The Megyn Kelly Show - Why CEO Killer Snapped, Dangers of ＂Gentle＂ Parenting, and Rise of ＂Normophobia,＂ with Dr. Leonard Sax and Candice DeLong ｜ Ep. 962

00:00:00.420 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

00:00:12.280 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Wednesday.

00:00:17.160 We are learning new and disturbing details about the accused healthcare CEO killer as his manifesto and other chilling writings become public.

00:00:25.900 This comes amid more bizarre displays of praise for this guy, Luigi Mangione, from those who are positioning him as some kind of Robin Hood figure.

00:00:35.240 I'm over it. I'm really over that psychosis by some faction of the American populace.

00:00:42.440 Just, you know what, like, Dr. Leonard Sachs is here in just a few minutes.

00:00:47.100 I mean, this is the parenting expert. He's an MD. He's a PhD. He has spent his life studying longitudinal, long-term studies of children and actually practicing with children.

00:01:00.620 And he actually knows a thing or two about psychology.

00:01:03.520 And one of his main takeaways is have dinner with your children.

00:01:07.680 Have family dinners.

00:01:09.100 In a perfect world, seven nights a week.

00:01:10.640 But as many nights as you can, even if it's short of seven, someone needed to do that in the families of the people who are now praising this guy as a Robin Hood figure.

00:01:20.800 You're an idiot.

00:01:22.240 By the way, heard this from our pals over on the editors.

00:01:27.120 The guy, Brian Thompson, who was murdered, the CEO who was murdered, comes from no privilege.

00:01:35.380 His dad was totally self-made.

00:01:36.680 I think he was a farmer, and this guy, Brian Thompson, was totally self-made, pulled himself up, got himself to the top of the insurance world.

00:01:44.260 The killer accused is from enormous privilege, tons of dough.

00:01:49.800 The family owned country clubs, radio stations, health facilities, went to some Tony boys school for $40,000 a year, valedictorian, UPenn, Ivy League, all the advantages, all the breaks.

00:02:02.400 And yet he's supposed to be the Robin Hood?

00:02:05.760 He's the one we're supposed to be rooting for?

00:02:07.500 Screw you.

00:02:08.900 Don't have the time.

00:02:10.140 My mom always used to say, I cannot respond to irrational behavior rationally.

00:02:16.300 And that is how I feel when I look at these morons trying to talk about this guy like he's some sort of our hero, this Luigi dude.

00:02:24.940 All right, so Dr. Leonard Sachs is going to be on in one second.

00:02:29.540 But first, we want to get into some of the psychology of this guy and how on earth this could possibly happen.

00:02:38.200 Like, how could this have gone down by a guy with that kind of pedigree who turns into a killer, if what the police say is correct?

00:02:45.960 And for that, we bring on Candace DeLong.

00:02:47.600 She's a former FBI criminal profiler.

00:02:49.760 She worked on cases like the Unabomber, the Tylenol murders.

00:02:55.460 We spoke to her on episode 466 about the Idaho murders.

00:03:00.140 So you may be familiar with Candace's work.

00:03:03.400 When they first recruited her over at the FBI, she was a head nurse over at Northwestern University.

00:03:08.520 And then she went on to work, as I said, on some of the most prominent cases in America.

00:03:13.680 She's hosted the award-winning podcast Killer Psyche with Candace DeLong.

00:03:17.480 Are you ready to challenge yourself and dive deeper into the ideas that shape America?

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00:04:23.300 Candace, welcome back to the show.

00:04:25.140 So let's just start with that.

00:04:26.260 How does a guy with that kind of a background, with all the advantages, who was a valedictorian of his high school class just 10 years ago in 16, not even 10 years ago, in 16, who goes on to complete a bachelor's and a master's at the University of Pennsylvania, not exactly an easy school, wind up becoming this much of what looks like a psycho killer in just a few years?

00:04:52.540 Well, Megan, a lot of mental disorders, mental illnesses emerge in the late teens, early to mid-20s.

00:05:04.860 Now, I'm not diagnosing him.

00:05:07.000 I'm simply saying that is a fact about mental illnesses, and it's certainly a good question. 1.00

00:05:15.320 Looking at this young man's meteoric rise to success athletically, culturally, socially, academically, and then to throw it all away and appear in behavior that is a head-scratcher became a murderer, I think we probably will find something.

00:05:38.840 What does it look like to you, like schizophrenia?

00:05:43.200 Because you tell me, if you're having a psychotic break, and I know, and we've seen this with young men in particular who are guilty of mass shootings, seems to happen between 19 years old and the mid-20s, but are those people generally like this guy, Luigi, where you're fine for all the years prior to that?

00:06:04.640 You know, there's no hint that this is going to happen to you.

00:06:08.900 Yes, that can happen.

00:06:10.200 Now, I'm not saying this guy is psychotic.

00:06:12.840 Clinical term means out of touch with reality, doesn't perceive things as they are possibly hearing voices.

00:06:20.200 We don't know that about him, but the answer to your question is, yes, I'm aware of a number of cases, both in my life growing up, and then as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people, young people who went away to college, and the expression is, came home in a basket.

00:06:42.500 And what happened was, mental illness, serious, usually schizophrenia, or sometimes bipolar disorder, emerged where there's that bridge from puberty to adulthood.

00:06:56.740 That's dark.

00:06:59.060 That's dark.

00:07:00.320 I mean, could that happen to anybody?

00:07:03.140 Because what I'm looking at with this guy is, well, we don't know much about his family, but there's a lot of references to, like, mushrooms or drugs on his social media.

00:07:15.320 And we did have on Dr. Roland Griffith, who was the guy who really founded, not really, who did found the clinic for psilocybin and for, you know, these sort of MDNA treatments for people who are depressed at Johns Hopkins.

00:07:33.960 But one of the main things he said, Candace, was, you don't do those drugs recreationally or outside of a setting in which a prior family history of psychosis or schizophrenia can be detected.

00:07:49.200 He said, because if we see anything like that in the questionnaire we give our potential participants, they're bounced, because it can trigger a psychotic break from which you may not return.

00:07:59.580 I have seen that.

00:08:01.840 As a psychiatric nurse, I saw it.

00:08:04.700 And when my son was in high school decades ago, a friend of his did some kind of designer drug, psychedelic drug, became a schizophrenic thought disorder, and it did not have a happy ending.

00:08:22.120 These are very serious drugs.

00:08:24.120 And if somebody has a history, they may not even know they have a history of mental illness of some kind, it can open the floodgates.

00:08:35.180 Are you surprised to hear all these friends coming out and saying, totally nice guy, absolutely didn't see any, and recently, you know, the college friend saying, absolutely no hint of this.

00:08:47.300 And the most they seem to be able to come up with is, well, he had this terrible back injury, though so far no one is claiming he was denied insurance or anything like that, but like he had some terrible back injury.

00:08:58.960 Right, exactly.

00:09:00.960 I'm not surprised that his friends from college, which was a while ago, were saying, gee, we didn't see this coming, he's totally normal, because when many of these mental illnesses we're talking about emerge, it happens in a matter of weeks.

00:09:20.080 And I haven't seen anyone being interviewed that said they had interacted with him in the last six months.

00:09:27.240 Nope, nope.

00:09:29.440 And would it be typical, do you think?

00:09:31.360 I mean, are you surprised to learn he went kind of underground or went radio silent with respect to family and friends over these past six months to the point where his mother filed a missing persons report for him in San Francisco in November, believing that that's where he was, though we don't know where he was at the time.

00:09:48.860 The most recent report was he was in Hawaii for a period.

00:09:51.100 Well, no, I'm not surprised.

00:09:54.300 A couple of things came to my mind about that radio silence with family and friends.

00:10:01.160 One is that, yes, possibly a mental illness was emerging.

00:10:06.440 But moreover, now that we know what he did last week, he had decided to do it to kill someone, to kill this person.

00:10:19.420 And he did not want to interact with anyone for like, could be right out of it.

00:10:26.840 Yeah.

00:10:27.020 What do you make of, I mean, you're about as expert as they come in the Unabomber. 0.64

00:10:35.560 He seemed to admire him quite a bit.

00:10:38.160 And they had some group, like a book club, that they were forming.

00:10:44.740 And it was this guy and two others.

00:10:47.140 And this is the first book he wanted them to read.

00:10:49.460 And apparently they all found it so disturbing, like his manifesto, that the book club disjoined.

00:10:56.240 It fell apart before they made it through the end of Ted Kaczynski's writings.

00:11:00.780 But this Luigi fellow really found him inspiring.

00:11:05.040 I almost lost my mind reading Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.

00:11:11.300 It's rambling.

00:11:13.360 It is at times almost incoherent.

00:11:19.020 So that doesn't surprise me that his colleagues, who probably were of sound mind, went, what the heck is this?

00:11:26.020 But it also doesn't surprise me that this young man that we are talking about became an admirer of Kaczynski.

00:11:37.080 What did Kaczynski do?

00:11:39.120 He killed people that he thought were harming society, or at least he attempted to.

00:11:45.660 The truth is, when Kaczynski put a bomb down and locked away, or mailed a bomb, he had no idea who was going to be hurt or killed by it.

00:11:55.140 And he didn't really care.

00:11:57.360 That is different than what we are seeing here with Mangione.

00:12:01.920 He was being led into the courthouse yesterday to be charged in connection with this alleged crime and seemed to be trying to wriggle out of the physical control of the police officers to be heard.

00:12:20.800 It's kind of difficult to understand what he's saying, but my read of it is, and we'll play it, but I'll just give it to you in advance.

00:12:27.740 It's completely, we don't know what, it's completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

00:12:35.500 It's lived experience.

00:12:38.260 Listen here.

00:12:40.760 We're in the world and it's completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.

00:12:47.340 It's lived experience.

00:12:50.800 Okay, so that was for his extradition hearing.

00:12:52.960 They're trying to bring him back to New York where his lawyer is fighting it to keep him in Pennsylvania for a few more weeks.

00:12:57.800 I mean, I think the game is delay, delay, delay when you have a criminal defendant with this much evidence against him.

00:13:02.580 What do you make of that?

00:13:05.240 When I saw that, of course, I watched it very carefully.

00:13:09.020 And one of the things that I noticed was when he was in the police vehicle, there is no indication, I couldn't see, that he was causing a stir, that he was combative, yelling, screaming, kicking, anything like that in the vehicle.

00:13:27.520 He gets out, he gets out, he looks around, he spots the camera, and then he goes on his rant.

00:13:33.980 Now, there was a time I worked at a county emergency psychiatric facility.

00:13:41.860 And most patients that were brought in were in the back of a police car, and they were screaming and yelling, there's actually a cage wall to protect, it looks like a cage to protect the police officers in front.

00:13:58.200 He wasn't doing that.

00:13:59.900 He was cool, calm, and collected until he knew the cameras were rolling.

00:14:03.800 Hmm, okay, so it's performative to some extent.

00:14:09.540 I think so.

00:14:11.480 We've got, I mean, his lawyer says, I've seen no evidence that he's the killer.

00:14:15.860 Okay, we've all seen overwhelming evidence if one-tenth of what the news is reporting that it was all over the sky.

00:14:22.380 He, other than, I mean, he basically had a t-shirt that read, I'm the killer of CEO Brian Thompson.

00:14:27.520 He had his manifesto on him, he had the gun on him, he had the bullets on him.

00:14:33.800 He, now the latest reporting is that his fingerprints, they do match fingerprints found at the scene of the murder.

00:14:41.740 And in the notebook that's on him, this is how one of the ways in which we know, other than his book club, that he had a fondness for the Unabomber, because they are reporting at CNN,

00:14:51.440 that his notebook included a list of to-dos and tasks that he needed to complete to facilitate a killing, as well as notes justifying those plans.

00:15:02.520 And in one passage in the notebook, he concludes that using a bomb against his intended victim could kill innocents,

00:15:10.460 but that shooting would be much more targeted, musing what could be better than, quote, to kill the CEO at his own bean counting conference, which indeed is what happened.

00:15:21.260 And try to help us understand here, Candace, because if you read his alleged manifesto, and the police haven't yet released it,

00:15:29.080 but there is a report online, CBS claims that they've seen it, Ken Klippenstein claiming he's seen it and has posted it.

00:15:37.740 It goes on to say some of what we already read to our audience yesterday.

00:15:43.480 To the feds, I'll keep it short, because I respect what you do for the country.

00:15:47.060 To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly I wasn't working with anyone.

00:15:51.120 This was fairly trivial, some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, I don't know what that means, a lot of patience.

00:15:58.380 The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and to-do lists that illuminate the gist of it.

00:16:05.920 But my tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering, so probably not much info there.

00:16:10.820 I do apologize for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done.

00:16:14.760 Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.

00:16:18.040 He rips on the healthcare system and how large United was and how life expectancy in America is not what he hoped it would be.

00:16:26.920 And then he goes on to say something interesting.

00:16:29.880 Obviously, the problem's more complex, but I don't have the space.

00:16:32.600 And frankly, I don't pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.

00:16:40.160 He says, many people have illuminated the corruption, the greed.

00:16:44.720 And then he writes, evidently, I am the first to face this with such brutal honesty.

00:16:50.700 So as somebody who, you know, does this kind of profiling, Candace, what he's saying, I don't really understand it that well.

00:16:59.400 There are a lot of people who get it better than I do.

00:17:01.840 But I understand I'm the one, the first one to sort of be brave enough, he's saying, to do what needs to be done here, to face it with brutal honesty.

00:17:11.180 And he's confessing to the feds, let me save you the time, I did it and I did it alone.

00:17:16.820 What does all that, if it proves to be real, and so far it looks like it may be, tell you?

00:17:22.160 He wants attention for what he did.

00:17:24.340 He's certainly getting it.

00:17:26.120 This is the biggest story I've seen in a long time.

00:17:30.880 This way eclipses the Idaho murders.

00:17:34.080 He, to me, what you just read seems a bit disjointed.

00:17:43.060 But what he's saying is, parasites, it needed to be done.

00:17:48.840 Sorry if anyone was hurt.

00:17:52.020 And he takes it upon himself.

00:17:54.160 He is the avenging angel as he sees it.

00:17:57.480 Yet, in his notes, I see fragmentation, wandering thoughts, which all would support that he is, this whole thing has to do with the mental decompensation going on.

00:18:20.000 And last question quickly, does that mean insane as a legal matter?

00:18:23.940 Well, it's insane, of course, legally means the individual did not understand, did not know at the time they committed an act that it was wrong.

00:18:33.900 And that's hard for people to understand.

00:18:36.000 But if an individual has voices in their head telling them to kill someone in order to save the rest of America, that is a very serious mental, they really thought what they were doing was right.

00:18:54.340 And they belong in a mental facility, not a prison.

00:18:58.680 Like John Hinckley.

00:19:00.640 Exactly, exactly.

00:19:02.120 Well, we may say that defense offered, depending on where the facts go.

00:19:08.260 Candace, it's always a pleasure.

00:19:10.260 Thank you.

00:19:10.780 Thank you so much for being here.

00:19:11.380 Thank you, Mandy.

00:19:12.800 Happy to do so.

00:19:13.760 So interesting, right?

00:19:15.080 It's so interesting.

00:19:15.840 I mean, this guy was methodical.

00:19:17.880 He used a lot of planning, you know, the escape plan and so on.

00:19:23.080 It was far from perfect.

00:19:24.500 Uh, so all of that will be used by the prosecution to say he knew exactly what he was doing, but legally insane is a different standard.

00:19:33.840 And, you know, John Hinckley went to a mental facility instead of a jail because he, he did it for Jodie Foster.

00:19:41.200 He didn't realize what he was doing was, was wrong.

00:19:44.700 I mean, this can work depending on what the facts are and we'll see.

00:19:48.900 So far his lawyer isn't saying we're going to cop to an insanity plea or anything like that.

00:19:52.820 He's suggesting we have the wrong guy, which is laughable.

00:19:56.300 Okay.

00:19:56.780 Now we're joined by Dr. Leonard Sachs.

00:19:58.780 Dr. Sachs is a psychologist.

00:20:00.300 He's a family physician, an MD and a New York Times bestselling author.

00:20:04.540 Uh, he, by the way, is one of the few people in the world, I think, to have completed his education at MIT at age 19.

00:20:11.400 That's the level of brilliance we're talking about here.

00:20:13.460 We had Dr. Sachs on in January of last year for a wide ranging discussion on parenting, the trans contagion and more.

00:20:21.160 It's a must listen.

00:20:22.060 It was episode four, seven, four.

00:20:24.040 He recently revised and updated his incredible bestselling book, the collapse of parenting, how we hurt our kids when we treat them like grownups.

00:20:33.420 And it is even more necessary today.

00:20:36.360 Dr. Sachs, welcome back to the show.

00:20:37.780 I want to get into all things about the update, but can I get your thoughts to kick it off on this, um, accused killer in connection with the murder of Brian Thompson and what you glean from the facts that we just outlaid?

00:20:51.080 Yes, absolutely.

00:20:53.340 I think it's such an illuminating, uh, illuminating story.

00:20:56.840 And I've seen this so much in my own practice as a family doctor now for more than 30 years.

00:21:04.040 So many boys want to be heroes.

00:21:07.120 They want to be seen as heroes.

00:21:08.980 They want to see themselves as heroes in their own eyes.

00:21:12.920 You know, I spoke some years ago at a, uh, conference on juvenile justice statewide conference in New Mexico, uh, and the topic was boys adrift, the title of one of my books.

00:21:23.000 And after my presentation, uh, they had a panel of four, uh, experts, uh, from across the state.

00:21:31.540 And one was judge John Romero, who's the chief of the juvenile judges in Albuquerque.

00:21:36.940 And he said, when he first began doing this work as a juvenile judge in Albuquerque, he was puzzled because all these, uh, teenage boys, um, you know, good men with, with, with great potential being accused of these horrible, violent crimes.

00:21:54.960 And he would take them into his chambers and say, why are you doing this?

00:21:59.120 Don't you understand?

00:22:00.460 You're going to go to jail for, for decades.

00:22:03.540 Why are you throwing your life away?

00:22:05.320 And he told us it took him a long time to, to understand these boys want to be heroes.

00:22:13.120 And, and the school doesn't understand that.

00:22:16.360 And, and, but the gang understands that the gang says, here's a gun, go and, go and shoot the, the rival gang leader.

00:22:22.920 And if you succeed, you're a hero.

00:22:24.820 If you get killed, trying your hero, if you get thrown in jail, your hero, if you chicken out, you're a wuss.

00:22:30.800 And, and then he looked right at us and he said, most of you, you don't, you're not from the barrio and you're thinking, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm doing great.

00:22:39.180 My son's not going to be in the juvenile justice system.

00:22:41.960 He said, but your son is no different.

00:22:44.260 The difference between your son and the boys I see your son is staying at home in his bedroom, playing his video games.

00:22:51.180 The difference between your son and the boys in my chambers is your son is playing with pretend guns in his video game, but it's the same, it's the same dynamic playing with pretend guns, being a pretend hero in his call of duty and his grand theft auto.

00:23:08.560 In both cases, though, your son has left the real world in his fantasy world, wanting to be a hero in his own mind.

00:23:18.880 And I, and that's the same thing that's going on here.

00:23:20.780 We have failed as a society to capture these boys, to give them better models, better ways to become a hero, to be a hero in the right way.

00:23:33.440 And, and, and again, that's going back to my book, Boys Adrift, where I, where I talk about good role models, men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave his life for the right cause.

00:23:42.700 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, had a comfortable job preaching in New Jersey in 1938 and left that job, went back to Nazi Germany, put his life in jail, in, in, in jeopardy and joined the conspiracy to take the life of Adolf Hitler and was caught and was executed in concentration camp.

00:24:04.300 Uh, that's a good man.

00:24:07.080 That's a role model.

00:24:08.140 We're failing at the job of inspiring boys to be the right kind of hero.

00:24:14.540 So how do you figure out whether it's that kind of a problem where he is sane and has not suffered a psychotic break, but just is under this delusion that he needs to be a hero somehow.

00:24:26.880 And he's got to do it.

00:24:28.480 He's the only one brave enough to do it versus, Oh no, it's, it's basically a school shooter with a different purpose.

00:24:36.120 He's had a break.

00:24:37.600 It happens often around this age and you know, he's lost it.

00:24:41.580 He's, he's no longer of sane mind.

00:24:45.420 Okay.

00:24:46.880 I've written about school shooters and that's a different process in place.

00:24:51.420 There's always been a small minority of boys who take pleasure in killing, take pleasure in inflicting pain.

00:24:59.860 And I wrote an article about this for a magazine called first things.

00:25:03.000 I called it the unspeakable pleasure.

00:25:05.140 And that's a minority of boys.

00:25:06.780 That's, that's rare, but it happens.

00:25:08.920 And again, that's not insanity.

00:25:12.660 That's a, a variation on human nature.

00:25:16.640 It's always been with us.

00:25:17.680 But again, we need to know how to capture those, these boys.

00:25:20.300 We have the game of football.

00:25:23.440 Hey, there's always been boys who enjoy inflicting pain in pain, have them play the line.

00:25:28.760 And I was doing this talk at the university of Wisconsin, Madison.

00:25:31.880 And, and it happened that my host used to play the line for university of Wisconsin, Madison.

00:25:37.040 And I called out to him and I said, do you have any comments about that?

00:25:40.840 And he said, a good hit is better than sex.

00:25:42.920 Healthy cultures know how to capture boys and channel those instincts into healthy channels.

00:25:54.460 It's not insanity.

00:25:55.860 The insanity plea in that case is a cop out.

00:25:58.700 Okay.

00:25:58.860 There are people who truly have psychotic disorders and they hear voices telling them that this person

00:26:05.420 is a lion who's going to eat them and they have to shoot them.

00:26:09.240 That's not what's going on here.

00:26:11.040 That's not what's going on with Luigi Mangione.

00:26:13.480 And that's not what's going on with school shooters.

00:26:15.760 Some inventive lawyers try to make that case.

00:26:18.420 It's unpersuasive.

00:26:19.920 We're not talking here about psychotic disorders and schizophrenics.

00:26:23.400 We're talking about here about boys who have evil impulses.

00:26:28.100 There's nothing new about this.

00:26:29.380 This is as old as Genesis chapter four.

00:26:32.280 Sin is crouching at the door.

00:26:34.180 Its desire is for you, but you must master at Genesis chapter four.

00:26:39.880 What would you guess?

00:26:41.160 And this is a total guess because we don't know much about his family, but you are a parent

00:26:45.460 expert and an actual MD and you've been doing this kind of work for decades now.

00:26:51.240 I'm just going to guess, Dr. Sachs, that the Mangione family probably didn't have the dinners

00:26:55.900 around the table together seven nights a week.

00:26:58.100 That's just a stab in the dark.

00:27:01.240 You know, I have learned the hard way.

00:27:04.220 It's very hard to speculate about what went on under the roof at home.

00:27:09.620 We do know, we all know that he graduated from a secular high school, a school with no 1.00

00:27:14.480 religious affiliation.

00:27:16.540 And the culture has changed.

00:27:18.240 You know, 30 years ago, American popular culture taught right and wrong.

00:27:22.580 We know this.

00:27:23.160 This is not a guess.

00:27:24.120 We have scholars who have looked at American popular culture.

00:27:27.360 The most popular TV shows, 1967, 77, 87, 97, were shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Family

00:27:35.800 Ties, Happy Days, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

00:27:38.720 Researchers have looked at these shows and they found that they consistently taught that

00:27:43.060 the most important thing is to do the right thing to tell the truth right through 1997.

00:27:48.560 But by 2007, they found American culture had flipped upside down.

00:27:52.580 And the most important thing in the shows that teenagers were watching in 2007 was not to

00:27:58.400 do the right thing.

00:27:59.560 It was to win.

00:28:00.660 In shows like American Idol and Survivor, the most important thing now is to win.

00:28:10.940 Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island.

00:28:14.080 So American popular culture, beginning in the early 2000s, was no longer about doing the

00:28:19.080 right thing.

00:28:19.600 It's about winning and becoming famous.

00:28:21.720 So American culture is now a post-Christian culture. 0.88

00:28:25.740 It's no longer a culture in which doing the right thing is taught.

00:28:30.380 And so, you know, 30 years ago, it wasn't so important to go to a school that taught

00:28:34.980 Judaism or Christianity. 0.70

00:28:38.220 Now it is.

00:28:39.080 You know, I attended public schools in Ohio, K through 12.

00:28:41.960 But today, I think it's more important that you enroll your kid in a school that has a

00:28:50.520 firm moral foundation.

00:28:52.760 And I can tell you many horror stories about public schools that don't and independent schools

00:28:58.480 that don't.

00:28:59.420 And what we do know about Luigi Mangione is that he went to a secular independent school, the Gilman School, which has no religious affiliation.

00:29:10.500 And now I am speculating.

00:29:14.440 But you go to a secular independent school, they're not teaching the Ten Commandments.

00:29:20.100 They're not teaching do unto others as you have them do unto you.

00:29:23.420 And boys are adrift.

00:29:25.460 If you don't have that firm foundation, what do you where do you find your rule for right and wrong?

00:29:33.000 And then you pen, which is so adrift that its president was forced out last year for not being able to say that it's wrong to chant things like, well, basically, death to Israel, death to the Jews.

00:29:46.080 Yes.

00:29:46.320 You know, she's going to have to really think it over and figure out whether that's allowed on campus. 1.00

00:29:49.700 Actually, boys are adrift and they're looking for what does it mean to be a man?

00:29:55.160 And you go online and what do you find?

00:29:56.860 You find Andrew Tate.

00:29:58.180 And that's really scary.

00:30:00.500 Yes, very scary.

00:30:02.540 So this, okay, there's so much to go over.

00:30:05.180 But I asked my followers on X today, knowing that you were going to come on, whether they had anything they wanted me to ask you.

00:30:13.260 And I'll get to some of those questions throughout the course of the two hours.

00:30:15.980 But one of the questions was, and it came up over and over, and I thought this is actually a really good one.

00:30:21.000 Let me see if I can find the way they put it.

00:30:22.940 But how do we help our children in today's day and age with AI, with tech everywhere, with video games and iPhones, how to find purpose, how to find their purpose?

00:30:37.000 I was like, oh, my gosh, that's a big one.

00:30:39.340 It's starting to dump that big one on you so soon in our interview.

00:30:41.960 But, you know, to your point, how do you?

00:30:46.020 So you have to prioritize the family.

00:30:49.500 And you cannot find your child's meaning of life.

00:30:55.720 But you can prioritize that connection.

00:30:59.280 And one of the challenges for kids is that they are looking for life meaning in all the wrong places.

00:31:07.240 They're looking at Instagram and TikTok and Charlie D'Amelio, who is this hugely popular person on TikTok.

00:31:18.260 And, you know, one in three 12-year-olds now says that their goal in life is to be the next Charlie, to be a TikTok influencer.

00:31:28.760 And that's not a good goal.

00:31:30.900 It's not a good goal because it's not going to happen.

00:31:33.820 And I have met with so many girls who are frustrated because they put all this effort into a TikTok video and it fizzles.

00:31:40.600 They don't understand the numbers.

00:31:42.180 They don't understand that there's 10 million other girls out there who are posting videos and it's not going to happen. 1.00

00:31:49.880 And if your meaning of life is on how many clicks you get on your video, you're going to be frustrated.

00:31:55.140 You're going to be disappointed.

00:31:56.920 You need to find your meaning of life in who you are, not in how many likes you get or how many views or how many followers you have.

00:32:05.960 And so that begins with the family.

00:32:07.660 So you prioritize the family.

00:32:09.100 You, you have family dinners, you fight for dinners at home.

00:32:13.340 And again, many parents are confused and they're, they're driving their kids around to play dates or they're driving their kids to travel team soccer or computer coding class.

00:32:21.900 Cancel the computer coding class.

00:32:23.660 Prioritize family time at home.

00:32:26.240 Prioritize the parent-child relationship.

00:32:29.320 And, and then the rest will follow once you have the strong family relationship.

00:32:34.080 That's so key that I think in today's day and age, many parents are very worried about is junior getting asked on enough play dates or to go hang with his or her friends enough.

00:32:46.220 Is my kid, the kid that's sitting at home with me and my spouse too much, you know, are they popular?

00:32:52.980 Are they out there with friends, which is what is considered quote normal.

00:32:57.500 And to those parents, you say.

00:32:58.920 I would say, I would come back to the central key point that I try to make in the new edition of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, which is that, that central paradox of American parenting right now, which is that parents are spending more time and more money on their kids than parents have ever done before.

00:33:16.020 But the results are worse than they have ever been.

00:33:20.080 American kids are more likely to be anxious and depressed than they have ever been.

00:33:24.080 They are in worse shape physically than they have ever been.

00:33:26.600 They are less fit than they have ever been.

00:33:28.360 They are heavier than they have ever been.

00:33:30.140 So bluntly, American parents are doing it all wrong because American parents are really confused.

00:33:35.880 They've got the priorities all mixed up.

00:33:37.660 They think that it's really important for kids to have friends who are their own age.

00:33:41.880 It's not that important.

00:33:43.120 It is not that important.

00:33:44.260 We know this.

00:33:44.980 Whether or not your five-year-old or your 10-year-old has a lot of other friends their own age is not important.

00:33:51.780 It's not.

00:33:52.420 It's not a predictor of good health.

00:33:53.940 It's not a predictor of happiness.

00:33:55.900 What predicts health and happiness for your five-year-old, for your 10-year-old?

00:33:59.220 The parent-child relationship is the most important thing.

00:34:03.060 It is.

00:34:03.680 We know this.

00:34:04.360 The data is there.

00:34:06.000 So your first priority should not be driving your kid around to play dates.

00:34:10.960 Your first priority should be building the parent-child relationship.

00:34:14.160 So one of my presentations for parents of young kids is titled, Cancel the Playdate.

00:34:19.200 Make a family date instead.

00:34:21.160 On that Saturday, those precious hours on a Saturday when you actually have some time, don't drive your kid to a play date.

00:34:26.640 Do something fun with your kid.

00:34:29.800 Go somewhere with your kid.

00:34:31.480 Just you and your kid.

00:34:32.580 Not driving them to a play date, but doing something fun with your kid.

00:34:35.380 Because the quality of the parent-child relationship is the most important predictor of your kid's health and happiness.

00:34:43.020 So focus on that.

00:34:44.460 Don't drive your kid to a play date.

00:34:45.900 What does it change when they get to be teenagers?

00:34:49.500 Okay.

00:34:50.140 This is where, again, a lot of parents are confused.

00:34:52.400 They expect their teenager to push them away, and they think that's fine.

00:34:56.920 And they assume that the parent-child relationship is less important for teenagers, and it's not.

00:35:03.700 It's more important.

00:35:05.280 And, again, parents are like, oh, you know, well, I really believe in privacy, so I'm not going to monitor what my kid is doing online.

00:35:14.240 Huge mistake.

00:35:15.380 Huge mistake.

00:35:16.460 We've got girls who are sending selfies to boys that they don't even know, and the parent is not aware of this, and it has life-changing bad consequences for girls.

00:35:27.280 You've got to put parental monitoring software on your teenager's phone and say, look, this app is going to see every photograph you take before you even do anything with it.

00:35:40.100 And if there's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my phone.

00:35:43.040 And if you do anything inappropriate, you're going to lose your device indefinitely.

00:35:47.680 Girls don't understand. 1.00

00:35:48.300 So one of the stories I share, a 12-year-old girl had a 14-year-old boyfriend.

00:35:53.940 He asked her to send him some photos, nothing obscene, just wanted to see her take off her school uniform, blouse, and kilt to reveal bra and panties.

00:36:01.960 Of course, she knew her parents would not allow this.

00:36:03.860 So she goes into her bedroom, closes the door, locks the door, and does as he acts and sends the photographs using Snapchat.

00:36:13.660 Now, Snapchat claims you can send a photo using a five-second self-destruct, and after the recipient has seen the photo for five seconds, it will vanish.

00:36:21.040 And if they try to save the photo using a screenshot, you, the sender, will be notified.

00:36:27.100 Snapchat is lying.

00:36:28.240 It knows that there's dozens of free apps out there that will save the photo, and the sender will not be notified.

00:36:33.140 The boy, of course, had installed one of these apps, and he saved all the photos.

00:36:38.360 School administrators later determined that he didn't intend for anyone else to see the photos, but he was at a party, and he set his phone down to grab some chips and talk to some friends.

00:36:47.840 Another boy came along that lock screen had not engaged, found the phone, went to the gallery, found the photos, forwarded each of the girls' photos to his own phone, posted each of the photos on his own Instagram.

00:37:00.700 Within three days, everybody at the school had seen them.

00:37:03.300 Boys, this girl didn't even know were coming up to her and say, hey, Emily, how about you do a striptease for us? 1.00

00:37:08.520 This girl had a total meltdown. 1.00

00:37:12.280 She'd never had any problems before.

00:37:14.920 She'd been invited to a three-day ski weekend.

00:37:17.980 The girl, the birthday girl whose parents were hosting the ski weekend, the birthday girl, called this girl and said, you know, I hate to make this phone call, but my mom is totally freaking out because all the other moms are freaking out, and they're all saying that they won't let their daughter come if you're going to be there because they all think you're now some kind of bad influence. 0.98

00:37:33.820 So I have to uninvite you.

00:37:35.240 I'm really sorry.

00:37:35.940 I have to uninvite you.

00:37:37.860 Girl totally melted down, refusing to go to school, saying her life was over, that the photos would always be out there, which is totally true, incidentally. 0.95

00:37:45.320 The school administrators made this boy take them down, but by that time, 20 other boys had picked up the photos and reposted them.

00:37:50.720 I'm told they're still out there.

00:37:53.460 Started cutting herself with razor blades, saying she wanted to die.

00:37:56.460 The parents took her to the doctor, doctor diagnosed depression, prescribed Lexapro, 10 milligrams, and arranged for urgent psychotherapy.

00:38:06.060 That accomplished nothing.

00:38:07.220 So you now have a 12-year-old girl with depression, not responding to medication or psychotherapy.

00:38:13.640 Who's at fault?

00:38:15.060 The girl?

00:38:16.060 Her boyfriend?

00:38:16.940 The other boy?

00:38:17.660 Uh-uh.

00:38:18.720 The parents are to blame.

00:38:20.900 Look, this is a very grown-up device.

00:38:23.180 With this device, I can take a photo and send a photo, and once I send that photo, I have no control over what happens to it, over who sees it.

00:38:31.700 If you're going to put a device like this in the hands of a child, then you are responsible for every photo they take and everyone who sees it.

00:38:40.180 You must install parental monitoring software if you're going to give a device to a child under 18.

00:38:46.380 And explain to your kid, the app is going to see every photo you take as soon as you take it.

00:38:52.700 If it's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my photo.

00:38:55.120 You're going to lose the device indefinitely.

00:38:56.840 And parents will push back.

00:38:58.620 Parents will say, look, I believe in privacy.

00:39:01.460 I don't want to see my kid's photo.

00:39:03.540 If she doesn't want to see my photo, if she doesn't want me to see her photos, I'm fine with that.

00:39:07.460 I don't want to see her photo if she doesn't want to see my photo.

00:39:09.480 And I say to that parent, look, privacy is great.

00:39:12.300 You want to share a photo privately?

00:39:13.600 Here's what you do.

00:39:14.160 You print it out on a piece of photo paper.

00:39:15.940 And then you take it over your friend's house and show it to them, and then you shred it.

00:39:20.100 That's privacy.

00:39:20.980 There is no such thing as privacy when you share a photo with a phone.

00:39:25.960 And you know who didn't get the memo?

00:39:27.540 Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest men, shared photos with his girlfriend, and they were leaked.

00:39:34.440 And you know who else didn't get the memo?

00:39:36.100 General David Petraeus.

00:39:37.300 Same story a few years earlier.

00:39:38.820 Had all of his passwords and his two-factor authentication.

00:39:42.280 Thought it could not be hacked.

00:39:43.580 Anything can be hacked.

00:39:44.560 The moral of the story of Jeff Bezos and David Petraeus, don't share any photo with a device unless you're prepared for grandma to see it in the newspaper.

00:39:56.480 And you don't share that by preaching that.

00:39:59.700 You communicate that by saying, I've installed an app on your phone.

00:40:05.400 Do not share a photo.

00:40:07.480 Do not take a photo unless you're prepared for everybody to see it.

00:40:11.140 And again, American parents will push back and they'll say, oh, come on.

00:40:15.520 My daughter's just going to Google, how do I get around parental controls on NetNanny? 0.99

00:40:19.180 Well, I've actually spoken with employees at NetNanny.

00:40:22.780 And they told me that they have colleagues whose full-time job is to Google the phrase, how do I get around parental controls on NetNanny?

00:40:29.120 And if they find that some kid has found a hole, they patch it, usually within hours, and the app will update.

00:40:34.860 You have to install parental monitoring software.

00:40:38.040 Is NetNanny the software that you're saying parents can use to monitor the kids on social media?

00:40:43.140 It's one of many apps.

00:40:44.680 I'm not endorsing any one app.

00:40:46.840 Ethics and Public Policy Center has a wonderful online guide to the different parental monitoring apps.

00:40:53.260 That's Ryan Anderson's group, Ethics and Public Policy Center.

00:40:56.580 They've got a good online resource that reviews all the different rental monitoring apps.

00:41:02.220 But, yeah, NetNanny is one.

00:41:03.400 Bark, Circle, there's a bunch of them.

00:41:05.140 I don't endorse any one app.

00:41:06.640 They're all very similar.

00:41:07.660 They all give you a dashboard on your phone.

00:41:10.640 They all light up if they see anything inappropriate.

00:41:13.200 But you've got to use one of these.

00:41:14.940 You've got to install one of these on your kid's phone and explain.

00:41:17.960 What about, Dr. Sachs, the question of privacy?

00:41:20.880 You know, you'll hear parents say, well, I need my child to trust me.

00:41:24.600 And if she doesn't trust me, she's not going to tell me anything.

00:41:27.740 So if she knows I'm sneaking around on her phone or I'm sneaking in her room to read her diary,

00:41:33.520 it's going to blow up to the relationship to where I'm no longer a resource for her.

00:41:38.680 Well, you know, there's good things and bad things about the American Academy of Pediatrics.

00:41:44.480 But in this domain of this question of how you balance that question of trust versus the dangers of social media and smartphones,

00:41:58.660 I think the American Academy of Pediatrics in this domain has done some very useful work.

00:42:04.760 They hired all the leading experts who spent two years reviewing all the research.

00:42:10.180 And the experts said, look, this is a new world and a new domain of immense risk and toxicity.

00:42:18.460 And for girls, the risk is huge.

00:42:22.740 And once those photos are out there, they will never go away.

00:42:26.100 You Google this girl's name, you're still going to find those photos today.

00:42:29.660 It will always be out there.

00:42:31.400 And these girls don't understand the risks. 1.00

00:42:34.140 And you have to balance those risks.

00:42:35.840 And the experts said, in the official guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics,

00:42:43.800 quote, there should be no expectation of privacy when a child or teenager under 18 is online.

00:42:50.320 No expectation of privacy.

00:42:51.800 That's the official guideline of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

00:42:55.040 A device with internet access should be in a public space like the kitchen or living room.

00:43:00.320 The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a very left-of-center organization, as we may get to later.

00:43:07.820 On the trans insanity in particular. 1.00

00:43:09.960 Yes, trans insanity. 1.00

00:43:11.640 But in this domain, they said a kid should not even have their device in their bedroom.

00:43:17.740 It should be in a kitchen or living room because there should be no expectation of privacy when a kid is online.

00:43:23.720 There's so much bad stuff out there that they should expect it after the parent.

00:43:29.980 And they know how you feel.

00:43:31.420 They know how I feel about social media use in children.

00:43:34.060 But like John Rich, a great singer, music superstar, he actually wrote in on my X account.

00:43:41.300 And his question was, I don't have the exact wording in front of me.

00:43:43.760 Hold on.

00:43:44.060 It was, what age is okay for social media, right?

00:43:48.680 With understanding the reality that at some point your child is going to figure out what Snapchat or TikTok or these apps are.

00:43:56.620 Absolutely.

00:43:57.020 At what point would you introduce it to them?

00:43:59.200 Do you want it to happen while you're there and they're still in the home with you and you can talk about it?

00:44:03.140 Or do you wait until they go off to college?

00:44:04.380 What do you think?

00:44:05.040 So my brand, if you like, is evidence-based.

00:44:08.280 When I make a recommendation, I'm always going to show you a study or a series of studies.

00:44:13.260 Long-term, longitudinal studies.

00:44:15.720 Longitudinal cohort studies.

00:44:16.820 You got it.

00:44:17.280 So Jean Twenge is one of our nation's leading researchers.

00:44:21.780 And back in 2019, she and her colleague Keith Campbell did a huge study, 220,000 adolescents.

00:44:27.960 And on the X axis is the time spent on social media.

00:44:31.040 And on the Y axis is the likelihood of becoming anxious or depressed.

00:44:35.160 And there is no rise in that trend line until you get past 30 minutes a day.

00:44:39.820 So 2019, 2020, 2021, I was telling parents up to 30 minutes a day on social media is fine.

00:44:46.720 Um, but that study was published in 2019 based on research gathered in 2018.

00:44:56.220 That's before TikTok.

00:44:59.060 TikTok changed everything.

00:45:00.820 So researchers who study social media talk about basically three generations of social media.

00:45:05.560 So Facebook is first generation.

00:45:07.380 Facebook is about connecting you to people you know, or you used to know, you know, on Facebook, you can connect with your first grade classmate, whatever.

00:45:15.100 Uh, Instagram is second generation.

00:45:17.680 So you not only connect with people, you know, you can connect with celebrities.

00:45:21.820 TikTok is third generation.

00:45:23.360 It's totally different.

00:45:24.140 So you go on TikTok and TikTok begins by saying, I'm not interested in who, you know, I'm interested in what you like to watch.

00:45:31.040 Tell me what kind of videos you like to watch.

00:45:33.080 Okay.

00:45:33.380 Uh, let me show you some videos.

00:45:35.620 And then the algorithm is watching you and the algorithm is crazy good.

00:45:40.120 And it starts customizing what it's showing you.

00:45:42.720 And after an hour, you're seeing things you didn't even know were out there.

00:45:46.460 And it's, it's so common to find teenagers say, whoa, TikTok knew I was gay before I did.

00:45:52.640 TikTok knew I was trans before I did.

00:45:54.700 And, and then in 2021, researchers reached out to TikTok and said, you know, that the algorithm is really dangerous.

00:46:01.480 It's, it's dragging kids, especially girls down in this rabbit hole of it's valorizing anorexia and self-harm. 1.00

00:46:08.220 You got to change the algorithm.

00:46:09.340 And TikTok responded and said, okay, we'll change the algorithm.

00:46:12.000 And then last year, the researchers said, you didn't make it better.

00:46:14.820 It's, you made it worse.

00:46:15.940 It's getting worse.

00:46:17.480 Um, and so I reached out to Gene Twenge and I said, look, look at the more recent studies.

00:46:22.140 This, there is no safe point anymore.

00:46:24.580 That it's shifted left.

00:46:25.980 That danger doesn't begin at 30 minutes anymore.

00:46:28.380 It begins at zero time.

00:46:30.320 And Gene Twenge responded and she sent me back an email saying the research now supports a total ban on social media for all teens, uh, for all children up below 18 years of age.

00:46:45.220 Um, and, and that is, that is where I am now that the newer research in the era of TikTok,

00:46:51.700 no social media for any kids.

00:46:54.820 We can argue about whether it's 16 or whether it's 18, but the research now strongly supports

00:47:00.980 no social media for any kid in the English speaking world under 16 or 18 years of age.

00:47:10.020 And that's, I, I mentioned the English speaking world because there's an interesting factoid here.

00:47:15.180 You know, everyone's been talking about this rise in anxiety and depression that has occurred in the last 15 years.

00:47:21.460 And, and John Height and Gene Twenge and others have talked about how, oh, it's all because of the smartphones and the social media.

00:47:27.580 But one thing that John Height and Gene Twenge haven't talked about much is that look at Greece, look at Russia.

00:47:34.900 You have not seen that rise in anxiety and depression in Greece and in Russia, even though kids in Greece and Russia are just as likely to have smartphones, just as likely to have social media.

00:47:49.520 They're not, they're not showing the rise in anxiety and depression.

00:47:55.200 Well, what's different?

00:47:56.720 Okay.

00:47:57.440 I've made the argument that American popular culture has become toxic in a way that that's not true in Greece and Russia.

00:48:06.420 American popular culture has changed in a way that it didn't change in Greece and Russia.

00:48:11.060 American popular culture has become post-Christian in a way that has not, 0.57

00:48:15.400 I'm not crowding up Russia as a, as a role model by any means,

00:48:20.640 but American popular culture is a post-Christian culture.

00:48:24.580 It's a toxic culture of envy and disrespect in a way that maybe is not true in Greece and Russia.

00:48:31.180 And I think that's important because just locking down the smartphones is not enough.

00:48:36.140 We also have to offer our kids a healthy, a healthier culture.

00:48:41.440 Yes, this is so good to hear.

00:48:45.720 I mean, I feel like we've all experienced this in our day-to-day lives with the weird competitive strain amongst some kids where they're not rooting for their friends.

00:48:55.440 They, you know, if, if one friend gets a home run instead of cheering him on, the other teammate is like, put me in, I need to get a home run.

00:49:03.840 You know, it's like, what, what's, this is a weird strain that we're seeing, um, in today's kids too often.

00:49:11.440 And that makes perfect sense.

00:49:12.760 And yeah, I mean, I think I've said this many times about the Russians.

00:49:15.380 I've been over there a few times and they're actually a very loving people who think wonderful things about the American people.

00:49:21.780 Our leaders have had obvious conflicts and, you know, we know what's happened in Ukraine, but it's not to demonize the Russian people.

00:49:28.740 If you went and spent time over there, it's still a Christian nation.

00:49:31.380 They still have some fundamental beliefs that we could all get behind.

00:49:35.000 It's our country that's lost its mind culturally.

00:49:37.940 And whenever you say that, they think you're some sort of a Russophile, but that's, that's not what I'm saying.

00:49:42.200 It's not what Tucker has been saying.

00:49:43.540 Anyway, I know it's not what Dr. Sachs is saying.

00:49:45.880 There's so much more to go over.

00:49:46.980 There's tons of questions coming in.

00:49:48.260 And by the way, our audience can email me with questions for Dr. Sachs.

00:49:51.800 You can still get on board.

00:49:53.080 It's Megan at MeganKelley.com.

00:49:55.640 You can do it right now and we'll pick back up with him in just two minutes.

00:49:59.040 Don't go away.

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00:51:04.980 Explain the title in today's day and age, what that means, when we treat our children like grownups.

00:51:15.420 Right.

00:51:16.080 So in order for parenting to work, parents have to have authority.

00:51:21.180 So I actually begin the new edition with something that happened in the office just as I was writing the new edition.

00:51:29.240 So mom brings her daughter in, and she's sick. 0.59

00:51:32.100 The six-year-old girl, mom explains her daughter has a fever and a sore throat.

00:51:37.120 So after mom explains what's going on, I say, okay, time for me to take a look.

00:51:41.320 Would you please open your mouth and say, ah?

00:51:43.720 And daughter shakes her head, no.

00:51:45.380 And I say, okay, mom, looks like I'm going to need your help here.

00:51:49.100 Would you please ask your daughter to open wide and say, ah?

00:51:52.140 And mom says, her body, her choice.

00:51:55.800 Okay.

00:51:56.540 My body, my choice, longtime slogan of the abortion rights community, more recently adopted by activists opposed to COVID vaccines.

00:52:04.520 Mom is using that slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me, the doctor, to look in her daughter's throat. 1.00

00:52:11.240 So that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting, parents who think it's actually virtuous to let kids decide.

00:52:19.160 That's an extreme example, and that's rare.

00:52:22.180 Let me give you a much more common, much more common example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting.

00:52:27.220 So boys not paying attention in school, 13-year-old boy not paying attention in school, totally not paying attention.

00:52:33.100 Off the chart on what's called the Conner scales, which is the teacher's rating, this kid's not paying attention in any class.

00:52:39.220 Parents take him to the child psychiatrist, child psychiatrist says, well, attention deficit disorder, let's try Vyvanse.

00:52:45.440 Vyvanse, medication, tremendously helpful, boy's now doing great, but he's jittery, totally lost appetite, palpitations.

00:52:54.760 Parents see this article I wrote for Time Magazine about the dangers of these medications.

00:52:58.660 They bring him to me for a second opinion, and I do a more careful sleep study.

00:53:02.620 I ask the boy, excuse me, I do a more careful sleep history.

00:53:05.880 I ask the boy, do you have a video game console in your bedroom?

00:53:10.160 He said, of course, doesn't everybody?

00:53:11.680 I said, were you playing video games last night?

00:53:13.200 He said, of course, wasn't everybody?

00:53:15.160 When did you finish?

00:53:17.220 Oh, like 1.30, too.

00:53:19.020 And mom's like, 1.30?

00:53:20.140 You were playing video games?

00:53:21.080 1.30, you were playing?

00:53:22.600 What were you playing?

00:53:23.720 Oh, RDR2.

00:53:24.960 Excellent game.

00:53:26.060 All right.

00:53:26.400 So I said to mom, you've got to get the video game console out of his bedroom.

00:53:31.180 No video game, no video games.

00:53:33.120 And you've got to limit how much time he's spending playing video games.

00:53:36.640 You know, max 30 minutes a night on school nights, and no video games after 9 o'clock at night, and no video game console in the bedroom.

00:53:42.940 And mom says, I couldn't take the video game console out of his bedroom.

00:53:47.220 He'd totally freak out.

00:53:48.160 This is a parent who is unwilling to limit how much time her son is spending playing video games.

00:53:58.280 She is uncomfortable exercising her authority.

00:54:01.840 That is very common.

00:54:04.960 And that is also what I mean by the collapse of parenting.

00:54:08.120 Parents who are uncomfortable exercising their authority.

00:54:11.820 And as a result, this kid is not paying attention in class.

00:54:15.600 He doesn't have attention deficit disorder.

00:54:18.400 He's sleep deprived.

00:54:19.880 Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics attention deficit disorder of the inattentive variety.

00:54:28.140 Vyvanse was immensely helpful.

00:54:30.200 What's Vyvanse?

00:54:30.980 What's Adderall?

00:54:32.020 They're amphetamines.

00:54:33.360 They're speed.

00:54:34.160 They compensate for the sleep deprivation.

00:54:37.020 But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not schedule two amphetamines.

00:54:42.560 And the psychiatrist failed to do a careful sleep history.

00:54:46.680 Uh, and this is happening all the time.

00:54:49.240 And I see this a lot as a family doctor, these kids who are being medicated because the parents

00:54:54.400 are not doing their job.

00:54:56.460 That's like, that's happening.

00:54:57.740 How about, how about the, um, the, the drive for good grades?

00:55:04.600 Because I had one parent right in saying, how hard should I push my teenager in today's day

00:55:12.380 and age with kids suffering from anxiety?

00:55:14.560 You know, if my kid is like, I'm striving for bees.

00:55:18.520 Do I just say good for you, honey?

00:55:20.660 You know, do what you think is right.

00:55:21.740 Or do I say, well, why not?

00:55:23.580 A's, you know, maybe, maybe you don't have to play two and a half hours of basketball.

00:55:28.640 Maybe you could take one of those hours and go for an A, but parents are almost afraid

00:55:32.420 to do that now because, you know, our kids are all so stressed out.

00:55:36.720 Well, when I speak to parents, I do a lot of presentations for parents.

00:55:40.480 Uh, and this is okay.

00:55:41.660 I don't want to come across the wrong way.

00:55:43.220 I'm not, the book is not a rant against bad parents.

00:55:46.980 The, the, the objective of the book is to empower the parents to exercise their authority,

00:55:52.480 to, to encourage that parent to do the right thing, to do what you know you should do.

00:55:58.280 That's what I'm trying to do there.

00:56:00.020 So you asked about grades.

00:56:01.580 So when I speak to parents, uh, either individually or in groups, I will often say, I'll, I'll,

00:56:08.120 I'll mention the longitudinal cohort study, which is a study where you follow kids from

00:56:11.560 childhood through adolescence, all the way to 32, 40, 50 years of age.

00:56:16.580 What characteristic of a child best predicts good outcomes at 30, 40, 50 years of age?

00:56:22.420 Is it the grades that they got?

00:56:25.360 No, it's not.

00:56:27.420 It's character.

00:56:29.160 It's honesty.

00:56:30.760 It's self-control.

00:56:33.560 So it follows from that, that our top priority as parents is not top grades.

00:56:41.560 It's honesty and self-control.

00:56:45.480 So good grades are great.

00:56:48.220 There's nothing wrong with that, but character and self-control and honesty are more important.

00:56:54.900 And, you know, as a family doctor, I've seen a big change 20 years ago.

00:56:59.520 Parents were more likely to say, I'd rather you get a C on the test, honestly, than cheat

00:57:03.620 and get an A.

00:57:04.280 And that's the right thing to say.

00:57:08.020 Today, I hear parents who say, hey, you want to get into top university?

00:57:13.320 You've got to have amazing grades.

00:57:15.300 And there has been a rise in cheating over the last 20 years, which I document.

00:57:19.920 So you've got to be very cautious about emphasizing good grades because a lot of kids are getting

00:57:25.140 the wrong message.

00:57:25.960 And there has been a rise in cheating among American kids over the last 20 years.

00:57:30.840 That was one of the things that the Menendez parents allegedly told their kids before they

00:57:34.920 killed them.

00:57:36.520 You've got to get straight A's.

00:57:37.900 You have to win, period.

00:57:39.260 It doesn't matter how you do it.

00:57:40.520 You can cheat.

00:57:41.120 You can steal.

00:57:42.120 Fine.

00:57:42.780 That what's important is to win.

00:57:44.080 Just don't get caught.

00:57:45.340 And it was kind of a fascinating thing and didn't end well.

00:57:49.880 We're losing that moral compass.

00:57:52.560 Being a good person and doing the right thing, even if it hurts, is more important than winning,

00:57:58.720 more important than getting a good mark.

00:58:02.220 Again, that was the lesson of the Andy Griffith Show a long, long time ago.

00:58:08.540 It was the lesson of happy days and family ties.

00:58:12.020 It used to be the lesson that kids would get from American television.

00:58:15.560 It's not the lesson they get anymore, but it's the lesson that you as the parent have

00:58:20.060 to teach.

00:58:21.040 But how do you teach drive?

00:58:25.580 Okay.

00:58:28.740 How do you teach motivation?

00:58:31.480 This is a real problem.

00:58:33.320 And there's a lot more going on than cultural factors are part of it.

00:58:40.540 Um, and some of this is gender specific.

00:58:44.460 So, uh, let's talk about boys.

00:58:48.160 Um, testosterone levels have dropped, uh, a lot in the last 50 years and even in the last

00:58:56.760 20 years.

00:58:57.720 And, uh, that's a major focus of my book, boys adrift.

00:59:01.620 And a lot of this is due to endocrine disruptors.

00:59:04.080 And it turns out that boys depend on testosterone for drive.

00:59:07.980 Girls don't. 1.00

00:59:09.340 Um, and, um, so yeah, I think that is part of the story.

00:59:14.160 And, you know, when I first started looking into this years ago, it sounded kind of weird.

00:59:19.540 And, uh, uh, but, but there is actually very good research.

00:59:24.260 And I actually wrote a paper for the National Institutes of Health published in their scholarly

00:59:27.920 journal on this topic about how plastic bottles, uh, the kind that, that people drink bottled

00:59:33.420 water out of actually contain endocrine disruptors like diathexyl phthalate that lower testosterone

00:59:38.880 levels.

00:59:39.440 So your son shouldn't be drinking water out of a plastic bottle.

00:59:42.960 You should pour tap water into a steel canteen.

00:59:46.240 And that's what you want to be drinking your, your water out of, uh, don't microwave in plastic.

00:59:51.480 It's, it doesn't cost anything to follow these guidelines, uh, but, and, and, and it, and it

00:59:56.700 fixes the testosterone levels.

00:59:58.300 So yeah, there's, there's different factors that affect.

01:00:01.580 That's why I wrote a book called boys called boys adrift and a book for girls called girls

01:00:05.620 on the edge because the fact, why gender matters. 1.00

01:00:09.360 Yes.

01:00:10.640 Whoa.

01:00:11.220 You've really done your homework.

01:00:12.700 I appreciate that.

01:00:13.480 I read that when it came out, Dr.

01:00:15.200 Sachs.

01:00:15.460 And I remember finding it so fascinating.

01:00:16.720 And when the trans insanity exploded, I was like, this is the one guy I want to talk to 1.00

01:00:20.360 because he wrote before all this nonsense that they did, they, they are two different

01:00:24.640 sexes.

01:00:25.300 They are very, very different and it matters.

01:00:27.940 And now we're told, no, it's completely, you know, interchangeable.

01:00:32.800 Yeah.

01:00:33.420 Well, and, and there's been a lot of change there.

01:00:35.820 The first edition of why gender matters had half a paragraph on transgender.

01:00:39.740 And then, uh, the publisher, uh, penguin random house asked me to write a new edition,

01:00:45.140 which I devote a lot of time to transgender because now it's a thing.

01:00:50.560 Yeah.

01:00:51.180 But I know you've been making the point.

01:00:52.540 You make the point here too, that there, the, the male brain and the female brain are

01:00:57.920 very, very different.

01:00:58.920 And that parents must understand that.

01:01:01.400 Yes.

01:01:01.820 And even the trans activists should be honest about this.

01:01:05.720 Like if you want to parade around trying to look like a woman, that's your choice. 1.00

01:01:09.420 But don't try to tell me that because you feel like a woman, even though you're a man,

01:01:14.500 you just are because this, all the studies showed that your brain is different.

01:01:19.320 You are, yes, your body's different, but your brain is different.

01:01:22.240 And you make the point in this book that parents need to understand that too, because

01:01:25.680 you, and you look at your child, your boy child, and you interpret his behavior one way

01:01:30.020 because you have an older sister to that boy who at this stage was doing things very,

01:01:35.020 very differently, maybe at a rapid, you know, face compared to the boy.

01:01:39.420 And you're making no allowances for why gender matters. 1.00

01:01:44.040 Yes.

01:01:44.780 So absolutely.

01:01:45.960 So in my book, why gender matters, I remind parents that girls develop faster than boys.

01:01:53.420 So if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your son to your daughter.

01:01:58.920 And again, from my own practice, a parent of a 18 month old boy said, you know, when my

01:02:05.960 daughter was 18 months old, I could bounce her on my knee and I'd say Google Gaga and 1.00

01:02:10.200 she'd say Google Gaga and I'd say EEO and she'd say EEO and we could do that for like

01:02:14.780 20 minutes.

01:02:15.460 We'd just crack each other up.

01:02:16.640 We'd have so much fun just making nonsense syllables.

01:02:19.240 And I tried that with my son and somebody was riding their bike past the front door and

01:02:23.360 he went and looked at that.

01:02:24.380 And then the house made a noise and he went and looked at that.

01:02:26.820 He's very distractible.

01:02:28.140 And I Googled that and it said, it could be a sign of autism.

01:02:32.160 It could be a sign of autism.

01:02:34.080 What do you think?

01:02:35.560 Could it be a sign of autism?

01:02:37.220 I said, well, could be, but it could also be a sign of boy.

01:02:42.220 But I could not reassure her.

01:02:43.920 And she insisted on a formal evaluation.

01:02:46.060 So I said, all right, treatment and learning centers in Rockville, they're very good at

01:02:49.820 play-based assessment for toddlers.

01:02:52.420 I shouldn't have done that.

01:02:53.480 That was a big mistake on my part.

01:02:54.860 But she went there and she came back in tears.

01:02:58.660 She said, they're very concerned.

01:02:59.900 They said his vocabulary is below average compared to the average 18-month-old.

01:03:03.700 The average 18-month-old should have a vocabulary of 65 words.

01:03:06.980 They estimate he only has a vocabulary of 40 words.

01:03:10.200 Well, actually, research shows the average 18-month-old girl has a vocabulary of 90 words.

01:03:15.620 Average 18-month-old boy has a vocabulary of 40 words.

01:03:18.980 So let's consider that statement.

01:03:20.360 The average 18-month-old child has a vocabulary of 65 words.

01:03:24.480 Okay, 90 plus 40 is 130.

01:03:26.380 135 by 2 is 65.

01:03:28.720 The average 18-month-old child has a vocabulary of 65 words.

01:03:31.980 That's a true statement, but it's completely meaningless because a child is either a boy

01:03:36.340 or a girl.

01:03:37.140 You've got to compare boys to boys and girls to girls.

01:03:40.820 There's nothing wrong with this boy.

01:03:44.020 And he's perfectly fine.

01:03:45.800 And this was years ago.

01:03:46.740 He's gone on to be totally fine.

01:03:48.000 He does not have autism.

01:03:49.500 He's not on the spectrum.

01:03:50.400 Um, so yeah, if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your, your son to

01:03:56.500 your daughter, compare boys to boys and girls to girls.

01:04:00.100 Let's talk about autism for a second, because it's of course very much in the news.

01:04:04.620 And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

01:04:07.440 Up for a potential HHS chief, he's been saying, you know, is it environmental?

01:04:14.000 There's so many toxins around us from the microplastics, which you just mentioned to, uh, the pollutants

01:04:20.140 in our air, in our soil and so on, on our food.

01:04:23.900 Um, he thinks it's too much toxic overload.

01:04:26.580 You have a different possibility that we should be considering for the explosion in autism

01:04:32.800 over the past decade or so.

01:04:34.200 Yes.

01:04:34.520 And there is an explosion.

01:04:36.220 So the journal of the American medical association, JAMA, one of our nation's leading scholarly

01:04:40.480 journals just a few weeks ago, published a study, looked at the diagnosis of autism in

01:04:46.140 this country in 2011 compared with 2022 and found in those 11 years between 2011 and 2022,

01:04:54.220 the diagnosis for autism for children, five to eight years of age tripled.

01:05:00.340 Why?

01:05:01.340 Well, the authors of the study didn't suggest why, but the main, the mainstream, the official,

01:05:07.460 uh, explanation is improved awareness and screening.

01:05:11.120 Okay.

01:05:11.960 I'm not buying that.

01:05:13.460 I'm not buying it because I'm a family doctor and I'm seeing firsthand what's going on.

01:05:17.300 And I can tell you, okay, there's a autism is a spectrum at one, at one end.

01:05:23.560 We've got this severely impaired kid who is not talking, not verbal, profoundly impaired.

01:05:29.660 And there has been a rise there.

01:05:31.660 And at that severe end, you know, I might actually agree with RFK junior that there's toxins in

01:05:37.660 the environment and something bad is happening there.

01:05:40.000 That's not the kid I'm talking about.

01:05:41.320 What's going on at the other end, the kid who is functioning, the kid who, who, who, who is, uh,

01:05:49.460 in school, but he's now being labeled as being on the spectrum.

01:05:52.700 Okay.

01:05:53.220 Here's something that I actually know something about.

01:05:55.560 Cause I'm seeing this.

01:05:58.360 Let's think about this eight year old boy.

01:06:00.200 Who's defined, who's disrespectful, who spits, who bites 20 years ago, the teacher would have

01:06:06.060 said to the parents, look, this is totally unacceptable.

01:06:09.240 Your son is rude.

01:06:11.440 When the teacher says to the parents, your son is rude.

01:06:14.880 The burden of responsibility is on the parents.

01:06:20.100 They have to step up.

01:06:21.760 They have to teach their son.

01:06:23.220 Okay.

01:06:23.740 You need, you need to behave differently or else.

01:06:26.780 But today, same boy, same behavior.

01:06:32.200 The teacher is much more likely to say something like, um, your son seems to have a deficit in,

01:06:38.260 in social awareness skills.

01:06:40.900 Um, have you thought of having him evaluated and he goes and he gets evaluated and sure enough,

01:06:46.180 he gets labeled as being on the spectrum.

01:06:49.140 Well, you know what?

01:06:50.460 He's not on the spectrum.

01:06:52.060 He's a rude, disrespectful boy immersed in this culture of disrespect.

01:06:56.940 Good news, he's just rude.

01:06:58.600 Yes, he's, he's, because the culture has changed.

01:07:03.020 And, and the first chapter, the new edition of my book, The Collapse of Parenting is titled

01:07:07.360 The Culture of Disrespect.

01:07:09.120 In my own practice, a mom of an eight year old boy said, can you explain to me what's going on

01:07:14.600 with our son?

01:07:16.240 His father and I never talked this way.

01:07:18.260 And he, he thinks it's funny to be disrespectful and talk back.

01:07:22.560 And I said to mom, I said, do you guys have the Disney channel, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.

01:07:27.080 And she said, of course.

01:07:28.520 I said, lock it down, turn off, do not allow Disney, Disney Jr., Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.

01:07:36.260 Don't allow it.

01:07:37.820 And it stopped.

01:07:39.840 Disney and Nickelodeon, they are teaching kids that it's cute, that it's funny to be disrespectful,

01:07:45.300 to talk back.

01:07:46.260 And mom called me three weeks later and she said, it stopped.

01:07:50.280 These shows are teaching kids that it's cute and funny to be disrespectful and to talk back.

01:07:56.700 And, and the culture has become a culture of disrespect.

01:08:00.020 And, and, and it's not just Disney and Disney Jr.

01:08:03.420 You know, Lil Nas X had this huge song, Old Tongue Road, 12 weeks, 12 consecutive weeks

01:08:09.740 at number one, the most popular song in the United States.

01:08:12.880 And he sings, can't nobody tell me nothing.

01:08:16.400 You can't tell me nothing.

01:08:18.420 You know, Bill Maher earlier this year had a huge bestseller with his book.

01:08:23.340 And he observes in his book, young people are beautiful, but stupid.

01:08:28.640 Old people are ugly, but more likely to be, to be wise. 1.00

01:08:32.240 So he continues, any successful culture will teach the young people to respect the old people 1.00

01:08:39.400 so that they can learn.

01:08:41.120 So the beautiful young people can learn from the wise old people. 0.91

01:08:44.840 You can't tell me nothing.

01:08:46.460 Can't nobody tell me nothing.

01:08:47.860 This new culture of disrespect, where American popular culture from the Disney channel to

01:08:54.620 the most popular songs to TikTok and Instagram breaks bonds across, across generation.

01:09:02.040 You can't tell me nothing.

01:09:03.180 If you can't tell me nothing, why go to school?

01:09:05.460 Why go to church?

01:09:06.780 The, the new American culture of disrespect breaks bonds across generations.

01:09:12.200 And the result is kids in their bedroom, looking at screens who want nothing to do with their

01:09:17.020 parents, nothing to do with church.

01:09:19.320 And, and the result is kids who are adrift.

01:09:22.780 And, and this is a major factor driving this growing generation of kids who are adrift and,

01:09:28.560 and, and looking for meaning.

01:09:31.380 Hmm.

01:09:32.240 This is a, in our own family, it's a hard line.

01:09:34.600 If, if the talk towards myself or my husband gets disrespectful, they will get punished and

01:09:39.700 they know it.

01:09:40.180 You know, we're not, they're usually very good kids.

01:09:42.240 They don't, we don't have a ton of opportunity to punish them, but you know, that's smart talk

01:09:46.380 back to the parent.

01:09:47.180 That's extremely disrespectful.

01:09:49.020 We will punish them for that.

01:09:50.360 But for this very reason, there have to be like societal boundaries within which we play.

01:09:55.080 And if you're a child and you're speaking to an adult, all the more so.

01:09:58.180 This reminded me, just asked my team to pull it over of a bit.

01:10:02.260 James Carville did after the election, you know, the Bill Clinton aid will help get him elected.

01:10:07.920 And, you know, and he's a Southerner, he's a Louisiana boy through and through, and he's

01:10:12.440 not woke.

01:10:13.140 He's a leftist Democrat, but he is not a woke guy.

01:10:16.340 And he had, he went on a rant about young people within the campaign, the Democratic Party

01:10:22.900 who think they know everything because someone hasn't set those guardrails for them on understanding,

01:10:29.660 respect and respect for one's elders.

01:10:31.700 And that one doesn't know everything, especially as a young person, is a great bet.

01:10:36.320 We haven't had the chance to play it for the audience.

01:10:37.860 Here it is.

01:10:39.000 The vice president was thinking about going on Joe Rogan's show.

01:10:42.980 And a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit.

01:10:49.980 Supposedly, the campaign said that that wasn't the term refactor, but they did.

01:10:53.960 But when you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you 1.00

01:11:00.780 exactly what you tell these people, what I would tell them.

01:11:04.220 Not only am I not interested in your fucking opinion, I'm not even going to call you by

01:11:09.840 your name.

01:11:11.340 You're 23 years old.

01:11:13.040 I don't really give a shit what you think.

01:11:15.320 If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying,

01:11:22.780 I'm going to resign if you don't do this, not only would I fire that motherfucker on

01:11:27.100 the spot, I would find out who hired them and fire that person on the spot. 0.70

01:11:34.000 That's amazing.

01:11:35.640 What do you make of it, Dr. Sachs?

01:11:37.100 Well, he speaks very emphatically, but indeed, I do think that we need young people to respect

01:11:48.780 their elders.

01:11:49.840 And the anthropologists would agree with Bomar, every successful culture teaches young people

01:11:56.260 to respect their elders.

01:11:58.140 And we used to do that too.

01:12:00.540 Uh, as recently as 20, 30 years ago, American culture was a culture of respect and the most

01:12:08.140 popular TV shows like the Andy Griffith show in the 1960s, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer

01:12:13.840 in the 1990s.

01:12:14.540 Little House on the Prairie.

01:12:15.940 Yes, were shows that taught, that had those strong connections across generations.

01:12:20.980 We have lost that.

01:12:22.420 And, you know, you, uh, you and I cannot change Hollywood, but we can create a culture of respect

01:12:28.680 in our own home.

01:12:29.540 And again, that's what I'm trying to do in my book, The Collapse of Parenting.

01:12:32.720 We can't change Hollywood, but we can, I'm trying to encourage parents and, and give parents

01:12:38.300 some guidance.

01:12:38.940 How do you do that in your own home?

01:12:41.340 You've got to create that culture of respect within your own home.

01:12:44.680 And you've got to be confident, asserting authority in your own home.

01:12:48.600 It's not about discipline.

01:12:49.820 It's about creating those bonds of love and respect across the generations.

01:12:55.140 The, um, this is reminding me too of the way we speak to our children today.

01:12:59.440 Or the way we're told we should speak to them today is just so vastly different from how

01:13:05.260 my parents spoke to me when I was growing up and just, you know, a couple of generations

01:13:09.340 ago, the way it was, you know, you, you could make the case against the way parents like

01:13:13.500 mine, my mom, Linda, who I adore, uh, you know, lines like, stop crying.

01:13:18.240 I don't want to give you something to cry about.

01:13:19.400 Okay.

01:13:19.720 That may have been a little far on the spectrum, but today we've gone so far around the bend

01:13:26.620 that we have lost our authority.

01:13:28.460 And we're, I don't know what kind of psycho babble these young parents are listening to,

01:13:33.060 but it's encapsulated in this bit that was going around Instagram recently.

01:13:36.740 This is like a, a prepared bit between what looks like a mom and daughter acting, but

01:13:42.800 it, it captures it perfectly.

01:13:44.280 Watch.

01:13:45.480 Be careful.

01:13:46.640 We don't say be careful anymore.

01:13:48.060 Instead say, what's your plan here?

01:13:51.040 I don't even know my plan.

01:13:52.200 Do you know your plan?

01:13:52.980 Don't stop.

01:13:53.700 Hit your sister. 0.99

01:13:54.760 Don't say stop.

01:13:55.360 Say gentle, gentle, gentle hands, gentle hands, gentle, everything, gentle, everything.

01:14:01.440 I am so proud of you.

01:14:02.800 I'm not supposed to tell kids you're proud of them anymore.

01:14:04.560 Why not?

01:14:05.260 Well, that's putting the focus on you.

01:14:06.940 What?

01:14:07.260 I'm so proud.

01:14:08.280 Don't say that.

01:14:09.020 Should I say instead?

01:14:10.080 You should be so proud.

01:14:11.200 I am so proud.

01:14:12.080 No, it's back on you again.

01:14:13.280 Hurry up.

01:14:13.700 We gotta go.

01:14:14.200 Don't rush.

01:14:14.580 We're fine.

01:14:15.080 Don't rush her.

01:14:15.680 Bye.

01:14:16.000 I thought we were in a hurry.

01:14:16.960 If you rush children, it makes them anxious.

01:14:19.520 Don't worry.

01:14:20.320 You always rushed us and I'm anxious.

01:14:22.180 Never rushed you.

01:14:22.840 We were always late.

01:14:25.060 Exactly.

01:14:25.640 And I was anxious because we were always late.

01:14:27.780 Am I supposed to say that?

01:14:31.840 Gentle.

01:14:32.640 This way.

01:14:33.300 Good job.

01:14:33.880 Good choice.

01:14:35.340 Thank you.

01:14:36.240 No.

01:14:37.160 Say good choice.

01:14:38.520 Watch out.

01:14:39.580 Do you feel safe here?

01:14:41.060 I don't feel safe about any of this shit.

01:14:44.280 Watch out.

01:14:45.520 No, it's do you feel safe here?

01:14:47.880 I'm sure you've seen a lot of this too.

01:14:49.440 Yeah.

01:14:49.800 So that's a riff on gentle, gentle parenting, which I talk about in the new edition, which

01:14:54.840 really wasn't a thing 10 years ago, but it certainly is now.

01:14:58.280 Gentle parenting means letting kids decide. 0.95

01:15:01.020 Gentle parenting means that good parenting means letting kids decide.

01:15:07.600 And gentle parenting is profoundly harmful.

01:15:11.200 And again, in the new edition, I present a lot of evidence that that is so.

01:15:14.900 Um, because, uh, the kids often are mistaken.

01:15:20.580 Uh, and you know, what is, what is childhood for?

01:15:24.440 I mean, literally a four-year-old child has barely begun.

01:15:27.700 A four-year-old horse is a mature adult and a horse is a bigger animal than a human.

01:15:31.820 So it can't just be about biological maturity because a horse, as I said, is a bigger animal

01:15:38.080 and a horse is fully mature by four years of age.

01:15:40.800 A human is developing, is immature for more years than most animals live.

01:15:46.820 Why?

01:15:47.820 Why does it take so long?

01:15:49.280 We don't have to guess.

01:15:50.260 We have scholars like Dr. Melvin Conner at Emory, who spent his entire career, decades,

01:15:54.540 studying this question, published this huge tome, 800 pages, Oxford University Press,

01:16:00.180 uh, titled The Evolution of Childhood, Comparing Development in Our Species with Development

01:16:04.760 in Other Species.

01:16:06.200 And the answer he gives, the reason it takes so many years, is that it takes many years

01:16:12.440 for parents to teach the child right and wrong.

01:16:16.880 And so I cite a column by a longtime columnist for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan,

01:16:22.140 who wrote a column about enlightened parenting, in which she asserts, and I'm quoting that,

01:16:27.740 she says that enlightened parenting means, and I quote, setting your child free to discover

01:16:32.080 for themselves their own right and wrong.

01:16:34.420 And if in so doing your child becomes a stranger to you, then so be it.

01:16:38.780 That may seem enlightened to some, but it's not enlightened.

01:16:42.500 It's a dereliction of duty.

01:16:44.040 If you set your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong, and they

01:16:47.880 have a device with internet access, what they will discover is Drake.

01:16:51.480 And Bruno Mars, and Megan Thee Stallion, and Cardi B, and, and transgenderism, and mainstream

01:16:57.000 pornography, your job is to teach your child right and wrong, to inscribe your law on the

01:17:09.780 hearts of your kid, on your child.

01:17:12.020 That's Deuteronomy 6.

01:17:13.380 That's your job as a parent.

01:17:15.700 Don't set your child loose to discover for themselves their own right and wrong.

01:17:19.100 That's a dereliction of duty.

01:17:20.700 Don't listen to the New York Times.

01:17:22.120 Don't listen to National Public Radio.

01:17:24.240 Do your job as a parent.

01:17:25.680 That's the message I'm trying to communicate in my book, The Glapse of Parenting.

01:17:30.700 It's, it's reminding me at our school, at our son's school, it's an all boys school. 0.97

01:17:34.780 They understand that students will make, make bad decisions and they'll do stupid things

01:17:41.100 sometimes.

01:17:41.940 But the thing that will really get you expelled quickly is if you get called in to the head

01:17:47.800 of school's office and you lie about what you did.

01:17:51.200 Like he, he's not calling you in there unless he's got you dead to rights.

01:17:54.840 But half the time they've got cameras in the school.

01:17:57.180 So he's already seen what you've done.

01:17:59.420 And if you lie, you're out.

01:18:01.480 He's pretty hardcore about that.

01:18:03.020 If you own up to it and confess you were a numbskull, you know, you did something really 0.53

01:18:07.140 stupid and you're sorry, you will live to fight another day. 0.91

01:18:10.100 But it's a, to your point, it's about the value system.

01:18:12.700 Like honesty is a, it's just a deal breaker.

01:18:15.800 You can't, we can't have anything, can't have character if we don't have that fundamental

01:18:19.300 basic honesty.

01:18:20.120 Can I ask you something else?

01:18:21.680 When another audience member asked, how do I know at what age I can start talking to my

01:18:27.260 kids more as adults, you know, being honest with them about my own thought process and

01:18:34.260 why I'm not going to allow them to do this thing that they want to do or about the problems

01:18:39.140 as I see it in the family, outside, whatever.

01:18:41.780 Like, how does one know what level of dialogue to have with one's kid?

01:18:46.740 I think it really varies from one child to the next.

01:18:49.500 And as a rule, girls mature faster than boys do.

01:18:55.500 Girls reach full maturity in brains development by about 22 years of age.

01:18:59.520 Boys don't reach maturity in brain development until 30 years of age.

01:19:03.140 So that explains a lot if you think about it.

01:19:06.320 And when in doubt, wait.

01:19:08.640 I find a lot of parents that I think are confiding too early.

01:19:12.600 And I know a boy who was very insecure because his mom was confiding, a single mom was confiding 0.74

01:19:21.280 in her son about how they were broke.

01:19:24.520 And he took that literally.

01:19:28.620 And he thought that they literally didn't have money for food.

01:19:31.440 And he was very insecure until he graduated and went off to college and realized that they

01:19:40.260 actually were not that broke.

01:19:44.420 And again, parents and sometimes single parents are a little bit more prone to this because

01:19:51.880 they don't have an adult confidant.

01:19:54.640 And they sometimes I've observed as a family doctor, they confide in their kids because they

01:19:58.940 don't have a partner to confide in.

01:20:02.760 And they're confiding in their 12-year-old when maybe they shouldn't be.

01:20:06.780 And as a result, that 12-year-old is insecure, more insecure than they have to be.

01:20:12.500 So when in doubt, keep it to yourself is one general rule I've learned.

01:20:18.240 I seem to remember you being a big proponent of chores and responsibilities for kids.

01:20:24.260 Does that extend to...

01:20:25.540 I had one audience member ask about, to what extent is it appropriate for me to ask the

01:20:30.760 older kids to help me with the younger kids?

01:20:33.260 Because the older kids have responsibilities of their own and they have grades they have

01:20:37.660 to keep up and they have sports they have to make.

01:20:39.420 And like, is it a dereliction of your parental duty to fold in the older ones to help with

01:20:44.900 the younger ones?

01:20:45.540 Or is that a good thing?

01:20:47.280 No.

01:20:47.500 So there's a whole chapter in the new edition titled Humility, which I call the most un-American

01:20:53.740 of virtues.

01:20:55.920 You know, Justin Bieber had a big hit a few years back where he's saying, I'm going to

01:20:59.400 light up the sky like lightning and this world will belong to me.

01:21:03.020 Being proud and standing tall and this world will belong to me.

01:21:09.680 Those are very American characteristics.

01:21:11.740 But we now have all these studies where researchers find that the kid with the highest self-esteem

01:21:17.600 at 15 years of age is that individual who's most likely to be resentful and frustrated 10

01:21:25.140 years down the road.

01:21:26.020 Because if I'm so amazing at 15, how come I'm working for a low wage in a cubicle at 25

01:21:31.640 years of age?

01:21:32.520 Um, actually one of the best predictors of happiness and contentment at 15 years of age

01:21:38.780 is humility, being humble.

01:21:42.560 And yes, absolutely.

01:21:43.740 And you'll find that for search in, in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, being humble,

01:21:47.960 being grateful, powerfully and accurately predicts happiness and contentment.

01:21:54.120 Um, how do you teach humility?

01:21:56.400 And, and again, and again, parents are confused.

01:21:58.760 They don't get this at all.

01:22:00.380 When I speak to parents about the virtue of humility during question and answer, a mother

01:22:04.960 said, I don't want to teach my daughter to be humble.

01:22:07.160 That's ridiculous.

01:22:09.100 I wanted to have my daughter to have a high self-esteem.

01:22:11.500 So when that big job opportunity comes along, she'll go for it.

01:22:14.540 I want to teach my daughter to be humble.

01:22:16.200 That's, that's ridiculous.

01:22:17.740 I said, mom, with all due respect, you're confused.

01:22:21.280 You're confusing being humble with being timid.

01:22:24.900 Um, those are not the same thing.

01:22:26.740 They're very nearly opposites.

01:22:27.900 And the virtue you want for your daughter in the situation you're describing, when a

01:22:31.720 big job opportunity comes along, the virtue you want for your daughter is, is not high

01:22:37.480 self-esteem.

01:22:38.740 The virtue you want for your daughter in that situation is courage.

01:22:43.580 Courage means, you know, your inadequacies, your failures, your shortcomings, and you find

01:22:51.600 the strength to move forward.

01:22:53.240 Anyhow, there is no courage without fear.

01:22:58.140 High self-esteem is not the virtue that you're looking for.

01:23:01.480 High self-esteem leads to frustration and resentment.

01:23:05.160 And I can tell you this firsthand.

01:23:06.740 I had a girl in my own practice, um, who at age 15 had very high self-esteem.

01:23:12.680 She wrote a short story and her English teacher wrote on it, A+++, you have a spark of the divine

01:23:19.040 fire, and she went on to write several novels, couldn't get an agent, couldn't get a publisher. 0.98

01:23:24.240 And at 23 years of age, she is seething with resentment and frustration and envy.

01:23:29.920 Why did that girl get her novel published? 1.00

01:23:32.280 I can't even get an agent.

01:23:33.640 I can't get a publisher.

01:23:35.580 High self-esteem leads to frustration and envy.

01:23:38.140 So you want to teach humility.

01:23:40.280 Yes, you do.

01:23:41.580 How do you teach humility?

01:23:43.540 The right kind of humility.

01:23:44.820 It begins with chores.

01:23:47.560 It begins with chores.

01:23:48.500 And again, many parents don't get this.

01:23:50.560 Many parents don't get this.

01:23:52.260 And they're like, okay, I want my daughter to get good grades, you know, and we're, we

01:23:56.320 have, we have, we have, you know, we have the resources.

01:23:59.100 We can hire a housekeeper.

01:24:00.860 My, my daughter's job is school. 0.58

01:24:02.620 Her job is school.

01:24:03.460 So we can hire a housekeeper to do the chores. 1.00

01:24:05.580 Many parents have said this to me.

01:24:08.200 And the unintended, the message they're sending to their daughter is you're too important

01:24:12.480 to make your bed.

01:24:14.900 Don't do that.

01:24:15.920 Don't send that message.

01:24:17.060 Don't send that message.

01:24:18.780 Chores is a great way to teach humility.

01:24:22.160 And throughout the book, I follow the Phillips family, a family I've known now for 30 years.

01:24:27.040 And it's an amazing story of an amazing family, Bill and Janet Phillips and their, and their

01:24:33.680 four sons.

01:24:34.340 Um, and I've been in touch with the, this family now for 30 years.

01:24:39.420 Um, and it's an affluent family, a big home in, in a mansion in, in Potomac, Maryland.

01:24:46.040 And they had the money.

01:24:47.920 They could have hired landscapers, but they didn't.

01:24:50.600 They insisted that their four sons do all the chores.

01:24:53.820 And I asked Janet, why did you do that?

01:24:56.440 And she said, yeah, we could have hired landscapers, but I wanted them to learn the meaning of work,

01:25:01.960 the value of work.

01:25:03.200 And, and I quoted from, from her words in, in the book, uh, that, yeah, even if you have

01:25:09.420 the money, you need to teach your kid to do this.

01:25:11.900 And her son, Andrew, really one of the most amazing athletes I ever knew, have ever known

01:25:18.920 in my 30 years as a family doctor was a, um, uh, recruited by Stanford, um, uh, played on

01:25:26.480 the Stanford football team alongside Andrew Luck.

01:25:28.920 But, um, uh, he was playing, uh, at the Maryland program, uh, after 10th grade in high school.

01:25:37.760 And, uh, the coach there had just said what a great football player was and how he wanted

01:25:42.860 to recruit and play in Maryland.

01:25:44.180 And his father said, oh, Andrew, I didn't tell you, you're going to be working, uh, on

01:25:49.240 one of my boats this summer.

01:25:51.100 He owned a fishing business, uh, scraping guts off the deck.

01:25:55.920 And Andrew was so upset.

01:25:57.280 He wanted to do all this fun stuff this summer.

01:25:59.060 And instead he's scraping dead fish off of, of a salmon fishing boat next to this guy has

01:26:05.380 just been released from prison, a convicted felon, drug dealer, uh, Mexican is talking 1.00

01:26:10.260 about coming to Jesus in the state penitentiary.

01:26:13.520 And, but Andrew said, you know, I learned something, uh, working alongside this drug dealer has come

01:26:19.740 to Jesus, something I would never have learned at, you know, the upscale, uh, camp learning

01:26:28.140 about the value of hard work, learning humility, humility, the most un-American of virtues.

01:26:35.380 You need to teach your kid humility, humility leads to contentment and happiness.

01:26:42.100 Use the kids, use the holders to take care of the youngers and use them around the house 1.00

01:26:46.440 and use them on everything that, so what if, I think it's, it feels very foreign to think

01:26:53.560 of a parent, you know, if your child is like, I really think I'm going to do something great

01:26:58.900 in this world.

01:26:59.860 Like to be like, now my mother would have said, you might, and you might not, we really

01:27:05.960 haven't seen any signs that you'll do that yet, but you know, good luck.

01:27:09.240 That's truly, that's how my mom raised me.

01:27:12.040 But I feel like I couldn't say that to my child.

01:27:15.280 I don't know what, I think I'd probably say, yes, you will, sweetheart.

01:27:17.860 I don't, what, how would you handle expressions of, from a child of, you know, hope about their

01:27:24.780 own future like that?

01:27:25.680 Like I, I see myself as destined for something wonderful.

01:27:29.880 I don't, whatever, however you want to phrase it.

01:27:32.240 I would encourage my child to have their loves properly ordered.

01:27:39.620 It was a phrase going back to St. Augustine to love God first, make sure you want the

01:27:48.960 right things for the right reasons.

01:27:51.140 So if my daughter, for example, wanted to be an actress, why do you want to be an actress?

01:27:56.920 You want to be an actress because you're inspired by the challenge of trying to become someone

01:28:02.140 else and to get inside that person's head and persuade the audience that you are that

01:28:08.220 person.

01:28:08.580 That's great.

01:28:09.080 That is great.

01:28:10.200 And I totally support that and endorse that.

01:28:12.620 If you want to be an actress because you want to be rich and famous, that's the wrong

01:28:16.900 reason.

01:28:18.600 Why do you want this?

01:28:20.020 What are you in this for?

01:28:22.200 Know yourself, know your motivation, want the right things for the right reasons.

01:28:26.680 You got to dig down deeply, know who you are and be headed in the right direction for

01:28:31.740 the right reason.

01:28:32.700 Got to know yourself.

01:28:35.180 So good.

01:28:36.280 I've been thinking about my mom a lot lately.

01:28:37.880 She just came for a visit. 0.98

01:28:38.700 She's hilarious.

01:28:39.960 And there was this meme going around on Instagram that read as follows.

01:28:46.360 I'm going to botch it a little bit.

01:28:47.480 It was something to the effect of the hardest thing about being a mom or a parent is you are

01:28:54.060 raising the one thing you can't live without to be able to live without you.

01:28:59.660 And of course, I was like, oh, my God, it's true.

01:29:03.120 This is heartbreaking, you know, instant lump in the throat and in tears welling.

01:29:08.520 And I'm sentimental like that.

01:29:10.120 And my mom actually was in for a visit and my daughter was in a play.

01:29:13.060 So we went and I showed it to my mom, who's 83 now.

01:29:17.220 And she laughed.

01:29:21.580 Linda, it's just she's tough.

01:29:24.940 And she raised me in a tough way.

01:29:26.760 But it worked out, you know, and I think about all this stuff like I never was told I had

01:29:30.480 to get straight A's.

01:29:31.480 I didn't get straight A's.

01:29:33.120 No one ever hassled me over it.

01:29:35.060 I was never told I was special.

01:29:36.620 It's all the opposite stuff that now I've sort of been making fun of for the past 20

01:29:41.420 years.

01:29:41.820 But you know what, Doc, maybe maybe my mom was on to something.

01:29:44.760 I don't know.

01:29:46.120 Yeah, it reminds me of my own mom, the late Dr. Janet Sachs, a pediatrician.

01:29:52.020 And I was the youngest of three boys.

01:29:55.020 And I remember when we were at a friend's house and one of the other moms said, oh, Jackie,

01:30:00.380 your youngest is going to be leaving soon to go to college.

01:30:04.740 And she said very coolly, she said, well, they do grow up, you know, that this is what's

01:30:11.420 supposed to happen.

01:30:13.500 But again, a lot of parents are confused about this.

01:30:17.000 And again, in my own practice, husband and wife were planning a ski vacation and they wanted

01:30:24.140 their 13 year old to come with them.

01:30:26.140 And she said, well, you know, I'm not that big on skiing.

01:30:28.880 How about if I just stay at Arden's house?

01:30:30.580 You and dad go away and I'll stay at Arden's house.

01:30:33.280 And mom was very proud of this.

01:30:35.060 And she was boasting to me that her daughter did not go on the ski vacation.

01:30:39.420 And I said, uh-uh, that's not good.

01:30:42.840 You should have insisted that she come with you.

01:30:46.300 At age 13, your daughter's primary attachment should be to you, the parents.

01:30:51.480 And again, parents are confused.

01:30:54.360 At age 13, the primary attachment should still be to the parents.

01:30:58.580 When that attachment breaks too soon and her primary attachment is to her 13 year old friend,

01:31:05.560 that's too soon because her primary attachment at that age should still be to her parents.

01:31:11.920 When it breaks too soon-

01:31:13.360 What age is not too soon?

01:31:16.360 18.

01:31:17.600 18.

01:31:18.800 At 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, the primary attachment should still be to the parents.

01:31:24.920 And we've got so much research now showing that when it breaks too soon,

01:31:30.060 at 23 years of age, now that girl's still now going to be texting her parents and saying,

01:31:35.420 I don't know what to do.

01:31:36.240 What should I do, mom?

01:31:37.500 And we've got so many of these stories now.

01:31:39.620 And not just stories.

01:31:41.300 We've got data.

01:31:42.620 We've got this explosion of kids in their 20s and even 30s who are now living with their parents.

01:31:49.680 There are more 30-year-olds living with their parents than has ever been the case in American history.

01:31:56.180 It's a weird demographic reversal of failure to launch of young people who now are unable to live independently

01:32:04.820 because the acorn broke open too early, is the analogy I use in the new edition of The Collapse of Parenting.

01:32:15.440 And these kids broke out on their own at 12 years of age and hung out with their primary attachment

01:32:24.160 was their 12-year-old peers at 12, 13, 14, 16 years of age.

01:32:28.900 And now at 25 years of age, they don't know how to live independently.

01:32:34.160 They did not develop.

01:32:35.500 Let me ask you this.

01:32:36.820 So I've got to take a break, but I want to ask you this question when I come back.

01:32:39.540 So how did any of us who were raised in the 70s or before survive?

01:32:45.380 Because most of us had parents who totally ignored us, and they were not the primary person really in our lives.

01:32:51.660 We were kind of alone and independent and latchkey, but we wound up okay.

01:32:55.680 Oh, that's a tease.

01:32:56.700 More with Dr. Sachs right after this.

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01:33:58.380 We're all feeling pretty good right now about where our country's headed, right?

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01:34:55.760 I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

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01:35:58.420 So, Doc, what do you make of that?

01:35:59.920 So, those of us who grew up in the 70s, pretty much without parents, who turned out fine.

01:36:04.620 Absolutely.

01:36:05.580 It was a much healthier culture.

01:36:07.700 We're talking about the culture of The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, Family Ties.

01:36:13.160 And, again, this is not a guess.

01:36:14.700 This is not nostalgia.

01:36:15.940 And I talk about this in the book.

01:36:17.420 And I talk about how the culture has changed.

01:36:19.880 And the culture of the last 15 years has become a much more toxic culture, a culture of envy and disrespect.

01:36:26.900 And this is why the burden on parents now is much greater.

01:36:30.980 Because now they have to do much more.

01:36:34.040 They have to do things that your parents never had to do.

01:36:36.900 They have to provide a culture, which your parents didn't have to do.

01:36:41.240 Your parents didn't have to be there for that.

01:36:43.680 But now parents today have to do so much more.

01:36:46.240 They have not only to provide a culture, they have to block out all the toxicity and harm of the bad toxic culture of the Disney Channel and of TikTok and Instagram.

01:36:58.140 And they have to provide a good, healthy culture.

01:37:01.480 And they don't even know it.

01:37:04.820 Many parents are not even aware of all the bad things that the culture is doing.

01:37:09.320 So, again, the mission of the book, the objective of the book, is to wake parents up to make them aware that, look, your TV is an agent of this really bad culture.

01:37:22.360 And you don't have to turn off the TV, but block out the Disney Channel.

01:37:29.100 You know, home and garden television, that's okay.

01:37:31.220 The History Channel is okay.

01:37:32.160 But not the Disney Channel.

01:37:34.960 And your laptop is fine.

01:37:37.400 You can watch the Megyn Kelly Show.

01:37:39.120 But not YouTube.

01:37:40.600 YouTube is spreading a lot of really bad stuff.

01:37:43.880 If you're going to watch YouTube, make sure you're there.

01:37:46.940 You can watch the Megyn Kelly Show, but not Andrew Tate, for goodness sake.

01:37:51.640 Oh, my gosh.

01:37:52.920 So, warning parents to block out the bad stuff to all the things that you've got to know now as a parent.

01:37:59.400 Because American culture has changed.

01:38:02.280 That's why it's so important.

01:38:04.460 We have two minutes left with the SiriusXM audience.

01:38:07.020 We're going to continue this over on podcast and YouTube.com slash Megyn Kelly.

01:38:10.600 But in the two minutes we have left, one of our audience members wrote in,

01:38:14.200 how do I deprogram a kid from the woke mind virus without losing them?

01:38:21.740 You know, in our family, we've done a pre-inoculation against it.

01:38:26.460 But a lot of parents got swept, their kids got swept into this, you know,

01:38:31.020 when they didn't even know to inoculate them.

01:38:33.140 So, what's the answer to that one?

01:38:34.720 I've got a chapter in the book for that parent.

01:38:38.000 And the chapter is titled Enjoy.

01:38:40.580 And actually, the new chapter is titled Joy, J-O-Y.

01:38:44.320 And basically, I would say, do a vacation.

01:38:52.580 Just you and your kid, you and your family together.

01:38:55.580 Go someplace fun and do something fun with your kid.

01:38:59.260 And they may be kicking and screaming.

01:39:01.520 And I describe a father and son where exactly that happened.

01:39:05.380 And the son didn't want to go and was kicking and screaming, didn't want to go.

01:39:08.680 So, that has actually worked.

01:39:11.260 That is the one thing that has actually worked.

01:39:13.080 Just doing fun things together with your kid, not lecturing them.

01:39:17.440 Just doing fun things with your kid is the natural, God-given way to reconnect with your child.

01:39:25.160 Wow.

01:39:25.840 That's excellent.

01:39:27.660 It's back to your core message.

01:39:29.760 More time with you.

01:39:31.560 More time around the dinner table.

01:39:32.820 More time with your values and bonding with you and reestablishing that close relationship.

01:39:37.680 And I know we talked about last time, don't vacation with your children's friends.

01:39:42.580 No, they cannot bring a friend on the vacay.

01:39:44.560 That's right.

01:39:44.920 Those are for families to reconnect with one another because those relationships are so critical to your child's wellness for reasons like this.

01:39:53.140 So, speaking of the woke mind virus, part of what it does is teaches children to prioritize identity over everything, skin color or some alleged weird sexual proclivity or some alleged gender spectrum nonsense.

01:40:11.380 But it also leans in to any weakness, illness, alleged mental defect.

01:40:22.960 You know, I was saying not long ago, in today's day and age, your kid cannot get into a good college by writing,

01:40:29.180 I came from a loving family where I was raised with great values and two present loving parents who were there for me to set boundaries.

01:40:35.940 You've got to say you've got some some phobia, some issue.

01:40:40.280 And there's a chapter in the book called what is it's about normophobia, normophobia.

01:40:45.500 So can you explain that?

01:40:47.040 Yes, absolutely.

01:40:48.680 So.

01:40:51.320 Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge and the girls I interviewed back then wanted to be effortlessly perfect.

01:40:58.700 That was a thing back in 2009.

01:41:01.960 And then more recently, the publisher asked me to write an updated version.

01:41:05.380 And I found that girls today don't want to be effortlessly perfect. 0.65

01:41:09.520 That's boring.

01:41:10.380 That's lame.

01:41:10.920 That's that's basic white bitch. 1.00

01:41:12.780 And, you know, who wants to be that?

01:41:15.240 And and the words that kids use on social media that they teach others to use kind of reinforce that.

01:41:22.160 Are you gender conforming or are you gender nonconforming?

01:41:26.500 Well, who wants to be conforming?

01:41:27.940 Are you neurodivergent or are you neurotypical?

01:41:32.500 You know, who wants to be typical?

01:41:33.720 You know, that's boring.

01:41:35.180 Divergent, you know, who wants to be typical and conforming?

01:41:37.980 You want to be divergent and nonconforming.

01:41:41.340 And so Mary Harrington has coined this term normophobia.

01:41:47.600 Kids don't want to be normal.

01:41:49.920 And this is a growing issue.

01:41:51.700 It's not true of all kids, but it's true of a growing number of kids.

01:41:55.780 They don't want to be normal.

01:41:56.960 It's not cool to be normal.

01:42:00.480 You got to have a and this is really something that is spread on American social media, on TikTok and Instagram.

01:42:06.840 You got to talk about how you are anxious, how you're depressed or how you're struggling with your gender identity or how you're wrestling with being trans or or you're non-binary or whatever.

01:42:20.340 You know, 70 years ago, C.S.

01:42:22.960 Lewis wrote this book for kids, The Magician's Nephew.

01:42:25.920 And he said that the problem about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

01:42:34.840 And I substitute stupider for anxious or depressed.

01:42:37.420 The trouble with trying to make yourself more anxious or more depressed than you really are is that you very often succeed.

01:42:42.780 The whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy is that a big part of being anxious and depressed is that you're making yourself anxious and depressed.

01:42:51.200 And as a psychologist and a family doctor, I can tell you a lot of these kids are making themselves anxious and depressed.

01:42:57.200 They're talking themselves into being anxious and depressed.

01:43:00.020 And again, we mentioned earlier that why is this not being seen in Greece and Russia?

01:43:06.700 Well, I don't speak Greek or Russian, but I talk with people who do.

01:43:11.020 And I can tell you, this is not a thing in Greece and Russia.

01:43:14.100 Greek and Russian kids don't see anything cool about talking themselves into being anxious and depressed. 1.00

01:43:19.000 This is a uniquely American English-speaking world weirdness. 1.00

01:43:23.380 I just came from Canada where this is definitely a thing as well.

01:43:27.580 And American parents need to understand how toxic and how weird this is.

01:43:32.560 We need to teach our kids there's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed.

01:43:36.420 And we need to disconnect our kids from the toxic culture that is spreading this, which is very much part of this woke mind virus thing.

01:43:43.900 There's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed or lesbian or gay or bisexual or non-binary or trans.

01:43:51.500 It is good to be healthy.

01:43:54.020 It is good to be straight.

01:43:55.820 There's nothing wrong with that.

01:43:57.620 And again, you need to create a culture in your own home where it is fine to be normal.

01:44:06.320 It's one of the, like a related offshoot of this problem is the nonstop desire to discuss one's problems in the school setting.

01:44:15.980 Abigail Schreier wrote a book about this recently, Bad Therapy.

01:44:19.460 But more and more, the schools, I will say, especially the girls' schools, want the kids to discuss trauma.

01:44:28.240 Has anything bad ever happened to you?

01:44:30.880 What did that feel like?

01:44:32.420 Has anyone suffered a loss or a death in the family?

01:44:36.420 What did that feel like?

01:44:37.720 And then they're supposed to go off and do math.

01:44:39.240 What do you make of this leaning into discussing your trauma in the school setting by some school psychologist who may or may not have any sort of abilities to do that kind of thing with a kid?

01:44:52.580 Yeah.

01:44:52.960 So-called trauma-informed therapy, I think, does not have a place in a public school setting.

01:45:02.380 And I don't mean a, I mean, in a setting where there's a bunch of kids around, the classroom should not be group therapy.

01:45:11.560 The objective in the classroom, the first objective should be to teach the content, not to conduct informal group therapy with untrained therapists.

01:45:21.040 So on that point, I agree with Abigail Schreier.

01:45:25.540 Let's talk about, and forgive me, we covered this the last time, I don't remember.

01:45:28.920 But, you know, my kids are getting into their teens now, so this is not yet relevant, but I'm sure will be relevant in the next, you know, five, seven years.

01:45:37.800 Drinking, right?

01:45:39.640 Like, I don't know.

01:45:42.440 I'm sure you'd see signs on your child if you're an attentive parent.

01:45:46.380 At some point, you would see signs once your child starts drinking socially, if they start drinking socially, especially when they get more up into, like, senior year.

01:45:55.520 College, you're not going to be able to control what happens at college.

01:45:57.780 But how do you see that?

01:46:00.620 Because let me tell you, in my mom's circles, there are all sorts of opinions on, like, you're not going to stop it, like, walk them through, like, don't have more than one, don't have a mixed drink, you know, set some guardrails for them.

01:46:13.100 Or there's moms who are like, absolutely not, don't, you know, it should be shamed, talk to them about the dangers of it, slippery slope, all that.

01:46:20.700 Or moms who are like, eh, you know, we host parties and we actually let them have a couple of drinks. 1.00

01:46:27.080 We just make sure nobody's driving.

01:46:28.280 So your thoughts on that issue?

01:46:30.040 Well, I don't think that kids should be drinking.

01:46:35.980 I think the dangers are clear.

01:46:38.660 I'm actually more concerned as a family doctor with vaping.

01:46:41.980 I see vaping is more popular than drinking right now.

01:46:45.700 And it is spreading.

01:46:49.280 I think kids need to be aware of the dangers.

01:46:53.660 But it's really more of a issue of what's popular.

01:46:58.480 And if all the other kids are doing it, it's really hard for kids not to, if everyone else in their group is doing it.

01:47:06.060 So you need to be aware of what all the kids are doing.

01:47:10.020 Again, I talk about in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, the Phillips family, Mr. Phillips had a breathalyzer.

01:47:21.080 And he would insist on if the boys were popular.

01:47:27.580 And so kids would come to their home from other parties.

01:47:30.520 And if a kid appeared intoxicated, he would insist that the kid blow into the breathalyzer.

01:47:38.500 And if the kid was drunk, he would insist that the parents come and pick up the kid and drive them home.

01:47:44.560 And that very quickly became known.

01:47:47.540 And everyone would say, well, you know, the crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer.

01:47:52.700 And that had interesting consequences.

01:47:55.560 Because people would say, well, you know, the crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer.

01:48:01.500 And that would give other kids an excuse not to drink.

01:48:05.340 Because they would say, well, I'm going to the Phillips place, so I can't drink. 0.89

01:48:10.120 You want to give kids an excuse not to drink.

01:48:13.440 So by all means, buy a breathalyzer and have it at the home.

01:48:18.220 And that will give your kid an excuse not to drink.

01:48:21.320 Uh, uh, so your kid can say, well, my, I cannot drink because my dad's got a breathalyzer.

01:48:27.740 He's going to be, he's going to insist on testing me when I get home.

01:48:30.920 Think about excuses you can give your kid.

01:48:34.020 You want to be the evil parent.

01:48:35.880 You want your kid to be able to say, I can't do that because my evil parents will do X.

01:48:40.960 My, my dad will make me blow in the breathalyzer.

01:48:43.960 Breathalyzers are cheap.

01:48:45.340 Give your kid an opportunity to blame you for doing the right thing.

01:48:50.060 All right.

01:48:51.220 And how about sexual activity?

01:48:54.740 Uh, so, uh, I believe that sexual activity is intended for a, uh, married couple.

01:49:07.040 And I believe that, uh, we want to teach that to our kids.

01:49:11.380 Um, uh, and, uh, I, again, describe a Marlowe.

01:49:20.060 Phillips, uh, true story using her real name in the book.

01:49:23.840 Her parents had that same belief and they were strict.

01:49:27.660 Uh, they would not allow her to be alone with a boy throughout her high school years.

01:49:32.680 And she was like, that is so ridiculous.

01:49:35.360 My best friend, she was alone with her boyfriend the entire weekend.

01:49:38.800 Her parents were away.

01:49:39.900 She was alone with her boyfriend the entire weekend.

01:49:42.100 And I'm not allowed to be with a boyfriend with a boy for this is child abuse.

01:49:46.980 I'm going to, I'm going to call child protective services.

01:49:49.540 And her mom said, all right, here's the phone.

01:49:51.060 Um, she said, I'm going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way

01:49:54.640 you guys are abusing me. 0.59

01:49:56.600 Uh, and then she went away to college.

01:49:59.220 She went to the university of Virginia Charlottesville.

01:50:01.620 And she told me at the beginning of her second year, she had an epiphany.

01:50:05.200 She suddenly realized I'm the only girl here.

01:50:08.280 Who's not going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way my parents

01:50:13.300 treated me.

01:50:13.740 She said, all these other girls here, they're coming to me. 0.54

01:50:16.540 They're saying, do you think this picture I'm putting on Instagram, do you think it's

01:50:20.460 too skanky or maybe not skanky enough?

01:50:22.700 Do you think I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm giving oral sex to too many guys or maybe not enough guys.

01:50:26.620 And she wants to grab these girls and say, have you no dignity?

01:50:31.840 Have you no self-concept that all you care about is what the other guys think?

01:50:36.320 And she realized my parents may raise me right that I have dignity, that I have self-concept

01:50:45.220 concept, that my self-concept does not depend on what the boys think of me.

01:50:52.560 And yeah, it's a toxic culture for girls out there. 1.00

01:50:56.120 That's all about what the boys think of how you look and getting down on your knees and

01:51:01.840 giving oral sex to other guys. 0.99

01:51:03.540 And yes, the best parent is both strict and loving.

01:51:09.300 And the, the, uh, the mainstream culture right now is about girls getting down there on their 1.00

01:51:17.000 knees and giving oral sex to boys. 1.00

01:51:18.880 They barely know you don't want that for your daughter and you have to make that very clear.

01:51:25.360 Mm-hmm.

01:51:26.060 So you talk about it explicitly and encourage her to make these different choices.

01:51:30.280 You insist on it.

01:51:31.720 Yeah.

01:51:32.900 Mm-hmm.

01:51:33.540 You have to, the best parent is both strict and loving and American parents are confused. 0.53

01:51:37.800 They think you have to choose between being strict or loving, but the best parent is both

01:51:42.920 strict and loving.

01:51:44.980 A follow-up on the normophobia, uh, discussion a minute ago, because we talked on our last

01:51:51.200 episode about the trans stuff and children and so much has happened.

01:51:55.560 I mean, a week is like a year on that front these days.

01:51:59.080 The Supreme court just heard a big case on it and so on.

01:52:01.680 But we've seen a few things in the news lately that have been pretty disturbing and I'd love

01:52:06.880 to get your take.

01:52:08.300 In the wake of that Supreme court case, CNN decided to bring on a bunch of children who

01:52:13.920 CNN says are allegedly trans, you know, believing that they are in quote the wrong body and are

01:52:19.860 actually the opposite sex of the one they are in some cases with their parents to talk about

01:52:25.360 just how awful the fact that their necessary medication is being debated by the U S Supreme

01:52:31.020 court.

01:52:31.300 What was at issue in that case for those not aware is the some odd half of the United States

01:52:37.380 have passed laws banning puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for children for chill for

01:52:43.460 minors.

01:52:44.200 And because it's been found by objective studies and places like the UK and elsewhere that they

01:52:50.780 actually are potentially very dangerous for children and they can sterilize you and remove

01:52:56.560 all sexual function and pleasure for the rest of your life.

01:52:58.920 And how can a 10 year old consent to any of that?

01:53:01.080 So CNN puts on this panel and they have this 10 year old child who I believe is a boy who's

01:53:09.440 posing as a girl named. 0.81

01:53:11.900 And I don't know the kid's name, but the, the boy posing as the girl is trying to express

01:53:19.860 their fear over this country and what's happening now.

01:53:24.900 And I'd love to get your thoughts on this clip.

01:53:27.060 It's a, is it sat five Kelly?

01:53:29.520 Let's play it.

01:53:31.120 What concerns have you had about speaking out?

01:53:33.720 That I'm going to be like murdered.

01:53:36.300 Like one day I'm going to be walking down the street and somebody's going to come up and

01:53:43.380 like shoot me or something.

01:53:44.940 That's a really scary thing to be worrying about at 10 years old.

01:53:49.100 Yeah.

01:53:49.520 That should not be a worry.

01:53:52.620 Michelle, what's going through your mind as you hear your daughter say this?

01:53:56.280 It's just hard to hear her say that.

01:54:01.160 And she asked me three, three questions after she heard who won the election.

01:54:07.860 Are we going to have to move?

01:54:09.600 Are they going to take me away from you?

01:54:13.540 And am I not going to be able to get my medicine?

01:54:19.740 It's just, it's frightening.

01:54:23.360 Your thoughts.

01:54:24.300 Well, I'm very troubled because so much of this is an artifact of modern medicine.

01:54:33.380 Recall that synthetic hormones were not a thing until really 80 years ago.

01:54:43.140 This entire transgender movement is a creation of modern medicine. 1.00

01:54:48.160 It was not with us before the 20th century.

01:54:52.680 Um, let's be straight.

01:54:55.000 Lesbian gay has always been with us.

01:54:57.480 It's mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

01:55:00.380 Um, transgender is not. 1.00

01:55:02.760 A thing, uh, despite claims made by the transgender movement, uh, the notion that, uh, that there

01:55:11.040 have always been boys who insist their girls and girls who insist their boys is, is really

01:55:16.000 a very modern development.

01:55:17.400 And it's a creation of modern medicine.

01:55:19.540 Those medicines that that, uh, child talked about didn't exist a century ago, didn't exist

01:55:25.760 a thousand years ago, um, could not have been obtained a hundred years ago.

01:55:31.820 And is this, uh, to what extent is this a real biological phenomenon?

01:55:38.500 To what extent is this transgender movement created by the cultural movement and the politics?

01:55:45.100 You know what?

01:55:46.020 We don't actually have to guess earlier this year, uh, team of, of researchers at Stanford

01:55:52.760 medical school, um, did a study of 1,500 young adults, 20 to 35 years of age, and looked at

01:56:03.380 their brain activity.

01:56:04.920 Uh, these are young people, men and women, uh, 20 to 35 years of age, and they are awake and

01:56:13.160 they're in an MRI scan, and you're looking at their brain activity.

01:56:17.420 Now, all human brains have a fingerprint, a neural fingerprint that is more unique to

01:56:23.020 you than your own fingerprint on your finger.

01:56:25.840 Uh, that's been known for many years.

01:56:28.100 And the researchers wanted to know, how does a man, does a man's fingerprint differ from a

01:56:33.260 woman's fingerprint? 1.00

01:56:33.940 Um, and the image that they, um, obtained, that, that, the graph that they showed is, is

01:56:42.540 really astonishing.

01:56:44.440 Um, uh, and there it is.

01:56:46.500 Um, so the women. 1.00

01:56:48.820 For the listening audience, it shows in the top left quadrant, a bunch of red dots in the

01:56:53.820 bottom right quadrant, a bunch of blue dots, and there's zero overlap.

01:56:57.580 The blue is.

01:56:58.100 Yes, there's no overlap.

01:56:59.300 So the, the women are up in one corner and the men are all down in the other corner and

01:57:05.620 there's no overlap.

01:57:06.540 And the difference between the men and the women is larger than the variation among the

01:57:12.660 men and the women.

01:57:13.780 And what this graph is showing very clearly is that whatever is going on in the brain,

01:57:20.800 in a man's brain at rest is different from what's going on in a woman's brain at rest.

01:57:25.520 There were 1,500 individuals now in a survey conducted earlier this year, more than 3% of

01:57:35.160 American high school kids said that they were trans.

01:57:38.400 Well, 3% of, um, 1,500, uh, would be 45.

01:57:46.280 We ought to find 45 people, um, in the middle or, or on the other or crossing over, but we found

01:57:53.560 zero, um, uh, zero, um, and, uh, and, and, and more from this study.

01:58:01.740 Okay.

01:58:02.080 So the, so the researchers found, what does that tell us?

01:58:04.520 What does that tell us?

01:58:06.600 It is telling us that these kids are confused and X, X, um, an XY male, uh, that child in that 0.83

01:58:18.680 video, we just saw as an XY male, every cell in that individual's body is XY male.

01:58:24.640 They may take female hormones. 0.58

01:58:26.740 They may be castrated, but they are still an XY male. 1.00

01:58:32.240 Um, and, um, in my book, why gender matters, I show that, uh, boys see differently.

01:58:39.320 They hear differently.

01:58:40.160 They smell differently than girls do. 1.00

01:58:43.320 Um, and that will not change, um, now that doesn't mean that all boys are one way and

01:58:48.820 all girls are another way. 1.00

01:58:50.280 There's great variation among boys and there's great variation among girls and we should celebrate

01:58:55.960 and acknowledge those variations, but male and female are biological realities.

01:59:01.480 There are not social constructs, um, and, um, uh, pretending that that is not so and, um,

01:59:11.420 um, castrating boys and giving them female hormones, um, is not going to be in that boy's best interest.

01:59:19.340 That is what this research is showing us.

01:59:22.460 Um, uh, possibly there may be rare exceptions.

01:59:26.600 We can debate that case.

01:59:28.660 Um, but, uh, the, uh, comprehensive review coming out of the United Kingdom, uh, by Dr.

01:59:35.520 Kass and her colleagues, uh, strongly suggests that, uh, in the great majority,

01:59:41.300 of cases, in the great majority of cases, uh, uh, pre-pubertal kids should not, um, should

01:59:50.700 not be transitioning to the other sex.

01:59:53.500 Uh, but I want to finish that Stanford study because they also found with these, uh, uh,

02:00:00.260 very high resolution, uh, functional MRI scans and the sophisticated, um, analysis that

02:00:06.380 they were doing, they found that they could analyze, uh, the brains of the men and they

02:00:11.420 could predict with high accuracy, cognitive function, including intelligence, um, for the

02:00:17.880 men.

02:00:18.120 But those, uh, rules that they come in, came up with to predict intelligence in men were

02:00:23.900 of zero value in predicting intelligence in women.

02:00:27.340 Conversely, they came up with rules that could predict with high, uh, accuracy, cognitive function,

02:00:33.100 including intelligence in women. 0.99

02:00:34.780 But those rules that predicted intelligence in women were of zero value in predicting 0.99

02:00:39.220 intelligence in men.

02:00:41.020 These findings tell us that whatever it is that determines intelligence in the brains of

02:00:46.300 a man, in the brain of a man, does not predict intelligence in, in brains of women. 0.57

02:00:52.760 Whatever it is that determines intelligence in, in the brain of a woman does not predict 1.00

02:00:58.000 intelligence in brain of a man.

02:00:59.920 Now, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, if you subscribe to the New York Times, if you listen to every program on national public radio, you heard no mention of this study conducted by the Stanford Medical School and published in one of our most prestigious scholarly journals.

02:01:17.120 If you subscribe to my free newsletter, you would have heard about it.

02:01:20.640 But our mainstream media, our mainstream media never mentioned it.

02:01:26.120 So go to my website, www.nrss.com and sign up for my free newsletter.

02:01:29.920 And how these parents, these parents lean in.

02:01:32.400 And in that clip for the listening audience, the young boy posing as a girl is listening to the mother who's crying over the child's potential loss of access to these pills.

02:01:45.420 And the child reaches up to comfort the mother.

02:01:48.180 The child like touches the mother from down below, which is a reversal, right, of the way this is a 10-year-old kid.

02:01:54.300 It's supposed to be.

02:01:55.260 And I, you know, all I can think of is this, this meme, Charlie Kirk sent it out.

02:02:00.300 I'm sure he may not have been the first, but it was, if your, if your child, if you think you're trans, you have a mental illness.

02:02:09.040 If your child thinks he or she is trans, it's the mother who has the mental illness. 0.99

02:02:15.600 It's the parents who have like, and I cannot help but notice over and over and over again, you see parents who are weirdly almost needy of this thing.

02:02:26.460 Like they won't, you write about this in the book, they won't say that they're having a boy when the ultrasound shows the kid has XY chromosomes.

02:02:36.760 You know, the baby, they're going to wait for the kid to tell them what they are.

02:02:40.960 And then that leads me to one other video I wanted to show you because we showed it on the show or we were, we haven't yet, but it's disturbing.

02:02:47.280 I can't remember whether we did or not, frankly, but anyway, it's a dad.

02:02:49.980 And I normally wouldn't, I don't, I don't bring parents and children, you know, onto the show or show their videos ever.

02:02:57.720 If they haven't put something out intentionally, I think if they want us to be talking about it, then I think it's fair game.

02:03:03.220 And that's what this dad wants.

02:03:04.960 He's in the UK.

02:03:07.020 His name is Jonathan Jolie, J-O-L-Y.

02:03:10.040 And he has a boy who he's now raising as a girl named Edie.

02:03:15.200 They have almost 4 million followers on TikTok.

02:03:19.620 And all this dad does is update us with his boy looking more and more like a girl at a very young age.

02:03:27.120 And it's a very almost sexualized looking exchange.

02:03:31.440 And what they're doing to quote Edie is very reminiscent to me of what like JonBenet Ramsey looked like a sexualized child with the hair and the makeup.

02:03:42.680 But I'm not an expert.

02:03:43.980 Let me show you what I'm talking about.

02:03:46.940 Hey guys.

02:03:47.900 So Edie wants to do a summer holiday morning routine and show you a get ready with me and show you guys what her skincare is and her room is and how she creates her outfit and all that. 1.00

02:04:02.500 Cool.

02:04:03.860 So that is the skincare element of the video complete.

02:04:07.820 What's next, Edie?

02:04:09.580 I think I'm going to do my hair next.

02:04:11.800 How do you get your hair so wonderful?

02:04:14.660 Maybe not in the mornings.

02:04:16.180 It doesn't look that wonderful.

02:04:17.900 And there are other videos of the parents putting a lot of makeup on Edie, very sort of sexy makeup, heavy eyeliner, wet lip gloss.

02:04:30.180 I find it very disturbing.

02:04:31.880 Doc, what do you make of this?

02:04:33.280 Okay, that's just creepy.

02:04:36.820 That's really creepy.

02:04:37.960 And that's extremely creepy.

02:04:40.980 And, you know, we could speculate regarding that father's psychopathology and why he is doing that.

02:04:51.260 Um, and I don't want to speculate, uh, but, uh, I think we need to focus on the child.

02:04:59.660 You made reference to the new chapter in the new edition of the collapse of parenting.

02:05:03.280 I was talking with a parent in Orange County, California, and she'd been trying to get pregnant for three years.

02:05:11.220 And, and she and her husband finally did get pregnant.

02:05:14.100 She was very excited.

02:05:14.900 And she was telling everyone at the school, including people she barely knew.

02:05:18.720 And she told a fellow teacher at the school, she said, guess what?

02:05:21.860 We're having a boy.

02:05:23.260 And her colleague said, don't you think you should let the baby decide?

02:05:27.460 And that is indeed a thing that her colleague reprimanded her, that, that, uh, the colleague thought you should wait and, and not assign, not assign a sex because there are indeed many Americans now who think that, uh, sex is assigned at birth and you should wait until the child is three or four years of age.

02:05:47.920 And then let the child decide, give the child a gender neutral name at birth, birth, and then that the, that the child choose.

02:05:55.660 And if the child was assigned male at birth, but they decide that they are female, then you should raise the child as a girl, uh, which leads them the road to castration and opposite sex hormones, et cetera. 0.72

02:06:09.000 Uh, and I felt this is, this was necessary to introduce a new chapter that wasn't in the original version 10 years ago, the new chapter titled babies.

02:06:17.700 Because this is really harmful and it is psychotic.

02:06:20.840 It is utterly detached from reality and sex is not assigned at birth.

02:06:25.600 Sex is recognized at birth because indeed you are born male or female.

02:06:32.300 And those differences that the Stanford university group recognized in adults are present in the baby prior to birth.

02:06:40.160 We have other studies of women in the third, third trimester where they've done high resolution MRI scans of the baby still in this mother's womb.

02:06:48.260 And they find the same differences in the cognitivity of the male brain compared with the female brain, because Genesis 127 in the image of God, he created him male and female.

02:07:00.800 He created them.

02:07:02.180 It doesn't say black and white.

02:07:03.560 He created them.

02:07:04.220 It doesn't say, um, Asian and Hispanic.

02:07:07.520 He created them.

02:07:08.260 Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic are indeed man-made categories, but male and female are of God.

02:07:13.920 You are in fact born male or female.

02:07:17.060 There is a rare category called intersex.

02:07:19.900 About two in 10,000 individuals are indeed born both male and female.

02:07:24.800 That's a rare, uh, pathology, um, on the same order of magnitude as Siamese twins. 0.94

02:07:31.160 Uh, but, uh, for 99.98% of individuals, you are either male or female, and that's the way, uh, we are born and made.

02:07:40.880 Hmm.

02:07:42.840 Hopefully the U.S. Supreme Court will see it that way as well and will issue a sensible ruling from what we saw.

02:07:49.420 I predict they will.

02:07:50.920 Dr. Sachs, so great talking to you.

02:07:53.480 Love, love, love when you come on.

02:07:54.600 Please come back soon.

02:07:56.340 Thanks again for inviting me.

02:07:58.320 And don't forget, the name of the book is The Collapse of Parenting, the revised edition.

02:08:03.460 You can get it right now and do so.

02:08:06.160 Don't let it sell out from all the listeners who are now rushing to read more about Dr. Sachs' longitudinal cohort studies that are, that separate fact from fiction and feelings.

02:08:19.060 Uh, and that, this is an area that's sorely in need of that.

02:08:21.720 Hope it was helpful to you, to you.

02:08:23.340 It certainly was to me.

02:08:24.040 Okay, uh, want to tell you that tomorrow we've got the fellas from the Rootless program back on the show.

02:08:30.100 Always fun when they swing by.

02:08:31.820 We'll see you then.

02:08:32.360 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

02:08:38.800 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

02:08:41.580 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

02:08:49.920 The Megan Kelly Show.

02:08:53.520 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

02:08:54.960 Yeah.

02:08:55.260 Thanks for listening.

02:08:59.300 Bye.

02:08:59.640 Bye.

02:09:00.160 Bye.

02:09:00.200 Bye.

02:09:00.740 Bye.

02:09:01.340 Bye.

02:09:01.460 Bye.

02:09:02.780 Bye.

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02:09:03.540 Bye.

02:09:03.680 Bye.

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02:09:05.560 Bye.

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02:09:07.620 Bye.

The Megyn Kelly Show - December 11, 2024

Why CEO Killer Snapped, Dangers of ＂Gentle＂ Parenting, and Rise of ＂Normophobia,＂ with Dr. Leonard Sax and Candice DeLong ｜ Ep. 962

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