00:00:30.000Okay. Remember A is for asking the questions that matter to me. Andrea, the doctor will see you now. B is for beginning the conversation. Hey, Andrea, good to see you. So what brings you in today? C is for choosing which treatment is right for me. And Z is for ZepBound. And I'm ready to ask.
00:00:52.460Ask a doctor about ZepBound QuickPen. Get your savings card at ZepBound.ca. Exclusions and
00:00:58.100exceptions may apply. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday
00:01:05.500at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's
00:01:16.320true crime mega episode. Today we have our psychological deep dive from various perspectives
00:01:21.940after the shocking Luigi Mangione murder
00:01:51.940We are learning new and disturbing details about the accused health care CEO killer as his manifesto and other chilling writings become public.
00:02:01.200This comes amid more bizarre displays of praise for this guy, Luigi Mangione, from those who are positioning him as some kind of Robin Hood figure.
00:02:10.300I'm over it. I'm really over that psychosis by some faction of the American populace.
00:02:17.400You know what? Dr. Leonard Sachs is here in just a few minutes. I mean, this is the parenting expert. He's an MD. He's a PhD. He has spent his life studying longitudinal, long-term studies of children and actually practicing with children.
00:02:35.700And he actually knows a thing or two about psychology.
00:02:38.840And one of his main takeaways is have dinner with your children, have family dinners in a perfect world, seven nights a week.
00:02:46.260But as many nights as you can, even if it's short of seven, someone needed to do that in the families of the people who are now praising this guy as a Robin Hood figure.1.00
00:04:13.540Like, how could this have gone down by a guy with that kind of pedigree who turns into
00:04:18.460a killer, if what the police say is correct?
00:04:21.040And for that, we bring on Candace DeLong. She's a former FBI criminal profiler. She worked on cases like the Unabomber, the Tylenol murders. We spoke to her on episode 466 about the Idaho murders. So you may be familiar with Candace's work.
00:04:38.640When they first recruited her over at the FBI, she was a head nurse over at Northwestern University, and then she went on to work, as I said, on some of the most prominent cases in America.
00:04:49.080She's hosted the award-winning podcast Killer Psyche with Candace DeLong.
00:04:53.800How does a guy with that kind of a background, with all the advantages, who was a valedictorian of his high school class just 10 years ago in 16, not even 10 years ago in 16, who goes on to complete a bachelor's and a master's at the University of Pennsylvania, not exactly an easy school, wind up becoming this much of what looks like a psycho killer in just a few years?
00:05:19.980mental disorders, mental illnesses emerge in the late teens, early to mid 20s. Now, I'm not
00:05:29.740diagnosing him. I'm simply saying that is a fact about mental illnesses. And it's certainly a good
00:05:38.580question. Looking at this young man's meteoric rise to success athletically, culturally, socially,
00:05:48.020academically and then to throw it all away and appear in behavior that is a head scratcher
00:05:58.300became a murderer i think we probably will find something what does it look like to you like
00:06:05.980schizophrenia because you tell me if it let's like if you're having a psychotic break and i know and
00:06:12.260we've seen this with young men in particular who are guilty of mass shootings seems to happen
00:06:17.520between 19 years old and the mid twenties. But like, are those people generally like this guy,
00:06:24.180Luigi, where you're fine for, for all the years prior to that, you know, there's no hint that
00:06:30.300this is going to happen to you. Yes, that can happen. Now I'm not saying this guy is psychotic
00:06:36.520clinical term means out of touch with reality, doesn't perceive things as they are possibly
00:06:43.260hearing voices. We don't know that about him. But the answer to your question is, yes. I'm aware of
00:06:52.180a number of cases, both in my life growing up, and then as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people,
00:07:01.120young people who went away to college, and the expression is came home in a basket. And what
00:07:07.180happened was a mental illness, serious, usually schizophrenia, or sometimes bipolar disorder
00:07:14.480emerged where there's that bridge from puberty to adulthood.
00:07:22.780That's dark. I mean, could that happen to anybody? Because what I'm looking at with this guy is,
00:07:30.380well, we don't know much about his family, but there's a lot of references to like mushrooms
00:07:35.720or drugs on his social media, and we did have on Dr. Roland Griffith, who was the guy who really
00:07:45.040founded, not really, who did found the clinic for psilocybin and for these sort of MDNA treatments
00:07:55.140for people who are depressed at Johns Hopkins. But one of the main things he said, Candice, was
00:08:00.520you don't do those drugs recreationally or outside of a setting in which a prior family history
00:08:08.920of psychosis or schizophrenia can be detected. He said, because if we see anything like that
00:08:15.040in the questionnaire we give our potential participants, they're bounced because it can
00:08:20.220trigger a psychotic break from which you may not return. I have seen that. As a psychiatric nurse,
00:08:27.420I saw it. And when my son was in high school, decades ago, a friend of his did some kind of
00:08:36.620designer drug, psychedelic drug, became a schizophrenic thought disorder, and it did not
00:08:44.880have a happy ending. These are very serious drugs. And if somebody has a history, they may not even
00:08:51.540and know they have a history of mental illness of some kind, it can open the floodgates.
00:08:59.160Are you surprised to hear all these friends coming out and saying,
00:09:02.960totally nice guy, absolutely didn't see any, and recently, you know, the college friend saying,
00:09:09.960absolutely no hint of this. And the most they seem to be able to come up with is,
00:09:14.720well, he had this terrible back injury, though so far no one is claiming he was denied insurance or
00:09:20.240anything like that, but like he had some terrible back injury. Right, exactly. I'm not surprised
00:09:26.780that his friends from college, which was a while ago, were saying, gee, we didn't see this coming,
00:09:32.320he's totally normal. Because when many of these mental illnesses we're talking about emerge,
00:09:39.760it happens in a matter of weeks. And I haven't seen anyone being interviewed that said they had
00:09:48.640interacted with him in the last six months no no and would it be typical do you think i mean
00:09:55.500are you surprised to learn he went kind of underground or went radio silent with respect
00:10:00.340to family and friends over these past six months to the point where his mother filed a missing
00:10:04.660persons report for him in san francisco in november believing that that's where he was
00:10:10.720though we don't know where he was at the time the most recent report was he was in hawaii for a
00:10:14.860period? Well, no, I'm not surprised. A couple of things came to my mind about that radio silence
00:10:23.020with family and friends. One is that, yes, possibly a mental illness was emerging.
00:10:31.660But moreover, now that we know what he did last week, he had decided to do it
00:10:39.800to kill someone to kill this person and he did not want to interact with anyone
00:10:46.480for like who could be who might talk him out of it yeah0.92
00:10:51.120what do you make of i mean you're as about as expert as they come in the unabomber
00:10:58.820say he seemed to admire him quite a bit and they had some uh group like a book club that they were
00:11:07.220performing and it was this guy and two others and this is the first book he wanted them to read
00:11:13.380and apparently they all found it so disturbing like his manifesto that uh the book club disjoined
00:11:19.220it it fell apart before they made it through the end of ted kaczynski's writings but
00:11:25.100this luigi fellow really found him inspiring i almost lost my mind reading ted kaczynski's
00:11:34.180manifesto. It's rambling. It is at times almost incoherent. So that doesn't surprise me that
00:11:45.840his colleagues who probably were of sound mind went, what the heck is this? But it also doesn't
00:11:51.720surprise me that this young man that we are talking about became an admirer of Kaczynski.
00:12:00.880What did Kaczynski do? He killed people that he thought were harming society, or at least he attempted to. The truth is, when Kaczynski put a bomb down and walked away, or mailed a bomb, he had no idea who was going to be hurt or killed by it. And he didn't really care. That is different than what we are seeing here with Mangione.
00:12:25.940he was uh being led into the courthouse yesterday um to be charged in connection with this alleged
00:12:37.200crime and seemed to be trying to wriggle out of the physical control of the police officers to
00:12:44.200be heard it's kind of difficult to understand what he's saying but my my read of it is and
00:12:49.320we'll play it i'll just give it to you in advance it's completely we don't know what
00:18:00.220To me, what you just read seems a bit disjointed, but what he's saying is parasites, it needed to be done.
00:18:12.960Sorry if anyone was hurt, and he takes it upon himself.
00:18:18.260He is the avenging angel as he sees it.
00:18:21.580Yet, in his notes, I see fragmentation, wandering thoughts, which all would support that this whole thing has to do with the mental decompensation going on.
00:18:43.960And last question quickly. Does that mean insane as a legal matter?
00:18:48.780Well, it's insane, of course, legally means the individual did not understand, did not know at the time they committed an act that it was wrong.
00:18:58.240And that's hard for people to understand.
00:19:00.120But if an individual has voices in their head telling them to to kill someone in order to save the rest of America, that is a very serious mental.
00:19:14.260They really thought what they were doing was right.
00:19:18.460And they belong in a mental facility, not a prison.
00:21:01.740I want to get into all things about the update.
00:21:04.240But can I get your thoughts to kick it off on this accused killer in connection with the murder of Brian Thompson and what you gleaned from the facts that we just outlaid with Candace?
00:21:15.880Yes, absolutely. I think it's such an illuminating story. And I've seen this so much in my own practice as a family doctor now for more than 30 years.
00:21:26.720so many boys want to be heroes they want to be seen as heroes they want to see themselves as
00:21:35.020heroes in their own eyes you know i spoke some years ago at a conference on juvenile justice
00:21:41.840statewide conference in new mexico and the topic was boys adrift the title of one of my books
00:21:47.100and after my presentation they had a panel of four experts from across the state and one was
00:21:56.240Judge John Romero, who's the chief of the juvenile judges in Albuquerque. And he said when he first
00:22:03.640began doing this work as a juvenile judge in Albuquerque, he was puzzled because all these
00:22:08.780teenage boys, you know, good men with great potential, being accused of these horrible
00:22:18.180violent crimes. And he would take them into his chambers and say, why are you doing this?
00:22:23.000don't you understand you're going to go to jail for for decades why are you throwing your life
00:22:28.820away and he told us it took him a long time to to understand these boys want to be heroes and
00:22:37.660and the school doesn't understand that and but the gang understands it the gang says here's a gun go
00:22:44.080and go and shoot the the rival gang leader and if you succeed you're a hero if you get killed trying0.98
00:22:49.820you're a hero. If you get thrown in jail, you're a hero. If you chicken out, you're a wuss.0.99
00:22:55.200And then he looked right at us and he said, most of you, you're not from the barrio. And you're0.98
00:23:01.000thinking, oh, I'm doing great. My son's not going to be in the juvenile justice system. He said,
00:23:06.580but your son is no different. The difference between your son and the boys I see, your son0.67
00:23:11.700is staying at home in his bedroom, playing his video games. The difference between your son
00:23:16.540and the boys in my chambers is your son is playing with pretend guns in his video game but it's the
00:23:22.780same it's the same dynamic playing with pretend guns being a pretend hero in his call of duty
00:23:31.500in his grand theft auto in both cases though your son has left the real world in his fantasy world
00:23:40.160wanting to be a hero in his own mind and i and that's the same thing that's going on here
00:23:44.860We have failed as a society to capture these boys, to give them better models, better ways to become a hero, to be a hero in the right way.
00:23:57.520And again, that's going back to my book, Boys Adrift, where I talk about good role models, men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave his life for the right cause.
00:24:06.780Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, had a comfortable job preaching in New Jersey in 1938, and left that job, went back to Nazi Germany, put his life in jail, in jeopardy, and joined the conspiracy to take the life of Adolf Hitler and was caught and was executed in concentration camp.
00:24:32.100We're failing at the job of inspiring boys to be the right kind of hero.
00:24:38.480So how do you figure out whether it's that kind of a problem where he is sane and has not suffered a psychotic break, but just is under this delusion that he needs to be a hero somehow and he's got to do it.
00:24:52.460He's the only one brave enough to do it versus, oh, no, it's it's basically a school shooter with a different purpose.
00:24:59.960He's had a break. It happens often around this age. And, you know, he's lost it. He's no longer
00:25:06.500of sane mind. Okay. I've written about school shooters, and that's a different process in
00:25:15.140place. There's always been a small minority of boys who take pleasure in killing, take pleasure
00:25:22.420in inflicting pain. And I wrote an article about this for a magazine called First Things. I called
00:25:27.740it the unspeakable pleasure and that's a minority of boys that's that's rare but it happens and
00:25:33.500again that's not insanity that's a a variation on human nature it's always been with us but again
00:25:42.100we need to know how to capture those these boys we have the game of football uh hey there's always
00:25:48.680been boys who enjoy inflicting playing in pain have them play the line and i was doing this talk
00:25:54.040at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And it happened that my host used to play the line for
00:25:59.640University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I called out to him and I said, do you have any comments about
00:26:04.600that? And he said, a good hit is better than sex. Healthy cultures know how to capture boys0.97
00:26:12.020and channel those instincts into healthy channels. It's not insanity. The insanity plea in that case
00:26:21.840a cop out. Okay, there are people who truly have psychotic disorders, and they hear voices telling
00:26:28.360them that this person is a lion who's going to eat them and they have to shoot them. That's not
00:26:34.160what's going on here. That's not what's going on with Luigi Mangione. And that's not what's going
00:26:38.540on with school shooters. Some inventive lawyers try to make that case. It's unpersuasive. We're0.91
00:26:44.240not talking here about psychotic disorders and schizophrenics. We're talking about here about boys
00:26:49.860who have evil impulses. There's nothing new about this. This is as old as Genesis chapter 4.
00:26:56.360Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master at Genesis chapter 4.
00:27:03.900What would you guess, and this is a total guess because we don't know much about his family,
00:27:08.240but you are a parent expert and an actual MD, and you've been doing this kind of work for
00:27:13.700decades now. I'm just going to guess, Dr. Sachs, that the Mangione family probably didn't have the
00:27:19.560dinners around the table together seven nights a week. That's just a stab in the dark.
00:27:25.300You know, I have learned the hard way. It's very hard to speculate about what went
00:27:30.840on under the roof at home. We do know, we all know, that he graduated from a secular high school,
00:27:37.780a school with no religious affiliation. And the culture has changed. You know, 30 years ago,
00:27:43.560American popular culture taught right and wrong. We know this. This is not a guess. We have scholars
00:27:48.940who have looked at American popular culture.
00:27:51.940The most popular TV shows, 1967, 77, 87, 97,
00:27:57.120were shows like The Andy Griffith Show,
00:27:59.440Family Ties, Happy Days, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
00:28:02.840Researchers have looked at these shows,
00:28:04.320and they found that they consistently taught
00:28:06.940that the most important thing is to do the right thing
00:28:09.360to tell the truth, right through 1997.
00:28:12.280But by 2007, they found American culture
00:30:26.540So this, okay, there's so much to go over.
00:30:28.880But I asked my followers on X today, knowing that you were going to come on, whether they had anything they wanted me to ask you.
00:30:37.380And I'll get to some of those questions throughout the course of the two hours.
00:30:40.100But one of the questions was, and it came up over and over, and I thought this is actually a really good one.
00:30:45.000Let me see if I can find the way they put it.
00:30:46.600But how how do we help our children in today's day and age with A.I., with tech everywhere, with video games and iPhones, how to find purpose, how to find their purpose?
00:31:00.900I was like, oh, my gosh, that's a big one. It's started to dump that big one on you so soon in our interview.
00:31:05.960But, you know, to your point, how do you?
00:31:08.720so you have to prioritize the family and i you cannot find your child's meaning of life
00:31:19.540but you can prioritize that connection and one of the challenges for kids is that they are
00:31:28.120looking for life meaning in all the wrong places they're they're looking at instagram and tiktok
00:31:34.320and charlie d'amelio uh who is this hugely popular person on on tiktok and uh you know
00:31:45.580one in three 12 year olds now says that their goal in life is to be the next charlie to be
00:31:50.640a tiktok influencer and that's not a good goal it's not a good goal because it's not going to
00:31:56.840happen and i have met with so many girls who are frustrated because they put all this effort into
00:32:02.600a TikTok video and it fizzles. They don't understand the numbers. They don't understand0.99
00:32:07.140that there's 10 million other girls out there who are posting videos and it's not going to happen.1.00
00:32:13.960And if your meaning of life is on how many clicks you get on your video, you're going to be
00:32:18.560frustrated. You're going to be disappointed. You need to find your meaning of life in who you are,
00:32:24.700not in how many likes you get or how many views or how many followers you have. And so that begins
00:32:30.740with the family. So you prioritize the family. You have family dinners. You fight for dinners
00:32:36.960at home. And again, many parents are confused and they're driving their kids around to play
00:32:41.660dates or they're driving their kids to travel team soccer or computer coding class. Cancel
00:32:46.320the computer coding class. Prioritize family time at home. Prioritize the parent-child
00:32:51.440relationship. And then the rest will follow once you have the strong family relationship.
00:32:59.200That's so key that I think in today's day and age, many parents are very worried about is Junior getting asked on enough play dates or to go hang with his or her friends enough?
00:33:10.340Is my kid the kid that's sitting at home with me and my spouse too much?
00:40:09.300The moral of the story of Jeff Bezos and David Petraeus, don't share any photo with a device unless you're prepared for grandma to see it in the newspaper.
00:40:19.920and you don't share that by preaching that you you communicate that by saying i've installed an app
00:40:27.300on your phone do not share a photo do not take a photo unless you're prepared for everybody to see
00:40:35.040it and and and again parent american parents will push back and they'll say oh come on my my daughter
00:40:40.280is just going to google how do i get around parental controls on that nanny well i've actually
00:40:43.900spoken to uh with employees at nanny and they told me that they have colleagues whose full-time job
00:40:49.600is to google the phrase how do i get around parental controls on net nanny and if they find
00:40:54.120that some kid has found a hole they patch it usually within hours and the app will update
00:40:58.120you have to install parental monitoring software is net nanny the software that you're you're
00:41:04.940saying parents can use to monitor the kids it's it's one of many apps i'm not endorsing any one
00:41:10.080app uh ethics and public policy center has a wonderful uh online guide to the different
00:41:15.900parental monitoring apps. That's Ryan Anderson's group, Ethics and Public Policy Center. They've
00:41:20.840got a good online resource that reviews all the different rental monitoring apps. But yeah,
00:41:26.580NetNanny is one, Bark, Circle, there's a bunch of them. I don't endorse any one app. They're all
00:41:31.000very similar. They'll all give you a dashboard on your phone. They'll all light up if they see
00:41:35.840anything inappropriate. But you've got to use one of these. You've got to install one of these on
00:41:40.400your kid's phone and explain. What about, Dr. Sachs, the question of privacy? You'll hear
00:41:45.440parents say, well, I need my child to trust me. And if she doesn't trust me, she's not going to
00:41:50.700tell me anything. So if she knows I'm sneaking around on her phone, or I'm sneaking in her room
00:41:56.160to read her diary, it's going to blow up to the relationship to where I'm no longer a resource for
00:42:01.500her. Well, you know, there's good things and bad things about the American Academy of Pediatrics.
00:42:08.580But in this domain of this question of how you balance that question of trust versus the dangers of social media and and smartphones, I think the American Academy of Pediatrics in this domain has done some very useful work.
00:42:28.740They hired all the leading experts who spent two years reviewing all the research.
00:42:35.480And the experts said, look, this is a new world and a new domain of immense risk and
00:45:48.400So you go on TikTok and TikTok begins by saying, I'm not interested in who you know.
00:45:52.800i'm interested in what you like to watch tell me what kind of videos you like to watch okay
00:45:57.460uh let me show you some videos and then the algorithm is watching you and the algorithm
00:46:02.860is crazy good and it starts customizing what it's showing you and after an hour you're seeing things
00:46:08.980you didn't even know were out there and it's it's so common to find teenagers say whoa tiktok knew i
00:46:15.480was gay before i did tiktok knew i was trans before i did and and then in 2021 researchers
00:46:21.440reached out to tiktok and said you know that the algorithm is really dangerous it's it's dragging
00:46:26.640kids especially girls down in this rabbit hole of it's valorizing anorexia and self-harm you got
00:46:32.500to change the algorithm and tiktok responded said okay we'll change the algorithm and then last year
00:46:36.780the researchers said you didn't make it better it's you made it worse it's getting worse
00:46:40.860and so i reached out to gene twangy and i said look look at the more recent studies
00:46:45.960This there is no safe point anymore that it's shifted left. The danger doesn't begin at 30 minutes anymore. It begins at zero time. And Jean Twain responded. She sent me back an email saying the research now supports a total ban on social media for all teens, for all children up below 18 years of age.
00:47:13.600The newer research in the era of TikTok, no social media for any kids.
00:47:18.920We can argue about whether it's 16 or whether it's 18, but the research now strongly supports
00:47:25.100no social media for any kid in the English-speaking world under 16 or 18 years of age.
00:47:34.120I mentioned the English-speaking world because there's an interesting factoid here.
00:47:39.680You know, everyone's been talking about this rise in anxiety and depression that has occurred in the last 15 years.
00:47:46.360And John Haidt and Gene Twenge and others have talked about how, oh, it's all because of the smartphones and the social media.
00:47:52.140But one thing that John Haidt and Gene Twenge haven't talked about much is that look at Greece, look at Russia.
00:47:58.300you have not seen that rise in anxiety and depression in greece and in russia even though
00:48:06.240kids in greece and russia are just as likely to have smartphones just as likely to have social
00:48:13.260media they're not they're not showing the rise in anxiety and depression well what's different
00:48:20.320okay i've made the argument that american popular culture has become toxic in a way that that's
00:48:28.280not true in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has changed in a way that it didn't
00:48:33.620change in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has become post-Christian in a way that0.68
00:48:39.020has not, I'm not crowding up Russia as a role model by any means, but American popular culture0.75
00:48:47.120is a post-Christian culture. It's a toxic culture of envy and disrespect in a way that maybe is not0.74
00:48:53.480true in Greece and Russia. And I think that's important because just locking down the smartphones
00:48:58.820is not enough. We also have to offer our kids a healthier culture.
00:49:06.780Yes, this is so good to hear. I mean, I feel like we've all experienced this in our day-to-day lives
00:49:12.560with the weird competitive strain amongst some kids where they're not rooting for their friends.
00:49:19.420They, you know, if one friend gets a home run, instead of cheering him on, the other teammate is like, put me in, I need to get a home run.
00:54:27.100All right. So I say to mom, you've got to get the video game console out of his bedroom. No video game, no video games. And you've got to limit how much time he's spending playing video games. You know, max 30 minutes a night on school nights and no video games after nine o'clock at night and no video game console in the bedroom. And mom says, I couldn't take the video game console out of his bedroom. He'd totally freak out.
00:54:49.600this is a parent who is unwilling to limit how much time her son is spending playing video games
00:54:59.320she is uncomfortable exercising her authority that is very common and that is also what i mean
00:55:08.000by the collapse of parenting parents who are uncomfortable exercising their authority and as
00:55:13.500a result this kid is not paying attention in class he doesn't have attention deficit disorder
00:55:19.580he's sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics attention deficit disorder of the
00:55:26.700inattentive variety. Vyvanse was immensely helpful. What's Vyvanse? What's Adderall?
00:55:33.460They're amphetamines. They're speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But
00:55:38.620the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not scheduled for amphetamines.
00:55:43.620and the psychiatrist failed to do a careful sleep history.
01:16:21.240and you know what is what is childhood for i mean literally a four-year-old child has barely begun
01:16:29.100a four-year-old horse is a mature adult and a horse is a bigger animal than a human so it can't
01:16:34.180just be about biological maturity because a horse as i said is a bigger animal and a horse is fully
01:16:40.360mature by four years of age a human is developing is immature for more years than most animals live
01:16:47.800why why does it take so long we don't have to guess we have scholars like dr melvin connor at
01:16:53.680emory who spent his entire career decades studying this question published this huge
01:16:58.220tome 800 pages oxford university press uh titled the evolution of childhood comparing development
01:17:04.700at our species with development other species and the answer he gives the reason it takes so many
01:17:10.680years, is that it takes many years for parents to teach the child right and wrong. And so I cite a
01:17:19.660column by a longtime columnist for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan, who wrote a column
01:17:25.040about enlightened parenting, in which she asserts, and I'm quoting that, she says that enlightened
01:17:30.040parenting means, and I quote, setting your child free to discover for themselves their own right
01:17:35.060and wrong and if in so doing your child becomes a stranger to you then so be it that may seem
01:17:41.140enlightened to some but it's not enlightened it's a dereliction of duty if you set your child free
01:17:46.560to discover themselves their own right and wrong and they have a device with internet access what
01:17:51.480they will discover is drake and bruno mars and megan the stallion and cardi b and and
01:17:56.840transgenderism and mainstream pornography, your job is to teach your child right and wrong,0.74
01:18:07.600to inscribe your law on the hearts of your child. That's Deuteronomy 6. That's your job as a parent.0.99
01:18:17.080Don't set your child loose to discover for themselves their own right and wrong. That's
01:18:20.680a dereliction of duty. Don't listen to the New York Times. Don't listen to National Public Radio.
01:18:25.100do your job as a parent. That's the message I'm trying to communicate in my book, The Glapse of
01:18:30.220Parenting. It's reminding me at our school, at our son's school, it's an all boys school,1.00
01:18:36.340they understand that students will make bad decisions and they'll do stupid things sometimes.0.94
01:18:43.360But the thing that will really get you expelled quickly is if you get called in to the head of0.95
01:18:49.200school's office and you lie about what you did. He's not calling you in there unless he's got
01:18:54.900you dead to rights. About half the time they've got cameras in the school. So he's already seen
01:18:59.580what you've done. And if you lie, you're out. He's pretty hardcore about that. If you own up to it
01:19:05.460and confess you were a numbskull, you know, you did something really stupid and you're sorry,1.00
01:19:09.600you will live to fight another day. But to your point, it's about the value system. Like honesty1.00
01:19:14.620is a, it's just a deal breaker. You can't, we can't have anything, can't have character if we
01:19:19.740don't have that fundamental basic honesty. Can I ask you something else? When another audience
01:19:23.740member asked, how do I know at what age I can start talking to my kids more as adults, being
01:19:32.800honest with them about my own thought process and why I'm not going to allow them to do this thing
01:19:37.700that they want to do or about the problems as I see it in the family, outside, whatever. How does
01:19:44.020one know what level of dialogue to have with one's kid? I think it really varies from one child to
01:19:50.420next. And as a rule, girls mature faster than boys do. Girls reach full maturity in brains
01:19:58.380development by about 22 years of age. Boys don't reach maturity in brain development until 300.72
01:20:03.640years of age. So that explains a lot if you think about it. And when in doubt, wait. I find a lot
01:20:11.160of parents that I think are confiding too early. And I know a boy who was very insecure because
01:20:19.660his mom was confiding a single mom was confiding in her son about how they were broke um and and
01:20:27.200um uh he took that literally and he thought that they literally didn't have money for food
01:20:32.820and he was very insecure until he graduated and went off to to uh college and realized that they
01:20:41.660actually were not that broke. And, and again, parents and sometimes single parents are a little
01:20:51.700bit more prone to this because they don't have an adult confidant. And they sometimes I've observed
01:20:57.540as a family doctor, they confide in their kids because they don't have a partner to confide in.
01:21:04.200And they're confiding in their 12 year old when maybe they shouldn't be. And as a result,
01:21:09.160that 12-year-old is insecure, more insecure than they have to be. So when in doubt, keep it to
01:21:16.180yourself is one general rule I've learned. I seem to remember you being a big proponent of chores
01:21:22.160and responsibilities for kids. Does that extend to, I had one audience member ask about, to what
01:21:30.000extent is it appropriate for me to ask the older kids to help me with the younger kids? Because
01:21:34.860the older kids have responsibilities of their own and they have grades they have to keep up and they
01:21:39.700have sports they have to make and like is it a dereliction of your parental duty to sort of
01:21:44.460fold in the older ones to help with the younger ones or is that a good thing no so there's a whole
01:21:50.140chapter in the new edition titled humility uh which i call the most un-american of virtues
01:21:56.060uh you know justin bieber had a big hit a few years back where he's saying i'm going to light
01:22:01.020up the sky like lightning and this world will belong to me. Being proud and standing tall and
01:22:09.000this world will belong to me. Those are very American characteristics. But we now have all
01:22:14.720these studies where researchers find that the kid with the highest self-esteem at 15 years of age
01:22:20.240is that individual who's most likely to be resentful and frustrated 10 years down the road.
01:22:27.340because if I'm so amazing at 15, how come I'm working for a low wage in a cubicle at 25 years
01:22:33.340of age? Actually, one of the best predictors of happiness and contentment at 15 years of age
01:22:40.120is humility, being humble. And yes, absolutely. And you'll find that for search in my book,
01:22:47.200The Collapse of Parenting, being humble, being grateful, powerfully and accurately predicts
01:22:53.440happiness and contentment. How do you teach humility? And again, parents are confused.
01:23:00.280They don't get this at all. When I speak to parents about the virtue of humility during
01:23:04.760question and answer, a mother said, I don't want to teach my daughter to be humble. That's
01:23:08.940ridiculous. I wanted to have my daughter to have a high self-esteem. So when that big job0.97
01:23:13.880opportunity comes along, she'll go for it. I want to teach my daughter to be humble. That's
01:23:17.840That's ridiculous. I said, mom, with all due respect, you're confused. You're confusing being0.99
01:23:23.980humble with being timid. Those are not the same thing. They're very nearly opposites. And the
01:23:30.000virtue you want for your daughter in the situation you're describing when a big job opportunity comes
01:23:34.320along, the virtue you want for your daughter is not high self-esteem. The virtue you want for your
01:23:41.600daughter in that situation is courage. Courage means you know your inadequacies, your failures,
01:23:51.020your shortcomings, and you find the strength to move forward anyhow. There is no courage without
01:23:57.720fear. High self-esteem is not the virtue that you're looking for. High self-esteem leads to
01:24:04.300frustration and resentment. And I can tell you this firsthand. I had a girl in my own practice
01:24:09.860who at age 15 had very high self-esteem. She wrote a short story and her English teacher
01:24:16.520wrote on it, A+++, you have a spark of the divine fire. And she went on to write several novels,
01:24:23.640couldn't get an agent, couldn't get a publisher. And at 23 years of age, she is seething with
01:24:28.560resentment and frustration and envy. Why did that girl get her novel published? I can't even get an0.57
01:24:34.640agent. I can't get a publisher. High self-esteem leads to frustration and envy. So you want to
01:24:40.740teach humility. Yes, you do. How do you teach humility, the right kind of humility? It begins
01:24:47.460with chores. It begins with chores. And again, many parents don't get this. Many parents don't
01:24:52.620get this. And they're like, okay, I want my daughter to get good grades. And we have the
01:24:59.840resources. We can hire a housekeeper. My daughter's job is school. Her job is school. So we can hire
01:25:05.460a housekeeper to do the chores. Many parents have said this to me. And the unintended message they're
01:25:11.460sending to their daughter is you're too important to make your bed. Don't do that. Don't send that
01:25:17.840message. Don't send that message. Chores is a great way to teach humility. And throughout the
01:25:24.520book, I follow the Phillips family, a family I've known now for 30 years. And it's an amazing story
01:25:30.160of an amazing family, Bill and Janet Phillips and their four sons. And I've been in touch with
01:25:38.700this family now for 30 years. And it's an affluent family, a big home in a mansion in
01:25:46.500Potomac, Maryland. And they had the money, they could have hired landscapers, but they didn't.
01:25:51.700They insisted that their four sons do all the chores.
01:25:55.560And I asked Janet, why did you do that?
01:25:57.840And she said, yeah, we could have hired landscapers, but I wanted them to learn the meaning of work, the value of work.
01:26:05.220And I quoted from her words in the book that, yeah, even if you have the money, you need to teach your kid to do this.
01:26:13.320And her son, Andrew, really one of the most amazing athletes I ever knew, have ever known in my 30 years as a family doctor, was recruited by Stanford, played on the Stanford football team alongside Andrew Luck.
01:26:30.660But he was playing at the Maryland program after 10th grade in high school.
01:26:39.920And the coach there had just said what a great football player he was and how he wanted to recruit him to play in Maryland.
01:26:45.740And his father said, oh, Andrew, I didn't tell you.
01:26:48.000You're going to be working on one of my boats this summer.
01:26:52.420He owned a fishing business, scraping guts off the deck.
01:26:56.220and andrew was so upset he wanted to do all this fun stuff this summer and instead he's scraping
01:27:01.380dead fish off of a salmon fishing boat next to this guy has just been released from prison a0.80
01:27:08.280convicted felon drug dealer uh mexican is talking about coming to jesus in the state penitentiary
01:27:14.460and but andrew said you know i learned something uh working alongside this drug dealer has come
01:27:21.180to Jesus, something I would never have learned at the upscale camp, learning about the value
01:27:30.580of hard work, learning humility, humility, the most un-American of virtues.
01:32:20.420At 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, the primary attachment should still be to the parents.
01:32:26.720And we've got so much research now showing that when it breaks too soon, at 23 years of age, now that girl is still now going to be texting her parents and saying, I don't know what to do.
01:32:43.640We've got this explosion of kids in their 20s and even 30s who are now living with their parents.
01:32:51.340There are more 30-year-olds living with their parents than has ever been the case in American history.
01:32:57.520It's a weird demographic reversal of failure to launch, of young people who now are unable to live independently because the acorn broke open too early.
01:33:12.560is the analogy I use in the new edition
01:33:39.060but I want to ask you this question when I come back.
01:33:40.820so how did any of us who were raised in the 70s or before survive because most of us had parents
01:33:48.620who totally ignored us and they were not the primary person really in our lives we were kind
01:33:53.360of alone and independent latchkey but we wound up okay oh that's a tease more with dr sex right
01:34:00.000after this so doc what do you make that so those of us who grew up in the 70s pretty much without
01:34:05.700parents who turned out fine. Absolutely. It was a much healthier culture. We're talking about the
01:34:12.480culture of the Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, Family Ties. And again, this is not a guess,
01:34:18.300this is not nostalgia. And I talk about this in the book and I talk about how the culture has
01:34:22.520changed and the culture of the last 15 years has become a much more toxic culture, a culture of
01:34:28.860envy and disrespect. And this is why the burden on parents now is much greater because now they
01:34:35.620have to do much more uh they have to do things that your parents never had to do they have to
01:34:41.340provide a culture which your parents didn't have to do your parents didn't have to be there
01:34:46.240for that but now parents today have to do so much more they have not only to provide a culture they
01:34:51.720have to block out all the toxicity and harm of the bad toxic culture of the disney channel and
01:35:00.520of TikTok and Instagram, and they have to provide a good, healthy culture. And they don't even know
01:35:07.520it. Many parents are not even aware of all the bad things that the culture is doing. So again,
01:35:13.640the mission of the book, the objective of the book is to wake parents up to make them aware that,
01:35:18.760look, your TV is an agent of this really bad culture. And you don't have to turn off the TV,
01:35:28.580uh but but but block out the disney channel you know home home and garden television that's okay
01:35:34.720the history channel is okay but not the disney channel uh and and your your your laptop is fine
01:35:40.920you can watch the megan kelly show but but not youtube youtube is spreading a lot of really bad
01:35:46.100stuff uh if you're going to watch youtube make sure you're there so you can watch the megan
01:35:51.440kelly show but not not not andrew tate for goodness sake oh my gosh i agree warning parents
01:35:57.840to block out the bad stuff, to, to all the things that you've got to know now as a parent,
01:36:03.020because American culture has changed. That's why it's so important.
01:36:08.020We have two minutes left with the SiriusXM audience. We're going to continue this over
01:36:11.480on podcast and youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. But in the two minutes we have left, one of our
01:36:15.620audience members wrote in, how do I deprogram a kid from the woke mind virus without losing them?
01:36:24.460You know, in our family, we've done a pre-inoculation against it, but a lot of parents got swept, their kids got swept into this, you know, when they didn't even know to inoculate them.
01:44:03.840Because let me tell you, in my mom's circles,
01:44:05.740There are all sorts of opinions on like, you're not going to stop it, like walk them through, like don't have more than one, don't have a mixed drink, you know, set some guardrails for them.
01:44:16.260Or there's moms who are like, absolutely not.
01:53:07.560Despite claims made by the transgender movement, the notion that there have always been boys who insist they're girls and girls who insist they're boys is really a very modern development.0.97
01:53:20.720It's a creation of modern medicine. Those medicines that that child talked about didn't exist a century ago, didn't exist a thousand years ago, could not have been obtained a hundred years ago.0.84
01:53:35.140And to what extent is this a real biological phenomenon? To what extent is this transgender movement created by the cultural movement and the politics?0.66
01:53:48.160You know what? We don't actually have to guess. Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Stanford Medical School did a study of 1,500 young adults, 20 to 35 years of age, and looked at their brain activity.
01:54:08.560These are young people, men and women, 20 to 35 years of age, and they are awake and
01:54:16.480they're in an MRI scan, and you're looking at their brain activity.
01:54:21.100Now, all human brains have a fingerprint, a neural fingerprint that is more unique to
01:54:26.340you than your own fingerprint on your finger.
01:54:29.420That's been known for many years, and the researchers wanted to know, does a man's
01:54:35.340fingerprint differ from a woman's fingerprint?
01:54:38.000um and the image that they um obtained that the graph that they showed is really astonishing
01:54:47.000um uh and there it is um so the women the listening audience it shows in the top left quadrant
01:54:54.920yes a bunch of red dots in the bottom right quadrant a bunch of blue dots and there's
01:54:59.560zero overlap the blue is yes there's no overlap so the the women are up in one corner and the
01:55:06.180men are all down in the other corner and there's no overlap. And the difference between the men
01:55:12.440and the women is larger than the variation among the men and the women. And what this graph is
01:55:18.540showing very clearly is that whatever is going on in the man's brain at rest is different from0.66
01:55:26.560what's going on in a woman's brain at rest. There were 1,500 individuals. Now, in a survey conducted
01:55:35.540earlier this year, more than 3% of American high school kids said that they were trans. Well,0.76
01:55:42.1003% of 1,500 would be 45. We ought to find 45 people in the middle or crossing over, but we found
01:55:56.900zero. Zero. And more from this study. Okay. So the researchers found-
01:56:06.800So what does that tell us? What does that tell us?
01:56:09.760It is telling us that these kids are confused. An XY male, that child in that video we just saw0.77
01:56:22.840is an XY male. Every cell in that individual's body is XY male. They may take female hormones,0.81
01:56:30.260they may be castrated, but they are still an XY male. And in my book, Why Gender Matters,0.98
01:56:39.860I show that boys see differently, they hear differently, they smell differently0.99
01:56:44.660than girls do. And that will not change. Now, that doesn't mean that all boys are one way and1.00
01:56:52.140all girls are another way. There's great variation among boys and there's great variation among
01:56:56.740girls. And we should celebrate and acknowledge those variations. But male and female are
01:57:03.640biological realities. They are not social constructs. And pretending that that is not so
01:57:12.660and castrating boys and giving them female hormones0.96
01:57:17.840is not going to be in that boy's best interest.0.95
01:57:22.660That is what this research is showing us.
01:57:27.640Possibly there may be rare exceptions.
02:33:52.360Well, I want to add one caveat here, just because it's important. It's easy to sit back in hindsight and make fun of it and kind of distance ourselves from what we had fallen for. I will say for me personally, I was all in on the curriculum. I was all in what I thought we were doing.
02:34:11.200so i one of the things that i don't like is when people don't own what they fell for and try to
02:34:18.020distance themselves from like you know i fell for this and it kind of minimizes the story and and
02:34:23.780the magnitude of of what can happen you know for me i was somewhat evangelical about like hey this
02:34:29.820is these are ethics these are changing the world yes i thought keith was was weird but i was i was
02:34:34.380hook line and sinker bought into what we were doing and not totally sold on Keith, but like
02:34:41.500didn't think there was bad things going on there in the way that they were. So I think it's important
02:34:45.860to own that that's, you know, how I got myself in the situation and not minimize the fact that I did
02:34:52.760fall for this thing. It's easy to laugh at now. So anyway, I just think it's important. I don't
02:34:58.960want to, I don't want to punch down on people that are in that situation because I do think
02:35:02.900you have to go take the bite out of that and really lean into it to understand what happened
02:35:07.000to you so all it's fun and kidding but and then just putting that out there yeah and it's
02:35:13.160therapeutic to laugh after the fact too it is it is i have plenty of i would not be through this
02:35:18.860trauma if it wasn't for the way that nippy and i can laugh about it and continue to uh but to
02:35:23.960answer your question i think for me it's a little different i even though he was a schlub and i
02:35:28.500wasn't attracted to him, I was greatly respectful of what I thought that he built. I thought his
02:35:34.640mind created this tech, which is another red flag, by the way, that curriculum, it's not a
02:35:39.840technology, but we had been so changed by it. And I thought that came from him. And I obviously now
02:35:46.240know that he stole that from a number of other modalities that already exist and packaged it as
02:35:50.680his own. But then he was also propped up by these women that seem to have their lives together and
02:35:56.500people that I really liked and respected. So I was getting so many of my social and emotional
02:36:02.420and spiritual needs met very, very quickly. Community, meaning, I was helping myself. I was
02:36:09.560growing, but I got to help others. I got to give people the transformational experience that I was
02:36:14.360getting, which totally filled my cup. I felt special. I got taken under the wing of women
02:36:20.580that I really looked up to and they were going to help me grow. And also it was measurable,
02:36:24.920The stride path, the martial arts system of growth was so different than acting, which
02:36:30.600is what I've been doing before, which is, you know, you never know if you're going to
02:37:22.440but if you could do it here you can do it in new york i know i should know this um
02:37:28.280all right he's ready to have fun yeah all right okay so in order to have fun we don't want anyone
02:37:37.340to get hurt right no not fun enough who here is here to have fun fun yeah come on fun
02:37:47.000okay you should be trying to turn up their energy level okay when the audience gives
02:37:54.140you the signal that they got it you move you move you move
02:37:57.480this is actually good i mean i'm listening i'm like that's all good advice i think
02:38:04.180he was teaching um basic rapport skills of how to like lead a group uh in the room but i haven't
02:38:11.700actually seen that since the vow came out i forgot how painful that was a to watch and b
02:38:15.760in the moment. And that was actually one of the only times I was ever trained by Keith
02:38:19.740personally in sales. And all I could think of was how beautiful you are. You're so beautiful. Like
02:38:25.500your angle, the angles of your face and your, the earnestness of you standing up there,
02:38:29.620actually trying to learn it. And I see it though, like he's charming and what he's saying to you
02:38:33.740makes sense of how to relate to a crowd. He's actually trying to improve you. He's trying to
02:38:37.660improve you, I think, to sell his products and get more buyers into his cult. No.
02:38:41.720yes but also he was humiliating me i don't remember if you see it in the whole clip but
02:38:47.660like he pushed me and pushed me and pushed me trying to get me to break down and i refused
02:38:51.800to cry and at the end he gave me a little crumb and said good job and that's when i remember
02:38:56.740like looking back that that's how he controlled so many of the women he was always humiliating them
02:39:02.180subtly under the guise of trying to develop them and then would give them these little crumbs of
02:39:07.380um attention and affirmation that they were on track and that he didn't really mess with me much
02:39:13.880mostly because i think i was out in vancouver just bringing new fresh students to him so he
02:39:19.420didn't do that a lot with me but that was a particular painful moment that i'd actually
02:39:24.960completely forgot about till i saw the vow and was horrified i also don't think you're susceptible
02:39:29.900in the same ways i was not susceptible in the same ways well we've since learned through mostly
02:39:37.240through our podcast and interviewing other, you know, survivors and experts, especially
02:39:41.460experts on gaslighting and narcissism and cults that a lot of these guys really look
02:39:46.500for, it's such a, I hate to use the word, but like daddy issues, but like a bad attachment
02:39:52.600with their father in some case, or bad, not good attachment with the parents.
02:39:57.000So then Keith would step in and be that father figure to a lot of these women, you know,
02:40:02.640to grow them, to coach them similar to how he was doing with Alison in that clip.
02:40:06.320he never reached me in that way uh partly I think because I have a great relationship with my dad
02:40:11.760and um strong attachment if you believe in those theories with my parents um so I mean he got me
02:40:17.040in other ways but not that way thank goodness and also you know being with Nippy uh long-term
02:40:24.180protected me um and which I think also infuriated him knowing what we know now yes yes oh god I can
02:40:31.220relate to all of this too I was just thinking like when Roger L started to feel like I was
02:40:36.300getting out from under his thumb and I was not, you know, just going to do whatever he wanted me
02:40:42.460to do or say whatever he wanted me to say, he started to insult me like a fair amount behind
02:40:47.560the scenes to try to, you know, cut down my confidence. And I just, I don't know if I'd
02:40:54.100identified that. I always just sort of attributed it to anger, but it, you're giving me a new way
02:40:59.820to think of it almost you know like it's it's a manipulation almost like to change you so that
02:41:06.940you'll go back to the way you were there's a term negging i don't know if you've heard it and it's
02:41:12.800i don't i don't know the book yeah it's from the game and the idea is as i understand it is i'll
02:41:20.360give you a little bit of approval so it feels good and then you'll always be chasing that approval
02:41:24.320and then also you start and so like the person it's it's actually a dating yeah training for
02:41:30.780men yeah to try to get women like men who can't just like date women normally would learn this
02:41:37.400way of like yeah it's basically dropping these little breadcrumbs of approval but then also
02:41:41.360the negging is sort of like an insult these little insults like establish interest and then take it
02:41:46.400away so that you'll want it more it's why you see sometimes women with these men you're like what is0.98
02:41:50.760going on there because they're like giving it's almost like a microcosm of um sex trafficking and
02:41:56.120grooming it's uh love bombing and then a couple episodes where women have described this valuing
02:42:02.680you know the cult of one you know we've had some episodes where people um have described this
02:42:08.120strategy um where men target women find their vulnerabilities and exploit it in that way and
02:42:14.600And depending on, I'm kind of out of my lane here, but depending on your attachment, say, with a loved one or a previous loved one or something like that, they recognize now that you might be vulnerable to that strategy.
02:42:30.100And if not, you might be vulnerable to another one.
02:42:32.160And this is how they operate, and this is how they work, and this is how they filter a room.
02:42:35.400I think they can walk into a room, according to some interviews we've had, and spot the person just by the way they look, by the care of themselves.
02:42:43.860because they have such in so much intel and such a body of work on people that they can kind of
02:42:49.680scan a room and go this person probably is susceptible to this this this and this yeah
02:42:54.920right and they do find out what your issues were i mean i was more like you sarah where i didn't
02:42:59.140really have that many i mean i thankfully i come from a great family though my dad died when i was
02:43:03.820young but a very loving family and i was a strong person but you can still get sucked in it it doesn't
02:43:11.160just happen to weak people i like it happens to strong weak people with issues people who have
02:43:17.320almost no issues it's that's one of the things i hope people take away from your story is like
02:43:21.880absolutely yeah a lot of these women were very strong very smart accomplished and before they
02:43:28.580knew it you know they were on the table without their clothes on saying it would be my honor if0.75
02:43:33.900you would do this thing to me um so let's let's push it forward a little can we just talk one
02:43:39.360minute about the seagrams heirs because he he had strong and powerful and very wealthy backers
02:43:48.760too because you know you wonder like nexium wasn't just in albany it was in quite a few places here
02:43:53.920you're canadian um he branched out quite a bit and he had some important financial backers so
02:44:00.740can you talk about these this pair of sisters the bronfmans you want to feel that one i mean you
02:44:08.560can chime in when you as i understand it um because again sarah and i weren't the inner circle
02:44:15.740right so you have to understand we we we are observing it from the outside but what we've
02:44:20.980gathered and what court documents have gathered is that i think and this is what we've kind of
02:44:27.040ascertained is once they came in they became made that they the admitted powers that be made them
02:44:33.180special and promoted them very quickly and sure as i as i understand it's like getting a bezos or
02:44:39.720a gates who wants to join your organization and help fund sure they were vips and they were
02:44:46.100targeted and i think claire from my assessment was a little bit uh susceptible more susceptible1.00
02:44:52.700when she was put in a position of authority and power and kind of ushered to the top where she
02:44:57.540was making decisions but really it was keith making decisions um sarah less so because i think
02:45:02.520sarah you know wanted other things i worked with sarah a little bit in new york city because we
02:45:07.660ran the center there for a little bit and i just think she constantly struggled with her commitment
02:45:11.900to the organization i think she wanted a husband a family and that's ultimately what she ended up
02:45:16.920doing so she ended up being peripheral ultimately but her sister was so it was claire claire was
02:45:22.540the one who held on to the bitter end i mean she was like the cops were taking him away she's still
02:45:27.500like no still till now yeah yeah still now wow she's in jail and she got the maximum sentence
02:45:34.180for her crimes she got tripled the suggested amount because she refused to disavow keith
02:45:41.360in court incredible this is i think i said but this is the heir to the seagram's liquor fortune
02:45:48.760and beverage fortune yeah um okay so you guys were things were kind of rolling along and then
02:45:55.520something critical happened to you, Sarah, where your best friend, who we mentioned,
02:46:00.480who was the daughter of the co-founder, Lauren, came to you and wanted you to do something that
02:46:08.340would make you extra special, like sort of an exclusive thing that she wanted to share with you0.99
02:46:13.220as your best friend and in this lane of female empowerment. Can you explain what happened?
02:46:20.000Sure. And there's a lot of steps that led to this point. And this is often where people
02:46:24.420stop and go, sorry, what happened? And I need to give a little backstory, which is this is,
02:46:29.460you know, 12 years into the organization. We've had our first child. I'm starting to pull back.
02:46:34.400I'm starting to recognize I want other things. And being a mom is more important to me than
02:46:38.500growing this, this company. And I get invited to a secret sorority. I've never been in a sorority,
02:46:45.300a secret club for women, by women, badass, sounds so dumb now, badass bitch bootcamp,0.98
02:46:51.680We're going to work on ourselves and take the tools to a whole new level, although it's got nothing to do with NXIVM.0.97
02:46:58.620And I sign up thinking this is going to take everything I've been working on to the next level.
02:47:05.060Also, Lauren invited me and I trust her implicitly.
02:47:07.660She was also, you know, she's our son's godmother, married us at our wedding.
02:47:15.300And it was many, many, many steps that occurred from saying yes to that and then being fully committed to this organization called DOS, which I didn't know what it meant until after the fact.
02:49:07.300And you'll have six slaves and then you'll be a grandmaster.0.99
02:49:10.780I'm like, you know, keep in mind, every step along the way is totally weird, just like sashes are weird.0.89
02:49:17.280But then Lauren explains it, and it's like a little less weird.
02:49:24.600And I think we should tell the audience about collateral before we talk about what happened next, because this was an important piece of the story.
02:49:32.520Can you explain what collateral meant within NXIVM or within DOS?
02:49:35.780sure so even before DOS was introduced there was this term called collateral
02:49:40.840and brilliantly Keith set this up for years before this ever happened I mean think about
02:49:48.440if I joined in 2005 and they would have told me that 12 years later I would have the leader's
02:49:54.000initials on my body I probably would have run for the hills but didn't happen that that way
02:49:59.220And I would say in around 2010, 11 is when collateral got introduced and it was, it was earlier. It was much earlier than this. It was 2017 that I got branded. And collateral was basically a term that, well, it's a term in the English language, but NXIVM, it was something that you'd put down as a commitment against your word. Is that something?
02:50:22.040yeah like if you were going to do a goal around weight loss or writing a screenplay you'd
02:50:27.840say if I don't do x y and z I'm putting this 500 down and it's consequence gonna go yeah gonna go
02:50:33.380to charity or something or I'm gonna donate it to the center or I'm gonna whatever and that was
02:50:38.180also mixed with penance which I think if anyone's religious I was not religious I didn't understand
02:50:43.200the term or have any background to it but penance was a part of it as well people were doing penances
02:50:48.020and putting down collaterals against their word.
02:50:52.000And in Naxiom, your word, your commitment, your integrity,
02:51:12.340And one of those things was commitment, your word.
02:51:14.980And so it was very normal to give collateral to back something up.
02:51:20.420And then it went next level in DOS, as I understand it, where they didn't want you to just give $500.
02:51:28.620They wanted something much more personal and potentially damaging.
02:51:33.760Yeah. And every step along the way with DOS, there was more and more collateral.
02:51:38.080And then once I had finally fully committed, I found out that there was going to be collateral collected every month.
02:51:44.040So people were giving things like nude photos, like sexual videos, false testimonies, false accusations of like the worst possible thing you could say against your parents that your master would hold so that if you ever defected or left the group that those things would be released, those letters would be released.
02:52:04.520one person i think that wrote that their parents had molested them um or that uh there was a lawyer
02:52:10.520involved who said that she had falsified evidence of a trial that would have gotten her disbarred
02:52:14.340terrible terrible things but these things were meant we were told to keep help you keep your
02:52:20.640word never to be released otherwise that would be blackmail which is what it was that's the
02:52:26.200appropriate word i mean speaking of scientology yeah exactly i mean when we just to jump to later
02:52:33.360deprogramming and watching Going Clear and all the Scientology content, I was just blown away
02:52:38.900by the similarities there. The collection of all the secrets, which also happened in NXIVM even
02:52:45.040before DOS was introduced. When you came to do a training, you'd write down on the intake form
02:52:49.540what your goals were, why you were there. What was your worst moment ever in your life? What was
02:52:53.800your worst decision? I mean, depending on bad things you may or may not have done in your life,
02:52:58.540those things in the wrong hands, 100% be blackmail.
02:54:32.320Like, and I, you know, I knew Lauren well, I had been, you know, I changed in front of
02:54:37.980her and like laid down naked and like, it's just, it's crazy.
02:54:42.380It's, I understand how crazy it is.0.96
02:54:44.640And, you know, it's it's hard to it's hard to explain 12 years of indoctrination to lead one to this point to understand what could be going on in my psychology that I would say, OK, and not like this is fucking weird.
02:55:00.960And like call Nippy to come pick me up because he dropped me off to have what he thought was soup and salad girls night or something.0.73
02:55:07.720Oh, boy. You guys you guys are married at this point, right?
02:55:10.360You're married. You have a son at this point, two year old.
03:10:09.340There was evidence of that submitted during his 2019 trial.
03:10:14.560This clip we're going to play here is via USA Today, and it's Keith and the actress Alison Mack, who we've mentioned a couple times here.
03:10:22.720She was one of the stars of the show Smallville and was a critical part of all this, including Doss and the branding and so on, and then a master of, quote, slaves, and his sort of right-hand person.
03:10:34.460And here's the two of them on tape discussing the brand.
03:10:38.380Do you think the person who's being branded should be completely nude and sort of held to the table like a sort of almost like a sacrifice?
03:10:50.280I don't know if that's a feeling of submission, you know, videoing it from different angles or whatever gives collateral.
03:11:03.320It probably should be a more vulnerable position.
03:11:08.380type of a thing back leg slightly for a leg spread straight like being feet being held to
03:11:15.000the side of the table hands probably above the head being held almost like tied down like a
03:11:19.440sacrificial whatever and the person should ask to be branded
03:11:23.820okay should say please brand me it would be an honor or something like that
03:11:30.820an honor i want to wear for the rest of my life i don't know
03:11:34.020And they did make the women say something like that, something along the lines of honor.
03:11:45.300Master, would you brand me it would be an honor, which is basically him proving in his mind that we asked for it, that it was a consensual thing.
03:11:53.840Oh, that must be so galling to listen to.
03:11:59.000And also vindicating because he's in jail.
03:12:01.200And to that point, there were still people saying who were defending him. He had nothing to do with the branding. This is a bunch of women who made some bad decisions and they shouldn't have done it. And Keith had nothing to do with the branding. And now there's video or audio evidence of not only that he knew about it, but he came up with the idea of how to do it and pass it off to Allison so that she would take the fall.
03:12:24.760So it's triply, there's no word, astonishing, horrific, all the things.
03:12:33.200You get the deep inside of a guy who's just diabolical.
03:12:51.600I mean, he was having young women who he was brainwashing into starving themselves nearly to death, entering this so-called sisterhood, which was really a sex cult, meant to service him.
03:13:05.020You weren't one of those, Sarah, right?
03:13:06.740But many other women were basically being groomed.0.99
03:13:18.360When people say you chose it, you could have left, whatever.
03:13:20.400it's really important to understand in my mind, I've committed to this game, like in a fraternity
03:13:25.760or sorority where someone's telling me what to do. And I'm saying, yes, because that's the
03:13:29.940commitment. A vow of obedience is what I've done. I think this is an exercise. And one of my
03:13:35.640exercises is to get this brand. So I do it. Other women had other things. And so the collateral,
03:13:41.420this is a key point. It's like a gun to the head. If you don't do the things, your collateral is
03:13:45.600going to be released so that's not really a choice in the cult space they call it uh about
03:13:51.100about uh binded choice abounded sorry bounded choice abounded choice where like there there0.98
03:13:57.520there's no actually no way out you you have to do the black man yes so the other women had0.95
03:14:03.980assignments like you know go seduce keith india talked about that in in her story that that was0.96
03:14:10.360her assignment and other women had to do other things with keith and that was their assignment0.96
03:14:15.220And that's what they committed to. And they went along with it as well, because what are you going to do? You're going to lose everything and also admit, hey, I just made a really bad decision, which is one of the components of it that keeps people kind of, you know, doubling down.
03:14:30.020the um india oxenberg story she's katherine's daughter they join this again katherine has
03:14:38.220such guilt over this because she thought she was bringing her daughter to a self-help0.97
03:14:42.700program yeah to help her learn business skills and did not foresee what was going to happen
03:14:48.460shortly into it katherine recognized this is not for me i i don't know i'm out but india was
03:14:55.160getting something out of the lessons and stayed. And before Catherine knew it, India was completely
03:15:02.480untethered from her, was being intentionally separated from her, her loving mother. And
03:15:08.520Catherine knew she's gone. And now it's turned from like, it's turned into a rescue operation
03:15:16.380and was doing everything within her power to try to get India back. But India at this point is0.51
03:15:21.920brainwashed. And the mere threat of like, I'm going to take you out. You need to get out. Keith1.00
03:15:27.840is a threat would otherize Catherine even more. I mean, that the person who's inside the cult is
03:15:32.900like, oh, hell no. And Catherine spoke to me in her first interview about this before India had
03:15:41.180got and pulled out before Keith had been arrested. And India and Catherine is a very well-known
03:15:48.820Hollywood actor, and going to the media was truly her last resort. Here's a little bit of that
03:15:56.080interview from early, or it was late 2017. Any program that seduces people to abandon their
03:16:04.940lives to serve their agenda rather than empowering your pre-existing life, there's something off
03:16:10.360about that. So I watched her get sucked in. The more I learned, because defectors came and told
03:16:15.840me about their experiences, the more concerned I became. And I realized that I did, well, I did0.89
03:16:21.640an intervention with her at the end of May and I failed. This is my last resort, going to the media.
03:16:26.860My daughter is very, very angry with me right now. And she has every right to be angry with me0.70
03:16:31.840because I would hate my mom if my mom came out and publicly exposed her in this way, exposed me.
03:16:38.840But I love her to the end of the world. And I am only doing this to bring awareness because
03:16:44.500without awareness there can be no outrage and unless there's outrage the authorities are not
03:16:48.820going to step in and do what they should do which is shut this down oh what's your reaction to seeing
03:16:57.140that sarah i remember that interview i was so grateful i don't know if you remember but i was
03:17:03.440your team had asked me to be there and i i wasn't um emotionally strong enough to to do live um tv
03:17:10.600I just didn't think I could handle it. But I was so grateful that Catherine had the strength to speak when we couldn't and brings back a lot of memories of a time when, you know, we were all just throwing our punches and that media punch and, you know, Catherine's role in the takedown was really important.
03:17:28.920we all had a very different role me with showing the physical abuse and um mark vicente and bonnie
03:17:36.580and katherine like and nippy like there was there wasn't many of us that were willing to talk people
03:17:41.240before us too yeah and people before us who tried and in 2009 like it just like this was a fight
03:17:47.540that took so much of our life force you know our life force in it and resources and resources and
03:17:53.320And then afterwards, and watching it, it just brings back a lot of memories of a very stressful time
03:17:59.500because we didn't know what was going to happen in the trial.
03:18:01.560We didn't know if Keith was going to be convicted or not.
03:18:04.540Even now to this day, he's still appealing.
03:18:07.560You know, a couple this week found out his third or fourth appeal was denied.
03:19:04.980I just tell it because I bet there's a million women out there and guys who tell themselves stories about, oh, it's something about me.1.00
03:19:12.320Why I didn't get this thing or why I didn't get invited to this thing or this person didn't say yes to my invitation.
03:19:17.940We make up the worst stories about ourselves.
03:19:19.820Like there's something wrong with me. I'm, I'm branded too. Right. I'm branded in a way. And then you, you know, you talk to the person, you find out I'm a fucking idiot. Why do I do this to myself?
03:19:30.560i love that you shared that and i love that i got to to tell you because it's you know it's been a
03:19:38.880long time a long time coming and i've been so grateful for your um activism around it because
03:19:44.640it was such a that interview was such a um an extra punch in an already um very we just didn't
03:19:52.380know it was going to happen and that was that really helped us so because the authorities
03:19:55.880weren't doing anything no they weren't doing anything no no no i mean they did for the record
03:20:02.060i show sarah clips of of meg and kelly on off twitter i go see she gets it oh yeah you get it0.84
03:20:08.260we we we we know you get it yeah oh thank you especially the coffee shit everywhere right now0.81
03:20:16.540oh i mean it's terrifying and the more vulnerable people are post-covid and in our weird world where0.98
03:20:22.520We don't know who to trust, and the media's falling apart, even more so.
03:20:26.740So finally, the police, the FBI, they do get involved.
03:20:30.540It took all of you, all the names you just mentioned, Catherine, all of you.
03:20:34.860And by the way, I should mention before I forget, India, thank God, finally saw the light, got out,
03:20:41.560and did her own documentary that she did on her own terms.
03:20:45.900And so I was very happy for her and for Catherine, too.
03:20:48.540I mean, that story individually is just about a mother's incredible love for her child and what a mother will do.
03:20:54.000But she's in this, the vow to all of you are there working, as you say, your own pieces of it.
03:20:58.820Everybody had a different sort of gift and a risk to take.
03:21:01.980And ultimately he does, he does get brought down.0.59
03:21:05.780He gets arrested in Mexico and still the top echelon of the women are like running after the car as they take him away.
03:21:14.900They just were completely brainwashed.0.66
03:21:48.540i did think that he would that he was a flight risk there you know claire owned this island in
03:21:56.100fiji and um i did we i just really did think that he would get away with it somehow even with the
03:22:02.620every appeal i'm like oh my goodness we're gonna are we going back to square one he is so
03:22:07.320manipulative he's so conniving he's such a sociopath will he get out of it i mean there0.96
03:22:13.160There was a point where I remember thinking, shit, this is going to be the next five to ten years of our life with Claire Bronfman just filing suits against us, bankrupting us, you know, because that's what she did.0.97
03:22:26.220That's what she did, very litigious on his behalf.0.99
03:22:29.900Yeah, and I just remember thinking, shit, this is not good.0.98
03:22:33.100And I remember thinking about my kids, you know, when my one son at the time was like, his childhood is going to have this going on until he's nine or ten.0.95
03:22:42.240and i just remember thinking like and then once the new york times article came out
03:22:47.780i felt i didn't feel entirely safe but i felt safer because i knew they had other problems
03:22:55.540and sarah and nippy weren't you know enemy number one we were because they had to put out a lot more
03:23:02.660fires because a lot more people were speaking and a lot of other problems were happening and
03:30:57.060And then the HBO documentary came out in COVID and then our lives blew up again in a very strange and also very meaningful way to have people reach out to us and say, holy shit, I didn't realize I was in a cult or in a abusive relationship until I saw The Vow and like thousands of messages and letters.
03:31:19.240And because it was COVID and we'd stopped acting, we decided to start a little podcast to keep the conversations going.
03:31:27.520Well, we had someone reach out to us whose birthday it is today, actually.
03:31:31.000Our associate producer, Jess Tardy, wrote us an email and said, you guys should do a podcast and laid out a season for us.
03:31:39.040Call it a little bit culty, call it this.
03:33:17.180I was going to say, serendipitously, as we've educated ourselves on what goes on in cults, a lot of the parallels that go on there are going on everywhere you look, whether it be in politics, whether it be with the vaccine.
03:33:33.980There's not any real field that's not immune to what these abuses of power look like and sound like.
03:33:40.140So putting language to it has been educational, and it's also been a really important journey for us because we're running into it in our day-to-day lives.
03:33:51.800And I want my kids to know what this looks like and sounds like, and I want other people to know what it looks like and sounds like.
03:33:57.000And I think if people are armed with this education, armed with this language, they can walk into situations and point it out in real time.
03:34:03.560So when you're faced with something like in your situation or other people's situations, they can go, oh, that's just like this.
03:34:09.600just like this and they can at least attempt to have a civil discourse about it and when the
03:34:14.520red flags come up they'll know what they're looking at so they can make an informed decision
03:34:18.520it's a way of inoculating yourself to be informed and to recognize these warning signs and just know
03:34:26.000when it comes to you whether it's in a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a business an employer or
03:34:30.920a real live cult that you may have inadvertently fallen into thank you both so much for coming on
03:36:44.740Much of the world is still shut down due to COVID.
03:36:47.860Our family still living in Manhattan and getting ready to travel south
03:36:51.880for the weekend for my nephew's wedding.
03:36:54.720As I pack up that Friday, my husband Doug calls, relaying that he has just heard from his then 84-year-old mother, Jackie, in Philadelphia.
03:37:04.260She's received a disturbing phone call from her daughter, Diane.
03:37:09.100Diane and her partner, Brad, are oyster fishermen on Cape Cod.
03:37:12.940she was hysterical sobbing and couldn't complete a full sentence but she said that she was in jail
03:37:28.620on a drunk driving charge and that um she we i needed to get talk to somebody
03:38:36.480I called the number, and he told me that the court was closed on Friday, and it was COVID, so they had limited times when you could get in, and he told me to call this lawyer, whose name I can't remember,
03:39:03.700and he would walk me through getting the bail money.
03:39:10.060So this was the court that you were talking to saying,
03:39:14.780you need to talk to a lawyer, here's a number you can call.
03:45:46.600We are picking up my conversation with Doug about what happened as soon as we got the instructions on how to get the crypto delivered.
03:45:56.140So I remember you were in Manhattan at the time.
03:45:59.340So I guess he went online and found locations where they have crypto kiosks where you can basically insert cash and it comes out on the other end as cryptocurrency.
03:48:05.780Yes, Doug and I, with all of our so-called higher education and city sophistication, had almost been had by some con man until Steve, the Cape Cod whale watch guy, shut the whole thing down.
03:48:20.440So I just stopped and took a breath and thought it out a little bit and it just didn't make any sense to me at all.
03:48:30.060He's just, he is so incredibly capable at every aspect of life.
03:49:00.060Like, he's not, like, he told us after the fact, yeah, he's like, yeah, I mean, when I answered the phone and it was Steve, he said, oh, good, you're home.
03:49:38.680So Steve figured this whole thing out.
03:49:42.300And Doug and I began asking ourselves, how on earth did we almost fall for this nonsense?
03:49:49.040Well, it all boiled down to one thing in our defense.
03:49:53.560We believed that Doug's mom had actually spoken with Diane.
03:49:58.020That was the key to this whole thing running us out as long as it did, because what we thought we had in the category of things we know wasn't right.
03:50:18.920And then, of course, COVID was just opening the door to so many of these stupid things because we're all, everything was ridiculous then.0.99
03:50:24.980Yeah, that's why they didn't, she didn't get it.0.98
03:50:28.020Your mom heard a hysterical adult woman claiming she had broken her nose,0.99
03:50:32.700which would explain a differed voice, and she went with it.1.00
03:57:10.320I haven't gone down there yet because I don't have the verification.
03:57:13.980Don't I need the verification before I can send anything?
03:57:16.000You're going to have to get on the chat and contact them because it could be that maybe the pictures were not legible or something like that.
03:57:26.240But if you go on the coinsource.net, you can actually get on the chat with them and ask them what's the status of your verification.
03:57:34.700All right. I'm worried about them sitting there all day. Is there any other way of doing this?
03:57:40.860I did contact the court and explain to them about, you know, the shutdown there.
03:57:46.700And they were, you know, it's unconstitutional to keep them there.
03:57:50.320So we've got enough time to get them out.
03:57:53.000We just have to try to pay the bails to get them out.
03:58:41.580You know, I'm pretty sure it's going to come back below the levels because that's what she, you know, she promised me that she was not drinking.
03:58:47.860No, there is zero chance that she was drinking.0.95
04:07:12.500Wolves go after the weakest sheep, the slowest, the oldest, the ones most vulnerable.
04:07:17.560And just to make a point, while we're laughing here, this is done in various machinations every day.
04:07:23.960Elderly women who are lonely, you know, the Lonely Hearts Club.
04:07:27.540I've had, through friends and family, I'd say about a baker's dozen cases where women in their 60s and 70s have sold their homes, have taken loans, sent that money, knowing them only a week.1.00
04:14:43.720number one, right? And how do you know my house is for sale? Oh, we'll pay cash. Oh, can I show
04:14:49.240your house? Because there are services that you pay into and you get certain demographics. So for
04:14:55.320me, I'm selling my house. There are elderly groups. If she ever signed on to any AARP or some type of1.00
04:15:03.140association, those lots of, you know, the intelligence gathering of who you are, what you
04:15:10.200are what demographic you are the same way advertisers buy that voters like the campaign yes
04:15:15.960the campaigns are getting all that information right now the same way uh you know certain
04:15:20.300demographics want that information for sales they get it for marks to mark you as a victim
04:15:26.120they can find out about us and it's scary and it's the basic psychology you see when we're in
04:15:31.480our home you're an old elderly elderly lady you may be widowed you're all alone and your primary
04:15:36.440thing is to go to the market, to get that sale and come home. You're hit out of the blue with a
04:15:43.480member of your family that's in distress and you could hit that button and you're going to be
04:15:48.560walked through it to get them out of trouble. That's what you live for. And they know that.
04:15:53.800There are so many people who are in this exact position right now. And it's like,
04:15:57.640I think my audience is in general, they're a lot younger than 87. So I urge everybody,
04:16:03.500speak to your parent speak to your great aunt speak to anybody who's in this age group and
04:16:08.180speak to your friends too because it's not just the elderly and let them know that this this is
04:16:13.140out there whether it's whether this it's this particular one whether it's they hack into your
04:16:19.040computer whether you're on one of those dating sites they go to the basic emotion and need and
04:16:25.180insecurity of people and just realize take that breath take a step back because nothing is unless
04:16:32.480Unless you're in a car crash where you have to hit that brake, you know, hit the brake in your mind, hit that cyber brake, hit that telephone brake and ask questions and say, give me a number.
04:16:44.100It can wait 10 minutes and that could save you a whole bunch of money, a whole bunch.
04:16:47.740And I will say in that fraud that I mentioned that the business reporter wrote up about that happened to her and in this attempted fraud of us, one of the things that she didn't do and that we didn't do and should have done was to do an independent Google search of the number of the courthouse or in her case.
04:17:06.360I don't remember that it was like that.
04:17:07.480She said they said she was getting investigated by the federal government.
04:17:11.240But whoever they say is the third party.0.99