The Megyn Kelly Show - Free Speech Pushback, the Gift of Fear, and Dangers of Fame, with Gavin de Becker | Ep. 348

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by security expert Gavin de Becker, author of "The Gift of Fear," to talk about the dangers of fame and the "marketing of human beings," the erosion of trust in the media because the press won't hold power to account, Fauci and Pfizer, predicting human behavior and school shooters through "pre-incident indicators," the outrageous police inaction in Uvalde, the danger of protests at public figures' homes, how to stop sociopaths from committing crimes, how the media needs to stop naming school shooters, the pushback against free speech in our culture, Big Pharma's power in our society, the difference between true and unwarranted fear, turmoil in his childhood and how early trauma can help and hurt your future, and more.CDC's official vaccine site: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/index.html CDC's official COVID vaccine site: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/index.html WHO's official site: https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/vaccines-and-immunization-vaccine-safetyFollow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow 

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, a very, very special show for you today that I've been wanting to bring to you for years. For the next two hours, I'm going to be speaking with renowned security expert. I mean, this is the security expert in the world, not just the U.S. And bestselling author Gavin DeBecker. Gavin's clients include, quote, the world's most famous and the world's most anonymous. Among them, the CIA, the U.S. Marshals, the U.S. Supreme Court, Hollywood celebrities, athletes, politicians, and for a while, even me. He's the author of many, many books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Gift of Fear, Survival Signs That Protect Us From Violence. Oprah once said it was the most important book she ever read. I feel 100% the same. Gwendolyn is here with me today. She's

my intern for the summer. Her dad's making her read this before she goes off to college. And I couldn't agree with that decision more. Everyone should read this. Young women, young men, older women and men. It is a survival guide to just being a human on this earth where there are predators in more pockets than you'd think. Gavin says that when you feel fear, it's an intuition. It's a gift that you must, must listen to and act on. Fear

should preside over logical reasoning. Even Gavin learned about dealing with real fear early on in his life. His mother was a heroin addict. When he was just 10 years old, he watched her shoot his stepfather. He was 16 when she committed suicide. For a short time, he moved in with a friend from school, and that boy's mother happened to be actress Rosemary Clooney, probably best known for her role in Bing Crosby's White Christmas. A few years pass by, and the next thing Gavin knows, he's 19 years old and an assistant to the biggest star on the planet at the time, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Burton. He would go on to help figures like Olivia Newton-John deal with not one but two horrific stalkers. And one of those stalkers also targeted Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

So the security issues our justices are dealing with today in the wake of the Roe decision, Gavin DeBecker knows very well how dangerous they are for these justices. We're also living with rising crime rates nationwide and Americans are scared. So we're gonna talk about ways to protect yourself and how to know when you really are in danger

as we dive into Gavin's fascinating life and career. Gavin DeBecker, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. And I just listened to your whole introduction and I feel like I've been to my own funeral. It was very nice. It was like it's impossible to believe you've done all this stuff.

But knowing your bio, you started very young. You were, you were selected by president Reagan to work on security issues when you were just 26 years old. So that explains it. Cause you're in your, your young 50, young sixties now, how old are you? 67. And when, when Reagan appointed me to his advisory board at department of justice, I was 26. He was the oldest president. I was the youngest presidential appointee. And and I didn't even know him. As you don't know presidents, I knew him very tangentially. But in later years, came to know him better and came to know Nancy better as well. And he he gave me great opportunities. And then Bush appointed me to another advisory board. And I had extraordinary opportunities. That's the gift I got. Well, and when I look at your life history, it seems like it created, I mean, it explains perfectly how you've reached the success that

you have in the industry that you have. Not only we mentioned your exposure to the world of celebrity fairly early on and mega celebrity, not just mild, but your own history and your family with your mom and domestic violence. And it just seems like all of that sort of made you perfectly suited for a life in the security industry. I suppose you would say could have gone the other way, right? Like a lot of people who experienced really violent childhoods go a different way. So what do you think made you wind up so well emotionally, mentally, and fighting crime instead of succumbing to a world of it? Instead of committing crimes. Yeah, I definitely went to crime school, no question.

And I remember many years ago before I wrote Gift of Fear, I was speaking at prisons around the country where I would meet with people and talk with them about violence and about their upbringing, etc. some had murdered their children some had one guy i remember had burned an apartment house down and a guy died inside i mean they were you know serious crimes that these guys had committed and uh and then we went around the room and each shared a little bit about our childhood and um when i was done one guy muscular tattoos uh said what are you doing sitting over there and i said what do you mean and he said well why are you sitting sitting over there? And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, why are you sitting over there? And I'm sitting over here. Why are you in that nice suit? And you're getting to go home today in a nice car. And I'm sitting over here. And it was a, you know, a question I had considered a lot. What were the factors that made it possible for me to

take the experiences I had, my mother, a heroin addict that brought into our lives, the whole, you know, into the orbit of our lives, the whole, you know, into the orbit of our lives, the whole group of people you would imagine would, would be part of the need to get that heroin every day. And, and then she shot my stepfather in front of me when I was 10 years old. I saw that was not the first time that gun had gone off in the house. I think by the time we moved out of that house, there were nine bullets embedded in the walls and in the floor. And so I had seen a great deal like these men that I was sitting with in the prison and asking myself, why was my circumstance now as an adult so different? And how did I take that raw material

and turn it into something better than it could have been. And I think the answer is, aside from God, universe, whatever one chooses to identify as a higher power, aside from that, I think it is that I had a few witnesses in my life, just a few people who saw my circumstance and told me that I was the resident of that house, not the architect of that house, and that I was not the creator and the responsible person for all the drama and trauma in my life. And I really believe it takes, I had a fifth grade teacher, by the way, I'm just remembering now, Mr. Conway, and he picked me from the group of students to do skits with and to do various things, you know, where he had a choice of who he could pick and gave me a feeling of specialness

when I didn't have that otherwise. And that sounds very small, fifth grade teacher, 10 years old, a few experiences with him, but it's not small. What I've learned is that if a young person has any adult who sees something more in them than they see in themselves, just these tiny moments make an enormous difference to the course of your life. I also want to say that, you know, my experience, you can sort of draw a straight line between violence in my childhood, all the people who were in my childhood that I learned from and experienced, and then what I ultimately did, which is became kind of an ambassador between the two worlds, between the world of violence and the world of protection and safety and wanting to

protect people. And as I look at that, I think many lives have a journey with a line that straight, which is, you know, you experienced injustice as a child and you grow up to be a lawyer. Maybe you, you experience violence as a child and you grow up to be a police officer or you experience a terrible medical trauma and you grow up to be a doctor. I think all of us with work can find that straight line as to why we do what we do, particularly, and this goes for you and me both, those of us who are lucky to do what you could say we're here on earth to do or what we're meant to do. So I won't ask you the questions of what it is in your life experience that brings you to an

interest in injustice and truth, but it's something to think about. Yeah, no, you're 100% right. And I know certainly my selection of the law as my first career was directly related to some bad bullying that I experienced when I was in the seventh grade and just an intolerance for bullies. And that's also been true in my journalism career. To be honest, part of the fun of this job is holding powerful jerks to account. I really enjoy that piece of it, you know, whether it's directly in an interview or just covering them and exposing them for what they are. So there's a through line there, which I had some pain in my life, but I can't compare it to what you went through.

I mean, it must have been so shocking because you had such a traumatic early childhood. And then to flip to, you know, Rosemary Clooney and forget Liz Taylor. I was more interested that you knew Sean Cassidy. OK, Beverly Hills. I'll tell you, by the way, we're still we're still super close friends. We call each other brothers and I'll tell him of your interest. Oh, my God. I had a life-size photo of him on the back, a poster on the back of my bedroom door.

I mean, in love. So, yes, I may need to use this connection at some point. So, yes, you're immersed now. And the Elizabeth Taylor thing is like the biggest of the big. You couldn't find a bigger star on Earth than Liz Taylor. And so the juxtaposition, right, of where you were zero to 10 versus what I guess about 15 to 25, pretty dramatic. It was. And I want to make an observation that you said, you know, your circumstance was not as bad as or as dramatic as mine. What I've learned is that everybody's worst day in their childhood, everybody's worst disappointment or disillusionment or abandonment

or feeling of abandonment is equal because it's relative to the rest of their life. It's not relative. Like I had a tremendous amount of drama such that things that would be, you know, very overpowering to some people were just another Tuesday for me. And then among those, some that were really quite profoundly traumatic for me. But I don't buy into the idea that my experience is really any different from anybody else's in terms of, in one way, it's actually easier because I can look back and say, oh, that's bad. That's objectively bad. But the person whose father is messing with their mind or is an abusive stepfather or abusive mother in terms of demeaning someone or any of these things or not protecting them,

you know, they're bullied at school and they say, oh, well, you can handle it yourself. Really, it's equal because it's relative to the rest of our experience. And I remember when I did enter the life of, let's say, Rosemary Clooney, it was actually very familiar to me. Both Rosemary and Elizabeth were drug addicts and alcoholics. And so I knew that territory very well because my mother was addicted to various pharmaceutical drugs and then also to heroin. And so I remember times with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that they must have thought, man, this kid can really take it because they were in massive drama. They were two alcoholics, very emotionally invested and very dramatic, i.e. movie stars as well. And so and I just wouldn't

it wouldn't make my heart rate go up because I'd seen so much. And Elizabeth was the most famous woman in the world in a time when there were really only three really famous women in the world. Elizabeth, Jackie Onassis and the Queen of England. Marilyn Monroe had already died. And so now we have hundreds of media figures that people know who they are or follow them in some way. But in those days, there were really three. And Elizabeth Taylor was, I mean, to look over in, you know, in traffic of the next car and see Elizabeth Taylor in the car, all I saw for the years that I was with her was faces aghast. Everybody, everywhere like that. If we put her car, whatever country we were in, if we put the car outside the hotel, there'd be 2,000 people outside

the hotel right away. I remember when we went to Israel, and I'm laughing at myself because I looked out the window of the jet, the regular commercial flight landing in Israel. And I thought, man, there were thousands of people all over the runway. And I thought, man, this country is really disorganized. It never occurred to me that it was because Elizabeth was on the plane. But so I learned a lot. And it was a much different, you know, a tremendous contrast to poverty and food stamps and welfare that I grew up on. That part was in contrast, but the turmoil was the same. It was a different flavor of the same soup. I know that you've said something to the effect of, I sound like the witness who testified before

Congress yesterday, something to the effect of, you said you began to understand the dangers of fame and what you called the marketing of human beings. That intrigues me. What do you mean by that? Well, that really, you know, around the Frank Sinatra time in 1948, when he first was seen by record companies as able to exploit a new market, which was young people. Remember, young people before were not buyers of records, and they weren't even buyers of records in the early Sinatra days, but they were forcers of their parents to buy them records. And so that beginning of the relationship with media figures and public figures that started with Frank Sinatra, and of course goes through Elvis Presley and the Beatles and now so many public figures where people believe, and you'll

relate to this because I know you would have experienced it, people believe because they've got you on this little screen in their house that they've got you, that there's a real relationship there. And like I know Johnny Carson or a talk show host, I know how they would react. I know what he would think of this, but it is really a fraudulent reality that people know. It is not knowing people for real. It's knowing a projection. And I mean, literally a projection, a psychological projection from the person and also literally a projection on the screen. And so fame changed a lot in that in the early Sinatra days and then through Elvis, Beatles, et cetera, et cetera, such that the Beatles, you know, one of the Beatles, George Harrison, said that the world went crazy and used us as the excuse. And that's really true. You become an object of merchandise, a piece of merchandise that others can use.

And the only four people on earth who didn't experience the Beatles were the Beatles. They didn't have something to look out at and see and chase around in cars and what have you. And so the nature of fame changed so much. And it is now, you know, in, in, uh, let's see, 1981, a, 1981, a mentally ill person who was obsessed with a movie star, Jodie Foster, shot a president who used to be a movie star. And it all kind of came together in this bizarre way that it is now. And and now, of course, John Hinckley was just released without restrictions just in the last couple of weeks, the shooter of Ronald Reagan. I realize not every audience member remembers the story as well as I do. Right, right.

I mean, I've I've distinguished my own experience in the public eye as there's sort of Megyn Kelly, the brand that people write about in papers. And then there's the real me. And it's helped me not to take the criticism so seriously and not to get bothered by this caricature of myself that people talk about because they're really talking about MK the brand, which is fair game and something that I've put out there. And I do reveal a lot about myself on my show and my audience probably knows me much better than anybody who writes about me in a newspaper magazine. But then there's this category of people that thinks that they have an intimate connection with you. And those those are unwell people, you know, like that you've

dealt a lot with that in your career. And I definitely want to get to that. The Rebecca Schaefer case, my own stalking cases. I mean, this is such a pernicious threat. And so it's sort of where I would like to kick that off is with what's happening with our Supreme Court right now. It's not that Justice Kavanaugh was stalked by this guy, but this guy meant to do him harm, who's been arrested because he wound up calling. This is a new detail I hadn't heard. He called his sister before he was going to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. And the sister convinced him to call 911. God bless that sister. I mean, thank God she told him to do the right thing. And the and the justice's life was saved as a result of that. But Amy Coney Barrett now is having protesters outside of her

house still, you know, these nine, they're, they're public servants, you know, they're civic servants, trying to just do their jobs have to deal with real death threats at the level of like a Tom Cruise that they should not have to deal with. And I know you've been intimately involved in trying to keep them safe for a long, long time. So what do you make of what's happening right now with them? Well, I think for me, the home where somebody lives is not part of their public life or public service. So for me, always in my career, I expected people to show up at NBC or CBS or ABC or the movie company or any of those places in pursuit of an encounter with somebody, even somebody they were obsessed with, if that's the

case. That sort of goes with the territory that you'll take extra precautions when you're at your work environment, newsroom or TV station or whatever it is. When it goes to the home, I think it is blurring the line between someone's private life and their public life. And I really dislike it. And it's happened in so many circumstances, often mentally ill people, but it's also protesters. We had out in Southern California, big protests at the home of a prosecutor, not the current prosecutor, but the prosecutor before, and such that you can't get in and out of your house comfortably without a feeling of safety that everybody's entitled to. So I really do draw the line at things at home. I think it's very wrong. I would like to see that police officials would close the street

so that protesters are moved back and can have their protest and get whatever media coverage they can get, but not have an impact on somebody while they're walking to their car or while their kids are walking to their car. I remember years ago, the PETA, the something for the ethical treatment of animals. People for. They were quite activist. I was all for the idea of limiting myself. I'm just giving you a personal opinion, of limiting the experimentation on animals to a few centers around the country. So you didn't have every pharma company doing it and every cosmetics company doing it. So my heart was with PETA in many ways. However, they went to the home on campus of the 19-year-old son of a client of mine who owned a clothing company, and they lost me

because that's just, and they were delivering notes there and basically making it impossible for my client, who was the CEO of a clothing company, to ignore. Now, if they'd shown up at the clothing company or the manufacturing plant or the headquarters offices, okay, that kind of goes with the territory. I put on my hat of being a CEO for eight hours a day and I can deal with it. But showing up at the homes and the occupancy areas of kids, which is what's happening now in the case of any public official who has kids, I think it crosses a line. And I think the powers that be, i. i.e government should react to it more fully it's interesting of course that there have been requests for additional protection for supreme court

justices and in the current democratically controlled uh congress those things have not moved forward with the speed or or the agility that i would have liked and uh so yeah it's a it is a sad reality of public life in the world today that we know a lot about our public figures whatever they're famous for uh through uh through sometimes their own actions meaning you know kim kardashian kind of actions and then uh and then these public officials who like them or dislike them agree or don't agree and by the way this goes to many other public officials who have not been supportive of the justices. It's the Supreme Court. We have a system that says the Supreme Court will make the decision.

That specifically means the decisions we don't like. If it was just the decisions we like, we wouldn't need a Supreme Court. We would just do everything by a majority vote or by who's in power at the moment, the right or the left or what have you. But you have to protect the courts because the idea of the courts, they might not always be right in a criminal case as well. But the idea of the courts is at the center of our or certainly what was our system of justice in America. The one thing that binds us together is the rule of law. And once we start rejecting it, I mean, these calls are, it's illegitimate.

And Maxine Waters saying, we're not going to follow the decision in Dodge. Well, yes, you are. It's the social covenant in addition to being, you know, respect for rule of law, but it's the social covenant. That's sort of how we've agreed to behave. And on that same front, John Podoritz, I think it was said something interesting about protesting the justices in their homes. I'm sure you can relate to this as having covered as many and to help to protect as

many people as you have. We need as a society, Justice Alito, to be able to go home to his house and feel like a man, feel like a dad, feel like a husband. Same for Kavanaugh, same for Chief Justice Roberts, all of them. There's there's a different role that these men and women fulfill when in those clothes surrounded by those homes and those people than they do when they're in their robes at the U.S. Supreme Court. And that's all part of our society's fabric, right? Like we need Alito at the neighborhood picnic flipping burgers and Kavanaugh out there with his daughter, helping her practice basketball and Amy Coney Barrett with her 10 year old who happens to have down syndrome, making sure that her child feels safe

inside the home. And these protesters, whether they commit violence or not, are disrupting that whole system. Yeah, I very much agree with you. And I think particularly for judges, not just Supreme Court justices, but for all judges, we do want them to go back to normal life. We don't want them to have, you know, five men to need, five men protected details all the time, because that does the very thing most people are concerned about, which is that, you know, you're living in an ivory tower, like a president, which is certainly the case with the president, a president is much divided, much like a king now, so divided from the population. And we don't want that for judges, or justices. And I agree. And I think they need that relationship

to their normal lives in order to say, you know, in the night as they're falling asleep, wow, that really does feel unfair about that case I'm ruling on this week. We want them to be that. We don't want them to be just another set of kings and queens like the president, like the speaker of the house, like these people who I'm a speaker of the house, even more so because you have the job for, you know, you're in the Senate for 30 years, 40 years now, for God's sake. And so, which wasn't in the original plan. And yet we have these professional, you know, professional politicians now who stay forever. Hey, Megan, I want to go back to something

because it's relevant, something you said about being drawn to your work by the interest in holding account, holding to account public officials and powerful people. I'm sure you observe, as I do, how broken the mainstream media is at the moment in that regard, where they should be the people asking Albert Bourla or any Pfizer company or any pharma company a thousand questions. What about this? How about the trials? Is this long enough? They should be the people asking presidents and other politicians the tough questions. And that has, to my view, literally evaporated in America. The catch out of powerful people that the media was for most of my life and for much of your career. I'm a little bit older, seems to have seems to have, you know, died on the vine.

It's just gone. And I think it is probably at the center of the say it differently. It is probably the single problem that has most allowed the erosion of public trust and the erosion of confidence in government agencies because nobody's holding them to account at all. I'll give you a fast example. NIAID at the National Institute of Health, which is run by Fauci, he's been there for 50 something years. When they're asked for documents these days, emails and what have you, we get redacted documents. This is not the CIA we're talking about. These are the people who develop and ultimately approve and push through medical products that people take. And the public may not be aware, but 25% of the products that are approved by the FDA are later recalled. So approval by the FDA does not mean safe, and it does not mean effective in all circumstances.

And I'm raising it here with somebody who has also raised it, by the way, I know from your work, but not that I'm interviewing you, but do you see what I'm talking about, about the loss of of that fourth estate, the media in America? One hundred percent. And it's it's you raise the issue of covid. And that's the most illustrative right now, because it's one thing when you OK, they don't they don't want to hold Biden to account because most of the media is left. So they give him a pass on a lot of the things. And they oh, they were very active. Democracy dies in darkness when Trump was in the office, right? Like, no, OK, we're finally going to fulfill our obligation to hold the powerful to account. But in such an unfair, one sided way with him.

But the covid example is the best because that's something where, OK, public health and private companies, big pharma that no one's supposed to be on their side. Although they are. The media is corrupted. RFK pointed this out in his book that they all take ad dollars from Pfizer and Big Pharma. And they they were like sycophants when it came to any messaging we got from Pfizer or Moderna or Fauci or Rochelle Walensky. It just had to be accepted as true. Otherwise, you would be censored. You know, you wouldn't even make air on a place like CNN online. It would be censored.

And it's gotten so bad that you have somebody like an RFK Jr. who came on our show labeled as a nut. I mean, he's literally number two on the so-called disinformation dozen that the White House put out. The White House, that's government trying to silence his speech by pressuring social media not to give this guy a forum. And we took a deep dive into his claims in that book and otherwise and found he's right. RFK Jr., the stuff he's writing about is well supported, not to endorse every single line he printed. But he is not a disinformation purveyor.

And so the media, rather than just saying, hey, well, let me figure it out for myself. Let me do my audience a service of like taking a look at that just marches like lemmings to the beat of whatever. I don't even know who calls the shots. I think it's their left wing instincts of getting patted on the head, being good boys and girls, wearing their N95s, getting their 5000 booster shots and saying, you know, they're they're compliant. Yeah, well, I'm with you on that. It is the best example we have. And it's the most alarming example, all all things related to covid and related to mass vaccination and now Paxlovid, which the president has talked about, which,

you know, has commercials that talk about it being used. And unfortunately, PaxLavid, according to Fauci himself yesterday in a video I have, but has been mostly removed from the internet, describes his circumstance, which is that he got COVID. He took PaxLavid. He tested negative, negative, negative, then positive, then got COVID again immediately. Worse than before. His words much worse. What does he do? Another round of Paxlovid.

I'll just take another round. And my point here isn't to make fun of, though I'm happy to, make fun of Fauci or the failed product Paxlovid, but rather, where is the media asking questions of both the government and pharma companies about these things? And I want to actually answer the question rather than just posing it. There is something called the Trusted News Initiative. Not sure if you've heard of it. Many of your viewers won't have. But it is run by BBC. And if you go to the BBC website right now, or after our podcast today, and enter Trusted News Initiative or even do a Google search, Trusted News Initiative BBC, it'll take you to the BBC website. And the BBC has organized

a group of previously competitive companies, CNN, Facebook, Google, ABC, CBS, Australian Broadcasting, Canadian Broadcasting, who all are acting in lockstep on matters regarding pharmaceuticals, mass vaccination and COVID. And they lay it out. They're not hiding it. And I'm not describing anything that isn't on their website. They make it clear that their intent and their purpose is to prevent and counter what they call vaccine misinformation and to draw their information from the CDC and the World Health Organization. Well, that's a problem. Having a bunch of companies that used to be competitive, all doing the exact same stories at the same time. And I'll give you two examples. You mentioned Robert Kennedy. When he was banned for life from Instagram, that story ran, that's February 11 or 12 in 2021,

that story ran hundreds and hundreds of times with the exact same headline, banned for life for misinformation, banned for life for false claims. It was a remarkable story. I would say it's one of the biggest Robert F. Kennedy's news stories that's ever been, is the one of him being banned for life from Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, which is a member of the Trusted News Initiative, which is run in part by a fellow who used to work for Reuters, young, last name is Clark. He left his job as the head of Reuters to become, oh, interesting, a board member of Pfizer. Go to the Pfizer website, ask for the board, you'll see him there. And he was 52 years old, by the way, not really the time you usually retire from being the head of Reuters. And Reuters is in the Trusted News Initiative group. My point here being, and going to Bobby Kennedy is a fine example, you have, oh, I didn't give you the other example, Joe Rogan and horse paste. Joe Rogan takes force medicine. That was hundreds of newspapers, bam, in the same afternoon with all the same narrative. That is the Trusted News Initiative. And that is something that is unheard of in our lives because it used to be that the Washington Post, which is in the Trusted News Initiative, would be competing with the New York Times and BBC and The Guardian and everybody else who could get this great story where we caught out this public official doing this wrongful act. Not now, not if it has to do

with- Or embarrass our competitors. Embarrass our competitors for saying the wrong thing. It used to, sure. And also to, you know, who would get the scoop? Well, there's no scoop today. There's no scoop on the pharma companies. There's no scoop on the administration. There's no scoop today. There's no scoop on the pharma companies. There's no scoop on the administration. There's no scoop on the World Health Organization or Fauci. Or I mean, look, here's an interesting note. And I won't go too far down this rabbit hole. But you have NIAID, Fauci's organization, has received $350 million directly paid to scientists and employees at NIAID, including Fauci and including Collins, who was the head of NIH.

Now, five years ago, or 2015, that was a big news story. Actually, Reuters covered it because at that time it was a much smaller number. But the fact that most Americans don't know that government employees whose salaries we pay can have patent participation in products they develop on our dime and they get paid directly for those patents by the pharma companies. Additionally, most Americans don't know that 45% of the budget, you have to go to the FDA website, it's there, of the FDA is from pharma, is provided directly by pharma in the form of fees. So this thing is broken, right? And normally, as in 2015, there'd be news stories about it. I haven't seen a news story about $350 million

being paid directly to government employees. To the employees. That's one of the things in Bobby Kennedy's book, disinformation, right? Quote unquote, that's in his book, that can't even get a review. No one, none of the mainstream papers, magazines, et cetera, would even touch it. They treat him like he's a virus. And he's trying,

the guy's devoted his life to environmental law, like to trying to clean up our rivers and our air and so on for our kids. That's that's it. Is that some sort of a sin? He's a Kennedy supposed to be beloved by the left and the people who control these organizations. But he he misstepped in their view on childhood vaccines. By the way, fascinating discussion with him on that, too. And he's got a lot of science to back up what he said. You know, it's like he's not making this stuff up. Uh, you can disagree with them, but to just dismiss it all as disinformation is dishonest. Um, and he raised all those claims

and suddenly there's a total blackout on his book on him. There are so few people interested in holding these government agencies to account. Instead, they just want us to shut up and take the 15th booster. Right. So it's like the only way to shut it down is the is the coming midterms. I mean, truly, politics is the only thing that made these people stop forcing this stuff on us. Yes, it's true. All true. And I saw that interview of yours, by the way, and it was great on a few levels, notably that you checked on the things he said. If something was inaccurate or wrong, you said so. If something was accurate, you said so. His book, by the way, which I gave a blurb for, and I've read now twice, is called The Real Anthony Fauci. And that book was the number one bestseller in America for 12 weeks. It was the number two bestseller in America for 16

weeks. And not a single review, as for 16 weeks and not a single review, as you said, and not a single reference in any potent media other than yours. And, uh, and even when the New York times did a, you know, uh, a hatchet job on, uh, on Bobby, they wouldn't even name the book. They also wouldn't accept ads for the book. They accepted one and then they wouldn't accept any more. And so, yeah, the book, they took, they had a choice of how to approach it. Either they could question it on the merits of its facts. It's really a history book. It's not an opinion book. It's a history book on the history of vaccines and how they've developed. And vaccines, of course, are different.

Some vaccines, they're not a uniform product. Some vaccines are worth it and worth any risks. There's always risks with anything you inject into yourself. Some are worth it. Some are not worth it. Many have been recalled, we have to remember. You know, the smallpox vaccine that was given to soldiers, people in the military, 40 million doses. And then they stopped because of adverse effects, including myocarditis, et cetera. And we've had a bunch of vaccines stopped. And so vaccines are not all equal. And these vaccines now, we're not getting a true account of them in the media because nobody's asking tough questions. And that's a problem. He's playing the adversarial role that the media used to play, right? He's like, we need people like RFK Jr. because he's not afraid of them.

Now, it's hard for him to get platformed. And just getting that interview on the air was a whole thing for us. I mean, believe me, it wasn't easy, but we managed to get it on all platforms. It didn't get pulled from anybody because we were careful. But, you know, the truth is we shouldn't have to be. We should be able to just interview the guy in the way we want to interview him. But, you know, we're subject to the same things everybody else is because we're not subscription based. We're ad based and we need these platforms to get out there, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's a whole different thing. But the media used to love being that adversarial role. You know, you want to tell us it's totally safe. You want to tell us like we need to vaccinate

zero to five year olds. OK, based on experimentation or based on the cases of 10 children, some of the more honest physicians are pointing this out online. You know, all these people we had on the show, the media used to go nuts over that. You can't make a recommendation for all Americans zero to five year olds based on looking at 10 children. This is insane. But anyway, I'm on board. I'm on board with everything you're saying. I want to pause because I got to squeeze in a break and there's so much more for us to go over. Really enjoying my very first live conversation with the one and only Gavin DeBecker. By the way, if you want to watch that RFK Jr. interview, it was a two part interview. It's episodes 282, 283. I guarantee you,

you will find them fascinating. Next in my discussion with author and security expert Gavin DeBecker, we're going to get into the topic of mass shootings. It's been just over a month since the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. And what we've learned since then about the police response is it's truly shocking. I know we overuse that term in media, but it is shocking. It turns out the police were inside the building three minutes after the shooter entered. My God, it makes your heart hurt just learning that. They spent an hour trying to track down keys to the classroom where the suspect was holed up. Never tried opening the door. They never tried just putting their hand on the doorknob

and turning it. And it turns out the door was not even locked. Security camera images released. So telling. They're jarring. They show police officers standing in the hallway with rifles and ballistic shields just feet away from the classroom doing nothing. The children inside had no protection, had none. And yet they still didn't barge in. These guys with the shields and the guns. The issue of mass shootings is something Gavin's team specializes in in terms of planning for and trying to prevent. And he comments they made about wanting to be a shooter, a mass shooter, the warning signs on social media for both this guy and the guy in Buffalo. I mean, it was just, I know you've said before, people don't just snap. They don't, they don't just snap. And sure enough, in this case and the one in Buffalo, that's, that's proving to be true. Yes, it's an important part of my public work. Like in Gift of Fear, I talk about the fact that people don't just snap. And while that's a, you know, he snapped and he went crazy in the workplace, or he was perfectly fine, and then he was, you know, insane and shooting people. It's really a process that is as observable as water coming to a boil. And in that process are a bunch of witnesses who experience fascination with weapons,

who experience statements and allusions to acting out violently, who experience the real major pre-incident indicators. Pre-incident indicator is an expression. We call it PIN for pre-incident indicators. Pre-incident indicator is an expression, we call it PIN for pre-incident indicators, things that happen before the thing happens that you want to prevent. So a pre-incident indicator for getting a bee sting is hearing the buzz. And a pre-incident indicator for somebody shooting at a governor is jumping up on stage with a gun, but that pre-incident indicator is too recent to be useful. And the birth of the assassin is also a pre-incident indicator, but that's too dated to be useful. So we're looking for the things that happen in this sweet

spot in the months prior to someone acting out violently. And human beings are predictable. We predict human behavior all day. We predict the behavior of our kids and advertisers predict the behavior of consumers. And lawyers predict the behavior of jurors. And anybody who tells you that human behavior is not predictable is not correct. And it's not that predictions are always perfect. That's not the idea. But that people who are displaying pre-incident indicators can be detected if we are open to seeing them and, of course, open to reporting them. And the number one pre-incident indicator for mass violence, for multiple victim shootings, for example, is misery.

Misery, alienation. These are things you see in the kids who act out violently again and again. And it's why, rather than even talk about the tragedy of the police response and the fact that kids were being shot while there were protectors present who could have made a difference, putting that aside for a moment, I think the bigger issue to look at, and we slip every time there's a mass shooting and focus on that mass shooting, when the bigger issue is the extraordinary number of multiple victim shootings going on in America this year. 2021 started about halfway mark, and then through 2022, when I was first studying these, there were a few, and you too, Megan, there were a few a year, a few Columbines a year in an active year. There are now five multiple victim shootings

in America every week. And there are shootings of lesser numbers that are happening every day. And so we have to really ask ourselves some questions about the misery index in the United States. We can look at inflation, we can look at alienation, we can look at lack of trust in our institutions. We can look at division, which is being nurtured by politicians, division between people. I want to tell you quickly why. Say it again? Social media too. Oh yes, social media. At the end of that very good documentary that ran on Netflix called The Social Dilemma, at the very end, one of the former Facebook executives is asked, does he let his own kids use Facebook? He says, no. And he's asked, what do you think is the natural result of this thing that you're telling

us about, about how social media and YouTube and other things lean us, incline us toward the most aggressive postures in everything? He just answers immediately, civil war. He doesn't hesitate for a moment that that's the natural outcome of what we're experiencing. But I want to just comment on all of these things that are leading to alienation. hostility between what is identified as two sides. You know, the media puts forth the good and the bad, the abortion and the anti-abortion, the pro this and the anti that, the vaccine and the anti-vaxxers, and all of these things that we are, you know, in dispute over. Why do they win? And the answer is, like many answers you'll get from me, is historic. It has always been this way. The king and the queen look over the castle wall. There's always a wall and there's a reason for the wall.

They don't want people coming over. And they look over the castle wall and they see the people in conflict with each other. And that is always good news because it means they are not coming over the castle wall. And that's where we are today, which is this degree of alienation, this degree of hostility, and this degree of division and divisiveness in America actually serves power structures. It actually serves people in power because you what you don't all you don't want in a population is that they all agree when they all agree. You get Tunisia or you get Egypt and you get the Arab Spring when it frankly doesn't even take all when 55 percent agree and are willing to be active. You get you know, you get substantial change real fast. As you said, you know, our politicians now real quick dropped Fauci. He's

not doing an interview five times a day anymore. Dropped, you know, the the nearly obsessive focus on getting not vaccinated, but vaccinated again and again and again and again. All that stopped because we have elections coming up. It reminds me of the Miracle on Ice team in 1980 and how Herb Brooks made these two factions who couldn't get along because they were from the Midwest and they were from the Northeast and they had been college rivals. He made himself the common enemy. It's exactly the opposite. He said, oh, you know, if if I can get them to hate me, they'll get along with each other.

And our politicians and our elites are doing exactly the opposite strategy on all of us. All right, stand by, Gavin. I got to squeeze in another quick break. And so much more to get to with Gavin DeBecker. This is fascinating, isn't it? Right after this break, this is the world expert on security and protection. So I understand that I've heard you say that that suffering is sort of the universal warning sign on these shooters. But how can you determine? Right. Because some of them, some of them for sure, especially in the school setting, are kids who suffered, who were bullied, who were ostracized. And the most recent shooter, there was evidence of him saying that the Buffalo shooter, his musings online reflect that he never socialized. He felt uncomfortable around people. He spent all his time online and he even he acknowledged that was a mistake. So there's those guys. But then there's true sociopaths. Now, then there are people who

I don't I think they're born somehow sociopathic. And I've interviewed some of these moms of these these kids who say, I have the next school shooter. My child is the next school shooter. And that person can't be, I don't know, showing kindness to that person. How do we prevent that person from unleashing this kind of terror on us? Well, every kind of person who acts out violently has some degree of pre-incident indicators that are revealed to people in the story you're telling there. The young person's mother has made this prediction already. And, you know, very many cases that I worked on, people would say afterwards. In fact, there's one case of a workplace violence shooting where people were

in the lunchroom and when they heard what they thought was firecrackers outside or a car back firing, one of them said, ah, that's probably just Mossbacher coming to finish us off, talking about a coworker named Mossbacher. And it was indeed Mossbacher coming back in. My point being that time and again, and there are a lot of them in Gift of Fear, where you see people say the exact thing. I don't want to open that package. I'm going back to my office. I don't want to be here when it blows up, as a joke. And dark humor is often a cover for communicating actual concern. And so I'm not aware of cases that occur, including in sociopathic people, without pre-incident indicators. Now, I'm not saying they're always detectable because Unabomber, for example, who killed a few people and injured many more with bombs that he sent.

I'm giving you the background because I know you might remember it, but younger audience members might not. So I don't think there are cases where there are no pre-incident indicators. However, I want to make a bigger point that isn't in my work because we're in a different time. And that is when we're getting many multiple victim shootings every week, when we're in a circumstance like we're in today, where violence in general is being normalized, Portland basically in a state of siege at times, but that was normal. That was called by some politicians like the summer of love. When we have cities with the degree of

homelessness, with the degree of public drug use, with the degree of violence, like in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where you have these flash robber know, robberies like flash mob where 60 or 70 people will go into a department store and just take stuff or people going in and, you know, taking stuff off the shelves into into trash bags because they know that there won't be prosecution of any crimes other than above $1,500, for example, Los Angeles has got its version of this, San Francisco has had its version of it. Well, the point I'm trying to raise here is that we are in enormous trouble right now, just enormous trouble in terms of the degree of alienation and division going on in the country. And I want to just say a fast note on alienation. You might have heard of Dr. Robert Malone, who's a man I've spent a lot of time with. He was on Joe Rogan's show and got something like 50 million downloads. And then there was an effort to have Joe Rogan canceled because of having Dr. Malone.

Yeah, that's what led to Joe Rogan's, the first big attempt to cancel him. Exactly. And so Malone is the original inventor of the mRNA technology or platform that is now used in vaccines. And he happens to strongly oppose these vaccines. He's a vaccinologist, so he doesn't oppose all vaccines, but he happens to oppose this particular mass vaccination program, this particular one, which is, you know, will be billions of people by the time it's done. Anyway, Malone talked about on that show mass formation, which was the idea that you had whole populations just accepting information no matter what from the government, just accepting without any questions, without any hesitation. And that

links to this alienation issue, because if you are alone, your only relationship is via social media, for example, or the internet, and you are lonely and feel alienated, you can instantly join a group that is adversarial with someone. It's emotionally charged. You can instantly join a group that is adversarial with someone. It's emotionally charged. You can instantly join a group pro-Trump, anti-Trump. He's the worst thing that ever existed. He's great. Pro-Hillary, anti-Hillary.

She's just victimized. Pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine, pro-abortion, anti-abortion. These things solve your alienation problem immediately because they put you in a community. And they put you in a community that is glad to have you and accepts you. And it's emotional. These are emotionally charged issues. We're not having these groups around topics like parking tickets. We're having these groups around topics that are central and represent belief systems. And the interesting thing is, if you are, for example, in favor of pharma, the most criminally fined entity in American culture, pharma companies recalled things, produced the problems with pain medications and Vioxx,

which killed 150,000 to three, all these things. And yet now they're kind of heroic in the culture. If you're for them, if you just believe, why would they say, why would Pfizer say something that's not true about their product other than the fact that they've done it a bunch of times? So I just want to download two quick things for people who might be still trusting pharma companies as an example. The FDA went to court to restrict release of the safety trials that Pfizer did on these new vaccines. They asked for 55 years to release the information. Most people

I say that to don't believe me. I say, you got to Google it. Then they went to court again with Pfizer, the FDA, and asked for 75 years before releasing the information. That's not stuff you do when you feel proud about the safety trials. And now they have been ordered to release the information. And the first tranche, guess what it's got? 1,200 post-marketing deaths that are vaccine associated. Well, these, again, no media. Where is the New York Times to talk about this stuff? And where is CNN? And so here, I'm bringing this all to my punchline back to shootings. We now have, instead of an individual who has no good relationship with his family, who's alienated, who's bullied in school, we have a population that feels that way. from our own government. They are withholding information from us again and again and again. And we're not getting well served by our politicians. Let's say the 535 in Congress,

by the way, is it 535? I failed that history class. Anyway, whatever that number is, I didn't want to get it wrong. But and where are we getting well served by these pariahs, these canceled people like Robert Kennedy Jr., who, of course, in reality, is a gifted trial lawyer, took on Monsanto successfully, and has a book that's got thousands of citations. And by the way, I mentioned I've read it twice. The citations in that book, The Real Anthony Fauci, I'm an author talking about somebody else's book, by the way, as a humorous note. But anyway, the citations- They're giving of you. The citations are to the New York Times, to CNN, to ABC, to Newsweek, to Time Magazine.

To federal documents. They're not citations to some... Your people looked at the claims that are made there, and they're not even claims, they're history. They're the history of what's gone on. You know, has Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation ever had a vaccine program in India where they told people that these were wellness shots, but they were actually vaccines that could affect reproduction? Yes. Not no. Yes. True. And so that was can I just say that was some of the most explosive stuff. It was like, whoa, wait, what? Let's make sure. And you you run through and you can see the evolution where they discovered it. They were accused to build, you know, the Bill Gates Foundation continues to deny everything. But you've got independent third parties saying it happened. We checked what was in your shot. And so it's sort

of something where you start off thinking, oh, yeah, he must be a nutcase. This can't be. It's Bill Gates. This all must be untrue. And then you keep digging and keep digging and you realize there is a nutcase involved here, but it's not RFK Jr. No, it's true. And by the way, also in Nigeria and all over Africa, the testing of vaccines take Gardasil at nine years old because one day they might grow up. And the whole Gardasil thing is such a scam. Can I just say this? So that's the HPV vaccine.

And we love our pediatrician, but our eldest is 12. He's a boy. And then we have an 11-year-old girl, and we have an eight-year-old boy. And so on his last wellness visit, just a month ago, our doctor wanted us to give our 12 year old boy Gardasil. He wanted us, you know, it's not sexually active. He's a young boy. But he's like, you know, so I got to give him double dose before he gets to that point. And I'm like, hell no, we are not doing that. And then I got home and I talked about it with my husband, Doug. We're like, absolutely not. But this is

somebody we trust. You know, it's like, I can see how people easily get sucked into this because you don't do any research and you don't read books like Fauci and, or not Fauci, RFK juniors, and you just trust your doctor. And the next thing you know, you've done it. Well, I want to, by the way, comment on that one, because I got asked by clients to do a study of it, because clients who have daughters were interested. And so we did a study of Gardasil. It's not that hard. A lot of it, a great deal of it is on the FDA website, and of course, in Bobby's book, there's a lot of good information. But Gardasil is a product to stop cervical cancer, which people get in their 50s. So you're giving it to a nine-year-old girl, and you look at your

nine-year-old girl, and it's a perfect product from a marketing point of view, because you say, well, I don't want her to have cervical cancer. Well, first of all, cervical cancer is highly survivable. It's not that common. And additionally, it's something that she would get if she gets it in 40 years. And that we have to assume that in 40 years, there'd be no better treatment than there is today. And we have to assume that the Gardasil vaccine works. And we have to assume that which stops HPV, it doesn't stop cancer, they're claiming a link. And we have to assume that it's entirely safe, which it is not. So it has risks, in fact, macabre risks that are listed on the package insert. Here's a quick thing for your

audience. Every vaccine, every product in pharma has a package insert that's required by the FDA. But you don't see the package insert on vaccines because you go to the pharmacy and they give you the shot or you go to your doctor and they give you the shot. Ask for the package insert on Gardasil. Read that. And then anybody who wants to give that to a nine-year-old kid or any kid, I'd be really surprised about. And why is it a perfect product? I said, Megan, because their commercials for Gardasil have a little girl saying, mom, dad, do you know about Gardasil? Like the little kid is the one who's going to tell you that they've done a safety study on the product. It is a terrible vaccine and vaccines are not equal. Tetanus, bring it on, right? You have a serious injury,

you want a tetanus vaccine right then and there because it can lead to lockjaw, very serious, not all vaccines are bad. That isn't my point. But these consumer products that are, you know, right now we have a product that is the most promoted consumer product in history and the most taken consumer product in history, often not by choice, more than Coca-Cola. And so this I'm talking about the COVID vaccines by the various American manufacturers and the one British manufacturer. And so when you have a when we have the FDA trying to hold back the safety trials for 75 years, you have to start asking questions. And of course, media is not doing it. And that's too bad, too bad. It's going to start up again. It's going to start up again because now they've backed off temporarily because they were getting hit politically and

they see these midterms coming and they realized and they saw what happened in Virginia with Glenn Youngkin and they saw what happened in New Jersey where their Democratic governor almost went down within three points in a race that he was supposed to have in the bag and they backed off. But we're going to go back into the fall and the temperature is going to change in the Northeast and they backed off. But we're going to go back into the fall and the temperature is going to change in the northeast and Washington, D.C., and probably we'll have some more covid cases and the hysteria will ramp back up as soon as those midterms are over. So we're not done with this battle. I mean, that's it's not over. I do want to say my crack team, because we like to remain platformed, says the following on the number of deaths after the vaccine,

according to this Pfizer report. Following up on what you said, they say among this group, the report shows there were 42,086 reports of adverse events, 1,223 reports of fatalities within a certain period of time following vaccination. Jeffrey Morris, the director of the Division of Biostatistics at UPenn, told USA Today. But this data does not mean there's a causal relationship between the vaccine and these events. In other words, the 1,200 people could have died of a heart attack of something not related to the vaccine. I think that that would be Pfizer's defense saying our vaccine didn't cause that health outcome. Moving on, right? OK, moving on. This is all fascinating to me because it's all part of a massive manipulation and a deterioration in trust.

And it's why people try to seek out new information in different places. And that's led to other problems. OK, I talked to a woman who wound up on the on on January 6th, right outside of the Capitol, thinking about going inside because she'd been getting information, you know, from places like Reddit about Trump was going to stay president. Right. She was misled because she distrusts CNN. She doesn't believe in Don Lemon. She did. So she just started going elsewhere for her information and went down a massive rabbit hole. And when you were talking about this, I was thinking about the trans craze sweeping our teenage girls, right? Like they're also looking for a place to feel like they belong. And we used to have that when I was a teenager too, and people might smoke pot or they'd, I don't know, join the cheerleaders or

they whatever. But today's day and age has offered this other potentially very dangerous avenue for them where you can have your breasts cut off and you can take cross-sex hormones when you might not actually have any gender dysphoria and wind up sterilized, right? It's sort of a cultism. Well, you must like radioactive subjects. I do. I'm sort of a third wheel kind of person. But I will comment on this to say that, you know, I've raised 10 kids. All the boys, you know, came in with dresses at some point. All the girls did whatever they did that was more inclined toward what we consider traditionally male activities and blah, blah, blah. I think that there is gender dysphoria. It's a very real thing. And I think that the decision to start taking hormones, for example, needs to be taken very carefully because now you're getting into things

that are not easily reversible. And obviously, you know, actual genital surgery or removal of breasts, these are not things you back away from very easily. I think it's interesting that when somebody wants to transition and goes through the whole process, and now there's, you know, there's an institution of people ready to do that, doctors ready to do it, people ready to encourage it, pharma products ready to be used as always. Well, when that happens, you are welcomed. However, for those few people who would like to reverse gender reassignment surgery, they are pariahs. They are some kind of betrayer. There's some kind of, you know, they should be canceled. It's just a fascinating thing because anything that becomes any medical or emotional issue that becomes a cultural and social issue is problematic. And I know I would hope that anybody who wants to do, you know, transition surgery does it as an adult. And of course, that's one parent speaking. But I wanted to say something about

one parent speaking. Freedom of speech is specifically about things we disagree with. Otherwise, you wouldn't need freedom of speech if everybody felt the same way. And so is it okay for me to have any opinion? Is it okay for RFK to have an opinion or Dr. Robert Malone to have an opinion? The answer today, or you, Megan, the answer today is no, it is not okay. It is not okay. You'll get into what would be called forbidden speech, and there's misinformation. That's just an error. There's disinformation. That's an intentional error designed to mislead people, they say. And now there's malinformation. Do you know that one, Megan?

Have you heard that one? Mm-mm. I haven't heard that yet. Malinformation is information that might or might not be accurate, but tends to diminish confidence in the government. That's called malinformation. And so we've been here before. I like to say on all of these things, I go historically, as you see in my books as well, on all of these things, it is not the first time that a culture is facing totalitarian behaviors by government.

You could blame it on Trump, you can blame it on Biden or Clinton, anybody you want. But ultimately, the federal government is so powerful at the moment that it can control information with complete impunity, which is going on right now. And, you know, these things throughout human history, some people have sought to control others, typically a minority of people right down to the king and queen. You can't have a smaller minority than that controlling entire populations. That is history. And a very quick thing is that if you looked at world history as a pie, the entire pie is totalitarian leadership and governance, other than a tiny, tiny sliver, which is the United States and Western Europe. It's not permanent. It's not destined to be permanent. And most societies

move toward greater and greater control of the population. And, you know, favorably, in 2020, a book that hadn't been in print, I mean, hadn't been published for 70 years, it was 70 years old, suddenly became a top 20 bestseller. And that was 1984, was a top 20 bestseller in 2020. Isn't that interesting? People are paying attention. They are. But the manipulation is at every level. You're right, government for sure. And media we talked about. And one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because it's an issue near and dear to my heart, is the way the media responds to these mass shootings. And in particular to the school shootings in which they take the shooter's name and his photo and they put it on loop.

And they make a star out of these guys without any thought for the infamy they're giving this guy. I you are one of the first people who raised this in my life. I can't remember what you wrote that I read it in, but it was it was condemning the media for not understanding how that's being part of the problem. And since then, many others have written about it as well. And the media continues to do it. And I understand as a member of the media, maybe we have a system where like the AP or we have some agreement where somebody reports the name of the shooter and some facts about the shooter and some basic bio about the shooter. You know, I'm not saying as a journalistic matter, it's totally irrelevant. It is relevant. But the lionization almost of these guys is playing a factor in the repeat nature of these crimes, is it not?

Oh, very much. And it's not done in every country. In England, you can't name the perpetrator until after a trial. And there are various reasons that's the case. But the upshot of it is that you don't have what you have in America. I'll give you a good example of when President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley. From that point on, we saw Hinckley's boyhood home, interview with neighbors. We obviously saw his name, all of his pictures through high school. We saw him being escorted by federal agents

to a waiting helicopter. And the whole experience is almost an equalizing of the target, which is the president, and the assassin, who is the shooter. And I strongly oppose all forms of lionization or creating a star out of an assassin, and yet it's gone on forever. The Unabomber, who I mentioned earlier, is on the cover of Time and Newsweek at the time, and it says genius, because he'd written such an intelligent manifesto or was perceived as a genius by somebody. The point being that you

ought not be able to enter the world of great goings on with simply a handgun and a few bullets. And that is what we give in America, the media gives. And I think some don't, by the way, I've observed your own hesitation about it. I've seen people not do it. But the immediate turning of a really a loser who could not influence world events by any method other than shooting a senator or shooting at a president or doing a mass shooting, turning that person into an enormous star is damaging because it encourages others. And we always saw, and we tracked it in my company, that within a few weeks of a mass shooting, you would have another. Well, now they're weekly anyway, so that issue has resolved itself.

But the point being that you are encouraging others, and you are saying among the large menu of choices that a young people can choose in their lives of who to be, what to be. Now there's a new character. Oh, I can be that mass shooter at Columbine in that cool black jacket that was worn by so-and-so in such-and-such movie. I can be like that. And I don't have a lot of other good options, right? My parents aren't good to me. My community isn't good such movie. I can be like that. And I don't have a lot of other good options, right? My parents aren't good to me. My community isn't good to me. I'm a loner. I'm alienated, but I can be a big deal just like John Hinckley, just like Mark David Chapman, who killed John

Lennon. I can be for a brief time as famous as the person I kill. That is a menu item offered up in America by the media that should be tempered. That should be tempered. I'm just thinking about this. There's a new protocol in media where if somebody dies by suicide, you it's not considered OK to talk about the method by which they did it. And because they understand that, you know, for lack of a better word, it can be contagious, like it can place the idea in somebody's head. We saw it right around the time of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade and some others. And I think that's a fine, responsible practice by the media. But why is the media so responsive to that issue? And on this issue, where you've got massive deaths and we do have a massive problem with these shootings in America. They don't care at all. It's like they need their B-roll. They need something to keep

the screen interesting and make you buy their paper. And they don't see their role in contributing to this danger at all. Yeah. And then the replaying it, of course, over and over and over again, the helicopter view of the school and the cops surrounding the school and the kids being hustled out. And another element of this is that it's scary images for kids who too many of them are at dinner with the television news on, you know, against my best recommendation, but nonetheless, I never let my kids are doing that. Never. Yeah. It's not, it's not good stuff. And so it leads to being afraid in the world. And people who are afraid are actually less effective citizens. We're seeing that right now with COVID, fear of COVID. My company did a report back in the beginning of 2020 on who was at risk. Because when I first heard about COVID, and you might be the same, all I heard was over 60 die, right? And it might be on the box, the pizza box that's delivered. It won't be on the pizza by some miracle, but it'll be on the outside of the box. And so that's

all we knew. But very quickly, a report came out of Italy, nine months before the United States CDC provided the same information for some reason. And it came out of Italy and it demonstrated that over 94% of the people who died had up to three comorbidities. Now that's 3.7 in the United States. So they were already suffering from up to three lethal diseases. And how old were they? So more than 90% of them were over 75. The average age was 79. It's now moved to 81. The average occupancy, where did they live? Where did they live?

They lived in nursing homes. 71% of the people who died attributed to COVID in Canada lived in nursing homes. So what that tells me is that if you're my 21 year old son, you really don't have to focus a great deal on fear of COVID, but we have a frightened population. We have a frightened population. England doesn't in the same way. Interestingly, England had bombing in world war II from, uh, from Germany and they have, that's the phrase of having a stiff upper lip. You we go to we go to work i remember at another big fear uh fear fest was y2k most of your viewers won't remember it and it sounds

funny to even describe it but you remember just trying to describe this to my kids turn right when the clock turned to the new year's on two in the year 2000 all devices would stop working your thermostat and your refrigerator and your aircraft and your missile systems, everything would stop working because there was no way for the thing to turn over. There were tens of millions of dollars spent on Y2K compliance. My company spent $400,000 on Y2K compliance. Anyway, I had to fly to England on New Year's Eve. I went to LAX, nobody there. And there were news crews interviewing the few people who were there flying. And I flew on British Airways, 21 people on the plane, normally holds more than 300. And the pilot walked through the cabin at one point,

and I stopped him and I said, why are you guys flying? American Airlines, United, Delta, Continental, none of them were flying why are you guys flying and the guy said the pilot said because it's on the schedule um which was very british because it's on the schedule uh america is is a country that you know i write books about fear it's a very frightened country and and it's generally unwarranted fear. And leaders throughout human history have used fear to control populations. And boy, is that happening right now. That's got to be your next book, like the downside of fear. The gift of fear was it resonated and is so true in so many ways.

But yeah, you're right. There are some massive downsides of fear. And one of the big ones is it can be used by people in positions of power to manipulate us. So how do we figure out when that's what's happening or when the gift is kicking in that we're supposed to listen to? We'll pick it up right there after a quick break. More with Gavin DeBecker. Love this conversation. So that was a provocative question that we left off on, right? Your bestselling book is called The Gift of Fear. And for people who haven't read it, A, you need to, and B, it's about how fear is a gift, that intuition, that sort of that, the hairs on the back of your neck rising up when you see somebody, listen to them, listen to that. That's something instinctual inside of you that's telling you you're in danger. But fear can be exploited by bad people or powerful people with bad motives politically and culturally in a way where maybe it's not so much of a gift. So expand on that.

Sure. The issue is, is it true fear or unwarranted fear? So my book and the benefits of intuition, by the way, intuition, the root of the word in tear, means to guard and protect. And that's what it does for us, our intuition, which knows everything much more than we do. It knows the distance of the sound and the scent of the smell and whether we saw that person earlier and whether that's the same car that was there earlier. It knows all

kinds of things that we haven't consciously assessed. But the issue is, is it true fear or unwarranted fear? So I'll give a very quick description of those two. True fear is always something in your environment that you sense. You see it, you hear it, you smell it, you touch it. That is true fear. And the unwarranted fear is always based on your imagination or your memory, something in your imagination or your memory. So I'll give you a real example. You're at the airport, you're about to board a flight, and you get that feeling that sometimes people get, which is don't board this flight, don't board this flight, this plane's going to crash, etc. If that is based on, you know, a news video you saw of a crash in Caracas, Venezuela three months

ago, that is unwarranted fear based on memory or imagination. But if it's based on seeing the two pilots stumble out of the bar drunk and board your flight, that's true fear because it's something you sense in your environment. It's a somewhat comedic example of the thing, but the point stands, which is that true fear is always something in your environment that you sense, and unwarranted fear is always something that you imagine or you remember. And so when we are presented with something to fear by a government or a corporation or a friend or a spouse, when we are presented with fears that someone is trying to program into us, we have to always ask the question, why are they doing it?

Number one, and to really dig in and understand the fear. So for example, fear of COVID or before it mad cow disease or before it flesh eating disease or before it Y2K or before it killer bees or anything else that we are being encouraged to fear. And we have to learn and understand. And that's why, you know, in the blurb that I did for Bobby Kennedy's book, I said, you don't have to agree or disagree with anything, but you have an obligation in a democracy to learn the details associated any time they tell you to fear something. So when we're told to fear the terrible enemy that's coming, you know, George Bush, we got to take the fight to them, weapons of mass destruction. Well, 700,000 people killed in Iraq, untold billions,

thousands of our own troops killed, and there weren't weapons of mass destruction. So, all right, then why did you want us to have that fear of, you know, Hussein sending over terrorists? We want to know why and we want to fully understand it. So in the present moment, we're told originally fear COVID, protect your children. I don't think there's one healthy child in America, not one that has provably died from COVID. You have kids in the hospital dying and COVID is part of what they have and likely part of what killed them if they're already sick. But what we needed to hear from the. Well, if I can just say that the problem with that is they haven't released the information.

The hospitals all along have been just doing deaths from COVID in the hospitals as opposed to dying from COVID in the hospitals. And only very, very late in the game did any any one of them try to start making that distinction. And same thing with the children. They wouldn't tell us how many had comorbidities. only very, very late in the game did any one of them try to start making that distinction. And same thing with the children. They wouldn't tell us how many had comorbidities. They just tried to scare us. So I understand the confusion on this. It's like we still don't have accurate data. Sorry, go ahead. No, it's true. And I've got a video of even Fauci explaining that some of the people whose deaths are attributed to COVID or hospitalizations are attributed to COVID might be there for appendicitis, but they also tested positive for COVID. So that's with COVID versus from COVID, which is an important issue. But on my main point, in the beginning of COVID, like in the beginning of, you know, after 9-11 with terrorism, what happens is events happen.

So 9-11 happened. And then everybody comes forward to see how can they exploit it. Example, I was giving a speech for the federal government in DC for directors of security for all the federal agencies. And in the middle, I gave one speech, then I did a Q&A, and then I gave a closing comment. And in between, there was a break. And a guy came up to me and said, boy, I really agree with you. You're really doing great stuff. I said, oh, what do you do? He said, I'm with a company that, whatever the name of it was, that reinforces federal buildings with extra concrete and bulletproof windows. I said, oh. I said, that's interesting, because in the entire history of the country, there's only been one

incident of a federal building being attacked. So he said, no, no, you're wrong. It's really like, it's like wearing a seatbelt. I said, brother, that's nothing like wearing a seatbelt. Spending $300 million to reinforce a building when it's only happened once in our history is not like wearing a seatbelt where you have thousands of people killed in cars every year. And so that company comes forward to exploit, let's say 9-11, what happened? Every building in New York suddenly had security asking for ID. You remember, you were there asking for ID before you go into the building. But that's not what happened at 9-11. Airplanes were flown into buildings at 9-11. And asking for

ID does not prevent an airplane from hitting your building. So it's never a match. The exploitation method is rarely a match for what actually happened, but is always a match for the fear. The fear will always be exploited. In COVID, in the beginning, we're told instant death, you're going to drop dead on the street. Look at this footage from somebody falling down in China. But the reality was that our children and our and our teens and people in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, if they were healthy, had very, very low risk of death from covid. And that's just the reality that hasn't changed. But Americans weren't told that they were told the opposite. Where were the leaders who would say, you're going to be fine? Yeah, you're going to be all right. You know, we had

we had South Dakota Governor Christine Oman earlier this week. She was one of the few. I mean, reading up on her backstory, she just has a book out called Not My First Rodeo. She was one of the few. She was bold. And it was because of these first principles she knew as a just as a person who would lead saying, trust the people, you know, trust the people and the actual people. You know, she lives in a state of ranchers and farmers who know the land and they know how to take care of themselves and they don't need big government telling them go left or go right. Um, and it turned out to be such a great example, right? It's like my state, New York went a different way. It's one of, it's actually been one of my teachings. I don't mean teachings by me, but I mean teachings that I've received in the last two my, it was somewhere in my DNA that the people,

you know, were somehow less able to make good decisions. But boy, have I learned through COVID that people intuitively, maybe 50%, maybe 60% of the country, if you went by the child vaccines, it might be 80% of the country just intuitively don't want to give these vaccines to a six-month old, for God's sake, or a three-year-old. And so I've learned the wisdom of the people that I've embraced much more in the last two years than I ever had before. I'm ashamed to admit, but also proud to acknowledge that I've come this distance. And you mentioned Nome, and then there's DeSantis, right? Here you have a state, the Department of Health in mentioned, um, uh, Nome and then there's DeSantis, right? Here you have a state, the department of health in Florida, by the way, run by a Harvard trained

doctor, Joe Latipo. It's 13,000 people. The department of health, Florida is a huge state. I think it might be 22 or 25 million citizens. It's bigger than most countries on earth. And they've come to the decision to recommend against these vaccines for children. Are they mentally ill? Are they crazy? No, they're real public officials and public servants and elected officials who've looked at the information

and made this decision. And I'm just disappointed that more states haven't done it. No, Dr. Latipo is amazing. He came on the show and we had a long discussion and he's been demonized too. Went from California to Florida. But they've got stats to back up their beliefs and then the results. And even now, you know, now you have all these honest doctors online, the great

Barrington Declaration doctors behind that some of the most respected physicians in the world. It's very clear who we should be listening to. It's less clear whether we will. All right, let me steal the last 10 minutes or so. Our show's almost over. Just for those people, because I'm thinking about my intern here, Gwendolyn. She's going off to college. And she hasn't read the book yet, Gavin, but she's going to. And just illuminating folks on what that gift is, because the gift of fear, the good side of it. And when you should listen to it in your book, you tell the story of Kelly, who was a rape victim. And this woman gave you such a harrowing account of what happened to her. There are so many lessons in it.

And when people read the book, they'll get it. But she made all the wrong decisions in the beginning with this guy. She had her groceries. She was going into her apartment building. He offered to help her with her groceries. She didn't want it. He pushed it. She wound up changing her no into a yes.

He got up to the apartment. He was like, let me take them in. She's no. But then she turned her no into a yes. And she felt bad. And she did what all we women tend to do, which is she didn't want to be rude. You don't want to be rude. I know this is also from your book. You go get into the elevator in the parking garage and there's a creepy guy in there and he's standing there and you're standing there. It's very clear.

You press the button and your instincts tell you don't get in the elevator. And what do you do? You get in anyway because you don't want to be rude. And you make the point of like you're getting into a locked box with a person your intuition is telling you is dangerous because you don't want to be rude. Are you insane? So listen to it it but this is the piece i wanted to raise with you her instincts kicked in and that she had been raped by this man but and he he said if you know don't complain and i won't kill you but she knew at the end not to believe that this is from your book um if you asked her you asked her like what, what made basically what made you understand you had to get out of there at the end as opposed to listening to him. And she says, um, I don't know. She took a long pause, a gazing off past me, looking back at him in the bedroom. Um, she says, oh, I do know. I get it. Noise was the thing. That's why he closed the window. That's how I knew. You go on. Since he was dressed and supposedly leaving, he had no other reason to close her window. It was that subtle signal that warned her, but it was fear that gave her the courage to get up

after she'd been raped without hesitation and follow close behind the man as he was leaving her bedroom, going to another room, who intended to kill her. She later described a fear so complete that it replaced every feeling in her body. Like an animal hiding inside of her, it opened up to its full size and stood up using the muscles in her legs. She writes, she said, I had nothing to do with it. I was a passenger moving down that hallway. She walked out, opened the door, went over to the neighbor's house. That person let her in. In that condition, she did a shh. And she lived. And that man who raped her had murdered at least another person who didn't have that gift kick in, didn't realize the promise of I won't kill you if you comply wasn't true. So can you just educate us a bit on the gift, how it works, and how we know when to listen? Sure. And by the way, even as I hear that story, I get chills now. And I remember very well hearing

it the first time and then hearing from so many people who've been victimized over the years who said to me, well, I say, how did you know that you should get away from that person? I say, I don't know how I knew. And then if I just am quiet for a moment, here come the details, like that tiny detail for her that led her to do this tremendously courageous thing of literally walking right down the hall, right behind him. She said to me, if I had breathed, he could feel my breath on the back of his neck, but I had breathed, he could feel my breath on the back of his neck, but I didn't breathe. And then he went on to the kitchen to get a knife, interestingly, and she turned and went out her door and went into the door across the hall,

which she knew would be open. And so what's going on there is that true fear, which she hadn't felt fear, by the way, up until that moment. She said it was amazing that she hadn't been afraid of him. She was very reluctant to be raped, obviously, and very resistant, but she had not felt fear that she would be killed until that moment. And true fear gives you a dose of some adrenaline. That's a famous thing we all know. But also cortisol, which is a brain chemical most people don't know about. Cortisol causes your muscles to swell up, basically becoming a kind of armor, causes your blood to clot more quickly in the event that you are stabbed, for example, and causes these brain chemicals together, basically get your arms and your legs ready for combat. And that's how they work. And so if we, if we accept that the natural signals that we get,

not the information that we think about, like there's a woman I'll tell you super quickly, a woman I interviewed for my second book who had somebody followed her and her, her daughter, as they walked a long walk at night from a movie theater. And he'd given to the creeps in line. He'd said to her, oh, is it ladies night out? Because there were a bunch of mothers and their daughters taking the kids to see a movie. And he had a t-shirt with a slogan on that gave her the creeps. Everything gave her the creeps. And then as she's walking in the night, she realizes he's following her to the car. And so she doesn't want to tell her daughter to speed up because if they run, he'd be able to run faster. And so she just accelerates her daughter slightly. They get to the car. She puts her daughter in the car first

and locks that door so she can get around to the passenger side. And when she gets to the passenger side, he is on her already and he's holding her legs. She hasn't swung her legs into the car yet. And she's looking at him and she suddenly gets this signal in her mind, car key. And she thinks to herself, well, I don't want to be the kind of person who sticks a car key into somebody's eyes because he was right there in front of her. And that's when she realizes she's already done it and she's already driven away and the car door has already slammed shut. And her daughter says to her, uh, mama, you haven't put your seatbelt on yet. All of that happens automatically. I want to say quickly, Megan, for your audience, I there's an advanced view that's available for

free at called gift of fear.com. And that's a gift of fear masterclass interviews with me, with all kinds of people who have prevailed through violence. And it's a gift of fear masterclass interviews with me, with all kinds of people who have prevailed through violence. And it's a nine part thing. And I want your intern to see it and your kids to see it before they go off to college and any kids to see it. It's free. And it's basically put on there as an advanced view. I think it'll always be free.

Who knows? But it's free right now. Gift of fear dot com. I'm I'm going to go and take it myself. I would 100 percent take your masterclass. I would actually enjoy it. I think you're just somebody who has helped me so many times. You've kept me safe, actually, as a client, but also just thanks to your teachings over

the past 30 years. And I'm incredibly grateful to you, Gavin, as are so many public officials and celebrities and regular folks. Please come back and we'll take a deeper dive into crime and celebrities and regular folks. Please come back and we'll take a deeper dive into crime and fear and all the rest of it. So great having access to your expertise. Thank you, Megan, for everything you do as well. Thank you so much. All the best.

Gavin DeBecker. Wow. He did not disappoint. I can't wait to take that masterclass. By the way, there's another masterclass out there by Victor Davis Hanson, which you should also take. Tomorrow, we've got a few great guests, including Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Nancy Armstrong. Now, she's also a friend of mine and she's brilliant. And she's done this fascinating documentary on ADHD and children and medications and very famous

people who have it and the upsides of it and the downsides of it. And I watched the whole thing and I was riveted. And I was like, my audience is gonna love this. So we're gonna talk to her and Glenn about all the latest goings on and January 6th and all of it. Don't miss the show. And in the meantime, download us and follow us on YouTube and we'll see you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.