to be joined in the show by Dr. Peter Atiyah.
00:01:34.500 Oh, love him.
00:01:35.760 I have thought so many times about our last interview with Peter.
00:01:38.960 Happened around this time last year.
00:01:40.480 And now he's got a new book out, which you must buy.
00:01:43.180 It's so good.
00:01:44.240 It's number one right now on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
00:01:48.020 And for a reason, I love audio.
00:01:50.900 He sent me the, you know, hard copy.
00:01:52.380 I love audio.
00:01:52.900 I put it on two times two.
00:01:55.260 I burned through that thing in like a morning plus a little bit of the afternoon.
00:02:00.360 Great, great info.
00:02:01.940 Good stuff.
00:02:02.660 We're going to help extend your lifespan.
00:02:04.120 Second hour of the show.
00:02:05.700 Want to tell you that right now it's noon Eastern and we are keeping an eye on some news this
00:02:09.980 morning regarding a shooting in downtown Louisville, Kentucky at a bank.
00:02:13.980 It sounds like from the initial reports, this is a case of workplace violence.
00:02:18.020 Reports are that there are five dead, including the shooter, who appears to have been an employee
00:02:22.860 of the bank.
00:02:24.260 Meanwhile, over in Tennessee, the so-called Tennessee Three, as they want to be called,
00:02:31.760 continue to dominate the headlines.
00:02:33.380 I mean, the absurdity with which the mainstream is reacting to what happened in Tennessee.
00:02:38.160 It's outrageous.
00:02:39.800 They're making heroes into these guys who disrupted the proceedings, broke protocol,
00:02:44.800 were absolutely rude and disruptive and disrespectful to their fellow colleagues, many of whom were
00:02:50.920 voicing the opinions of families aligned with the victims of that Tennessee shooting.
00:02:56.300 The media wants to make it sound like, oh, all the victims of that Nashville, Tennessee
00:03:00.580 shooting were on our side.
00:03:02.260 And then they threw our two guys out.
00:03:04.040 And it was all about race, too, because the black guys got thrown out without the white
00:03:06.900 woman.
00:03:07.200 We attacked that on on Friday.
00:03:09.160 That's absurd.
00:03:10.380 The seven million people in Tennessee, many of whom did not agree with what those two were
00:03:14.680 asking for, those three.
00:03:16.820 And they were rude in trying to silence the debate when they didn't get their way.
00:03:21.020 That's what happened there.
00:03:22.520 Of course, Vice President Kamala Harris making a surprise visit to Nashville on Friday not to
00:03:29.000 support the victims of the Christian school shooting over which the lawmakers were arguing
00:03:33.460 in the first place, but in support of the ousted lawmakers, she did not even deign to visit
00:03:39.660 with the families of the three nine-year-olds who were murdered at that Christian school.
00:03:46.220 She didn't even try to do the fig leaf of saying she wanted to.
00:03:50.520 Joining us now to discuss this unbelievable news and news cycle, Glenn Greenwald.
00:03:55.420 Glenn is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of System Update on Rumble.
00:04:01.040 Glenn, great to have you back.
00:04:01.960 How are you doing?
00:04:02.320 Hey, Megan, great to be with you.
00:04:04.880 The Tennessee thing is so annoying to me.
00:04:07.400 The fact that she would deign to go down there and not even make a showing of saying, I would
00:04:12.440 love to meet with the victims of the six who were killed, especially the victims of the
00:04:16.300 three nine-year-olds who were killed there.
00:04:18.880 But I'm going to meet with these three posers who are looking for their moment in the sun,
00:04:24.600 who disrupted the proceedings, were disrespectful and rude to everybody, but are now being lionized.
00:04:29.420 Did you see them on the Sunday shows by the media as, you know, critical to democracy?
00:04:35.940 And by the way, they're going to get right back in, too, because they were expelled.
00:04:38.980 Two out of three were expelled.
00:04:40.160 They're going to get put right back in there by the voters like this week.
00:04:42.740 So what's your take on it?
00:04:45.560 Yeah.
00:04:46.080 I mean, first of all, I remember very well in the weeks and months after January 6th that
00:04:50.360 he demands that a whole variety of members of Congress who had nothing to do even arguably
00:04:55.260 with the January 6th riot, such as Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, anybody basically who wanted
00:05:00.680 the congressional examination of that election be expelled.
00:05:03.760 They were demanding expel Josh Hawley, just expel Ted Cruz, expel these dozens of House
00:05:08.800 members, and now suddenly expelling elected members of Congress for disrupting congressional
00:05:15.720 procedures, not for positions they've taken as some sort of fascist assault on democracy,
00:05:20.360 exactly what people like AOC were demanding not all that long ago.
00:05:23.780 I think the bigger and more important point, though, Megan, is this Nashville shooting has
00:05:29.320 been erased from memory, even though it happened very recently, because it's such an
00:05:35.080 inconvenient narrative, given that the shooter was not just someone who was trans, but very
00:05:41.240 possibly acted on behalf of this radical ideology.
00:05:46.940 And amazingly, they won't show us the manifesto, even though we always see the manifesto when they
00:05:51.180 can link it to the right. And we're actually we retain counsel in Nashville to try and obtain
00:05:56.580 that that manifesto, because, of course, it's journalistically in the public interest.
00:06:00.820 So that's why Kamala Harris goes there and pretends there are no victims, because they want
00:06:04.240 to forget about that shooting completely, except to the extent they can exploit it for gun control
00:06:09.340 issues. That's exactly right. And now what we're seeing is this message that once again,
00:06:15.260 it's Jim Crow 2.0. I mean, how many times have we heard that? It's like they're excited
00:06:20.720 on the left because they can turn what was the targeting of a Christian school and little
00:06:25.580 nine year olds by a trans person into Black Lives Matter. You threw out the two black guys
00:06:31.480 instead of the white woman. And by the way, her expulsion only failed by one vote. And
00:06:35.520 she did not grab a bullhorn and take it out into the well. And she did not lead the protests
00:06:39.780 of the people up in the balcony. So there was a distinction. And she argued those distinctions
00:06:43.760 on her own behalf and through her representatives in distinguishing her own behavior from that
00:06:48.160 of the two black men, only to then be saved. And then when she was saved and the black men
00:06:52.520 were kicked out, she turned around and said, racism. You're the one who distinguished your
00:06:57.220 behavior. OK, so but the left is loving the shift to it's not about the dead Christian children.
00:07:03.600 It's not about the trans person who committed the murders or the buried manifesto. It is about
00:07:08.620 the the expulsion of the two black people who were fighting for democracy.
00:07:12.960 Yeah. You know, I first of all, one of the main weapon of the Democratic Party,
00:07:20.700 kind of the establishment that would the establishment wing that leads it is to depict
00:07:24.660 anyone and everyone who opposes them and their views of being bigoted in some way.
00:07:28.940 It's an automatic reflex. It probably had its roots or at least it's kind of newer iteration
00:07:35.320 back in the 2016 election when I don't know if you recall, but the main tactic of Hillary Clinton's
00:07:40.260 defenders against Bernie Sanders supporters who were trying to kind of challenge the establishment
00:07:44.060 wing of the party was to claim they were all misogynist. That was the only possible reason
00:07:48.160 you might be opposed to Hillary Clinton, somebody with a long line of ideological positions and all
00:07:53.480 kinds of corrupt behavior in public life. It had to only be misogyny and it worked. They did it through
00:07:58.540 the general election where it didn't work, but that became their main tactic. So they're incapable of
00:08:03.760 ever engaging in any kind of political debate without immediately insisting that anyone who's on the other
00:08:09.400 side by virtue of being on the other side of them is automatically a racist or a misogynist or a
00:08:14.560 homophobe or transphobe or whatever. That's why they're so eager to destroy Clarence Thomas because
00:08:19.960 he's kind of a living, breathing testament to the lie of that narrative. But that's the only political
00:08:25.540 debate and the only framework in which they're comfortable. And so somehow a shooting by what
00:08:30.420 appeared to be somebody motivated by, at least in part, radical theories of gender ideology and killed
00:08:36.680 Christian children in the name of that ideology, somehow that has been turned around so that
00:08:41.020 whoever is concerned about that component of the story is now back to being a 1960s Jim Crow racist.
00:08:47.480 And of course, it wouldn't work without the media's cooperation. That's how they frame everything in
00:08:51.720 partnership with their partisan allies.
00:08:53.520 Yes. You see, Kamala Harris goes there to meet with, again, the lawmakers, the ousted lawmakers,
00:09:02.260 not the victims. And for the first time in her vice presidency, she was truly animated. You could tell
00:09:08.220 this is what she actually cares about. The race narrative. Yes. Something I can glom onto. I can really
00:09:13.800 get behind. That's been injected. That actually fires me up. And listen to her messaging. Listen to this.
00:09:20.280 This is a sought three. It wasn't about the three of these leaders. It was about who they were
00:09:29.280 representing. It's about whose voices they were channeling. Understand that. And is that not what a
00:09:38.660 democracy allows? A democracy says you don't silence the people. You do not stifle the people. You don't
00:09:46.880 turn off their microphones when they are speaking about the importance of life and liberty.
00:09:55.040 Okay. So she finally cares about something. She's finally managed to have an articulate moment
00:09:59.240 because race and divisive insertion of it where it doesn't belong. That's what fires her up. But the
00:10:06.040 irony, Glenn, the irony of her saying in a democracy, you don't silence people. You don't take away their
00:10:11.520 microphones. Tell it to the disinformation doesn't. Right. Tell it to Trump who you impeached twice
00:10:16.480 because you didn't want the people to be able to vote for him a second time. Tell it to the Twitter
00:10:21.800 files reporting on how how many private citizens have been stifled and not been able to offer their
00:10:27.580 opinions online. Tell it to Facebook. The shutdown discussions that went against the administration's
00:10:32.460 narrative when it came to COVID and so on. Tell it to the people who are on the banned lists
00:10:36.300 after January 6th who suddenly couldn't get books published or hired or do business at banks
00:10:42.040 because they were affiliated with Donald Trump. This is an absurd statement to come out of her mouth.
00:10:48.680 What a lie that she believes that. All right. She didn't believe any of that. Let's remember the
00:10:53.520 only good moment of her ill-fated presidential campaign. Remember, she dropped out before the first
00:11:00.280 vote was cast. That's what a complete object failure it was, was when she accused Joe Biden of being a
00:11:06.080 racist because he had opposed bus busing and and desegregation of schools. And she had that moment
00:11:12.680 in that debate where she said that little girl was me, Joe, really strongly implying that he was a
00:11:18.900 racist. She shot up in the polls very temporarily. And then if she really believed that Joe Biden was
00:11:24.060 animated by racist sentiments, depicting him as this Joe Jim Crow supporter of segregation, which is what
00:11:29.860 she said. It's amazing that, you know, then she turned around less than a year later and embraced him
00:11:34.420 and heralded him as this man of great character when just a year earlier she was claiming he hated
00:11:39.580 black people. That shows you how cynical this game is. And on top of that, the bigger issue is exactly
00:11:45.100 the one that you raised, which is suddenly now the Democratic Party is the party that safeguards the
00:11:50.620 voices of dissent and the right to protest. Like when all those people were going to protest
00:11:55.640 COVID lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and they were told they were should be
00:12:00.220 arrested and were criminals and were risking grandma's life because they wanted to go protest.
00:12:04.960 And then suddenly when they had a protest, they liked after George Floyd's death, they demanded
00:12:09.800 everybody go protest or exactly. They've imposed a censorship regime on this country using not just
00:12:15.040 their power over big tech, but also the law. Remember, they tried characterizing parents at school
00:12:19.320 board meetings, expressing concerns about the curriculum their children were being taught as
00:12:23.760 people engage in a RICO violations or terrorism. The Democratic Party is about nothing other than
00:12:29.520 criminalizing dissent and protest. Everything she just said there is so cynical and so disingenuous.
00:12:36.200 It's hard to know where to start, honestly. And let's look what actually happened in Tennessee,
00:12:40.920 that she's that this is what's firing her up. This is what's outrageous to throw out two guys
00:12:46.340 who in the wake of all these protests in which people are now officially getting hurt as the mobs get out
00:12:52.140 of control. And we'll get to rally gains in a second. Finally, somebody stood up as the lawmakers
00:12:57.220 of Tennessee and said, you will not do this. You this is such a breach of decorum. You're thrown out.
00:13:01.800 You're out of here. You're done. And that's a procedure available to us to expel lawmakers who go
00:13:06.380 beyond who actually lead the protest of the protesters up in the balcony, who actually breach decorum to the
00:13:11.760 place where they take out the bullhorn and start shouting over civil debate that we're trying to have on
00:13:16.500 a public shooting because you didn't get your way. Do you remember how the Democrats
00:13:21.680 freaked out at Marjorie Taylor Greene for heckling Joe Biden at the State of the Union, how disgusted
00:13:29.820 they were at the breach of decorum? Oh, my God. But this with the bullhorn underneath the jacket,
00:13:35.460 that's fine just because you're losing the debate. That's totally fine. What does it depend on skin
00:13:39.820 color? Does it depend on ideology? Does it depend on whether you're talking about shootings of little
00:13:43.800 Christian children? What is it?
00:13:45.200 Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of things that have, you know, increasingly sickened me about the
00:13:51.840 Democratic Party. It's kind of new hegemonic coalition with people who had spent their lives
00:13:57.860 as Republicans and who became disaffected Republicans. One of the things, maybe the thing
00:14:02.720 that principally revolts me the most is the utter lack of principle. They just have no principles of
00:14:08.580 any kind. They feign outrage at one thing and then turn around the next day and do exactly that.
00:14:14.100 And they demand that nobody notice. And the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is a perfect example.
00:14:18.500 Nancy Pelosi melodramatically tore up President Trump's State of the Union speech in front of him
00:14:24.040 and in front of the cameras to express her disgust. And that was a potted that became a very popular
00:14:29.400 meme among liberals. And now suddenly they're worried about decorum because Marjorie Taylor Greene
00:14:33.980 yells something during his speech. But then expelling people who actually disrupt the procedures,
00:14:39.680 not just speak out of turn, is this grave assault on democracy. It's just from one day to the
00:14:43.860 next. What they condemn becomes what they do. And then the next day it goes back
00:14:47.600 to what they condemn again, entirely based on their own power, whatever they need in the convenience of
00:14:53.640 the moment. And there are a few people more repellent than that because they sanctimoniously pretend to
00:14:57.760 defend things that are righteous. And in reality, it's all just about their own power. And, you know,
00:15:03.640 it's just a repellent character trait. And I just want to add one more thing, which is,
00:15:06.740 you know, Megan, just as a human being, like if you want to go to Nashville and exploit
00:15:10.080 that situation for political gain, you know, have at it, that's what politicians do.
00:15:14.100 But isn't there like any kind of human, you know, sentiment that would say, oh, I'm the vice
00:15:20.440 president, I can go and like, give the power of my office to console these families who just lost
00:15:26.400 their three children, as well as the other three families that lost adults because they were blown
00:15:31.840 away and had their lives snuffed out by some crazy unhinged person acting the name of a radical
00:15:37.740 ideology. You would think just like on a human level, there'd be some desire to do this. But
00:15:42.020 these people are vacant of that. They're just so craven that they see the world entirely as a
00:15:47.160 function of their own agenda. On this same front, you have a week, at least, of the Democrats telling
00:15:56.160 us no one is above the law. No one is above the law on the week that Trump sits and gets arraigned
00:16:01.980 on this indictment, this paper thin indictment that Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan, has brought
00:16:06.920 against him. No one's above the law, totally ignoring that there is prosecutorial discretion
00:16:11.720 and that prosecutors make decisions all the time on whether this case is worth it or can
00:16:15.800 be proven and is worth the time and heartache it's going to bring to any given community.
00:16:22.240 Never mind the defendant. That was the messaging. Then we get a ruling out of a Texas federal district
00:16:29.040 court that this abortion drug approved by the FDA in 2000 may need to be stopped, that the FDA is going
00:16:37.920 to have to stop distributing it in the wake of the collapse of Roe and the Texas law down there on
00:16:44.760 abortion. There was a conflicting ruling in another jurisdiction. And you have AOC going on with CNN State
00:16:52.640 of the Union, I think, to begin. First, it was Anderson Cooper. First, it was Anderson Cooper saying,
00:16:57.560 do not comply. OK, so we've gone from no one is above the law to F that federal court ruling. Just
00:17:03.320 don't follow it in the span of about two minutes. Here she is, top one. Senator Ron Wyden has already
00:17:10.220 issued statements, for example, advising what we should do in a situation like this, which I concur,
00:17:15.700 which is that I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling. The interesting thing when it
00:17:21.800 comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement and it is up to the Biden administration to enforce
00:17:29.760 to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling. OK, so it's all it's like your choice. I'll leave
00:17:36.400 it up to you. And then to her credit, Dana Bash actually asked her about it on State of the Union
00:17:41.880 on Sunday. And listen to this. What? Listen to AOC dodge, because here's the real question.
00:17:48.000 You could make the argument that when there's dual dueling court rulings in two federal district
00:17:52.320 courts, just proceed. If you're the if you're the Biden administration, just proceed with the status
00:17:56.920 quo until the higher court resolves it. You could definitely make that argument. And Dana Bash zeroes
00:18:02.120 in on this with her and listen to the dodge that follows, which is just to simply ignore the court ruling.
00:18:07.700 That's a pretty stunning position when this case is resolved by the Supreme Court. Should the
00:18:16.100 administration follow that decision if that decision ends up banning this abortion drug?
00:18:22.620 Well, you know, I want to take a step back and dig into the grounds around ignoring this preliminary
00:18:28.240 ruling as well. There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this, for folks saying this is a
00:18:33.620 first, that this is a precedent setting. It is not. The Trump administration also did this very thing,
00:18:40.040 but also it has happened before. And we know that the executive branch has an enforcement discretion,
00:18:46.260 especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington. But I do not believe that the
00:18:52.020 courts have the authority to to have the authority over the FDA that they just asserted. And I do believe
00:18:59.760 that it creates a crisis. So Dana Bash asked, should that apply if the Supreme Court upholds the Texas
00:19:08.480 judge's decision? If the Supreme Court of the United States of the land says the Texas judge was right
00:19:14.980 and the FDA should not release this drug, should that hold? And she dodges because now she's out on a limb
00:19:22.600 saying we can say F the Supreme Court and not. And this is where the Democrats are going, Glenn. This is where
00:19:28.180 they're going. The mentality of the Democratic Party, the court animating principle, it was actually
00:19:33.700 expressed in a very viral video by the philosopher Sam Harris when he was asked about the way the
00:19:40.120 media lied and the CIA lied about the Hunter Biden laptop. And they made up the story that it was Russian
00:19:44.740 disinformation, got the story centered and discredited before the election. And he said, I think Trump is
00:19:49.860 such a singular evil. I think our cause, meaning Democrats or Trump opponents, is so just that anything
00:19:56.540 and everything we do, even lying, censorship, disinformation is justified in the name of this
00:20:02.280 broader cause because the evil of Trump is so much greater than anything we might do to stop him.
00:20:07.840 It's an ends justify the means argument. It's what's led to every historical evil when you completely
00:20:12.760 are unmoored from any poor principle, any fixed principle, which is exactly what they are. That is
00:20:18.480 their mindset. Judicial review is the foundation of our entire republic. It was, you know, Andrew
00:20:24.580 Jackson, who notoriously said when the Supreme Court ruled against him, oh, well, the Supreme
00:20:29.920 Court made their ruling. What army are they going to enforce it with? This is, you know, this was
00:20:34.220 resolved 215 years ago with the idea that the courts do have the power to rule that executive
00:20:40.180 branch conduct or executive branch policy is it legal or transgresses the Constitution.
00:20:46.120 When she first made those statements, it wasn't grounded in the fact that there was a conflicting
00:20:50.120 district court ruling. It was grounded in the fact that when Democrats believe that a court ruling is
00:20:56.380 sufficiently erroneous or baseless, that the executive branch, since they're the one with all
00:21:02.920 the power, they're the ones with the people with the guns, can just go about and ignore the courts
00:21:08.220 because the courts have no enforcement mechanism, just like the Congress does it. So this would work
00:21:13.180 for the Congress as well. This is a recipe for presidential tyranny. The idea that the president
00:21:19.140 is like this strongman figure, you know, that's what happens in Latin America and in Asia a lot where,
00:21:24.320 you know, they get to the point where they say, we don't care about the courts anymore.
00:21:27.560 We're going to strip the courts and the legislature of all its power so that we just have a strongman
00:21:31.740 ruling with no barriers. That is what she and a lot of other Democrats were calling for here.
00:21:36.800 And I think it reflects this kind of underlying mindset that's very dangerous.
00:21:40.500 Mm hmm. You get to the point where you're just completely ignoring Supreme Court rulings and we
00:21:45.800 don't have a country anymore. I mean, that is the fundamental thing that binds us together is the
00:21:49.100 rule of law. Well, there's no Constitution. It's the Supreme Court. The Constitution is a list of things
00:21:54.580 the government can't do. And if the government does one of those things anyway, it's the courts
00:21:59.180 that come in and say, this is something that the Constitution doesn't allow you to do. And if the
00:22:03.480 president can now ignore court rulings instead of appealing them, which, of course, they should do.
00:22:08.480 But no, ignore them. And they don't exist. Violate them. There's no Constitution. There's
00:22:13.420 no republic. It's just rule by tyranny. The same person was on the air last week saying that Clarence
00:22:19.380 Thomas needs to be impeached for accepting perfectly acceptable gifts from a very rich Republican donor
00:22:27.580 for the last 20 plus years. They changed the rules on March 14th to say, OK, if you go on somebody's
00:22:33.940 private jet, you do have to report that publicly. Part of that, you didn't have to.
00:22:36.900 She wants to get him impeached for taking nice vacations with the guy and going on his private
00:22:42.920 yacht before it was required that he disclose any of it. My point is, she's a congressional
00:22:48.240 Kardashian. She's an idiot. She's there to make herself a star. And yet she's all over the Sunday
00:22:53.160 shows. We have to listen to this. I object to being surrounded by this stupidity.
00:22:58.500 Yeah, you know, I was defending 60 Minutes for interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene because the
00:23:02.560 reality is whether you like her or not or things about her or not. Marjorie Taylor Greene is somebody
00:23:06.360 who does represent the views of millions of people. And I don't think it's a job of journalists
00:23:10.580 just wish people away. And I know you're not suggesting that. It is annoying how ubiquitous
00:23:15.260 she is because she is extremely ignorant. I don't know if you ever watched her get interviewed about
00:23:20.300 foreign policy, but she can barely place countries on a map, including ones about what she has very
00:23:24.840 didactic views. She was on with Margaret Hoover once on Fire in Line. She had made this like very
00:23:29.080 melodramatic statement about Israel and Palestine. It turns out she had no idea what she was talking
00:23:33.120 about. She didn't know what the occupation was that she was condemning. She's a person of complete
00:23:37.280 ignorance. Exactly. Her talent is a social media star. But I don't think that that her ignorance should
00:23:43.040 distract us from the fact that she is a talented demagogue and is channeling not just sentiments on
00:23:50.320 the kind of conservative or mainstream Democratic Party wing, but also their allies now on the left.
00:23:56.720 There used to be kind of a tension between establishment liberals on the left from the
00:24:00.300 Hillary campaign against Bernie, but that has disappeared. And this sentiment is now united.
00:24:05.140 And there's a lot of neocons and Bush era Republicans with them that our country faces such a grave threat
00:24:10.920 in the name of Trump's movement or conservatives in general that we can't even allow people basic
00:24:17.620 freedoms anymore. They can't vote for themselves. They can't decide things for themselves because when they
00:24:22.040 do, the outcome is too dangerous. And all we should do, this is the AOC view, and a lot of people are
00:24:27.800 cheering, is just seize power in whatever way we have to, including by ignoring court orders. That really
00:24:32.860 is what's animating everything they're doing from the censorship regime to criminalizing dissent.
00:24:38.560 One of the things that's bothering me about AOC and others like her is I watched them absolutely ruin
00:24:46.880 the Me Too movement. You know, that that was rooted in something good, which was we shouldn't force
00:24:54.280 women to be sexually harassed in order to advance their careers at the office. Who would disagree with
00:24:59.660 that? Really? I mean, what normal person would say? Oh, I disagree. And it's complex. I get it. And
00:25:04.580 you know, whatever. But they're the ones who turned it into a witch hunt. They're the ones who just
00:25:08.460 wanted scalps. They wanted male scalps. Brett Kavanaugh, believe all women, all women. OK, unless the target
00:25:14.960 happens to be a Democrat like Andrew Cuomo, in which case it's complicated. Oh, we're all going
00:25:19.460 to switch secretly and help the man accused and not the women or Joe Biden. In the case of Tara
00:25:24.020 Reid, let's secretly work against Tara Reid to ruin her life and smear her as a human because the
00:25:30.560 target is Joe Biden. So they ruined it. And it was people like AOC. And they're the same ones who told
00:25:35.680 us they were all about women. They're about women, women, women, women. And now that leads us to
00:25:40.820 Riley Gaines, an actual woman and a fierce competitor, somebody they would normally be
00:25:46.020 celebrating out there in the pool with the best of the best NCAA tournaments, winning medals and so on,
00:25:51.680 who didn't win in the NCAA final. And I can't remember whether it was the 100 or what heat it
00:25:58.940 was because she tied instead with Leah Thomas. And instead of getting the trophy to Riley to hold,
00:26:06.300 they gave it to Leah Thomas saying we want Leah to hold the trophy, not you. Why? Oh, why would
00:26:10.840 that be the one who was on the guys team this time last year, placing 500th or or Riley Gaines?
00:26:18.480 OK, so Riley has a thing to say about trans people in sports, trans women in particular and in women's
00:26:23.800 sports. And she goes, as we discussed on Friday, to this San Francisco State University and gets
00:26:29.740 absolutely attacked. She did speak. So that was a plus. But then get absolutely attacked.
00:26:34.540 The video is horrific. She says she was assaulted twice by a trans woman, some guy wearing a dress,
00:26:40.380 punched in the shoulder and then again grazed her face. They were screaming terrible things at her.
00:26:46.140 She was forced to hide in a room for three hours as the cops on campus did virtually nothing.
00:26:51.780 They were yelling ransom demands to let her out. And I mean, not a peep, not a peep from the AOCs of
00:27:00.160 the world on women's rights and the assault of a woman who was not saying trans people don't exist,
00:27:06.720 who was not saying I refuse to use pronouns, who was simply saying it's not OK to have trans women
00:27:13.080 compete against biologic women in sports like mine or they have an unfair advantage. That's it.
00:27:17.640 So I can't listen to them paint themselves as our advocates. It's absurd and it's an obvious lie.
00:27:24.800 I'm sure you've had this experience to be willing to bet. But when you're somebody who's in a so-called
00:27:32.140 marginalized group, if you're a woman, if you're black, if you're a person of color, if you're a
00:27:36.560 gay, a gay man or a lesbian, whatever, this is something that Democrats and liberals supposedly
00:27:43.180 honor and protect and constantly demand that you be respected to right up until the point that you become
00:27:50.740 some kind of a dissident to their ideology, at which point the vitriol and and use of these
00:27:58.920 very bigoted tropes is just unleashed like nothing before. I mean, the most grotesque racism I see
00:28:05.680 directed toward Clarence Thomas comes from liberals and Democrats who hate him. The most grotesque
00:28:12.080 misogyny I bet you you've encountered probably came during moments when you confronted Donald Trump
00:28:19.180 and people were angry at you for that, but then also from liberals who hate you. And that's
00:28:23.600 definitely been my experience in terms of just like ugly homophobia has mostly come overwhelmingly
00:28:29.860 from those moments in my career when I've been perceived as being a dissident to the Democratic
00:28:34.160 Party or the American left. And so to watch this woman who, as you say, would ordinarily be celebrated,
00:28:39.840 be violently and physically threatened. It wasn't that they were just disagreeing with her or
00:28:45.160 expressing dissent toward her speech, all of which is fine. They menaced her physically to the point
00:28:50.520 that she needed 20 police officers in order to safely leave. She was trapped in that school for three
00:28:55.900 hours. They were saying things like, let her pay us and we'll let her leave. This is criminal behavior
00:29:01.160 that's obviously misogynistic, misogynistic in nature. It's exploiting this perceived vulnerability
00:29:06.860 that women have under those kind of situations to defend themselves physically. That's the way in which
00:29:11.620 she was menaced. And nobody has the slightest objection to it who ordinarily would be waving
00:29:16.920 the misogyny flag because she's expressing dissent to their agenda. And it's it's you know,
00:29:22.580 that gets back to the thing I was describing earlier. It is absolutely repulsive to watch.
00:29:26.400 I mean, who would look at that video no matter what your views are on trans women in sports and
00:29:30.900 not be disgusted and horrified by that behavior? Absolutely right. There's and there's a lot more to
00:29:36.180 discuss on Riley and what the university is now saying. We'll pick it up right there after this
00:29:40.600 quick break. More with Glenn after two minutes. Don't go away.
00:29:44.400 Beat, beat, beat boxing actually has hidden health benefits. It can help strengthen and protect
00:29:50.340 your voice from injury. See healthy living differently with Manulife. Visit manulife.ca
00:29:56.560 slash health. Yeah.
00:30:00.080 What I experienced was peaceful. It wouldn't even be peaceful in an alternate universe. I mean,
00:30:07.300 it was quite literally the exact opposite barricaded in a room where I could not leave for three hours
00:30:12.540 where they were yelling obscene, terrible, violent things towards both myself and these officers who
00:30:19.260 were protecting me. What you have to do to make changes in regards to protecting those freedoms is
00:30:27.540 to go where it hurts, which is the pockets. If I weren't to do something, there would be no repercussions
00:30:34.880 for these people. Therefore, something needs to be done to hold these people accountable.
00:30:40.440 Right on. That's Riley Gaines saying she's going to sue. She's going to sue the university over what
00:30:45.760 was done to her. Welcome back to the show. I guess today, Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize winning
00:30:50.080 journalist and host of Rumble's system update. She's right, Glenn. You hit him in the pocketbook.
00:30:55.800 That's the only thing they'll listen to. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I was just thinking,
00:30:59.920 first of all, I'm a little bit worked up still from those clips about how the Democrats should ignore
00:31:03.360 court rulings. I forgot how angry I was about that. It was a few days ago. So I'm trying to
00:31:06.840 put that to the side. On this Riley Gaines thing, the one point I do want to make that I think is
00:31:11.160 very important is, I don't know if you saw, you might have. There was a viral clip where Ben Shapiro
00:31:15.680 was interviewing Neil Tyson DeGrasse and asked him about this kind of gender ideology. Can a trans woman
00:31:21.380 be a woman? And he basically said, look, beyond the issue of what we teach kids in schools, which is
00:31:26.600 always relevant, the only real issue that matters when it comes to trans people, otherwise we could just
00:31:33.240 say adults live and let live and they have the right to do what they want, is the issue of how
00:31:37.480 we treat fairness in sports. Even people who are on the side of the trans movement acknowledge this
00:31:43.820 is a very, very legitimate question. People like Martina Navratilova and Chris Everett, who are
00:31:48.180 pioneers in women's sports, who basically are the reason why there's so many opportunities along with
00:31:54.060 Billie Jean King for female sports to exist on a professionalized level with a lot of corporate
00:31:58.920 money involved and for female athletes to get wealthy and famous doing it, are very good liberals.
00:32:04.220 But both Martina Navratilova and Chris Everett have said, there's no way it's fair to allow people
00:32:09.260 born as biological men to compete in professional women's sports because you can never treat or
00:32:16.280 hormonize out the advantages, the inborn advantages that come from being a biological male, especially if
00:32:22.500 you pass through puberty as a man. This is all Riley Gaines is saying. She's talking about that issue
00:32:27.420 that even supporters of this movement acknowledge is a valid one that requires debate and to grapple
00:32:35.600 with. And she obviously has a lot of credibility since she's devoted her life to excelling at swimming
00:32:41.120 and feels like she's being cheated against or mistreated. And to treat her like she's some kind
00:32:47.060 of Nazi figure to the point where violence and that kind of abuses is merited is sickening.
00:32:55.180 But I'm not surprised this movement, once a movement gets so righteous, you know, it gets
00:33:00.420 back to what we're talking about before. They feel like anything they do is justified in the name of
00:33:04.300 their cause. And increasingly, that is liberal politics in the United States.
00:33:09.140 They they're jumping the shark. This is their moment of, you know, when BLM would go up to the
00:33:14.800 private diners in the summer of 2020 and say, raise the fist, get your fist up or your tables going
00:33:21.980 over or you're getting attacked. And they lost the American people who they had after George Floyd.
00:33:27.480 They had this is their this is that moment. You've gone too far. You're losing the people who are in
00:33:34.140 the center, who are open minded to you. It's it's done. And I do think this is an inflection point.
00:33:39.540 What happened to her? The latest poll, I think it was by trying to find out who to NPR. Ipsos
00:33:45.040 suggests nearly two and three Americans oppose allowing trans people to compete on the sport of
00:33:52.440 whatever they identify with. So they don't support trans women competing against actual women in
00:33:58.720 sport. That's two thirds of the American people. That includes a lot of Democrats. And this kind of
00:34:03.360 thing is not going to help. So that brings me to the problem with the university system, which
00:34:08.740 deserves at least a nod here. I know we're all aware of it, but we can't just breeze by it.
00:34:14.000 So when we saw the behavior out at Stanford and it was terrible and, you know, I mean,
00:34:19.360 the protests out there with the judge and how disgracefully he was treated, at least Stanford
00:34:23.380 tried to say, we're sorry, we stand for free speech and we're going to do a half day reeducation
00:34:28.940 clinic for the protesters on why you should not say to a federal judge, you can't find the CLIT on a sign
00:34:36.480 and do fake throwing up sounds as he begins his remarks. They need a little lesson on that at
00:34:42.700 Stanford law. God help us. This university didn't even feel the need to pretend it cared about Riley
00:34:49.880 Gaines and what happened to her. San Francisco State University issues this long statement.
00:34:55.180 I got to tell you, Glenn, I read it and I literally thought they forgot a paragraph. Whoever posted this
00:35:00.380 must be a San Francisco state hater. And they removed the paragraph where they said, we're very sorry
00:35:04.480 about what happened to Riley. No, that's not what happened. It's not in there. I won't read the whole
00:35:10.020 thing as it just goes on, but it's basically as follows. Let me begin by saying clearly the trans
00:35:14.880 community is welcome. Okay, wait, well, that's not where you begin. What? What? No, Riley Gaines is
00:35:20.160 welcome. Free speech is welcome. Let me begin by saying the trans community is welcome and belongs
00:35:25.180 at SFSU. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care, and compassion, and we value
00:35:33.120 different ideas. Okay, great. We do. How? How do we let those ideas be expressed? Walk us through it.
00:35:38.000 Doesn't get to that. We may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views on campus and even
00:35:45.080 views we find personally abhorrent. These encounters have sometimes led to discord, anger,
00:35:50.400 confrontation, and fear. We must meet this moment and unite with a shared value of learning.
00:35:54.560 Where's the condemnation? Where's the, we must not let those emotions take us to the place of violence
00:36:00.120 where we actually heard another human, not in there. Then this woman goes on to say,
00:36:04.080 thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening's event.
00:36:09.840 It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. Oh my God. I hope she's
00:36:16.800 referring to Riley Gaines. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful
00:36:22.320 questions. I'm also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech
00:36:26.500 and the right to protest peacefully. This is, I don't, she's just ignoring what happened.
00:36:32.540 And then she says, this is the capper. This feels difficult because it is. As you reflect,
00:36:38.160 process, and begin to heal. From what? Your assault? Your foray into the criminal behavior?
00:36:48.200 Please remember there are people, resources, and services available. And she goes on to list them.
00:36:52.440 Equity and community inclusion, counseling, psychological services, dean of student's office,
00:36:57.340 and goes on. Her name is Jamila Moore, vice president of student affairs and enrollment management.
00:37:02.540 My comment on the, on my memo, I'm not going to lie, reads, you asshole. But when you go back and
00:37:08.200 look at her history, Glenn, it's a long list of DEI. Of course, it's straight out of central casting.
00:37:13.420 Nothing to Riley Gaines, not even an apology.
00:37:15.180 It's also Orwellian. I mean, first of all, the idea that to be a student of this extremely left-legged
00:37:22.580 school in San Francisco, it requires courage to protest a speaker that I'm sure 98% of the faculty
00:37:30.680 and student body at least are opposed to. It requires courage to join a mob, to join the crowd,
00:37:36.940 to take the majoritarian position and threaten somebody from dissenting over it. That doesn't
00:37:41.700 require courage. That requires this kind of mob behavior, this, this like thuggish sentiment.
00:37:48.340 And, you know, I think when I see stuff like this, you know, people often, not often, but sometimes
00:37:54.220 argue about what my political ideology is. Am I on the left? Am I on the right? Am I Democrat,
00:37:59.500 Republican, whatever? Really, my ideology is just anti-authoritarianism. I distrust human beings,
00:38:04.860 institution, human institutions to wield power without limits, which is why it was so horrifying that the
00:38:09.760 idea that Joe Biden, as president with all of his immense power, could even ignore when the Supreme
00:38:15.420 Court or the judiciary tells him that he's crossed constitutional lines, like Democrats can just
00:38:19.600 ignore that because they're the ones with all the guns and power. And that's what's happening at these
00:38:24.600 kinds of universities when you're part of the mob that commands overwhelming majoritarian sentiment,
00:38:31.180 when almost nobody is willing to stand up and disagree with you because that's actually what
00:38:34.860 takes courage, is to disagree with the mob. They have this sense of power, and it's very inebriating.
00:38:42.080 Like what you were saying with going and forcing somebody to raise their fist against their will
00:38:46.740 in support of a cause they may or may not support under threat of physical violence. That's the kind of
00:38:52.580 power that when human beings get it, it pulsates through the body, and it makes them do very,
00:38:57.620 very dangerous and kind of threatening things. And I think that's really what you're seeing here is this is
00:39:03.520 mob justice, the idea that if we gather enough people, and we unite in hatred of somebody else based on
00:39:09.520 their political viewpoint, there's nothing and nobody that can stop it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had
00:39:14.740 torn her apart physically without being in a locker room and without that police escort. I think those
00:39:19.280 measures were necessary because that's what mobs start doing when they work themselves into that kind of
00:39:24.500 frenzy. But increasingly, that is what is animating left wing politics on the culture war is that kind of
00:39:30.580 sentiment. Yeah, mob justice is right. And that's that's why I for one was delighted to see the
00:39:36.700 Tennessee legislature do something about these three out of order rude, disruptive lawmakers teach
00:39:44.280 them unless they're coming right back in. Please give me a break. This is not the death penalty for
00:39:48.380 these three. But they were trying to stand up for the constituents who they represented. There will be
00:39:54.380 law and order inside of this chamber. There will be a protocol that you follow. You are not the leader of
00:39:58.780 a protest mob. You are a lawmaker. You were elected here and agreed to follow certain protocols. You
00:40:03.680 didn't do it. And I noticed you sent out a tweet that I thought was perfect because let's just say
00:40:09.120 you disagree with me on Tennessee. They shouldn't have thrown out the lawmakers, whatever. Fine. That's
00:40:13.240 OK. There's room for disagreement there. That's how you would see it. That's how I would see it.
00:40:19.580 When reporting on it as straight news reporters, we would report the facts and let the people decide
00:40:25.200 not if your name is Ben Collins and you work at NBC as a senior journalist over there.
00:40:33.200 I loved your response to this. So Ben Collins tweets out. He retweeted somebody else and agreed
00:40:41.720 with a Democratic Party activist, like an overt liberal Democratic Party activist.
00:40:47.680 Yeah, you tell the story. I mean, I have the quote in front of me if you need it.
00:40:49.860 But no, you go read it. I just wanted to make clear that the person he was retweeting,
00:40:52.760 because I don't have the quote, is someone who says I my my goal in life is to advance
00:40:57.580 the interests of the Democratic Party. I want to elect as many Democrats as possible
00:41:00.740 because I'm a liberal and I believe in liberal ideology. That's the person this news reporter
00:41:04.820 for NBC was retweeting. And you go ahead and read the tweets. I don't have it in front of me.
00:41:09.240 OK, so so this guy is tweeting out. He's outraged about the Tennessee lawmakers expulsion.
00:41:13.800 And Ben Collins, the NBC guy, tweets out exactly right. Both sides are not the same. And it's time
00:41:20.820 for media outlets to stop pretending they are. The polarization is asymmetric. And you made a great
00:41:27.800 point about how this is a good thing. It's a good thing that Ben Collins was bold enough to retweet
00:41:34.020 that and say what he said on behalf of NBC News. Why? Yeah, you know, I it's so ironic because when I
00:41:41.240 first began writing about politics, I really disliked the conceit in journalism that journalists
00:41:46.160 were objective. I don't think journalists or any human beings are objective or all the byproduct of
00:41:51.680 our subjective biases. I think we strive toward objectivity. We that's the goal is to present facts
00:41:58.300 as neutrally as possible. So as you say, we inform the public rather than propagandize them.
00:42:03.000 But everything about what we do, including who we recognize as experts, how we describe situations,
00:42:08.220 what we react to. Of course, we're seeing that through a subjective prism. And I never I'd always
00:42:13.060 felt that the journalistic claim that they're objective and partisans are subjective was a kind
00:42:17.840 of fraud that corrupted the profession. Because if you start off lying to people about what you're
00:42:22.220 marketing to them, which is journalism, they're already going to be suspicious of everything else
00:42:26.340 that follows. And I always wanted more candor among journalism. So when I did that Snowden story,
00:42:32.660 I would report what the NSA was doing. But I would also be very clear that I opposed what the NSA
00:42:37.780 was doing, massifying on Americans, because I didn't want to hide my own views and pretend I
00:42:41.820 had no no perspective. I feel like reporting is more honest when journalists admit what their biases
00:42:47.020 are. We're now at the point where NBC and CNN, like ostensibly apolitical or at least nonpartisan
00:42:55.040 news outlets that would be claimed to be allow their reporters to be very explicit about the fact that
00:43:00.420 they believe the Democratic Party is superior. And what was so notable about that tweet that he
00:43:04.940 retweeted, that media coverage should reflect that premise that the parties are not equal, that the
00:43:10.820 Democrats are superior, the Republicans don't believe in democracy, they don't believe in freedom or
00:43:15.080 whatever, they're a fascist party. And so for an NBC News reporter to say this is how I see the world, I
00:43:21.040 believe the Democratic Party is not only better, but that journalism should be about making that clear
00:43:25.440 was kind of a new level of candor to me that I do consider positive because that is really what they all
00:43:31.960 think. So why not just have it on the table? Come right out and say it. So that great. Half the
00:43:37.700 country now knows this is explicit from NBC News is Ben Collins. Both sides are not the same. And it's
00:43:43.000 time for media outlets to stop pretending they are. OK, got it. Keep that in mind when you watch their
00:43:49.840 coverage and read his reporting, how he feels about 80 million Americans on the subject of NBC.
00:43:56.840 I have to touch on what happened this morning. So the some of the Easter festivities at the White
00:44:03.440 House took place today and Al Roker was sent over to the White House to interview President Biden,
00:44:08.720 I assume, because everyone on both sides is assuming zero damage can or will be done in such an exchange.
00:44:16.000 Well, guess again. Watch what happened when Al Roker tried to get the president to make news on whether
00:44:22.480 he is going to run again. Are you saying that you would be taking part in our upcoming election in
00:44:31.300 20? I'll either roll an egg or, you know, being the good, you know, the guy who's pushing him out.
00:44:37.180 Come on, help. Help a brother out. I plan on running out, but we're not prepared to announce it yet.
00:44:43.580 All right. There you go. I'm planning on running. I'm planning on running, but we're not going to
00:44:49.900 announce it. I don't know what that first half is about. I'm going to roll it. I'm going to push it.
00:44:53.920 We're going to don't know. But he said it. He said he's going to run again. And all we could talk
00:45:00.240 about on the team before the show, Glenn, was they needed the Easter Bunny again. Remember last year
00:45:04.900 how the Easter Bunny was like, no, no questions. And he was in charge. That guy really served a
00:45:10.560 purpose. Look, this person needed to get back in the suit and keep him away from Al Roker.
00:45:16.040 I mean, it's really, you know, it's such an interesting media dynamic because on the one
00:45:23.260 hand, obviously, the overwhelming majority of people at NBC and places like it, CNN,
00:45:28.440 want the Democrats to win, want Joe Biden to be reelected. That was what we were just talking
00:45:32.380 about. But on the other hand, and you were the one who pointed this out in a clip I always use
00:45:37.340 because it was said so vividly and so clearly, nobody benefited more from Trump's candidacy and
00:45:44.800 from Trump's prominence in politics than liberal media outlets, because that's the only thing that
00:45:50.180 generates ratings for them. Nobody watches their show. If Trump's not in the news, the only time
00:45:54.200 people watched was when he emerged in politics because he's interesting and liberals won't watch
00:46:00.500 them unless they they're excited by Trump and they need Trump. So they're in this very weird position
00:46:05.920 where on the one hand, they obviously for as as ideologues don't want Trump reelected.
00:46:12.700 But as media figures, as people whose career depends on ratings, which they can't get without him,
00:46:17.640 they do need Trump to go back. And if you're somebody who's worried about another Trump presidency,
00:46:23.200 the fact that he's leading polls, especially after the Salvin Bragg indictment in the Republican side,
00:46:28.520 and you watch Joe Biden, who's going to be even two years older when he runs, he's going to be 82,
00:46:33.440 too, Megan. His term, if he wins, well, he'll be 86 when he completes it. He's already so clearly
00:46:39.780 addled cognitively. I think it's going to be, you know, I don't think there are enough medications
00:46:45.020 in the world to get him through that this time, let alone a covid pandemic that really helped them
00:46:49.560 hide in the basement the whole time. And I think they're playing a very dangerous game,
00:46:53.880 but we'll see how that works out. But you really see that clip and he's just degenerating before our
00:46:58.360 eyes. Well, here's another one, which is just funny. Look, look at this, where he appears to be
00:47:04.240 terrified that the Easter bunny is chasing him. This is from this morning. Watch. They're walking
00:47:10.080 in jail. The Easter bunny holds hands with jail. He turns around, notices that they're twice.
00:47:16.660 Twice. You got to go to YouTube and watch this later. He's like, oh, shit. Here he's coming for
00:47:24.600 me again. He's going to stop me. It's pretty amazing. Well, I think there was like a jealousy.
00:47:30.360 There was a little jealousy there. It was like, who is this rabbit holding my wife's hand? Like
00:47:34.620 there was some kind of like protectiveness. And then, yeah, he kind of got scared. He like
00:47:38.140 scampered to stay in front of the rabbit so the rabbit couldn't get him. Meanwhile, they really
00:47:42.400 should have used the rabbit again to keep him away from Al Roker and making any additional news.
00:47:47.640 He's obviously running again. I think that's right. He was supposed to announce in February. He
00:47:51.220 didn't. Now here we are in April. He hasn't. There's no way they want Kamala Harris, who at this
00:47:56.620 point would be the only realistic. I mean, the closer they wait until we get to the summer debate system
00:48:01.160 a season, the less likely anybody else can run. Although Robert F. Kennedy has thrown his hat into the
00:48:07.960 ring. Oh, it's a pleasure. Oh, I forgot about Marianne. Yeah. My friend. Thank you, Megan.
00:48:13.180 Great to talk to you. Great to see you. All right. We're looking forward to Dr. Peter Atiyah. He's
00:48:18.320 back. His new book is so good. And there are really, really great approaches to your well-being,
00:48:24.100 your long-term well-being and your longevity. Don't go away.
00:48:31.880 Aging is a fact of life, but one of our health did not have to decline with the passage of time.
00:48:37.960 I mean, we all got to go sometime, but what if we could push that time back and live really well
00:48:42.700 up until the moment of death? In a new book, Dr. Peter Atiyah challenges the conventional
00:48:48.400 medical thinking on aging. This is a brilliant man who's done so much research and study
00:48:53.780 on all the aspects of aging. We are so lucky to have him here. When we had Peter on the show last
00:48:58.660 year, he mentioned he was working on this book and now it's out to save us all. It's called
00:49:04.900 Outlive, The Science and Art of Longevity. And it is a number one New York Times bestseller,
00:49:11.880 which is not easy to do. Peter, congrats and welcome back to the show.
00:49:16.560 Thank you so much, Megan. And thanks for having me back.
00:49:19.460 Oh, I think it's so interesting. And I love how you sort of say up front, look, I know if you're
00:49:25.080 reading this book, you're like, tell me what to eat. Tell me exactly how to exercise. Tell me exactly
00:49:30.160 what I should be taking. Right. So I can live forever or at least to 110. Well, and you're you
00:49:35.420 talk about how that that's not exactly what this book is. We're talking about approaches and educating
00:49:41.580 you on what matters and what doesn't matter. And you do get lots of very practical, useful tips,
00:49:48.160 but it's it's an education on how to think about your life and your wellness. And before we get to all
00:49:56.220 that, I think that you set it up beautifully when you started the book with the egg story. And as I
00:50:00.440 listened to the books, I listened to the audio with you reading it. The egg story keeps coming
00:50:05.260 back and it makes sense to me. Can you tell us about that that nightmare that you that plagued you
00:50:09.060 for a long, long time? Yeah, it was basically kind of standing beneath a building and trying to catch
00:50:17.080 eggs that were being thrown off the top of the building and being, you know, sort of quasi successful,
00:50:22.920 right? So you catch an egg, but then you miss an egg and it sort of splats all over the ground. And
00:50:27.640 this was just, you know, kind of a feeling of helplessness. But it led to an epiphany eventually,
00:50:35.320 which was the strategy of waiting until the eggs are about to hit the ground and then trying to make
00:50:41.940 a miraculous catch was really doomed to fail in the long run. A far better strategy was to go to the top
00:50:48.620 of the building and find the guy who was throwing them and either forcefully or not remove his basket
00:50:54.100 of eggs. And that's the same when it comes to one's wellness, one's health. You talk about how
00:50:59.960 as a doctor, you saw young people dying in the hospital and you think, oh, that's terrible. The
00:51:04.460 woman with the aneurysm. But really that aneurysm, even though she was a young woman who died of it,
00:51:09.220 was coming her way a long time prior to that. And so there's very little the doctors can do when you
00:51:14.240 come into the hospital about to have an aneurysm, but there's a lot the doctors can do 15 years before
00:51:19.420 that in checking your wellness and advising you on how to avoid the aneurysm 15 years later.
00:51:26.980 And where does it start? Does it start by just a good person going in to see a good doctor and saying,
00:51:32.640 here are the blood panels I actually want, not the nonsense lipid panel that we do that just gives
00:51:38.540 us surface level info every year? It's actually many things. And I don't think I could
00:51:44.220 say it's just one thing, but I think the most important thing and the most important first
00:51:48.700 step is the cognitive shift from what I describe as medicine 2.0 to medicine 3.0. And that cognitive
00:51:56.820 shift, I liken to as important a shift as what took us from basically witchcraft into the modern era of
00:52:05.800 medicine 150 years ago. That was the scientific method. So that was a huge step forward. Being able
00:52:13.720 to realize that not only was everything that we saw happening in the body explained by actual nature,
00:52:21.600 laws of science, but that you could form hypotheses and test those hypotheses with experiments using
00:52:27.560 the experimental and scientific method. That's basically what allowed us to eradicate, for the
00:52:32.720 most part, infectious diseases and double human lifespan in the span of five generations.
00:52:38.540 Well, we're sitting here looking at a deeper problem today, or at least a different problem,
00:52:42.060 for which that solution isn't working. The solution of let's just extend life once life is close to its
00:52:51.040 end, as the example we've just discussed, isn't working. We need a radical shift. And the radical
00:52:56.500 shift is living longer does not mean living longer with disease. It means living longer without disease.
00:53:02.500 disease. And you can only accomplish that if you truly adopt principles of prevention that get a ton
00:53:10.380 of lip service in the conventional system. There's nobody who's going to say, oh, I don't agree with
00:53:14.080 prevention. The question is, what does that mean? How early do you have to start and how aggressive do
00:53:19.000 you need to be? Well, and also what came across to me in the book is you're not without data.
00:53:24.240 Like there are data that are available. If you connect with the right doctor on where you are
00:53:29.560 right now, what genetic blessings you may have, what genetic, I don't want to say curses, but
00:53:34.560 challenges, as they say, when you get your school kid review opportunities, yet another opportunity for
00:53:40.720 us to work on, uh, opportunities for you. Um, so it's not just, I have shitty genes and that's that
00:53:48.020 I'm going to die young. It's there's so much that you actually can do. Even if the magic age of 52,
00:53:53.520 you write about it in your book. Um, you use it as an example age. It's where I am now. Last year,
00:53:58.320 you told me I really needed to be committed to a health routine and like sort of be getting my
00:54:02.320 fitness on by 53. So I've got about seven, eight months. I don't know what it is. Anyway,
00:54:08.260 there are things that you can do. And to me, the reason I mentioned the lipid panels,
00:54:11.460 because that's one thing that's, that's real data you can get that's available to you.
00:54:14.560 Yeah, it's really interesting. We got an email through our website over the weekend from a guy
00:54:20.320 who had read the book already. And I say already, cause the book has only been out about 10 days.
00:54:24.660 And it's, as you know, it's not the shortest book. Um, nevertheless, the guy read the book
00:54:28.720 and immediately and went and had, uh, his LP little a checked. Now LP little a is a, is a lipid that most
00:54:37.380 people aren't aware of. It's a lipoprotein. Most people aren't aware of yet. It's the most common
00:54:40.920 hereditary, uh, uh, cause of cardiovascular disease. He went and had his checked and it was,
00:54:48.920 uh, a little bit elevated, not hugely elevated, but, but certainly elevated. Uh, his APOB, which
00:54:54.360 is another lipid we talk about was also slightly elevated, but not enough that anybody would have
00:54:58.060 cared. But a CT angiogram revealed a 90% occlusion in, um, the main artery that runs down the left
00:55:05.900 ventricle. Um, interestingly, this guy's a remarkable athlete, uh, you know, has done
00:55:11.780 several iron men. And in the past, he'd even complained a little bit of chest pain, but it
00:55:16.860 was never taken seriously because how would you take that seriously in a 41 year old who's a,
00:55:21.000 you know, as fit as a fiddle. And there are lots of other reasons why, you know, people have chest
00:55:24.700 pain, especially young, um, healthy athletic people to make a long story short. He ended up requiring
00:55:29.300 two stents in his, uh, left interior descending artery over the weekend. And, um, just wanted to write us to
00:55:34.700 tell us, you know, Hey, thank you for, you know, alerting me to all this stuff so I could go out
00:55:38.900 and get this done. And in some ways that's a success story, but in some ways it's a tragedy,
00:55:42.500 right? It's a tragedy in that, you know, why aren't we checking LP little a on everybody in
00:55:47.060 their teenage years? Because there's a lot that can be done about this. If you catch this early.
00:55:51.940 You know, it makes me think because Abby knows my assistant every year, because my dad died at 45.
00:55:56.340 And I know you've had lots of early death and thanks to cardiovascular disease in your family,
00:56:00.580 which I now believe was like, there was a reason for it. That it gave you, it gave us,
00:56:05.100 you determined to look into these issues. Um, but yeah, so my dad died of a sudden heart attack at
00:56:10.400 age 45. So I, every year I go for a stress test and Abby's always got to give me the 30 day warning
00:56:15.360 because I do exercise going into my stress test, Peter. I'm defrauding myself. Study for the test.
00:56:22.780 Yes. It's very sad. But, um, in any event now I'm wondering what am I doing? Am I, why am I getting,
00:56:28.620 you know, the stress, it's the real stress test with, you're hooked up to the monitor and you have,
00:56:31.880 you get down right after you do the 13 minutes and they check your breathing. But like you're,
00:56:36.280 I don't know. I didn't, I'm not sure. I can't remember how you feel about that, but
00:56:39.340 I've also had my calcium score done. It was zero, but you're not even saying the calcium score is
00:56:44.800 all that reliable. It's the CT angiogram, which I do think is really, should everybody be getting
00:56:49.360 that? I think at some point it depends. Well, let me back up for a second. So the calcium score
00:56:55.780 is directionally helpful. But as you're alluding to, as I wrote about in the book,
00:57:00.480 15% of calcium scans give a false negative. So 15% of the time, if you get a zero on your
00:57:06.920 calcium score, it's not actually zero either. There is calcification that's so small it's being
00:57:12.880 missed. That actually happened to me once. Alternatively, you don't have calcium, but you
00:57:18.100 have soft plaque, which is just as problematic, meaning you still have atherosclerosis, even at
00:57:25.040 the level or at the gross resolution of a CT scan. So that's one point I would make. The other point I
00:57:30.620 would make is, you know, I don't believe in doing tests unless the test is going to alter your
00:57:36.000 behavior. So if I'm treating a person who's young and has other risk factors that we deem relevant,
00:57:44.500 I don't necessarily need the CT angiogram because the probability that, you know, a 30-year-old is
00:57:50.520 going to have advanced atherosclerosis, that's going to change our management might actually be
00:57:55.060 low. So, you know, in your case, having that calcium scan of zero is great news, but I'd want
00:58:01.680 to make sure I knew what your LP little a was, what your ApoB was, and were those things being treated
00:58:06.400 as aggressively as you could tolerate medically? And if they are, then I wouldn't feel the need to
00:58:11.560 repeat those scans or move you to CT angiogram. And as far as the stress test goes, you know,
00:58:17.800 a stress test is a great test because it's, as its name suggests, putting you under the maximum
00:58:22.520 amount of stress, which is when we can see changes in the heart that would be different in its
00:58:28.500 electrical activity. And those would be real, you know, canary in the coal mine changes for ischemic
00:58:33.620 heart disease. The good news is generally for people who are exercising aggressively, if they're
00:58:40.060 doing it symptom free, a stress test is not adding a whole heck of a lot in a, in a, in a case like
00:58:45.060 yours. But again, I still think the stress test is a valuable test and we do use them in, in select
00:58:50.760 patients. You talk about the four horsemen of death and you know, what's going to get us. We all know
00:58:58.040 something's going to get us, but can you just walk us through what those are? Yeah, the four horsemen
00:59:03.660 are basically the big chronic diseases that took over. So once medicine 2.0 ushered in an era of
00:59:10.140 remarkable success against infectious diseases and communicable diseases, which really happened
00:59:15.200 again in the late 1900s in the early part of the 20th century, we basically started living longer,
00:59:20.700 right? We went from living an average of 40 years to getting into our, you know, eighth decade of life,
00:59:26.040 living into our seventies. And all of a sudden something happened, which was all of these chronic
00:59:31.320 diseases started to kill us. So the, basically the way I think of them is these four horsemen,
00:59:36.380 right? So atherosclerotic diseases, so heart disease and stroke far and away, number one
00:59:40.700 cancer, which is not one disease. Of course, cancer is a herd of diseases that all get lumped in under
00:59:47.840 one umbrella. So breast cancer and colon cancer are totally different diseases, different risk factors,
00:59:52.500 et cetera. But nevertheless, we think of it as one disease neurodegenerative diseases. And when a lot of
00:59:58.600 people think of that, they think of course, is the most prevalent of these, which is Alzheimer's
01:00:01.560 disease, but that also includes Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease, et cetera.
01:00:06.540 And then the third one doesn't directly account for a lot of, you know, lists on the death certificate,
01:00:14.440 but indirectly may be the single greatest contributor of them all. And that is the suite of metabolic
01:00:20.580 diseases that ranges all the way from even just insulin resistance through fatty liver disease,
01:00:26.660 which is an enormous epidemic at this time, uh, all the way up to type two diabetes. So that I kind
01:00:31.860 of think of that as a metabolic continuum of disease that again, in terms of actual lives lost
01:00:37.440 on a given year is not an, it's not a huge number, but when you have those conditions, your risk of the
01:00:43.500 other three horsemen that I mentioned goes up significantly. And on that last front, I do think
01:00:48.840 it's interesting. You don't really refer to obesity so much in the book. It's about metabolic disorder
01:00:53.080 because you could be thin and have the fatty liver there. You tell some harrowing stories in
01:00:59.240 there about cutting people open and seeing, Oh my God, this is a thin person who's not a drinker.
01:01:03.400 And there it is. So don't, don't assume you don't have that just because you're not heavy into booze
01:01:10.120 or you're not obese. The metabolic disorder could encompass you. And as Peter points out, it could
01:01:15.560 lead to one of the other three horsemen. So that's disconcerting.
01:01:19.180 Yeah. We have this preoccupation with weight, right? That, you know, obesity is the big boogeyman.
01:01:25.420 And I don't want to suggest that obesity doesn't come without its problems or that it isn't correlated
01:01:30.280 strongly with some of these other issues. But I also think like we should be smart enough to walk
01:01:36.900 and chew gum at the same time. Like we should be nuanced enough to actually be able to talk about
01:01:41.760 what really is causing the issues. And it's not obesity per se. It is the metabolic derangement
01:01:48.460 that often comes with obesity. But as you point out is often present without obesity. I think I have
01:01:53.720 a figure in the book that I drew that shows the Venn diagram, the overlap of lean people who are
01:02:00.020 metabolically unhealthy, obese people who are metabolically unhealthy. And interestingly,
01:02:06.260 a lean person who is metabolically unhealthy has worse outcomes than an obese person who is
01:02:12.880 metabolically unhealthy. In other words, there's something really dangerous about a person who can't
01:02:18.400 get fat, but goes directly to metabolic unhealth.
01:02:23.660 If memory serves, it was like 10 million people are walking around in that boat. So it's a lot.
01:02:28.500 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's about the most conservative estimate I can come up with is
01:02:33.060 that there are 100 million adults in the United States that are metabolically unwell from both of
01:02:38.480 these camps.
01:02:39.660 So how does one, before we get to lifestyle changes, because a lot of this is within your
01:02:44.700 control. It is not just the genetic lottery. Did you win it or didn't you? But there are ways of
01:02:49.680 finding out whether you won it or you didn't, which we can talk about too. But how does one begin?
01:02:53.680 Like people who are inspired by your book, by this conversation who say, I'm with you. What should
01:02:58.280 I do? How do I get data to figure out where I am?
01:03:00.920 Well, I mean, you know, unfortunately, we do live in the medicine 2.0 world still. And so that means
01:03:09.620 that as an individual, you have to become a bit more of a consumer. I guess that's why I wrote the
01:03:14.480 book. So think about it from your profession, right? So you're a lawyer, Megan. And if a person comes to
01:03:22.360 you and says, you know, Megan, I need to retain an attorney. I'm just going to go to Google and find the
01:03:27.300 person closest to me. Would you say to them, like, that's a great strategy. Definitely do that.
01:03:32.500 I mean, of course not, right? If they said, I need a contractor to build my house. I guess I'll just
01:03:38.940 find the guy with the nicest truck. Like, you know, in most other areas of our life, we're relatively
01:03:44.960 sophisticated consumers. And we're relatively interested in taking some ownership of the
01:03:51.100 problem. Somehow medicine has turned into this deity state where we just assume every doctor is
01:03:58.820 equal and every doctor is incredibly knowledgeable and we don't have the right to become stewards of
01:04:05.880 our own health. And I think step one is sort of saying, how much of this stuff can I do without a
01:04:12.340 doctor? For example, I can go and get a DEXA scan without a doctor and that DEXA scan will tell me
01:04:18.000 how much muscle mass I have, how much body fat I have, how much visceral fat I have.
01:04:23.540 And the data is all readily available to tell me how I stack up against other people in the
01:04:27.600 population. So in other words, I'm not just going to have some abstract number that doesn't mean
01:04:31.520 anything to me. I will know for my age and for my sex if I'm doing well or if I'm not. Similarly,
01:04:37.560 I could go and get a VO2 max test and that will tell me how fit I am. And you can certainly ask
01:04:43.960 the doctor to say, look, I know that you're going to order these standard tests, but I also want to
01:04:48.700 see some of these more advanced tests, for example, ApoB and LP little a. And right there and then you
01:04:53.720 have a check gate because a doctor that says, I don't know what those are, bingo, failed the test,
01:05:00.040 time to get another doctor. So I know that people don't necessarily want to hear that because that's
01:05:05.140 work. You know, it takes work to go out and doctor shop and find people who have this level
01:05:10.720 of sophistication. But I can't think of a problem that's more pressing, that's more worth putting
01:05:16.420 effort into. So one of the things you would love to hear if you go through all that is that under
01:05:22.260 this ApoE, ApoE I think it is, which is right about in the book, there are three little subsets,
01:05:30.580 E2, E3 and E4. And I loved hearing about this. I don't know what my numbers are, but okay. E2,
01:05:38.380 one copy of this gene and no copy of E4 is good. That seems to protect you against dementia and
01:05:48.740 suggest you are more likely than the average person by far to reach old age. So yay, you would love to
01:05:54.760 go get this test and find out you have one copy of E2 and no copies of E4. However, E4,
01:06:00.580 E4 is not so good. One copy of E4 increases your risk of Alzheimer's by a factor of between two and
01:06:07.440 12. And it makes you 87% less likely to reach old age. If you have two E4s, you got one from mom
01:06:12.680 and dad. So you may be thinking I'm screwed if I've got two of these E4s. However, you keep reading
01:06:18.280 the book, you go down and you find out there's another possible longevity gene, FOXO3, where you can
01:06:25.800 activate, you can activate better things for you when it comes to longevity. So I don't know that
01:06:30.920 I'm making them all relate to one another accurately, Peter, but to me, it seems like people are afraid,
01:06:36.400 right? They don't want to hear that they have two E4s, but it's better to know because there are
01:06:40.020 things available to you to activate longevity genes inside of you. So you can fight that. It's better
01:06:45.260 to don't just let it sit dormant. It is what it is. The truth is there yesterday, tomorrow, and today,
01:06:49.500 tomorrow, it could be a lot better if you take action. Yeah. I mean, it comes down to a philosophical
01:06:55.580 question. So I've been spanked very hard in the past from various physicians when I've tested for
01:07:03.680 their APOE status. And it's exactly as you say, with a couple of differences. So if you have one
01:07:09.980 copy of the E4 gene, so if you're a 3-4, your risk of Alzheimer's disease is about twofold higher,
01:07:16.840 maybe up to threefold higher. But as you said, when you have two copies of the 4-4,
01:07:21.200 we're talking about that eight to 10, maybe even 12-fold higher risk. That's an enormous risk
01:07:26.800 difference. So I've had some doctors say, how careless of you, how cavalier of you to order
01:07:32.840 such a test because all you're doing is giving the patient something to worry about for which they can do
01:07:38.020 nothing. Now, I was involved in this series called Limitless that was part of NatGeo. And Chris
01:07:45.880 Hemsworth was kind of the protagonist. He's the star of the series. And then there's a whole
01:07:50.220 bunch of little two-bit people around him like me that are kind of helping him along this longevity
01:07:54.740 journey. And in the process of this, Megan, unbeknownst to any of us going into this, we
01:07:59.800 discovered Chris had two copies of the E4 gene. Now, keep in mind, this is pretty rare. Only one to
01:08:04.820 2% of the population have this. But what I explained to Chris and what Chris now understands
01:08:11.700 and has accepted and embraced is knowing that at such a young age, I mean, Chris found this out when
01:08:18.580 he was 37, empowers you to make a lot of changes that will reduce risk greatly. And where people like
01:08:27.280 me fundamentally differ from people who are kind of stuck in the old way is, I think the data is
01:08:32.520 overwhelming that you can indeed reduce risk of all of the horsemen, including Alzheimer's disease.
01:08:39.200 And if that's true, and again, I could point to reams of data that suggest it's true,
01:08:44.160 then not knowing is simply the worst thing that you can do from an outcome perspective.
01:08:49.400 Wow. The Chris Hemsworth thing made national news. And I didn't realize that he was quite that young.
01:08:57.500 Oh my God, I thought he was a little older and that you were involved from the baseline in that.
01:09:02.240 That had to be a moment on your heels.
01:09:05.900 Yeah, it was kind of an interesting situation because we're getting ready to do this thing.
01:09:11.800 We took advantage of Chris being in the US passing through to get his blood tested. And then the plan
01:09:17.940 was I was going to go out to Australia for the first shoot. This is over three years ago,
01:09:21.540 COVID really slowed down the production of this thing. And two weeks before I'm supposed to go
01:09:27.440 out to Australia to begin the shoot, I get the blood test back. And I go through it and I see
01:09:31.580 that he has two copies of the E4 gene. Again, you don't see this all the time. This is very rare.
01:09:36.380 And I knew that they wanted me to present the data to Chris on screen for the first time because it
01:09:43.020 is a documentary. And so I was stuck in a bit of a bind because one, I just didn't think that was the
01:09:50.980 right thing to do to present that type of news to a person for the first time on camera.
01:09:56.680 So I called Darren Aronofsky, who is the producer and also a very close friend. That's the reason I
01:10:03.400 was involved. And I said, look, I can't tell you why, but I need to talk to Chris before we're on
01:10:09.620 camera alone. Meaning like now, like in the weeks that lead up to this. And you have to trust me
01:10:15.640 because I'm not going to, you know, I couldn't tell Darren why I wanted to have this discussion.
01:10:18.940 And Darren was like, yep, no problem. I trust you completely. So he connected me and Chris
01:10:22.940 beforehand. Chris and I had a chance to discuss just that one finding. And truthfully, Chris was
01:10:30.760 not sure that how comfortable he would be with that information being public. So interestingly,
01:10:36.480 as we filmed Limitless over the course of several years, everything was done in parallel. There was a
01:10:42.820 version that included that information and a version that did not. So that at the end, Chris could make
01:10:47.960 the decision. Um, and completely on his own, Chris decided, you know what, I really do want people
01:10:53.900 to know this. Cause I, you know, I know that 25% of the population have one copy of this gene. So if
01:11:00.840 being public about this is going to help those 25% of people, that's a lot of people.
01:11:06.380 Does it mean, I mean, he's also got a very famous brother. Does it, if you have it,
01:11:10.240 does it mean your siblings also have it? Cause you have the same gene pool.
01:11:12.900 Um, you have to go back and look at the parents. So for example, if his parent, if one parent has a
01:11:20.020 two, four, and one has a two, three, uh, say a three, four, one sibling could be a four, four,
01:11:26.960 the other could be a two, three. So as a general rule, we just sort of test everybody. Um, and you
01:11:33.760 know, if we, if we can't figure it, it's not worth trying to guess what a person is.
01:11:38.000 Hmm. I mean, does this, is this what explains, cause you talk in the book of fair amount about the,
01:11:42.900 I I'm not going to pronounce it right, but it's not centurions. It's centenarians.
01:11:48.320 Yeah. The people who live above to be above 100 and happily we have one of those in my,
01:11:53.400 in my family. I think I mentioned my Nana to you last time. My mom's mom lived to 101
01:11:57.760 and broke all the rules. And you mentioned that's not unusual that it's not all Japanese fishermen.
01:12:05.200 You know, that's what you think of, right? It's like, it can like, there's lots of examples in
01:12:09.480 your book of the person who loved the whiskey every day, the person who smoked cigarettes,
01:12:13.460 the person who had two glasses of wine every day and just cut back on calories. There's just no
01:12:18.640 unifying principle. If you look at diet exercise or general approach to life in my Nana's case,
01:12:24.700 she, yes, she was born in 1915 and she ate natural foods for most of her life. But then
01:12:29.400 for most of my life, she was eating processed foods. She was kind of stressed out. She never once
01:12:34.360 exercised a day in her life. Um, all the rules, right? She didn't smoke and she didn't really
01:12:39.520 drink a lot, but I will say one good thing she did was she was very social, very social. And I
01:12:44.480 think, you know, you write in the book about how important that is in emotional wellness and,
01:12:47.440 you know, connection. But in any event, what do you glean from these centenary? Like what,
01:12:53.420 what? Cause of course everybody's like, I'll do it. I'll drink whiskey. I'll, I'll eat processed foods.
01:12:57.220 I'll socialize. I'll get grumpier. What do I need to do?
01:13:00.020 Yeah. The lesson from the centenarians is pretty clear and you're right. There's an entire chapter
01:13:05.460 devoted to them because they teach us a very important lesson. And there's some sub lessons.
01:13:11.260 The most important lesson we learned from centenarians is that they live long despite
01:13:16.800 their lifestyle, not because of it. Because on average, centenarians are indeed doing things less
01:13:24.860 healthy than the non centenarians. It's kind of crazy, but they're more likely to smoke more likely to
01:13:29.960 eat poorly, less likely to exercise. And despite all of those things, they live longer. So this
01:13:35.520 points to a very clear set of genetic attributions that they have. And, you know, the truth of it is
01:13:42.460 the genetic study of centenarians has proved less exciting than people would have hoped. There are a
01:13:49.660 handful of genes that seem to crop up more often than not in this group. You've already mentioned a
01:13:55.920 couple of them, right? So APOE, the two version of that gene crops up disproportionately here.
01:14:02.480 A certain variant of FOXO3 pops up disproportionately here. I could rattle off a few others. It's not
01:14:10.860 relevant. Here's what is relevant. The superpower of the centenarian is their ability to live longer
01:14:18.940 without disease, not their ability to live longer with disease. This is so important. It's worth
01:14:25.660 reiterating. Once a centenarian comes down with a given disease, i.e. has their first heart attack or
01:14:32.540 develops cancer, they're just as likely to die in about the same time period as a non centenarian.
01:14:40.640 What their superpower is, is the length of time it takes them to get that disease in the first place.
01:14:46.780 What everybody else looks like at 60, they look like at 80 or 85. This effectively becomes the
01:14:57.460 cornerstone of the strategy for medicine 3.0. You must delay the time it takes for chronic disease
01:15:03.920 to sink in, not do what medicine 2.0 does, which is figure out ways to extend life once disease has
01:15:11.040 taken hold. That strategy has produced lousy outcomes. That's so helpful.
01:15:16.780 And we can spend some time now on how, even though it's not, as I pointed out, a TikTok on exactly
01:15:23.040 what to eat and how to exercise. But let's talk about the E word. Because exercise is really,
01:15:29.380 I mean, if it boils down to one thing, it really is exercise.
01:15:33.320 Yeah, there's virtually nobody out there who doesn't have opportunity to get better based
01:15:40.340 on exercise. And I know we talked about this the last time I was on, Megan, so I won't need to
01:15:44.680 rehash it. And exercise is so important that of the 17 chapters in the book, three of them are devoted
01:15:50.240 to exercise. There's no other chapter, there's no other topic in the book that warrants so much
01:15:54.940 attention as exercise. But I think the simplest way to explain it is the following. Take the magnitude
01:16:02.300 of harm that is caused by the most harmful things you can think of. Smoking, type 2 diabetes, high
01:16:09.440 blood pressure, coronary artery disease, cancer, you name it. When you look at the all-cause mortality
01:16:17.320 risk associated with those things. In other words, if you have X, let's take smoking. If you are a
01:16:23.820 smoker, when compared to someone who is otherwise identical, but not a smoker, what is the risk that
01:16:30.380 you will die in a given year relative to the non-smoker? It's about 40% higher. That's huge,
01:16:35.980 right? Do the same exercise with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, all of these things.
01:16:40.600 You're going to see anywhere from a 20 to 100% increase in the risk of all-cause mortality.
01:16:47.320 When you do the same exercise and compare being unfit to being fit or being weak to being strong,
01:16:57.040 that magnitude difference is two, three, and even four times higher than the ones we just spoke about.
01:17:07.120 In other words, being unfit relative to being fit is worse than having any of these typical
01:17:14.560 medical conditions that we know so clearly are associated with a shorter life.
01:17:20.020 That is huge. Okay. So define fit.
01:17:24.940 So typically fit is defined by this metric called VO2 max because it is reproducible. It is highly
01:17:32.400 objective. And it's been, you know, we have so much data on it. It is the gold standard by which
01:17:38.300 we measure peak aerobic performance. It's not a pleasant test. So it's a test where by definition,
01:17:45.700 you are exercising to the point of maximum exertion and failure. It's typically done on a bicycle or on
01:17:52.220 a treadmill. So it's sort of like your stress test, Megan. It's almost exactly like your stress test,
01:17:56.800 except my guess is they stop you a little earlier on your stress test because they probably just target
01:18:03.200 a certain heart rate for you. And they say, okay, you got there. You're fine. We're going to stop you
01:18:07.660 with the VO2 max. You'd be doing the same thing, but you'd also be wearing a mask. And that mask is
01:18:13.480 measuring how much oxygen you're consuming and how much carbon dioxide you're producing. And you would
01:18:18.300 go until you truly failed until you couldn't stay on that treadmill any longer. What we'd be looking
01:18:23.860 for is at your peak, how much oxygen were you able to extract from the air you breathed in?
01:18:29.960 That number is called VO2 max, ventilation of oxygen max. And that number is so predictive of how long you
01:18:40.120 live. In fact, I haven't seen, and I've been looking, I haven't seen a single number that can be gleaned
01:18:47.300 from an individual, either a biomarker test or otherwise, that is more predictive of how long you will live
01:18:53.320 than your VO2 max. What if you could do really well on that after 30 days of exercise, but then you
01:19:01.740 totally abandoned it. You've got to keep the VO2 max going, I imagine.
01:19:07.420 Well, here's the good news. The reality of it is if you did nothing for 11 months and then just train
01:19:14.780 for 30 days, you wouldn't really get to a high VO2 max. To truly have a high VO2 max, it does require
01:19:21.740 consistently training. By the way, it doesn't require consistently killing yourself. It just
01:19:26.000 requires consistently training. And you don't have to be in the top 5%. That's certainly where
01:19:34.460 you're going to see the most benefit. But simply going from being in the bottom 25% of the population
01:19:40.100 to being in the third quartile, so being from the 50th to the 75th percentile, that's a very reasonable
01:19:47.440 jump, right? To go from being in the bottom quarter to the third quarter has the equivalent
01:19:53.120 of reducing your mortality by 50% in any given year. Huge.
01:19:59.520 So yeah, it's just like there is nothing. There's no drug that does that. There's no diet that does
01:20:05.420 that. There's no anything that does that. Not even close. And that's not a big ask. That's the kind
01:20:12.840 of thing that you can achieve that level of fitness exercising five hours a week, combined
01:20:18.340 with weight training, right? So it doesn't have to be five hours of cardio. It's like five hours,
01:20:22.360 six hours of really well-balanced exercise consisting of both strength and cardio. That's
01:20:27.600 completely achievable.
01:20:30.340 The cardio is important, though, because in my world of women who would like to be thin,
01:20:35.660 um, the, the messaging is don't be a cardio bunny. You know, that the new messaging is cardio bunnies.
01:20:43.940 They don't lose weight. You know, you just tread away, tread away, you know, you spin, spin, spin,
01:20:48.680 and you never lose any weight. And it's better to just eat less, not drive up your appetite and
01:20:53.640 remain thin. But that doesn't take into account at all fitness, cardiovascular or other strength
01:21:01.460 or longevity. It just takes into account appearance.
01:21:07.280 Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a real tragic set of messaging. And it's, um, it's, it's, again,
01:21:12.000 it's missed the mark. Um, I think obviously there are lots of reasons for that, that, that are
01:21:16.440 certainly beyond my area of expertise in terms of the social and cultural reasons of why, you know,
01:21:21.780 we place such an emphasis on leanness aesthetically without any concern for health. I mean, I'm sure
01:21:29.440 you're very familiar with the latest craze with semaglutide, which is a, an injectable drug that
01:21:35.620 has Zempic. Yeah. Zempic being the diabetes version of that would go V being the pure weight
01:21:41.420 loss version. It's the same drug, just a different name. Um, you know, there are clearly patients who
01:21:47.120 benefit from this drug, but Oh my God, what I see behind the scenes of what it's doing to people.
01:21:52.860 And I'm sure other doctors can tell you similar stories. Um, this, so, so give you an example,
01:21:58.760 Megan, if a person, let's just say a person wants to lose weight and, and, and they need to, right.
01:22:02.800 You know, you do the DEXA scan. They've got, they've got too much body fat. Um, they've got
01:22:06.760 visceral fat. They need to lose 20 pounds. Here's what we consider ideal weight loss. Ideal weight loss
01:22:14.320 would be if you lose 20, 15 of it should be fat. Five of it should be lean mass. So you can't just
01:22:23.840 lose fat mass, but three quarters of your weight loss should be fat mass. When we're putting people
01:22:30.260 on a Zempic and every person we put on a Zempic or semaglutide or, you know, whichever one of the
01:22:35.180 variations, and there's another drug called trazepatide. That's actually even better than
01:22:39.340 semaglutide. When we're putting patients on these drugs, we're doing DEXA scans before and after.
01:22:44.120 This is something the FDA did not require the company to do when they sought approval.
01:22:50.440 We're seeing two thirds of the weight loss is lean mass. Only one third is fat mass.
01:22:57.760 Wow. So they're getting lighter, Megan, but they're getting fatter. Meaning their body fat is
01:23:04.800 either not improving or getting slightly worse and they're disproportionately losing muscle mass.
01:23:10.140 They are becoming less healthy. They might look better in some perverse metric where they,
01:23:15.960 you know, wear a smaller set of jeans, but there's nothing about them that's healthier. Furthermore,
01:23:21.000 we track our patient's heart rate overnight, every night. And without exception, every patient who is on
01:23:29.140 a GLP-1 agonist or dual agonist, so semaglutide or trazepatide, every patient, Megan, and we've seen this
01:23:35.660 for the last three years, their resting heart rate at night is going up by eight to 12 beats per minute.
01:23:41.000 Wow.
01:23:41.440 There's nothing I'm aware of that is good about your resting heart rate going up at night.
01:23:47.620 Hmm. Well, that's scary. What did you say? You said that one of the drugs is better.
01:23:53.420 Did you, do you mean better at curbing appetite or better at messing you up?
01:23:57.600 No, more potent. No, it's more potent. It's just, uh, trazepatide is a, is a, is a more potent version
01:24:02.380 of, of this type of drug. Um, it just produces better results. It may be more durable as well.
01:24:08.900 I think it's too soon to say, cause that's the other drawback of these drugs. And again,
01:24:11.820 I don't want to suggest that these drugs shouldn't be used. They're absolutely our use cases for them.
01:24:17.160 And clearly we use them in some patients, but we don't use them in patients who say,
01:24:22.120 I just want to lose 10 pounds to look really good in a bathing suit or look good at the wedding next
01:24:26.060 summer. We're like, that's, you know, you can find another doctor, but that's not how we operate.
01:24:30.260 And we think that that's a lousy strategy. Um, but one of the challenges with these drugs that we
01:24:36.120 don't really know is when you stop taking the drug, are you eventually just going to regain all the
01:24:40.180 weight? Uh, and in the short run, it looks like that's mostly the case. Um, yeah, they say that,
01:24:46.880 they say that in the studies, people regained at least two thirds of the weight. And that if you go on
01:24:53.340 it, it's really kind of a lifetime drug. If you don't want to regain the weight, you just have
01:24:56.280 to stay on it forever. And it's very expensive. Unbelievably expensive. I mean, truthfully as
01:25:01.780 draconian as it sounds, you're better off getting a gastric bypass, which has equal efficacy that
01:25:07.580 lasts indefinitely and costs a fraction of the, you know, the whole thing is just, again, if we could
01:25:13.280 just come back to metabolic health, muscle mass, you know, caring about those things. Um, I think
01:25:20.120 there'd be less demand for this. I want to ask you about metformin because, uh, a good friend of
01:25:25.940 mine read your book and had a question about that. That that's, that could be a potential miracle
01:25:30.720 drug. It's also got some downsides. Um, but we'll talk about it. Let me squeeze in a quick break
01:25:36.160 and come back and we'll talk about that and food more with the one and only Dr. Peter Atiyah right after
01:25:41.620 this. We're kind of on the subject of meds because I brought up metformin. The book talks about
01:25:49.540 rapamycin, talks about, uh, AMPK. Is there something right now in the form of a pill moving
01:25:56.900 on from the shot? Let's move to the pill that can help us live longer that we should be considering.
01:26:02.460 I think it's a bit too soon to say, um, to your question about metformin, that question
01:26:06.600 is being posed in a clinical trial. Uh, I don't know if the trial has started yet, but it has secured
01:26:13.060 funding. So, you know, at the pace at which this type of science moves, it might be five years before we
01:26:19.020 know the answer to that question, but it is asking this question, which is does taking metformin,
01:26:24.920 if you are not a diabetic, because metformin is a drug that is indicated as a first line treatment
01:26:30.280 for people with type two diabetes. And it it's proved beneficial in that regard, but is a non-diabetic
01:26:36.300 person who takes this likely to delay the onset of chronic disease, which is we've discussed is
01:26:41.520 tantamount to living longer. Um, I, I think it might, to some extent, I don't, I don't,
01:26:49.200 you know, and again, I could, I'll be happy to be proved wrong on this, right? So be happy in five
01:26:52.840 years to look at this clip and have egg on my face. My intuition is it's not going to be a dramatic
01:26:59.420 difference. Um, but again, I could be wrong. Uh, but I, but I, the reason I say all that Megan is if
01:27:05.780 you go back and look at all of the epidemiology that has been suggestive of metformin's gyroprotective
01:27:12.900 benefits, gyroprotective is just a word that means it broadly tackles or targets the hallmarks of
01:27:20.200 aging. I actually think the epidemiology is not as compelling as it looks on the surface. In other
01:27:24.800 words, I think there are enough confounders in those data that I don't think metformin is as potent as
01:27:30.320 we would be led to believe if just looking at the, at the surface level data.
01:27:33.580 Is there another drug that we should be consider a supplement people? A lot of people think there's
01:27:38.200 a supplement they need to be taking. I, I, you know, again, my bias is having looked at all of
01:27:43.880 these data. I think rapamycin is the most promising gyroprotective agent out there, but I say that with
01:27:51.800 an enormous, uh, set of caveats. First, it's unambiguously the most gyroprotective agent. If you're
01:27:58.220 anything other than a human, in other words, when you look at the, this is what they give to transplant
01:28:02.120 victims. Is this the one they give to people? Transplant patients take this, um, and it's, uh,
01:28:07.860 it's an immune suppressant, but, um, it's all about the dose and it's all about the frequency.
01:28:12.660 So if you take a low dose of this drug every day, it suppresses the immune system. If you take a higher
01:28:18.320 dose, say once a week, it actually enhances immune function. And it seems that almost independent of how
01:28:25.660 you give it to animals, they live longer. Um, so the, the, the sort of accolades supporting
01:28:32.620 rapamycin's efficacy in, you know, anything from mice to worms, you know, fruit flies, yeast up to
01:28:40.220 dogs seems pretty promising. There is a very large study that's, um, undergoing, well, I guess it'll be
01:28:47.500 done in 2025 or 2026 looking at dogs. It's called the dog aging project done by Matt Kaberline at the
01:28:53.460 University of Washington. That will be the closest we get to human data. And frankly, that's as close
01:28:57.960 as it's going to get. So the real question is, could we believe that a drug that has proven efficacy
01:29:05.460 across a billion years of evolution on basically all more, all model organisms, will it extend to
01:29:12.680 humans? I don't know. Uh, you know, full disclosure, I take rapamycin myself. I've been taking it
01:29:18.480 for five or six years. Um, and, but it's a bit of a leap of faith because I don't, we don't have a
01:29:26.640 biomarker for it. You see, if you're taking a drug that to lower your cholesterol, you have a biomarker,
01:29:32.020 you can measure your cholesterol. You know, the drug is working at least through that metric.
01:29:35.480 We have no biomarker for the efficacy of, you know, a zero protective drug like rapamycin. So
01:29:41.700 it's possible. When I, when I read the book about the dog study first, I was like, Oh dogs. But if
01:29:47.480 you're saying that it helps them either way, then that makes me feel a little better. But you're,
01:29:51.220 the point you make in the book is that this is on another thing. This is on intermittent fasting,
01:29:54.700 which got my attention since I'm a fan of it. The studies that have been done on that saying it's,
01:29:58.780 Oh, it's so good for you have been done on mice and they're useless because mice have a very limited
01:30:04.600 time on this earth. And so you're basically saying like studies on mice really are very limited in
01:30:11.640 terms of your takeaways. Well, certainly for that application, they're a little more,
01:30:16.060 depending on the strain of mice, you can learn something about drugs from them. But yes,
01:30:21.400 on the fasting cause, boy, it's really tough. The reason is if you keep mice fasting for 14 hours a
01:30:28.660 day and it does something heroic to them, you really have to be careful how you extrapolate that
01:30:34.240 to humans because a mouse not eating for 14 hours is like you not eating for probably three days.
01:30:40.780 Hmm. Very different. Yeah. Very different.
01:30:45.960 I know. So you're not really a fan of the intermittent fasting anymore, but you do acknowledge
01:30:50.040 that lower calorie intake on a daily basis has beneficial effects.
01:30:55.600 If you're overnourished, meaning I sort of go through these three questions when I'm looking
01:31:00.920 at everybody. Are you undernourished or overnourished? Meaning are you storing excess energy? Yes or no.
01:31:05.860 Are you under muscled or adequately muscled? And are you metabolically healthy or not?
01:31:11.440 Only when you have the answer to those three questions, can you begin to dole out advice on
01:31:17.760 how a person should be eating? Do they need to be in a calorie deficit? Are they eucaloric? Do they
01:31:22.880 need to be in a calorie excess? Are they getting sufficient protein? Yes or no. You know, obviously
01:31:27.480 what's the role of exercise and sleep because those play a huge role in insulin sensitivity and metabolic
01:31:33.260 health as well. So sometimes you get these really hard cases, right? The hardest case is the person
01:31:38.260 who's overnourished, meaning they're overweight, but they're under muscled. Because in that person,
01:31:43.460 you have to lose weight while adding muscle, which is not easy to do.
01:31:48.120 Right. I haven't been asked anybody. Pretty much everybody would like to do those two things
01:31:52.820 simultaneously. You also spend a little time on seed oils, which is interesting because we've done
01:31:58.140 shows on that and I was turned hard against the hateful eight and all that. Tell me,
01:32:03.260 well, look, it's a, it's a great story, right? It's a great story to demonize seed oils because
01:32:09.880 as you know, having had people on the show, I'm sure, um, you know, these things didn't really
01:32:15.400 exist 150 years ago and now they're running rampant. Um, but if you look at the data and
01:32:22.420 I'd love to demonize seed oils because I think that the foods that they come in are horrible
01:32:27.000 for the most part, but if you look at the data, Megan, if there is, if there's a downside to
01:32:33.660 seed oils, it's, it's, it must be pretty small at the level, at the resolution that we can measure
01:32:39.460 it. You know, and I cite the three most comprehensive meta-analyses ever shat into our
01:32:47.020 civilization on this subject matter. And there just doesn't seem to be much of an effect.
01:32:52.060 So I think the precautionary principle is a reasonable approach, right? I think when it
01:32:57.540 comes to the three main types of fats, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and the polyunsaturated
01:33:03.920 fats, which are predominantly made up of seed oils on the Omega six branch, you know, the data are
01:33:09.660 pretty clear. One of those is a clear winner. And my view is why not make that the fat that is the
01:33:14.880 dominant fat in your diet, that fat of course, being the monounsaturated fat. So rather than dwell
01:33:21.180 on, you know, seed oils, like I don't eat a lot of seed oils, not because I think they're bad,
01:33:25.580 which they may be, but the data doesn't really suggest it if you're being honest and looking at
01:33:29.800 it, but because the data are so clear that Omega, that, that pardon me, that monounsaturated fats,
01:33:34.360 like olive oil, olives, avocado, that those things are really beneficial. So it's, it's, it really
01:33:40.120 should be 50 to 60% of our total fat intake should come from, from, you know, olive oil and the like.
01:33:46.100 Yeah. And just finally, because people were wondering about the diet, you said this last time and you
01:33:50.160 maintain it in the book, you're not, you're not a keto, paleo, vegan. It's the diet. It's just,
01:33:57.680 there's no silver bullet there. No, I mean, look, any, any, any sort of named diet is going to be
01:34:04.680 an improvement over the standard American diet, the standard American diet, which says basically
01:34:08.720 eat whatever you want, whenever you want, and whatever quantity you want. That's our default state.
01:34:13.340 We live in a default environment that, that fosters that. And that for most people is devastating.
01:34:18.380 Our genes did not have enough time to catch up to that environment. So instead I argue that
01:34:25.720 virtually everybody to be healthy is going to have to live in some form of restriction. And there are
01:34:31.440 three things you can be restricting. You can obviously do combinations of these, but you have
01:34:35.700 to be thinking about this through the lens of dietary restriction, time restriction, or caloric
01:34:40.320 restriction. So dietary restriction is kind of where most people think of diets. It's pick a boogeyman
01:34:46.040 and just don't do it. So the boogeyman might be plant food or whatever, animal food or sugar or
01:34:53.500 carbs or fat or whatever. Um, that said, it could be, uh, you know, limit the time in which you eat
01:35:00.660 that's time restricted feeding, or of course, just restrict the calories altogether. And that's what
01:35:04.280 calorie restriction is. Hmm. That's, I mean, that's, that does make sense. And the way you outlined
01:35:09.580 the questions you should be asking of your doctor before you get to what's my next move makes sense
01:35:14.520 to all of this is in the wonderful outlive. And this is a gift from Dr. Peter Atiyah who didn't
01:35:20.880 have to write this down for us at all, but has, and there's a reason that it's number one on the
01:35:24.660 New York times. I mean, this is legit. Um, thank you so much for writing this and please, will you
01:35:28.700 come back? There's so much more to discuss. I feel like we only scratched the surface, but hopefully got
01:35:32.460 people inspired. Yeah. Thanks so much, Megan. Really appreciate it. And thanks for taking the time to read
01:35:36.660 it or listen to it. Cause I know it's, uh, Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Again, the book is called
01:35:40.780 outlive the science and art of longevity. Uh, and it's well, well worth your time. And you're going
01:35:46.060 to have more time. Thanks to this book. It's out now. We'll be back tomorrow with the EJs. The gals
01:35:52.600 are going to come on. There's so much to discuss. Don't miss that show. Thank you for spending the past
01:35:57.200 hour plus with us. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
01:36:06.660 Thank you.