The Megyn Kelly Show - Hysteria Harming Our Kids and Why We Can't Stay Focused, with Abigail Shrier, Johann Hari, and Megan Rafalski | Ep. 247

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

Megyn Kelly's latest "The Truth" monologue on COVID hysteria hurting our kids, plus she's joined by Abigail Shrier, author of "Irreversible Damage," Johann Hari, author of "Stolen Focus," and Megan Rafalski, a parent and head of the Education Task Force to Take Back Our Schools, on the need to balance precaution with liberty, parents fighting back over COVID restrictions and other issues, activist teachers trying to recruit LGBT kids, gender dysphoria and the danger of transitioning too early in childhood, a mom suing over teachers convincing her daughter she was trans, the trans collegiate swimmers making waves, why we can't stay focused and the forces working against us, how our kids are being hurt by tech and social media, the problem with addiction and depression in America, and more.Follow 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. The push for freedom is multiplying. You can feel it, can't you? The demands for a return to normalcy, for a return of the people's rights, like the right not to wear a mask, to say what gets injected into one's body without fear of losing one's job or education, to require truly informed consent on mandated medical treatments, to go to school without a mask, without plexiglass, without being treated like a leper when you're there. You could see it at the Defeat the Mandates rally in D.C. on Sunday.

Thousands of protesters in the cold, standing up for a return to liberty. And I also want you to know, spoiler alert, freedom wins. The papers tried to dismiss the event as, oh, just a bunch of MAGA folks with don't tread on me signs. But this was not a partisan event. Brett Weinstein, who helped organize it, is a liberal. Yesterday on this show, a self-described lifelong Democrat called in to say she had driven eight hours to be there. This isn't about left-right. Last weekend, I had dinner with 10 women in New York. These were women who voted for Joe Biden, some of whom campaigned for him. Women who considered themselves liberal and proud of it just one year ago, all of whom had effectively been red-pilled.

Some just registered Republican. Most openly prayed that DeSantis will be our next president. A few even mentioned Trump in a positive light. And all are furious about ongoing draconian COVID policies at the local, state, and national level. These are responsible, loving, kind, professional women, moms who hand sanitized, masked, quarantined, homeschooled, and didn't complain for nearly a year in a city devastated by COVID. But two weeks became two months, became two years, and nothing has changed. No off-ramps are provided, not just in New York City, but in many cities and states run by Democrats. And any complaints on behalf of themselves or their children are repeatedly met with,

do your part, how dare you, or people are dying. Case in point, Barry Weiss, another liberal friend of ours, who has seen the light on COVID. On Bill Maher, she appeared this past weekend, followed by a CNN doctor responding to her watch. You get the vaccine and you get back to normal. And we haven't gotten back to normal. And it's ridiculous at this point. This is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime. The United States lost 10,000 people last week. She needed to grow up because she's acting like a child. And when somebody who is who is relatively young and relatively

healthy says that, what they're saying is, I'll be okay if I get this virus. Screw you. He's mad because Barry said she's done. People are dying. He's not wrong about that. We all get that. The CDC says it was 7000 people last week, not 10000, mostly seniors. We have no idea how many of them actually died from covid as opposed to just dying with covid, a distinction the fear mongers keeping these tallies refuse to make. But yes, people are still dying from COVID, which is not going anywhere. And so we are faced with a decision now, after two years of this, of how we are going to handle this reality and also foster the well-being of our children

and ourselves. The COVID death rate matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. And guess who realized that first? Moms, like my new pals. And they are not selfish to say they, like Barry, are done. Their kids missed nearly a year of in-person school. When after 12 months of remote learning, they attended an open-the-schools rally. They were called white supremacists. Their kids still play basketball, dripping with sweat into a mask and while mandatorily vaccinated. The children, as young as two, have been forced to wear masks for eight to 10 hours a day for nearly two years. The kids ears are sore. Their faces are broken out. They can't breathe as well. They can't understand one another. They don't know what anyone's smile looks like. They've

been forced to eat lunch outside on the ground while six feet apart, sometimes in frigid temperatures. Many children are not even allowed to speak during lunch, including last year, my own. They see each other, other children at lunch, only through plexiglass. They're no longer allowed to sing at school. They're harshly scolded or even threatened with expulsion if their mask dips down below their nostrils. Hi, Horace Mann, talking about you. These kids lose playdates because other kids' moms are too scared to allow socializing. Their extracurricular activities have been canceled, along with their prom, their homecoming dance, their bar mitzvah. Is it any wonder the CDC says attempted suicides by teenage girls in the pandemic have gone up 51%?

That stress, anxiety, and depression among children has doubled since this thing started. These moms live in a city in which neither they nor their children can go into a restaurant, a Knicks game, a theater, or a gym without a vaccine and a mask and now a booster and their papers. A city in which CRT is rampant in the schools, violent crime, including murder, has spiked to record levels. Mentally ill vagrants are cutting up men in ATM vestibules and throwing innocent women in front of oncoming subway trains. They are dealing with a lot. They are doing their best to not scare their children, to give them normal lives, to play down their fears, not stoke them. Why doesn't the harm to these children being done during this pandemic count? Why does so many others belittle it or dismiss demands for normalcy as selfish?

People like those who host The View, for example, who undermine these New York moms and others just like them. Yesterday, they took aim at Bill Maher, another liberal, who has also had it with the COVID hysteria. I don't want to live in your paranoid world anymore, your masked paranoid world. You know, you go out, it's silly now. You know, you have your mask. You have to have a card. You have to have a booster. They scan your head.

Like you're a cashier and I'm a bunch of bananas. I'm not bananas. You are. That messaging? Not okay for the ladies of The View who love to mask, vax, and above all, shame. That's not really funny to people who have lost their kids to this vaccine or people who have lost family members. This is not something we're doing because it's sexually gratifying. This is what we're doing to protect our families.

And you don't have to do it, but stay away from everybody. Stay out of the public, man. This is not, nobody wants this. I don't want it. And I think he's forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated. People who can't get, little kids under the age of five. Or people with health conditions how dare you be

so flippant man they're over it like a relationship i'm over it i don't feel like seeing him anymore once again people are still at risk don't you care about the people who died what about the children how dare you how dare you whoop For two years, the American people have sacrificed incredibly during this pandemic. They have proven over and over and over again they're not a spoiled, selfish bunch of brats. They lost jobs, businesses, careers, marriages, life savings, while at the same time, in many cases, losing parents, friends, careers, marriages, life savings, while at the same time, in many cases, losing parents, friends, colleagues, and teachers. They get it.

They watched their children's anxiety, stress, depression, and even suicidal ideations go through the roof, all in the name of doing their part. They wore masks when they didn't want to. They got vaxxed and boosted when they didn't necessarily need to. They missed graduations, weddings, births, even funerals. They did all of this because they do care. And they were willing to make sacrifices for the good of society. But that calculation involves a balancing test. And at some point, the safety provided to society by these measures will no longer outweigh the negative impact on one's self, one's family and one I are saying, we have vaccines. We have therapeutics. We have PCR tests. We have antigen tests. We know far more about this virus than we used to. Like the fact

that we can all get and spread it, vaccinated and masked or not. And it is time to try to get back to normal. Like those red-pilled liberal moms that I met. I have young kids and I also have an 80-year-old mother and I get the need to protect the young and the old. My mom, she takes precautions and we help her. But she would never want our children to stay in COVID purgatory until all risk had been abated. Why are we treating our seniors, most of whom lived through far more challenging times than we have, without caving to their fears, as if they are incapable of handling risk? They're strong. They know how to protect themselves. And most of them have no interest in burdening their children and grandchildren,

even if it would eliminate some risk to themselves. As for children under five who cannot yet be vaxxed, whoopee, what a red herring, and you know it. The COVID death rate of healthy children under 11 is approximately zero. What these kids need is not more restrictions, it's less. They need to go to school, to see their friends' faces, to play, to sing, to play sports, and get their heart rates up, and have their faces uncovered while doing so, to eat lunch indoors, and to laugh and talk, not through plexiglass, to have their proms, their graduations, to not be treated like they are dirty, disease-carrying killers. One final note, some, like Whoopi's colleague Sarah Haynes, take a different view. They maintain this is the new normal. Listen. To the post-mask part, because I think there's

a prudence we've learned with the mask, kind of like 9-11 with flying, is always going to be here now. There's a new normal. I think some of the things we've learned in this pandemic are going to stay the same. I may never ride a subway again without a mask. I may never go indoors to big crowds, never feel comfortable without a mask. And that's up to me to do that. If Sarah would like to do that, fine. But I choose something different. I do not accept her new normal. The moms I met do not accept her new normal. Most Americans don't. We have never voted for these restrictions. They were handed down by leaders declaring emergencies that have now lasted years. It's not OK. It has to end. And if you agree, you have to fight. Now is the time. It's past time. Fight. Write your governor, your

congressmen and women, a letter to the editor, attend a rally, call your principal. You don't normally do that? Too bad. It's time. And vote. Vote like my new friends in New York are going to do. Vote in November like your future and that of your children depends on it. And don't let anyone shame you for demanding your rights, for protecting your children after two years of enormous sacrifice. We did our part. This isn't selfish. Liberty is a right. And none of this ends until we insist on its return. Joining me now is a mom who is doing just that, insisting on the return to normal. Megan Rafalski lives in Loudoun County, Virginia. She's the head of education task force to take back our schools. And Loudoun County, as you know, has become ground zero in this fight.

Yesterday, after Governor Glenn Youngkin said it was up to parents to decide if their child would be masked at school, she sent her 10-year-old boy to school without one. The school responded by sending him home. Megan, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Hey, Megan, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Of course. And I know you're feeling the same frustrations I am and had a moment of celebration when Glenn Youngkin won and said, I'm going to sign an executive order and then did so. And you had that feeling that I continue to wait to have where they can just go with their beautiful faces exposed and see their friends, beautiful faces and have a normal day at school without all the issues that come attached to these protocols. And you sent your boy and what happened? Yeah, there's so much to say. You're exactly right. I mean, when he, when Governor Youngkin came out with the executive order on last week, I cried and my husband and my son both embraced me and my son was so excited. We've been battling this since the beginning of the year for first, we asked for a religious

exemption that was denied. Then we asked for a medical exemption of which we really didn't feel like we legally needed to, but we were trying to go about the proper channels. That was also denied. My son's been having dizziness, headaches. He nearly blacked out in class one day. He began to have nosebleeds right before Christmas break. And his overall demeanor has been with school. I mean, I hesitate to say it, but depressed. It's been a really, really rough year and it's such a travesty because we love our school. We have been there since kindergarten. We actually, we have a special exemption right now

to go there that they have now threatened to revoke because we want him to finish with his peers to laugh and play exactly like you were talking about. So when we showed up yesterday morning, along with another group of moms, dads, and kids to walk in, we were strong armed at the door and told immediately to go to the library. We had asked several questions to which no one gave us answers. Long story short, our principal said he would be with us after announcements, then made us wait outside in the freezing cold for over an hour with our kids waiting to go to their classrooms. We asked why they were not being allowed to go to their classroom. I handed yet another letter of my religious exemption that I didn't really need because the governor said that we had our parental rights restored as they should be. And he took it and pretty much didn't respond to it

at all and just continued to quote what he says is policy. It's not policy. It's a mandate by the superintendent that's unlawful, by the way. And I would just encourage any teacher, I know you're out there. We see you. We hear you. There are ones that I'm talking to. If you are feeling threatened by administration, you need to go to HR. You need to tell them that you are working in a hostile work environment and that they are forcing you to do things that are unlawful. I know, unfortunately, right now that you are stuck in between a rock and a hard place in a lot of ways. And you can't talk to some of your colleagues because they have drunk the Kool-Aid. They're experiencing hypoxemia because they've got 18 masks on and they're upset as they should be. They can't breathe, but you've got to start

making your voice heard or this is not going to change. So yeah, you're right. My son was in, he was forced to go in the principal's office to which he closed the door with my son in there alone. Highly inappropriate. I already have, um, you know, I'm not going to get into that. That's getting into some things that are too personal at this point. Um, but the point of the matter is we are having a rally tonight of a rally for our rights at the school board meeting in Loudoun County. And I encourage anyone who's listening right now, if you are in the area and you want to fight for the rights of the parents to be the ones who decide what is right for their child. And you're right, Megan. I mean, you had so many good things

to say in your monologue, like personal choice, right? The party that cries, my body, my choice, my choice, my choice. Where is choice now? And I understand, and I am not being flippant at all about the severity for some people, but all the actual science and statistics out there show us that cloth masks, which is what these children are wearing, do not do squat. It's like trying to catch mosquitoes with a chain link fence. It doesn't work. That shows that all of the statistics we're seeing now with tests on these kids for after two years, kids born in the last two years have a lower IQ already. All of this stuff is happening and it's been a political war in a lot of ways.

Listen, I'm a mom. I love to be at my house. I like to clean it. I like to cook and provide and have people in it. I like to take my son to his baseball practices. And I like to lead a quiet life. But I have been forced to take the reins in a lot of ways because we've got to stand up. And if we don't stand up, then it's not going to change. So Megan, you're right. Plead with people.

Get involved. Get involved. You have to. It's past time. When I was speaking with these moms, I felt so inspired by them because none of them was particularly active. You know, I mean, a couple of them really wanted Joe Biden elected and had worked to get him elected. But, you know, they weren't the ones calling up the school board or going to the meetings or calling the principal or writing letters. And so they weren't. But what our kids have been through over the past two years is bad enough. And there are no off ramps provided that have raised our level of concern high enough that we realize now

no one's fighting for them. No one's fighting for them. And I am sick and tired of people like Whoopi Goldberg trying to shame people who stand up to say something, to say that balancing test is now leaning the other way. That doesn't mean we don't give a damn about the people dying from COVID, but it's still a balancing test. And we have other little people whose fortunes literally depend on us. You know, they have no one advocating for them. There's no one. Glenn Youngkin tried and your school board is overruling him. You're right. And can I just say that?

No one's talking to these kids. That's the whole point. They're talking to one another. They're getting guidance from people that know what they're talking about on all this science. Science. Follow the science. Okay, yeah, let's actually follow the science now since we've been saying it.

14 days to slow the spread has long since come and gone. Again, the severity of COVID for some people is a very real thing, absolutely. My in-laws over the Christmas break, they were severely ill. I would even say on death's door when I arrived to take care of them from COVID. Praise God for people and doctors

that are willing to step up and prescribe things that are necessary to fight an illness, things that actually don't cost a lot of money, things that don't have the name Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson and Johnson on them. You need to find a doctor, I would say, before you get sick so that you have a plan of attack when you do get sick. But let me just tell you this, upping your zinc, your vitamin C, your vitamin D, and getting outside for some fresh air is going to give you a really good chance when and if you do get sick, which you most likely will. This is like the flu now. We're nearing that endemic, like it's going to be around. You've got to figure out how

to live with this. And this is not a long-term solution that is sustainable. And they are destroying our kids' lives. Absolutely destroying them. Yep. And if we don't fight, no one will. That's what we've seen. You know, you kind of sit back sometimes and let other people take the lead. You don't want to be the squeaky wheel.

You're like, somebody else is going to solve this. It's going to come to an end. It hasn't. They won't. You don't want to be the squeaky wheel. You're like somebody else is going to solve this, going to come to an end. It hasn't. They won't. They they don't they don't want to. And certainly people without kids. I don't know whether Whippy Goldberg has children of her own or whether she has young children. I don't think she does. She's she's an elder, an older person now. But like they don't care. They really don't give a shit. They look at our kids like you should take the hit. So, okay. It's time for pushing back.

The kids didn't take the hit and they were, they were champions. They were amazing about it, but it's done. It's that piece of this has got to stop because now we're actually ruining the experience of a generation. And I don't, I don't want to hear from one more mom. My kid doesn't mind wearing the mask. Great. Good for your kid. Then you put your kid in that mask. My kid minds. If it's relevant what they mind or what they don't mind, then let's talk about that. Let's make it individual. And yet they still pretend like we are in March of 2020 and it's

infuriating. It is infuriating. It's totally infuriating. And you're right, Megan. I was not an activist. I love gardening. I love being outdoors. I like having coffee with friends and listening to what they're going through and comforting them and encouraging them and praying with them. Two years ago, when we were in school, my son was in third grade at the time, I was hearing about these pornography books and what in the world are they talking about? These books start coming into our school. That's a whole nother story for another day that I'd love to talk about. And actually, I'm so excited about your next guest.

And I don't know if I'm allowed to say who it is. Yeah, yeah. I have her book. Abigail Schreier. Yes, right here. Abigail Schreier. She is on to it. So there's so much damage. It's amazing. I know

they're damaging them in so many ways. It's like I didn't even scratch the surface. I want to say this. It's going to be a legal battle now in Virginia. There's going to be a lawsuit. There's already a lawsuit by the school challenging the Youngkin executive order claiming that it violates a state law that was enacted under the earlier governor that says you have to follow the CDC recommendations and that's why they can't lift the mask mandate. That's going to there's going to be a legal challenge and they're going to present it to a judge and a judge is going to have to read the letter of the law and decide whether that's true. But even so, the Virginia state legislature is prepared, as I understand it, to write a new law.

So what are they waiting for? Just do it. Just do it. Don't wait. Just do it. Get on it. And apparently they have the votes and now they have a Republican governor. These kids have suffered long enough. Megan, I'm so glad that you're fighting, that your son is fighting and let him know that I know he knows this, but he's not alone. I know there were about 160 to 100 students not let in yesterday. Yeah. Can I say something about that real quick? Yeah, I'll give you the last word. So in an effort to control the narrative, as usual, there were so many children that showed up to go into school unmasked and were strong armed by the presence of authority and standing there looking at them and intimidating them,

pull up your mask, pull up your mask, pull up your mask, put on your mask, where's your mask? And people, kids, so especially in the high school, and I want to talk about this because this is something that is not being discussed enough. There are teachers that are threatening kids to sideline them from sports, to not write recommendation letters because they either haven't gotten the vax or they don't wear a mask to school. Let's talk about that. That needs to be talked about a little bit more. The mind control of the adults in the room is absolutely despicable and deplorable, and something needs to be done about it. And Loudoun County seems to be claiming such an equitable environment.

Well, I have seen quite a lack of that recently. Well, I can't wait to see what happens at the school board meeting tonight. We'll cover it tomorrow. Megan, good luck. Sounds luck. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. When we come back, it was a good tease by Megan. Abigail Schreier is here and we are talking. You're not going to believe this. A mom believes the school has been pushing her daughter to become trans, her seventh grader. And now she's got the actual audio tapes and Abigail's going to play them here for the first time to prove it. Wait until you hear these California teachers and their plan for this one woman's child. Don't go away. I'm joined now by Abigail Schreier, the brilliant Abigail Schreier. And if you have not read,

if you haven't read her book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, you have to, you must. It's a life changer. I mean, truly, it's a life changing experience. She is now an independent journalist on Substack as well. Abigail, that's wonderful. That's amazing. And it's so great to have you back. Oh, it's great to be here, Megan. Always great to talk to you.

Likewise. So, OK, and you heard our last guest is in love with you, too. This story is scary. This we talked about this when you came on my show and to the listening audience. If you didn't hear Abigail's full length interview on our show from last year, it's one of my very favorite interviews we did since I launched the show. And we talked about what's happening in certain school districts, including California. public schools, that they allow students to leave campus during the daytime and go off campus to get cross-gender hormones or puberty blockers. I know it's happening and they don't loop in the parents, but this is next level, what you've discovered out of this one California school. So can you

just set up the story for us? Sure. So I was sent audio of a California Teachers Association. That's the largest public school teachers association, public school union in California, and which two teachers were at a large conference and someone had recorded it. And these two teachers were talking about how to deceive parents and electronically surveil students for personalized invitations to the LGBTQ clubs, how to hide the membership of these clubs from parents. And we're talking about middle schoolers, 12-year-olds. And they were specifically targeting students they thought would be vulnerable to invitations with personalized invitations to join the club. So, you know, this was all on audio. I wrote it up and it's it's highly disturbing. It's outrageous. It's immoral and maybe illegal.

It's unbelievable. This one mom believed that they had tried to push her daughter into thinking she was a boy. And she suspected based on her daughter's experience. And then you get it on tape. These teachers admitting they do exactly that. So here is it's two teachers in particular who you have on tape. I believe this teacher is named Kelly Bakari. And it's soundbite eight talking about how they totally stalked the children. Listen.

So we started a brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year. What are we going to do? We got to see some kids in person at the end of the last year, not many, but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. We totally, when we were doing our virtual learning, totally stalked what they were doing on Google, right, when they weren't doing schoolwork. One of them was just Googling Transgender Disability, and we were like, check, we're going to invite that kid when we get back onto campus. Whenever they follow, like, the Google Doodle links or whatever, right? We make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever.

And we use our observations of kids in the classroom, conversations that we hear to personally invite students, because that's really the way that we kind of get the bodies in the door, right? That they need sort of a little bit of an invitation. Okay, so that's at a teacher's, I didn't realize it was at a teacher's union meeting, because what I saw was that there was some meeting discussing, quote, best practices. This is her pitch for the best practices for teachers.

That's the important thing to know. These are not two rogue teachers. In fact, I uncovered more videos from the California Teachers Association in which they are training teachers statewide in the deception of parents and through these LGBTQ clubs, commonly called the Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs, or they have various names for them. This one was called Inequity Club and then UBU. But they're even doing it in the elementary level. And they will often direct kids not to tell the parents. The really insidious thing here is that they're hiding it.

They're actively deceiving the parents. They're telling kids to keep secrets from their parents. U-B-U-Y-O-U-B-Y-O-U. And the reason she chose that as the name of her club for LGBTQ kids is because she didn't want it to be too on the nose to where the parents could know just by the name of the club that this was something involving potential trans issues and so on, because they want to foster secrecy between the children and their parents. And they're succeeding in really gender confusing a lot of young kids. I mean, you know, you heard from Jessica Conan, the mother who

was who is furious and suing and rightly so. But, you know, going out and changing as young kids gender identity without discussing this with the parents, giving them a new name and pronouns. And that's what was done, she alleges, to her 12-year-old daughter. I mean, this is something that the courts are going to have to sort out. And parents are critical here. They absolutely must fight back. This is that mom that you just mentioned. Now, again, her name, Jessica Conan. She was at a school board meeting in December. Just to just so I'm perfectly clear, I may have misstated this.

Is Kelly Bakari and the other woman who she's talking with on this on these tapes? Is she at Jessica Conan's school? Or is this Kelly Baraki and Laura Kedara Caldera are at the Spreckle School? They've been suspended. But, you know, look, this is how the California Teachers Association is training teachers statewide. This is not about two rogue teachers. And that's what I really want everyone to know. Whatever happens with these two teachers, we've got a massive problem.

This was an agricultural community, okay? This is not a liberal community. The activist teachers know exactly what they're doing and they're not confined to the Upper West Side or Santa Monica. And they just before we play Jessica soundbite of her going off on the school board about what they did to her 12 year old girl, they because the soundbite was a little hard to decipher. We have it verbatim if you guys want to look at it on YouTube later. They're talking about how she was going during the remote learning, the teachers on the Google Docs record, you know, that the teacher can see what the student's done and the student uses it at home to see where they've Googled, whether they Googled something, anything having to do with trans or LGBTQ. And that's how they would say, aha, that's a mark. We got to go get

her. And they would recruit them. And meanwhile, you and I talked about this last time you explained that in, you know, something upwards of 85% of the cases where kids think they may be trans, if you just leave them alone and don't do anything, it goes away. It resolves. You don't want them recruited by teachers into a group that celebrates it. No, we're solidifying a very gender confused identity in a generation of kids. I mean, really astounding numbers of kids now. And yes, historically, gender dysphoria, which is an absolutely real condition that afflicted an infinite, truly infinitesimal percentage of the population, a, very small, 0.001% of the population.

Over 70% of the kids always outgrew it on their own. Some didn't and in adulthood would transition, but today we're not giving them time to outgrow it. We're affirming and solidifying that identity in young people and putting them on a path to being lifetime medical patients. And there's so much regret in so many of these kids when they take drastic measures, like Abigail's book says, they cause irreversible damage to their bodies because they get sucked into groups online or perhaps at school that want to celebrate the transition before they're even sure whether they want to make one. And then there's tons of pressure to go through with it. Tons of pressure to go through with it and not to reverse.

OK, so here is this mom, Jessica Conan, who's now suing this school for what they did to her 12 year old daughter. Listen. Do they have psychiatry degrees that I was unaware of because I didn't hire them? OK, I did not hire them to sit there and nitpick my child's brain. You took away my ability to parent my child even before I had any knowledge. I didn't even get to show support. You asked for support. I didn't get a chance. Your job was to educate my child in math, science, English, etc. Do your job and let me do mine. You changed her personal documentation, her gender, her name, her email. I authorized

and AKA added to her attendance because I wanted to be supportive. But guess what? She's allergic to bees. Her medical record says a birth name and you changed it. Who administers that now? Not everything, not me. You guys did this on your own accountability and you changed it. Who administers that now? Not everything. Not me. You guys did this on your own accountability and you've gone too far. They downgraded me in front of my child and allowed me to question myself as a mother.

You sat there and told me how my child was going to be. And then you wrapped your hands around her while I sat across the table and cried because you thought you could be there better than I, and I never got a chance. She was scared to even say anything. Your guys' voice for her, not hers. Wow. What do you make of that? I mean, it's hard to listen to. The pain is so raw. And I've talked to a lot of these parents. Look, schools are doing this. They are conspiring.

It's a conspiracy because it's a school-like conspiracy. They create these documents called gender support plans. They change the child's name, gender pronouns, identity in school, and they actively conceal this from parents. I've talked to parents who have walked through the halls, who have been on the PTA, and had teachers lie to their faces by calling the daughter by the female name in front of the parent while secretly calling her a different name with the school. This is so confusing to a 12-year-old when she has been identifying as a boy for a year. It's awfully hard to go back. But it's also alienating her from her parents because she's creating this whole secret world from them. So the parents, the people best able to protect her, are completely unable to do

so. We have parental rights under the 14th Amendment. The Due Process Clause allows us to direct the upbringing of our children. And we need to fight this. Parents need to go into court and have the courts sort this out because the public schools are not going to give them back their rights. You know what else? It's such a dangerous precedent. If you're a predator at a school where this is the atmosphere, oh, we do secrets between teachers and students. It's not appropriate to tell mom and dad everything. Mom and dad are the ones who are the bad ones, the outsiders, the ones who don't want what makes you happy. I'm here for you. This is how sexual abuse takes place in schools and stays under the rug for too long because teachers groom young

children and lead them to believe that telling is the mistake and that the parents are the outsiders. I'm not saying that these teachers are sexual abusers. I'm saying this approach to the relationship between teacher, student, and parent is sick. That's exactly right. That was so well said. You know, the nefarious thing is the secrecy. And what they are doing is, just as you said, they are breaking down boundaries between, you know, children and adults. And by creating a secret space from the parents, a secret world.

And yes, that absolutely conditions a child to be approached by a predator because after all, the child's already been habituated to this idea that you keep these secrets from your parents with adults, with other adults. This woman did fine, Jessica Harmeet Dhillon. Yay. Thank goodness she did. She is suing. Harmeet's amazing. She's been taking out a lot of these cases and she gave a statement. I think this is to the Daily Mail saying that since she filed the case, she hasa, had said to the San Francisco Chronicle, the quotes are accurate, but they were taken out of context or misrepresented. The the district has hired a law firm to investigate. And the superintendent says that the personnel policies prevent him from revealing whether the

teachers are back at school, but the district is reviewing and updating its policies on student clubs. That's not going to be sufficient, nowhere near sufficient. I mean, it's amazing. She says the quotes were accurate, but taken out of context. Well, that's why I quoted them at length, because I had a feeling once they were aired, someone might say, oh, we need more context. We need more context for the surveilling of kids to find out who's vulnerable to a private invitation, personalized in-person invitation to an LGBTQ club where you can't tell your parents? I mean, look, these clubs are fine. They can exist, but there absolutely needs to be full transparency with parents. And what keeps parents from fighting back is they're embarrassed. They're afraid of upsetting their child. Look at Jessica Conan. Her daughter's doing much better. Okay. And her daughter knows that her mother's fighting for her. Parents need to get over their embarrassment and get out there and sue. Because this Lori Caldera is on tape saying,

because we're not official, we have no club rosters. We keep no records. In fact, sometimes we don't really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming, we're like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe they came. And your point is, this is all intentional. She did actively work to keep parents from knowing what club their child was in and whether they had an issue like this, which can be severely traumatizing emotionally and otherwise.

And she ought to be fired. She should be fired immediately, as should this Kelly. Well, however you say her last name. There's so much more to discuss. Um, we're going to pick it up there and we're going to talk about this transgender swimmer at UPenn because now there's an allegation, uh, that Leah Thomas, who formerly swam on the men's team, she's biologically male, um,

conspired to lose a race to a different trans swimmer. It's getting complicated. It's next. Uh, and remember you can find The Megan Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. The full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. That's youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast, subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever

you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find our full archives, including more than 240 shows. And you have to listen to our first time with Abigail Schreier way back. This is how much I love her on episode 12. So Abigail, one other thing before we leave this first story, Buena Vista Middle School is the name of the school I should mention in Southern California. Lori Caldera and Kelly Baraki are the teachers we're discussing, though it's not limited to them in this school or others, maybe even yours to the parents out there listening. But this Caldera was awarded some award as a role model for inclusion. And she came out defending her work saying, the students set the agenda, that the teachers are there to provide honest and fair answers to

their questions. And this is as this mother is claiming that this, that Lori Kelly and others planted the seed in her daughter's head that she was bisexual, then went on to convince her that she was actually a transgender boy. This this happened in my school, not this exact thing, but this is the reason I left my boy's school. I took my boys out, Doug and I did, because they they taught the boys. I think I told you this on the show. One of the parents at the parent teacher said, why did my son come home asking, is it true he can prevent puberty by taking a pill and then have his penis cut off at age 18 if he wants to be a girl? And the teacher's defense, we expected her to say, no, we never said that.

Her response was, we take the discussion wherever the boys want it to go. We were all like, why do you do that? That's not OK with us. That's right. This is all over the country. I mean, this is not confined to Southern California at all. In fact, this was an agricultural community, you know, where this took place near Salinas. This is not, you know, Santa Monica, but it is all over the country. It calls from parents in Florida, you know, you name it. And it's incredibly flagrant. They believe they have the right to do this. And I'll tell you something, you said, oh, this is student led. Well, I can tell you why I know that's not true, because I examined many of the videos put out by the California Teachers Association. That's the

largest public school teachers union in California. And one of the things that is a common theme in the creation of a middle school LGBTQ club and even elementary school LGBTQ club is they have trouble with retention. Kids don't want to show up, especially when the weather's nice outside so the teachers will talk and instruct other educators statewide on how do we get the kids to stay how do we get the kids to come back and one of the things they talk about is giving out candy one teacher brought up jolly ranchers was very effective i mean this is ridiculous it is very much activist teacher driven this is not based on the student wants. It's really based on the teachers and gratifying their activist agendas.

Giving out candy. I'm picturing that creepy guy and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with a creepy little candy thing. You know, remember, like, that's insane. I love the fact that the students don't really want anything to do with them. You know, I love the fact that they have actually to take these active measures to recruit. So if we can just get them to stop doing that, maybe these kids can lead a normal life and not be bothered and, most of the teachers who are pushing this agenda are neither gay nor transgender. You know, and unsurprisingly, you know, middle schoolers don't always want to sit around with a middle-aged white woman talking about gender and their new gender identity or their new sexuality. They'd rather go play ball. But, you know, I have transgender parents calling me and gay parents calling me all the time saying, we don't really want these people we don't know keeping secrets with our kids and creating new identities for our kids. I mean, I literally had a transgender parent call me and

say, I really don't like this. What can I do to stop it in my kid's school? Nor are transgender parents from coast to coast looking to recruit other transgender people. But transgender people are not looking to recruit other trans people. Only these weird activists are doing this crap, right? They don't speak for the trans community. This is wrong on every level, whether it's gay, lesbian, you know, like you, like I have trans people who are friends, gay and lesbian people who are in your family and so on. Like they don't want to recruit. This is a weird new dynamic of like dangling something in front of the children and trying to make it seem cool or desirable. And you've got them in these transcripts talking about how they say like, well, how do we get them?

Well, we go back to them. We say, we miss you. We miss you. And it's just totally, it's so untruthful to suggest that this is somehow bigoted approach by parents. I mean, think about it this way. What if the teacher were just creating a secret Christian club in which they were going to teach kids about Christianity, but not tell the parents. So they told the kids, don't tell the parents, but we're here to talk about faith and my interpretation of your faith. I wonder how parents would react then. And we know how parents would

react. They would hate that. They would say, that's none of your business. What are you doing in my family's faith? And my kids aren't supposed to keep secrets from me. And that's what we should be saying across the board with everything, including LGBTQ clubs. Well, and especially if, what if you're Jewish? Then you really object. It's like, wait a minute, stay in your lane. We did a lot to educate our child

on what his religion is and what our beliefs are. And you're not gonna change it in your secret club, which is kind of what they're doing. All right, we're gonna pick it up with Leah Thomas. I'm gonna hold you over if you don't mind. We'll talk about Leah Thomas. Not at all. That case is getting confusing and even more disturbing. And now there's an allegation that she lost. So she is a biological male swimming as a woman. She's been crushing all the women

on her team and other teams. Then she swam against a biological woman who was about to transition to male. That's why they were allowed to swim against each other. And she lost. Now there's an allegation. It was a deal between the two of them. Don't go away. We'll be right back. So, Abigail, this UPenn situation continues to make news. They have a person who was born male, who lived his life as a man, who was on the male swimming team at UPenn. And then two years or two or three years into swimming as a man decided to transition to female, took a year of hormones and now is swimming on the female team and he goes now by the name leah leah thomas leah's been crushing all of her competitors uh and until uh earlier this month when leah leah lost okay so leah who did leah lose to did leah lose to another woman that just she happened to swim against in a meet not exactly she swam

against a transgender swimmer on the yale team but this so i was asking myself okay so let's just say leah is a woman she should be swimming against she and she has been swimming against women so man i know no but i'm saying i'm trying to walk myself through the genders try to to understand what happens. You know what I mean? So like Leah's in the pool as a woman identified as a woman. Who is she swimming against lately? She's been swimming against biological women. That's why she's been crushing because she's actually a biological man. Now she loses. Who does she lose? That's correct. Yeah. So now she loses. Who does she lose to? Somebody says a man, a trans man. I'm like, well, that's a biological woman. So it's the same. So she's so she's. But this this helps Leah's argument in a way, because she kind of lost to a biological woman.

She did lose to a biological. But now a fellow swimmer on Leah's team comes out and says that was no accident that she she told outkick sports uh that's clay travis's organization that she saw them talking that um it was right before the 100 freestyle race on january 8th that leah's time and even the swimmers observations of leah that day suggest she wasn't even trying to win she says these two are friends she saw them talking she, I think there was a deal to let the other swimmer win to prove the point that Leah could be beaten by quote, you know, a woman. And this other woman is biologically women, a woman. I know it gets confusing. I hope you guys are still with me. And here's an example. So the Yale swimmer, who again is a woman who's going to transition to male, got a 49.57 on the 100 freestyle. Thomas lost, Leah Thomas lost to that swimmer at 52.84. So it wasn't close.

By swim times, that's two full seconds. That's not close, or three. She crushed. During a November meet, Leah Thomas swam that same race at 49.42, which would not only have crushed her own time, but would have beaten the Yale swimmer's time easily. So it does suggest something may have gone on there. And you tell me how this was allowed to happen on the UPenn swim team with no one doing anything about it. Well, it's awfully suspicious. That's a difference of 3.5 seconds, which is massive in the 100 yard. You know, I've talked to Olympic coaches about this and the times are roughly same, you know, similar in the 400 meter track events.

And there an Olympic coach has told me that that you expect to see variations of roughly 0.2 or 0.3 seconds meet to meet. Here with Leah Thomas, suddenly we see a difference of a variation of 3.5 seconds. That's massive. So look, we're never going to know what happened, but that's awfully suspicious. And swimmers, the swimmer who spoke to an outkick, they know when a swimmer is just keeping pace with the other swimmers. You can tell.

And when a swimmer is swimming their hardest. So I think there's a lot of credence to that, but there's something else too. The trans man who allegedly beat Leah Thomas was allowed to continue to swim against the females. I mean, this is someone who identifies as a male, but is swimming against the females. Why? Because there is no logic to any of this. It's all about choosing your competitors based on who you can beat and creating chaos. And that's what they're doing. Is the trans male swimmer at Yale.

I thought that that person hadn't done anything other than have a double mastectomy. That's all. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm talking about hormones. I thought that, um, that person had done nothing to go from female to male other than the removal of the breasts. So she had, you know, that, that swimmer has not started testosterone to the best of my knowledge. Um, you know, has had a double mastectomy, has not started testosterone to the best of my knowledge. You know, has had a double mastectomy, but not started testosterone, but that person identifies as male. I thought this was about identity. Suddenly when you want to swim against women, it's not about identity. It's about something else. It's about current, you know, hormone levels, you know, bioactive hormone levels. This is ridiculous because of course the changes that are brought on by male puberty are enormous. All they're doing is

cherry picking the competitors they want. And so we're allowing mediocre males to smash women's records. Right. Exactly. Because when Leah Thomas was a man, was swimming with the men, he was nothing special. Now that he's crossed over to swimming with the men, he was nothing special. Now that he's crossed over to swimming with the women and he's got, you know, a foot in height over them and his, you know, his femurs are longer, his arms are longer. He's crushing. He's crushing Leah Thomas. She is crushing in every race, except weirdly that one where, you know, Leah was seen talking to the other trans student, blah, blah, blah. People can form their own conclusions. So explain this to me, Abigail, because even Michael Phelps has come out now saying, look, I believe we should all feel comfortable with who we are in our own skin. But sports need to be played on an even playing field.

And that's, I think, him saying this is not fair. He can see it. He knows how hard these women work and that they have no chance against a biological male. But nobody's doing anything about it. USA Swimming, help me understand this. They issued a statement in support of transgender athlete inclusion, but they didn't commit to any particular rules. And I guess now they're kind of saying, I don't know what USA Swimming is saying. NCAA is kicking it. USA Swimming seems to be kicking it. Who's deciding the rules? Who gets to say, no, you can't swim against the biological women here at UPenn?

It seems like the Olympic Committee is going to ultimately make a lot of these choices. They're doing it on a sport-by-sport basis. But it's ridiculous because, as you said, the bioactive, however much you bring down your current bioactive testosterone level, it's too late. If you've been through male puberty, you have a much larger heart, you have much larger lungs, you have much more oxygenated blood, you have much more fast, which much muscle fiber, you have vastly greater muscle mass. You know, this is not a fair competition and everyone knows that. And I'll just say one more thing. You know, all these people who go on and

on about empathy, we need more empathy. Why don't they try for a moment to put themselves in the shoes of a young woman who has spent her entire life competing and working to be a division one athlete only to be bested by a mediocre biological male? Try that one on for size. It's completely unjust and everyone knows it. Yes. I one on for size. It's completely unjust, and everyone knows it. Yes, I could not agree more. It's just like I was opening the show with talking about the COVID thing. You get lectured if you try to speak up on behalf of your child, saying, he lived like this for two years, and I don't want him to have to live like this anymore. It's time to shift the balance back in favor of the children. They say you want to kill grandma,

they call you selfish, and blah, blah, blah's like then they demand empathy and they demand that you consider society at large. Great. Let's both do that. Let's both do that. You consider society at large, too, and you include all the children in it, too. And and the sacrifices they have had to make for very little risk to themselves personally, which isn't even medically ethical to ask children to take mandatory vaccines that they don't need to, quote, protect the elderly. A lot of doctors have come on the show and said that same thing here. Right. It's like the empathy only goes in one direction. The good of society, which is what Glad is arguing to keep trans swimmers and athletes in the opposite sports sports. They say it's about the good of society. It's not just these individual swimmers. Well, why aren't they factored in? Why don't they get a vote in the good of society? The good of society? The good of society is successful young women. That's the good of society. It's complete nonsense to suggest otherwise. America has been awfully proud of its young women with good reason and our talented female athletes. And now we're letting those records and those achievements be vandalized or completely

eliminated. It's really an outrage and it's past time we stopped allowing it. Yeah. I'll tell you, it's going to be interesting when and if Leah Thompson, Thomas, breaks a record held by Katie Ledecky, you know, one of our most decorated swimmers. And then what? Are we going to allow Leah to say I am the first female to swim the 100 freestyle at this number? No, we're not. We're going to have to speak out against it because Leah didn't travel the same roads Katie Ledecky did to get to that number. And, you know, with all due respect, she doesn't get to claim those those wins under that moniker. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Think about all these little girls who are watching this right now and their parents thinking,

should I wake her up at 4 a.m. every morning for swimming? What's the point? What's the point to have a mediocre boy decide his junior year of high school, actually, I'm a girl. I want to compete on the girls team. And there you go. He gets to destroy her scholarship, eliminate all of her potential. I mean, we're eliminating a whole generation of female potential right now. Now's the time to stop it.

Yeah, that's right. And I've said it before. Let's see what happens in women's professional tennis when you have a man say, you know what? I'm a woman now. I've been through puberty. I'm a full man. I've got all my muscles. I got my biceps.

I got it all. And I'm just going to take a little tour on the woman's side. And you see who wins all the prize money and who gets all the attention and whether people will be more vocal on behalf of young women then. Abigail, you're amazing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me on, Megan. So much love.

Okay, we're going to switch gears now. And we're going to talk to a guy named Johan Hari. He's got a book out called Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression. Now, that book became a celebrated New York Times bestseller. And then he wrote a follow-up. This is the one that's actually out now and it's called Stolen Focus. Why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply. Again, have you suffered from depression? Do you now find yourself struggling to pay attention? You are not alone. These are really common problems. And some of them have actually been manipulated into you.

Okay. Some of them are not entirely your fault. So we're going to ask Johan about it all. And he's here now. Johan, thank you for being here. Hey, Megan. That was a great intro. Thanks very much. Oh, my pleasure. Okay. So let's talk about focus because I can see it. Anybody who's gone out to dinner, you look around the restaurant at any given table, half of the tables are on their iPhone while conversation's happening with real live humans before their faces, right? You try to talk to a teenager,

they're constantly looking down at their phone. They won't even look at you. You know, the attention span seems to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And how, so I want to know why, and I want to know how is that affecting us? How is the lack of focus affecting us? That was exactly the question I asked myself because I could feel it happening to myself. With every year that passed, it felt like things that required deep focus, like reading a book, were getting more and more like running up and

down escalator. I could do it, but it was getting harder and harder. So I started to research this. I was quite struck by some of the early research that I saw. For every single child who was diagnosed with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children given that diagnosis. And that's a real problem that they're identifying. A typical American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. So I wanted to understand exactly that question you're asking, Megan. Why is this happening to us? So I use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to travel all over the world, from Miami to Melbourne to Moscow, to interview over 200 of the leading experts on focus and attention.

And what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can cause your attention to deteriorate have been hugely rising in the last few years. Obviously, invasive tech is one of them. It actually goes way beyond invasive tech, from the food we eat to the sleep we don't get. And this is so important. I mean, I kind of's that our attention didn't collapse our attention has been stolen from us by these bigger forces and the reason the thing you said that's so important is why is this so why is this so crucial i just say to anyone watching or

listening think about anything you've ever done in your life that you're proud of whether it's starting a business being a good parent and learning to play the guitar, whatever the thing you're proud of is that thing required a lot of sustained focus and attention. And when focus and attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down, your ability to solve your problems breaks down. This is why we become more anxious in a way you become a kind of stump of yourself. You can sense what you might have been, but you feel you can't get it, which is why we have to tackle these problems very clearly and face on. You tried it yourself, right? You went to one of the most beautiful places in America, Cape Cod, and tried to unplug and reconnect, grow from the stump to the flowering tree. And so talk to us about that.

A child in an elementary school playing when he saw that image. But no, you're totally right. Well, at the start of this journey for my book, Stolen Focus, I thought the problem, I basically had two stories about why I couldn't pay attention. I thought you're weak, you don't have enough willpower and someone invented the smartphone. So I decided to make a really big step of willpower. I went away for three months to Provincetown, which you mentioned, with no phone and no laptop that could get online. I had a huge brick phone that couldn't get onto the internet either. And I learned a lot, including about the limits of this approach.

But the thing that amazed me was how much my attention came back because I was nearly 40. I thought, maybe it's just that my attention, you know, I've gotten older, your mind deteriorates. My attention went back to what it had been when I was 17. It was extraordinary. And I remember at the end of those three months, and there were lots of changes that happened in Provincetown beyond tech that improved my attention that we'll maybe we'll get to. But I remember at the end of it thinking, well, I never want to go back to how I lived before. Why would I go back to that? And I'm being reunited with my phone in Boston. And within a month, I never went back to quite as bad as I've been, but I went a long way back. And I only understood why when I went to interview someone called Dr. James Williams,

who was a senior Google strategist who became horrified by what Google was doing, quit, and has become one of the leading philosophers of attention in the world. And he said to me, the mistake you've made with taking this approach that's purely individual is it's like thinking the solution to air pollution is for you personally to wear a gas mask, right? I'm not against gas masks. If I lived in Beijing, I would wear one. But this is a huge, exactly like you said at the start, Megan, this is happening to all of us. At the moment, it's like someone is pouring itching powder over us all the time. And then that person is leaning forward and saying, hey, hey buddy you might want to learn how to meditate

then you wouldn't scratch so much to which the obvious response is yeah I'll learn to meditate but we need to stop you pouring the itching powder on us which is why we need to have two levels of response to this there are lots of things that we can do as individuals to protect ourselves and particularly our children the last quarter of the book is about our kids. There's all sorts of steps that everyone can take tomorrow, but I want to level with people. That will help. It's helped me a lot. I can talk about what those steps are, but it will only get you so far because we're living, Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children's attention problems in the world, said to me that we need to ask if we're living in what he called an attentional pathogenic environment, an environment that is undermining the ability of all of us to pay attention.

And to deal with that, we're going to have to take on these powerful forces that are doing this to us. And I believe we can. And it's not just the iPhone. I mean, I remember this is anecdotal, but when I was at Fox News, I'm working in cable, you'd look down at the screen and there I am delivering a news report or one of my colleagues delivering a news report. And of course, you've got the lower third that adds a new piece of information, you know, in addition to what the anchor is telling you. And then beneath that, you have the ticker that has got all, you know, the NASDAQ and the stocks. And so people can understand whether their money's going up or down in the stock market.

And then on screen left, you'd have additional facts about this guest or this topic, right? So it's like, and then people at home could watch all that and do picture and picture so that they've got the NFL game sitting there in the bottom corner. And they probably have their phone out as well. And then you go to break and you give the audience a task, like go to foxnews.com and enter, you know, ask, answer our poll, right? Like how many things can we layer on ourselves at one time you're so right megan you've gone to one of the key 12 factors that i write about and there was a moment this really fell into place for me i went to interview professor earl miller who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world he's at mit and he said to me look you've got to understand one thing

about the human brain more than anything else you can only think about one or two things consciously at a time that's it right this is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain human brain has not changed in 40 000 years it ain't going to change on any time scale anybody's going to see you can only think about one or two things at a time but what's happened is we've fallen from massive delusion the average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time so when scientists get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, they observe them. And what they discover is you can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you very rapidly juggle between

the things you're doing. And it turns out that comes with a huge cost. The technical term for this is the switch cost effect. When you try to do more than one thing at a time, exactly what you're describing, you're trying to watch Fox News. You're also trying to watch the game. You're also trying to, what was that person just say to me on Facebook? What was the WhatsApp message there? Wait, who's at my door? What you're doing is when you try to multitask, you will do everything you're trying to do much less well. You make more mistakes. You remember less of what you do. You're less creative. You're just significantly more incompetent. And there's one study, there's loads of evidence for this. There's one very small study that really drove it home for me. Hewlett Packard, the printer company, did a little experiment. They got a

scientist in and he split their workers into two. And one group was told, just do whatever your task is, get on with it. You're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, do whatever your task is, but you've got to answer a fairly heavy amount of email and phone calls. So basically the life most of us live. And then at the end of it, they gave them all an IQ test. The group that had not been interrupted did 10 IQ points better on average on that test. And to give you a sense of how big that is, if you smoke cannabis in the short term, it lowers your IQ by five points. So that evidence shows you'd be better off sitting at your desk,

getting stoned and doing one thing at a time than you would what we do at the moment, which has been constantly distracted, you know, not getting stoned. And to be clear, you're better off neither getting stoned nor multitasking. But Professor Miller put it to me, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation. And there's just one more study about this that really threw me. A guy called Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon discovered if you're interrupted, and it could be something as small as a text message, it will take you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before. But most of us are never getting 23 minutes spare. So we're constantly operating at this profoundly diminished level of attention and focus.

And so the question is, how do we stop doing that? How do we save ourselves? Because if even you went to Provincetown and came back and got sucked back in, I mean, it makes me feel better because most people don't have three months to go spend at the beach and they have to stay in this world permanently. And then you came back. We have to ask ourselves about solutions as opposed to just unplugging because that's not realistic. Exactly. That's as good a tease as any to leave it right there. Squeeze in a break, come back with answers.

And I want to get to the depression thing too because I think a lot of people are dealing with that right now. So Johan, what are the solutions? And you mentioned, one thing you mentioned that I'd love to get to is sleep yeah so for all of the 12 factors that are screwing up our ability to focus and pay attention we've got to handle it at two levels I would put it as we've got to play defense and we've got to play offense so there's all sorts of steps that everyone listening can take tomorrow

today to defend themselves and their children so I'll give you just one example that helps a little bit with sleep. Sleep is a huge factor. I'm sure we'll get to that. So you can't see, I'm pointing stupidly, but you can't see behind my laptop, obviously. I have in the corner of my room, something called a K-safe. So it's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put your phone in, you put the lid on, you turn the dial at the top and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. On my laptop, I have a program called Freedom that does the same thing. I will not sit down to watch a movie with my partner. I will not sit down to have a meal with my friends unless we all put our phones in the

K-safe. And it's hard at first. It massively helps me with sleep, by the way, because you lie there with your phone next to you, you're sort of half awake, you feel anxious, you check it. If you just lock it away, you've just got to go to sleep. You just lie there, you've got nothing else to do. So it's really difficult at first, but as the muscles of focus start to come back, as you find yourself, the rewards of focus start to kick in, being able to think deeply, being able to solve problems. It really works. So that's one of dozens of examples that I give in the book of

things we can do to play defense. And there's loads of things we've got to do with our kids on that front. We've got to model good behavior for our kids as well. But then we've got to go on offense because the truth is this is being done to us by really powerful forces from the food industry to the people releasing pollution in the air that's inflaming our brains. But let's look at one that a lot of people think about, which is tech. So there's an analogy that really helped me to think about what we need to do with tech now. We're about the same age, Megan. So I think you'll probably remember, it used to be really normal. I remember my mom used to put leaded gasoline in her car, right? And it used to be normal, this is before our time, for people to paint their homes with leaded paint.

And then it was discovered that the lead in paint and in petrol, when children's brains are exposed to it, it really damages their ability to focus and pay attention. So when this was discovered, a group of ordinary moms banded together and just said, you know what? You're not going to do this to our kids. You're not going to damage their ability to think. We need to ban leaded paint and leaded petrol. Now it's important to say what they didn't say. They didn't say let let's ban all gasoline. They didn't say, let's ban all paint. They wanted to go after the specific aspect that harms our attention. And there's an analogy. I spent loads of time in Silicon Valley interviewing some of the leading

dissidents who designed this world that we live in and have been kind of hijacked by their own creations and feel really bad about what they've done. And that analogy really helped me to think about it because we don't want to ban social media. We're not going to all convert and join the Amish, nor would we want to. No disrespect to the Amish. I was going to say in case they're listening, but I guess they're not. They're not listening because they don't have this technology. But I think the Amish demographic is huge. But we're not going to go and join them, right? What we want is the good things about these technologies as much as we can have them without these bad things. And this is why you have to understand the specific aspect of the technologies we use that is invading our attention. And it comes down to

the business model, which at the moment is very simple. Every time you or your kid pick up your phone, these social media companies start to make money. And the longer you scroll, the more money they make. So all of their algorithms, all of their engineering power, all of this genius is geared towards one thing. How do we get Megan to pick up her phone more often? How do we get her to scroll more often? How do we get our kids to do the same thing? That's it. That's all they care about. It doesn't matter whether the companies are run by nice people or nasty people. All they care about is will you do that?

But social media doesn't have to work that way. At the moment, as Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook explained, we designed it to maximally invade people's attention. We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. That's what he said. We now know, of course, from Facebook's, which you've covered very well, Facebook's leaked information that they know they're doing it, right? So Asa Raskin, who designed a key part of how the internet works, said to me, look, the first step of the solution is really simple. You've got to ban the current business model, just like we banned lead in paint. You've got to say a model premised upon figuring out the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack them and sell them to advertisers. That's just inhuman. It damages our brains, damages our societies. We won't allow it.

And when people started saying to this to me, I said to them, it seems so odd. I said to them, but wait, so let's imagine we do this. We ban the current business model. If I open Facebook the next day, would it just say, sorry guys, we've gone fishing? And they said, of course not. What would happen is they'd have to move to a different business model. And everyone listening has experience of the two alternative business models. One is subscription. We all know how HBO and Netflix work. Or another is think about the sewage system.

Before we had sewers, we had feces in the street. We got cholera. So we all paid to build and maintain the sewers. And we all own the sewers together. Now, it might be that we own the sewage pipes together, we want to own the information pipes together because we're getting the equivalent of cholera for our attention. But the key thing to understand is whatever the alternative model we move to, suddenly all the incentives for the social media companies are different. The incentive isn't how do I hack Megan and her kids' attention in

order to invade it as much as possible? It becomes, what does Megan want? Oh, Megan wants to be able to pay attention. Okay, let's design it to heal her attention. Oh, Megan wants to be able to meet up with her friends offline. Let's design a way to do that. But if we don't change the incentives, and the only way that will change is if we pressure them, just like the lead industry was never going to go, hey guys, we've made enough money. Let's stop putting lead in paint. This will only happen if we force these companies to do it. How? They have shown, I mean, they're so powerful and they're so rich and they're bigger than government now. It's almost like it's too late. That's how it feels. Yeah. There were times when I felt like that. And when I felt like that, Megan,

and this might sound strange, I thought a lot about my grandmothers. I was raised by one of my grandmothers because my mother was ill when I was a child. My grandmothers were the age I am now in 1963. One of them was a working class Scottish woman living in a housing project. And the other was a Swiss woman living on the side of a mountain in a wooden hut. And in 1963, my grandmothers were not allowed to have bank accounts in their own names because they were married. It was legal for their husbands to rape them as it was legal everywhere in the world for men to rape their wives. In practice, it was legal for their husbands to beat them up because the police never did anything. My Swiss grandmother wasn't even allowed to vote. And I think about how much power was ranged against them, right?

And then I think about my niece, who's 17, Erin, who I absolutely love, you know, and I think about her life and how unimaginable it would be for someone to say she shouldn't be allowed to have a bank account. You know, it should be legal to rape her. I mean, no one would say that they'd be regarded as a psychopath if they said that. And so when people say to me, as you just did, and I totally get it, I feel it myself. Oh my God, these forces, and it's not just big tech. Many of the other factors invading our attention that write about installer focus these are really powerful forces i remind myself they're not they're not a tenth as powerful as men were in 1963 men controlled literally everything in the world in 1963 every country every company every police force every army and they had since all those things were invented

and it's tempting to get tempted to say and i used to say what you just said megan that think about these companies are more powerful than governments. But when you look at the evidence, that's not true. Look at what happened in Australia. The Australian government, a centre right, a conservative government in Australia decided to take on Facebook because Facebook has destroyed our industry, the news industry, right? You used to get advertising in newspapers. Now it's almost all gone to Facebook. So the Australian government used to get advertising in newspapers now it's all gone almost all gone to facebook so the australian government said to facebook you're going to have to start paying the media companies you benefit from having their news stories on your site you're going to have to

start paying them percentage and facebook huffed and puffed they threatened to shut down in australia and what happened they gave in because ultimately governments are much more powerful and we can, and our governments will be as good as we can make them. So I would argue just like we needed a movement for women to reclaim their, their lives. That's what we've got made change the story from my grandmother's life to my niece's life. I think we need to have an attention movement to reclaim our minds. And it requires a real shift in conscious consciousness.

I think Megan, we've got to stop conscious consciousness i think megan we've got to stop there's lots of things we've got to do at an individual level and i talk about a lot of them in the book but also we need to stop asking just for these small things we are not like medieval peasants sitting at the court of king zuckerberg begging for a few little crumbs of attention from his table we are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds and we don't have to tolerate our children being hacked and invaded and our own minds being hacked and invaded to the point where one small study found that a typical college student now focuses on any one task for only 65 seconds. Another study found that college students can't focus for more than a few minutes and the average office worker only focuses for three minutes. This is no way to live. We don't have to live like this. Most humans have not lived like this. We can deal with the factors in our food

supply, in the way we work, in the technology we use. We can deal with these factors that are doing this to us. But at the moment, it's like a race. All these factors doing this to us, they're getting stronger and stronger. Paul Graham, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley, said the world is on course to be more addictive in the next 40 years than it was in the last. Think about how much more addictive TikTok is to your child than Facebook was, right? So they're going to invade us more if we don't act. So what we've got to have on the other side of this race is loads of us saying, no, you don't get to do this to us. This is not a good life. We don't tolerate it. We're going to

regulate you. You can still have your business. You'll still be very rich people. We want you to have good lives, but you don't get to invade us to the degree that you're doing. I think people are just becoming aware of it. I think it's just becoming frontal lobe as people realize, wait a minute, I don't feel very good. I'm on the phone all the time and I just don't feel very good. And then you see it happen in your kid and you really have to pay attention. But the business model, you know, thanks to the social dilemma. And I know that you're you've talked a lot with Tristan Harris. He was on the show just last week in a very eye opening and disturbing episode, which everyone should should should listen to. I've ever since we did it, I'm like, what can I do with this? I

got to go to all my schools and tell them that we need to have him come lecture or I can just summarize or something. But like everyone needs to be, it's a red alarm. It's a five, five star red alarm fire. I don't know. I just, I, I think people are, it's just becoming, they're becoming aware of how they've been. I think you're totally right about both things. Both that Tristan Harris is one of the great heroes of our time and everyone should listen to him. And also, you're right that I think at the moment, most people are where I was when I started writing Stolen Focus four years ago, Megan, which is I'm thinking, well, this is a problem with me, right?

I'm just not strong enough. I remember I had a real weird moment when I started researching the book because I thought I had a problem with my willpower, right? So I went to interview this guy called Professor Roy Baumeister who's the leading expert on willpower in the world he wrote a book called Willpower right so I go to interview him and I said oh you know I'm thinking of writing a book about attention I'm just thinking about it and he said oh it's interesting you should say that because I've noticed I can't really pay attention very much anymore I just play video games on my phone all the time and I was was sitting there, I was like, wait, didn't you write a book called Willpower? I'm like, oh my God, if this guy can't pay attention. So you have some real moment where it's like, oh, why is this happening to literally everyone?

Right. We have no hope. I think it's also, you mentioned your kids' schools. And I think it's interesting because if we think about the 12 factors, one of the things that fascinated me is when I started, partly I thought it was a willpower problem mainly i thought it was a tech problem one thing that was so interesting to me is actually doing the research tech is not the biggest cause if you think about things you can talk to your kids schools about i'd recommend for example one of the other 12 causes which is the way we eat so there's this really fascinating new movement called nutritional psychiatry you

should have some of these guys on your show because i think you'd really find them fascinating just looking at the ways how the ways in which we eat affects our mental health and our mental abilities and what these nutritional psychiatrists and others taught me is the way we eat at the moment and i've literally got a mcdonald's bag in the corner of the room so i'm not saying superiority the way we eat at the moment is really damaging our ability to focus and pay attention in three big ways. So one way, so imagine you eat a typical American or British breakfast. You have, you know, a sugary cereal, you have white bread, the stuff I grew up having, right? What that does is it releases a huge amount

of energy really quickly into your brain, right? Releases a huge amount of glucose. So it feels great. You're like, I've woken up, right? You suddenly feel like you're awake again. But what happens is an hour or two later, you'll be at your desk or your kid will be at their school desk and you get a real energy crash and you get what's called brain fog. We just can't focus until you get another carb,

another sugary treat. And what's happened is we live, the diets we eat make us live on a kind of rollercoaster of energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day so we're experiencing periods of brain fog where if we ate food that releases food steadily which most people of humans most humans in history have eaten you can pay attention much more easily the way one nutritionist put it to me is it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini those little

1970s british cars it'll go really fast and then it will just stop there's two other ways that what the diet we eat deprives us of the nutrients that we need for our brains to develop fully and and also it's not just that our diet lacks the things we need it actually contains chemicals that act on us like drugs there's a really chilling study in britain where they got 297 kids and they split them into two groups and one group was just given water to drink and the other was given a drink that contained a lot of the food dyes that contain in the candies that your kids eat pretty often the stuff we get in supermarkets and the kids who drank the food dyes were significantly more likely to become hyperactive manic so we've got to change our food supply system if your school is full of vending machines if it's full of and there's been a big move to

this as we cut back on funding for school meals full of vending machines, if it's full of, and there's been a big move to this as we cut back on funding for school meals, vending machines containing cookies and other sugary carbohydrates, that's going to trash your kids' attention. So there's all sorts of these other factors, some of which are even bigger than tech, that we've got to look at. Wow. This is fascinating and something we can do something about like ASAP, our diets. I'm wondering as I'm listening to all this, whether this is, it's no surprise that you wrote a book on depression. Now you're writing a book on focus, but they do seem linked, right? All these things, you can't focus, you can't have sort of the joy that comes with long moments of downtime and being able to focus and let your mind wander and become more creative. I'm sure it can be connected to feeling depressed.

But I want to ask you about the depression too, because that's fascinating to me. I think a lot of people are dealing with it right now. Lost Connections was the name of that book, released in 2018, New York Times bestseller. The real causes of depression and the unexpected solutions. And one of the quotes on the book is from Melton John. If you've ever been down or felt lost, this amazing book will change your life. Do yourself a favor and read it now. So great. I'm going to try and persuade Elton to sing a duet with you about the book. That's pretty cool. You got Elton John. All right. So can we talk about that for one minute? Because

what is it? Because you kind of ruled out that it's not just like you were put on antidepressants when you went to your doctor and said, I don't feel so good. And he's like, oh, I can increase your serotonin. It's going to be awesome. And then you went through the same cycle that so many people go through, which is the depression came back and then you increase the drug and the cycle until you beat the drug, sadly, and it no longer is of use to you. And then what do you do? And you're forced to ask the question of, I guess I'm going to have to deal with root causes. You know, that's a really good way of putting it. And I think one way that helps us to think about it in relation to what we've been through in the last two years is everyone knows they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.

If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.

And the culture we built is good at many things. I'm glad to be alive today. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs for a very long time now. And it's funny, you mentioned chemical antidepressants. There was a moment that's really fell into place for me. So I took chemical antidepressants. They helped me for a while. Then the effect wore off. Sadly, they give some people real relief and anyone who's listening, who's getting real relief from them, my advice is

to continue taking them. But there was a moment i went to interview this guy called dr derek summerfield and he happened to be in cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in cambodia they never had them in that country before and the local doctors the cambodians were like oh what's an antidepressant and he he explained. And they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like ginkgo biloba, St. John's wort, something like that. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him

an artificial leg. And a few months later, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's really painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it's pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where you got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he just refused to get out of bed. He developed what we would call classic depression. This is when the Cambodian doctors said to Dr. Summerfield, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, well, what was it we gave him an antidepressant. And he said, well, what was it? They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense.

You only had to talk to the guy for five minutes to see why he was so depressed. One of the doctors figured if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. They said to Dr. Summerfield, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right? Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that it's entirely a biological problem in your brain, that sounds like a weird joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. She gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively

from this anecdotal example is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, there can certainly be biological contributions. But in the main, you are not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs.

And what we need to do is help you to get those deeper needs met. So obviously, I went to lots of places in the world that have built their responses to depression primarily around that. Does that ring true to you, Megan? Yeah, my gosh, that's amazing. And that too, we're losing at every turn, right? We're not prioritizing one another or relationships. We look at the phone, as I said, back to my example at the dinner you have live humans there who want

to be with you they want to hear from you and talk to you tell you about their experiences and hear about yours and instead you're online scrolling with people who are not there and sometimes who you don't even know and and who definitely don't care about you it It's like, it's all, it's all been turned on its head. And I dream of one day, I realize we're not going to be the Amish, but you know, that we sort of get back to more of our Luddite roots and there's a movement, you know, that's real and that, that you can really draft into that rejects this technology where we can go back to living with some of its advantages. I'm not going to lie. I love the convenience of Amazon, but rejects some of this social media stuff that can be so corruptive of actual relationships. I want to say one other thing before I let you go. So we talked about your book, Stolen Focus. That's what's out right now. We talked about just a bit on Lost Connections, the book on depression. We didn't talk about the book released in 2015 called Chasing the Scream. The opposite of addiction is connection. And I just want to give it a shout out because our audience should know not one, but I think two movies are being made based on this now. A story about Billie Holiday, which is by Lee Daniels. And then another one narrated by Samuel L. Jackson called The Fix. So you're crushing it, Johan, and I'm thrilled for you. And I'd love to

have you back to talk about more of these. I would absolutely love that, Megan. It was very weird hearing Samuel L. Jackson read out my lines. I considered asking to record my answer phone message in character as his character from Pulp Fiction. But I thought it'd be a little bit disrespectful so I couldn't question myself to do it. But it's like a weird stress stream. It's not too late. It's like a weird stress stream where you wake up and Samuel L. Jackson is saying your words back to you.

It's like, what? What's happening? I insist that you do that. Before you come back, don't come back without telling me you've done it. Samuel L. Jackson has got to read that to you. All right, great to meet you. Thank you so much for being here.

The name of the latest book is Stolen Focus. I hope you listen tomorrow because we're having one of our great debates. This one's going to be on guns. Guns in America tomorrow. Download The Megyn Kelly Show on podcast for free and youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. See you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no no agenda and no fear