The Megyn Kelly Show - Secrets to Living Longer and Better, with Tony Robbins, and Hollywood Captured by China, with Erich Schwartzel ｜ Ep. 259

00:00:00.540 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.880 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have an interesting

00:00:15.920 program for you today. It's going to make you think and have fun and offer some promise while

00:00:20.760 doing it. We've got two authors of new books, one whose name you know very well. We'll start

00:00:26.180 with him in one moment. But later we are diving into the way China has captured Hollywood. 0.59

00:00:31.980 This is fascinating. You know how like Hollywood movies these days seem boring and scrubbed

00:00:38.560 and designed to only appeal to one subset of our population. There are really interesting

00:00:43.700 reasons for that. And we're going to walk through it through the ball. But my first guest today

00:00:48.560 is a bestselling author, philanthropist, and all around inspirational guy who everyone loves

00:00:53.960 and people pay lots of money to go see because everyone just wants a piece of Tony Robbins

00:00:59.300 inspo, right? His wisdom. And he's written some of it down in a new book called Life Force,

00:01:07.660 how new breakthroughs in precision medicine can transform the quality of your life and those

00:01:12.960 you love. It's full of tips on how to increase energy, boost your immune system, and most importantly

00:01:19.040 and interestingly, I think, turn back your biological clock. Yes, you want to live longer, but not

00:01:23.820 if you can't live well. Well, he takes a hard look on at how that's possible and says the notion of

00:01:29.880 what it means to be old or middle aged is about to change dramatically, that 80 will soon be the

00:01:36.320 new 50. Tony, thank you so much for being here. Nice to see you, Megan. I've been a fan of yours

00:01:42.120 for years and years, all the way back to Fox time. So thanks for having me on. You're amazing.

00:01:46.080 That's so nice to hear. Thank you so much. All right. So you are here to do something really

00:01:49.320 important, which is help us not just live longer, but live better and become CEO of our own health

00:01:56.040 care. Let's start with why this is important to you. Why did you write this book? You don't you

00:01:59.520 don't need the money. You don't have to be doing this. So why did you like why did you take on this

00:02:03.300 cause? I'm also donating 100 percent, as I've done with the last three books. We're going to feed 20

00:02:07.940 million people through Feeding America. I've been feeding. I committed to feed 100 million people a

00:02:12.020 year for 10 years to a billion people. In the last seven years, we're up to 850 million. So I'm really

00:02:16.760 proud of it. But I wrote it because there's a revolution that's happening right now in our

00:02:21.760 medicine. There's something called precision medicine. And it's very different than anything

00:02:25.680 we've seen before. It's being driven by technological changes. You know, most people

00:02:29.980 know that technology basically doubles in its power about every 18 months and it halves in its cost.

00:02:35.280 And we haven't seen that very often in health care. But it's happening right now by a group of

00:02:39.400 scientists around the world. So I decided I want to interview 150 of the very best Nobel laureates,

00:02:44.620 scientists, the best medical doctors. And none of the book is my opinion. It's bringing you exactly

00:02:49.320 what they're showing in the areas, like you said, increasing energy and strength, vitality.

00:02:53.560 What are the basic things you can do that don't take anything at all? Just a couple of choices.

00:02:57.600 What are some of the new tools and technology? And then if you're having a real challenge,

00:03:01.140 if you've got something like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, what are the best tools that are

00:03:05.200 really available now? And I just wanted to bring it to people in a way that would be accessible

00:03:09.240 because, you know, my billionaire friends know most of these things, but the average person doesn't have

00:03:13.500 access. So I really just try to bring you access and then also do it in a form that would really

00:03:17.920 move you emotionally. The head of the Cleveland Clinic interviewed me yesterday and he was saying,

00:03:21.360 it's the best book that I've literally read. He said, I normally scan books. I read it cover to

00:03:24.760 cover. It's a large book. He said, but it also made me cry. So I've never had a book that showed

00:03:29.320 me the science and made me cry because you'll be moved by the stories of the people who've created

00:03:34.300 these breakthroughs, who've worked 20 or 30 years of their life. What they almost all have in common,

00:03:38.420 Megan, is they lost a husband or a wife or a child and it pushed their brain to go beyond the standard

00:03:44.840 of care and find new ways that can transform our lives. It's just beautiful to see.

00:03:49.540 It's so great. To your point, my doctor's in New York, but I need somebody. I've moved to

00:03:54.500 Connecticut, so I need like a local guy. And I went to this office the other day and it was like,

00:03:59.860 it's a concierge service, concierge medicine. It's an all cash business. I basically just needed one

00:04:06.280 shot, so I didn't really have to get into it. But I was thinking like, this is next level

00:04:10.120 healthcare, but of course it's only for rich people. And so your point is, here's a book with

00:04:15.480 all the information you would get from such a doctor and people well beyond such a doctor for

00:04:20.800 everybody, for the average working Joe. And in particular, on how to live well and live longer

00:04:26.100 and with more energy and better and better sex drive and all of it built into these 800 some pages.

00:04:32.740 All right. So let's talk about you because you had an injury that inspired you to start

00:04:36.760 taking a look at this. One, I think I can relate to a little bit. I didn't have as bad as you did.

00:04:41.140 I had a roller blade injury. It was roller derby, believe it or not, that I did for NBC.

00:04:45.720 Are you kidding?

00:04:46.740 No, but you really hurt your shoulder, your rotator cuff, and it kind of changed

00:04:51.260 the way you thought the remainder of your life would go.

00:04:54.960 It really did. I want to first say that my desire to do this started much younger. When I was

00:05:00.040 19 years old, I started when I was 17 at what I'm doing. So I've been doing it for 45 years.

00:05:05.300 And I was obsessed with helping people and I worked extremely hard and I always had a lot of

00:05:09.740 grace in my life. So I got access to some amazing athletes and I got great results and some CEOs.

00:05:15.680 And then at 19, Megan, I found myself at a place, you know, that part of your brain,

00:05:19.900 that's kind of the fight or flight part, the kind of survival part. I didn't know how to manage that.

00:05:23.220 I had a tough childhood. And so my brain suddenly started to say, well, maybe I'm in this position at this

00:05:29.160 young age because I'm going to die young. I'm successful now because I'm going to die young.

00:05:33.100 And even though intellectually, I know that was insane, I even started having dreams about it,

00:05:37.700 obsessing about it. And I thought it would be cancer, not some easy thing like hit by a car,

00:05:42.180 walked away from cancer. And the reason I tell you this is because it was a huge part in what made me

00:05:47.300 later on be able to deal with the injuries I had because I, you know, I'm obsessing on it. And of

00:05:52.260 course, you obsess on something that shows up in your life usually. And fortunately, the first time it

00:05:55.740 happened was not a tumor with me. It was my girlfriend and it was her mom. And she came

00:06:00.460 home and said, I sent her home to die. She's going to die in nine weeks. And even if it would 0.66

00:06:04.580 have been me, Megan, I think, you know, I think most of us will do more for others we love than

00:06:08.620 we'll do for ourselves. If it had been me, I'd probably gone into fear. But instead, it's like,

00:06:12.300 wait a second, there are thousands of people that have been in stage four cancer and turned it around

00:06:16.840 in our life today. Let's go study those patterns. That's what I've done my whole life, right? So I would,

00:06:22.340 you know, I'd taken a speed reading course. I started reading all these books and I found this book

00:06:25.260 called One Answer to Cancer. It wouldn't be the one I recommend today because there's much better

00:06:28.820 tools, but it was written by this dentist who had pancreatic cancer, the most deadly cancer of all.

00:06:34.040 And 12 years later, he was alive and he explained what he did. So I went to this woman, her name was

00:06:38.220 Jenny in her early forties. And I said, Jenny, I said, I said, I think you can still live. This man

00:06:43.180 lived. There are a lot of people. Why don't you read this and see if it's worth going for it? I mean,

00:06:46.640 you have no downside. If it doesn't work, you're just going to have the same outcome. And long story short,

00:06:51.140 she applied it and she had a tumor on the back of her shoulder that was protruding. And she had one in her 0.93

00:06:55.120 feminine organs. And within two weeks, three weeks, she started having more energy and feeling better.

00:07:00.460 In about 10 weeks, you couldn't see the tumor anymore. You couldn't feel it even.

00:07:04.640 And so finally, when she outlived the time they thought she'd die, they did exploratory surgery

00:07:09.040 and they found the end of my pinky's fingernail was all that was left of it. And that actually,

00:07:13.920 this is just an absolute miracle. And she said, it is, but let me tell you what I did. And he's like,

00:07:17.980 no, it's just a miracle. She's by the way, in her eighties today, totally alive. And that changed me

00:07:22.900 from victim and fear to really being kind of a biohacker and transforming my life. And so,

00:07:28.840 you know, I do events for four days, seven days with 12, 15, 20,000 people in a stadium. And I

00:07:34.320 hold them 12, 14 hours a day when they wouldn't sit for a three hour movie. So what I do with my

00:07:38.840 body is insane. But what happened to me later is I got a tumor. I was actually, I went for,

00:07:45.000 I'm a helicopter pilot as well. And I went for, you know, a normal physical to stay qualified. You do it

00:07:51.740 every two years. And the doc there did some blood tests. And so he kept calling and I was going to

00:07:56.080 south of France. And I said, well, just tell him to send the report. And I come home one night,

00:07:59.680 there's a note that says, call the doctor. He says it's an emergency. And then, you know,

00:08:03.840 my old fear just went crazy. You know, the mind goes nuts. I've been so healthy for all this time,

00:08:08.360 but I do fly. Is it too much radiation? You know what the mind does. And then I, you know,

00:08:12.600 I've learned to settle myself and say like a coward dies a thousand tests, a courageous person once,

00:08:17.240 let me wake up in the morning and find out. Sure enough, doc tells me, you got a tumor in your brain.

00:08:21.740 I'm like, what? I can't do it. There was nothing wrong with me. He says, no, I noticed you have

00:08:24.860 a lot of growth hormone. I said, well, how'd you figure it out? My hands are bigger than your head

00:08:28.020 and my feet are size 16. I grew 10 inches in a year. I was five, one in high school. I'm six,

00:08:32.520 seven now. And he said, well, all I'm going to tell you is you have a pituitary tumor. You need

00:08:36.780 to come in immediately for surgery. And when I asked the prognosis, he said, well, you know,

00:08:40.960 I have to tell you, honestly, you can die. It's not an easy surgery, but you're not likely to,

00:08:45.400 but your, you know, hormonal system will not be the same. And you probably have a lot less energy. And I was like,

00:08:50.280 well, I'd love to get a second opinion. You know, I'd seen the Mayo Clinic studies, you know,

00:08:54.380 saying everyone should get one. And so a long story shortened, I went off trying to forget

00:08:59.180 about this. And of course the mind didn't let you do that. Came and did it, found out I had the tumor

00:09:03.020 and then decided to try a different approach, a biochemical approach. And I saw this top doctor

00:09:08.000 in Boston and he said, don't do the surgery. That's crazy. He said, you go to Switzerland twice a

00:09:13.640 year, take this injection. I have something called gigantism. And he said, your heart valves won't get too

00:09:18.420 big and you won't die. And I said, but my heart valves are normal. And he said, yes, they are.

00:09:23.100 And I said, well, then why would I do this right now if I've had this for 10 years and I'm normal?

00:09:27.420 He said, well, just to be certain. I said, well, there's a price to certainty, right? What if the

00:09:30.960 drug has side effects? And which, by the way, this man was the sweetest man. He goes, you know,

00:09:34.860 the baker wants to bake, the surgeon wants to cut. I want to drug you. He said, but you're right.

00:09:39.640 You do have that option. So I went to six other doctors. The last one said to me, Tony,

00:09:43.860 you recover from basically two marathons in a weekend, like no one I've ever seen. And he said,

00:09:50.280 you know, I know bodybuilders that pay $1,200 a month to get the growth hormone you have. So that 0.99

00:09:54.180 was when I'm 32. I'm now 52 or 62, I should say. And in 30 years I monitored and I don't have a

00:10:00.200 problem. So these things affected my psychology. So when I finally had this piece you described being

00:10:05.720 an idiot going down the side of a mountain with chasing a 22 year old professional snowboarder and 0.83

00:10:10.940 discovering I didn't have that ability, the wreck was pretty bad. I thought I broke my neck. It was

00:10:15.640 so painful, but I tore my roller derby. Okay. But just for the record, not as dumb as roller derby,

00:10:20.000 but go ahead. Were you doing a story, Megan? Is that how you did it? Yes, I do have that as an excuse.

00:10:26.260 Well, I was going to say, I can't imagine you just doing it for fun. I was doing it for fun. So I

00:10:30.400 would still say idiotic. But the bottom line is I'd live with pain zero to 10. It was a nine,

00:10:35.580 nine, Megan. I mean, like I couldn't sleep. The nerve pain was so bad. So you go to your doctors. I went

00:10:40.860 to four surgery, surgery, surgery. And I always ask, what's the prognosis? Well, you know, you may

00:10:45.260 not be able to lift your arm above your shoulder. You know, could tear again. How long does it take

00:10:49.940 to rehab? Four to six months. I'm like picturing me with one arm trying to do a seminar for 12 hours

00:10:54.480 a day. So I asked about stem cells because as you know, I've worked with some of the greatest of all

00:10:59.120 time and variety of sports, great goat athletes. And some of them like Cristiano Ronaldo, he's supposed

00:11:03.900 to have three months of recovery. It was two and a half weeks with stem cells. But all the docs said,

00:11:08.020 no, they don't work. They won't make this happen. So I went to Dr. Peter Diamandis. He's a good

00:11:12.520 friend of mine, rocket scientist and an MD from Harvard and said, you know, everybody, who should

00:11:16.240 I talk to? And he said, Dr. Bob Harari, who's now a partner and a coauthor in this book. He's one of

00:11:21.580 the people that discovered stem cells. He said, Tony, at your age, your stem cells drop off the cliff.

00:11:26.620 I was 53 at the time. He said, you need the force of life. You need to get stem cells that are brand

00:11:32.720 new, like four days old. And I said, well, I don't want to do fetal tissue. He goes, well, we never do

00:11:36.460 that. But when we have babies, you know, the placenta and the cord come out and most people

00:11:41.080 throw them away. And we discovered it has the healing power like nothing else. So I went for

00:11:45.160 three days of treatment. I had just an IV 20 minutes a day, a single injection. And I left out

00:11:51.260 the most important part. The fourth doctor I talked to, after telling me about this problem in my

00:11:56.540 shoulder, he turned to me and said, literally looked me in the face and said, now I need to be

00:12:00.100 your doctor. I need to tell you life as you know it is over. I said, what? And he said, let me show

00:12:05.260 your spine. No more jumping, no more running, certainly no more snowboarding. He said one

00:12:09.840 hit and you could lose the ability to walk. And I was used to a lot of pain, but I was used

00:12:15.280 to that level. I came out of that and said, I got to find the solution. I went down to the

00:12:19.380 stem cells. On day two, I woke up not only with no problem, my shoulder, I have the MRI,

00:12:24.080 my shoulder's perfect, no surgery, perfect soldier. But the second thing that happened was

00:12:28.560 I had no pain in my spine, Megan, for the first time in 14 years. So I became obsessed. I want

00:12:33.480 to know everything about stem cells. And then I discovered it's not just stem cells. It's this

00:12:37.060 regeneration revolution. And believe it or not, the Pope, and I'll finish with this, the Pope

00:12:42.120 does every two years the biggest regenerative conference in the world because he sees this

00:12:46.480 as a gift to humanity. And he brings all these doctors together. And he asked me to be the

00:12:50.820 cleanup speaker. And I said, I'm happy to do that, but I want to go to the whole program with all the

00:12:54.580 other docs. And I did. And I met some of the most genius scientists in the world. I met people,

00:12:59.360 at least two dozen people that were sent home to die, you know, because their cancers were

00:13:03.580 untreatable, but they met Dr. June with CAR T-cells, or they met a new approach and they're

00:13:08.540 alive 10 years later. I met Jack Nicholas, who's, you know, the greatest golfer of all time. He was

00:13:13.240 told he was in so much pain, he couldn't stand for 10 minutes, literally without the pain being

00:13:17.520 unbearable. Here's a guy in his whole life, athletic, playing golf, and missed all that. They were

00:13:22.100 going to fuse his spine, which only works about half the time. Thank God he didn't do that. He did stem

00:13:26.720 cells. And he's now 82 years old playing golf and playing tennis again. So that gave me the drive

00:13:31.260 to say, I'm going to interview these 150 doctors. I want to bring those answers to people. And I have

00:13:36.080 this healing in my own body as a secondary gift as well. Now, wait a minute, because, you know,

00:13:40.900 when you give birth to a baby, they give you the option of sending, sending all that off to be

00:13:46.740 stored just in case your kid needs some life-saving thing, which I did. Would I need to use that? Or I

00:13:52.540 can just get stem cells from, you know, any doctor? Does it have to be something that came from me?

00:13:57.360 No, it doesn't. That's called otologist. That's the legal term for what comes from you. And at this

00:14:02.000 stage of life, that probably, unless you have like a small change, like an elbow, or maybe a little

00:14:06.000 bit to a knee, but for something greater, you need what's called allergenic. It's just a fancy word

00:14:10.340 from cells from someone else. But it's still valuable that, you know, I met an 11-year-old child

00:14:14.860 who was supposed to die when he was four, and they use his sister stem cells because they forgot to,

00:14:19.660 or didn't believe in, you know, saving the cord. And Dr. Bob Harari, by the way, was the first person

00:14:24.540 ever did that. He's the one who created the original companies that do that. I did that.

00:14:28.020 I just now have a 10-month-old daughter. I have a 48-year-old and a 10-year-old. I have five kids

00:14:32.320 and five grandkids. But I saved it for the same reason. But today, they can take even skin cells 0.82

00:14:38.220 and turn into something called pluripotent, which means cells that can become anything else in your

00:14:42.220 body, any organ. So there are a lot more choices. But I still recommend for parents to save that

00:14:47.240 because the match is so precise, it's still incredibly valuable.

00:14:51.620 So it's not just the stem cells. I mean, that, I'm sure it sounds like it really helped you. But

00:14:55.980 there's another effect that you write about in the book involving the placebo effect, which

00:15:00.900 was fascinating to me. So I wonder, I mean, do you, and we'll get it, I want you to explain it, but

00:15:06.180 do you think that it was indeed the stem cells that helped you? Or do you think there was some element

00:15:11.140 of just the power of positive thinking and believing that they would help you?

00:15:15.540 I'm a very positive person. I was using every positive approach I could and trying multiple

00:15:21.080 other approaches and they didn't make it happen. No, the stem cells both take down your inflammation,

00:15:25.420 but they also send the signals to your body. They have the original signals that you're made from.

00:15:30.920 There's actually a company that has something different. It's called, well, I think you know,

00:15:35.500 your audience may not, that the FDA goes through three phases of approval on something. And stem cells

00:15:39.900 have been approved, a million people have used them. But there's a brand new company that if you

00:15:43.380 have osteoarthritis, for example, when you and I are born, we have fetal tissue. But after that,

00:15:48.500 there's something called the Wnt pathway, WNT pathway. And it's a signaling system that tells

00:15:54.040 the stem cells what to become, become brain cells, become this many heart cells and so forth.

00:15:58.660 Well, this company has created this breakthrough of being able to accelerate that natural process in

00:16:03.640 your body. And they are in the third phase, which means they think they'll be approved if it goes

00:16:08.380 through in the last part of this year, the beginning next year, where you can eliminate

00:16:12.120 osteoarthritis, which affects millions of people, single injection, and it stimulates your own

00:16:18.320 Wnt pathway to make your own stem cells. And you regrow your own tendons over 11 months. And it

00:16:23.920 sounds like science fiction. But the tendons you get, if you understand a little bit about your genome,

00:16:29.540 it's like Dolly the sheep, and then you make a brand new sheep when they did that. Well,

00:16:33.500 they, the new genome allows you to have like 16 year old tens, even if you're 40, 50, 60, 70 years

00:16:39.240 old. So these things are happening everywhere. But I don't think it was just the mind, based on what

00:16:44.400 I've seen. I'm a big believer in the mind, as I think you know. Yeah, exactly. But there are limits

00:16:48.560 to even what Tony Robbins can do with his mind. So that doesn't bode well for the rest of us.

00:16:53.580 All right, so wait, I'm going to squeeze in a quick break. But I want to get to the placebo effect.

00:16:57.960 And I want to talk about the three things that you say everybody needs to focus on to improve their lives.

00:17:02.820 And we'll walk through how they can do that. More with Tony Robbins after this very quick break

00:17:07.200 on the secrets to living longer and better.

00:17:17.580 So Tony, what is the placebo effect? And talk to us about some of these studies

00:17:21.740 that have looked at it, because it's real. The one involving the veterans was just stunning. And

00:17:27.120 the surgery they were doing, I think, on knees.

00:17:29.680 Yes, it's amazing. Well, first of all, most people don't realize the power of the mind to

00:17:33.580 make you sick or to make you well. And in World War II, a surgeon who was very famous was trying

00:17:38.880 to help people, and they're bleeding out. And so they needed morphine. Morphine keeps them from

00:17:43.080 going to shock, besides lowering the pain. And they ran out of morphine. And a nurse, actually,

00:17:48.380 she's really responsible for this, because the doctor was freaking out. And she said,

00:17:51.400 oh, I found some more. And I don't know why she did it, but she just gave him saline.

00:17:55.220 And he thought it was an injection of morphine. So he had the total belief and told the patient,

00:18:00.040 you'll be out of pain in a couple minutes or less. You're going to be fine. And he did it with

00:18:04.240 each of them. Well, none of them went into shock. And 90% of them, the pain disappeared with no

00:18:09.540 drugs being applied. And so when he went back to school after World War II to Harvard, he was the

00:18:14.480 first person that started to make these studies that we basically do now. We compare drugs to a

00:18:18.560 placebo, an inert substance to see their value. What a lot of people don't know is oftentimes a placebo

00:18:23.420 is more powerful than the drug, but you don't make billions of dollars sharing that information.

00:18:27.860 And as you noted, placebos are affected by your level of certainty that something's going to happen.

00:18:33.300 It's like our brain can heal itself. And so if we give you a small pill, you get a bigger reaction

00:18:38.560 if I give you a big pill. If I give you a shot, even bigger reaction in terms of healing and speed.

00:18:43.840 And the one that's most powerful, Megan, you just alluded to, is what some people call a sham

00:18:48.160 surgery, but it's a placebo surgery. So the Veterans Administration decided with

00:18:52.860 arteriosclerosis, not arteriosclerosis, with knee pain or knee challenges, that they would do a third

00:18:59.000 of the people where they would cut them open and do nothing and just sew them back up. So they would

00:19:04.780 think they had the surgery. And a year later, the Veterans Administration stopped funding those types

00:19:10.040 of surgeries because a year later, to a man and to a woman, the people who had no surgery claimed they

00:19:16.120 had no pain, that they had extraordinary flexibility versus the ones who had the surgery,

00:19:21.480 large numbers of them still had pain and challenges. So literally that changed.

00:19:24.760 But it's even more powerful than that, Megan. Harvard did a study where they didn't use placebos.

00:19:30.540 They used real drugs. So they handed somebody a large red pill and said, this is an amphetamine.

00:19:36.420 Your body's going to speed up. You should be prepared for it. And they actually gave them a

00:19:40.180 barbiturate, which would slow you through the floor. Every person exploded through the roof as if

00:19:45.760 they'd get an amphetamine. And then they reversed it with a blue pill and did the other piece.

00:19:49.400 It sounds like a movie, but they do this. Dr. Langer, who's kind of one of the co-founders

00:19:55.140 of Mindfulness at Harvard, is a friend of mine. And she's done these studies where you see changes,

00:19:59.540 like they go to people and take a group of people in their 70s and take them off for two weeks on this

00:20:05.180 little journey for the Catskills. And they inform them everything is from 35 years earlier, the imagery,

00:20:10.600 the television shows, everything. And they inform them talking first person as if it was 35 years

00:20:15.880 later or earlier. What's amazing is after two weeks of this experience, they measured all their vitals

00:20:22.020 before and afterwards. And the first thing that happens, their eyesight improved. The second thing

00:20:26.360 that improved is blood pressure dropped massively from the high blood pressure most of them did.

00:20:30.760 Blood sugars balanced and they looked younger. And there are all these studies also about how we make

00:20:35.500 ourselves sick with our mind. I had the privilege of meeting a man named Norman Cousins,

00:20:39.420 probably not many people know his name now, but he was really one of the fathers of psychoneuroimmunology,

00:20:44.940 which is the study of how your brain psycho affects your immune system. And he was diagnosed

00:20:49.440 with a deadly disease. And for whatever reason, he did not want to use the drugs that were available.

00:20:53.760 They had large side effects. And he decided that he thought his immune system would be stimulated if

00:20:58.960 he wasn't in pain. And the way out of pain was to laugh. And so he would go spend when he had this pain

00:21:03.820 two, three hours watching these old, silly movies and laugh his guts out. And ironically,

00:21:09.760 what happened, science has now shown it, is he cured himself of the disease. He got out of the pain.

00:21:13.480 But most importantly, he wrote a book called Anatomy of an Illness, which kind of launched this form

00:21:18.040 of study around the world. There are buildings dedicated to him at UCLA now. But this man told

00:21:23.240 me, I interviewed him when I was 24. There were no podcasts. And I have this cassette tape program that I

00:21:28.080 used to share with people. I'd interview people.

00:21:29.840 And he told me a story. He says, Tony, not only can we make ourselves healthy,

00:21:34.600 but make ourselves sick, but we can make our own fears viral to affect other people's health.

00:21:40.380 I said, what do you mean? He said, I'll give you an example. He said, you know how

00:21:42.680 you yawn and he said, don't yawn. You find yourself yawning or somebody's laughing hysterically.

00:21:47.940 It's not that funny, but they're having such a good time. You find yourself laughing. That's viral.

00:21:52.220 It's psychological viral. He said, I went to a game, a college football game. And he said,

00:21:57.260 here's what happened. He said, a person got really sick and were literally projectile vomiting and

00:22:02.060 they're in the stands. So people are kind of trying to get out of the way. They call the doctor.

00:22:05.780 The doctor is trying to diagnose what happened, trying to find out what's different in this man's

00:22:09.960 regimen. Was it food poisoning? And he found out he had gone to the vending machine and drank a Coca-Cola.

00:22:17.160 And so the doc just thinking, well, that's the only thing that's different. Maybe the thing is

00:22:22.720 poisonous. Maybe there's some kind of chemicals that have gotten into it. So they made an announcement

00:22:26.840 over the airwaves in the middle of halftime to everyone to avoid the vending machines because

00:22:31.940 they may be poisonous. Well, he said, Tony, it was, it was like a movie. He said, projectile vomiting

00:22:37.180 started happening within five to 20 minutes all over the place. 12 ambulances going to two different

00:22:42.520 hospitals, taking people, shuttling people back and forth. An hour and a half later, they did tests

00:22:47.220 and found out there was nothing wrong with the vending machine. And they told everybody and everybody

00:22:50.840 got well. And so I'll give you the last piece, the CDC. When I put this, everything in my book is

00:22:56.020 documented. It's not my opinion again, but it sounds ridiculous. The CDC, you know, what are people

00:23:01.200 most scared about right now? COVID-19 and dying of it. Now, the number one factor obviously is age,

00:23:06.160 somebody in their 80s, because their immune system is often suppressed at that stage. But outside that,

00:23:10.980 the number one factor most people know today is obesity, something we can actually do something

00:23:14.780 about. 79.8, call it 80% of the people that have died are obese. There's all kinds of comorbidities

00:23:20.260 that come with that, that make your body weaken. But you know what number two is? According to the CDC,

00:23:25.960 fear and anxiety is the number two thing that will cause you to die. Because when you're afraid,

00:23:31.060 you shut down your immune system. When you're afraid, it changes your heart rate, can make an

00:23:35.360 irregular heart rate. It changes your breathing. It changes your oxygenization. So unfortunately in our

00:23:40.100 media and media people, you know, they're doing their best job they can. They're not trying to harm

00:23:43.660 people. But we all know if it bleeds, it leads. And so, you know, the death rates constantly in

00:23:49.920 front of you has created so much fear. And that is, according to CDC, a factor that we want to avoid

00:23:56.120 at all costs. Oh, yeah. The cable news model, and actually I can say firsthand, broadcast as well,

00:24:01.480 is to upset you. That's what will get you to tune in. Either anger you or upset you. And you know,

00:24:07.100 it's funny, Tony, because I'm listening to you talk. My mom's mom died at almost 101.

00:24:10.640 101. And wait, she was 101. Yeah, she was 101. Anyway, she, she was overweight. She never 1.00

00:24:18.980 exercised a day in her life. She ate terribly, only processed food. I mean, only processed food,

00:24:23.880 nothing fresh or healthy. And I'm thinking of myself, and she was kind of stressed out for

00:24:28.280 parts of her life. So I'm like, well, I don't get it. But you know what? She laughed. She was

00:24:33.020 funny. And she, she was quick to laugh. And she was quick to make others laugh. And I'm listening to

00:24:37.820 you thinking, I finally get it. Well, I interviewed a woman named Alice Summers was

00:24:44.240 at this time, she was the oldest living survivor of the Holocaust. I think she was 108 at the time

00:24:49.120 I interviewed her living on her own, Megan, swimming every day, playing the piano. This is a woman who

00:24:55.000 was a very famous penis in Europe. And during World War Two, when Hitler, she was Jewish, took her family, 0.59

00:25:01.060 killed everybody except her son, and use her son as the hostage to say, you are going to perform for us, 0.92

00:25:07.620 because they made these films, the Nazis did, to try and make it look like they were treating Jews

00:25:11.940 well. And we're going to kill your son in front of you if you don't look healthy, if you don't look

00:25:17.120 happy, and if you don't play well. So imagine going through all of that, and then surviving the

00:25:22.000 Holocaust. And by the way, the music was the escape for not only her, but all the people listening, 0.80

00:25:26.900 you know, in the camp, they talked about it. And the people in her apartment still listen to her

00:25:31.300 play the piano. But she went through all those things, and everything was beautiful to her.

00:25:35.800 See, the microphone is beautiful. I was beautiful. My wife was beautiful. What we're talking about is

00:25:40.580 beautiful. And I really believe that it's a giant part, biochemically, of what makes somebody be

00:25:46.460 able to manage through all the stresses we have, because we're all going to have extreme stress.

00:25:50.200 We're all going to have time. I don't care.

00:25:51.380 But you know there are people sitting there right now listening to this who don't have the power of

00:25:54.900 positive thinking like a Tony Robbins, and they're like, I can't. I'm genuinely stressed out.

00:25:58.920 I know I shouldn't be stressed out. It's like, you know, I've been told I have cancer,

00:26:02.120 and you want me to not be stressed. And I'm more stressed than ever. And I can't de-stress,

00:26:06.320 because no matter what I try to tell myself, I know the cancer is still there. That's what's

00:26:10.440 stressing me. Yeah. Well, I still have the tumor inside my head as well. But I understand some are

00:26:16.200 more compelling or more scary than others. So I'm not suggesting that's an easy thing to do.

00:26:20.980 But there are, you know, one of the things I was always, you know, I felt I could help anyone in any

00:26:26.080 situation. But tell you honestly, the one place I didn't feel I could, it was somebody who

00:26:29.560 was terminal. I think it's probably because I had my own sense of not wanting to die or my own

00:26:34.620 handle that within myself. So I went and I interviewed the professors at UCLA, Tony Atala,

00:26:40.400 also a whole group of NYU, who are doing research now, and they use for people that are in a place

00:26:46.640 where they're terminal. They use the equivalent of magic mushrooms, the ingredient magic mushrooms.

00:26:53.120 And they've done these studies. And I said, you know, when people get addicted or something,

00:26:56.580 they said, no, it's a one-time session. And they don't know which one it's going to be because

00:27:00.540 it's done properly. And he said, Tony, they showed me a video of this woman. He goes, this woman,

00:27:04.720 before I show it to you, to give you a sense of this woman, she's not a California atheist.

00:27:09.040 She's a New York atheist. California atheists might say God might be in the trees or something,

00:27:13.200 but she's like, there is no God. There's never been a God. It's all BS. And she's really angry and

00:27:17.820 scared. And then you see her afterwards and she says, I experienced God for the first time. And

00:27:22.740 92% of the people lose their fear. So I want an audience that is in that position,

00:27:28.380 that there are solutions and they're not ongoing medication. That's what a drug is. It's a one-time

00:27:33.560 experience that resets the nervous system. There's actually, for people that PTSD, you know,

00:27:40.080 I've worked with 22 veterans, killed themselves every day. It's one of the saddest things in our

00:27:45.020 world, in my opinion. And I've worked with guys. I worked with a gentleman that had gone on,

00:27:48.880 lost 42 of his buddies, been in both Iraq and Afghanistan, came to one of my programs with

00:27:55.200 dark glasses because light would set him off, night sweats. I mean, anything you can imagine.

00:28:00.020 He was holding a microphone that was shaking like this. And, you know, I've got a lot of tools. It

00:28:03.580 took me about two hours, turn them around. I actually took them on CNN. The producer cried when

00:28:07.240 she saw him because she saw him before and then saw him two months afterwards. But if I worked 24 hours

00:28:12.360 a day, I couldn't support all the veterans. So I was looking for a scalable solution. And there is one

00:28:17.240 right now. The army has done a study on this new injection. It's done to calm the part of your

00:28:22.320 system that keeps you in this hypervigilant state. And so if you're really adrenalized and when people

00:28:28.180 come back. So I sponsored a hundred vets and I'll just give you one example how powerful it is. It

00:28:32.860 works 85% of the time. The first vet ever wrote me, and I don't know these people. I just wanted to

00:28:37.920 help and wrote me. They knew I've sponsored it and said, just want to thank you. And the person described

00:28:42.980 what they'd been through and described how when they came home, they couldn't be around their

00:28:46.240 children or wife, that they were either, everything was black and white or they were enraged. Those

00:28:50.280 only two years they had and that they tried to kill themselves twice. And after the first shot,

00:28:55.780 20 minutes afterwards, that's called the sympathetic nervous system, the part that makes you go, go,

00:28:59.940 go like crazy versus parasympathetic, which is what allows you to relax and heal. And a person said,

00:29:05.200 wrote to me, he said, I see colors for the first time. I went home and hugged my wife and children

00:29:09.340 for the first time. I have no fear of the future. I still have the memories, but I have none of the pain

00:29:14.140 associated those memories. And so I have that described in the book as well. And by the way,

00:29:19.160 this person that was three years ago, he's now helped me. He's helped, I think, four other people

00:29:23.940 with a very similar response. So there are solutions when the fear is that extreme that are available to

00:29:29.740 people where it's not just positive thinking. And by the way, I don't really believe in just positive

00:29:33.720 thinking. I believe in intelligence. I don't think you should go to your garden and say, there's no

00:29:37.140 weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds. I believe you should see the weeds and pull them out

00:29:40.540 and be proactive towards the solution. I'm not into rah-rah. I certainly believe in energy and

00:29:45.760 enthusiasm because that one makes us feel alive. And when you have more energy, you tend to take

00:29:49.680 action as opposed to just be afraid and do nothing. Well, what about that energy? I mean,

00:29:54.100 because everyone would like to have a little bit more energy and just feel a little bit more youthful,

00:29:57.820 a little bit more vibrant. How do we go after that? Is it just, I mean, is there some sort of stem

00:30:02.160 cell cocktail for those of us who just want to pick me up? And speaking of which, I said to my same

00:30:06.920 doctor in New York, what do you got? I'm in the market for an upper. I need something. And he

00:30:10.820 said, you're over 50, you got three kids and you work full time. Suck it up.

00:30:16.120 Well, I like his attitude. But, you know, also a concierge doctor just means you get to the front

00:30:21.780 of the line. It doesn't mean that you get the most unique in front healthcare because you have to get

00:30:26.640 to a regenerative doctor to do that. So just so you know, there's a little difference there.

00:30:30.660 I will tell you, there's all kinds of things you can do naturally. Let me tell you the natural

00:30:34.760 one first. It's so simple. I mean, basic ones like I sleep. I, my thing is I'll always been,

00:30:40.540 I'll sleep when I die. I was actually working on that chapter at 615 in the morning. I had to be

00:30:44.460 up at 930 for a meeting. And I was like, what's wrong with this picture? But then, you know,

00:30:48.480 I met Dr. Walker, who's a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley. He's kind of like the sleep Google doctor.

00:30:54.160 And he convinced me to change my pattern. My wife lives eight hours, just loves it. Come to bed. 1.00

00:30:58.400 Oh, I'll be there soon, you know, but I've changed my pattern and I see a giant difference in the

00:31:03.420 energy. And the reason he convinced me is he said, there's this study done on 1.6 billion people in

00:31:08.940 the world on sleep. And I said, you couldn't have coordinated. What are you talking about?

00:31:12.120 He said, Tony, I didn't have to. He said, it's daylight savings time in 70 countries. And all

00:31:16.380 we had to do is look at the stats. This is crazy. I remember this from your book. Yeah. Tell us.

00:31:20.880 Yeah. When you, when we, when we, you know, have spring forward and you lose an hour, just one hour

00:31:25.500 of sleep compared to what you're normally used to on average in all 70 countries for the next three days,

00:31:30.860 heart attacks go up 24% like clockwork. When we fall back and just get one more hour of sleep,

00:31:37.360 right? 21% decrease in heart attacks. And then he also shows you accidents and everything else.

00:31:43.500 He also showed me that a man like me that's sleeps four to five hours a night, usually has testosterone

00:31:48.620 levels that of a man, 10 years older. If a woman in a family feels like, God, I don't feel intimacy. 0.76

00:31:55.900 Sleep is one of the first categories, but then there's the high tech pieces that are mind boggling that

00:32:00.200 are coming. So I'd love to share that with you. Um, and let me just tell you, there's a guy named

00:32:04.000 Dr. David Sinclair. He's one of the greatest longevity experts in the world from Harvard.

00:32:08.660 He's become a good friend and he took his himself and he's 53 years old, you know, chronologically,

00:32:15.620 but he's 33 years old biochemically. We don't, our body doesn't all age at the same level.

00:32:21.340 And he does these forms of triggers to the body using natural substances that literally moves the

00:32:26.900 body, slows the aging process. And he's beginning to show that it actually can begin to reverse it

00:32:31.500 for the first time. That used to sound like, you know, science fiction. Uh, he's done it with animals

00:32:35.960 and he's now doing it with humans. His father is 80 years old when he was 72. He couldn't walk anymore.

00:32:41.580 Now he normally walks two miles a day. He outlifts David in the gym. His cognitive capacity has gone

00:32:46.120 through the roof. Now how's this happen? Well, one, I'd love to give your audience an education

00:32:51.140 without being too technical. So let's just think of it this way. We all know our DNA. Your DNA is

00:32:56.780 not your destiny. Your DNA is instructions from your mom and dad, 3.2 billion of each. They're

00:33:03.240 these letters and they form genes and so forth. And what's interesting though, is which genes get

00:33:08.120 turned on or off is what determines your destiny. And that's called your epigenome. Your epigenome,

00:33:13.120 epi means above. And the epigenome can be affected by your diet, your sleep, your exercise,

00:33:18.620 radiation, chemicals, and so forth. But here's the really cool breakthrough they found.

00:33:23.920 There are seven master genes. They're called sirtuins. You don't have to remember the name.

00:33:27.660 It's in the book if you want it. But these seven master genes do two competing things that are

00:33:32.000 critical for your life and energy. First, they get the epigenome to turn on or off certain genes.

00:33:37.900 Determine how quickly you age, how well you deal with poisons or toxins in your body, et cetera.

00:33:43.080 Second, it reduces inflammation, which is the basis of a lot of disease.

00:33:46.940 And third, the energy of your body is called mitochondria. It's in every cell of your body.

00:33:52.520 And it stokes those mitochondria. It provides the conversion of food so we have energy. If you're

00:33:57.900 really efficient there, you have a lot of energy. If you're not, the energy is lower. COVID steals from

00:34:02.620 that energy in your mitochondria, for example. So these sirtuins also do a separate competing task.

00:34:09.700 As we age by exposure to radiation, bad foods, lifestyle, et cetera, our DNA starts to break down

00:34:17.080 and get corrupted. These master genes, sirtuins, go in and clean that up for you. But when you,

00:34:23.220 they need a fuel. So one more word, okay, NAD. This is a natural substance in your body that your body

00:34:30.520 makes, and it makes these sirtuins have the fuel they need. Well, when you turn towards the end of your

00:34:35.980 40s to early 50s, these NAD drops off the cliff. So there's no fuel. So now the sirtuins have to

00:34:43.360 decide, am I going to clean up your DNA and make you great? Or am I going to give you energy or

00:34:47.340 inflammation? And so that split focus, imagine like you had a mansion and you had this great staff and

00:34:52.420 they're young. In the beginning, anything breaks down, they fix it. Everything looks perfect, but they

00:34:56.300 get older and older and a little senile. And all of a sudden you don't have the raw materials and now

00:34:59.840 your mansion's gone. That's aging. So there is one more factor. Those factors that NAD only becomes

00:35:06.760 possible by a precursor. And I'm sorry for all the language, but NMN, like never mother, never is

00:35:12.300 something your body creates, but it also drops off the cliff. So you can supplement it. And that's

00:35:16.860 what David does. And that's why 53 versus 33. That's why his dad's doing what he's doing.

00:35:21.080 Like when you say supplement, was that a pill or what?

00:35:23.620 Yes, it's a pill now, but here's the challenge. We went, David's office did it. I was with them.

00:35:28.220 They checked out seven of these on the market. Some sell for like $30, some $120 a month.

00:35:33.800 Not one had any NMN in it. I said, how's this, that's the lab guy. How's this possible? Are they

00:35:38.540 all cheating? It all comes from China. And he goes, well, some people do cheat, but he said,

00:35:42.540 more likely it's taking so long to get here to your door. It breaks down in 30 to 45 days. So

00:35:48.120 David has a special NMN that holds up well, but here's the most exciting thing. In the book,

00:35:52.420 I show you what you do right now and then what's coming short term, 12 to 36 months. So you know,

00:35:57.560 you're prepared for it and you can take advantage of it. There's a company called Metro Biotech and

00:36:03.220 they have created a new form of NMN that does not break down. It's crystallized, but it's better

00:36:08.760 than that. So let me give you two examples. If they give this NMN to an old mouse, the equivalent

00:36:14.220 of a 70 year old person is a 20, 24 month old mouse. An old mouse can go a quarter of a kilometer

00:36:21.120 without going into exhaustion. A young, strong mouse can go four times that a full kilometer.

00:36:26.580 When they give 14 days of this NMN to an old mouse, it runs after that two to three kilometers,

00:36:33.940 200 to 300 times as much as the strongest mouse. You might say, well, Tony, that's interesting,

00:36:38.580 but does that transfer to humans? That was my question. Well, we got the answer. The Daily Mail

00:36:43.500 got a scoop and also in Boston for two years, they've been working top secret with our special

00:36:50.860 forces, with our military. And the commander, they just finished the two year study and the

00:36:55.040 commander got so excited. He kind of blurted it out somehow to somebody in the news. And so they

00:36:59.560 know some of it. I know more. I invested in the company because I wanted first access to this for

00:37:03.680 me and for my family. But here's what's really fascinating. Here's what the commander said. I can tell

00:37:08.220 you that. He said that results they've gotten previously with mice, they're seeing in the strongest,

00:37:12.780 fittest people in the world. So these are people that are already fit. There's not much room to

00:37:16.860 improve. He said their endurance has exploded through the roof. Their strength has increased

00:37:21.760 from the same stimulus, same exercises. And most importantly for special forces is you get

00:37:27.220 exhausted. Can you keep your cognitive ability together? And their cognitive scores have gone

00:37:31.180 through the roof. So now there's a phase three tile on COVID that's going on in the hospital right now

00:37:35.620 for prevention and for long-term COVID because it steals the mitochondria, right? It affects you.

00:37:40.000 And there's one for kidneys because it's another challenge with COVID. And then there's all these

00:37:44.200 ones for performance. One of the gentlemen who's the founder of this company introduced me, a friend

00:37:48.080 of his issues. He was 60 when he stopped playing competitive chess because he just cognitively

00:37:52.700 couldn't do it. And your brain needs more energy than anything else. Well, this provides that at a

00:37:57.260 cellular level, including in your brain. He's now 72 playing world-class competitive chess. So

00:38:02.280 there's some pretty exciting things that are coming as well as the things that you can do right now.

00:38:05.600 And you're saying soon. You use the term 12 months potentially, like we could get this at the store

00:38:10.460 within a year potentially? This would be 18 to 24 months for this one, where they are in the FDA

00:38:15.420 process for this one. When I told you about growing your tendons, that's the one that we think they'll

00:38:20.240 have by the end of the year, the beginning of next year. But it won't be a nutraceutical.

00:38:24.340 They'll break down. This is being approved by the FDA. So you'd go to your doctor,

00:38:27.760 your doctor there, and he could provide it for you. But you then be cleaning up your DNA at the time

00:38:32.080 you need it most because, you know, when you're 20, you don't have as much exposure. By the time

00:38:35.880 you're 50 or 60, you've accumulated a lot more and you're getting more energy and you're reducing

00:38:40.840 inflammation and you're turning on and off the right genes. So it's one of the greatest breakthroughs

00:38:46.620 that's coming forward that also is non-invasive. It's not a surgery. It's nothing of that crazy

00:38:50.720 thing that puts on your body. This is reminding me of, I was getting this, there's this laser that I

00:38:56.440 liked called Skin Tight. It didn't do anything other than just like heat through your skin

00:39:00.320 to stimulate collagen. And if you had five treatments, it was supposed to take off like

00:39:04.800 five years or something like that. And I was telling my husband, Doug, and he goes, well,

00:39:08.480 how many treatments are you planning on getting? Because if you go back too far,

00:39:11.340 this relationship is going to start to feel inappropriate.

00:39:17.340 I like your husband already.

00:39:19.120 He's a good man. All right, let me pause it there.

00:39:22.300 I'll pay a bill. We'll come back and we'll do much, much more on how you can live well.

00:39:26.160 And what about the sex drive? Let's get to it. Stand by. We're with Tony Robbins right

00:39:29.920 after this. And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM

00:39:34.400 Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing

00:39:40.180 to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe

00:39:46.380 and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you leave

00:39:52.280 me a comment on the Apple comments, I will read it. I read them in the mornings. I read today's.

00:39:56.780 I read every single one. There's over 22,000. And that's how I hear back from you guys. And it

00:40:01.040 also helps our show. So it works both ways. And by the way, you'll find our full archives there with

00:40:05.840 more than 250 shows, which I think you'll find fascinating.

00:40:16.260 All right. So can we talk about peptides? Because I don't know anything about peptides,

00:40:19.440 but I'm looking at this book. I'm looking at the list of stuff it can do for me.

00:40:22.020 Reduce appetite, promote fat loss, strengthen immune system, boost sexual arousal and satisfaction,

00:40:26.720 heal the gut, increase muscle mass, revive skin and restore. I'll do it. What is it? How do I get

00:40:32.140 it? Well, first of all, these are not some new thing. They were made in the 1960s in Russia.

00:40:37.860 They were trying to figure out what to do. They're trying to compete with America with

00:40:40.540 nuclear submarines. And these sailors are dropping like flies. And so a gentleman there who became very

00:40:45.300 famous discovered these small chain amino acids can change how your body responds. And he

00:40:49.880 healed the sailors. But then he also was responsible for a lot of the athletes during

00:40:54.060 the Olympic time. But there's one, there's a whole list in them here. So there's one,

00:40:57.500 for example, called PT 141. These are hard to remember, but I have a chart in the book. So you

00:41:02.120 can decide what I'm interested in. You can talk to your doctor, or you can talk to a telemedicine

00:41:05.840 doctor. We recommend you can listen to, we do it as well. But what's really interesting is,

00:41:10.120 you know, men have, for example, blue pills, because it's a blood flow challenge in most cases.

00:41:14.920 But for women, it's not usually a blood flow challenge. It's the desire itself. The women 1.00

00:41:19.460 are taking on so many things, thinking about all the people they care about and all the management,

00:41:23.880 and their brains work differently. So this actually has been proven. It stimulates that desire. Men use 0.62

00:41:29.440 it as well. But it's pretty extraordinary. And there's some for healing the body. There's so many

00:41:34.260 different ones. And it's a science within itself. But I'd like, I know we're going to run out of time,

00:41:38.620 if I may, there's one thing I'd love to make sure, because I really want people to know about,

00:41:42.100 you know, the big fears that people have, there's all these great things you can enhance with.

00:41:46.920 But cancer and heart disease are the two big killers. And I just want people to know that in

00:41:51.620 the past, you know, getting a diagnosis, going to your doctor, and have them tap on your knee,

00:41:55.880 and maybe do a blood test, doesn't sound like very much. But today, there's new tech. And so,

00:42:00.520 for example, everybody in the book, who's a hero, you go on the journey with them, their stories,

00:42:04.720 and they broke through because somebody, like I said, died in their family, and they just were pushed

00:42:08.640 to another level. One of those created a cancer breakthrough people need to know about.

00:42:12.820 The Cancer Society described something really interesting, a study of 100,000 people. And

00:42:17.320 they found that if you're at stage three or four, when they find the cancer, you have an 80% chance

00:42:21.520 of dying. I prefer the 20% chance of living and focusing on that. But their point is, it's really

00:42:26.300 hard to turn it around. If you're at stage one or two, you have an 80 to 99.9% chance of living,

00:42:31.860 it might even an outpatient situation. But most of the cancers that get us are not mammograms,

00:42:37.040 it's not, we don't have tests for them. So this gentleman lost his wife, who's from Google,

00:42:41.280 is very wealthy. And he put together this project called Grail. And it's just come out in the last

00:42:46.700 four or five months. And it can do a simple blood test and find 50 different cancers, even before

00:42:52.940 they're showing up in your body. And this is so important. We had a gentleman that came to one of

00:42:56.520 our Fountain Life Centers, and his wife pushed him to go. And he said, I've already had my physical,

00:43:00.840 and they did my blood and urinalysis. And we did the Grail test with him. And sure enough,

00:43:04.980 he had kidney cancer, but it was just the beginning of it. And so guess what? It was an

00:43:08.760 outpatient process that took 20 minutes and he's free of cancer. So you got to know that along with

00:43:14.280 MRI, there are these tools that are priceless today. You want to catch it when it's young.

00:43:18.320 And then the other one just want people to know about is heart disease kills number one for both 0.99

00:43:22.100 men and women. And traditionally, maybe if you've got a CT scan, it's hard to tell what's going on.

00:43:27.520 They're trying to see, have you built up plaque that's going to cause a heart attack or a stroke?

00:43:32.220 And it's really hard to read. And sometimes there's false surgeries even. There are problems

00:43:36.440 with it. There's a brand new tool. Again, last six months came out. It's called a CCTA test. And

00:43:41.740 it has an AI, artificial intelligence, that digitally opens your arteries, goes through and says,

00:43:47.320 is this calcified? Because if it's calcified, it means it's hardened. It means you've actually

00:43:51.920 healed. You're not going to have a heart attack. Or is this something that can break off? It's soft

00:43:56.940 plaque and it can cause you to have a heart attack. They can predict a heart attack five years in

00:44:01.600 advance, Megan. And they can show you what to do. So I'll just give you an example. My partner's

00:44:05.320 called me up. So you've got to do this test. And my father-in-law's with me and he's just turned 80.

00:44:09.780 And he's a really beautiful man. And he, you know, he was in the lumber business. But you know,

00:44:13.580 when people get older, people start saying, hey, you got to get ready, prepare for, you know,

00:44:17.000 the inevitable. You see him lose that edge. So I said, dad, I'm going to go do this test.

00:44:21.700 We're both at a stage of life. We're going to have some soft, you know, plaque there,

00:44:25.340 but they'll tell us exactly where it is and what we can do to clean it up.

00:44:28.340 And so he came. My father does this test and he has nothing wrong. It's all

00:44:32.740 calcified. He is completely healthy as can be. His entire mindset changed. I was better than five

00:44:37.180 years ago, but he was better than me. And then you have this hip problem and there are these tools

00:44:41.200 now. I had it done to my ankle where they can scan your body now with ultrasound, see where the problem

00:44:45.760 is, open up the tissue with amnio fluid and release a nerve or release what's stopping you.

00:44:50.900 And so my ankle's perfect. So my father said, I said, well, as long as you're here, why don't you see

00:44:54.280 these guys? Well, they've done 30 minutes with him and now his hip's perfect. So now, you know,

00:44:58.440 what makes you old? Feeling pain, feeling like I can't do things. He's walking perfectly. His

00:45:02.620 heart's perfect. So he gets on the plane with me. I'll never forget this. He closes his arms. He says,

00:45:05.640 you know, Tony, those people that talk about living to 110, 120, I don't know if I buy that,

00:45:09.940 but my heart's perfect. You know, I'm walking perfect. I can live another 20 years. I could live

00:45:14.860 to 100. You've only been married to my daughter 22 years. That's like another lifetime.

00:45:18.820 And he's completely transformed. So this doesn't have to be the negative that people think about

00:45:23.820 what technology today, the breakthroughs are extraordinary. And by the way, if you're

00:45:28.280 concerned about cancer, go get yourself some broccoli sprouts, just to plant a little seed

00:45:32.120 with you. There are thousands of studies and for breast cancer specifically reduces 80% of cancer

00:45:37.120 for breast cancer. There's some little things you can do, but you got to know where you are and then

00:45:42.060 figure out where you want to go. And then you can navigate that, whether you want performance or great

00:45:45.860 energy or you're trying to avoid some kind of challenge. I'll steal the last word because one

00:45:50.780 thing you mentioned or recommend in the book is something that I believe in too, which is get

00:45:54.600 yourself, if you're 50 or older, a bone density test. It's really just an x-ray. It's like an x-ray

00:46:00.640 of your wrist. It's such a non, it's a nothing. And it can tell you whether you are going into

00:46:06.540 osteoporosis or whatever. And they have these amazing meds now, or if you basically get a shot

00:46:11.820 and you can get your bones back to youthful strength. I mean, it's crazy. So much is

00:46:17.740 reversible now in terms of the aging process. And for women, as you know, that's critical in 0.93

00:46:22.640 their fifties, really critical. There's also something called osteo strong, which is a 10

00:46:26.320 minute exercise a week at a local place that has been shown to produce the strongest changes in bone

00:46:31.540 density. And you can wear your clothes and do it. It takes literally 10 minutes. A lot of athletes do

00:46:35.980 it because your muscles are limited to your bone strength. So it's not just people breaking down that are

00:46:40.700 doing this. So it's, it's the best 800 pages you will ever read in your life. It could literally

00:46:46.720 add quality years to your life. Why wouldn't you check it out? Life force. And as Tony points out,

00:46:58.080 all the profits go to help feed people in need. What a pleasure, Tony Robbins. Thank you so much.

00:47:02.900 Please come back. I will. Thank you so much, Megan. Take good care of yourself. Lots of love. You too.

00:47:07.540 Coming up next, we're going to take a deep dive into Hollywood's deep, weird and destructive

00:47:12.780 relationship with China. My next guest is Eric Schwartzel. He's a reporter who started covering

00:47:23.440 Hollywood over a decade ago. Right away, he noticed something weird. Everywhere he looked, he saw the

00:47:29.900 presence of China, the influence of China. Why? How did that happen? What's going on? He says it was

00:47:36.380 eye opening to see a foreign country so blatantly using our film industry to spread its values 1.00

00:47:41.420 abroad in casting, in financial deals, in marketing, in box office tallies, and so on.

00:47:47.440 And he's got a new book out of out that explains it so well. It's called Red Carpet. Nice. I like that.

00:47:53.960 See the play on words, Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the global battle for cultural supremacy.

00:48:01.620 Eric, thank you for being here.

00:48:02.500 Megan, it's my pleasure. Thank you.

00:48:05.340 I didn't think you're so good at explaining this. I mean, I've listened to you on some podcasts and

00:48:09.700 the book is just so educational. So you kind of break it down in a way that's very easy to

00:48:15.240 understand. And as I see it, you know, you talk about first sort of acts, first act, second act

00:48:19.540 of the book. In the first act, you've got China opening up to American movies. Hey, maybe we'll show

00:48:25.760 some American movies in China. This is interesting. OK, we'll do that. Then there comes China becomes

00:48:32.420 our student. China says, would you teach us how to make the movies? This is actually a really cool

00:48:37.280 industry. You know, like we'll be the little tutor and you be or mentee and you be the mentor American

00:48:42.140 Hollywood people. And we'll learn from you. This is so interesting. And then suddenly, you know,

00:48:47.100 that's that's happening. And it moves on to China begins its own movie industry. And now is at the

00:48:53.640 phase of that's booming. And now they're trying to export their values to us. And not just that.

00:49:00.820 But the central theme of the book is not only they're exporting their values to us and their

00:49:04.100 movies, but they have effectively kidnapped the Hollywood filmmakers into not offending the Chinese 0.95

00:49:13.560 self-censoring, explicitly censoring to please the Chinese, not just in the movies that they're going to

00:49:19.680 release over in China. But even the ones they're going to release here and it has to do with way

00:49:24.680 more than just ticket sales. It has to do with large international relationships that are very big

00:49:34.420 business. And boy, oh boy, Hollywood has surrendered. It explains so much. Anyway, so you've studied it all.

00:49:41.120 Let's let's walk through it because it's a fascinating story. Let's start back. And it was

00:49:44.480 what you said, like the 90s, I think, when when they first were like, oh, gee, Hollywood's fun.

00:49:49.280 Maybe maybe, you know, we will start showing American movies in China.

00:49:53.880 Exactly. And Hollywood wasn't the only Western industry moving into China at the time. China's

00:49:59.460 economy was modernizing rapidly. And this is when we started to see the real rise of the Chinese 1.00

00:50:04.660 middle class. So Hollywood kind of, frankly, followed behind aerospace, auto tech, a lot of American

00:50:12.540 sectors that were moving into China. And at the time, despite having this massive population,

00:50:18.300 China had very, very few movie theaters. And so the box office was really something 0.99

00:50:23.280 of an afterthought. There really wasn't a lot of money to be made there. But that started to change

00:50:28.260 in the early 2000s. And by 2009, 2010, it became clear that China's box office was going to be number

00:50:35.280 one in the world. And it was going to be a market too big to ignore. And one that you really couldn't

00:50:41.040 politically anger, because that would mean shutting off access to all of that revenue.

00:50:46.120 And we've got forbid the Hollywood filmmakers do that. But at the same time, they they were

00:50:50.540 suffering back at home in terms of ticket sales and box office and so on. And so they saw this very

00:50:56.840 lucrative market overseas that indeed would become the number one market for them. But it was bigger

00:51:02.820 than that, because there are these companies are stacked in a way where they really can't take off

00:51:08.420 China, because it could affect so much more than just their their ticket sales. Can you explain

00:51:13.600 that? Exactly. So over the past 20 years or so, there's been more of a corporatization of Hollywood

00:51:19.840 where studios that once may have been independently owned or even family owned are now smaller pieces

00:51:26.140 in a much bigger corporate pie. And China, through some very high profile examples, made it clear

00:51:32.540 that any infraction that it identifies threatens that entire corporate hole. So this means that when

00:51:39.300 in 1997, Disney makes a movie about the Dalai Lama called Kundin, China isn't mad just about the production

00:51:46.700 of that movie. It's not like they're saying, we're not going to let that movie and no one even thought

00:51:50.360 that movie was ever going to get into China. They say, no, but that theme park that you're already

00:51:55.120 talking about, and all those toys you're talking about selling here, those could be jeopardized by the

00:52:00.860 production of this movie in a subdivision of a subdivision. So you start to see how any comment,

00:52:07.620 anything that will cross a tripwire in China threatens much bigger holdings. And especially

00:52:14.600 because the studio chiefs are answering to larger corporate interests, they have to worry about much

00:52:21.120 bigger investments than just losing the budget on a single film.

00:52:25.380 You write in the book, there's a saying in Chinese, which roughly translates to kill the chicken to scare

00:52:30.620 the monkeys. The chicken is the person who could be made a public example of. The monkeys are everyone

00:52:36.240 who watched and learned from that person's mistake. Like Sony, you said China threatened the disruption of

00:52:44.780 the electronic supply chain that would cost billions to rebuild if they released a movie that that China 0.81

00:52:50.880 didn't like, that didn't make China look the way China wants to look. 0.99

00:52:53.780 Right. That was also back in 1997. You might remember the Brad Pitt movie, Seven Years in Tibet.

00:52:59.660 Oh, that was when it was released. Sony really had to do quite a behind the scenes charm offensive to

00:53:05.820 get back in China's good graces and preserve that supply chain you just mentioned. And the chicken

00:53:12.180 monkeys dialectic, I think, explains a lot. So so whenever you see a Western celebrity or a Western

00:53:19.160 company hurrying up and apologizing to Chinese authorities, whether it's because a map on their

00:53:24.720 website recognizes Taiwan or there's some kind of border dispute that is that Chinese authorities

00:53:30.240 think that this person is mischaracterized. Oftentimes you can think about that person

00:53:35.200 as the chicken who is, you know, teaching the other monkeys because these public examples kind of teach

00:53:42.460 everyone a lesson. And really what I think is fascinating is all the better if the offense,

00:53:47.900 I'll say, quote unquote, the offense doesn't seem like that big of a deal at all, because then

00:53:52.560 it lowers everyone's tolerance for risk. And then they start to self censor, which is even better

00:53:59.400 than having China have to do it explicitly. And that leads us, of course, to John Cena,

00:54:03.620 who was promoting last year's May of 2021, one of the Fast and Furious movies. And he said,

00:54:10.840 I think that Taiwan is a country, right? He said that was if I'm not mistaken, that's what he said.

00:54:15.300 That's right. And man, did the hammer drop on him. Just for fun, we're going to play his little

00:54:20.400 apology. It's it's actually in Mandarin, right? It's in Chinese. OK, listen, listen, just to just

00:54:27.420 remember. All right. You get the you get the picture. There he is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

00:54:39.320 Self-flagellating. Boy, I really stepped in it. And I mean, most people back here threw up a little

00:54:45.160 in their mouths watching him do this. Now, actually, having read your book, I have more a little bit

00:54:49.720 more empathy for the guy because it's like he was made to I mean, they there is there was no way he was

00:54:56.220 going to get away with that. You're absolutely right. And it wouldn't have been that much of a

00:55:01.260 surprise if we saw the next six John Cena films never play in China. And not only that, but that

00:55:06.900 the studios affiliated with those movies start to see larger corporate interests threatened in the

00:55:12.260 country as well. And you're right. When I was reporting the book, I started to realize that, no,

00:55:16.680 John Cena is not the first to run into this problem. It's happened many, many times. And now,

00:55:22.460 actually, in fact, when Hollywood actors and actresses go to China, they're often sent with

00:55:27.720 binders of what comments they are allowed to make. If certain topics come up, these are the

00:55:32.960 this is the wording or phrasing to avoid. Really, they've been trying to train actors and actresses

00:55:38.980 to avoid just that problem. Oh, my gosh. All right. But enter Richard Gere, who's basically

00:55:44.160 middle finger up saying, I don't care. And to his credit, you know, I mean, he's like, I'm an

00:55:50.060 American. I'm going to make the films that I want to make. And I'm gonna take a stance. We have a 0.62

00:55:53.900 clip of him. He was was he testifying before Congress? I think we have taken a stand on this

00:55:59.940 before our Senate committee. Okay, let's just listen to him.

00:56:04.060 I'm not allowed to go to China. I don't even know now if I'd be allowed in Hong Kong.

00:56:08.980 I asked point blank to very well known actress friends of mine, Chinese actresses,

00:56:16.440 if I could work with them. And they said, absolutely not. The careers would be over in

00:56:21.080 China. They'd never be allowed to work again. I've had other circumstances with very talented

00:56:26.960 Chinese directors that one was in tears with me, having to call me up and say that he couldn't

00:56:33.880 work with me, that his career would be over and his family could not travel. So I mean,

00:56:39.740 this is personal to a lot of people. So what was his original sin in the eyes of the Chinese?

00:56:45.820 It starts in the 90s as well. I mean, actually, it's it's interesting. He starting in the early

00:56:50.980 90s really became the Dalai Lama's number one cheerleader in Hollywood and spoke out repeatedly

00:56:57.580 about human rights abuses in Tibet and China's treatment of Tibetans, even interrupting an Oscar

00:57:03.800 ceremony before that was cool. Back in back in the early 90s to talk about it. And he started a

00:57:10.000 movie in 1997 called Red Corner about China's legal system certainly didn't make the country look good.

00:57:18.160 And, you know, but things hummed along for a while and he was able to kind of balance

00:57:21.660 that advocacy with his stardom. But then as China's box office started to grow at a clip,

00:57:27.740 it was growing, I mean, 15, 20, 25% a year. He became radioactive to a lot of studios because

00:57:34.780 casting such a public supporter of the Dalai Lama might mean your movie doesn't get released there.

00:57:41.680 And at the very least, it just might create more noise than you want to generate and more questions

00:57:46.460 and uncertainty than you want to have. So the last major studio movie that he made was in 2009.

00:57:51.860 And when I started out reporting this book, I wanted to figure out if what he just said was

00:57:56.480 true. Is it true that he has been blacklisted because of his public stance on Tibet and against

00:58:02.140 China? And, you know, everyone here in Hollywood, they can be really nice and generous, Megan. And so

00:58:07.660 some people said, oh, no, no, no, no, that that's crap. He's he's difficult to work with. Or,

00:58:13.220 you know, I remember one person said he was he was getting John Travolta's sloppy seconds anyway.

00:58:17.700 So some people kind of disputed that he he's had this this consequence laid upon him. But it turns

00:58:25.280 out my reporting shows that it is true. I spoke to an executive at Warner Brothers who said, you

00:58:32.000 know, it wasn't like a memo went around saying don't hire Richard Gere. But the thought just became

00:58:38.360 if you can get someone else, just get someone else, because why take on that problem? And so

00:58:44.840 if you really need Richard Gere to star in this role, let's have a conversation. But if you can

00:58:49.900 call Michael Douglas, you can call Gary Oldman, you know, let's get them on the line.

00:58:54.060 It really makes me want to do a crowdsource funding thing to get Richard Gere more movies

00:58:57.720 right now so that we stand behind Americans who have the guts to speak out about these abuses.

00:59:02.540 Right. I mean, there's a reason that they go on for so long because the international community

00:59:06.660 has turned the other cheek. They have decided we don't care about the genocide going on

00:59:11.680 in China right now with respect to the Uyghurs or any of these other abuses that they've committed. 0.99

00:59:16.900 And and the blackballing, as you point out, OK, so maybe it's not expressed. But

00:59:20.740 isn't it true that Brad Pitt cannot work in China like you forget? I mean, he's like next level.

00:59:26.820 He's past Richard Gere on the band list. You know, it's interesting. It's always hard to say

00:59:31.980 because really, you just have to essentially see what Chinese authorities do, what movies they let

00:59:37.280 in, what movies they don't let in and see if if a de facto ban has been lifted. I mean, Brad Pitt,

00:59:43.620 that was back in the 90s. And, you know, it's interesting that the juxtaposition of the two,

00:59:48.200 because Brad Pitt's movie Seven Years in Tibet came out the same year as Richard Gere's much more

00:59:53.680 critical movie Red Corner. And while Richard Gere was giving interviews far and wide talking about

00:59:59.400 why he thought it was so politically important to take a stand, Brad Pitt was trying to run in the

01:00:04.380 other direction and say, you know, I'm just an actor who cares what I think, you know, don't don't

01:00:09.340 bring me into this. And nonetheless, it took, I think, 15 years before he went back to China.

01:00:15.780 He went with Angelina Jolie when they were married and she was promoting a film. And since then,

01:00:21.300 it's I have to say it's it's probably for his career been a little touch and go. Now he's making

01:00:25.840 the kinds of movies that aren't necessarily going to get into China anyway. I guess the question would

01:00:30.080 become, you know, if he wanted to star in one of the big superhero movies, would this kind of

01:00:34.360 rear its head again? Because over the past year, especially, we've seen Chinese critics of

01:00:42.680 Westerners really ramp up. And it seems like no comment or, you know, history against the China

01:00:50.160 is too distant to be to be rehashed, to be punished. Can you speak a little bit about the business model

01:00:57.240 of Hollywood right now? Because you expose that to about there, you know, as a as a woman who grew up

01:01:03.300 in the 80s and 90s, I look back and I think, you know, we're we're the fun rom coms. We're like

01:01:08.140 the fun little things that we grew up with. We're like the John Hughes type things. And it's all

01:01:12.620 it's all franchises, series, you know, superheroes, which is great if you're an 18 year old boy, but

01:01:17.960 I'm not. And there is a I just thought they they didn't sell here. So like, I guess people have

01:01:24.500 different tastes now. It's actually more layered than that. The Hollywood studios have basically sold

01:01:29.940 out. And now all they care about is generating big box office like the art piece of it is kind of

01:01:37.640 gone. You know, I have to say, I don't know if this is any consolation, but you sound a lot like

01:01:43.020 the studio executives here in Hollywood. A lot of it's not a consolation. Yeah, I think a lot of them

01:01:50.080 are asking the same questions, though, which is where are the rom coms? Where are the movies that we grew

01:01:53.700 up with? Where are the movies that made us fall in love with Hollywood? And the fact is that they're just

01:01:58.360 not good business anymore. I mean, if you were running one of these studios, I mean, per our

01:02:03.140 earlier point, you're really running a corporate animal and you have to make sure that you were sort

01:02:09.300 of giving up offerings to the to the corporate gods. And increasingly, that means making the biggest

01:02:15.400 possible movies that not only sell ticket sales around the world, i.e. in China, but also sell toys

01:02:22.980 can, you know, service theme park attractions, can generate sequel, sequels and prequels and

01:02:29.520 spinoffs. I mean, this is the playbook that's been established and really the one that everyone

01:02:34.960 has to follow. Now, I will say I think there's probably some refuge to be found in the the

01:02:41.900 rise of streaming. We've seen that introduced different kinds of movies. Well, you got me excited

01:02:46.360 about Netflix and then you dashed my hopes about Netflix with the stuff about Saudi Arabia.

01:02:50.700 So tell us about Netflix and how they've avoided the China problem.

01:02:54.220 I guess I mean, this this book sounds like it was a real emotional roller coaster for

01:02:57.900 you. It was just so illuminating. It just explains so many things that you kind of know at a gut

01:03:02.700 level, but you haven't necessarily at least I hadn't taken the time to really understand,

01:03:07.440 you know, how we got to to this point. I appreciate I appreciate that. And you're right

01:03:11.180 about you're right about Netflix because Netflix several years ago tried desperately to get

01:03:15.880 into China. The list of countries that China or I'm sorry, that Netflix isn't in is really

01:03:21.220 quite small and illuminating. It includes China, North Korea, Syria. I mean, it is a real a real

01:03:28.600 crew there. And China said, we don't want Netflix to come in because we have our own streaming

01:03:33.200 services and we want to have some protectionist measures in place to preserve their business.

01:03:38.480 And after Netflix pretty much figured out that it was it was a lost cause, it was not going to get

01:03:44.200 into China. It did give filmmakers and producers there a little bit more license. And so that's why

01:03:50.760 of the few movies or documentaries that have come out in the past couple of years that present more

01:03:56.840 of an unvarnished look at China or have plot details that Chinese authorities would not appreciate.

01:04:02.720 They are often on Netflix because they don't have to have that same consideration that a studio like

01:04:09.020 Universal or Paramount does. And because they don't have a revenue stream up upstream from them.

01:04:13.780 They're not like Sony with an electronics arm that can be punished.

01:04:17.780 Exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right now. So you're right. So while Netflix has a number of high

01:04:23.320 profile cases censored content for countries where it is operating, China, just by virtue of the country

01:04:30.940 not letting it in is not one of them. So walk us through some of the censorship that China does

01:04:37.120 now with respect to American movies that appear in China. They're sort of that piece. They change our

01:04:42.940 movies. And then with respect to their own movies, it's it reminded me the way you wrote about it,

01:04:47.940 the way we used to portray every Russian back in the Cold War or every, you know, sort of Muslim

01:04:55.420 country right after 9-11. You know, we sort of pick the groups that we want to have appear as the bad guy

01:05:02.240 or the enemy. They're doing that to us right now. But start on what they're doing to our movies.

01:05:07.520 Exactly right. And I think it's over the past decade or so. It only takes a couple high profile examples

01:05:13.000 for everyone to to learn what will fly and what won't in China. And the first thing to understand is that

01:05:20.100 before an American movie is released into Chinese theaters, it has to pass approval from Chinese

01:05:25.920 censors, and they're looking for things big and small. So it can be something very cosmetic, like there

01:05:32.860 was a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that was filmed in Shanghai, and it featured laundry drying outside of

01:05:39.540 apartment buildings, which is a very common sight in Shanghai. But China didn't like the idea of audiences

01:05:45.280 around the world, seeing an image of their country that looked more, more backwards than they would

01:05:50.740 have liked. So they asked the studio to edit it out. But then there are also deeper, more thematic

01:05:56.260 issues with some movies. There's an example of a sequel to Men in Black being released. And I don't know

01:06:02.900 if you remember, but in that movie, anytime a civilian sees one of the secret aliens, there's a memory

01:06:09.000 wiping device that the agents can use to essentially scrub their brains of what they just saw.

01:06:15.040 And China, Chinese authorities didn't like that plot detail too much, because it just seemed

01:06:20.300 too much, a metaphor that hit too close to home in a country that controls the media and the

01:06:26.520 narrative as the Communist Party does. So it ranges from the cosmetic to the thematic. But you're

01:06:32.520 absolutely right that if you go to the movies in China, which I try, I would try to do every time I

01:06:36.840 was over there, I try to just go see a movie. And it really does remind you quite a bit of those

01:06:42.180 1980s rah-rah movies about the evil Soviets. I mean, really black and white, any portrayal of

01:06:49.740 an American is often a pretty, a pretty negative one. I met a young guy who moved over to China and 1.00

01:06:58.660 students started getting cast in some of these movies. And he said, you know, he said it with a

01:07:03.240 laugh. But he was like, you know, I'm typecast all the time. I'm either an American soldier who gets

01:07:07.920 shot, or an evil businessman, or the guy who's trying to steal the girl from the hero. I mean,

01:07:14.780 it's not, there's not really a lot of flexibility there. And what's fascinating is, especially after

01:07:21.240 COVID, when tensions between the US and China really rose, we started to see a bunch of movies

01:07:28.520 about the Korean War rushed into production. And so right now, some of the biggest Chinese 0.92

01:07:34.360 blockbusters in China today have been Chinese movies that are about Chinese victories over

01:07:41.400 American troops. So while Hollywood has had to scrub its product of Chinese villains, 1.00

01:07:48.600 China's been casting America as the villain time and time again.

01:07:51.720 Hmm. Okay, I'm going to squeeze in a break. After this break, we're going to talk about

01:07:55.760 why the Chinese communist leadership apparently loved Titanic and managed to change Top Gun. Okay,

01:08:05.160 so stand by for that, because there's a remake of Top Gun that they were involved in more with Eric

01:08:10.120 right after this. So Eric, the apparently, is it President Xi who likes Titanic?

01:08:21.300 It was his predecessor. Back in the late 90s, Titanic, I mean, this was a fascinating story to

01:08:30.420 revisit. When Fox released Titanic, obviously this worldwide global phenomenon, China's box office

01:08:38.400 was still relatively small, but this was its first real breakout hit. And what was so fascinating was

01:08:44.880 that Chinese leadership, the leadership of the Communist Party, actually encouraged party

01:08:50.960 members to go see the film. And there were several reasons why, one of which was they thought it was

01:08:55.880 a very good commentary on class issues, right, because of the lifeboat situation and all of that.

01:09:02.720 But there also was a speech given by the leader of the party saying, we have to go see this so that

01:09:08.800 we can sort of understand just how you can emotionally move people through art like this.

01:09:15.540 It was one of the first real moments we see Chinese leaders understand the power, the soft power, 0.98

01:09:23.460 frankly, that narrative and spectacle and the movies can provide. And I think it's one reason why

01:09:29.820 Chinese influence on Hollywood hits Americans a little different than Chinese influence on tech

01:09:35.960 or aerospace or some other industry. It's because over the past hundred years or so,

01:09:40.920 we've really treated these films and these companies like hearts and minds factories.

01:09:46.840 And we've come to expect them to sell America to the world like a movie like Titanic did.

01:09:53.220 Yeah. And I know you wrote that they particularly liked the scene

01:09:56.440 with the musicians staying on the deck of the Titanic as it went down.

01:10:01.340 I mean, who doesn't, right? It was on TV the other day, actually.

01:10:07.260 I think it meant something different to them.

01:10:08.980 It meant something different. It meant something different. You're right. But we see that actually

01:10:12.900 throughout history sometimes where an American movie just kind of hits a little differently

01:10:18.780 in China because of some kind of cultural reasons. And you're absolutely right that in Titanic,

01:10:24.840 the bandmates who were sort of doing their job and sort of fulfilling their duty, even as the ship

01:10:31.280 sinks, they were held up as heroes among the Communist Party members.

01:10:34.900 It's all about subjugation of the self and performing for the masses, the better of the masses.

01:10:41.360 So what happened with Top Gun? Because I know you say if you just if you sort of look at what

01:10:45.300 happened with Top Gun and then the remake of Top Gun, it gives you a good insight into China's

01:10:50.540 growing power. Yeah, I think it's I think it's an appropriate bookend because here you have the

01:10:56.180 original Top Gun released in 1984, really just like the perfect emblem of Reaganism on screen

01:11:02.780 enlistments in the armed services jump after the movie comes out. I mean, the movie does a better

01:11:09.820 job of getting people to enlist than traditional enlistment campaigns do. I mean, like who's ever

01:11:14.120 looked cooler on screen than Tom Cruise flying those jets, right? So when Paramount decides they're

01:11:20.120 going to reboot the film many, many years later, in 2018, they start to release some marketing

01:11:26.320 materials for this new film. And the marketing materials show just how much has changed to the

01:11:32.000 economics of Hollywood in the 30 years between the two films. Because you might remember that in the

01:11:38.500 original film, Tom Cruise has got his he's got his sunglasses and he's got that bomber jacket that has

01:11:44.480 the patches on the back that symbolize the tour of the USS Galveston. And there is a Taiwanese flag and

01:11:52.840 there's also a Japanese flag among the patches on his back. And when the new movie was made and the new

01:11:58.740 poster was released, those two flags were gone. And the reason why was because of China's influence over

01:12:04.860 the film industry. Because a Taiwanese flag, you know, to our earlier conversation,

01:12:10.300 is a is a reminder of territorial issues and a bit of a challenge to the one China policy that Beijing

01:12:17.700 wants to enforce. And tensions between China and Japan have been last have lasted for for several

01:12:24.860 decades. So Chinese financiers on the new top gun pointed out that this might be a problem or it might

01:12:31.980 just be something to avoid a risk not worth taking. And so before Chinese authorities could even say a word,

01:12:39.560 Paramount removed those two patches from the jacket of the new film. And there just is something so

01:12:45.560 deeply ironic about this happening to a movie as American and is sort of distinctly American

01:12:51.820 as Top Gun, as a change coming to a character named Maverick, of all things, you know,

01:12:58.460 Oh my God, we're such bootlickers now. We're bootlickers.

01:13:01.140 Well, I mean, I think I think what it and then the the ultimate irony is that doing this doesn't

01:13:08.260 necessarily guarantee the movie will be released in China. It's still possible that Chinese authorities

01:13:13.480 decide they don't want their audiences to see a movie that valorizes the US military to such a degree.

01:13:20.800 So it might have all been for not.

01:13:22.820 Oh, OK. Tell us what happened with the movie Red Dawn, because this is this was one of the big films

01:13:28.480 when I came of age, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen. And when you were first saying it was problematic,

01:13:33.620 I was like, I don't get it. That was about that was about the Soviets. Right. I mean,

01:13:37.380 like that wasn't about the Chinese. So what was the problem they had with Red Dawn?

01:13:41.480 It was it was a similar situation to Top Gun when they remade Red Dawn in 2009. MGM thought,

01:13:47.760 you know, just as you said, it has a lot of fans who grew up with the original film. So they said,

01:13:52.200 let's remake it. And they said, well, you know, a Russian invasion of the US doesn't make a lot

01:13:56.860 of sense. So why don't we do China? Why don't we make it a Chinese invasion? So they write the

01:14:01.180 script. They film the movie. And it's very similar to the 1980s version, where instead this time we

01:14:07.440 have Chinese paratroopers landing on the front lawn. And then someone didn't get the memo.

01:14:14.780 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But they eventually did because China made it clear that this could be a

01:14:20.640 problem. And this is a problem for MGM for a number of reasons, one of which is MGM releases

01:14:26.560 James Bond movies, and they release a lot of big budget features that rely on the Chinese box office.

01:14:32.520 And those releases might be jeopardized if this Chinese version of Red Dawn was released. So MGM did

01:14:40.540 something extraordinary. This is back in 2011. They send the movie, the completed movie to a secret

01:14:48.820 visual effects company here in Burbank. And they pay them a million dollars to go in and frame by

01:14:55.060 frame, remove every Chinese flag, every line of dialogue referencing China and replace it with North

01:15:01.460 Korea. And the movie is released as a Red Dawn remake about a North Korean invasion of the US.

01:15:09.240 And the screenwriters on this film were not happy. As one of them pointed out, this is the most

01:15:14.920 ridiculous thing he had ever heard in his life. It's, I mean, we can have issues with the plausibility

01:15:20.200 of the original Red Dawn. A North Korean version of Red Dawn makes even less sense. And audiences also

01:15:27.080 rejected the idea outright. But what was fascinating to me is when I went back and I did research on this,

01:15:33.700 I didn't find there to be a lot of outrage or consternation. People knew that MGM had done this

01:15:40.060 before the new movie came out. But there really wasn't a lot of backlash. And I think it was

01:15:45.120 probably because relations between the US and China were at a different point than they are now.

01:15:51.480 And what's interesting, though, is that the movie did come up back in 2018 or 2019. Trump

01:15:58.380 administration officials would cite that as one of the examples of, in their eyes, how Hollywood had

01:16:03.780 helped fuel and support China's rise. Yeah, you point out in the book, Trump, William Barr,

01:16:10.560 our old AG, Pompeo, they all pointed to this movie as evidence of something else. But consciousness

01:16:17.100 about China and its problematic nature and its relationship with us. And that weirdness is 0.98

01:16:22.000 rising a point you get to and I want to get to with you in one second. But first, a couple more

01:16:26.000 movies that I think are they'd help tell the story. Transformers kind of went a different way.

01:16:30.980 It wasn't about scrubbing scenes from Transformers. Tell us what that movie did that shows China's 1.00

01:16:38.140 power. So this was this is this is one of the movies that that you reference is all you see.

01:16:43.640 It's one of those big budget franchise titles and Transformers. This is the fourth film in the

01:16:49.240 series. It's a it's a film called Age of Extinction. It was coming out in 2014. And this is really the heyday

01:16:55.980 of Hollywood chasing Chinese money because the box office is growing and the U.S. box office is

01:17:02.220 flatlining. And so Transformers became this case study. And how how much can you try to appeal to

01:17:09.140 Chinese audiences in a single American movie while keeping it in an American movie? So there are 0.97

01:17:14.400 Chinese actors and actresses in it. There are scenes filmed in China. There is product placement

01:17:20.220 up the wazoo. I mean, there is a scene where Mark Wahlberg is using Chinese protein powder in the

01:17:27.100 middle of Chicago. There's another scene where a character has to use an ATM in the middle of Texas.

01:17:33.300 It turns out to be a Chinese ATM. I mean, really, some illogical choices in this film. But what was 0.98

01:17:41.220 fascinating is that there was one scene that the Chinese authorities specifically requested,

01:17:45.960 and that ended up in the final product. And it's a scene at the end. It's one of the classic,

01:17:50.780 like, you know, third act whole cities being destroyed and the city being destroyed is Hong

01:17:55.820 Kong. And in the original script, Mark Wahlberg and the American heroes arrived to help save the day.

01:18:02.480 And the Chinese authorities said, you know, it would be better if Beijing came to the rescue first.

01:18:08.400 Oh, my gosh. And the executives working on the film thought, well,

01:18:13.180 it's probably not something that a lot of audiences are even going to clock and the fighter jets in

01:18:19.180 Beijing would be closer than those in the US. So it might make sense. And so in the final version

01:18:24.360 of the film, you can still see this today. There is a scene of Hong Kong being destroyed. And then

01:18:29.620 there's a rather random cut to a Chinese defense minister who says, we will defend Hong Kong at all

01:18:38.200 costs. And this was in 2014. And when I caught up to people who worked on the film from Hong Kong,

01:18:44.740 many years later, they said, you know, in retrospect, it feels like it was one of the first

01:18:49.980 signs we had of how China was going to exert a heavier hand over Hong Kong, and really try to cast

01:18:56.360 itself as Hong Kong's benefactor, protector, you know, overseer. And they were complicit.

01:19:03.440 That's it. This isn't a Hollywood movie starring Mark Wahlberg and robot guns.

01:19:08.080 Yeah. And they were complicit instead of being the America we've always known and loved that

01:19:12.180 stands up to bullies. We bowed. We bowed over and over these Hollywood companies over and over and

01:19:17.460 over for the reasons we're discussing. Is the is the box office now officially bigger in China for most

01:19:23.580 movies made in America than it is here in the States? It is. But COVID had a lot to do with that

01:19:29.660 because theaters in China reopened far faster than they did in the U.S. So even though we expected

01:19:36.140 the Chinese box office to eventually become number one in the world, COVID accelerated it by probably

01:19:42.380 three or four years. OK, so I guess it's not a huge surprise. But can you can we talk for a minute

01:19:47.900 about Kung Fu Panda? I mean, my kids love that movie, Jack Black, right? He does the voice. What

01:19:54.340 what's the deal with Kung Fu Panda? This was another this was another turning point in the

01:20:00.140 relationship between China and the U.S. because it came out in 2008, which is the year of the Beijing

01:20:05.740 Olympics, a really fascinating moment to look back on, because I think it was a moment of optimism and

01:20:12.940 potential, you know, more cooperation between China and the U.S. And DreamWorks Animation releases this

01:20:19.740 movie, Kung Fu Panda that really had been conceived of almost not by accident, but in that kind of

01:20:26.600 random way that stories come together. They thought it would be funny to combine Kung Fu with pandas.

01:20:31.280 And they released this film and it's this global hit. And it really prompts some existential soul

01:20:38.360 searching among Chinese authorities because they say, wait, why did an American company take our

01:20:45.580 national mascot and our national tradition and make this global soft power tool, turn it into this

01:20:53.920 kind of cuddly hero for kids and families? Why didn't we do that? Why didn't our filmmakers do that?

01:20:59.760 And we started to see this fascinating. It was one of the first realizations that I think Chinese 1.00

01:21:03.680 leaders had that whenever you're making movies and you're trying to use movies to win people over to

01:21:09.540 your cause, it can't feel like medicine and it can't feel like propaganda, that the most effective

01:21:15.220 propaganda doesn't feel like propaganda at all. And so they started asking officials from DreamWorks

01:21:20.820 Animation, they would have them come to China and say, you know, how did you do that? Why did you

01:21:25.100 decide to make his father a duck? Was that a commentary? Were you trying to make a message here?

01:21:29.940 And I think it was one of the first realizations that a lot of people in Hollywood had that China

01:21:34.860 was still approaching cinema as a primarily or purely messaging tool, that it actually also could be

01:21:43.740 entertaining. And sometimes if it were entertaining, it could be even more effective. And I think over

01:21:48.940 the next decade or so, what we saw was China learn how to do that. As I say, it's they learned how to 0.94

01:21:54.560 put the pill in the peanut butter. I have a golden retriever. That's what we have to do when he has

01:21:58.620 medicine. You put the medicine inside something that kind of helps it go down a little bit more

01:22:03.360 easily. And that's what a lot of the more recent Chinese movies have managed to do.

01:22:07.860 And it's not just Hollywood. I mean, you point out the book, there's something that I don't know if

01:22:13.100 Hollywood was the was the canary in the coal mine, but it was certainly one of many industries and

01:22:19.100 sort of areas in the United States that would eventually succumb to Chinese influence or go

01:22:23.600 seeking Chinese influence. Can you put it in a broader perspective?

01:22:27.840 Yeah, I think I think in many ways it was an early student. It's funny, though, I said that to

01:22:32.460 someone who worked in Hollywood and worked or tried to work with China a few times, and he used the

01:22:37.460 same analogy you did. He said, no, it was more a canary in the coal mine. But at the very least,

01:22:42.220 I think this happened quite a bit with with the NBA, when the NBA had its own issues of sort of

01:22:49.020 seeing an economic backlash to political problems with with Chinese authorities or taking a stance

01:22:54.980 that China didn't like. Really, what the NBA was doing was learning the lessons that Hollywood had

01:22:59.860 several years later. And I think every time you see a company, whether it's Intel or H&M or Tesla,

01:23:05.840 have to thread the needle between maintaining that access, but not incurring the wrath of critics

01:23:13.040 here at home, they're really trying to sort of follow a playbook that Hollywood had to learn,

01:23:17.860 you know, 20, 15 years ago. You've got brand new reporting in the book breaking news on companies

01:23:24.040 like Apple with with respect to deals that they struck like Tim Cook that we didn't know about that

01:23:30.140 help put their relationship in perspective. I mean, they Apple obviously very beholden to China and

01:23:36.460 is in no position to lecture anybody on the protection of human rights. It's we've been

01:23:41.120 talking about it lately because all these sort of folks who want to see Joe Rogan kicked off of

01:23:45.680 Spotify is saying, like, go over to Apple. It's like, read this book. Apple's got some problems, too.

01:23:52.260 Well, Apple is an interesting case because they, I mean, they've been moving into Hollywood

01:23:58.360 quite aggressively with movies and TV shows. And I think sometimes whenever we talk about these

01:24:05.520 studios being so beholden to maintaining access to the Chinese market, sometimes people say, well,

01:24:10.980 you know, with these tech giants, they've got more money than God. They don't have to care about that.

01:24:15.180 Well, it turns out it depends on the tech company because Apple has not only a deep customer base

01:24:21.780 in China, they sell millions of iPhones in China, but they also have a supply chain that can't be

01:24:28.360 disrupted as well. So as we see Apple move in to Hollywood, their their executives have been quoted

01:24:34.640 as saying, look, the one the two things we're not going to do are hardcore nudity and anything that

01:24:40.600 crosses China. Wow. And by the way, you point out in the book that after Red Dawn and the censorship

01:24:47.680 of that, right, to make it North Korea, the invaders, that that no I want to get my note,

01:24:53.220 no major studio release had cast Chinese characters as villains since then. And no major studio release

01:25:00.800 portrayed China's government as a bad actor. I mean, truly, it's when the bully gets in your own

01:25:07.560 head that he's really won. I think I think that that, you know, that detail there about Red Dawn that

01:25:14.120 came out in 2012. So it's been a decade. I mean, I think it gets all the more glaring as

01:25:19.080 the US China relationship becomes the clear story of the 21st century. It is it is a story that I

01:25:26.360 think we haven't been able to explore in all its complexity. And I mean, more than just casting,

01:25:31.500 you know, China as the villain, I think that it's it's flattened a lot of Americans understanding of

01:25:37.720 China in general, because studios are either afraid to touch something they think is too sensitive,

01:25:42.500 or really, they've been blocked from portraying China with any nuance or complexity.

01:25:49.220 All right, let's talk about how, you know, Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016 for the

01:25:54.340 presidency. Trump won. You write in the book that her husband's presidency was a time that may have

01:26:02.300 laid the foundation in some ways for people like the Teamsters and so on to wind up voting for Trump

01:26:10.200 instead of Hillary Clinton. It's a fascinating story and connection. Explain what you're talking about.

01:26:16.660 Yeah, I was fascinated by this as well. This was back in the 90s. The Clinton administration really

01:26:22.240 was was the spearhead of getting China to join the WTO. And it's what allowed China to really

01:26:30.760 see the economic rise that we've had over the past two decades. And what was fascinating was at the time,

01:26:37.120 because I had to go back and read all these articles that were written at the time. And there

01:26:41.340 were stories of union members and really influential Democrats saying, this is going to destroy our base,

01:26:48.000 this is going to lead to job losses that really turn Democrats against the party. And sure enough,

01:26:57.320 in 2016, as you said, counties that had lost more jobs to China because of that deal were more likely

01:27:06.480 to have voted for Trump. So you're right. So it is one of the one of the interesting things we see

01:27:12.380 sort of like just when you go back and you look at history and sort of unintended consequences, you know,

01:27:17.560 Bill Clinton's support for the WT for China's entry into the WTO, which then was moved through under

01:27:24.140 George W. Bush, was seen at the time as one of the best ways to bring China to reform. You know,

01:27:32.120 there were speeches that Bill Clinton would give in which he said, you know, if we open up China's 1.00

01:27:38.340 economy, if we allow the internet in, it's only a matter of time before democracy and reform will

01:27:43.880 follow. And that has proven to be not the case. In fact, there have been several steps backwards in

01:27:49.440 that respect. It's gone the other way. Exactly. And then the other way. Right, right. And then at

01:27:55.040 the same time, you know, the decision seems to have really cost the Democrats some of the core

01:28:02.260 constituencies that they'd relied on reliably for several election cycles. I know we all sort of

01:28:09.340 laughed a little with Trump with China, China, China. He was onto something and he was so disciplined

01:28:14.720 in his message. That's the craziness of Trump, right? It's like he's smart and he's wily. And

01:28:22.520 there was a reason he kept saying, China, he understood that sort of white working class

01:28:27.480 that makes up the teamsters and so on in a way that Hillary did not. And she should have. And boy,

01:28:33.240 oh, boy, did it cost her. You do get to the sort of present day realities, though. In 2022,

01:28:39.260 as we're seeing now with the record low ratings with the Olympics in Beijing, Americans are waking up

01:28:47.440 to China's serious problems and to the problems with our having received so much of their culture 1.00

01:28:55.160 and embraced it and gone with it and let them we've let them buy up so much land and so much of

01:29:00.920 our industry and, you know, from pigs and meat and so on, like their their power grows daily here.

01:29:07.240 And Americans, I think, are starting to see this is this is problematic. So how have things changed

01:29:12.660 and how does that affect, do you think, Hollywood? Well, Hollywood is really had a very weird six

01:29:19.220 months with China because starting last year, several major movies that traditionally would

01:29:25.680 have had no problem getting into Chinese theaters like Black Widow, The Eternals, The New Spider-Man.

01:29:31.420 None of them were accepted into Chinese theaters. And it's left a big fat zero on the balance sheets

01:29:37.840 of studios that were expecting releases there. And no one really knows why there are theories,

01:29:44.860 but there's no answer. No one gets a memo from Beijing saying this is why we're not accepting your

01:29:49.340 movie. And it's really led to a lot of consternation here in Hollywood, because it looks like we now have

01:29:57.100 more uncertainty than ever in a business plan that has been essentially calcified over the last 20

01:30:03.200 years. A business plan that's come to expect those Chinese grosses has been thrown out the window and 1.00

01:30:09.100 it could change tomorrow. China could just start letting movies in again. But it's a degree of

01:30:14.080 uncertainty that I think has bred quite a bit of resentment here in Hollywood and even a sense

01:30:18.940 that the industry may have gotten played that over the past 20 years. Well, I mean, it's and it's

01:30:25.580 something that I think it's it's a it's something that other industries have said, you know, they

01:30:30.800 experienced to you run in you rush toward you rush toward Chinese access. And then whenever the wall

01:30:37.000 goes back up, there's little recourse or nothing you can do. And that seems to be a moment that Hollywood

01:30:43.340 is in right now. And and it'll be I'll be curious to see what people do, because like I said, this

01:30:48.520 really disrupts the way that Hollywood has thought it will be doing business for the next foreseeable

01:30:54.560 future. And you see, you know, what's happening with the Olympics right now, the press intimidation.

01:31:00.060 You're probably not surprised to see any of those stories come out. I mean, that's just a smaller scale

01:31:04.580 example of what they've done without us necessarily noticing in the films we watch, the entertainment we

01:31:11.640 seek for decades now. No, I think I think you're right. I mean, the the Olympics, the experience of

01:31:18.240 seeing the Olympics right now has been fascinating because it is such a bookend to the 2008 games,

01:31:23.360 right? In 2008, George W. Bush attended the opening ceremony. Here we are 14 years later in the middle

01:31:28.780 of a diplomatic boycott. And and I do think that it's I think NBC and others covering the games

01:31:35.440 knew going into it that there would have to be some conversation around the human rights abuses,

01:31:42.900 the issues of free expression in China, and that it really does feel like at least from the American

01:31:49.400 perspective, like this has been part of the conversation. I'm curious to see, though, how it's

01:31:55.040 playing in China, because I think within China, oftentimes party leaders want the Olympics not just

01:32:01.920 necessarily because of some kind of victory on the world stage, but to bolster support internally as

01:32:07.700 well. And to signal to the Chinese people that this is their moment, this is their moment in history.

01:32:12.820 And I would hear that time and time again, when I went to China, when people would say, you know,

01:32:17.620 back in the 80s, when you talk about this Hollywood heyday, that was America's time. But now it's China's 0.99

01:32:23.400 time. And why shouldn't we have our own heroes? Why shouldn't we have our own blockbusters? And why

01:32:28.060 shouldn't we be able to show our movies around the world like you did? And I think I think so

01:32:33.080 sometimes I think the Olympics, even if it looks like it's taking a reputational cost here in America

01:32:39.020 or other countries that are willing to have these conversations and explore China in those kind of

01:32:44.660 darker and more complex ways. I think sometimes in China, though, it might not matter as much. And

01:32:49.960 there actually might be the reverse effect of bolstering support and bolstering.

01:32:53.560 It's not China's time. It's not. I mean, they're very good at propaganda, less so at actual economic

01:32:59.800 rewards in this communist country. I will say this. You know, Ben Shapiro was on yesterday of

01:33:04.660 The Daily Wire talking about this movie that they just put out. It's on YouTube today. It's called

01:33:08.580 Shut In. It's really good. It's a thriller. And I was saying it's really important to support them

01:33:12.580 because they are independent and they're not woke and they're not controlled by sort of

01:33:16.300 far left people on in Hollywood. They're not controlled by China either. And if we don't start

01:33:21.780 supporting companies that aren't controlled by them, we deserve what we get. Eric, you're

01:33:27.820 brilliant. I love the book. It's called Red Carpet and it's out right now. Highly recommended

01:33:31.760 to everybody. Thank you for being here. Hey, it was my pleasure. Thank you, Megan.

01:33:35.980 Wow. What what a good read. So I've extended your lifespan. I've made it more healthy for you

01:33:40.440 and I've helped you understand how not to support the Chinese propaganda machine. You're welcome.

01:33:45.540 Tomorrow on the show, we've got Dave Smith, fascinating guy, comedian, libertarian and possible

01:33:50.180 candidate for president. Download the show in the meantime, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

01:33:56.020 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - February 10, 2022

Secrets to Living Longer and Better, with Tony Robbins, and Hollywood Captured by China, with Erich Schwartzel ｜ Ep. 259

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