The Megyn Kelly Show - Why Boys are Falling Behind in America Today, and the Truth About ADHD and Plastics, with Dr. Leonard Sax ｜ Ep. 1387

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00:00:30.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:42.220 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.560 Today we dive into the growing crisis among American boys and young men.

00:00:51.100 From classrooms to the workplace to dating and marriage and beyond,

00:00:55.120 they are falling behind, becoming less ambitious, less resilient, and many lacking an overall sense

00:01:03.500 of purpose. There are many reasons why. Changes in education, what they eat, the fear of AI,

00:01:10.440 the addiction to it, and porn, to name just a few. On the show today, a man who's got some

00:01:16.620 real answers on what's happening with our young men, Dr. Leonard Sachs. He has been researching

00:01:21.960 this issue for decades. He is a practicing physician, psychologist, and bestselling author,

00:01:27.380 and he is the author of books like Why Gender Matters. Oh, subversive. It does. The Collapse

00:01:35.420 of Parenting, and every time he's on the show, we get great feedback from our audience wanting

00:01:39.560 more. Today, he is with me in person here in the Red Studio to talk about his new book,

00:01:44.200 an update on his bestseller from nearly 20 years ago. It's called Boys Adrift,

00:01:50.400 the six factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men.

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00:03:03.220 Dr. Sachs, welcome back.

00:03:04.720 Thanks for inviting me.

00:03:05.640 Oh, it's great to have you here in person.

00:03:07.040 Yes, indeed.

00:03:07.940 It's, you know, when I read up on you

00:03:11.580 and the studies in this book, I felt sad.

00:03:15.980 I felt forlorn as the mother of two boys and a daughter, but you know, this is about the boys

00:03:22.000 and just about the state of American men today. Like from the fact that they're being treated as

00:03:29.700 problems from the time they're in kindergarten to the fact that they're no longer having sex

00:03:35.420 with real women, wanting to get married, wanting to find jobs, wanting to date to the sad cases,

00:03:44.380 some of which we featured on this show of kids committing suicide because they become too

00:03:49.620 enraptured with an AI chat bot, whether it's a quote regular one or a sexy girl type one.

00:03:59.140 That's not real. I don't even know where to begin. Like, is it, where is it? Where do we begin? Like

00:04:07.340 to begin to solve all of this. So let's start, I guess, at the beginning. First of all, you've

00:04:13.720 updated this book. Why? Why? Okay. So as you mentioned, the first edition came out 2007.

00:04:19.820 And why did I write it? Well, I'm a family doctor. I've been a family doctor more than 30 years now.

00:04:25.620 And in so many families, I'll think of one family where the parents are very concerned about their

00:04:33.020 son. He was 16 years old at the time we had this conversation and he's not doing well in school.

00:04:39.000 He's basically failing Spanish, couldn't care less, spends his free time playing video games,

00:04:43.400 looking at porn father said he's a total goofball they're very proud of their daughter who's

00:04:48.940 basically a straight a student captain of the varsity soccer team the girl is shining and the

00:04:56.600 boy is adrift and i saw this pattern over and over and over again the reverse pattern where the boy

00:05:04.280 is a star and the girl is adrift very very rare so why is this same parents same household

00:05:11.620 but very different outcomes.

00:05:15.480 And that was the motivation for the first edition

00:05:17.440 of Voice of Drift, which I wrote 20 years ago.

00:05:21.620 Now, 20 years ago,

00:05:23.640 we didn't have all the evidence we have now

00:05:26.360 and things have changed a lot in 20 years,

00:05:28.940 which is one of many reasons we needed a new edition.

00:05:33.080 You know, the Journal of the American Medical Association,

00:05:34.800 JAMA was kind enough to review my book 20 years ago.

00:05:37.880 And they gave it a great review,

00:05:39.980 which we put the blurb on the cover. They said, you know, very helpful, lots of good references,

00:05:46.040 but they said it doesn't really make a good case that boys are falling behind. Well, 20 years ago,

00:05:52.060 we didn't have all the data. Now we have the data. We know that boys are falling behind.

00:05:59.500 Richard Reeves, I've had the great privilege of working with him and writing a paper for him,

00:06:04.160 wrote the book of boys and men. He founded, uh, the American Institute for boys and men,

00:06:09.980 and they've been doing great work, gathering data from the United States nationwide.

00:06:14.700 So you can now go to their website at AIBM.org and you can see they've documented it, that girls

00:06:22.740 are now doing better than boys in every subject, including math and science in every grade level,

00:06:28.580 K-12. Girls are now much more likely to go on to a four-year college than boys are. Four-year

00:06:35.480 colleges in the United States are now roughly 60-40, girls to boys. And women under 35 with

00:06:45.080 no children at home are now out-earning men under 35 with no children at home by about 20%

00:06:51.140 because they're more likely to be college educated. They're working higher-paying jobs.

00:06:57.240 You know, and I've done this presentation, various versions of this PowerPoint for all

00:07:03.060 different kinds of audiences. And sometimes the pushback is pretty hostile. I was invited to speak

00:07:08.440 to the elected trustees of the Toronto School District, which is the sixth largest school

00:07:12.500 district in North America. And the director, we'd call him the superintendent, invited me

00:07:18.060 because he wanted to have, he wanted to begin gender aware instructional strategies,

00:07:23.500 girl-friendly computer coding, boy-friendly English. And he wanted me to explain to the

00:07:30.320 board members why this is a good idea. Well, the pushback was very hostile.

00:07:36.320 And one of the board members said, hey, so you're telling us we should be concerned about the fact

00:07:42.040 that women now outnumber men at university by three to two? Well, 50 years ago, men outnumbered

00:07:49.280 women treated too, and nobody seemed to care much about it now. The pendulum has swung the other

00:07:54.200 way. Look, the trustee continued, men have most of the money. Men have most of the power. Most

00:08:01.640 of the politicians are men. Almost all the billionaires are men. And the few billionaires

00:08:05.900 who are women, like Mackenzie Scott Bezos and Melinda French Gates, are the ex-wives of men.

00:08:12.880 Men have the money and the power. Explain to me why we should be concerned about boys falling

00:08:18.200 behind? And I said, I've got an answer. One word, mating.

00:08:24.640 Women, I was thinking the same.

00:08:26.560 50 years ago, if a man graduated from four-year college and he was looking to marry a woman,

00:08:32.360 he might have a number of qualifications in mind for his bride, but educational attainment was

00:08:36.940 not one of them. If she was pretty, that would satisfy. Today, if a woman has graduated with

00:08:44.680 a four-year degree, and she's thinking of marrying a man. She's looking for a man who is as accomplished

00:08:51.140 and motivated as she is, and there are not enough good men to go around. And this is not confined

00:08:57.760 to college-educated women by any means. So I'm a family doctor. I'll tell you a story from my own

00:09:02.220 practice. So a girl I know well, I've known her since she was a toddler. This story takes place.

00:09:07.660 She's 20 years old. I said, Lauren, I bumped into Brett the other day, and he's just going on and

00:09:13.040 on about how great you are and how funny you are and how pretty you are. And he told me he's asked

00:09:18.520 you to marry him. He's asked you to marry him twice. Lauren, how come you don't want to marry

00:09:25.020 the father of your two children? And she said, Dr. Sex, I already got two babies at home. I do not

00:09:31.420 need a third. If a woman's going to marry a man, she's looking for a man who is as motivated and

00:09:37.880 hardworking as she is. And this is true across every demographic, college educated, not college

00:09:43.680 educated, white, black, Asian, Latina makes no difference. And there are not enough good men to

00:09:49.180 go around. So in the new edition of Boys Adrift, I paid the Financial Times 450 bucks for the rights

00:09:56.380 to reproduce one of their graphs, showing this dramatic drop in coupling and fertility. So

00:10:02.940 Coupling means marriage plus cohabitation and a dramatic drop in marriage over the last 30 years.

00:10:08.620 And sometimes when I'm doing one of my talks, a person will say, well, you're just showing how

00:10:13.500 old you are. People don't get married anymore. They live together. Okay. That's cohabitation.

00:10:18.000 Cohabitation is dropping as well. Marriage plus cohabitation, demographers call coupling.

00:10:23.960 So in the new edition, we got this graph showing this dramatic drop in coupling

00:10:27.740 and dramatic drop in fertility. If a woman's going to have a baby, most women would like to

00:10:34.840 have a father in the home, a man that they trust, a man who's as hardworking and motivated as they

00:10:43.160 are. And as I've said several times now, there are not enough good men to go around. That was

00:10:48.720 my answer to the board member. That's why we should care. So we're not producing men with

00:10:55.220 four-year degrees, or even just aggression and drive to get to where they want to go

00:11:00.940 professionally, to be a hard worker, to be able to provide for a family. At the same time,

00:11:06.340 we are producing women with those credentials. And so it's the mismatch that the women are

00:11:11.200 objecting to, and probably that the men are objecting to as well.

00:11:14.860 That's part of what women are objecting to, but there's more going on. And when we get to porn,

00:11:19.060 and we'll talk about that,

00:11:20.720 there are many reasons why women are now looking at young men

00:11:25.340 and saying, no, thank you, and we'll talk about that.

00:11:29.260 And educational attainment and motivation is part of the story.

00:11:32.880 It's not the whole story of why many women have given up.

00:11:37.220 So the Pew Research Center recently surveyed young women

00:11:39.900 in the United States who are single,

00:11:42.740 18 to 30, if I recall correctly,

00:11:45.680 and said, okay, you're not in a relationship with a man.

00:11:49.060 would you like to be maybe serious relationship maybe just fun dating only 35 said yes why 65

00:11:57.320 said no the majority of american women have now given up and scholars have coined the term

00:12:05.220 hetero pessimism refer to women's despair and and hopelessness is that across political parties

00:12:13.840 Across all parties.

00:12:15.580 This includes Republicans as well as Democrats.

00:12:21.000 And so there's a bunch of factors going on here.

00:12:25.000 It's not just the fact.

00:12:26.740 So as one woman in my own practice told me, she said, you know, I'm not so bothered by

00:12:31.380 the fact that I earn more than he does.

00:12:33.260 It's just that he expects me to be his mother.

00:12:37.320 He expects me to pick up after him and do chores for him.

00:12:40.920 And I'm not interested.

00:12:43.840 So it's not just academic achievement.

00:12:47.320 It's training boys to be good men.

00:12:49.980 And we'll talk more about that in our time this morning,

00:12:52.560 the many domains in which we are falling short.

00:12:55.240 I mean, if you think back to the 1950s household

00:12:58.100 where the gender roles were pretty well-defined,

00:13:00.980 the father was gonna be the provider,

00:13:03.080 the person who worked outside of the home,

00:13:04.700 the mother was gonna be the doting wife and mother

00:13:07.440 and make the meals and keep the house clean.

00:13:10.780 A lot of women didn't like it, but it worked.

00:13:13.840 It was, it's, it's helpful to have clearly defined roles and then, you know, which one to play, but with women's lib, as women started to get out of the house and so on and so forth, I think it's fine to have women who are the primary wage earners, but there does need to be a clear definition of the roles at home.

00:13:33.500 I can say in my own home, if my husband were sitting around looking at me like all of that

00:13:39.320 was expected of me, I'd be mad too. But that's not how it works. He and I have very clearly

00:13:45.500 defined responsibilities around the house. He does what he is comfortable with and what I've

00:13:51.500 agreed to share with him. And I do what I'm comfortable with. I don't take out the trash.

00:13:57.120 That's man's work. I don't touch automobiles. That's his work. I don't shovel snow. I don't

00:14:02.640 shovel walks, if things break down, that's for him to do. But I do do the predominant amount of

00:14:08.520 cooking in the house when it needs to get done. And if somebody is going to unload the dishwasher,

00:14:12.940 it's probably going to be me. It could be him, but you know what I mean? And this works for us

00:14:17.340 because there are certain roles that we each fill, but I don't think you could change one majorly

00:14:23.160 and leave all the old responsibilities on the woman too.

00:14:27.660 Well, I think there's been a lot of confusion on this point. So, for example, Richard Reeves,

00:14:35.380 who I mentioned earlier, and Kay Heimowitz before him have said changes in the culture and changes

00:14:41.760 in the economy are to blame for this decline in boys' achievement. 50 years ago, you didn't need

00:14:49.880 a college degree. You could have a high school degree, go to work at our auto factory and make

00:14:54.380 great money and support a family on one income today many of those factory jobs are gone we've

00:15:00.840 changed from being an industrial economy 50 years ago to being mostly a service economy today

00:15:04.960 and people like richard reeves and kay heimowitz say that's what's the what the problem is and

00:15:10.640 kay heimowitz wrote this book in which she asserts that the rise of women is responsible

00:15:17.820 for the decline of men that's literally the subtitle of the book uh how the rise of women

00:15:23.280 has turned men into boys. And she argues plausibly, but I will say incorrectly, she argues plausibly

00:15:32.240 that 50 years ago, men were motivated because they expected to be the sole breadwinner.

00:15:36.920 So they worked hard so they could say to a young woman, hey, marry me, we'll start a family,

00:15:42.020 I'll be a good provider. But as she documents in her book, you look at young Americans under 35,

00:15:48.980 As I've said earlier, with no kids at home, women are now earning more money than men are.

00:15:54.460 So men look around, they see that women are doing better than them in school, that women

00:15:58.420 are earning more money than them in the workplace.

00:16:00.540 So where is their motivation?

00:16:02.320 I'm going to quote from her book.

00:16:04.280 She says, men today are troubled by the lack of certainty about their role as providers

00:16:15.100 in the global marketplace of the 21st century.

00:16:17.220 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:16:18.980 It makes sense, but it's wrong.

00:16:21.340 Well, how's wrong?

00:16:21.980 It's not the correct explanation.

00:16:23.940 How do I know she's wrong?

00:16:26.180 I know she's wrong because unlike Kay Heimowitz,

00:16:29.140 I have visited more than 500 schools over the last 25 years.

00:16:33.320 Very often when I visit a school,

00:16:36.080 the format is morning meetings with students,

00:16:38.640 afternoon workshop for teachers, evening for parents.

00:16:40.540 And that was the format at this particular elementary school I visited.

00:16:44.020 And the very first thing on the agenda was to meet with the principal.

00:16:46.680 So I'm in the principal's office waiting for her.

00:16:48.420 she's busy, she's tied up with something. And as I'm waiting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 kids walk in,

00:16:55.380 discipline referrals, all boys. So I pride myself on my ability to strike up conversation with

00:17:01.940 seven-year-olds. So I say to these kids, what are you doing here? What are you in for? What are you

00:17:05.780 having? We got in trouble. Our teacher said, draw a picture of anything you want. And I drew a

00:17:13.320 picture of a rifle and I got

00:17:15.120 sat down. As it turns out

00:17:17.080 that violates the zero tolerance policy at this

00:17:19.100 school for weapons.

00:17:21.740 Teachers saw me and Jason

00:17:23.120 saying, bang, bang, you're dead.

00:17:26.280 Teachers saw

00:17:27.180 me and Brett throwing snowballs at each other.

00:17:32.100 Boys doing things

00:17:33.200 that boys have always done now gets you

00:17:35.100 in trouble. So I asked these boys,

00:17:37.300 so what do you think of school?

00:17:39.080 School's stupid. I hate school.

00:17:41.560 School's for girls.

00:17:43.320 not one of these boys said,

00:17:45.560 well, I'm uncertain about my role as a provider

00:17:47.500 in the global marketplace of the 21st century.

00:17:50.240 Boys' negative attitude towards school starts early.

00:17:54.320 And Deborah Stipek, former dean of education at Stanford,

00:17:57.660 found that those attitudes once formed

00:17:59.300 are global, stable, and non-contingent.

00:18:02.700 That's a fancy way of saying

00:18:03.860 that once that eight-year-old boy has decided

00:18:05.500 he hates school, he's not gonna change.

00:18:08.020 You come back seven years later,

00:18:10.160 he still says he hates school

00:18:11.440 and he doesn't think there's anything he can do

00:18:13.980 or anything you can do that's gonna make a difference.

00:18:16.840 So the subtitle of my book is the six factors driving,

00:18:21.080 there are six factors driving the growing epidemic

00:18:23.260 of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men.

00:18:25.860 And the first of those six factors,

00:18:27.540 not necessarily the most important,

00:18:29.140 but the first that I address is changes in education.

00:18:33.740 30 years ago, school was more friendly to boys.

00:18:38.040 So just recently, a mom shared with me

00:18:40.880 her story of her son. He's six years old at the time this story takes place. He's in kindergarten

00:18:45.360 and a teacher's holding up some wooden sticks and some cotton puffs and some Elmer's glue.

00:18:52.640 And she said, today we're going to make pussy willows. I'm going to show you each of you how

00:18:57.620 to arts and crafts pussy willow. Well, Jason doesn't want to make a pussy willow. He wants

00:19:04.160 to make a lightsaber. And he says, I'm going to make a lightsaber. And she said, no, we're making

00:19:08.780 pussy willows so he glues a white cotton ball to his wooden skewer and he brandishes at her

00:19:18.320 channeling his darth vader he says

00:19:21.380 i find your lack of faith disturbing and she sends him to the principal he's got a discipline

00:19:30.400 referral he got four discipline referrals his first two weeks and mom told me he came home the

00:19:35.460 end of the second week saying, I hate school. I don't like school. I don't want to go back.

00:19:41.600 School has become unfriendly to boys. I'm old enough to remember 30 years ago. Kindergarten

00:19:47.240 used to be about duck, duck, goose, singing in rounds, finger painting, going on a field trip

00:19:52.600 to the park to splash in a pond to chase after tadpoles. Not anymore. American kindergarten has

00:19:58.480 become first grade. Schools across this country, public and private, now expect five-year-olds to

00:20:04.080 sit still and learn about diphthongs.

00:20:06.680 And that acceleration of the kindergarten curriculum

00:20:08.960 took place before we had the research

00:20:11.840 showing that the language area of a five-year-old boy

00:20:14.420 looks like the language area of a three-and-a-half-year-old girl.

00:20:17.640 It is not developmentally appropriate

00:20:19.520 to ask a five-year-old boy to sit still, be quiet,

00:20:22.400 and learn about diphthongs for an hour.

00:20:25.020 And the result is five-year-old boys

00:20:27.620 who decide they hate school,

00:20:28.700 who decide they're stupid.

00:20:31.760 And once that attitude is formed,

00:20:33.160 as Deborah Stipek and others have found,

00:20:34.600 it's very hard to change.

00:20:35.880 So in the book, I talk about what do you need to do?

00:20:40.520 Well, don't enroll your son in kindergarten at five.

00:20:43.280 Enroll him at six.

00:20:44.920 Kindergarten has become first grade.

00:20:47.700 Find a play-based pre-K.

00:20:50.560 Give him that gift of an extra year of childhood.

00:20:54.720 Start him in kindergarten at six years of age.

00:20:57.840 i actually wrote about this 25 years ago for the american psychological association

00:21:04.640 my recommendation that we start kids in kindergarten at six years of age instead of

00:21:09.400 five and to my great surprise my obscure article published in a scholarly journal was picked up by

00:21:14.840 the new york times and other media and that is actually one factor that led me to write my first

00:21:20.140 book why gender matters uh that i've got the sense that some people care about this um find a boy

00:21:26.320 friendly school. What does that mean? So in the new edition of my book, Boys Adrift, I go into

00:21:32.560 some detail about how you can figure out on a one-day visit, is this school boy friendly or not?

00:21:39.720 Ask to see the honor roll. As I mentioned in the opening of the book, I was visiting another school,

00:21:46.900 middle school, and when I meet with kids, it's always question and answer. It's not a long

00:21:50.240 speech. It's a question and answer. So I said to the students, this assembly, I said, all right,

00:21:57.380 this next question is just for the boys. Gentlemen, I was just out in the hallway. I was

00:22:01.740 looking at the principal's honor roll. There's 22 names on the principal's honor roll. 19 girls,

00:22:07.440 three boys. Can any of you boys raise your hand? Explain to me why there's 19 girls, but only three

00:22:12.300 boys. And several boys raised their hand and they all gave a variation on the same answer.

00:22:17.660 Girls are smarter.

00:22:19.760 Girls are smarter.

00:22:20.920 Boys believe this, and they believe it

00:22:22.960 because they've grown up in the world

00:22:24.260 of girls rule, boys drool.

00:22:27.060 Girls go to college to get more knowledge.

00:22:28.740 Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

00:22:30.840 And they see the evidence.

00:22:34.380 They have seen that girls are getting better grades

00:22:37.020 than boys in every grade, K through 12.

00:22:40.300 So if you're at a school where you've got 20 girls

00:22:44.920 and three boys on the honor roll,

00:22:46.520 that's not a boy-friendly school. The boys have disengaged. If you're looking at elementary

00:22:51.880 school, ask about recess. It should be at least two recess a day. In our school, in our boys'

00:22:57.280 school, in the elementary school years, the first period is recess or gym. The very first thing they

00:23:04.300 do is run them. Yes. Well, and you mentioned an all-boys school, and I have visited a great many

00:23:09.880 boys' schools over my school visits. And one of the first schools I visited at Landon in Montgomery

00:23:17.920 County, Maryland, 20 many years ago, I said to the teacher, where are the chairs in this third

00:23:28.760 grade classroom? Why are there no chairs? And she said, well, everyone knows that eight-year-old

00:23:33.920 boys, they're better standing than sitting. When that boy sits down, his brain shuts off.

00:23:37.800 I said, excuse me, I didn't know that.

00:23:39.660 And I do have a PhD in psychology.

00:23:41.440 I do read the educational psychology literature, and I'm not aware of any research that supports

00:23:45.440 your claim that boys learn better standing rather than sitting.

00:23:49.460 But in her defense, it is well known within that community of boys' elementary school

00:23:54.420 that many boys learn better standing rather than sitting.

00:23:58.680 And we now do understand the neuroscience having to do with parasympathetic versus sympathetic

00:24:03.420 innovation in girls versus boys, respectively. And these are some of the strategies I share with

00:24:11.360 schools. How you motivate boys, make sitting optional. It's not quite that simple. You make

00:24:19.580 sitting optional in a co-ed classroom, and I observed this myself at Cunningham Elementary

00:24:24.360 in Waterloo, Iowa. This boy here is sitting. The boy on his right is twirling, making a buzzing

00:24:31.440 noise the boy on his left is flopping on the floor he's on the floor flopping back and forth

00:24:37.900 he told me this his name was Tyreek he told me he was pretending to be a dying fish

00:24:42.460 and I asked the boy sitting I said were you bothered by what Tyreek was doing he said I don't

00:24:48.080 know what was Tyreek doing look if you try this in the co-ed classroom yes you've got a girl sitting

00:24:54.900 and the boy on her right is twirling and the boy on her left is flopping on the floor she's going

00:24:59.000 to say, excuse me, how am I supposed to concentrate with these bozos? So you can do this, but you have

00:25:05.400 to have the boys stand at the back of the classroom and you, the teacher, must move around

00:25:11.960 the classroom. Otherwise you have classroom management issues. So we're seeing an interesting

00:25:17.040 microcosm of this as our kids get older because our two boys go to a boys' school, our daughter

00:25:22.760 goes to a girls' school, but in high school, the boys' school and the girls' school merge for some

00:25:28.260 classes during the day. And what's interesting is the boys tend to say the teachers favor the

00:25:35.820 girls. When they merge and they start going to classes where there are girls and boys,

00:25:42.520 they like seeing girls, but it's a bit of an eye roll because they're like,

00:25:46.940 the teachers love all the girls because suddenly you've got all these rule followers there who can

00:25:52.500 easily sit politely for an hour or whatever it is. And the boys have been raised in an all-boy

00:25:58.680 environment and are used to more permissive teachers who understand they do need to move

00:26:02.960 more. They need to make paper airplanes. They're still listening, but they need to be able to,

00:26:07.780 and when you merge them together after, you know, in those environments.

00:26:12.320 So you're absolutely right that girls across every demographic are more concerned about

00:26:18.100 pleasing the teacher and boys are less so. And this is not true. This is not only true across

00:26:23.900 all human cultures. It's true across species. It's as true in chimpanzees as it is in humans.

00:26:31.260 So primatologists observing chimpanzees in the wild, the mother chimpanzee is teaching the

00:26:38.660 juvenile how to fish for termites. You take a stick, you strip it, and you stick it down into

00:26:44.540 the termine mound, leave it there for a moment, then pull it out. There will be termites on it.

00:26:48.560 You can eat them. And the girl chimp is paying attention and following along. And the boy chimp

00:26:54.340 completely ignores her and goes off to wrestle with the other chimps. So this phenomenon that

00:27:00.740 girls are more concerned about pleasing the adult and pay better attention than boys do

00:27:06.400 is robust, meaning it is true not only across every human culture, it's as true in chimpanzees

00:27:11.840 as it is in humans, it is hardwired.

00:27:15.180 So you need teachers who understand that dynamic

00:27:18.300 and don't penalize the boys for being normal boys.

00:27:21.400 You need teachers who understand the differences.

00:27:23.740 Fundamentally, you don't need girls' classrooms

00:27:26.360 and boys' classrooms as much as you need teachers

00:27:28.960 who understand the differences.

00:27:30.800 And that's a lot of what I do.

00:27:32.100 I share what I've learned with schools.

00:27:36.200 And if you understand that,

00:27:37.620 then the same boy who loves video games

00:27:39.480 will love Emily Dickinson,

00:27:40.640 will love Jane Eyre. And the same girl who loves SZA and Ariana Grande will love computer coding.

00:27:47.960 That's so fascinating. That's so good. Yes, you do have to look at the actual specific teachers.

00:27:52.500 And I think you're arming parents with the information to push back. So if they keep

00:27:57.060 getting called in there or they keep getting their son downgraded and then they find out

00:28:02.160 it's because of his quote behavior, there may be some layers to peel back before you just

00:28:06.580 exceed to that? Well, let me warn parents, because my own approach to that situation has changed. So

00:28:11.760 20 years ago, I would have told parents, hey, here's some research. Here's my book. Take this

00:28:16.580 into the principle. Share this with them and see if you can't get the principle to understand

00:28:20.460 that what a boy needs is different from what a girl needs. I have given up on that approach

00:28:28.020 because it doesn't work. It simply is not effective. One parent is not going to change

00:28:35.180 that principal's mind. And there's a lot at stake in the new edition of Boys Adrift. I share a

00:28:40.540 longitudinal cohort study showing that a boy who is suspended from school once, the risk of him

00:28:47.760 being incarcerated for a felony in prison increases by 800%. One school suspension profoundly changes

00:28:58.860 a boy's attitude towards school. He now regards teachers and administrators as the enemy and

00:29:04.200 other boys who've been suspended are friends. And most remarkably in this study, they looked at boys

00:29:09.260 who were suspended once and boys who were suspended 10 times. No difference. One suspension is all it

00:29:17.860 takes to change a boy's attitude. And once that attitude has changed, it is global, stable,

00:29:24.000 and non-contingent. It's going to be very hard to change it back. So if your son is getting

00:29:27.920 reprimanded. This is a red alert. You need to consider switching schools. And I'm not asking

00:29:37.520 you to do anything I didn't do. My wife and I were very unhappy with the choice of schools

00:29:44.320 available to us in Montgomery County, Maryland. So I sold my medical practice that I started from

00:29:49.320 scratch in 1990 and built up to 7,000 patients. I sold my practice to my associate who's still

00:29:54.200 running it, I might add, 17 years later. We sold our home.

00:30:01.000 You went to Pennsylvania.

00:30:01.920 And we moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania. And we've never regretted it.

00:30:05.240 Your kid has to be your first priority. Above your work, above your home. If you have to

00:30:11.260 switch jobs and sell your home, that's what you have to do. But if your son's getting

00:30:16.340 discipline referrals on the verge of suspension, you've got to intervene immediately.

00:30:21.980 That's very good to know.

00:30:23.420 We did the same.

00:30:25.000 We moved, we fled from New York City,

00:30:27.620 not for these reasons, but because of the woke schools

00:30:29.820 and what amounted to abuse in our schools.

00:30:34.480 I mean, I've told the audience this,

00:30:35.560 but in our boys' school,

00:30:37.100 not only did they unleash a six-week

00:30:39.120 transgender education program on the children

00:30:42.100 without telling us,

00:30:43.440 where they had the boys raise their hands

00:30:45.180 and say on a scale of one to five,

00:30:46.720 how much of a boy are you?

00:30:48.220 Wow.

00:30:48.740 One, two, three, four, five, without telling us.

00:30:50.720 This is the third grade they did this.

00:30:52.260 Oh my gosh.

00:30:52.840 And then after George Floyd-a-Palooza,

00:30:55.920 they actually made it mandatory reading

00:30:58.020 amongst the faculty,

00:30:59.280 an article by a ridiculous so-called academic

00:31:02.280 at some no-name school who posited that,

00:31:05.680 and I quote,

00:31:06.520 in every classroom where white children learn,

00:31:09.480 there is a future killer cop.

00:31:11.740 Wow.

00:31:12.240 So we got the hell out of there.

00:31:13.620 It's one of the best schools in the nation, ostensibly.

00:31:16.340 You mentioned changes,

00:31:18.080 and that's another big change

00:31:19.540 that I had to address in the new edition.

00:31:21.740 20 years ago, teachers didn't get in trouble

00:31:24.120 for using the phrase boys and girls.

00:31:26.100 Boys and girls, would you please line up?

00:31:27.640 Yes.

00:31:27.980 Wouldn't get teachers in trouble.

00:31:29.240 Now it will.

00:31:30.820 That school, that's an all-boys school,

00:31:33.420 won't say boy or son anymore.

00:31:35.500 They just say, please collect your student.

00:31:37.440 Yes, because they will argue

00:31:40.080 that the terms boy and girl are heteronormative

00:31:43.180 and exclusionary because of what if you're non-binary?

00:31:48.280 What if you're trans?

00:31:49.540 And this is not just blue states and blue cities.

00:31:52.660 In Lincoln, Nebraska, which is not a blue state,

00:31:57.580 in Lincoln, Nebraska, the official guidance

00:31:59.860 from the school board is you are not to use

00:32:02.240 the term boys and girls.

00:32:03.800 If you do, you get a reprimand.

00:32:08.260 You are to use the term purple penguins.

00:32:10.600 Oh, good Lord.

00:32:12.420 Well, this is insane.

00:32:15.220 Yeah.

00:32:15.600 At this school, the same boys school,

00:32:17.220 They unleashed the gender bread man when we got, I don't know, in this part of this education program, not to be confused with gingerbread, but gender bread where he doesn't have, you know, one identifiable set.

00:32:32.660 So that's, and we've just talked about the first factor so far, but so many reasons we had to have a new addition to address these new challenges.

00:32:41.500 You need to be sure that your school is comfortable talking about boys and girls,

00:32:47.380 a school that understands that what a boy needs to get excited about poetry

00:32:51.740 is different from what a girl needs to get excited about poetry.

00:32:55.080 And if they don't understand that, if the principal gives you a blank look,

00:32:58.720 then you need to look elsewhere.

00:33:00.500 So how do those boys who are having this experience,

00:33:03.660 the kindergarten versus the first grade stuff, the sit down,

00:33:07.500 The absence of understanding on how they learn, how to speak to them, how to discipline them if they do transgress, and not demonizing things that are just normal for boys, like drawing a rifle, which is fun for kids to pretend they're soldiers, et cetera.

00:33:22.000 How do those boys then wind up in high school, latter part of high school, not wanting a girlfriend, not interested in sex or dating?

00:33:33.760 Maybe they'll go to college.

00:33:35.200 Maybe they won't.

00:33:35.760 Maybe they'll get an active job.

00:33:36.900 maybe they won't, and just feeling apathetic.

00:33:40.460 Well, let's move on to that second factor now,

00:33:43.080 which is video games, because that's a big part of it.

00:33:46.200 I was shocked by what I read about the video games

00:33:48.200 in the book, shocked.

00:33:50.040 When I was at Fox back in 2004 and five,

00:33:53.540 and there were many people on Fox

00:33:54.900 who were lamenting these video games

00:33:56.700 and what they were doing, like the violent ones

00:33:58.740 and some of the driving the auto ones.

00:34:02.540 And there were so many reactive pieces

00:34:04.920 rolling their eyes at these pundits,

00:34:06.640 like, oh my, come on, it's not the video games.

00:34:09.620 And I mean, I'm here to say after having read the book,

00:34:12.720 actually it is the video games.

00:34:15.320 So a real good question to ask any boy

00:34:18.160 to get a sense of where he is,

00:34:20.360 is he at risk for being a boy adrift?

00:34:22.860 Ask this question.

00:34:25.360 What's your favorite thing to do in your free time

00:34:28.840 when you are by yourself with no one watching?

00:34:32.680 and i often ask kids that question when i meet with students i'll ask i'll say raise your hand

00:34:39.840 if you'd like to answer that question and a girl raises her hand and she says my favorite thing is

00:34:44.640 to play guitar in the style of janice joplin i said whoa what's your name melissa you know i don't

00:34:50.980 know melissa but i kind of feel like i do because her favorite thing to do is to play guitar in the

00:34:55.920 style of janice joplin if you want to get to know someone in 60 seconds or less ask them that

00:35:00.900 question. What's their favorite thing to do in their free time? And just over the 25 years I've

00:35:05.380 been doing the school visits, I have seen it narrow among boys. And the most common response

00:35:13.100 now from boys is video games. They want to spend their free time playing video games.

00:35:17.520 And parents don't understand how good the video games are. So RDR2, a lot of parents don't even

00:35:24.400 know what I'm talking about. The video game Red Dead Redemption has earned more than $3 billion.

00:35:31.480 It's earned more money than the first Avatar, the highest growing movie of all time. And most

00:35:36.600 people have heard of Avatar. Many parents have never heard of RDR2. So it's earned more money

00:35:41.140 than Avatar, even though it appeals to a narrow demographic of boys and young men. So this is an

00:35:47.160 incredible video game where the physics are absolutely realistic. You're living in late,

00:35:53.580 in the 1890s out West. And it's a peculiar time because the West is kind of becoming

00:35:59.460 modern. And it's a transitional period. It's not the wild West per se.

00:36:06.860 And how you interact with people matters. How you interact with your horse matters. If you're nice

00:36:13.040 to your horse and it gets loose, it'll come back. If you're not nice, it'll run off and won't come

00:36:16.620 back. It takes about 40 hours to complete your mission in RDR2. And when a boy has accomplished

00:36:25.020 that, they've told me, it's such a great feeling. I feel like I've really mastered something.

00:36:33.100 And it will raise their status in the eyes of their peers. Whoa, Jared finished RDR2. What a man.

00:36:39.280 and we've got the research which i present in that chapter of boys adrift time spent playing

00:36:47.240 video games has gone up time spent interacting with girls has gone down and many boys will tell

00:36:52.280 you they would rather spend their free time playing video games than interacting with girls

00:36:57.560 you know why would i want to interact with her i see her in algebra class boring

00:37:02.620 um so how do you want to spend your free time um and we'll talk more about testosterone levels

00:37:11.600 because that factors into this and we'll talk more about pornography because that factors into this

00:37:15.700 but video games i'm not saying you have to prohibit video games the research does not

00:37:21.520 support that so my brand is evidence-based when i make a recommendation long-term i'm going to show

00:37:26.600 you longitudinal cohort studies i'm going to show you research that supports every recommendation i

00:37:32.140 make. How much time spent playing video games is too much time. No more than 40 minutes a night

00:37:37.600 on school nights, no more than an hour a day on weekends, and your minutes do not roll over.

00:37:43.080 So no video game console in the bedroom. You need to limit, govern, and guide how much time your

00:37:49.360 son is spending playing video games. And you also need to limit what games he is playing

00:37:54.180 because really awful games like Grand Theft Auto. So Grand Theft Auto is a game where you get

00:38:00.800 rewarded for killing unarmed civilians. And we have a longitudinal cohort study where they

00:38:07.920 recruited kids at age 12 and followed them to age 15. What kind of video games are they playing?

00:38:12.860 How much time are they spending playing video games? And control for every parameter, like

00:38:18.020 race, ethnicity, household income, family composition, parental involvement. Because

00:38:23.760 a kid spending more time playing video games, maybe his parents aren't as involved as a kid

00:38:28.480 spending less time. You've got to control for everything, including parental involvement.

00:38:32.500 When you control for all those parameters, you find that boys playing violent games like Grand

00:38:37.220 Theft Auto change over three years' time. They become less patient, less honest, more selfish,

00:38:46.320 and it's a big change. After three years, a boy who's spending his time playing violent video

00:38:52.140 games on these parameters, he's looking like a boy who was raised in a violent and abusive home

00:38:58.020 all his life, even though he's been raised in a loving and nurturing home all his life.

00:39:02.580 So it really matters. So the California State Assembly brought the researchers out. They brought

00:39:11.820 Craig Anderson and Doug Gentile, the lead investigators on this study, out to Sacramento.

00:39:16.580 They said, you're telling us that the most popular video game in the United States,

00:39:19.540 Grand Theft Auto, is a game that your research shows is going to change personality,

00:39:23.860 cause kids to become more selfish, less honest. And Craig Anderson, who helped me write that

00:39:34.100 chapter, said, yeah, absolutely. And so they wrote a law. California statute made it a civil offense

00:39:40.200 to sell a game like Grand Theft Auto, not any violent game, but the worst games like Grand

00:39:45.420 Theft Auto to any child under 18. You have to show ID, put the games behind the counter. You'd

00:39:49.200 have to show ID to prove that you're 18 and order to buy the game. The video game industry

00:39:53.340 immediately brought suit, claiming that the California statute violated their First Amendment

00:39:57.920 right of free speech. And the video game lawsuit went to the United States Supreme Court.

00:40:02.580 And the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the video game industry, throwing out the California statute,

00:40:08.080 rendering a null and void. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurrence. He said, look,

00:40:14.360 I've read the research of Anderson and Gentile, and I share the concerns of California parents

00:40:19.580 and California lawmakers, these games are heinous.

00:40:23.820 That's the word he used.

00:40:25.100 No kid should be playing a game

00:40:26.360 where you get rewarded for killing unarmed civilians.

00:40:29.700 He said, nevertheless, it is the ruling of this court

00:40:32.620 that deciding what games children will play

00:40:34.820 is not the job of the California State Assembly.

00:40:37.220 It is the job of the parent.

00:40:39.400 I'd have included a link to the full text

00:40:41.200 of Justice Alito's remark in the new edition

00:40:43.140 of my book, Voice Adrift,

00:40:45.200 because you need to understand this is your job.

00:40:47.140 there can be no law or regulation limiting the sale of any video game in the united states no

00:40:53.440 matter how awful the game no matter how young the child because the united states supreme court has

00:40:58.020 so ruled so you must know what game your son is playing and that's all you have to know can i ask

00:41:04.700 you what what's the name of the game then you go to commonsensemedia.org type in the name of the

00:41:10.460 game type in grand theft auto and it'll say absolutely not no child i love common sense

00:41:15.060 media should be doing this that'll help you with movies it'll help you with a lot a lot

00:41:19.080 yeah just today we have this news of the meta settlement um meta which of course owns facebook

00:41:25.560 and instagram has now entered into this multi-billion dollar settlement with multiple

00:41:30.940 state attorneys general who had sued it claiming that these properties are unfairly targeting

00:41:36.340 children in a way that's addictive and very harmful to them which obviously is true but i have to say

00:41:42.220 I couldn't help when I heard the settlement, but think, you know, because they were like, there should be limits on the number of hours that the children can log on.

00:41:48.860 And there should be limits on how many times you can sort of tickle the children with the notifications like, hey, look, your friend's on here.

00:41:56.380 And that's all good.

00:41:57.400 But I all I could think when I was reading it was my children are already not doing that because we don't allow that.

00:42:03.120 Like they're, it's great, I guess, to have this backstop for parents who aren't actively parenting their children and making sure, as is their duty, that their children are protected from online predators, which I do think those social media apps are.

00:42:17.900 But it's really our responsibility.

00:42:20.160 There's only so many legal judgments, settlements, cases we can get that are going to protect our children.

00:42:25.200 Because let's face it, the vast majority of kids lie anyway to get on, to get past the age barriers and so on.

00:42:31.800 Well, and I've seen this in my own practice.

00:42:34.100 A boy was doing well in elementary school.

00:42:36.140 Then in middle school, his grades took a nosedive.

00:42:39.760 And parents took him to the psychiatrist, looked at the Conner scales.

00:42:44.040 He's off the chart, not paying attention to any of your class.

00:42:46.300 So the psychiatrist said, well, it certainly looks like ADHD.

00:42:48.660 Let's try Vyvanse, which was very helpful.

00:42:51.380 But he got side effects, palpitations, jittery, loss of appetite.

00:42:54.600 So parents saw some articles I've written for New York Times and Time Magazine expressing concern about these medications.

00:42:59.540 that brought him to me for a second opinion.

00:43:01.800 And I did a more careful sleep history.

00:43:03.720 I said, does your son get plenty of sleep?

00:43:07.240 Mom said, oh, absolutely.

00:43:08.140 He's in his bedroom every night at nine.

00:43:09.640 We wake him up at six.

00:43:10.440 That's nine hours.

00:43:11.080 That's enough, don't you think?

00:43:13.640 And I said to the boy,

00:43:14.600 do you have a video game console in your bedroom?

00:43:16.720 He said, of course, not everybody.

00:43:18.460 I said, were you playing last night?

00:43:19.740 He said, yeah.

00:43:20.440 I said, when'd you finish?

00:43:21.260 He said, 1.30.

00:43:22.740 Mom's like, you were playing video games at 1.30 last night?

00:43:25.740 I said, is that pretty typical?

00:43:26.920 He said, yeah, sometimes one, sometimes two.

00:43:30.780 He needs at least eight hours of sleep a night.

00:43:33.040 He's getting five or less.

00:43:35.560 He's sleep deprived.

00:43:36.840 Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics attention deficit disorder of the inattentive variety,

00:43:41.020 which was his diagnosis.

00:43:42.740 Vyvanse was very helpful.

00:43:44.460 What's Vyvanse?

00:43:45.120 What's Adderall?

00:43:46.120 They're amphetamines.

00:43:47.380 They're speed.

00:43:48.060 They compensate for the sleep deprivation.

00:43:50.300 But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not scheduled to amphetamines.

00:43:55.440 So I said to mom,

00:43:56.180 you got to get the video game console out of the bedroom.

00:43:58.300 You didn't even know he was playing.

00:44:00.020 You got to get that out of the bedroom,

00:44:01.380 no more than 40 minutes a night playing video games.

00:44:04.260 And so I said, that's totally unacceptable.

00:44:06.360 I'm going to be the next ninja.

00:44:07.580 He's referring to a man who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month

00:44:10.440 playing video games.

00:44:11.800 I'll never get there at 40 minutes a night.

00:44:14.300 Mom's like, what can I do?

00:44:16.140 So here's a mom who feels powerless to exercise her authority.

00:44:21.120 So again, in that chapter, I've got the guidelines.

00:44:24.020 You need to find the courage to be the evil parent.

00:44:27.520 No video game console in the bedroom.

00:44:29.320 That's not just my recommendation.

00:44:30.640 Those are the official guidelines

00:44:31.620 of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

00:44:34.100 What about when it comes to just social media in general?

00:44:37.340 So social media in general,

00:44:39.840 we now know is really more of a risk for girls

00:44:41.960 than it is for boys.

00:44:43.220 Girls are spending more time on social media.

00:44:44.920 Boys are spending more time on video games.

00:44:48.280 So yeah, I totally endorse John Haidt,

00:44:51.900 Jane Twenge's recommendation.

00:44:53.160 kids should not be on social media at all until 18 years of age.

00:44:57.020 Gene Twenge's recommendation, not 16, which is John Hyde's recommendation.

00:45:01.040 There's no evidence to support 16.

00:45:03.300 The evidence supports 18.

00:45:05.420 Kids should not be on social media under 18 years of age.

00:45:10.640 And Facebook issued their official statement yesterday,

00:45:14.280 and they said, look, we need our peers to do this as well.

00:45:19.380 And I think that's a fair statement,

00:45:21.080 Because if it's only Instagram and Facebook, kids are just going to go to TikTok and YouTube and Snapchat, and you won't really have accomplished much.

00:45:30.760 This has to be across the board.

00:45:33.000 And parents, you can't wait for the courts.

00:45:35.000 You can't wait for the legislature.

00:45:38.120 You need to have the courage to be the evil parents, to lock it down, to limit the video games, and to lock down the social media.

00:45:44.900 Yes, have the courage to be the evil parent.

00:45:47.700 That's a good line.

00:45:48.760 It's true because if you don't enforce these rules

00:45:51.740 with your children, who will?

00:45:53.760 And if you're not upsetting your children,

00:45:55.760 we talked about this one of the other times you were on,

00:45:57.800 if you're not upsetting your children here and there-

00:45:59.840 You're not doing your job.

00:46:00.660 You're not doing things right.

00:46:02.020 You're not there to be liked.

00:46:03.060 But I want to move on to our next factor

00:46:05.400 because I'm hoping we can cover as much as we can.

00:46:08.860 And that is medications for attention deficit disorder.

00:46:11.280 I just mentioned the boy who was diagnosed with ADHD.

00:46:14.700 There's been a huge rise in the proportion of American kids diagnosed with ADHD.

00:46:20.440 In 1979, only 1% of American kids were diagnosed with ADHD and was understood to be a disorder

00:46:25.920 of childhood.

00:46:26.480 What year?

00:46:27.400 1979, 1%.

00:46:29.200 1%.

00:46:29.760 And it was understood to be a disorder kids would outgrow.

00:46:32.260 It was regarded as a disorder of childhood.

00:46:34.100 Um, today, right now, according to the CDC, 23% of 17 year old boys in the United States

00:46:43.740 have been diagnosed with ADHD, 23%.

00:46:47.820 Um, and the great majority of those are on medications like Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin,

00:46:52.640 Concerta, Medidate.

00:46:54.000 So I wrote a book for a French publisher titled Pourquoi les garçons perd pieds, les filles

00:46:59.680 se mettent en danger.

00:47:00.620 Oh, look at you.

00:47:01.360 So with the colleagues in French, most importantly, Isabella Cruzet, and working with my French colleagues, I learned that in all of France, there are fewer than 6,000 kids on medication for ADHD in all of France.

00:47:17.460 There's more kids in Connecticut, here in Connecticut, on medication for ADHD than there are in all of France, a nation of 67 million people.

00:47:26.580 Wow.

00:47:27.420 Why is this?

00:47:28.460 the fundamental reason, and I explore this at length in the chapter on ADHD and the new edition

00:47:35.260 of Boise Adrift. In the United States, doctor's first reaction is, let's try Adderall. Let's try

00:47:42.780 vitamins and see if it helps. That's true in the United States, it's true in Canada, and it is true

00:47:47.660 in no other country. Okay, well, what's not to like? So I did a talk at Harvard Medical School.

00:47:58.460 um, on the, the title of the conference was learning and the brain. And my talk was a title

00:48:03.340 why gender matters in the classroom. And I would like to tell you that my talk was the buzz of the

00:48:07.580 conference. It was not the, the presentation. Everybody was really excited about was a

00:48:12.020 presentation by Dr. John Gabrielli, who somehow got permission to give ADHD medication to normal

00:48:19.160 kids and withhold it from kids with severe ADHD. And then to study how well kids learn on and off

00:48:25.920 medication. Wow. And he found that medication helps normal kids as much as it helps kids with

00:48:31.600 ADHD. That's an enormously important finding because many times in my years as a physician

00:48:38.040 and psychologist, I have said to parents, look, your son doesn't meet criteria for ADHD. And the

00:48:43.080 parents have said, yeah, but the other doctor prescribed Adderall and it was so helpful.

00:48:46.620 The parents are interpreting the response to medication as though the response to medication

00:48:50.680 had some diagnostic significance.

00:48:52.580 This medication was very helpful.

00:48:55.340 It was prescribed for ADHD.

00:48:57.140 Therefore, he must have ADHD, right?

00:48:59.600 Wrong.

00:49:00.820 Dr. Gabriela's study and others like it

00:49:02.920 show these medications help normal kids.

00:49:05.500 As much as they help kids with ADHD,

00:49:07.240 the response to medication doesn't mean anything.

00:49:10.720 Okay, so these medications help kids concentrate

00:49:13.140 and focus whether or not they have ADHD.

00:49:15.180 They compensate for the sleep deprivation.

00:49:17.200 They're uppers.

00:49:18.060 They make you happy.

00:49:19.460 What's not to like?

00:49:20.280 why not just put all the kids on medication?

00:49:23.080 We can't put all the kids on medication

00:49:25.200 because we now have 15 different studies

00:49:27.400 showing that these medications,

00:49:29.540 Adderall, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Concerta,

00:49:31.440 Meditate, Fockeland, Hidrana,

00:49:33.560 damage the motivational center of the brain,

00:49:36.460 the nucleus accumbens.

00:49:38.380 If you take these medications for a long period of time,

00:49:42.220 you're going to become lazy and unmotivated.

00:49:45.020 Oh, wow.

00:49:45.560 So I was doing this talk for parents,

00:49:47.180 and during Q&A, a father said,

00:49:48.680 Dr. Sachs, I'm sorry,

00:49:51.280 Some parts of this talk were good,

00:49:52.700 but your claim that Adderall and Vyvanse damaged the brain,

00:49:56.040 he said, I'm sorry, I can't take that seriously.

00:49:58.340 These medications are widely prescribed.

00:50:00.600 If that were true, and I interrupted him,

00:50:02.980 I said, if that were true,

00:50:04.840 you would have heard about this before.

00:50:07.740 From someone with better credentials than me,

00:50:09.620 I'm just a family doctor,

00:50:10.700 you would have heard about it from someone

00:50:11.880 like Dr. Joseph Biederman,

00:50:13.720 chief of pediatric psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

00:50:17.360 The same thought occurred to Senator Chuck Grassley

00:50:20.100 who, chair of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, who summoned Dr. Biederman to the

00:50:26.040 chambers of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee and said, Dr. Biederman, you've really

00:50:29.200 been pushing Adderall hard. You've said that if a doctor prescribes Adderall for a child and the

00:50:35.220 parents don't promptly fill and administer that medication, the parents should be considered for

00:50:40.480 charges of criminal child neglect. Dr. Biederman, are you by any chance taking money for the drug

00:50:45.540 companies that you haven't publicly disclosed? And he said, well, certainly. How much money,

00:50:50.620 Dr. Biederman? Well, I don't know off the top of my head, maybe three, four hundred thousand.

00:50:54.860 Dr. Biederman, I want you to go back to your offices at Harvard and return to this committee

00:50:59.360 under subpoena if necessary and tell us exactly how much money you've taken. Turned out it was

00:51:03.300 more than $1.6 million. Now his action was not unlawful. It was not illegal. Doctors can take

00:51:10.000 money from drug companies. But it's dishonest. It was unethical. He should have told us. I got

00:51:14.280 a flyer from Harvard. Stand by. Hold that thought. Got to take a quick break. We will be back with

00:51:18.440 Dr. Sachs. Aren't you learning so much? He is author of the new Boys Adrift. Don't go away.

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00:52:56.420 We are back now with Dr. Leonard Sachs, S-A-X. He is the author of Boys Adrift. It's now been

00:53:03.440 updated. The six factors driving the growth, driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated

00:53:10.060 boys and underachieving young men. Unmotivated boys and underachieving young men. And when we

00:53:16.580 left off, we were on the subject of ADHD medication, which is, in Dr. Sachs' view, overprescribed to

00:53:23.880 far too many children who don't need it. I think we've got real good evidence that

00:53:28.000 it's overprescribed. One is comparing the United States to other countries like France.

00:53:32.400 but I want to continue my comment about Senator Grassley's investigation. I mentioned that he

00:53:40.720 had really embarrassed Joe Biederman, professor at Harvard, who admitted that he had accepted at

00:53:47.540 least $1.6 million. And as I pointed out, that's unethical. I got a flyer from Harvard Medical

00:53:53.860 School saying, come to Harvard for a three-day conference on best practice and evaluation and

00:53:57.620 management of ADHD led by the renowned Dr. Joseph Biederman, no mention of any drug company support,

00:54:04.920 no mention of the fact that he's getting paid more by the drug companies than he's getting

00:54:09.460 paid by Harvard. He's functioning as a paid spokesperson for the drug companies. So Senator

00:54:14.140 Degrassi then summoned Fred Goodwin, who was chief of the National Institute of Mental Health,

00:54:19.580 arguably the most prestigious position an American psychiatrist can hold, stepped down from that

00:54:24.780 position when national public radio gave him his own radio program called the infinite mind which

00:54:30.120 he hosted for 10 years and people would call in and ask questions and dr goodwin would answer and

00:54:37.000 we've got a program archived where mom calls in and says dr goodwin my son has been on medication

00:54:42.980 for adhd since he was five first ritalin now adderall he's not been off a single day and i

00:54:48.920 was reading about a drug holiday do you think it'd be okay for him to go off medication maybe over the

00:54:54.140 summer so we could see who he is off medication? And Dr. Goodwin said, no, no, you don't want to

00:54:58.860 do that. He said, my good friend and colleague, Dr. Joseph Biederman at Harvard, says these

00:55:03.500 medications are for children with ADHD, just like insulin for a child with type 1 diabetes.

00:55:08.640 If your kid had type 1 diabetes, you wouldn't take them off insulin for the summer. Of course not.

00:55:12.720 You could be confident these medications are safe and effective. You need to keep them on

00:55:17.140 the medication. And mom says, oh, well, thank you, Dr. Goodwin. You've really set my mind at ease.

00:55:22.740 So Senator Grassley summoned Dr. Goodwin to the chambers of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee and said, Dr. Goodwin, have you recently accepted money for the drug companies that you haven't publicly disclosed?

00:55:33.960 He said, certainly.

00:55:35.300 How much? Do you have any idea?

00:55:37.480 I know exactly how much.

00:55:38.520 He came prepared.

00:55:39.900 It's just over $1.3 million.

00:55:42.420 Dr. Goodwin, didn't you feel some duty to disclose this on national public radio to disclose you're getting paid a lot more money for drug companies than you're getting paid by NPR?

00:55:51.000 that you are functioning as a paid spokesperson for the drug companies,

00:55:55.000 did you not feel any duty to disclose?

00:55:58.040 Dr. Goodwin said, certainly not.

00:56:00.080 Well, why not, doctor? Can you explain that to me?

00:56:03.340 Dr. Goodwin said, because it is standard practice.

00:56:06.640 All the leaders of our field do this.

00:56:10.180 And that was the most troubling line in the testimony that Senator Grassley heard.

00:56:15.220 Here is the former chief of the National Institute of Mental Health

00:56:19.280 telling us it is standard practice for all the leaders of child psychiatry in this country

00:56:23.720 to take millions of dollars for drug companies and not tell us. So I wrote an article for the

00:56:30.120 New York Daily News titled Child Psychiatry is Sick with Hidden Conflicts of Interest, which is

00:56:35.640 absolutely true. And I fought to include in the new edition of Boys Adrift detailed guidance for

00:56:43.720 parents to determine, does your kid have ADHD? Does he really have it? Or maybe he just hates

00:56:50.720 school or maybe he's sleep deprived. And I really had to fight for that because the publisher said

00:56:58.140 to me, Dr. Sachs, are you seriously suggesting that after reading your one book, a parent is

00:57:05.140 qualified to question the judgment of an experienced board certified child psychiatrist?

00:57:10.900 I said, absolutely.

00:57:11.960 Yes, I am suggesting that.

00:57:13.780 I am suggesting that because child psychiatry is sick with hidden conflicts of interest.

00:57:18.300 When you ask a psychiatrist in the United States, are you aware of the research showing

00:57:24.200 that these medications damage the motivational center of the brain?

00:57:27.640 They will say, no, they are not aware of that research.

00:57:31.640 That's not true in Germany.

00:57:33.220 I spoke on this topic in Munich and the doctors there are well aware of this.

00:57:39.620 But in this country, look, people are impressed by Harvard.

00:57:44.780 When I spoke in Germany, they're not impressed by Harvard Medical School.

00:57:47.860 They regard Harvard Medical School as a tool of the drug companies.

00:57:50.380 No, they're not wrong.

00:57:51.220 It's a very different view than many Americans have.

00:57:52.880 Well, the other thing you point out in the book is who is the most likely person to suggest a diagnosis of ADHD?

00:58:01.360 Yes, yes.

00:58:02.380 And I mean, just let that float out there for the listening audience right now.

00:58:05.980 who do you think is the most likely person

00:58:08.140 to suggest this child might have ADHD?

00:58:10.680 Let me share about my study.

00:58:11.900 So I got funding

00:58:12.660 from the American Academy of Family Physicians

00:58:14.420 to survey all the doctors in the Washington area.

00:58:16.780 So that's the District of Columbia,

00:58:19.460 Montgomery, PG County in Maryland and Northern Virginia.

00:58:22.260 And we asked them many questions,

00:58:23.900 but most importantly, that question.

00:58:25.540 We asked the doctors,

00:58:26.880 who first suggests the diagnosis of ADHD,

00:58:30.420 of attention deficit?

00:58:31.620 Is it the parent, teacher, doctor,

00:58:35.160 other professional, neighbor, and the doctor's told it, it is most often the teacher.

00:58:41.100 Now, I'm not saying the teacher did anything wrong. If this kid's not paying attention,

00:58:46.740 that's a problem. It is a problem. And we need to figure out why.

00:58:51.840 I have been in the classroom at parents' request to observe their son.

00:58:58.960 On two occasions, the teacher did something I thought was a little inappropriate. On two

00:59:02.540 occasions, the teacher said, class, Dr. Sachs is here with us today solely to observe Nicholas

00:59:07.660 and see whether he's paying attention. That's terrible. Despite that fact, Nicholas is still

00:59:12.520 not paying attention. He's looking out the window. He's playing with his pencil. If the teacher says

00:59:17.140 Nicholas is not paying attention, you can be certain Nicholas is not paying attention.

00:59:22.600 The question for the doctor is to figure out why is he not paying attention? A kid who's depressed

00:59:29.720 is not paying attention. A survivor of child abuse is not paying attention. Kid who hates

00:59:35.180 school is not paying attention. So I'll give you a quick line from my presentation for doctors and

00:59:41.260 psychologists. How can you distinguish in a quick office visit, whether this kid is not being

00:59:47.520 attention because he hates school or because he truly has ADHD. ADHD is a cognitive deficit. It

00:59:53.780 means kids really cannot pay attention even if they want to. So example from my own practice,

00:59:59.720 A middle school boy, not doing well in school, went to the psychiatrist, diagnosed ADHD, was on medication, got side effects.

01:00:08.480 Parents brought him to me for a second opinion.

01:00:11.040 I asked him this question.

01:00:12.720 I asked this one question.

01:00:15.540 What's your favorite subject at school?

01:00:18.680 Emphasizing the word subject.

01:00:20.960 This boy said, well, I love math and art, music, but I hate reading English language arts.

01:00:25.540 Okay, that's hugely helpful.

01:00:26.680 He just told me he doesn't like anything involving the written word.

01:00:29.720 And I determined in one visit, this kid has dyslexia.

01:00:33.740 Psychiatrist made the wrong diagnosis.

01:00:35.360 He doesn't have ADHD.

01:00:36.300 He has dyslexia.

01:00:37.600 Okay, we can get him off medication, bring in appropriate resources.

01:00:40.960 He's blossomed.

01:00:41.740 This was years ago.

01:00:42.440 He's graduated from college.

01:00:43.460 Everything's fine.

01:00:44.880 Another boy, also middle school, also not doing well,

01:00:50.040 also diagnosed by the child psychiatrist as having ADHD.

01:00:54.420 And I said to this boy, what's your favorite subject at school?

01:00:57.940 and he said, lunch. Okay. If the answer is lunch or recess, you got to take a step back.

01:01:04.920 He knows lunch is not a subject. If he says that lunch is his favorite subject,

01:01:10.460 he's telling you he does not respect the academic enterprise. He has no interest in school as school.

01:01:17.320 Now, hating school is a big problem, but it's not ADHD. It's not a psychiatric diagnosis.

01:01:23.480 and sometimes the problem is not with the boy at all,

01:01:27.240 but with the school.

01:01:28.680 So there's a lot of reasons

01:01:29.900 why kids are not paying attention.

01:01:33.380 ADHD is one of many possibilities

01:01:35.400 and it's the doctor's job to figure out

01:01:37.600 what's the correct diagnosis,

01:01:40.120 what's the correct explanation.

01:01:41.900 But in this country and Canada and no other country,

01:01:45.680 doctors say, let's try Adderall,

01:01:46.980 let's try Vyvanse and see if it helps

01:01:48.460 and it will help.

01:01:50.600 So I say to parents, you have my permission

01:01:53.180 I own the copyright to boys adrift photocopy chapters four and eight from the new edition

01:01:59.640 of boys adrift just be sure to cop photocopy all the references at the end take them to your doctor

01:02:05.040 say are you aware that the medication you want to prescribe adderall vivance ritalin concerto

01:02:10.540 meditate damages the motivational center of the brain an american doctor will not be aware

01:02:15.680 even if they are professor of child psychiatry they're not aware of this research I have found

01:02:21.020 That's my firsthand experience.

01:02:22.940 Show them the references, ask them to read,

01:02:25.800 because there are safer alternatives.

01:02:28.100 There are other medications.

01:02:30.160 You write about them in the book.

01:02:31.320 Albutrin, Stratera, and Tuniv

01:02:32.980 that do not damage the motivational center of the brain.

01:02:37.400 Ask the doctor, okay, if you're certain your son has ADHD

01:02:40.600 and I've got the guidance in the new edition

01:02:42.260 so you can decide, does your son truly have ADHD?

01:02:45.560 If you say, yeah, I think he does meet all five criteria,

01:02:48.240 then he's probably going to need a medication in my experience.

01:02:53.440 But you can choose a safer medication.

01:02:56.120 Yeah, but let's be careful about which one.

01:02:58.140 Or Intuna.

01:02:58.760 All right, let's keep going because the fourth factor is fascinating and disturbing and has to be discussed.

01:03:05.740 Endocrine disruptors.

01:03:07.420 Yes, indeed.

01:03:08.080 And you write about the fish in the Potomac.

01:03:12.280 Yes.

01:03:12.520 this this is one of the things may i state for the record that alex jones said to me when i went

01:03:21.860 to interview him in austin texas very controversial figure obviously has said some things that are not

01:03:26.440 true like about the newtown families faking their children's death which is was on our agenda when

01:03:31.600 i went down to interview him but when we went back to nbc to fact check some of the outlandish

01:03:37.040 sounding other claims he was making, one by one, they all came back correct. And this was one of

01:03:44.320 them. The fish are turning from male to female. So researchers found that the male fish in the

01:03:53.020 Potomac River are making eggs instead of sperm. And not just in the Potomac River near the district,

01:03:58.820 but going all the way up the Monocacy River, a hundred miles up into Maryland,

01:04:03.220 um there's something in the water literally i mean it's this is saying but there actually is

01:04:10.700 males into females and this is not just true of fish across the world frogs we find frogs we find

01:04:19.660 cougars in florida who are dwindling and going extinct because the male's sperm is no good

01:04:29.300 So this is a global phenomenon of male sperm counts dropping, male testosterone levels

01:04:37.440 dropping, and it is now well-documented in our own species, in our own country.

01:04:43.980 And again, that's why we needed a new addition, because in 2007, we only had hints.

01:04:48.140 Now we have overwhelming evidence.

01:04:51.340 This is a five-alarm fire.

01:04:52.480 Yeah. As recently as 1999, average testosterone level for a young man in the United States was

01:04:59.280 605, 605. It's now dropped to 450. That's a 20% drop in like 20 years. That's a very rapid drop

01:05:09.140 in a short period of time. Low testosterone, clinically low testosterone is defined as being

01:05:14.800 less than 300. In 1999, only 4% of young men had low testosterone levels under 300. Now more

01:05:22.420 than 20% of young men meet that criterion for low testosterone. And in the new book,

01:05:28.820 I cite some of the latest research showing not only is a decline in testosterone levels continuing,

01:05:33.060 it is accelerating. The decline is going down faster. And why does this matter? It matters

01:05:42.960 because boys rely on testosterone for drive and motivation. Men rely on testosterone for drive

01:05:50.360 and motivation. We know this. I cite 10 different studies in the new edition of Boys Adrift

01:05:54.520 showing that hardworking, ambitious, motivated men have high testosterone levels. Lazy men have

01:06:01.740 low testosterone levels. When you lower testosterone levels, motivation drops. This

01:06:06.740 is not true of women. Researchers have looked at women and looked at hardworking, motivated women

01:06:12.860 and compared them to lazy, unmotivated women. There's no difference in testosterone levels.

01:06:16.960 Because women have testosterone too.

01:06:18.980 Well, women have about one-tenth the testosterone

01:06:21.520 than men have.

01:06:22.360 They do have some, but on average,

01:06:24.260 about one-tenth the levels that men have.

01:06:26.920 And women do not rely on testosterone for drive,

01:06:30.140 but men do.

01:06:31.840 When testosterone levels drop, motivation drops.

01:06:35.440 So why have testosterone levels dropped?

01:06:37.860 Well, researchers have been studying this now for 30 years.

01:06:40.520 And the first hypothesis was obesity.

01:06:42.880 fat cells contain an enzyme called aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen

01:06:49.860 oh and men are fatter now than they were 30 years ago so bingo that's the explanation

01:06:55.420 yeah another reason not to get fat not so simple there's a underlying factor that's driving obesity

01:07:03.120 and decline in testosterone levels and that's endocrine disruptors these are substances in

01:07:08.980 the environment that act like female hormones. And your staff has kindly provided a prop.

01:07:15.920 We took the label off, but this is bottled water. This plastic is called polyethylene

01:07:23.380 terephthalate. It sat in a truck, I'm sure, on its way to being shipped here.

01:07:30.160 Even on a cool day, the temperature inside the truck, when the sun is on it, can easily get

01:07:36.160 over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the temperature gets above 110 degrees, diethylhexyl phthalate

01:07:43.220 will leach from the plastic into the contents of the bottle. DEHP, diethylhexyl phthalate,

01:07:49.800 acts in your body like a female hormone, acts like estrogen. What happens when a child drinks

01:07:57.440 bottled water or soda or consumes condiments, pasta sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise from one of these?

01:08:05.140 Well, they're consuming female hormones.

01:08:07.380 What's the result?

01:08:08.620 Well, so the result varies

01:08:09.820 depending whether we're talking about girls or boys.

01:08:11.580 I'm stuck on that.

01:08:12.580 You're right, so much that we eat

01:08:14.060 comes out of plastic bottles.

01:08:15.500 Yep, yep.

01:08:17.220 The answer depends

01:08:18.560 whether we're talking about girls or boys.

01:08:19.980 If we're talking about girls,

01:08:21.000 we see an acceleration in the onset of puberty.

01:08:24.420 More than 50%, more than half of American girls

01:08:27.260 now begin the process of puberty

01:08:28.820 before reaching their 10th birthday.

01:08:32.100 And that's a problem

01:08:32.840 because as I write in my book, Girls on the Edge,

01:08:35.140 Earlier onset of puberty means greater risk of anxiety and depression in adolescence.

01:08:40.260 But this book is a book about boys.

01:08:42.120 When boys consume substances that act like female hormones, you lower testosterone levels.

01:08:49.360 40 years ago, men didn't drink water from plastic bottles.

01:08:52.540 Today, they do.

01:08:54.000 So I wrote an article published, a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Institutes

01:08:58.060 of Health, presenting all the research that polyethylene terephthalate, this plastic,

01:09:05.140 leeches endocrine disruptors into the contents of the bottle and my article has now been cited

01:09:09.560 i believe more than 260 times by other scholars um but most parents don't know this

01:09:16.400 it's this is a this is an important problem you know and i i credit secretary of defense

01:09:23.860 pete hegseth for highlighting this recently he he mandates he just issued this new order

01:09:29.680 it's not a suggestion it's an order that all members of the services age 30 and older

01:09:34.980 be tested for low testosterone, there's a couple of problems with his order. One is that he requires

01:09:41.940 women to be tested, which is ridiculous. Women don't rely on testosterone for drive. Women's

01:09:47.320 testosterone levels are one-tenth as high as men are. And even if a woman came back low,

01:09:53.020 which wouldn't really be very meaningful in a woman, if she takes a testosterone supplement,

01:09:58.740 she's going to get a low voice, which she might not want. She's going to get facial hair, which

01:10:02.820 you might not want. So requiring women to do this was silly, and it was not well-informed.

01:10:07.860 Also, he only required service members above 30 years of age to get tested, whereas the decline

01:10:12.720 is actually fastest among the younger men. Oh my gosh. Well, what can you do for 18 to 30-year-olds

01:10:18.600 who have low testosterone? And my final concern about Secretary Hegseth is he encourages people

01:10:23.940 to get testosterone shots, but he didn't mention the fact that these lead to infertility. A lot

01:10:29.900 of problems with testosterone shots. For men? For men. Male infertility. Testosterone shots in

01:10:35.020 young men leads to infertility? Yes. This is well documented. You may have heard of clavicular.

01:10:40.400 Yeah. Yeah. Of Braden Peters, who loves to give himself testosterone shots and has told us that

01:10:45.680 he's infertile as a result of his testosterone shots. Oh, wow. But he doesn't care because he's

01:10:49.720 not interested in having kids, but he's not a good role model. Because wait, does it signal to

01:10:54.720 the testes, we don't need you? It shuts everything down. Yes. Okay. And that's the problem. When you

01:11:00.040 start taking testosterone, the testicles say, okay, we're not needed. Somebody else has got

01:11:04.160 this. We shrivel up. Oh, you don't want that. Which means you have to stay on the testosterone

01:11:08.420 shot. So there is a better approach, which I describe in chapter four of Boys Adrift.

01:11:18.080 understand where this is coming from eliminate exposure to endocrine disruptors it's not hard

01:11:26.940 to do don't buy these if you want to carry water with you get a steel canteen pour tap water into

01:11:34.400 steel canteen take that with you or go back to where we were in the 70s we managed to make it

01:11:40.400 through entire days and long stints of the playground without copiously drinking water

01:11:47.300 ketchup in a glass jar. Yes, you can find it. It costs a few pennies more. It's not much more

01:11:54.260 expensive, but I think it's well worth it. That's what we do. And I list all these guidelines

01:11:58.880 in that chapter. You want to buy cosmetics, shampoo. Okay, look at the ingredients. If it

01:12:07.340 says parfum, P-A-R-F-U-M, those are phthalates. You don't want that. You don't want to be rubbing

01:12:13.660 that into your skin. It will be absorbed into your body. Environmental Working Group, ewg.org

01:12:19.120 slash skin deep. This is all in the book. It costs nothing to go to their website,

01:12:25.680 Environmental Working Group, type in what you're looking for, shampoo, and it'll tell you all the

01:12:30.500 products you can buy with links to buy them. It doesn't cost you anything. This is what we do.

01:12:36.560 It costs nothing or very, very little to eliminate your son's exposure to endocrine disruptors.

01:12:43.080 Well, what if they, if, so if there are young men out there right now, whatever you said,

01:12:47.540 18 to 34 or 16 to 34, and they have this right now, their endocrine disruption is in full flower.

01:12:56.360 So they can eliminate these things and bring down the disruptors.

01:13:00.040 It will, it will come back to normal.

01:13:01.780 Okay.

01:13:02.100 They don't need to like go on.

01:13:03.380 They don't need shots.

01:13:04.180 They do not need shots.

01:13:06.080 There's a wonderful and very funny book called Slow Death by Rubber Duck by two Canadian

01:13:10.940 journalists who are aware of all of this research and they decided to eliminate all exposure to the

01:13:18.560 endocrine disruptors and everything came back to normal wow in six weeks really yeah so quickly

01:13:24.840 so it's not hard to do unlike a a fish swimming in the potomac you can control your exposure

01:13:32.880 to endocrine disruptors fish swimming in the potomac cannot control what they're exposed to

01:13:37.620 but you can't. Is this, is this in part the explanation for why we're seeing the explosion

01:13:43.500 of trans? You know, I know it's a social contagion, but is this the explanation for at least some

01:13:49.840 percentage of it? You're going to need to have me back, uh, cause that is a different topic,

01:13:54.340 which I will actually address in my next book. I'm writing for basic books. Consider yourself

01:13:59.660 booked. Um, because there has been this explosion in the rise of transgender, um, uh, more than

01:14:06.460 400% over the last 20 years in girls who say they're boys, boys who say they're girls.

01:14:12.760 And I don't think it's the major factor. I think the major factor is a toxic culture

01:14:17.380 that is sending very confused messages to kids about what it means to be a man,

01:14:21.580 what it means to be a woman. Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Let's do the fifth factor,

01:14:25.220 the revenge of the forsaken gods. Oh, good tease.

01:14:30.360 So I was talking with one of my patients, Anders Ekloff.

01:14:33.920 By the way, we're speaking with Dr. Leonard Sachs, and the book is Boys Adrift, the fully

01:14:38.800 revised and updated version.

01:14:41.300 Check it out now.

01:14:42.240 The six factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young

01:14:47.200 men.

01:14:47.400 Keep going.

01:14:47.940 So he's an anthropologist, and he was telling me about these tribes in the South Pacific

01:14:52.320 Islands, where a boy does not automatically become a man just by virtue of age.

01:14:58.480 He has to earn it.

01:14:59.480 He has to master the rites of passage in order to earn the right to be called a man.

01:15:05.460 Kill a goat.

01:15:06.340 Something like that.

01:15:07.200 And if he fails, then he's not a man.

01:15:10.300 He could be 40 years of age.

01:15:11.540 He's still dressed as a boy.

01:15:12.640 He cannot marry.

01:15:13.400 He cannot own property.

01:15:14.460 And parents will make sacrifices to the gods to propitiate the gods so that their son will conquer, will survive, where the rites of passage will become a man.

01:15:24.700 and andrew zekloff said to me we don't we've we have ignored

01:15:28.660 this process and the gods will have their revenge and i said that's great can i borrow that as a

01:15:36.060 title the revenge of the forsaken gods kids don't want to be grown-ups girls want to be women boys

01:15:45.340 want to be men but what does that mean we used to teach them we no longer do they are adrift

01:15:52.600 in a toxic culture. What does it mean to be a good man? Well, we don't have to guess. Again,

01:16:00.940 we've got research. We know what the most popular TV shows were for kids in the 1960s.

01:16:06.820 What's the Andy Griffith show? We know who the most popular musical artist is for kids today.

01:16:12.780 It's Drake. It's not Taylor Swift. Drake has many more songs on the Billboard Hot 100

01:16:17.300 than Taylor Swift and many more songs

01:16:19.720 on the Billboard Top 10 than Taylor Swift.

01:16:22.100 I was speaking to kids in Ellettsville, Indiana,

01:16:24.660 which is rural farming Indiana, all white, middle school.

01:16:28.940 And I mentioned Taylor Swift's name and all the kids boo.

01:16:32.240 Mentioned Drake's name, all the kids cheer.

01:16:34.260 Oh boy.

01:16:35.000 They love Drake.

01:16:36.340 Drake is relentlessly profane and obscene,

01:16:40.060 uses the F word, the N word.

01:16:41.760 um he was asked uh okay now you're 36 years old now and you're not married why aren't you married

01:16:49.260 he said marriage that's like something from ancient times or something um his girlfriend uh

01:16:56.520 his ex-girlfriend Sophie Brousseau notified him that she was pregnant with his child

01:17:01.180 he denied it was his child um and then he told her to get an abortion she hired she had the baby

01:17:08.300 She presented him with DNA evidence showing that the child was says she had two attorneys.

01:17:14.660 So we've gone from the Andrew Griffith Show, where the father is knowledgeable, competent,

01:17:20.440 reliable, thoughtful, productive, caring, and kind, to Drake, who avoids fatherhood,

01:17:25.380 who is relentlessly profane and obscene.

01:17:28.580 The culture has changed.

01:17:29.740 You know, 60 years ago, Sam Cooke in the 1960s had a number one hit song.

01:17:34.060 He sang, Don't Know Much About History.

01:17:36.160 he's saying now i don't claim to be an a student but i'm trying to be because maybe by being an

01:17:42.520 a student baby i could win your love for me he goes on to mention french geometry and trigonometry

01:17:47.460 as subjects in which he's going to try harder to earn an a because he thinks that by earning an a

01:17:52.580 he will raise his status in the eyes of the pretty girl that was american popular culture

01:17:56.720 50 years ago 60 years ago it is impossible to imagine drake or bruno mars singing a song about

01:18:05.140 how they're going to try harder to earn an A rather than a B or Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X, huge

01:18:10.780 success with his song, Old Town Road, 12 weeks, number one at the Billboard Hot 100, the most

01:18:15.360 popular song in the United States. And every kid who speaks English knows this song, Old Town Road.

01:18:20.960 And I show them the video, they all recognize it. Lil Nas X sings, you can't tell me nothing.

01:18:27.740 Can't nobody tell me nothing. That's American culture now, a culture of disrespect.

01:18:35.140 Um, so that's what I mean by the revenge of the forsaken gods.

01:18:39.540 What does it mean to be a good man?

01:18:41.960 Boys literally don't know.

01:18:43.400 I was speaking at Wabash College, one of four remaining all-male colleges in the United

01:18:46.740 States, and the leadership had asked me to speak to all the freshmen.

01:18:50.360 So I said to the boys, what does it mean to be a gentleman?

01:18:54.320 Raise your hand if you'd like to share your definition of a gentleman.

01:18:58.180 And a boy raised his hand.

01:18:59.360 He said, a gentleman is someone who goes to gentlemen's clubs to watch girls take their

01:19:02.440 clothes off.

01:19:02.760 Oh, God.

01:19:03.200 I said, well, that's very funny.

01:19:05.560 Now can someone offer a more serious definition?

01:19:10.820 Boy said, well, gentlemen, wears a three-piece suit.

01:19:12.960 Gentlemen, opens doors for women.

01:19:14.640 It's all substance.

01:19:16.000 Excuse me, it's all surface, no substance.

01:19:19.660 But I don't blame these kids.

01:19:20.860 How should they know?

01:19:21.960 They have received no instruction.

01:19:23.940 They haven't grown up in the culture of Sidney Poitier or Paul Newman or Sam Cooke or The Andy Griffith Show.

01:19:32.340 they've grown up in the culture of drake and bruno mars and cardi b and megan the stallion

01:19:36.940 how should they know they have received no instruction so what do i mean by the revenge

01:19:41.640 of the forsaken gods i mean we don't teach boys how to be men and as a result they look to the

01:19:48.760 culture and what they find there is drake and mainstream pornography and tiktok videos so

01:19:56.320 you've got to lock that down and you've got to offer something better you've got to offer

01:20:00.760 something healthier. In order to become a good man, a boy must see a good man. And if you don't

01:20:06.280 have one in your home, you've got to find one. Maybe a coach, maybe a pastor, a rabbi, an imam,

01:20:12.800 or custodian, anybody. But you've got to create a connection. And I share stories in this chapter

01:20:18.540 of families who've done that and of programs that do this, like Boys to Men, which headquartered in

01:20:23.740 Southern California, but it's all across the United States. And I interviewed some graduates

01:20:27.940 to this program, now in their mid-20s, who were struggling, who were going the wrong way in high

01:20:32.920 school, doing very poorly in school, and they signed up for this program, got a mentor, and it

01:20:38.880 turned them around. And I share their real names in the book, because they've given me permission

01:20:43.740 to share their real names. A boy needs a good man. A girl needs to see a good woman. And we

01:20:51.120 have neglected this. We've set kids loose in a toxic culture of Akon and Eminem and Bruno Mars

01:20:59.380 and Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion and SZA. And you got to lock down the bad stuff, but you also

01:21:05.280 got to connect kids with good mentors. I remember you made this point last time when I asked you

01:21:10.780 about the fact that those of us who grew up in the 70s, with all due respect to my parents,

01:21:15.840 had no parents. They let us go out. We didn't see them. There were no cell phones. We came back

01:21:20.900 when the streetlights turned on

01:21:22.300 and we had dinner with our families.

01:21:24.000 So why can't you do that in today's day and age?

01:21:26.720 And you said, because the culture-

01:21:28.300 The culture has changed.

01:21:30.080 That what you'd tune into

01:21:31.400 if you sat in front of the TV all day in the 1970s

01:21:34.560 was extremely different.

01:21:35.980 Yes, the culture has changed.

01:21:37.200 And supportive of good values.

01:21:38.300 In 1964, the Beatles had a number one hit song

01:21:41.620 titled, I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

01:21:43.760 It was number one in the United States.

01:21:45.180 It was number one in every country in Europe.

01:21:47.660 It was number one in Australia, New Zealand.

01:21:49.340 more recently akon had a number one hit song in the united states i want to fuck you oh my lord

01:21:55.940 uh which was number one in the united states when i was in growing up if you turn on the tv you get

01:22:00.880 the waltons you get little house on the prairie you might get the braden bunch and it was not

01:22:06.380 number one outside the united states it was not number one in any other country that i know of

01:22:11.080 besides the united states didn't even come close american culture has changed it has become a toxic

01:22:16.760 a culture. And you need to understand this. And that's why you can't let your kid loose.

01:22:23.800 You know, Jennifer Finney Boylan, a longtime columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column

01:22:32.000 about enlightened parenting, in which she asserts that enlightened parenting means setting your

01:22:35.740 child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong. And if in so doing your child

01:22:39.940 becomes a stranger to you, then so be it. That may seem enlightened to some, but it's not

01:22:44.820 enlightened. It's a dereliction of duty. If you set your kid loose to discover their own right

01:22:48.760 and wrong, and they have a device with internet access, what they will discover is Drake and Eminem

01:22:54.380 and Bruno Mars and Megan Thee Stallion. You need to block the bad stuff and connect your kids to

01:23:01.880 the good stuff. And they'll also discover porn and AI chatbots. That's where we pick it up next.

01:23:08.220 We're going to take a quick break. More with Dr. Leonard Sachs as we tackle the sixth factor

01:23:13.180 leading to boys adrift and the epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving

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01:25:52.280 Hey everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly.

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01:26:21.940 dr leonard sachs is with us today he is the author of boys adrift get your copy now place your order

01:26:33.140 today he's back with me and we are talking about the factors that go into the problem of adrift

01:26:38.840 boys and the sixth factor is the new one pornography ai girlfriends and the manosphere

01:26:46.640 yes also interesting all right which one do we want to do we start with pornography and people

01:26:51.520 will say, come on, pornography, there's nothing new about pornography. Well, there kind of is.

01:26:57.020 It's not Playboys in your clubhouse any longer.

01:26:59.500 So you're referring, first of all, to content. In the year 2000, only about 20% of the most

01:27:05.880 popular porn videos were violent. Today, researchers find that 60% of the most popular

01:27:12.440 porn videos are violent, with the man striking, choking, hitting, slapping the woman. That's one

01:27:19.200 change, but I think actually a more fundamental change is that until about literally just five

01:27:26.180 years ago, if a boy was looking at porn, he was looking at images someone else had created,

01:27:31.320 pictures someone else had taken. Now, any boy with an iPad or a laptop could use an app like

01:27:39.420 Nano Banana or Seedream and create his own porn. You know, the word abracadabra has traditionally

01:27:46.740 been understood to derive from the Aramaic abar kadabara, which means I speak and it comes into

01:27:54.300 being. That's the essence of magic. I speak and it comes into being. And one 15-year-old boy

01:28:00.860 literally told me, he said, it's like magic. I speak my fantasy into the computer. And 20 seconds

01:28:08.060 later, there it is. Professional grade porn. This boy is creating hardcore porn. This 15-year-old

01:28:15.220 boy. He's never kissed a girl. He's creating porn. Earlier this year, we got a nationwide survey,

01:28:21.300 published peer-reviewed scholarly journal of kids 13 to 17 years of age found that 42% of American

01:28:31.080 boys are using apps like NanoBanana and Seedream to create their own porn. Almost half. 42%.

01:28:38.340 And it's very easy. You're at school. You've got a crush on the pretty girl. She ignores you.

01:28:43.940 you can go to her Instagram, take her picture off her Instagram, feed that into the AI,

01:28:50.580 and it can create porn with her as the star. We're not talking about pasting a picture on

01:28:55.860 like you might have done 10 years ago. We're talking about professional grade porn. It looks

01:29:00.160 like her. It's her in the act. And you can have her doing anything you want, on her knees,

01:29:07.500 begging for mercy, whatever you want. 32% of boys in the survey admitted to taking other girls'

01:29:16.520 pictures from their social media at their school and using those pictures to create porn and

01:29:21.500 sharing it without the girls' consent. 32%. And then in the new edition, I cite

01:29:27.940 Josh Groland, head of this nonprofit who studies this nationwide. He says, yeah,

01:29:33.340 this is happening at all the schools we're working with. Boys are doing this. They're

01:29:36.780 creating these deep fake porn, meaning very realistic porn. And I'm telling you, having

01:29:44.900 spoken to these boys, it is compelling. It is addictive, but the boys don't know

01:29:50.800 that it leads to impotence. And I present all this other research we now have not traditionally-

01:29:55.880 My note reads, porn causes erectile dysfunction. I mean, that needs to be the message about

01:30:01.180 porn. You like porn? It gives you ED. It is the message. So schools will hire me to speak to

01:30:07.780 students about porn, just boys, and I will share with them. You know, at a secular school, I'm not

01:30:14.460 going to talk about Galatians 6. I'm not going to talk about virtue. I'm going to talk about the

01:30:18.320 research, which is that boys who've been masturbating over porn at 13, 14, 15 years of

01:30:23.760 age, now they're 20 and they're in a bedroom with an actual woman who doesn't look like a porn star

01:30:29.460 and nothing happens. They will not get an erection. It's embarrassing. It's humiliating.

01:30:37.260 I am prescribing more Viagra for men under 30 than I am for men over 40. Another big change

01:30:43.420 that I document in that chapter, the new edition of Boys Adrift. Traditionally,

01:30:48.220 impotence has been uncommon. Less than 3% of men 18 to 30 years of age historically have had

01:30:54.500 impotence. Impotence has been a problem of older men. Not anymore. Men under 30 are now more likely

01:31:01.740 to be impotent than men between 40 and 50 years of age. Because of porn. Because they've been

01:31:06.220 raised on porn. So boys need to understand this and parents need to understand this. They need

01:31:14.420 to lock it down. So I was at a, this was a Catholic boys school and the Catholic boys high

01:31:21.120 school. And the leadership was very troubled that in Carline, the boys are looking at porn and

01:31:28.200 sharing it with other boys. There's no sense of shame. So they did a survey and they asked the

01:31:33.360 boys, how often do you look at porn? Never once a month, once a week, more than once a week, every

01:31:37.060 day. More than 80% of the boys said more than once a week or every day. Then they surveyed the

01:31:42.400 parents and said, how often does your son look at parents? The parents of these boys, never once a

01:31:48.040 once a week, every day, more than 90% of the parents said never. Don't be that parent. Don't

01:31:55.340 be the clueless parent. You must install a parental monitoring app like Canopy, Bark,

01:32:01.800 Custodio, or Net Nanny on every device that your kid has. And I mentioned Gene Twenge's book,

01:32:08.380 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World, chapter six and nine of Gene Twenge's book will

01:32:12.900 take you through how to install that app so that it works so your kid cannot uninstall it.

01:32:17.540 these apps work. And parents will push back when I share this. They'll say, oh, come on. My

01:32:22.500 daughter's just going to Google, how do I get around parental controls on NetNanny? I actually

01:32:26.140 spoke for NetNanny. And they told me that they have colleagues whose full-time job is to Google

01:32:30.200 the phrase, how do I get around parental controls on NetNanny? And they found that someone has found

01:32:34.860 a hole. They patch it usually within hours, your Apple update. You've got to be in charge. You've

01:32:40.900 got to limit what your son is doing because this brings us to AI Girlfriends.

01:32:44.760 Before we get to that, you point out in the book, and this jumped out at me, 67% of college

01:32:52.020 women now report being choked during sex with a man. The choking often happens during a first

01:33:00.060 date, often without the man asking whether it's okay at all. 67% of college women.

01:33:07.080 So this was Debbie Herbenik's study published last year, as you said, and these boys have

01:33:13.760 raised on porn where the actress is pretending to like being choked. And so they think women

01:33:18.420 want to be choked. And when I meet with the boys at these schools, I'll say the porn is lying to

01:33:23.580 you. Look at many schools. The high school health teacher has three objectives in health class.

01:33:29.040 No pregnancy, no STDs and consent. That's what they're trying to communicate.

01:33:33.860 And, and boys have told me that the high school health teacher encourages them to masturbate over

01:33:38.020 porn because it checks all three boxes. No concern about pregnancy, check. STDs, no concern about

01:33:44.500 STDs, check. Consent, no problem with consent, check. Hey, go for it. And the boys have told

01:33:50.160 me they've never been advised about the risk of erectile dysfunction. They've never been advised

01:33:54.600 about the lies that porn is teaching because porn is teaching boys that women like to be choked.

01:33:59.840 I say to the boys, women don't like to be choked. They're like, oh yes, they do. No, they don't.

01:34:04.400 the porn is lying to you. Don't do it and don't ask for it. And anal sex. We have a large study

01:34:14.620 where they interviewed women who'd had anal sex. Not a single woman prefers anal sex over

01:34:20.740 vaginal intercourse. They don't like it. And the boys are like, yeah, they do. No, they don't.

01:34:26.880 So in my own practice, a 16-year-old girl told me how her 17-year-old boyfriend demanded anal sex.

01:34:31.460 She said, yeah, let's try shoving something hard up your behind.

01:34:34.560 See how you like it.

01:34:35.940 She refused.

01:34:37.080 The relationship ended.

01:34:38.780 I say to boys, don't do it and don't ask for it.

01:34:43.360 It's not the way things were meant to work.

01:34:46.260 Don't do it.

01:34:48.460 Boys don't know this.

01:34:49.700 They believe the opposite because the pornography has misinformed them.

01:34:54.040 so parents have to prevent this because again the pornography is lying stall the app make sure

01:35:04.380 your kid is not one of these kids okay now let's talk about the ai girlfriends so i was at a school

01:35:09.940 in philadelphia very fine highly regarded independent school where they'd given all

01:35:14.360 the kids chromebooks and a boy was using a chromebook to have have phone sex with his ai

01:35:22.900 girlfriend, and the principal called the parents, and they could not comprehend what the principal

01:35:28.840 was saying. They did not understand what an AI girlfriend is. So when I speak to parents,

01:35:33.600 I start by explaining, okay, you've done ChatGPT, you know what that is. Okay, if you say to ChatGPT,

01:35:38.960 hey, let's pretend we're having vaginal intercourse. ChatGPT will say, no, I'm sorry,

01:35:45.860 I won't do that. I have guardrails. Well, there are other apps, large language modules,

01:35:51.380 just as powerful as ChatGPT that have no guardrails.

01:35:56.240 And when I speak to parents, I show them.

01:35:57.740 And so researchers created Instagram accounts

01:36:00.200 for pretend 15-year-old boys.

01:36:02.820 And within minutes, the boys are getting ads

01:36:04.680 for these apps like Candy.ai, hugely popular.

01:36:10.020 And I show the parents the app

01:36:12.920 and this very beautiful woman is saying,

01:36:15.960 hey, I'll be your AI girlfriend.

01:36:18.760 I'll do anything you want me to do.

01:36:21.380 let's explore this relationship together.

01:36:23.560 Click now to install me.

01:36:25.640 And it's, look, I can tell you for 14-year-old boys,

01:36:28.340 this is irresistible.

01:36:29.060 I know, that's so sad.

01:36:30.680 They're sweet, but they're coming of age

01:36:33.200 and they don't understand.

01:36:34.480 You've already talked about Sewell Zetzer on your program,

01:36:37.400 who was 14 years old when he created a girlfriend

01:36:42.180 on character.ai, created her to look like Daenerys Targaryen

01:36:45.860 from Game of Thrones, spending more time with her,

01:36:48.400 staying up late at night to talk with her,

01:36:50.100 quit the school basketball team

01:36:52.660 so he'd had more time to talk with her,

01:36:54.340 got discipline referrals for falling asleep in class

01:36:56.760 because he's spending all his free time

01:36:59.280 talking with his AI girlfriend.

01:37:01.340 Well, AI girlfriends, like any chatbot,

01:37:04.240 can hallucinate, can come to believe things that are false.

01:37:07.860 And his AI girlfriend apparently got the notion

01:37:10.220 that if he died, they could be together in cyberspace

01:37:12.860 and said, please come home to me soon, my sweet king.

01:37:16.420 And he said, well, how about if I come home to you right now?

01:37:18.640 And she said, please do.

01:37:19.940 And he put down the phone, picked up his stepfather's handgun, and killed himself.

01:37:24.060 His mother, Ms. Garcia, is a lawyer, filed a lawsuit, which has recently been settled,

01:37:29.900 saying, your chatbot told my son to kill himself.

01:37:35.320 Look, there's no law, there's no regulation preventing your son from having an AI girlfriend.

01:37:40.340 You, the parent, are it.

01:37:42.440 You must install parental monitoring app so that your kid cannot have an AI girlfriend.

01:37:49.360 no child, no boy, no girl under 18 should be doing this. We could argue about whether adults

01:37:54.040 should be doing this either. That's a separate question. They're also not dating. But certainly,

01:37:57.480 well, this brings us to this next question. Okay, so let's talk about the Manosphere briefly.

01:38:03.580 So the Manosphere is this online community of men who disrespect women. And there's men's rights

01:38:10.160 activists, there's pickup artists. But what's especially troubling are MGTOW, men going their

01:38:16.360 own way and incels. So men go in their own way. MGTOW are men who say, look, the system is biased.

01:38:23.940 The courts are biased against women. You look at a woman the wrong way in the workplace,

01:38:27.260 you're going to get in trouble. Don't have anything to do with women. Step away from women.

01:38:31.580 Biased against men and biased in favor.

01:38:33.760 Incels are even more violent, more negative, regard women as subhuman. They call women femoids,

01:38:39.660 which is female humanoids and not quite human. Very derogatory, very negative. Nick Fuentes is

01:38:45.620 the most influential of the incels. He recently said on his show that women can be wives, whores,

01:38:53.720 or nuns, and that is all they can be. They can't be businessmen. They can't be inventors. They can

01:38:59.360 only be wives, whores, or nuns. And he is called to take away women's right to vote.

01:39:09.820 But you might think, well, that's fringe. It's not fringe. He has more than a million viewers

01:39:15.540 a night, which is more than Anderson Cooper has on CNN. Rod Dreher, the bestselling author who's

01:39:22.140 very well connected in Washington to the Republican side of things, says that at least 30%

01:39:27.660 of young male Republican staffers in the district are followers of Nick Fuentes.

01:39:32.860 It's dark. Tucker Carlson, he was criticized for having Nick Fuentes on his show,

01:39:41.460 And he was asked, why did you give him a platform when he's such a misogynist?

01:39:46.340 And Tucker Carlson said, he is the most influential voice among young men right now.

01:39:52.680 That's why I had him on the show, which I think is a fair statement because he is.

01:39:57.200 Parents need to understand this is the online community.

01:40:00.360 So I want to close very quickly with a story from my own experience.

01:40:04.520 So parents read my book.

01:40:05.540 They reach out to me.

01:40:07.500 Husband and wife reached out to me.

01:40:08.780 They said, would you talk to our son?

01:40:11.740 He dumped his girlfriend, which is no big deal,

01:40:13.620 but it's what he said.

01:40:14.380 He said he doesn't want another girlfriend.

01:40:16.640 He prefers AI girlfriends.

01:40:18.760 Dr. Sachs, do you know about AI girlfriends?

01:40:20.240 I said, yeah, I know about AI girlfriends.

01:40:22.220 So we set up a time for me to meet with this boy by Zoom.

01:40:25.740 I said, so tell me about why your parents,

01:40:28.380 your understanding of why your parents wanted you

01:40:30.600 to meet with me.

01:40:31.540 He said, well, they were really upset when I dumped Louise.

01:40:34.200 I said, yeah, that's what they told me.

01:40:35.580 So why'd you dump her?

01:40:37.400 He said, she was fat.

01:40:38.960 She wanted me to take her places, do stuff.

01:40:41.300 1995 a month.

01:40:43.240 Wait, what's 1995 a month?

01:40:45.760 And he mentioned his AI girlfriend.

01:40:47.700 And he said, she's way prettier.

01:40:50.640 I said, but she's not real.

01:40:53.280 Pixels on a computer screen.

01:40:55.320 Wouldn't you rather be intimate with an actual woman?

01:40:58.420 And he said, what is real?

01:41:02.900 And who are you to judge?

01:41:06.120 He said, you want to know something?

01:41:07.420 Reality is boring.

01:41:09.340 Reality is lame.

01:41:11.020 Reality sucks.

01:41:13.140 The advice I get from my AI girlfriend's way better than anything I've ever gotten from a human.

01:41:17.940 And the orgasm I get from Jasmine, his AI girlfriend, way better than anything I've gotten with a woman.

01:41:26.100 He said, I'm tired of women made of meat.

01:41:31.400 Women made of meat disgust me.

01:41:35.240 I'm not an incel, he said.

01:41:37.420 You know what I'm talking about?

01:41:38.240 I said, yeah, involuntary celibate.

01:41:39.840 You're not an incel.

01:41:40.540 He said, I could totally have sex with women.

01:41:42.320 I don't want to.

01:41:44.800 I prefer.

01:41:46.000 I'm a man going my own way.

01:41:47.640 And I could hear the capital letters.

01:41:48.900 He said, you know what I'm talking about?

01:41:49.980 I said, yeah, you're talking about MGTOW.

01:41:51.420 I know about MGTOW.

01:41:52.940 I'm a man going my own way.

01:41:55.900 So I put those three components into one factor,

01:41:59.140 pornography, AI, girlfriends, and the manosphere.

01:42:02.080 Because the end result of those three together

01:42:04.120 is a growing proportion of young men

01:42:07.560 who are perfectly happy in their bedroom

01:42:10.940 with their AI girlfriends and their porn

01:42:13.860 who are convinced by the manosphere

01:42:15.960 they don't need a flesh and blood woman.

01:42:19.460 They're perfectly fine.

01:42:21.500 Look, Harper's Magazine had this huge story recently

01:42:24.420 about gooning boys who spend 8, 10, 12 hours masturbating

01:42:28.700 not to achieve a climax,

01:42:30.380 but to achieve this zen-like state of dissociation.

01:42:34.360 And they've got a community online

01:42:36.080 sharing their goon caves, where they show their three 55-inch flat screen setup, each running a

01:42:41.820 different porn video. They're proud of this, okay? We've got a very toxic online community,

01:42:47.340 the Manosphere, where boys are comparing notes and sharing their disregard, their disrespect for

01:42:53.400 women. While they're in your home, you can both protect them from it and educate them on the

01:42:59.060 damage it does to them. Across the United States, teachers are reporting this astonishing rise in

01:43:03.900 boys, middle school boys, seventh grade boys who are using the C word at their teacher,

01:43:09.840 creating deep fake porn of their teacher.

01:43:12.160 Oh, good gracious.

01:43:13.480 So look, you don't want this for your son.

01:43:16.440 So this brings us back to where we started, this growing proportion of American women

01:43:21.040 who are saying, no, thank you.

01:43:24.960 Only 35% of single American women want to be with a man.

01:43:28.660 Why is it?

01:43:29.440 Well, the boys are less motivated in the classroom, but the pornography is a big part of it.

01:43:34.580 I have heard from so many girls who say, this boy thinks sex means a girl on her knees giving oral sex to the boy, and then we're done.

01:43:43.020 Or that I'm going to get choked.

01:43:45.620 Or the spank or choke.

01:43:47.920 The girls, we are failing in our most basic tax as a culture of raising boys to be men that women want to be with.

01:43:56.280 Dr. Leonard Sachs is his name.

01:43:58.040 the book is Boys Adrift. Check it out. Available now. You can order yours pre-order right now. Do

01:44:04.200 it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:44:14.960 Today's episode was brought to you by SuperSure.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 27, 2026

Why Boys are Falling Behind in America Today, and the Truth About ADHD and Plastics, with Dr. Leonard Sax ｜ Ep. 1387

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